Echo and Speaker--To Martian Anthropologists

With regard to the quotation by the Belgian art critic Thierry de Duve in the curatorial statement, a Martian has something to say from the very beginning. The sentence goes like this: “You descend from Mars to the earth and know nothing about it. Therefore, you have no prejudice (except for that of seeing everything with the eyes of a Martian)….” No, no, no, just try to imagine: this exhibition is not aimed at any Martian, but a Martian “anthropologist”. How could he know nothing about the earth, or have no prejudice? No, no, no, even if a Martian anthropologist who has never set foot on Earth must have read on Mars historical archives and documents about human beings, and already published several papers. Not only does he have a certain understanding of the earth, he must also have a lot of prejudices in landing (plus prejudices of being a Martian), but this time, he finally gets out of that comfortable armchair.

“Ah, ARE you a Martian?”

The Martian anthropologist’s first discovery after on Earth is that, fortunately or not, the earthlings often use “Martian” to tease those who are weird in the group or whose reaction is different from most people. But this sentence cleverly explains his situation: “Yes, I AM a Martian.” He gladly accepted it, and conveniently found justification for the following observation and interpretation of what humans call “art”.

“What we left behind is the clue.”

The Martian anthropologist feels that the physical exhibition venue itself is a map that can be printed in the mind. The first exhibition room. Upon entering the door is the LED panel light board hung by Wan-Jen CHEN. On the right are the curatorial statement and site plan of the works. On the left front of Chien CHI’s fish tank of neon tubes are the Netherlandish proverbs posted on the wall by Eric WATIER and Chun-Yi CHANG. On the opposite side of the wall locates Claude CLOSKY’s hammer prices to guess, next to which are Dorian GAUDIN’s various kinds of Yingge ceramics. Opposite to these ceramics stands Joyce HO’s white shirt (with a luminous metronome inside). Then, the works of Chih-Sheng LAI: a roll of toilet paper hung high and a white electric fan; near the bottom of the exhibition room, there is a giant piece of fragrant, marble-like soap of Jui-Chien HSU and on the ground, a SONY portable speaker broadcasting the sound composed by Yannick DAUBY; then the house frame built by Yung-Chun SHIH (there are two chairs behind the door and he judges them as part of the work, but few earthlings have noticed them). By the way, there is a red line next to the wall on which the curatorial statement is posted. The red line is very long and becomes the most recognizable route drawn in this simple exhibition room. It divides the ground, climbs the exhibition wall, crosses the ceiling light steel frame and finally drops towards the ground to connect a light bulb which is neatly aligned with the surface of a glass of water (he doubts that someone has to make up water every day). Fortunately, with the guidance of this line, he hasn’t missed the ceiling and Jui-Chien HSU’s stack of fabrics and steel bars.

Ah! This sense of body immersing in the space is something he can’t feel when watching online exhibitions. Yet, he now understands better why the sentences next to the QR code on the physical wall read like this: “What we left behind is the clue. You may now attend personally the site.” That is what the curator Chun-Yi CHANG (she is the direct witness of the entire exhibition from nothing to something) has constantly emphasized in the encounter with him: unlike many online exhibitions that have replaced the physical ones during the pandemic, https://martian.beauxarts.tw/ is the corpus of To Martian Anthropologists, i.e. the authentic address of the exhibition.

Take for example Discreet Works (thanks to Bruegel) collaborated by Chun-Yi CHANG and Eric WATIER. This work comprises fifty sentences irregularly pasted on a white wall in the physical exhibition, somehow inexplicable at the first sight: “Bite a pillar.”, “Bump your head against the wall.”, “Take the hen’s egg and leave the goose’s one.”, “Piss at the moon.”, “Look for the smallest axe.”, “Give roses to the pigs.”, “Rub your ass against the door.” and so on. Is it an awful taste that the artist deliberately cultivates? But if contemporary art leaves such obvious axe marks, it is due to either a clumsy technique, or a trick. “What does this work mean?” He immediately clicks on the web page. As soon as he sees what pops up on the screen, he almost gets the whole picture. The online work is interactive and the rule is similar to that of number coloring books. Yet, it is not a corresponding number to match, but a proverbish illustration. Once you start playing, you will realize that the arrangement of the sentences on the wall is not accidental, but based on the relative positions in the original painting. When the 50 proverbs are matched, the rest of the proverbs not quoted will be fulfilled automatiquement and the painting Netherlandish Proverbs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder will leap to the eyes. These 50 proverbs (some are slightly different from the original ones, but this is the essence of the clues because they never have to be complete) allow us to trace the source of inspiration for Bruegel’s painting so as to grasp what “thanks to” implied in Discreet Works (thanks to Bruegel) and the key to guide the audience to fall into the imaginary trap of nonsense or meme. Let’s put it this way. In every era on the earth, people have been probably practicing such things as illustrated proverbs, and the stickers for the elder which have not yet faded out of fashion share the same logic to a certain extent. They are not a pioneering work at all. If the artist copies the modern proverbs without originality, it will inevitably be superficial and seen through immediately. But this work has changed the context of these authentic Netherlandish proverbs (the meanings of the aforementioned proverbs are: false believers, overpowering, choosing the wrong side, wasting effort, making excuses, spending money indiscriminately, ingratitude) in consideration of the conditions for the shift of time and space, plus the regional cultural differences. It won’t cost a penny and the effect is pretty good.

“You may now attend personally the site.”

The second exhibition room. Relatively small.

He first passes The Out There is Truth by Craig QUINTERO x Riverbed Theatre (a modified version of the sentence “The truth is out there” in The X Files! Never try a Martian), but just as he’s thinking about it, he hears a slap with the lighting in the distance: To see is to believe (Ah! The online version of James Ming-Hsueh LEE’s work can only be seen when two people are online at the same time. This should be it!). At this time, the light bulb in front of Yu-Cheng HSIEH’s Calibrate: Blue Screen on the left is also lit, and he instantly understands that the entire blue screen is hand-drawn, and a little bit further the screen of Pixel and Star Cluster composed of spots of RGB lights is hand-drawn as well (contemporary art is also a laborious job). Upon his entrance is triggered the mechanism with a dizzying effect. Seeing is believing.

Further ahead is Joyce HO’s Metamorphoses. The artist draws a woman on the cover bottom of the book Metamorphoses (speculated from the thickness of the book, the author is not Kafka, but the Roman poet Ovid), looking at the hole punched through on the cover. Then, Jun-Qiang NIU’s Self Portrait of two photographic works: a completely blind person in a white space, painted with a white paint bucket, and a soft sculpture sewn from pieces of cowhide with Braille (he doesn’t understand Braille. After reading the online version of the work, he comes to realize that the work is about the description of the artist by the blind man) At the bottom of the exhibition room, the words on the screen of James Ming-Hsueh LEE’s Distant Hollow have disappeared. He walks back and stares at the physical work of Ya-Hui WANG, Wanderer’s Clock #3: wood grain, chessboard and hand (indicator). He adores the moment when the hands blend into the chessboard, a kind of pleasure for a real hermit hidden in the city. The online work of Ya-Hui WANG is called Draw a Circle, from which he expected nothing great at first. He just follows the instruction to click the white circle and The Book of Time shows up first. The theme of “time” (and light and shadow) is really unoriginal, but so magnificently done by the artist. Her videos deliver a kind of aura of ancient painting and he ends up watching each one several times.

If the first exhibition room is an archaeological site, then the second exhibition room is probably an exhibition room of antiquity. The truth revealed to him is actually about seeing, about the loop of being here and now.

Echo and Speaker

After a tour of the exhibition, the Martian anthropologist feels that he seems to have got the knack of contemporary art. First, contemporary art has almost no restrictions on media, techniques, size and exhibition venue and the works of this kind are ubiquitous. For example, he passed just now the entrance hall to the second exhibition room and saw a ceiling fan above his head. The ceiling fan, rotating slowly with its five grayscale blades, looks exactly like a piece of artwork, and indeed, it is. It is called Breeze by Chih-Sheng LAI, but no one will deny the fact that it is called a ceiling fan. So, secondly, the argot system of contemporary art is huge enough to build countless towers of Babel. Intuition is not inacceptable, but whether it concerns either artist or audience, it is difficult to ignore meanings. People on the earth like to argue about how meanings thrive and seminars and forums prevail.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009, a well-known anthropologist on the earth) once cited the painting Echo and Narcissus (Écho et Narcisse) by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) in the introduction (‘Variations on the Theme of a Painting by Poussin’, in We are All Cannibals). It is mentioned that in European (or more precisely French) cultures, the echo always maintains a tacit understanding with the speaker, so that how the speaker feels will give rise to a resonance, but paradoxically, it does not mean that there will be no misunderstandings in between. In Ovid’ Metamorphoses, Echo can only repeat the last fragmentary words at the end of Narcissus’ sentences, which looks like a response, but it is actually a misunderstanding. Yet, the echo in the Indian myths of South and North Americas are always obstructing and interfering, whether it is Echo as the old lady who has paralyzing power, or Echo who delays the hunt of the ogre with specious tautology. However, the Indians on the Pacific coast of Canada create human-shaped masks for the echo with deformable mouths of bears, wild wolves, crows, frogs and other creatures. “These masks with various mouths evokes the inexhaustible plasticity of the echo and its constantly renovated sounding ability.”

After having visited the exhibition, the Martian anthropologist concludes that the prototype of contemporary art about art and performance embodies, more rigorously, in the exhibition To Martian Anthropologists, the relationship between echo and speaker. In particular, when the curator comes up with the idea of exchanging the virtual online space, which is often regarded as an echo, with the physical venue regarded as a natural born speaker, and puts the very idea into experimentation, the dialectical space between the two will thus be expanded. The theme of “echo and speaker” is like a waterfall, starting from the online/physical exhibition frames, rushing down and splashing water everywhere.

He suddenly wants to laugh. In fact, he was worried about the relatively small scale of this exhibition (15 artists from all over the world on Earth, 17 online works, 19 on-site creations). In regard to the representative of the population group, would it be barely satisfactory? However, in consulting information by cross comparison, he found an interesting thing: this curator first opened a common platform in Air Plant 2017 to allow artists to exchange ideas from the early stage of creation so as to patch up the break between creation and exhibition. Then in Daily+ 2018, she invited a novelist to prepare for the novelette Wall Climber based on the exhibition venue and made the novelette become a reference for the artists’ imagination of the physical venue. Now, in response to the rising online exhibitions during the pandemic on Earth in 2020, she asked the artists to take the online exhibition as primary and at the same time, created another physical site as secondary. So persevered and unwilling to be overlooked, she is obsessed with the very thing--thinking about art and performance. Oh yes, as an artist herself, she invited in 2019 as models the artists of contemporary art, including Chih-Sheng LAI, Yu-Cheng CHOU, Ya-Hui WANG, Wan-Jen CHEN, James Ming-Hsueh LEE, Kuang-Yu TSUI and Joyce HO, and created and completed a trilogy of This Is Very Simple: This Is Very Simple So I Can Do It, Who Wouldn’t Be Able To Do It? and This Is Very Simple So Everyone Can Do It. That anthropologist on Earth, Marc Augé, seems to have something to say: the ethnologist in the field, if he is conscientious, always has the means to go to see a little further if what he believed to observe from the beginning can still be valid.” (Non-Places, 1992) This curator/artist called Chun-Yi CHANG herself is actually an anthropologist! (“Yes, she’s Martian!”)

Wen-Yao CHEN

Ph. D. candidate of E.H.E.S.S in France, is now working as a French/Chinese translator and art critic.