Daily+: A Daily Superimposition Technique
Text by Gou HOUNG
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First off, it is necessary to discuss what is “daily” and how it is sensed and perceived? The first question is about the identity of the daily, while the second is about its aesthetics. More important still, only when the latter is sorted out can the former be made sure. The so-called plainness of the daily is its as yet unperceived state, and what is to be discussed here is that Daily+ does not exceed the plainness of daily life but rather deals with how to perceive its many possibilities. Therefore, Daily+ is not “surpassing the daily”; instead, Daily+ is exactly the daily, the form in which it is being perceived.
An effective way of perceiving the daily does not lie in representing the daily. What representation provides is at best a conceptual interpretation of the daily, but conception is not sufficient to make people really perceive the daily. The real problem does not merely reside in understanding the daily but how to perceive it. It’s not distancing oneself as the subject of perception and regarding the daily objectively. Rather, it is getting involved in the daily, contributing to the superimposition of the daily.
We have to take into consideration the English title chosen by the curator Chun-Yi CHANG for this exhibition, Daily+, which goes to show that the focus of this exhibition is none other than the superimposition of the daily. Compared to the common conception of many other contemporary events, this one does not seek to stage an anthropological anthology on the content of daily life or attempt to facilitate any social reform by intervening in daily events. In addition, it is neither a form of participation by way of relational aesthetics.
Why does the artwork have to be a superimposition of the daily? That’s because what we believe is always what we’ve already known. Therefore, if believing is merely a self-regurgitation of the known, it implies that we can no longer believe anything. The daily tends to make people numb not because there is nothing new produced in that respect but just because the daily is repeating the production of objects that we already can put a finger on within our known content sphere. This is the trap of capitalist activity: engaging in meaningless product differentiation in the sphere of the known. Thus, only the true superimposition can help one break through the trap. That is why the real problem does not lie in believing but in how to understand something that we cannot believe.
Affirming that Daily+ is a technique of superimposition on the daily not only helps us understand the manner in which the daily is perceived but helps us grasp how to interpret the artwork. We have to identify what is superimposed on the daily in a piece and in what manner that is achieved. I will verify the argument below referring to certain pieces from the exhibition
To start with, if the plain state of the daily is disturbed ty the superimposition of the exhibits, and the pieces themselves involve how to understand things that we cannot believe, then art must be an attitude confronting the daily. One of the participating artists Julien PRÉVIEUX, winner of the 2014 Marcel Duchamp Prize, presents a way of confrontation in his Letters of Non-motivation (2000-2007). Job ads, situated between the job seekers and hirers, are read and written with an understood agreement. And when the applicants reply by sending over their resumes, they are in fact surrendering to this kind of daily agreement. A boring and uninspiring daily mechanism it is, but it is not the only one at work. Ironically, the daily only runs smoothly based on the many boring and uninspiring mechanisms like this. And this is exactly the problem pinpointed by Letters of Non-motivation.
In Letters of Non-motivation, we witness a kind of superimposition running against the daily. This does not only criticize these boring mechanisms in our daily life but also force them to criticize themselves. The hirer has to be careful with the wording in his reply, but he is often constrained by his own limited vocabulary to make the replay that is deserved. As a result, every sentence reads like a mutiny against himself, full of malice toward himself.
What’s more, in Letters of Non-motivation, we can also see that the daily is signified and represented through language in far more unstable ways than we have imagined. Speaking of the signification of words, the words have to take a step back for the meanings they carry to manifest. If the words stubbornly cling to themselves, not any meaning can get through. Wan-Shueb TSAI’s Plant and Waste (2018) has embedded metal type blocks on the wall. This is a way of reading / appreciating that cancels each other: the more we appreciate the beauty of the blocks, the more we won’t be able to read the poems. However, when we ready the poems smoothly, we have to overlook the material fact of the metal blocks. It prevents the words from becoming a thing of the past while making them return to the present. It bestows a new daily identity to movable type, which used to be realistic but is not so more.
Aside from the signification of words, temporal and spatial experience also determines our understanding of the daily. Art, after all, is a technique of experiencing time and space. In this universe, however, our human use of time and space is relatively limited, so the daily is magnified in the limited time and space. But if we stretch the axes of time and space to infinity, then our daily life is immediately leveled out. Félicie d’ESTIENNE d’ORVES’s Light Standard (2016) presents the leveled state of the daily set against the backdrop of infinity. On the one-meter-long steel ruler, we see the positions of celestial bodies relative to the earth change over the span of a year right before our eyes. And the daily can’t get more macroscopic than this. It tells us that we are all part of a flat horizon, moments in a vast universe; nonetheless, the daily life before our eyes is so difficult and faltering.
In terms of space and time, the co-curator Charles CARCOPINO’s Personal Computer Music (2018) also pivots on the experience thereof. This piece is created based on the composer François-Eudes Chanfrault's musical work of the same title. The music itself is said to have originated from the final moments in the musician’s own life. Carcopino turned the space into a passageway, with the projection of electrocardiogram-like images set to the rhythm of the music.
The same passageway seems to feel longer or shorter when we walk inside it in different directions, as if the space changes every time we walk to and fro. At the same time, we lose precise perception of time due to the spatial illusion: sometimes slow and sometimes fast, time and space are disturbed inside the passageway. Such discrepancies are in fact caused as we move in the same direction with or against the continuous rhythmic waves projected on the walls. The speed of these moving lines disorients us in spatial reference. Moreover, the accord and discord created by the rhythm of the music relative to our physical movements lead to a rather distorted spatial and temporal experience, one that is drastically different from the state of the daily outside the passageway.
Indeed, we have witnessed art as a technique of superimposition on the daily life, and our perception of the daily changes to the change of technology. Therefore, a reflexive understanding of the technology is in actuality a question of how to understand the daily, too. This is precisely what Jeff DESOM seeks to identify in his Rear Window Loop, (2010).
This piece, which spreads open Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic Rear Window, can be described as a kind of metacinema on the art form of cinema. Hitchcock used a classical montage technique in taking the audience along a linear logic to experience the narrative he as a director wanted us to see. This is not panoramic, and the representation of time is also always limited. What the viewer perceives is entirely up to the director. Desom’s Rear Window Loop, meanwhile, returns the control back to the viewer by spreading out the space and relativizes the order of events in the spread-out space. This technique is, at the same time, a unique response to the basic construction of cinema: the frame-by-frame accumulation of time driven by arranging the space.
The original Rear Window by Hitchcock is a study on the technique of viewing the daily. Desom’s Rear Window Loop, meanwhile, deals with the technique of viewing the daily as well as the film which reproduces the daily. This presents a different vista beyond the superimposed vision, a technique of viewing the self viewing.
The form of regarding the daily also involves the question of inertia. Everything about the daily is charging ahead furiously, but as we are also moving at the same speed, we become numb to the speed. Then how do we get to sense the speed of the daily? As long as a link in all this loses speed or we make it lose speed, we’ll be able to perceive the speed of the daily.
Pierre-Laurent CASSIÈRE Moment (2018) is probably doing just that. An electric fan, seeming motionless but still generating wind, triggers our doubt of the daily. But what is suspicious is the source of the wind rather than the still fan blade; we are doubtful because we have such strong faith in “seeing is believing.” Meanwhile, it once again shows that our retina is so closely related to conceptual construction. Everything one sees with the eyes points toward the formal construction of conception, and as a conceptual construct is completed, it blocks out all the information one obtains through other senses. Such is the challenge posed by Moment to our conceptual understanding. It is a nonvisual reply of perception, dissolves conception, and gives back power to physical senses and sensibilities.
Furthermore, the trick of Moment does not lie in its mechanical operation but in the lighting that reveals the piece. When the flickering of the light synchronizes with the turning of the fan blade, the illusion of the fan blade remaining still is thus created. In this sense, we can even say this is an anti-animation piece. That’s right, the mission of animation is to make still objects move. This is not because moving is such an interesting activity but because everything that stays still is unimaginable. Driving stuff to move is an obsession with making things catch up with the pace of the daily. Therefore, animation is always emulating the pace of the daily, and we are ever so frightened of not keeping up pace.
As for the artworks, they are something created to make the daily viewable rather than something to be viewed themselves. Such is the superimposition enabled by Chih-Sheng LAI’s Drifting Sandbar (2018).
In regard to the revelation of the daily, Lai’s piece offers two types of interpretation. To start off, the artist made use of what’s in hand on site. He aimed to enliven the local by using the ingredients that have always been there, adding or eradicating something, and thereby made visible some of the things that have been covered up hitherto. Then he let the viewers in, made their physical bodies interact with the locale created by the artist, and turned them into the viewed. But exactly because of the activity of their bodies in this locale, some of the other things hidden deeper below were made visible therewith.
The daily is something put on display, and more interesting still, the perceiver (that is to say, viewer) of such content is at the same time the object of perception. The viewers are a part of the daily. He/she sees and is seen. Lai’s pieces often put the viewer in a test for this dual identity. He allows the viewer to step onto a stage of perceiving and being perceived, much like a careless and ignorant animal heading towards a trap chasing some faint trace of food smell coming from somewhere. Isn’t it exactly like this? Every captured prey used to be a bird of prey.
Finally, unavoidable, we need to discuss the significance of Yi-Chin LO’s Wall Climber (2018) for this exhibition. This novel is an entirely new piece written by Lo on the space of the NTUA’s Northern Campus. How did he get on with writing it? How much field work did he conduct on this locale? How close to or how far from this locale is he? From the content of the book, one can clearly see that, in terms of the real superimposition on this locale, this piece and the plain daily of this locale are in fact distant judging by objective facts. However, with what is perceived latent in the plain daily, this novel can in fact be in close proximity.
It is necessary for us to understand what the English word “fiction” stands for. In addition to be a collective term denoting novels, it is also something made up: that is to say, the fiction in itself is a technique of making believe. Fiction is not a question of the distance between imagination and reality but a necessary question that arises when objective content is placed in any art form. Yi-Chin LO knows about this very well. That is exactly what he did in his 2008 novel Western Xia Hotel. What can be a more fitting subject for fictional manipulation than a country that only exists in history books but is no more?
In Chun-Yi CHANG’s curatorial scheme, we can see that Yi-Chin LO’s Wall Climber plays a special role. All the artists got information on the exhibition locales as well as Lo’s novel (in either Chinese or English) for reference in the early phase of the project. This kind of curatorial technique is undoubtedly a break from traditional practice. Then, it begs the question: What role did Wall Climber play when the other artists were conceptualizing their pieces? Does Wall Climber qualify as pre-work in the context of the exhibition? Whether a work comes before another in an exhibition is not determined by the chronological order of production. Rather, it is about how other works are understood when a certain piece functioning as a premise. That is to say, every artwork, under the curatorial framework, always serves as the foil to other works, which in turn stimulates its own potential. The state of Daily+ is a result made possible by superimposing all the artworks not only on the daily but also on one another.
The abovementioned identify some of the superimposition techniques on the daily. Still, it does not mean that those are the only techniques for that purpose; meanwhile, it does not mean that only the superimposition techniques of the pieces presented here warrant discussion. Also, not necessarily one but multiple techniques may have been employed in all the exhibits. Lastly, an exhibition always invites the viewer to discover the hidden superimposition techniques therein, and the more you discover, the more diverse facets the exhibition will reveal before your eyes.
In conclusion, art has always been a field of view on the plain daily life itself. As a result, art, compared with the daily life, is not something dispensable or that which one does in pare time. Rather than explaining art as the surplus of the daily, this essay tends to see art as the superfluous of the daily. Art is a superfluous technique in terms of the daily, and it is indeed what was not there or is not needed by the plain daily. However, it is exactly because of the existence of such a superfluous technique that the plain daily gets to be understood. And this kind of understanding is not merely a conceptual work but a new sensibility of the existence of the daily brought about by physical intervention. This is what Chang meant by saying, “[T]he daily+ diverges the dimension of the daily to the unknown, to a place seemingly close yet out of reach, and endows the daily with a future never expected.”