To Martian Anthropologists as Curatorial Practices: an Interview with Chun-Yi CHANG (1/2)

The exhibition To Martian Anthropologists invokes the imaginary future scenes from the book In the Name of Art. For an Archeology of Modernity by the Belgic art critic, Thierry de Duve, and invites the artists to leave behind, in the cyberspace and the physical venue, all kinds of clues for the martian anthropologists who might land on Earth someday to launch a field research on the human civilizations. For the artists, web pages will be the specific site where the artworks actually take place, and the physical venue serves as an extended interface and an index of deployment echoing remotely the online artworks.

Q: How does the idea of curating an exhibition go online? Could you please talk about the curatorial proposals and how they work?   

Online (Cyberspace) as Primary, Offline (Physical Venue) as Secondary

Due to the Covid-19 outbreak this year, online exhibitions as an alternative to physical ones have almost become an international trend so that the audience unable to go to the exhibition can “watch online”. In addition, due to the restrictions caused by the pandemic, it was necessary to assume in the early stage of exhibition planning that foreign artists might not be able to come to Taiwan for the exhibition at the appointed time, and it would be difficult to conceive works according to the physical conditions of the exhibition venue. The two conditions drive me to reconsider the following questions: would it be possible that an online exhibition is not just an alternative to a physical one, but a site where the exhibition and works actually take place? On the contrary, we’ve always been accustomed to “attend personally a physical site” for the artworks. Would it be possible that the physical site becomes an “index interface” that allows us to continue to visit and explore the works online? In other words, by a curating practice “online as primary, offline as secondary”, could we destabilize the common compositions and reading habits of the online and physical exhibitions?

 

Curatorial Proposal I: Online as the First Site

By the end of March or early April, I began to invite artists one after another to use “web pages” as the happening site for their works (the HTML pages constructed with internet syntax are the exhibition venue for the works). I proposed to take advantage of the cyberspace as “the first site” of the exhibition where the works actually take place, and to extend the works to the physical venue as “the second site”. It allows the conceptual ideas to be demonstrated in different forms on the different interfaces: internet and New Taipei City Arts Center. So, the text images or objects left in the physical site, as the traces or implications of the online works extending into the physical space, can evolve into another form of work. In short, the invisible clues attached to the space permit the audience to follow and return to “the first site” where the works happen. In the meanwhile, it will transform the physical site into an “index interface” for the audience to return to the online works. To put it differently, in different ways (such as extension, correspondence, or complementarity, etc.) is created a relation between web page and physical site where the objects, like shuttling indexes, can refer to each other and construct back and forth new reading paths.

 

Curatorial Proposal II: What clues of the works will be left behind?

This proposal doesn’t actually ask the artists to create an online work completely irrelevant to their past creations, but an artwork derived from their original creative contexts and let it take place in a specific cyberspace. It permits the conceptual ideas to expand in or to be derived from two different kinds of space--online and offline. So, I proposed the second proposal to invite the artists to think over the hypothesis: if, one day, the anthropologists on Mars come to the earth to launch a field research of what human beings call “art”, what clues will we want to leave for them? By raising the question, I tried notably to resolve or attenuate the first proposal about “using web pages as the exhibition venue”. Apart from the French artist Claude CLOSKY with long-term practical experiences in online works, the other participating artists are relatively unfamiliar with this part.

 

Q: Could you explain the preposition “to” in the title of the exhibition? Does it involve a specific viewer?

Distant and Unfamiliar “Other”

The idea for the title of this exhibition comes from the book In the Name of Art by the Belgian art critic, Thierry de Duve. In this book, the author invites readers to imagine themselves as the anthropologists coming to Earth from Mars, and to re-examine the human art world from a perspective external to the people on Earth. In my opinion, the assumption tries to imply that we should temporarily cast away (or at least be conscious of) the prejudices too deep-rooted to be noticed in the face of art. In addition, it provides an enlightening vision of the future, which gives birth to the exhibition To Martian Anthropologists. I employ “Martian anthropologists” as a metaphor for a distant and unfamiliar “other”, and this other stands not only for a hypothetical question that invites the artists to conceive and think about the creation together, but for an external perspective that invites viewers to temporarily put aside the reading customs “taken for granted” towards artworks or exhibitions and thus to experience the exhibition beyond the established viewpoints. Although the exhibition entitled To Martian Anthropologists seems to be set for a specific public, it actually hopes to open more widely a door and invite more audiences not so accustomed to contemporary art to set foot in the museum.

 

“Leaving” behind Clues

I propose to employ “Martian anthropologists” as an external imagination and to think what clues could be left behind for a distant and unfamiliar “other”, so that Martians can go back and forth between online and physical interfaces to reconsider the creative thinking of human art by inventorying the human creative activities. Based on this idea, “leaving” behind is the principle verb in the curatorial strategy, a thinking about the movement, “what to leave behind, allowing what to come”. “Leaving” behind involves “choices” which might trigger an introspective angle to reexamine the overall idea of creation; it is a sort of “letting go”, returning to a relatively destabilized state, which might allow more unexpected possibilities to penetrate. This is a crucial point to weigh when it comes to the configuration and disposition of the works.  

 

To Keep Making Works

In addition, the title of this exhibition also has something to do with my conception about a video project in 2005, equally entitled To Martian Anthropologists. At that time, I was thinking about the electricity problem of video works: if there were no electricity, painters could still paint with brushes, and sculptors could carve or chisel stones. The history of art was not supposed to stop moving because it did not after all depend on electricity as a principal condition to evolve. But, how could video artists relying on electricity “keep making works”? And the very idea of “keeping making works” is actually the original intention of the exhibition planning: under such restrictions, how could we continue to make works, to organize exhibitions, and to make art happen?

 

Q: The physical exhibition venue is relatively narrow and long. How do you deploy the works?

In addition to forging a relationship between online and offline exhibition spaces, the disposition of the works in the physical venue is one of the crucial matters in regard to the curatorial strategy. The positions for the works in the space are well thought out, calculated and configured by the coordinate axes so that the specifically relative relations come in form between works,  between work and space. It’s a bit like playing chess, like a continuous process of rehearsal in the mind. As the picture of each artist’s work becomes more and more clear, its position in the space becomes more and more obvious. I try my best to maintain the space in a state of emptiness and fluidness; the overall deployment observes the principle “the simpler, the better”. 

 

Depth and Span of the Space

The exhibition venue of the New Taipei City Arts Center is divided into three sections: the first exhibition room, the second exhibition room and the entrance hall in between. The three sections are lined up, with a total depth of 70 to 80 meters. When viewers have to walk through a long strip of space where the exhibition rooms are not completely adjacent because of some other public space, I think that I have to, first of all, take care of the space depth itself, and then to resolve the different spaces of each exhibition room so that the works won’t be demonstrated evenly in sequence. The method I’ve adopted is to create a unique rhythm and tonality for different exhibition areas, so that the works can unfold themselves along the long strip of space in a more organic way and engage in a fugue of dialogues. 

 

During the discussion of the project proposals, I communicated with several artists good at dealing with space, and in the meanwhile, I tried to coordinate other artists to develop their projects in the same direction. Take for example Joyce Ho’s 20200804. The red wire, connected to the first socket at the entrance of the exhibition, runs along the wall, ceiling and ground, and penetrates the space in a diagonal manner, dividing the exhibition room into several blocks. Finally, a bright light bulb is hung from the ceiling at two-thirds of the exhibition room. The wire running across the space, on the one hand, looks like a compressed frame from a distance. When we walk through the long space, it’s just like crossing a series of frames that gradually open up, as if the invisible partition walls were created in the exhibition room without any compartment. On the other hand, it resembles a guide-line that leads the audience to discover the potential association between the works.   

 

Jui-Chien HSU also deals with the depth of the space in his work. The sculpture material starts from the ceiling at the entrance, spreading along the central axis of the light steel frame in the exhibition room, and extending to the bottom of the space. In addition, Chih-Sheng LAI uses the relatively subtle element of “wind” to connect the two long exhibition rooms on the left and right sides of the entrance hall: in the second half of the first exhibition room, a standing fan blows a scroll of toilet paper hung high (Letter) ; a ceiling fan installed on the ceiling of the entrance hall between the two exhibition rooms (Breeze), runs slowly in the transitional area, and creates with the standing fan a constantly flowing “wind” circulating in the exhibition rooms. 

 

Boundary of the Exhibition Room

Besides, Fish Tank on Live by Chien CHI is installed at the entrance, which plays a role of isolation and communication: on the one hand, the square-shaped object blocks the direct relationship between entrance and exhibition room; on the other hand, the transparent frame provides a perspective comprising all the works in the venue. The location of the fish tank also echoes the quotation at the beginning of the curatorial discourse at the entrance of the exhibition venue: “As always, the fish doesn’t know it’s in the water.” As for Yung-Chun SHIH’s wooden house structure (Home Theater), the artist transforms the original exhibition venue’s mobile wall into a part of his work, forming a door gap passing through to another space. On the other side of the exhibition wall, two wooden chairs located in the “rear” of the exhibition room, as if back to the shadow of a painting, draws with the half-covered door the outline of a seemingly endless end of the exhibition room.

 

Potential Connections between Works

In terms of the exhibition blocks, I try my best to emphasize the difference and correspondence of tonality through the contrast of brightness and hue, or mutual references between the works in the two rooms. If the first exhibition room retains the original characteristics of brightness and spaciousness and most of the on-site work types (not in the spirit of “presentation”) are similar to the clues “left” behind by the artists, then the second exhibition room is more somber and most of the works sharing a closer relationship involve viewing or reading issues.

 

In the second exhibition room, when we stand in front of The Truth is Out There by Craig QUINTERO, the light box by James Ming-Hsueh LEE will be triggered with the words “To see is to believe” (Distant Hollow). The two works seem to exchange thoughts about “what truth is” one after another. On the right of LEE’s work follow the tactile writing system of Braille typed on a piece of cowhide by Jun-Qiang NIU and the photographs of a blind person painting with white paint in a white space (Self Portrait). The “white space painted with white paint” faces the LCD screen of RGB lights (Pixel and Star Cluster) hand-drawn by Yu-Cheng HSIEH with countless juxtaposed units of red, green and blue paints. Next to it stands a blank blue projection screen that seemingly waits for signal input (Calibrate: Blue Screen). In front of the screen is hung a light bulb. During the exhibition period of the physical venue, the audience can click “login” on the online web page to light it up.  

 

In fact, there is also a potential connection between the works in the two exhibition rooms. For example, the light bulb in front of Calibrate: Blue Screen corresponds to the same light bulb, hung but constantly bright, in the other side of the exhibition room (Joyce HO 20200804). Yet, the light bulb in the online version by HO is an existence that makes the scene go out (disappear). In addition, the hands in Wanderer’s Clock #3 by Ya-Hui WANG drifts beyond the latitude and longitude of the chessboard and only in a short moment, they will match and hide in the chessboard’s regular grid lines, which calls upon our subjective and objective viewpoints of time: multiple time zones that intertwine. It reminds me of the regular sound of the metronome hidden in the pocket of the shirt in the first exhibition room, suggesting that time is advancing steadily (Joyce HO, 20200529) .

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