From On Site to On Line--Shift of Exhibition Venues in the Pandemic Era
One day, If aliens land on the earth, what kind of clues the artists hope to leave to alien anthropologists? Taking 2020 as an orientation of reference, I will provide three key words: “Pandemic”, “On Site” and “On Line”.
Pandemic
“Being personally present at the right time” and “being personally on the scene”, would these provide empirical clues of “seeing is believing”? If all the others are aliens of some kind, everything that happened in the pandemic era becomes the most faithful witness to what’s happening to the contemporary scene.
Similar to the aesthetic taste, the epidemic concerns two levels: regional and global. Likewise, there are two sensations of popularity: one comes from the physical defense system, and the other, the taste-oriented system. “Pandemic” is not only a spread of infection, but also a cohesive force among the social population: it reflects both alienation and intervention.
The principal symptom of “epidemic” is fever, a rising temperature of infection and transmissibility, which brings about the positive and negative symptoms and expectations. Epidemics were called plagues in ancient times, which referred to large-scale, infectious, and death-causing popular social events. The writer Zong-Yuan LIU of Tang Dynasty wrote in ‘Notes on the breathing earth in Longxing Temple, Yong-Zhou’: “More epidemics circulate in the south, and the overworked die first.”, suggesting that most people susceptible to infection have physical problems. The earliest application of this word might be found in ‘Weizhi’ of Baopuzi・Inner Chapter: “You don’t have to be afraid to go through the plague-stricken area, you can hide your body in an emergency situation.” This statement proposes an alternative way in the face of barriers. As for the term “popularity”, it originally appears in Mencius・Gong Sun Chou (part I): “The dissemination of virtue is faster than transmitting orders through the mail.” The popularity here means to disseminate widely.
Infection of disease and transmission of taste, both share the concept of “popularity”, which comes from the linguistic usage during a certain wave of contagion in the Orient and the Occident. In translating the concept of “pandemic” in the occidental epidemiology, modern Japan proposes in wasei-kango「大流行」(literally “big fashion”) for “pandemic”, derived from Greek, pan (all) + demos (local people = crowd), meaning a phenomenon of transmission in the crowd. In addition, the term “popularity” tells a difference between “locality” (epidemic) and “globality” (pandemic), and is associated with the transmission of taste; in the Chinese semantics, it produces new significances after being translated, which are related to the ideas of being well received, universal, common, and public. Popular culture refers to a type of culture that can influence the thinking and behavior of the public in a period of time. It is people’s pursuit and entourage of a certain lifestyle. It is time-sensitive and extensive and will also be replaced by another new taste within a certain period of time.
Similar to flu viruses, popular culture itself has to provide the subjective and objective conditions for invasion and parasitism, together with the assistance of influential media. According to the degree of enthusiasm and length of time, the manifestation of symptoms can be divided into fashion and fanatical pursuit. It will form a short-lived paradigm and mutate as well. The popular characteristics of this cultural pathology are shown in clothing, hair style, music, behavior, language, taste, etc., and their common features are novelty, bipolarity, timeliness and circulation. Popularity is also different from customs. A violation of customs may be opposed by social groups; the fashion detractors will not be blamed by society, but may only feel incompatible with the mainstream of the times. Like an “epidemic”, people may pursue a fashion based on psychological needs, such as conformity, imitation, self-defense, self-revelation, or self-promotion. From epidemic to a pandemic, the production and manufacture of a social trend requires the unique charm of the product (pathogen), attraction of the community (host), the excavation of public relations, media hype and fabrication until the new product possesses its own survival mechanism.
The production of new cultural and artistic concepts, like the ecology of viruses, always encounters the issue of perfect harmony of time, place and people. Even the evolution of the concept of art history ressembles a history of resistance against aesthetic viruses one after another in the face of the original, hybrid and mutated viruses, being adapted, adopted, eliminated and possibly residing in the taste consciousness of our body. If there exists another kind of understanding that goes beyond, human behaviors can be regarded as a kind of multiple viruses of infection and the earth, as a great host. The role of anthropologists is to figure out the alienated relationship between humans and their ecology.
On Site
The site where you appear might be a dream, or a period of tiny, parallel spacetimes. If you do not come, it never exists; yet, you came, it could never exist anymore.
Art is a kind of action of dissemination exclusive to human society, and many researches on the source of its formation have been conducted. What is certain is the requirement for being “on site”, which is one of the characteristics of contemporary art. Many contemporary artists have explored the relationship between artwork and location, and how this relationship affects the significance of the artworks on display. The site-specificity has not only become part of the existence of the work, but also a basis for the work to be read and interpreted. Related to the development of the media, the involvement of the audience has also become a feature of contemporary art. All collisions in the site where art occurs are elements of the formation of art.
Mark Rosenthal once regarded installation art as art made for a specific site, so that the work is not an object, but attached to the surrounding environment and should be difficult to be removed. Regarding works that appeared in specific sites, James Meyer, art historian and curator, divides “site-specificity” into two types of spatial concepts, namely “literal site” and “functional site”. He believes that the literary site is the work’s actual location where it derives part of its meaning and establishes its uniqueness. As for “functional site”, it is a process of endowing “literary site” with significance and provides the temporary movement of information surrounding the work, such as debate, idea, drawing, photography, and video. Korean art historian and curator, Miwon Kwon in ‘One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity’ (1977), further divides the exhibition site into physical site, cultural site and discursive site. The three spatial sites of occurrence involve three levels: the deployment strategy of the work and physical site; the cultural, political, economic or social significance of the work, and the discourse surrounding the knowledge and ideas of the work. Among the sites, the discursive site must stem from the deeper significance inspired by the physical and cultural sites. This significance must also be related to the specific time of the exhibition period, and the site of occurrence might be ubiquitous.
The conceptive relationship between work and space has been discussed for a long time, so that each discursive formation defends its favorable order of arrangement of the first space, the second space, and the third space. The upsurge of global travel and globalized internet world have enabled viewers to reach works with a new mode of intervention. It is undeniable that the space of the strongest communication and discourse power has the best opportunity to promote a work’s horizon to be recognized. As an intervener, is it that a personal experience on site appears more authentic? Or, is it that the off-site big data and text collection are more comprehensive and real? Departing from the interrogations, a new issue is coming in form: is it necessary to think about the relationship of viewers’ sensations between body and site.
On Line
Is the invisible non-material space more evolved than the visible material one? Likewise, that you think the ghost sphere is the past or the future of the human world is not just a question of identification with disenchantment or enchantment.
Online, network, and connection are the pursuit of technology for human beings. Where the physical body is not reachable, the cloud can reach all over the globe on your behalf. Just as website specificity in different types of websites, website-specific art also stores different forms of art. Before the pandemic years, the exhibition space as a web-based browsing site was mostly used as a warehouse for the storage of cultural and discursive sites. For the lack of physical space, the concept of virtual museums emerged.
“Perceptual response on site” and “perceived response on line”, it is hard to tell which is superior in regard to bodily sensations. Obviously, these are two different ways to intervene in the works. The “on line” characteristic of the cloud provides two contradictory spaces: one is a fluid, short-lived encounter interface; the other is a fixed and shared storage interface. It is more like a concept of time capsule: after removing the time-effect interference of physical space, it tries to become a part of the theory of immortal information..
In his new book The Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture (2020), James Meyer writes that certain eras will produce unforgettable memories, so that the eras survive. What is the purpose of history repeating itself? How do past events obscure our understanding of the present? Through writing, James Meyer absorbs a variety of cultural objects that delineate anew the revolutionary era from the 1950s to 1970s, including the protests of civil rights, anti-war and women’s rights, and the representations of painting, sculpture, photograph, novel and movie. Many of these works were created by artists and writers born in the 1960s, who were forced to understand the great era they missed and showed us what the past brought forth from the viewpoint of the present. The history in memory can never be a perfect reproduction of the past. Nevertheless, people have always been enthusiastic about using various methods to preserve the archives that have happened. Apparently, these spaces of preservation provide not only a channel to study the relationship between humans / history, memory and nostalgia, etc., but also the previous life experiences for curious people in the future as the materials of testimony for studying the evolution of human society.
We did not miss the year of 2020. The COVID-19 of 2020 is now becoming a pandemic and the “measures of isolation” have given rise to a shift to online spaces for cultural gatherings: the face-to-face intervention of the body has been temporarily replaced by the audio-visual site of the cloud. On the one hand, in the face of the global outbreak, the cloud users have to propose how to change the world and adapt themselves more efficiently to a new life mode of technology; on the other hand, the cloud users emphasize the return to nature and tradition through cloud information. The impact on mankind in the 2020s will inevitably be greater than that in the 1960s, and how the historical relationship between the 2020s and contemporary culture can be established has shifted from street to cloud.
As far as the exhibition space in To Martian Anthropologists is concerned, the curator Chun-Yi CHANG employs “webpages” as the exhibition venue and adopts a curatorial strategy of “online as primary, off-line as secondary”. Would it be the future trend of exhibition planning? In other words, would we choose either a future of technology or a past of humanity? The art world is itself a world of artificial nature. It imitates phenomena such as light, time, sound, illusion and judgement of beauty. It assumes that human beings have lost certain abilities of perception and they have to summon, with another “in-the-name-of-art” attitude, some ancient or unveiled means of observation. If you come from a four- or five-dimensional space without any formal concept of the three-dimensional space, you will naturally receive almost no great visual stimulation from the installations taking place in the physical venue. However, you might enter into another space of speculation and start to think about the questions: Is seeing believing? Is a definition the answer? Have we been framed too long by the term “art world”? etc.
In a few years, how will the future generations create an index for the relationship between creative energy of the 2020s and contemporary culture? At this moment, everything is happening. In the sphere of art, the “non-substantial mode of performance” is a kind of chronological demonstration. It demands your presence and non-presence (online); it cannot renonce the material interface, nor can it purely appeal to metaphysical perception. Looking at anthropology from the perspective of art production, we are experiencing the phenomenon of the shift of the art sites in the pandemic era, from on site to on line, which is emerging at the crossroads of the modes of human communication.
Chien-Hui KAO
Art educator, curator and critic of art history and contemporary art.