review

A Mirage in Time: The Cinematic Scenes of Daily+

Text by Song-Yong SING (Art Critic, Professor of Graduate Institute of Animation and Film Art, Tainan National University of the Arts)

What can be more banal and boring than the daily life? Taking Daily+ as the proposition heightens the irony and tension of the exhibition subject. The daily may seem to be nothing but are in fact extraordinary and changing all the time. The more daily, the more unusual. It is more complicated than people take it to be and arguably unfathomable, with the appearance and reality entwined with each other, layer upon layer. Looking back over the history of visual art, the undercurrent of the daily, whether as a school of practice or theory, is manifested in at least two equally important trains of thought, opposing in terms of aesthetics and ideology yet converging in terms of minute subject and expression. If we see the daily as the pulse of realism, its most immediate, direct, and primal face isn’t fully visualized but lurking in wait for blooming and even transformation. Ultra-real reality, or its unexpected abstract counterattack, is in fact a situation of the undercurrent of reality that can’t be foreseen. On the other hand, the pulse of surrealism originates from the unusualness of the daily: its possible forms include oversized measure of details, flocking of the unknown and the know, and the helix of reason and violence.Therefore, the daily is undoubted a polyhedron, never stopping with its variation, twisting, and transmogrification. If the daily is a mirror, what do we touch when we intend to penetrate it, a smooth breakable surface or a rippling surface that turns into water upon contact?

Some kind of variant, or erroneous, dailiness can serve as a keyword in understanding Daily+, the second Greater Taipei Biennial of Contemporary Art. The curator Chun-Yi CHANG started with inviting Yi-Chin LO to scout the location, visiting the Northern Campus and Nine Single Rooms Art Space around the National Taiwan University of Arts. She told him historical events happening in the dormitories, communities, and the neighboring National Overseas Chinese Senior High School, as well as anecdotes from past exhibitions. This way, the daily became a core subject piecing up fiction and reality, location and history, fate and documentary films in the novelist’s writing. Wall Climber, as the first commissioned work, consists of eight stories: “Matchbox,” “Stacked Spaceship,” “Spider’s Web Castle,” “Small Half-Empty Frame,” “Coral Reefs Ecological Settlement,” “Maze of Alleys: Tsai Story I,” “Maze of Alleys: Tsai Story II,” and “Drifting Planet.” On the one hand, it lays down the narrative clues, or distinct language conditions, for the proposition of the exhibition. On the other hand, it serves as a trampoline for participating artists from home and abroad to freely jump on. Basing off this curatorial methodology, the biennial is tied up with literature, setting itself apart from the usual practice of exhibitions taking trendy theoretical concepts as the prerequisite while endowing Daily+ with a kind of poetic, lyrical, and surreal quality. It is noteworthy that there is actually a history of employing literature as the groundwork for contemporary art and exhibition. For example, in 2016 we saw Tales of Our Time curated by Xiaoyu WONG and Hanru HOU, in which LO provided a story for the accompanying album in the New York Guggenheim exhibition. While that story is somehow independent and detachable in character for Tales of Our Time,  Wall Climber provides the marrow and bone for the spatial deployment, object design, and character composition of Daily+.

To put it specifically, if we interpret the actual function and significance of Wall Climber in  Daily+ via the language of film, we can see that it is closely related to the constitution of screenplay and mise-en-scène. The novel serves as the script and a written form of storyboard, laying out a preview of geography and biography for the exhibition.This is more than a common denominator for CHANG and the artists when collaborating and negotiating to make the art happen; it is also the genealogical link connecting the curator’s idea with the artworks. The novel can be seen as a catalyst, laying down the basis for the creative collaboration and practice between the curator and the artists while driving the interaction and dialogue among the works of all participating artists. At the same time, the curator managed to include existing pieces that manifest the spirit of the exhibition proposition, setting off a “cadavre exquis,” a collaborative drawing approach started by the surrealist artists 90 years ago.This “town of works,” carefully and exhaustively vetted by the curator and artists, is noteworthy for manifesting the topography created in the novel as well as highlighting the distinctive features of specific locales.

Finishing reading the short novel in the white capsular space or coming into the exhibition space after listening to Yi-Chin LO reading his book, the reader/viewer, involuntarily, is bound to have a weird sense of going into a miniature world.The spaces of collage, dream, and diverging maze in his writing are transformed into rooms of flashing, shrunk, and dilapidated frames. As the viewer steps inside the novel, he becomes a unique character experiencing the immersive world, turning Daily+ into a film production site or a film in rehearsal.

When I saw Jeff DESOM’s single-channel video loop Rear Window Loop (2010), I couldn’t help but marvel at the panorama of the piece as a mesmerizing analogy of the spatial image and interpersonal network in Wall Climber. The proximity and labyrinthine spatiality emphasized in the Taiwan novelist’s original work is expertly brought out in the remix of a work Rear Window Loop. The key point of this piece, however, is far more than this: it’s the fact that a murder is happening right before our eyes in the apparently uneventful daily life. As a modern film instrumental in the transition of “movement-image” to “time-image,” this masterpiece of Alfred HITCHCOCK’s provides the visual material for DESOM to demonstrate time.As a fixer of time, the Luxembourg artist carefully rearranged and spread out the motion sequences and actions on a visual plane, not overshadowing the subject nor getting lost in the crowded buildings and neighbors’ lives as well as the temporal background of day turning into night.The dailiness of Rear Window Loop is by no means daily. The trompe l’oeil evenly pieces up the apartment blocks and all the action details, turning the film into a moving picture, or a painting waiting to move. Rear Window Loop is testing the viewer’s eyesight: the eyes are a surveillance camera, testimony to time, and witness to a crime. 

No other work in the exhibition than Pierre-Laurent CASSIÈRE’s Moment (2018) is more intended to engage in dialogue with Wall Climber even during its creation. With the flash of the desk lamp and the old silver grey electric fan making a humming noise while making wind, it’s hard for the viewer not to think of the scene about “a metal Tatung electric fan” in “Stacked Spaceship.” Walking in the darkened room, the viewer’s attention is immediately caught by the electric fan by the wall. If Rear Window Loop is a panorama, Moment is arguably a close-up. The gigantic shadow of the fan reflected on the wall is comparable to the ghostly shape of another exhibit Personal Computer Music (2018), as if it was taken from the filming site of an expressionist film. All those deadly, scary unexpected incidents seem about to descend upon the viewer. As the counter-proposition of or reaction to Rear Window Loop, Moment makes seeing not believing: Could this be smoke and mirrors? Or is this an illusion in a dream? How can an electrical appliance with motionless fan blades generate such strong winds?The mystery lies in the dailiness. Instead of looking to see what is happening, it’d be better to close one’s eyes and slowly feel the transmogrification of reality. Following this vein, we can see that Moment, a moving sculpture according to the French artist himself, is more than a magical prop in a filming site. More crucially, it functions as an example of “paracinema” as it’s formed by asynchronous sight and sound, light and shadow, and temporal perception

Nicolas TOURTE’s I Don’t Know (2018), made with plastic sheets, furniture, and image projection, is an exception piece positioned between Rear Window Loop and Moment. With a medium shot perspective, the piece is at the same time there and not there, propped up on physical objects and moving images. Apparently the installation of abandoned furniture covered in plastic echoes “Matchbox” and “Maze of Alleys: Tsai Story I & II,”and Yao-Tung WU’s documentary film on Guo-Tang GU, foregrounding the human shape forgotten by society. The interplay of reality and fantasy is a distinct feature of the piece. The sense of reality is so close yet far away, covering the daily with a ghostly color. This unknown person, like a wandering soul, rests in an empty house, lying on the sofa as usual, reading, drinking, dozing off, and occasionally mediating and sometimes sleeping. Ousted by fate, he comes back to this decrepit house, seemingly not knowing he is already dead, barely clinging to his wrinkled body which has been crushed by time.

The cinematic scenes seeping with Daily+ consist of these microscopic panoramas (Rear Window Loop), close-ups of invisible perception (Moment), and medium shots of overlaying truth and fiction (I Don’t Know).The projection screen is no longer a mere exterior vehicle of representation but a visual scene that keeps extending and expanding until reality and fantasy coexist in an indistinguishable state. Therefore, the blurred mirage of Daily+ is at the same time a latent image of time and fantasy come true. (Translated by Yi-Hsuan CHEN)

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