Daily+: Evolution of an Undefined Aesthetics of Curation
Text by Xiaoxiao Yan
Originally published on artouch.com
Not only categorized as biennial, but taking place in the blooming season of biennial, the second Greater Taipei Biennial of Contemporary Art baptised as Daily+ seems inevitable to fall into some stereotyped imagination of aesthetics. When I visited in person Our Museum of the National Taiwan University of Arts (NTUA) and its adjacent exhibition venues, I felt a vivid methodology of curation summoning the ability of perception derived from the 2017 exhibition Air Plant: Performance Ability within Contemporary Arts (referred to hereafter as Air Plant), and see how it could be extended and intensified in the new exhibition pattern of the Daily+.
Game Rule of “Symbiotic Collaboration”
It is very difficult not to compare Air Plant with Daily+ because of the coherence of curatorial conception and mechanism. Through such a curatorial move in a row, the curator Chun-Yi CHANG breaks down the curator-centered stereotype by putting into practice (or experiment) an alternative strategy in which curator, artist, even exhibition institution and staff--all assume the risk within and get involved in a game rule of “symbiotic collaboration”. The non-fixed constitutional art of exhibition grows out of CHANG’s personal experience which could be traced back to the Open Contemporary Art Center (OCAC) where she was curator of an experimental exhibition called Work-Medium. The artists then entered the exhibition site one after another to create “in relay” according to the current situation of the space and ended up by the “return-to-zero operation” of Ju-Huan LI, who dismantled and cleared one by one all the previous works.
The sequential characteristic of card game has been extended more than a decade later to Air Plant and Daily+ by which the option of presentation is transferred in the same way to the artists. Following the spatial continuation, CHANG turns to connect the works of various artists and gets as close as possible to the hidden working thread out of the momentum of artist as a creative subject. The flexibility of exhibition layout is further integrated with the inherent operation mode of Our Museum. The curating method allows some marge of unconventionality. For example, inviting artists propose in situ projects in different time and site. They are kept informed of the presentation of the other artists’ projects in the same exhibition venue and can choose to dialogue with them or not. They can as well change halfway their own projects, and even add new ones appropriately for the space before the opening ceremony. The title of the exhibition is formulated in accordance with the general perspective of presentation.
Borrowing a striking metaphor of botany from the Bromeliaceae, Air Plant highlights, if we may say so, the subject of art creation who is active and free from the system of industrialisation. As the title suggests, Daily+ brings about, on the one hand, a connection between artworks, between artwork and frequency in resonance with the daily triviality, and a response to the above-mentioned contemporary condition at the curatorial level. On the other hand, the curatorial practice as such is obviously endowed with a returning characteristic toward creation, by which the whole curatorial process is viewed as a subject of momentum, as a grandiose creation with an aesthetical interest. For spectators, the interest of observation lies not only in the individual artwork and the aesthetical taste delivered from the exhibition venues, but also in the dynamic balance achieved both inside and outside the exhibition. The inviting artist Jeff DESOM reconstructs a panoramic narrative by retailoring with digital softwares the shots from the classic movie of Alfred HITCHCOCK’s Rear Window for his own video installation Rear Window Loop. The deployment logic of time-space overlapping might be analogous to two sets of creating characters in different registers: artist (DESOM) - director (HITCHCOCK) v. s. curator of Daily+ (CHANG) - artists
The transparency and great flexibility in the curation process stimulate the mobility of artist in face of the space and the other creators. Before the opening ceremony, Youki HIRAKAWA decides to add an in-situ work A Root for a Room, whose underwater is taken directly from Greater Taipei Area. Together with the prearranged video installation of the past Vanished Tree, the two works co-construct an ecological circle of virtual reality. In the space where the mechanically powered installation Lucie’s Dream is demonstrated, Dorian GAUDIN decides to add another video work Saâdane and Sarah in which the daily absurdity is presented in a slanted room. Through a small format of screen, the video functions as a body-space installation with close-up and thus intimate shots, which becomes along the exhibition route a bridge between Mise-en-scène of Bernd OPPL, a series of generic spaces in miniature and Lucie’s Dream of GAUDIN, a real-sized single bed roaming in the space. While the curatorial mechanism in general is suffering from sclerosis and restriction, the uncertainty and openness inherent in the art creation have been released to some extent because of the mode of planning advancement more or less colliding with the administrative system.
Participation of the Literary: Organic Embedment and Intertext
Evolving from Air Plant, the particularity of Daily+ lies in the strategy of incorporating the literary writing of Yi-Chin LO into the exhibition. When the concept of interdiscipline becomes more and more dominant on the scene of contemporary art, literature/text, in the form of script, supplementary essay and contraposition, is relatively independent, and yet limited. The curatorial scheme of Daily+ unfolds itself by inviting LO to carry out a site survey on the idle houses in Northern Campus, used to be household dormitory for the teachers of senior high school of Overseas Chinese, and to launch a brand new novelette Wall Climber. The literary work has become an important reference of conception for all artists, especially for those who live aboard and have difficulty in conducting a site survey in Taiwan. The very move of CHANG breaks as well the stereotype of curatorial organisation by providing, instead of a cold reference system of photos and plans, a more warm, inspiring, creative text of unbound imagination.
The magical and subtle touch of LO goes so well with the labyrinth-like area, full of old, abandoned gardens, houses and household dormitories, and mixes with some artworks of Air Plant (the homeless passenger in 254 Yen by Joyce HＯ and Snow HUANG). Before the participating artists vitalize the creative imagination, a rich soil of intertext has been well prepared. For CHANG, initiator of such a conception, whether the interdisciplinary manoeuver works is far from the focus of attention. What’s worth exploring lies in the “upstream” where art is able to take form into different media, that is to say, where art shares an abundant “anterior” commonality in which thought and image are most possibly generated and inspired to each other among the creators in face of the undivided medium.
Shrouded by an atmosphere of obscurity and a mixture of reality and fiction, the novel of LO penetrates beyond all doubt into the artworks based on Northern Campus. Pierre-Laurent CASSIÈRE in his space/sound installations, Moment and Dislocation, transforms the fragments of the novel to appeal to our senses. It is stunning that the flashing frequency of the table lamp is meticulously adjusted so as to erase the boundary between reality and fiction. A fit of wind from the seemingly static fan blades is sensationally physical and the artist creates thus a realistic dream comparable to that in LO’s writing. All the artistic device can be counted as an example of “expanded cinema” in which the sensory experiences of human beings are incorporated completely into the image making. In Nicolas TOURTE’s video installation I Don’t Know, the furniture and fixtures are covered by a filmy piece of canvas serving as a projection interface of which the non-smooth surface plays directly a role of blurring boundary of virtual reality. Furthermore, the unification of image content and site is unceasingly implicated in the imagination of memory belonging in particular to the idle house.
However, the aforementioned “anterior realm” is after all difficult to be directly transformed to the actual products on which visual art relies, and the curatorial experiment has to face in the end the publicity of institutional exhibition (especially for Our Museum attached to the NTUA with an educational mission). As a confirmation and re-acceptance of literature as creative writing, LO’s Wall Climber “returns” finally in different forms to the exhibition venue and becomes not only a truly participating artwork, but also a traceable clue for the strategy of intertext as stated. The first art form derived and inspired from the “dream capsule” in LO’s novel is Reading Capsule: a purely white art box or a box made out of the neutral space with an aura of science fiction movie. As a reading space for spectators, the capsule demonstrates itself as a complete whole of installation (the long cell as bookshelf composed of purely white book spins is not for public reading). The second art form is the tablet inscription on which CHANG chooses and rephrases the words from Wall Climber. With an identical design to the system of visual indication in the museum, the tablet inscriptions are embedded on the buildings’ outer walls in Northern Campus. The two forms could be viewed as a creation of visual art based on Wall Climber because the textuality and visuality in different registers are equally postured so as to form an organic structure of intertext. The third art form is called Daily+ Satellite Station, demonstrating three kinds of reading interfaces that return to the novelistic text: physical book, e-book, and audio book. The satellite reading “tour” is planned during the biennial in the eleven art spaces in Greater Taipei Area, including museum, gallery and bookstore.
Space as Emotional Body
The planning and presentation of exhibition are quite rare among the scene of contemporary art: from the soul-text Wall Climber of the whole exhibition and its three derived art forms to the overall exhibition around the starting point of literature. Different from the simplification of interdiscipline, the deployment of quite creative “medium-penetration” unites practically the different spaces and sites related to the exhibition, including Our Museum of the NTUA, Northern Campus, Nine Single Rooms Art Space, city network under the frame of biennial to highlight the event, other institutions due to diversification of space, and even a series of forums and workshops organised by Yun-Ting CHANG to construct a prolonged space of dialogue.
Some traces of creation in Air Plant one year ago are deliberately kept by Daily+ in Northern Campus. For example, an iconic in situ work then Recycling Scenery by Kuei-Chih LEE, is juxtaposed right next to a nearly collapsed house where Wan-Shuen TSAI now introduces a visual combination composed of lead types as both writing carrier and content. The two artists employ entirely different spatial intervention patterns (grand and subtle, penetrating and embedding), but they continue in relays the final memory of the house in face of demolition. The move echoes CHANG’s initial thought about the spaces of Northern Campus. The area, intertwined with abandoned houses and inhabited dwellings, old and new memories, had been recruited as the official exhibition venue for the First Greater Taipei Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2016. Photography, cultural and historical investigation, and resident interview--each serves as a gesture to reserve as thoroughly as possible the texture of the fading area excluded from the list of historic monument. A gesture of invitation to LO is even more an important dimension-shifted step, full of momentum of warmth and depth of remembrance, which will be extended beyond the duration of the exhibition.
Living in the dormitory in Northern Campus during his student’s days, Ho-Jang LIU returns to the very space with a set of sculptures created in his tender years, and further triggers a folding in space and time by delivering the handwritten letters to the inhabited neighbors and waiting for the reply (DaGuan Villa--Flash Fiction). Chih-Sheng LAI intervenes directly the interior and exterior of the old house with by inorganic medium (steel cable in Drifting Sandbar) and organic body (branch in A Tree Planted on the Wall). Talented in connecting directly physical space and complexity of human emotion by installation and image, Stéphne THIDET in There is No Darkness employs the aqua element appearing very often in his recent masterpieces. It is quite moving to see that a pool of water covered with duckweed is gently disturbed by a lamp which gently glides in endless circular motion and resonates across the “dynamic-static” spectrum. Instead of being a carrier or container in service of artwork, the architectural spaces have been transformed completely by the aforementioned artworks into an organic body full of emotional tension. One of the participating artist-curators Charles CARCOPINO presents in Our Museum an immersive installation Personal Computer Music, in which, with light and sound, he interprets the last living moments of the composer François-Eudes CHANFRAULT: just another chapter to demonstrate the “corporealization” of museum space by externalising and enlarging such an emotional tension.
Towards a Future Reincarnation of Institution?
In “The Rise of Minimalism-based Postnatural Aesthetics: Observing the Vibration Ability of Air Plant by Adopting a Playful, ‘Game-Oriented’ Perspective”, the author Chien-Hui KAO observes a mode of art production that “returns to the state of art game without purpose” and an “aesthetics on the point of being vividly portrayed”. Before the aforementioned aesthetics is sufficiently sketched to be definitely formulated, a similar methodology of curatorial practice could work out in the frame of biennial, i.e., highly institutionalized paradigm in the system of contemporary art. The tile Daily+ itself shares hardly an epiphany beyond the “paradigm of biennial”. As an art institution under the reign of the NTUA, Our Museum enjoys, compared with public art museum, more flexibility and possesses unique, disposable space resource: two features lead to a series of soil for curatorial practice with a fresh breath. Despite all the facts, we are able to observe from the exhibition many common strategic directions and to unfold a new dimension of imagination for some questions: how the curatorial experiment profits from the commonality and particularity of institution, and even how the institutional sclerosis of structural mode could be changed in the future. It is interesting to see that at least two artworks in the exhibition embody metaphorically the new dimension as stated. The “bouncing particles of light” in the video installation Song and Detachment of Nicolas TOURTE are set according to the wall structure of interior space and furnished equipements. A bouncing system is thus arranged with restraint between computing programmation (virtual) and wall structure (physical). In the video Ready to Try the Artists’ Habits? by Emmanuelle LAINÉ & Benjamin VALENZA introduces as a metaphor of contemporary art institution an “ever-changing and undefinable” fictional female body from whom a reincarnation of institution toward multiple possibilities is refracted. (Translated by Chih-Chung LIN)