(For Gao Bo’s Paris Retrospective and Exhibition Publication, Spring 2017)
Title: Moments of Ritual Displacement: Strategies of Being Lost
Here then, earlier than expected, the fold opens. For in a strong sense all that happens in the exhibition space is part of the art work… as the definition of the artwork includes its effects, the limits of its performance radiating ever outwards… including even this text and its reader… until all that concerns the artwork is folded into it, placed in its fold (‘but what is hidden in the fold…’).
Introduction: Passing Genres…
In every genre, an increasing materiality; as if a drive to the increase of matters. Charting a voyage from outer to inner space (and back).
In every genre, the presence of the Photograph: as basis, ground and palimpsest, accreting layers of paint and objects; as image, transferrable onto objects, stones and musical instruments; as icon, placed in a niche or dangling from a sacred tree. And a tenuous, but persistent, index.
So we begin with the mysteries of Black and White Photography, with its special relationship to time and human temporality, and to the past as captured in the Portrait; move on to the Landscape, with its special relationship to the ideal and to our otherwise invisible interiority (every ‘outside’ is an ‘inside’) and onto the interrogative in visual culture; so finally arriving at the scandal of Performance Art with its special relationship to ritual (special over and above even the relationship of all art to ritual -as ritual- as identity-implying and community making). So the art of Gaobo/ Bomu/ ‘GB’ moves (like his name) through varying moments of representation, evoking differing genres of seeing and experiencing; from the politics of identity; to the politics of (critical) landscape; to the politics of performance and participation – and, for the audience, the politics of being a witness.
The black and white photography of the artist’s Tibetan period offers documentary images that use the many aspects of this most unusual of ‘means of expression’: black and white’s memorializing effect, its inherent lyricism, in conjunction with its -often contrasting- sense of reportage, its sense of a gritty realism that offers ‘truth’ as it is (unvarnished by glossy colour). This latter effect also negates any potential for the kind of touristy exoticism, the images of the ‘travel romance’, that we often find adhering to images of people from ‘other’ cultures, their life style or geography – as is all too often found to be the case with the people here represented. These image investigations crystalize around the genre of the portrait; here again, black and white offers a seriousness, even austere cast to the documentary effect, as well as offering a beauty that augments the personal honour, pride and uniqueness of the people so portrayed. Rather too many have ventured here, amongst those depicted, to photograph ‘authenticity as Other’, a ‘lost life’ or ‘disappearing way of life’; today bookshops offer such folksy coffee-table accessories aplenty; but Gao Bo’s images rise above these commerce-based, exoticising fantasy, or ‘professional’ travelogue type appropriations. We can immediately sense whether a photographer is looking for a cute face and a striking pose, or a way to express serious engagement with his subjects… This desire for a unique representation of the unique is further accentuated in the techniques and accretions that envelop, reframe or otherwise transform the later photographs of the Tibetan way of life; here the photograph becomes the basis for an original and inimitable art work at once expressing the intensity of the mode of life represented and the commitment of the documentary photographer driven to extend the expressive remit of the photograph to become an artist - so propelled by the impact of his subject matter.
Moving through photographic portrait images with increasing amounts of added material, added paint and other modifications, we logically arrive at the genre of installation. Likewise, the apparently painted backdrop -which quickly turns out to be a vastly enlarged photograph- replete with mounted objects, has already moved into landscape as its chief genre of reference. As with any art work, once the frame has been placed and the piece of reality to copy has been cut out, inscribed, re-framed, then its meanings become subjective. The frame not only intensifies (the rituality effect) it also offers the image as a cultural, intellectual event; it can no longer, or only with difficulty, refer only to its origin… Our habits of thinking relating to the genre of landscape and these particular landscapes together with their content now also come into play. How much more true this is of constructed landscapes: where collections of a variety of material, layers of materials, as well as images (and behind them the Ur-image of the photograph), make-up the genre of installation. Interior landscapes (and landscapes with added materials are always interior – the added material acts as a conceptual catalyst) are also repositories of ethical purpose; they carry a critical charge… their object, as it were, is an intellectual object. Other assemblages or installations offer a frozen event; a collection of objects (found and constructed) the equivalent of a conceptual (or Zen/Chan) provocation to thought. As a puzzle provokes the process of reflection.
When the accreted objects and characters of an installation begin to move (and when their movements are framed in time, both unique and repeatable), than we have entered the realm of performance art. If all art partakes of ritual on one, the most basic, level, to guarantee its effects (the reframing in time and space and the concomitant intensification of meaning), then performance art recognizes and foregrounds these aspects of the art work; foregrounding in it and repeating in it most closely (as in the case of the relation of poem to prose) the rituals of life. As in the poem, the performance work, at its richest, concentrates a number of levels in parallel, so concentrating our thoughts even as it is opening up chains of implication, linking passages of metaphor and levels of meaning, and presenting an allegory in which we participate as to the definition of the topic. A definition in which the ever present presence of the photograph plays a role, for even here, at its apparently frozen opposite pole, opposite to the gesture of performance, even here, the still life of the photograph is prime back drop and tool of interaction of the artist in his role as performer.
In these three moments, these movements across genre boundaries, we see the development of an interior gaze, a philosophical inwardness, the development of an artist and thinker in images; from the portrayal of the face in its exteriority (the resistance to subjective penetration of such portraits is what gives them their sense of pride, protects their inner privacy), through to the interior landscape that resides behind the eyes (behind our eyes, the eyes of the viewer), to the performance that sutures us all to the reality we believe enfolds us, but which we in our performance unfold around each other… A journey through images and ideas; a philosophical as well as aesthetic journey.
*
I
The Photography. From Documentary to the Portrait: from the Portrait to Art. The long wake of the artist’s encounter with Tibetan culture extends from the early black and white documentary type images… traverses the incorporation of image into a matrix of en-framing materials, including some very corporeal inclusions, and proceeds through paintings that resemble collages into a veritable ‘wake’ in stones… as the ‘portraits’ of earlier encounters reappear on the ‘faces’ of a trail of stones… If art, the art of reproduction (outside of the installation) reproduces the images it reproduces in silence – an indicative void to be filled, in subjunctive voice, by the inner voice of the viewer. The stilling and silencing of the original voices in art: the condition of their being seen; the condition of their survival. As portrait. And as portrait, the silence is a part of the genre as well as the image medium meaning (the means of expression include the absence of voice, foreground the presence of silence). Portraits do not speak, do not move… but they do speak to us and move us. When we listen to that gift of silence they bring… Still Lives. (‘But what, after all, is a Portrait…?’)
Of the face, and the stare that resides within it - or the absence of this stare. This residence the mark of consciousness (our modern way of paraphrasing the older notion of the windows of the soul). And with consciousness the ocean in which it swims, the irresistible current it must follow; of temporality in painting. In the genre that privileges and compresses their combination into the presence of a single face: the Portrait.
The Black & White Group Portraits and Other Documentary Photographs.
For the choice of this particular means of expression, the choice of black and white, avoids another kind of ‘noise’; the noise of colour. If we see (night vision apart) in colour; then our reproduction of the images we see appear always to carry other meanings, meanings attached to the medium, the means of expression - meanings perhaps unwanted. Or wanted by some: at issue is that of avoiding the question of exoticism; local colour does not mean ‘local’ colours but the colours of the other; of otherness for some (that Some is ourselves, the Same, looking in, looking out, looking for a ‘colourful’ experience’). So the avoidance of colour reproduction precisely voids the tourism or travel industry effect, the advertisement for an exotic holiday (‘of a life-time…’); leaving gritty black and white to tell the ‘truth’ (and one reason why black and white is preferred to this day for many documentary images). Yet this disqualification of colour does not disqualify the discovery and revelation of poetic moments - even incorporating or suggesting elements of the ‘classic’ effect so closely linked to black and white photography in the popular mind (as yesterday’s well-formed documentary images become today’s poster and postcard classics). The resulting poetry is no longer ‘gaudy’, a ‘bauble’, decorative food for a short ‘hit’, designed to (momentarily) distract eyes over-charged with the visual inputs of today’s perception and communication (and extended by our reliance on the technologies of personalized communication, recording, storage and transmission): rather we are called to stop and think. As with black and white as the medium of documentary news, so the frame of the message, the frame of the content of expression is one of a different kind of attention. Yet if the sense of urgency and reflection carried by such images also is accompanied by an aesthetic charge, rendering the image, poetry, then this is not some manner of contradiction, rather the inevitable corollary of the range and subtlety of our visual sense (we are not reading a ticker tape feed-out nor a telegram nor text massage shorthand – nor even the abbreviated sub-titles of news headlines that flow across our many screens). Conceptualism was wrong to associate rebarbativity with thought. The implied contrast here is to certain received images in the popular realm, to certain tourism-type images, as to other forms of ethnic-exoticism or exotic ‘othering’. So we see in the reproductions and art works featured here, non-exoticising images taken from Tibetan culture. Here, precisely because in black and white, with the colour, of ‘local colour’ excluded, so excluding such ‘colourful’ meanings as would elicit ‘coos’ from the passing tourist (or the reader of a colour magazine). Faced with these faces, in black and white, such noises would be inappropriate. What we see in this use of black and white photography is an image resisting stereotypes (insofar as a passive, silent, image can resist our cognitive attempts to find significance through stereo-typology). These are classic anthropological documentary images, showing documentary force; a memorializing in the present: but which also include lyric feeling (or otherwise ‘classicizing’ elements due to the effect of formal arrangements in their relation to the black and white format). This drawing on a sense of the past, by emphasizing the pastness of the image content, may also indicate the passing of a way of life. These images, along with the collection of which it is a part, also avoids the other cliché, now becoming popular with ethno-photographers; that of a ‘high art’ or putatively ‘serious’ form of the depiction of Others (of those deemed the Other of ourselves), as a form of ‘authenticism’ depicting ‘others’ as possessors of ancient wisdom, and in true touch with Real Nature. Part of the Neo-Romantic ideology of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. Such depictions seem to us to be ‘flat’; lacking in the depth (temporal and cultural) that is offered here, so lacking in rationale (we ask ourselves: ‘Why were they taken?’). The rationale of the pictures we see now is that of the fruit of a long engagement with the cultures in question - and not a hasty appropriation of an empty (if popular or even universal) ideology of nature, authenticity and timelessness. We are back with the politics of representation, with the politics of the portrait. (‘But what, after all, is a Portrait… ?’)
What is a portrait?
Face on: apart from the hands (culture depending) the face is the one part of the human body (sex and culture depending) which remains naked, exposed as indispensable to identification, recognition, and communication. Every feature found to be readable, interpretable, scrutinised for signs of presence, signs of intention; combinations infinite. Full on: (like a full moon centre-field, centre-screen, taking up the space of central focus, hypnotic in its demand for our full attention). But the portrait does not demand that we act as if we are being read in turn… (we are permitted to drop our visual manners, the etiquette of exchanged stares is absent, there is no exchange - or at least none between minds, our own identity continues in its endless quest to bargain time and objects for self).
The ‘Blood Portraits’ (photographs of documentary origin).
Two elements arrest our vision: over and above the depicted content, the portraits and documentary images of life, there is the strange calligraphy and the texture and colour of the pigment employed; could this be blood in which the writing is expressed? It is these factors working together (with other additional materials) which transform the photograph or documentary image into an artwork existing beyond the reproducibility of photography - so, in one respect, returning us to the early days of photography and the uniqueness of the daguerreotype. And like the daguerreotype, carrying a similar sense of uniqueness; an insistent originality which ineluctably points us towards the lost past or to the temporally and geographically distant persons and objects there represented; transferring the sense of uniqueness to the referent of the image. In effect the image functions as a ‘prosopopoeia’, the classical trope of the evocation, or here, representation, of the dead and distant, abstract or absent. A trope, a meaning relation, a form of meaning making, which at once covers all photography, the relation of photography as such to its referents, but has a particularly special affinity with black and white, and with the passage of an image from documentary to larger meaning (perhaps eventually into a ‘classic’) - and may even go on to offer a toehold in the realm of the Sublime. If in written language, in the realm of the Word, there is a ‘call’, an evoking of the absent, then in the world of visual culture we have the face and the stare, the ‘return’ of gaze, from one who is not, no longer, there… their presence in our mind, our viewing, our reading, is their return – their… summoning to presence.
The first extra-photographic element is a meaningless invented script, at times resembling Chinese characters, at times resembling Tibetan script (at times almost resembling a scrawled form of the Western or Cyrillic alphabet). So it is that we are presented with a de-particularisation in the place of the irredeemably particular; as the images so specify, so the writing abstracts (may we even say, evokes a universal frame of reference). Indeed amongst the very materials, which, when added to the photographic images so framed, guarantee their uniqueness, their denial of mere (or pure) photographic reproducibility, are elements which in turn deny this uniqueness through an evocation of writing as such, a graphic signifier bereft of its signified, or whose signified (as symbol) points us to recorded meaning in general (or perhaps its opposite, as a invented language, bearing no sense for anyone, might well be called ‘unique’). Uniqueness and generalization, these terms of course readily apply to the human condition, more precisely to our perception of ourselves in our difference and commonality, our sense of distinction and sense of community. The very difference and commonality which calls upon a common humanity, and which is present in and through every cultural and genetic difference, as well as asserted in every unique human life. A uniqueness and generalization which is best expressed through the face (and so the genre of portrait) and in those most over-read, ceaselessly interpreted, features of the face… the eyes…
Stare: (looking back, look averted (gendered looks)). Above all zones of the face it is the eyes that offer most to the politics of interpretation. With return of stare or not, not-withstanding, we understand from the nature of the look the character of the transfigured, the pious, the convivial, the successful and the downright arrogant (‘full of self’). Potential contexts: the history of the painted eye from Giotto to Rembrandt, from Caravaggio to Paula Rego. Offering a range of expressions we might want as templates for ourselves; an armoury of masks, ‘of the peg’, a training ground in the school of self-image, a select range of ‘look’ (all by-and-large positive, this is not journalistic photography where the face of disaster is sought to illustrate the hideous fact). The eyes have it.
The second extra-photographic element, the faded red pigment we see expressing the scripts, the brown-red ink in which they are written, their means of expression, not only suggests blood – but is, in fact, actual human blood. What first appeared as a suggestion is again found to be a reality (an icon again turns out to be an index, a trace of what is seen). There is nothing fake about these artworks… in leaving behind the realm of pure photography (with its infinite reproducibility) we have not entered the world of illusion or painterly illusionism. The blood on the frame and face of the image, through its ability to be what it appears to be, offers a promise, a kind of guarantee, that the content is genuine (indeed a genetic signature). So the signing in blood implies a contract with the viewer, to which, by the very act of looking, we are called to bear witness: for the blood we see, in which the graffiti or note-like text is written, is the blood of the artist and even of some of those portrayed. The apparently additional afterthought, scrawled over the textures of the image and its frames, acts as an index that points back to the unseen materiality of the bodies, their corporeal element, that obtains at the origin of these images and that is a part of the referents. Not only is the representation of a culture to be found here, but part of the nature too of the inhabitants, the bearers of that culture (a synecdoche, or part for whole, as well as an index or material, physical quotation, the marks of reflected light, tracing the surface, the outside, and a sample, a gift, taken from the inside…); all this is found in the world of the artwork.
These additional textures and expanded palette offer an extended means of expression, an extended range of meaning which is at once part of the images contained, framed or even quoted by their en-framing, and at the same time a commentary upon them and the veracity, if you will, of the emotional commitment, of their meanings… This method also transforms once easily reproducible photographs into a part of a sequence of art works that are now unique; the inclusion of unique materials renders each image individual and personalized (the blood, again, is precisely that of the artist and many of his sitters, his subjects, now equalized, in terms of a politics of representation, made ‘blood brothers’ as the artist includes a sacrifice of a part of his own corporeality into the material text of the image).
These additions also mean that the work can now also refer to a unique time, a people and a place; a means of expression pointing out the content of expression as something now irredeemably particular – performing the original place and objects and persons, as irreplaceable and beyond simple reproduction and exchange - to be valued… And in its offering, a ‘blood offering’ a reminder that in its irredeemably particular and personal origin there also lies a commonality, a shared blood, which when scratched, is the colour in which we all bleed. Sacrificial witness to a shared species-being. Ritual offering to a shared humanity.
The browning red in black and white.
Together mobilizing an alchemy which transfigures photograph into fetish, record into art work, historical mark into memorial - in a word, into ritual (or into the sacred object at the heart of a ritual, that object of our visit, the ritual visit to the temple of art).
(Sketch Portrait) Masks and Defacement. Portraying Others…
Silence: the silence of the portrait is also the silence of the voyeur (and we are all in love with our visual sense). For the making of a portrait, the rendering of a likeness… is also to render someone dumb.
The image is speechless; it speaks otherwise. The pose of the sitter must therefore be suitable to silence; otherwise they would render themselves (be rendered) laughable… The portrait somehow functions, even glories, in the absence of the most important form of human communication (there is also the absence of touch – but this realm of social experience is anyway always heavily tabooed; witness the latent violence and brittle erotics of touch in the case of contact between strangers). The image is speechless; it must be made to speak otherwise. This lack of speech leaves all to the work of visual cues, to realms of human comprehension and experience dependent upon the eye and its memory. The visual imagination (and its unconscious, a social as well as a personal unconscious) must take over the guiding of the other senses: not least that of speech (how rarely do we think of smell before a picture). For the portrait only encourages our tendency to make a mental paraphrase of everything. Words may describe, summarise, provide a suitable narrative setting (a temporal trajectory) but they also play games with the image; punning and seeking out the possibilities of the rebus.
Foregrounding speechlessness and providing the Word. Silence underlined; the silence proper to the portrait doubled, then contrasted… The portrait as puzzle. A picture in interrogative mood. A question, yes; but addressed to whom? To ourselves, but also to our time; and our time is after… after that of the image. Just as the descriptive sentence (declarative, indicative) exists in the present (where we may question its reference, its truth values) or the past (where the moment of reference may have past, leaving testimony or physical proof in demand) so the interrogative is launched out into time to find a home that does not yet exist (unless in the case of the already answered ‘rhetorical question’). Every question is addressed to the future in the sense that its answer (no matter what the origin of the proofs that may inform it) lies in the future, it is something we await (as every question awaits an answer). So in contradistinction to other ethnographically inspired photographs which function as an indicative, documentary, record, these pictures offer the form of the image as a question, are framed as the asking of a question. In the example of the ‘Sketch Portrait’, series (1996) we have a powerful example of the interrogative voice in black and white photography.
One of the ways this interrogative effect is achieved is that the image incorporates smearing and handwriting - incorporating graffiti or a written note as a form of commentary (or as a citation, suggesting, ‘citing’ the word as from the mouth of the silent speaker, or read as present in his or her mind). This addition then de-presences the image, re-presenting it as a source of difficulty (it is important that the ‘deformation’ occurs on the level of the image, as if between us and the image, and not in the world of the image, for these temporal-rhetorical effects to come into play). Furthermore the use of such deformations to the surface of the image can have the effect of combining the tenses (past, present and future) as we are provoked to perceive a pre-existing problem, acknowledge its presence in the here and now, and address the possibility of a solution (or if there is no suggestion of a solution, then as the continuation of the problematic state) into the future… A picture that predicts the persistence of its problematic. An image that insists, in its very effacement, on foretelling the presence of a response. Oracular.
Deformation here has the status of a question posed; a future deixis that throws us into a realm as yet undecided. Problematising not only the status of the life of the depicted object, person, or event, but also posing a question on the very nature of the black and white photograph, indeed of photography itself as the right medium, or action of recording, of representation, as suitable for what purpose? Calling representation itself into question (the ethics of representation, posing the question: is it right to show certain things, and how should they be shown and when, in what context, the question of the responsibility of the arts and processes of representation). So asking the question: what is it for, what does it do, for whom… when?
Also dating from this period are the Duality Sketch Portraits; a series in which each discrete work is made up of two pictures, a diptych, with one face wearing a mask (breathing/medical) the other featuring a mask itself, upside down, a ritual Tibetan Buddhist mask; all in black and white (including also the addition of paint), for the artwork begins with the ‘indexical foundation’ of the photographic image, then accretes layers of paint and other materials. Yet the resulting image is still black and white, the aesthetic too, is also that of black and white imagery; despite the additions and reframing, the unique meaning repertoire of black and white photography, still applies (as it will continue to do throughout Gao Bo’s work, whether as ‘Bomu’, or ‘GB’). The use of the diptych form does not only foreground the framing and contrast of the portraits, it also references religious art history and the rhetoric of eternity, the attempt to represent the sacred. In the ‘Dualities’ sequence, over and above the content with its sense of ritual masking, the self-protection of the medical mask and the supernatural protection afforded by a ritual mask, and also beyond the mask as an implied absence of speech which deflects meaning onto the eyes, over and above these, the form of presentation, the diptych, suggests a sequence of oppositions to be overcome… Oppositions of tradition and modernity, interiority and exteriority, expression and silence, illusion and reality. (See the section on the Beijing Exhibitions, in section IV below, for a full analysis of these works in their latest manifestation.)
And like a trail of image-thoughts, a trail of presence haunting galleries and the artist’s personal history alike, reoccurring in many artworks, in installations and performances, the repeated figure of the repeated use of stone faces. Of portraits on stones. A ‘borrowing’ of lives, as in the stealing of the self, that many peoples of simple technology believe is the result of the taking of their photograph. A borrowing that will be atoned for, as the artist plans to ‘return’ them to their source, to be washed away, washed clean in the waters of their origin.
And again, we witness, have our meaning-making configured by, the unifying means of expression, black and white, conjuring up the art history of the photograph; and the unifying theme, the force of genre; the presence of Portraits, of the Face… the presence of another in all their enigmatic offering and refusal of self…
Portraits are always iconic. Making sainted (representing the ideal, and so the immortal, as well as representing the merely mortal, the real, the mimetic). Part message to the future (continued existence within a given quantity of time), part claim on status as an eternal (qualitative shift of identity), the suggestion here is that a not-so-surreptitious attempt at immortality is part of the rationale of the commissioning of the Portrait. A link to the afterlife maintained this side. When the past coincides with the shades of eternity, and memory with the fires of the sacred, and when the soul and limits of our belief find their symbolic place in a picture of a deceased mortal, then we begin to comprehend the power of the historical portrait. Portraits are our form of ancestor worship.
(What, after all, is a Portrait?)
The ‘wake’ of this photography in stones… on stones… these enfaced stones used in a variety of installations – but this is another story, even if consequent and contiguous…
As living rituality takes place outside of the space of ritual, so repetition is the first degree of ritual (as identity, the end, is the second, and eternity, the means – although represented as the end in intense forms- is the third). As a sign, the portrait already is repetition; its use, temporality and identity function (observed above) reveal it as ritual image, as ritual. The ritual possession which results makes of portraits a microcosm, a mise-en-abime, or part/whole relation, of the process of identity-making and its supports. Indeed our relation to images as such (whence the logic of the iconoclasts) produces this conferral. The slower the image flow, the more persistent its call upon us; the more slowly we peruse a given image, the greater its constitutive force; the more profound our fusion; its role in our confirmation, its transformation into a sacred object which comes to represent us (which becomes us by metonymic extension). The portrait as ritual; given image as graven image; most precious palimpsest.
For what, after all, is a Portrait?
Transubstantiation observed.
*
II
Installations: assemblies of objects (some of them images, images of photographic origin); their background… the place of the installation (its place, its placing, the space of a photograph). And if the objects come with their own background? Then a landscape with objects. And if the back ground is a photograph, no matter how transformed? Then we have a double borrowing, or excision, a translation (in the sense of a transfer of sacred relics from one site to another) of the light once reflected and of a piece of the matter that it once illuminated; of the precious materiality of art as the constituent parts of an icon, an icon made from indexes – parts that point, that point back to their origins, and that point forwards to the meaning of their unity in the art work, their unity in our thought, pointing forwards – pointing towards questions addressed to our future.
Landscapes; found objects. Arranged together, perhaps making up a Still Life, making up another genre (another pre-established way of seeing and feeling), taking on its concentrated charm; and, as a ‘Still Life’ signals a culture, a moment in the use of our objects of everyday utility, a moment when the objects that are made for that culture, that make up that culture, are found together, together with the transfiguration that comes from their placing and combination, so the assembled objects of an installation too reflect this focusing of a cultural moment, itself a special part of that culture (its ‘Art-culture’) and so group together significances and feelings, thoughts and associations, questions and … maybe even answers... Installation/landscapes (outer landscapes are always inner landscapes).
(‘But what, after all, is a Landscape…’)
Installation. Already in considering the genre of the Portrait we have approached the Installation; in looking at the stones; an installation made of ‘Found Objects’ and their ‘Faces’ (these stones and the faces they bear are also used in the many works based around an image of Samuel Beckett, described below, as in other works.)
Installation. Making landfall. Boats placed well apart, and a long middle… a connection… a bridge, a path, an extended crossing. A boat may sail elsewhere… or it may go out and return. It may arrive on a strange new land, ferry us over to the other side, or in the labour of fishing or transportation, or the pleasure of a boat trip, it may return to where it began. Either way we, the passengers, in fact and even in imagination, are aware of our destination (and even if we are not, as refugees or those lost at sea, then we are aware that there ought to be one, but that it is lacking). And when we land, make landfall, then we cross over to the port we have arrived at, by means of a bridge, pontoon or causeway that connects the boat to this land. But here there is no land… only another boat. For we are (in the world of the artwork) all at sea.
Two boats. Between them an extended connection, a ‘bridge’ or ‘path’, a crossing; a link as one that links planets in orbit, ships, if in motion, circling each other - a path that only leads to yet another voyage. Destination? There is no hint of such. Only different forms of passage.
Walking along the artwork, we accompany the long ‘bridge’ that links the two boats (accompany alongside, not actually on the crossing, walking, as it were, on the water, the ‘water’ of the world of the artwork). Walking on water is, of course, impossible, but a ‘thought experiment’ we can all do. So we are outside the artwork, looking on, as if in the position of a meta-set, or outer limit, outside watching, seeing the whole (a privilege we do not have in our lives) in turn watching others, like ourselves, watching the artwork, as the meta-set moves outwards, as we imagine in turn the new whole, including the viewers, from a new ‘external’ position, which then, in turn, becomes… an infinite deferral of the end. A performance of the problem or question posed, as much as a position ‘outside’ watching, the presentation of a question…
As we continue to accompany the artwork in this way, we observe this connection, this link between the place we have come from and the place we are going to, at the same time watching others do likewise, as they too accompany us, or cross other-wise in the opposite direction, alongside us or past us, on this side or over on the other side, of the ‘path’. And as we walk we become aware that the ‘other’ boat we approach is pretty similar to the one we have just left, that there is no landfall, no harbor, nor haven, no terra firma. In effect we have made a crossing or effected a return to the same; a crossing that returns to the same (thinking we are heading out and away, we find we are returning, coming back, going… back in). So caught in a kind of infinity loop, an invisible bend (like the bending of space or the path of light as it is affected by gravity) a pattern of repetition, the very image of the two moments that make up the poles of a departure and an (unconscious) return… Different in time perhaps but similar in space (in appearance), and maybe identical in thought… So, back to where we started. This installation is an installation of a repetition dilemma, posing the riddle of repetition, a rebus of escape and its impossibility. And the making conscious of this realization; in itself is already a lot; in itself the beginning of a solution. Otherwise we are on a long walk to nowhere… A long think in a circle; a long search for a chimera. The content and consequence of this allegory, however, are a matter for the viewer and his or her metaphysics, their own bedrock of belief, their own myth of landfall.
(And on their desire to repeat… or let land fall…) To make their own myth of land fall.
Picture. Black background with neon. Black background; is it abstract, or can we make out trunks (yes, it is a photograph, there is such a place). Is it a night scene of Nature, a haunted wood, perhaps a Sacred Grove, home of the Golden Bough: or Nature as Chaos, alien, inimical and destructive? In the foreground, the word and neon; on the Face of the Darkness, there was the Word and it was lit (from within) by Neon… What a sequence of contrasts: from back to foreground; from deep to shallow; from dark to light. The deep as hidden behind the shallow; obscured behind the froth and glitter of a sample of media culture… its garish electric colours blinding us to what lies behind, as any bright light desensitises us to what else there is to see; light pollution in the city blotting out the stars. The light of a culture. Culture-lite: light but not profound. What is offered, the picture implies, is light not enlightenment; ‘light entertainment’: with darkness as fecund. And (as in the picture that follows), something to be feared, to be warded off by means of a talisman made from twisted tubes of neon. What a reversal of priorities; overturning of the metaphors of the making of knowledge, the passage from obscurity and ignorance to the light and clarity of knowing. Yet light too is blinding: the glare of the headlight that hides the approaching car. The flash of the camera that destroys our night vision. We refuse the path to our own dark wells of creativity. Refuse the stillness that allows hearing – even the hearing of the self.
Picture. Black background with mask. On a black background… again, abstract, chaotic, elemental (as in the music of Xenakis and Birtwistle). With trunks of trees indicating a natural place. Nature (But in what aspect? What face does ‘she’ show?) Certainly it is a photograph. Again, there is such a place… For this is not a Garden (or perhaps we should say, a Garden is not Nature) rather a Nature untamed and so uncaring of us. Nature in its Sublime aspect. Radically uncaring. Surmounted by actual (as opposed to painted) masks and the wire that at once supports them (keeps them attached to the picture) and wraps the picture, refrains it, contains it… so addressing our attention to what is so contained… Masks that offer themselves as the mask that Nature wears, that we wish it to wear in our attempts to understand, to tame, it to our understanding – and finally to our use. What is contained; what is restrained. That which we both fear and enjoy, exult in; Nature’s (ours) creativity (and the accompanying paradox of its inimicality, its destructiveness…). And what we fear, as the infant fears the anger of the parent on which it depends; the wrath of a Nature we have abused…. The negative face of the Landscape.
Masks. For much is masked. The imagination of anthropology: the anthropology of the imagination. The mask which calls up the past; and which conceals the present (as the one so masked pretends to the powers of the myth the mask represents). The concept as mask for the object: and the object as mask for the concept. But the mask which we fear most is that which covers over what is imagined as worse… or what is most useful (if only we knew how to approach it)… The mask is but a bridge over the deepest chasm: the most terrifying, because a yawning abyss; the most fecund, precisely because of this void, this preparation for, this provocation of… creation itself. Or that which calls forth its need. Was the mask first conceived to conceal the human face, or to mask the face of the Other?
For the darkness calls upon us to accept our being lost.
Being Lost: Wondering in the Land of the Lost (The Art of Critical Landscape).
‘Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.’
(Samuel Beckett, ‘The Lost Ones’)
‘Nature Requiem’ (2011), is at once an Installation and a Landscape. A landscape with bones and string, where bones, distributed as if on the pattern of a grid, have replaced the masks and now include the handwritten text: ‘En Cherchant Pan et Faun’
Bones, like a curtain, overlay a landscape photographed, documented, then painted, a cleared ravaged land - overlaid by bones, attached by a web of wires and numbered. The art work, ‘自然安 魂曲 – 寻找潘神’ (2011) ,which includes the handwritten words, ‘En Cherchant Pan et Faun’ (In search of Pan and Fauns), offers Nature as despoiled… with the concomitant inference that the Culture that does this is to be put in question. Because a culture that does this is itself despoiled.
Sometimes it is necessary to return to basics in order to analyse the impact of emotionally-moving and thought-provoking art works: genre is the most basic element in the recognition and evaluation of any given cultural artifact; in all the arts we look to the genre classification for guidance and a prepared lexical field. If the physical and institutional framing of an art work is the source of its first definition or recognition as such, then genre is the first key to meaning - its semantic frame. Landscape is one such a repository of meaning, provocation of significance. (When the Landscape in question includes elements that may be considered as Found Objects, so offering a sense of installation, then we also access the range of responses we associate with the Still Life, genre of the transfiguration of the everyday, sometime bearer of the gift of luminescent sacrality – aided by the black and white of the background image, a photograph, whose aesthetics are unchallenged by the whiteness of the bones, the photograph, itself is a… Found Object).
The history or tradition of the Landscape charts a course from religious and mythical content to a record of possession (a witness to wealth) to (as an echo of the first stage) a representation of the ideal (Landscape as desired place of beauty, desired heavenly dwelling place, vision of heaven on earth). The second phase of the Landscape reappears now as returning us to our ‘possession’ as a record of our possession (what we have done with our ‘birthright’) with the associated religious and mythic force now found to be criticizing this ‘possession’ – criticizing our record of stewardship. The ideal Landscape returns to us only in its negative guise, as a belated awareness of the lack of manifestation of this ideal.
Furthermore, in an updating of two key terms inherited from art history, ‘the Beautiful’ and ‘the Sublime’, Landscape may now be read as including, not only an appraisal of our stewardship or relation with Nature, but also increasingly of the ‘landscape’ of culture, of the mindset and actions that produced this landscape, so of our history. The critical Landscape becomes the critique of culture, of human history. Yet, in turn, recent history provides us with the background to landscape; the new context on which we situate the modern day genre of landscape - the ‘landscape of landscape’ so to speak. (This background is perhaps most in-formed by the post-war landscapes of Anselm Kiefer). Such landscapes are not beautiful. So in a revived use of ‘the Sublime’ we are offered the predominance of the negative or the ironic. Nature (actually presented as a product of agri-culture) is presented as a critique of culture (so of the culture that made it) as dystopian; our cultural landscape is seen as not living-up to our ideals or, more realistically, to our potentials. Nature is no longer the scene of authenticity (unless that of an ‘authentic’ wound) much less the backdrop to moral regeneration and the renewal of potential. An Anti-Pastoral. Art work in which only a trace of a reminder (of the original Pastoral vision) remains… We are left with a deictic indicator, a ghostly indication of pastoral remains; what remains of the utopian, of ideal remains; there remains only enough to motivate a ghostly contrast, to criticise the present.
If the Modern(ist) landscape was the continuation of the Romantic landscape (‘by other means’) then it continued the critique of the urban, of industry, technology and scientific or utilitarian reason (as well as the tradition of a standpoint which was anti-mass culture, anti-mass society and anti-mass democracy, which later aspect was taken over by the neo-feudal responses to the crises of industrialization and nationalism). In the latter half of the twentieth century, the Modernist landscape was subsumed by the Post-modern; continuing the force of critique, but now shorn of its anti-democratic elements (rather celebrating aspects of mass culture). Yet still continued is the element, taken over from Modernism, of experiment and difficulty (albeit on differing grounds). Yet critique and experiment in Post-modern form, as evinced in the ‘combine’ and installation element (formal) together with the lack of backward looking indexes as the cure for the Fall (content), all suggest that the simple solutions touted in the past have all been eschewed. In terms of moral propositions we find we inhabit a negative landscape. A landscape of problems. A landscape of the lost…
As once we searched for the Grail that would provide the answer to the question of meaning and value amid the depths of the forest, searching for the glimmer of light that would lead the way to a clearing; so now amid the ravaged remains of the cleared forest we discover that the glimmer was something that we always carried within ourselves. A Manichaeism stripped even of its distant and absent God. Leaving us alone and lost in the deforested spaces of the soul.
Found Objects, when they appear against the background of a Landscape, may suggest yet another genre, another field of meaning. In the work in question these (the bones carefully arranged upon the face of the canvass) amount to a 3-D reference to the realm of the ‘Still Life’, accessing its lyrical power and appeal to beauty as residing in the object itself and in its relations within a formal arrangement. A tradition dating from the earliest Christian art as representing symbolic (religiously-charged) objects gathered together, initially appearing on church walls (in the 7th-8th centuries, echoes of the frescoed decorations of Classical society) to its heyday in the 16th and 17th centuries whose significance included possession and beauty, objects and their interrelation as form, the transformation of the everyday (but also included carcasses etc., echoing the meanings accreting to the momento mori, the death’s head Vanitas of the Baroque, itself a feature of the Still Life of the period). The current meanings of Found Objects and the Still Life are often more ironic, more iconoclastic, than beautiful - so more useful for conceptual ends. Now, as incorporated into a globalised Post-conceptualism, the hybrid heir to sculpture as ‘combine’ or ‘installation’, offering a celebration and critique, a presenting and questioning of modern society, whose jumble it re-presents, as a cut-up, or found-object poem, at once a lyrical elegy for what might have been, and a carnivalesque affirmation of (Post)modern identity.
So Nature is represented by bones, by dead things, matter that still remains, signs of previous life… (prosopoeaeic evocation of an absent or lost life) and their arrangement into a Still Life, (nature mort in French). But here the Still Life is still indeed, is dead, mere index of a former state; in the subjunctive mood only is future ‘life’ again possible. Art is memory work. Indeed in another work, ‘献曼达’(2009) we see a collection of stones, each with a face (echoing the memorialising works of Boltanski); we witness the superimposition of an image upon a stone for the remembrance of a life; ’head stones’ in the graveyard of memory. Found Objects and the Still Life in this sense are religious ‘fetishes’ - with the word ‘fetish’ used in the proper sense of the word, as something, precious, profound, sacred, so to be protected, remembered (and not as used in its Enlightenment-rationalist, or intellectual neo-colonialist, form as a put-down, or negative comparative, for the religious -non-rational- beliefs and practices of other social forms; whilst remaining blind to the beliefs implicit in modern forms of identity, or denouncing all non-rational elements of human culture). If the celebratory end or appropriation of cultural objects offers a cultural landscape as collage as collection, as fragmented modern experience as positive, as pleasure, as jouissance, then the more thoughtful end of this appropriation, through its lyricism, points to something absent or lost, conjures up other modalities of reflection and feeling, pointing to a ritual of ‘remembering’; remembering what is important… asserting an identity focused upon reflection and value (also reflexivity and value, with the paradoxes of ironic self-consciousness and the necessary performative assertion of value(s)). Performing a quest (ritually, as art only can): searching for (and in so doing, creating) meaning (as humans only can).
Still Lives: Found Objects. Lost; what is lost? Lost object(s). Replaced by found object(s)…so ‘found objects’ represent what is lost, lost objects, symbols of what is lost… Or what is to replace what is lost?
In‘迷失者的岸’(2010) we experience Beckett as ‘Beckett’; the Proper Name as a cultural referent which includes the impact of his works, as a lost self, as existential uniqueness and isolation, existential ‘thrownness’, as well as dilemmas of moral choice in a post-foundational world: asking the question: whence value, whence morality? Unfounded but necessary. Inferred in art. (Since Romanticism offering art as a source, or interpretation, of value in the world – at once symptom and diagnosis; an alternative source of the sacred). A ‘thrownness’ applicable collectively to ourselves as a species (as in Beckett’s short prose work, ‘The Lost Ones’). We have found ourselves as lost; are ready therefore to found ourselves anew, to reinvent values - to discover (to assert) values where we no longer can support beliefs…
The presence of water in the Beckett installation also taps into a history of symbolic significance. Water (apart from its conjunction with ‘Earth’ as an element of landscape), more precisely the view across water, connotes ‘the other-side’, and ‘crossing’… as well as the open space of light that seems to hover above it. The sense of ‘crossing’ carries a ritual sense, suggesting the image as capable of holding ritual force, and so of the consideration of landscape as ritual, as a means of purification (again via Nature, in the tradition of Pastoral from Theocritus through the Romantics –climaxing, in Wordsworth’s ‘epic’ ‘The Prelude’, with Nature as final cure for all ills, intellectual and moral, individual and social- to William Empson and D.H. Lawrence and taking a last gasp in the counter-cultural authenticism of the 1960s – before returning as ‘weekend in the country’ or exotic travel to ‘unspoilt’ authentic holiday destinations…). Today’s Post-modern pastoral is, however, ironic, a negative pointer back to a lost former ideal (the naiveties of the Culture and Nature, town and country, opposition have been surpassed, and are employed with an awareness of their limitations). (Chinese equivalents of this, pro-Nature, moralist, authenticist, tradition, would begin with Daoism (Yang Chu, Laozi, Zhuangzi) and extend through Wang Anshi and Dai Zhen to the 20th century philosophy of Jin Yuelin). Such scenes again access ‘the beautiful’ in art. Deploying sensuous pleasure as calming, reflective and orderly, whilst suggesting something else, something absent, wistful, even melancholic (so not a ‘pure’ or ideal classical form of beauty). Something we can find in many water scenes; poignant, with loss…inviting, or suggesting, redemption. Cross the water.
Landscape in one of its related forms, the Pastoral, here as always connoting Nature, appears in a ‘beautiful’ form as loss. And in ‘sublime’ form as an anti-pastoral; the pastoral lives on as Complaint, itself damaged by the very culture it would denounce, present as a wounded scene calling forth an absent cure…
Or a fertility rite… a rite of Spring. Rite of rebirth.
Genre as a marking-of, a re-framing, an intensification of meaning. (Art as ritual. The ritual face of art.)
Installation: a machine for making meaning (for making feelings). As with the frame of the picture (augmented by the gift of time of the viewer), so too the framed space of the installation offers the significance only available to ritual. Most basic function of ritual: our recognition of ourselves.
To be lost in the world; to be at a loss before the world. To be at a loss before a world… to be lost to another world…
*
III
(But what, after all, is a ritual…) A ritual in the place of art, which is the place of ritual in the world, a return to its home then, performed in its home, its church or temple, the Temple of Art. Where else to perform such?
In the previous stages of Gao Bo’s artistic development, the genres discussed, Portrait, Landscape, Installation, both in two dimensions (the Portrait, Landscape, Still-life) and in the three-dimensional Installation composed of Found Objects, including images, photographs and prints) have already owed much of their emotive power to a kind of ritual force (this ritual effect is true of art work as such, due to the re-framing the constitutes the art work, as also of the particular choice of content and its means of presentation). One of the heirs, in the modern world, of rituality and its emotional functions, previously tied to religion, is Art. As witnessed by its framing devices, including that of time and space, and the attendant intensification of meaning, providing the ‘effervescence’, that Durkheim saw as the key to ritual (including the framing of place due to the gallery and museum and of time, as in the time we spend within them, all framing the ‘lost to time’ -with its implied universal referent, so ‘outside-of-time’- of the art/ritual experience).
The role of ritual in everyday life is as the protector of the identity of the individual with itself, through constant repetition, and is its bond with its community of identification (subject to social entropy), again through repetition; often expressed in the nod, wink, handshake or other gesture of recognition, through to birthdays and similar cyclic events to the periodic mass rituals particular to every community (Christmas, Spring Festival, National Days). Rituality is still very much a part of everyday life. The forms of recognition ritual supports are basic to the human condition and part of a process of constant renewal. It is a process on which we spend a lot of time and money.
Indeed this expenditure marks the very modern relation of Ritual and Commodity (as a previous means of, or mode of exchange, ‘gift exchange’, marked by non-equivalence, but always co-existing with forms of exchange marked by equivalence -as measured by being brought to market, exchanged by barter or for money- transits successfully into modern mass market exchange-based social life). Whence Marx’s, now infamous, deployment of the concept of ‘commodity fetishism’, where the ‘fetishism’ in question, was not meant as a compliment, rather a negative comparative. The word, ‘fetish’, however, originally connotes sacral force, as in a sacred object or symbol, and all societies have these, most notably connected to identity and its collective affinities. The kernel of truth in Marx’s use of the term lies in the ‘spiritual’ use value of modern commodities (defined by their exchange value) as now inseparable from identity (what do we buy that is not marked in some way by a statement about our identity?) and recognition (our implied membership of a real or imaginary community and what we must pay, or sacrifice, for this membership).
Art read as functioning as a form of Ritual concerns the effect on the audience of the whole art work. Its status as the implied audience of the art work, its identity as those who can know, can understand, as those who have mastered the codes necessary for pleasure on this cultural level (Bourdieu). So the sacrifice of time (spent before the art work and spent coming and going, and including that invested in the past in its comprehension, the learning of its codes) and cash (ticket price, transport and dressing-up price!) invokes the ritual that is the experience of the art work (be it play, performance art or art work as image). In this way the whole of the art work, the realm of art as such, the re-framing of a special piece of space and time, is understood (or better, felt) as a ritual experience.
However we many also find (not least in drama) the effect of Ritual within Art as a citation or re-enactment, of a ritual process as one part of the art work (a ritualised part of the whole art work as ritual). The effect of the ritual portion: in Drama, with a play within a play, a performance within a performance, or moment of intensity; a purple set-piece or climactic passage in prose; a reframed space – or confluence of diagonals and of other formal indicators- within the frame of the image. As such this aspect of ritual (of ritual as a part) functions as summary or focal point for the work’s meaning and indeed its very structure.
Meaning in art, not least conceptually influenced, or even post-conceptual art, and so concerning the vexed relation of ideas and art, ideology and art, or art and theory; theory into art often makes bad art (propaganda): conversely, good art makes good theory as we try to explain its efficacy and affectivity, rationalize and conceptualise its aesthetic force.
Performance Art so partakes of both types of reframing, both manners of making meaning intense… and approaches ritual most closely as it resembles drama, as it is… a performance.
In terms of meaning, the relation of the performance to the images on show, of movement to static, of gesture to the photograph, is complementary: it extends the meaning of the image or installation by means of the performance. Already present on many art works are gestures inscribed on the surface of the visual text (a photograph), daubs of paint, scratching effects, defacing and graffiti-like additions, all may be read as signaling the existence of a problem… art in the interrogative. Performance extends this accretion of layers (of matter and of meaning), by allowing the audience to witness the covering over, repainting, re-writing… and washing away… the performative equivalent of call and response, of question and answer? In this way themes of rebirth as representation (and vice versa) are put into play; to represent is to cause something to be reborn, be re-conceptualised, its perception so refreshed - the very function of ritual.
We should never forget that ritual is about unity (is ontologically conservative, anti-entropic) whether on the level of communication (Bataille’s ‘intense communication’, but also the connection between the audience and performer) or of social bonds (identity and recognition). But first comes transgression (a taste of sublime disorder), a journey from form to un-form (‘in-form’) and back. So the presence of the sublime is through a relation to surprise or shock (the means or negative exemplar or completion of the job of entropy): only then followed by a ‘new’ order… a reaffirmation (its general function or end); and as thought-provoking (its art function, artistic intention, as communication). These relationships have often been misunderstood (resulting in the reification of the relationship of transgression, with shock-for-shock’s-sake quickly becoming commercialised, or misrecognition, as with the ‘carnivalesque’ as cover for historical pogrom, in reality, historically, a ritual affirmation of the identity of the pogromers).
Unity (a sense of community…) of feeling. As a (if only symbolic) unity of opposites; which may also be a supersession of these opposites (as we move beyond binaries as a means of conceptualisation). Just so with art and people (matter and meaning), performers and audience (sender and receiver), and the genders (male and female). Also with each to other: in the making of the other person as an art work, taking each other as artworks as action on each other and as a dual, mutual effort… So a continuation of the crossing of, the dissolving of boundaries; as lines on floor and as demarcations of art/person, gender, paint/material thought/feeling and person/other…
Again on the return of order, the return to order, in performance, we might, for example, turn to the particular performance piece that took place in Korea (discussed below), and note that, as the intensity unfolds, then lessens and is reversed within the ritual itself (in the world of, in ‘the frame of’ the art work) yet outside the art work, the world of both the audience and the participants, it has in one sense, ‘not finished yet’. Because after it has ended, as the paint is washed off the canvasses (and the floor cleaned, accompanied by the cleaning of the artists, ‘off-stage’) so the ritual process continues, we are returned to the world (the status quo ante). A ritual within the world. A ritual that leaks into the world (cause and effect continue along the arrow of time). But the world is still the world.
(The witnesses however carry with them the memory, affective as well as visual and conceptual, of the event that occurred… that has therefore not ceased to occur…)
If the sense of return or return to order (to present pre-existing reality) means that rituals are indeed conservative (the identity of the audience is re-confirmed and not changed) they are also the source of the renewal of our social bonds and identities, so perhaps ‘conservational’ is a better word (in theatre, as in ritual, minds are reconfirmed and not changed). In fact it is precisely this conservative aspect of rituality which gives implicit permission (as in the history of ritual proper or from an anthropological perspective) to ‘go overboard’; to transgress within the frame of a ritual art event (and make of such a popular ingredient in the expression of ‘generational difference’). Whence the paradox: the more transgressive, the more conservative; as the contrast becomes more extreme, first within the ritual in the moment of reconfirmation, and then (outside the ritual) with the return to order in the non-ritual, non-art world after the end of the event. So if ritual time and events are boxed off, then, like all art, or even imagination (representation is not the thing or event itself), it leaves a space for experiment, and even excess… As a thought experiment; for the dissolving of boundaries and limits which do not challenge order or identity itself (this was the fantasy of the ‘60s, regarding the role of ritual in the theatre, to release human nature in an animal, man, who is however, entirely cultural…). But, like the imagining of a variety of situations, it opens questions… it releases creativity… and gives substance to the thought, often unspoken, of the observer (so expressing, rather than changing, their identity). This is already a lot.[i]
The performance pieces and their recording.
The performing pieces are an evolving work in progress, each transiting into the next – all existing in many versions. For example, there is a significant difference between the first version of the Duchamp/Eliot piece with its writing on and ritual washing of the body, which is edited like a film, and later versions edited as a record of a performance event or constituted by the documentary record of a particular performance. The comments that follow apply equally to a sequence of photographic stills, a couple of short films and a filmed performance event, all featuring a female model taken as a photographic body, receiving projected images and being cleansed of them….
Received ideas and the receiving body. And we receiving the spectacle… as the body receives water… a reception where the image of the flesh remains, even as the image is removed. Our removal from the image, the presence of the body cleansed, at once a removal of what is received and a removal in place and time, we part, once removed, in receipt of a gift.
Theme: art as covering, art as veil; so suggesting that there lies a place ‘beyond the veil…’ Topics: woman, the body, representation and art, representation as art (concept and object), subject as object and therefore personhood or interiority and society. The presence of a male artist and female model repeat, but also evoke (and so problematise) the typical power relations of what is historically a male gaze. The medical settings (of some photographs) are also gendered in terms of received notions of power and authority.
The male artist calls his own gendered subject position, his identity, and the power relations, into question. Evoked are the gaze, the frame, the content relation, and the right to treat the body as a mise-en-scene; all called into question. As with Duchamp (‘guest artist’ in the art work) in ‘La mariee mise a nu par ses celibataires, meme’ (La Grand Verre, 1915-23/’The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even’, and the fragment of body image framed in ‘Etant donnees’ (posthumous).
(Note the image where female model covers eyes/face in the face of artist/photographer… modesty/refusal…minimal privacy…reference to the interior as sequestered, separate, inviolate?)
The Body as Surface: receiving projected images.
Projection 1: the ‘Mona Lisa’, Leonardo after Duchamp’s, ‘LHOOQ’, (1919). It is important to note the presence of humour and parody… most ancient and most efficient means of critique; adding grotesquerie to image acts as an auto-critique… Not least in the ‘Mona Lisa’ after its ‘defacement’, or appropriation, by Duchamp (the reference to Duchamp reminds us of his other proto-conceptual art work, as mentioned above); so it is that the projections, the ‘beard’, involve a double parody (the artist re-inscribes himself after Duchamp in a further layer of parody…). The match of beard and body hair offers a grotesque visual pun with the resulting humour as proof of the mismatch of projection and receiving surface, the body in question… so the becoming aware of the layers superimposed on such in our everyday actuality.
Projection 2; Violin, with an echo of Ingres after Man Ray (‘Countess Casati’ (1928)). Beneath the parody (the ‘curves’) the question of music in its relation to representation… Even more than the Lyric (a subgenre of verbal language and its writing) the most directly emotional of the arts (here not present in its written form but as symbol: as metonymy, the instrument depicted makes music; or metaphor (via synecdoche, a part comes to stand for the whole). The meaning of the violin symbol. The projected curves of the violin enact the same trope as that of the Mona Lisa and her ‘beard’; a visual pun (simile, metaphor, resemblance) based upon a part of the body. If more subtle than the grotesque humour of the ‘beard’ this projection (upon, imposition upon) the body, nevertheless reminds one that an implied comparison is taking place… the ground of which is pleasure (predominantly, but not entirely, the pleasure of the male gaze). The visual pleasure of the shared curves of violin and body, the aural pleasure of music as the expression of feeling. And so woman as (reduced to) place of pleasure (the metonymy of the ‘beard’ also points in this direction…). So the washing-off of these markings both signifies and performs the process of purification from these unwarranted layers. So ‘woman’ is not reducible to curves (nor indeed to ‘beard’), nor even emotion, music personified… A ‘flattering’ comparison to be rejected because reducing a person to feeling is to deny what most philosophers would regard as making up the human; reflective ability, reason… (a familiar Romantic, or even philosophical, trope, to vaunt, elevate something as Natural in the world of rhetoric, but to leave untouched its actual or perceived subordinate role in reality).
Furthermore, ‘Nature’ too, as the ‘nature’ of the ‘object’, may be called into question, its role in our language and culture also put into dispute by the questioning of the ‘nature’ (the cultural representations) of ‘woman’, or ‘the body’.
Woman as theme: but… ‘woman cannot be defined…’ (Kristeva). Woman (as such, in general) cannot be represented; the word has a (general) deixis, but the semantic and lexicological implications are under review… beyond negotiation is particularity (and so perhaps notions of typicality). A given exteriority only is shown, a (body) surface. ‘Woman’ is plural; so beyond any available stereotype. ‘Woman’ (usually allied to Nature) here may be read as a figure for society (Culture); the problems of perception and understanding configure all attempts at understanding; we are left with an allegory for problems and politics of representation, of art and thought.
She (‘the model’) has no interiority, volition, can only cover her eyes; access to interior denied, privacy, refusal of gaze as proof of interiority; an image, a surface, remains. ‘She’ is also denied a voice… Only the voice of male narrator is heard; so ‘she’ remains enigmatic, plural. Not (yet) specific, so liable to allegoric readings. This latter point reminds that the allegory taking place before our eyes is also one of subjectivity, of persons and their (here ‘her’) unrepresentability. Making all suggestions as to interiority and feeling into suppositions and metaphors as in the history of the Lyric (and music, so often allied to the visual sense, yet so profoundly separate from it…).
The body as image. The uses of nudity (no tabula rasa, the nude in art history as back ground to any viewing of the female nude in an ‘art’ context). No innocent viewing. Photography and film repeatedly demonstrate this conundrum - and the problems that inhere when we try (as we must) to overcome the inheritances from the past not deemed worthy of survival… (our received prejudices or preconceptions).
Art as body/art on body. Fashions/interpretations, image/history accretions as false, as mismatch… no longer useful or appropriable? Except in this instance? As part of the putting into question of this tradition… as part of the process of generating allegories on similarly problematic subject matter.
Body as surface. The transfer of images of (a ‘customised’) Mona Lisa and violin (echoing a similarly ‘customised’ nude after Ingres) to the body of the model functions as a parody and the subsequent cleansing indicates that this process (of decoration, of a particular manner of understanding) as limiting… as a source of limitation. What there actually is… is to be left open… closed off from popular (or ‘art’) cliché.
In fact the projected images on the body and their insistence (as an aspect of the photographic ‘fixing’ that has taken place on the surface of the skin) increasingly resemble a form of defilement, a kind of dirt or pollution… to be cleansed. Having pulled the viewer in with the lure of the body (typical of art and advertising alike) accompanied by the history of the nude and its accreted significations, the critique of its appropriation may now begin. Together with its potential for allegorical usage… as of the allegory of pollution and cleansing of all manner of object, including context and situation (and concepts, with which we comprehend such)…
Reflections on representation and meaning, on different languages (visual, aural, musical, oral language/communication). De-inscribing historical clichés; woman not reducible to pure beauty, or as the ideal nude of art history (as surface), not to be taken as pure feeling, as music (as mindless sense). Projections (as of painting, or spraying, or ‘developing’) onto the body as a superimposition (so evoking the temporal politics of superimpositions, the less-present on the present, so signaling a choice of past or future in relation to the present; here indicating the persistence of the unwanted past). Impositions… as the accretions of the unwanted. Painting as taking place over another surface, potential palimpsest… Yet what is there to be discovered beneath? A question of letting the surface material ‘speak’ (which it cannot here do, if ‘it’ did, then ‘she’ would loose her allegorical force). To speak… ‘for itself’. Body as matter and body as person, as a relation of tension… (as well as the inescapable tension between what is spoken and what is understood).
Opening shot (Short film and performance documentary). A collection of received clichés. Artist, (young) female body, moon (with the ‘movements’ of the moon as periods, cycles, as ‘female’ or ‘feminine’; male forms female; male gaze at female, suggest our gaze too is gendered ‘male’…
Including the reflection that all actual appropriations are themselves also individual, so never quite irreducible to a public average; even if partially reducible to context of appropriation and its complex web of power relations… and desires.
Image succession: moments from the short film: (First climax): of music as of image flow, as a parody of image flow (the Mona Lisa and the ‘beard’).
To body wrapped, sprayed, or coated… (‘clothed’ in an invisible cloth… the cloth of received culture). Layers of paint on the body.
(Second climax): White-lit studio space; model at centre, object of attentions (of mainly, but not exclusively, male photographers, the media, the image industry).
Open window… exit route…a way out…? The window, open, suggesting another place another space/time, an alternative. The entry of air; wind, as ‘breath of fresh air’ after the claustrophobic space of interiors (a simple image, cleanly composed… highly evocative – in the context of the prior flow of images, and, in retrospect, after what follows…).
Final: the ritual cleansing. The model being cleaned… the massive symbolism of washing (present in all religions and part of, if not required preparation for, most rituals). The removal of the everyday in its negative aspect. With the artist too being cleansed. Self-purification; an auto-critique; a critique of art… putting its own house in order, questioning the morals of representation of art and artists…
Washing away the image obsessions of ‘art’.
Sound. Commentary/verbal element: language and music as processes in time. Language and music as purification: in time, so subject to change, requiring renewal in the face of entropy so opportunity for renewal. Ritual may not only be a backward form of repetition (of received cliché), but a ‘repetition forward’, as reinterpretation, re-appropriation, or change. A (Chinese) vase, a container, (a traditional ‘female’-tagged image, as space) so a (Chinese) woman as loosing the patina of space, the accreted images of history and ‘art’. (And acceding to ‘woman-as-time’? The transformation, ritual cleansing as a temporal phenomenon…).
New beginnings (the text and accompanying images of ritual washing).
Where to find things that are already lost? Where to lose the things that must be lost?
Quote: ‘The end is my beginning’, T. S. Eliot, from ‘Four Quartets’.
Music (Ravel); impressionistic, waves of emotion, a little in excess of the image, augmenting and hyperbolic, so parodic - not least of itself. Offering exaggeration as critique; a reminder the received position of music as ‘feminine’, as pure emotion… And by contrast, Sofia Gubaidulina, ‘Hommage `a T. S. Eliot’ for Octet and Soprano’ (1987), a restrained, minimal setting of Eliot’s poetry with its promise of rebirth.
General movement: from received material, through parody, to ritual cleansing. What next (what is left? What will the body, figural or otherwise, do?): A question posed, (just as the body is posed…) but not answered…
The auction, or publicity event, launch that frames the performance event marks it as part of the art world, of the entry of the art work into the art world… Reframes the art work as defined by its entry into the public realm. Affirms its definition as art. Affirms its auto-critique of this institution.
The body in question…body as allegory; as woman, as person (inadequacy of relation of image to person) so as allegory of representation… of ‘art’ itself… also for the social body, the body of society. Or as allegory of itself; allegoric because beyond representation – originating such: both its beyond and home… the question embodied.
‘The end is my beginning’
(But a beginning which has no end.)
In a performance which took place in Seoul, Korea in 2014, the artist and his co-performer, a young woman, anointed themselves (along with part of the gallery) with paint, black and white, and engaged in a frenetic and messy, mock coupling that subsided into expressions of mutual care and solicitude. The stages of a ritual (coupling) was followed by an expression of collective care towards the end (including the wrapping of the participant’s bodies in cloth and paper)… in which the audience began to play a part. Indeed, the effervescence of ritual was in evidence in the clearly emotional response of many members of the audience; rather as if participants, than as detached on-lookers. Desire (eros) was perhaps transformed into love (agape), desperation into a kind of calm, a wound certainly transformed through a form of healing. The cathartic expression presupposed the expression for its catharsis. Indeed the apparently destructive, desperate, wild and orgiastic moments that connote sexual coupling, may be read as carrying the same general meaning as Euripides’ great play, The Bacchae, reminding us: do not forget you are still matter, organic, made of blood and desire… the nature of human (even if the expression is always cultural). And the message perhaps is that expression is what is required, even at the risk of moments of apparent excess, if a new healthier state of stasis is to be achieved. Art is the barometer of expression. Performance art its ritual diagnosis.
IV
The Beijing Exhibitions and Performance Pieces.
In the winter of 2015-2016 the artist, now known as GB, held a sequence of exhibitions and accompanying performance pieces in the ‘Tokyo Beijing’ Gallery at the 798 art complex in Beijing. ‘GB’ ; these initials also featured in the image logo for the exhibition, which went under the general title of ‘The Great Darkness’.
The First Beijing Exhibition
The first of the exhibitions in Beijing featured a new version of the ‘Dualities’ sequence. This sequence is made up of paired pictures, side by side, each showing different faces in the same configuration, in one there is a face wearing a mask (breathing/medical), in the other we are presented with a mask, upside down - a mask that features in Tibetan Buddhist ritual. Again the dominant means of expression is black and white, based upon, or built upon a photographic foundation (like Rauschenberg, the artist begins with the photographic image, then adds layers of paint and other materials; yet it is again worth noting that the resulting image is still basically black and white, despite the paint added the image remains loyal to the achromaticism of the photograph beneath). Furthermore the backgrounds of each half of the diptych are painted as opposite (if one is black then the other is white) further reinforcing the sense of duality. The aesthetics of black and white apply: contrasts are brought out; life is at once represented as seen through a veil (reality is in colour), and yet also like it is… (documentary origin and code of reading). The indexical trace which is the key feature of photography in general is preserved in the received code of the documentary effect of black and white at the same time as the formal aesthetic aspects of monochrome images are brought into play. So sacralising and transfiguring the image in a way different to what is possible ‘in colour’… we see what is ‘otherwise than colour’, indeed, in a way colour cannot manage nor imagine – at once, immediate and mysterious, possessing a deictic realism and speaking in poetry.
This first exhibition is called, and indeed features, ‘Dualities’, but points beyond; as if the title were a question, or identification of a problem. So, the contradictory or contrasting or complementary character of the diptych suggests a further contrast, perhaps a single deeper meaning. As in many philosophies and religions and the methods of science, we are asked to look beyond the divisions on the surface, beyond the contradictions, as in every search for ‘essences’ or just for truth. Masking and masks may protect (from disease and demons; by means of medicine or superstition) but they also conceal… so adding to the enigmatic, question-posing character of the images and their title. In asking the question the artist uses the visual language of concern; addressing the audience as adepts, those who already know; perhaps like the participants of many a tribal ritual, we already know who and what is behind the masks. For sometimes difficult things require a little shade; we must look to what is ‘hidden in the fold…’ Art in interrogative mode.
Face. A key feature of these art works (as of documentary images and many of the ‘blood’ ensembles), is an image of a person as portrait, as constituted by their face. Put another way, what is uncovered of a person is their face (or head) and their hands… Heads and faces feature in sculpture, as in the genre of the ‘bust’, as head and shoulders: in the image it is the portrait that offers the person, in which identity is seen as residing in, or symbolized by, the face (in effect a synecdoche or part/whole rhetorical relation to the body, or invisible nervous system, as a whole). The face or head; face on maybe read as an appeal to humanity (as in the work of the most recent philosopher of the ‘Face’, Emmanuel Levinas, where the face is read as containing a moral aspect, indeed a moral commandment or imperative, calling forth a moral obligation of care from the viewer). How is the obligation effected by the presence of a mask?
Masked face and face-mask. Faces covered, are they faces concealed, medically or supernaturally protected; masked for protection… or gagged? Masked face; other’s faces …and face-mask; counter-posed to other’s faces, the mask of the Other. Representing the force of eternity; the sublime and its value to the living as a kind of talisman: ritual face, or face of ritual. A ritual mask to ward-off evil. A real (documentary) identity and a symbolic (imaginary) one. A modern life and an ancient culture. Existence and its Others. Dualities…
Dualisms incarnated in a diptych, further divided (or should that be united… but pushed into the background) by neon light tubes; fluorescent red-pink light, often flashing, changing intensity of glow, so sacred… Mock sacralising (like Christmas or other winter decorations, the lights on a Christmas tree… the lights bedecking trees on a busy high street - the neon of advertising). These lights form a cross or grid over each picture; dividing each, but uniting the whole – uniting by obscuring, the play of electric light masking the play of light and dark behind. A bauble effect of the contrast of electric light and monochrome background; behind in the dark, over ‘shadowed’ by the light’s shallow attraction, its mediating distraction, lies the real meaning, or truly sacral element. The first ‘false’ impression is followed by the impression of the divided matter that lies ‘below: we must focus beyond the dividing light and see beyond… make out the meaning as in a rebus. The dazzling effect of a commodifying modern society and the effect of this on those not quite ready for such a transformation, or not entirely understanding this change… (In this sense, the Dualities sequence in its latest form follows logically on from the Nature-with-Neon pictures, discussed above …)
The divided image: divided here first by the vertical as in the form of the diptych, a reference to religious history, one layer of a problem, but positive; divided here again with the neon cross, vertical and horizontal running through the centre of each image, each portrait, each mask (its focal point, appropriated), the addition of a bright light as paradoxically negative, the overlay of a shallow culture whose only rationale is the ever more rapid exchange of commodities (with the packaging of all, as in the light ‘wrapping’ the diptych, as the transformation of all into a token on this market). Dividing the whole, breaking it up… or re-packaging it; perhaps masking the function of the mask, to protect, to ward-off evil… or to gag or silence. To ward-off meaning. Ward-off the deeper levels of meaning and render their problems trivial.
And what of the upside down mask, the reversed (the reversed Other); once un-reversed, now to be reversed again to be seen as an aid to understanding… the representative of traditions reversed, the representation of traditions reversed, of cultures and their transformations. The dance of cultural masks that masks our nature. The mask beneath the mask. Which mask is the chosen one? (Which mask have you chosen to wear?)
Performance 1 (linked to, and set in, the ‘Dualities’, in Exhibition 1).
Wearing protective gear, and masked, a lonely figure wanders through a fog flowing (dry ice drifting over the faces on the stones) landscape, and wearily, anxiously mixes powder and water to make paint, the preparation of a ritual medicine, for changing or absolving or dissolving a problem or performing a ritual simulacrum of the real - an invocation of another reality. A preparation of black paint and white paint, which it then throws and paints and wipes onto the ‘Dualities’ canvasses; black paint onto the one with a black background and white paint on the one with a white background, so attempting to unify each canvass by eradicating the presence of the opposite colour, eradicating difference… an attempt to wash clean, a symbolic cleansing of difference making whole each canvass, but leaving the duality of the canvasses, now denuded of their content, intact…… But beneath the layer of paint we can still apprehend the faces of the person and the mask become part of the layer an accretion in the layers of the picture, surviving to remind… hidden but insisting. Ineradicable. The figure is then prepared by being wrapped, as in added protection against an external poison, a taboo force, or a force holy but powerful and dangerous…a ritual protection against a force it must confront or approach. It then crawls towards the LED cross mounted on a pile of boxes, tips open the boxes of candle holders, (traditional Tibetan) and lights several. It then proceeds, with considerable difficulty, to climb a ladder in order to illuminate the cross, the LED when lit shows the stock exchange in red light (complementing the cross divisions of the ‘Dualities’ pictures…). Finally the masked and suited figure prostrates itself before the flashing LED in an act of ironic self-abasement or blind worship… Worshiping the very thing that has caused the fallen state of the world it inhabits…
The Second Beijing Exhibition,
A sequence of pictures, all linked in theme and content (and means of expression), arranged into triptychs; each element developed from an image taken from nature - tree trunks in their elemental aspect. Initially a photograph (black and white), then with paint added: now, at this stage, each image crossed by a bough, crucified. A bough, branches tied together, and wrapped in a gauze, or fragments of shroud, with blood apparently seeping through, as from a wound. A bleeding bough arranged as a cross over the landscape beneath, in an image of crucified nature, or a desolate or devastated Grove. Devastated but still with the power of negative sacrality. The image counterpart of the negative power of Nature (the destroyer… see The Aesthetics of Ruins: Ankgor Wat (2016) also with images by Gao Bo, for a discussion of ‘Nature’ in its negative symbolic aspect). The result of over-development and economic exploitation, as in the case of the ever-cogent problems of deforestation and environmental pollution. Accumulating problems that are themselves creating a ‘negative Nature’ where ‘our’ environment runs out of our control – becoming inimical to our survival.
The photograph exists still, a buried trace of itself, as the basis of the image, and so as index or ‘pointer’, pointer back in time, back to the referent, a referent lost, remaining as the trace of nature surviving in the artwork - as itself the work of devastation, and, performing the meaning it seeks to represent - as icon of this process. Again the tonalities are profoundly black and white: in the photograph, as in the paint added, in the ‘colour’ of the wood and the shroud - only the blood escapes the black, white and grey palette… escapes as if from somewhere else, somewhere beneath… inside. By these means, genres (as means of expression) are crossed, from photograph to painting to installation. Also crossed are genres as indicators of the content of expression, from documentary photograph to landscape painting to conceptual installation; the addition of the cross of bleeding branches divides and covers the image, itself a partially covered photograph; a cross, crossing genres and intertwining meanings – referencing Christian myth and the history of ritual to cross the bridge between feeling and understanding in the cause of a present day problem (the task of conceptual art at is best). Referencing a sacrificial myth in the place of traditional sacrificial ritual, a sacred grove, foregrounding the threat in sacrifice to suggest Nature’s destructive side as a response to its own destruction; the threat we read is a threat of our own making. A fear deferred, the fear of our own blundering. Nature’s negative sublime emerges as both memorial, cause (human development) and effect (our fear of the environmental changes we have engendered). Our ‘sacred grove’ has turned upon us, as gods are wont to do with wayward children, and we are not prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to propitiate them.[ii]
Performance 2 (linked to, and set in, Exhibition 2).
In many ways more simple and direct that the other performance pieces, the key moment of this event was the writing of texts onto the paintings described above… followed by the wrapping of the artist/performer in a shroud attached to a tree trunk across railway sleepers… with a live goat as witness and comforter. (The goat is also present in priapic aspect, perhaps symbolising the archaic nature god Pan - referenced in the art work discussed under the heading of Landscape above… ‘En attendant Pan et Faun’). The personification of Nature in its masculine aspect - as opposed to its usual personifications as female and maternal.
Writing on to the photograph/painting, the image text behind. The Landscape as background for the Word, as four languages, sacred texts, sacred sentences, are painted over the image (so adding further layers, further distancing ourselves from the original index, last trace of reality). And eventually over each other; then only to be crossed out, cancelled… In a performance which, at once represents and re-enacts the ‘crisis of faith’ of the modern world. Religions and belief systems are in this way rejected as sources of solutions to these problems, the problems raised by the artwork’s symbolism and fields of reference, its iconicity and indexicality…
The Third Exhibition
In many ways the climax of the sequence (with the fourth part following as a kind of coda) this exhibition included many pieces, all thematically linked as well as continuing the black and white means of expression, taken from the use of the photograph as base on which, and out of which, the resulting artworks are assembled.
i) Installation. The wrapping of a violin in mesh and neon, with photograph of nude body beneath, encircled, or enframed, by steel wire, repeated four times. The work offers two levels of meaning: one personal, particular, unique; the body’s owner at the time of showing was ill with cancer, a fact and symbol of limited possibilities (the drawn pictures behind each of the four installations were by the owner of the body so featured, drawn during her illness, so strengthening the personal element). On a universal level the symbolism of the violin as creativity and art is counterpointed by the restrictive wrapping. Neon, as in the other works featured in ‘GB’, configures commercialisation and shallow religiosity, so referencing the stifling of creativity by the twin corrupting forces of commerce and the varieties of artistic restriction. As well as the theme of health, which now, as the body of the violin, perhaps reflects back on the state of art and culture.
ii) Long scroll; running along one wall. A scroll, of painterly appearance, made from photography; a collage of photographs – a photomontage. Also a base for the confluence of art histories: the Eastern influence, the scroll form, and perhaps ‘Long March’ mythology; the Western influence, in the left to right directionality and the painting of sequences of heads as in the genre of portrait virtuosity. Whether in the sense of a journey, quest, search… or queue, they are numbered… a reference to the quantitative approach to life by bureaucratic reason. So we have the contrast of individualism; the uniqueness of the faces: and their ordinal quantification in numbers; people on a list, subject to bureaucratic registration or some other requirement or instrumental rationalisation.
iii) Installation. One of the most important installations in this sequence of exhibitions, a conceptual puzzle or philosophical assemblage. Heads, portraits, photographs hang, suspended from cords, the characters look up, imploringly, with religious gaze, in pious hope. Above is a ladder leading up; by the side a neon arrow points up… and nearby another points down. Below is a cracked mirror (cracked as part of the performance which accompanied this exhibition) which reflects the contents above… adding, or should one say, once added, another dimension, illusionistically doubling the ‘space’ of the installation – so providing either another ‘heaven’, another pole of escape, or a reflection of the one heaven above, its reflection a representation - which is then cracked, in an symbolic act of denial, refusing the option proffered by the rhetoric of hypsosis (eye-raising). This reversibility (the mirror image with its extended, ‘downward depth’), is also the illusion of ‘in and out’, or assorted eternities, of assorted escape routes; the cracked mirror signifies (indeed performs) the refusal of the illusion. Reversals suggest an equivalence of illusions, parallel rhetorics of eternity finally recognized as such, the crack in the mirror may, conversely to previous reading, suggest all such mirrors of reality as fake eternities, illusory ‘outsides’ (eternity as based upon our Eternal Present, generalized and projected beyond history is already our all too human illusion)…
iv) Installation; boats, cage and masks…
v) A pile of box-baskets (’dou’ = rice measures) and blank books, with, leaning upon them, as on a bank or slope, an over-lying crucifix. This cross is made, not from wood, but from neon and LEDs: one member, the vertical, displays stock exchange readings; the other, the horizontal, offers the artist’s ‘Lostist Manifesto’ - both displayed in LED. The empty boxes and books, bodily nourishment and mental leaning, food for body and mind, are paralleled by the two members of the cross, with their LED ‘readouts’; the surface of economic life and a strategic attempt at dealing with the implications of this reality.
vi) Photograph/paintings; a sequence of masks and masked faces, portraits… as with the Dualities sequence described above; now with added neon, and hangman’s rope, and gauze hanging over the head like a head dressing or ceremonial death cap –a strip of gauze ironically resembling the traditional Tibetan white silk scarf of greeting; last things meet first (meeting) or the death cap becomes a greeting from or to elsewhere… Also added is an incomprehensible script (signifying, an ‘other’ writing… meanings beyond those expressible…). The hangman’s noose also featured on each portrait, may again suggest the strangulation of a culture… with neon added …so implying its being strangled by commercialisation…
vii) Beckett with voice over. Beckett memorabilia connotes art as creativity and also art as solution to the insoluble problems in life (a role religion once played): the existential absurdism also associated with Beckett is a key part of the installation’s meanings. A nude body photograph is also featured as part of the art work; the voice, however, is not the voice of Beckett, it is the voice belonging to the body telling her story, the story of illness with cancer and its treatment (as featured above in (i) therefore the enigmatic presence of hair, a result of the medical treatment, hair loss). Absurdism and seeking, a kind of journey; art as the best worst answer – to unanswerability… illness and chance…fragments of boats underscore the sense of passage, a crossing … but to where… ?
viii) A centre piece of wooden boats, glass floats, rope and glass screens with neon writing; with a sound over, a baby crying. This installation piece is a shortened version of the installation in the Three Shadows Gallery (Beijing) where it was very long, and lengthily, reflexively ironic… as the long rope along the path only leads from one boat to… another identical boat (see also the section ‘Installation’ above, for analysis of the original work, most of whose meanings have been substantially preserved, indeed heightened in the Beijing Tokyo installation). The long ‘towpath’ is here collapsed by the sawing-up of the boats and further condensed by glass panels facing each other, both saying, in neon hand writing, ‘the other side’; a statement true from the point of view of the other panel opposite, inside; but paradoxical to us, outside, looking in; we see the ‘big’ picture, two pretenders to transcendence… Mirror images of each other. There being, as in (iii), only a mirror, their being only in a mirror; they are both the same - empty. We begin to understand the nature of the Great Darkness…
Clearly the two installations mentioned above, items (viii) the sawn-off boats and (iii) the hanging portraits and cracked mirror, share many meanings. Their central thrust (as with the Dualities series and similarly designed works) is the going beyond of received binaries or metaphysical stereo-typologies, paired concepts, opposites; with reversibility and its questioning as a form of satire; the questioning of the mirror image, of the opposite as same, as repetition, of this form of reflection (sic) as critique; paradox suggesting nonsense…
In this, the third exhibition, there were two more installations: an ironic altar, made in the form of a triptych, with portraits and neon in the form of a cross: and one with boats piled up and masks, with cage (a very large cage is part of the 798 scene… within which visitors like to photograph each other - a mark of ironic self-awareness?).
Performance 3 (linked to, set in Exhibition 3).
The ceremonial casting of dried flowers onto the boats that make up the exhibition’s central installation is the gesture that opens the third performance piece – as before, an interaction of the artist with his own work. At once a commentary upon and a performative extension of the meanings of the art works in question. A bringing together of the artworks present in the room into a unifying summary.
The ritual breaking of the mirror in the installation of the hanging portraits mentioned above was done by mounting a ladder and casting stones on to the mirror - as if breaking the still surface of water by dropping stones into the water… but here the breaking is irreversible (water re-seals, re-heals itself, smooths itself over) the cracks in the mirror are subject to entropy, they are irreversible, so destroying the illusion of the above shown below, its ‘mirror image’; or continuation, an illusion of depth and repetition to infinity (of the illusion) the illusion of the temporal (so anti-temporal) extension of infinity to time as eternity -actually time’s ‘outside’- as part of a ‘rhetoric of eternity’; a ‘parallel universe’ spun out of the ‘eternal present’ of human experience; a fiction, which must be broken to allow the living to live in the present… So simultaneously negating the offer of a path to the heavens above (with its other reflected below) and also offering a trace of another existence, hidden ‘below’ the splintered surface of the mirror, which now reveals not only what lies ‘above’, but what lies, revealed in the cracks, below.
Finally the artist is found lying prostrate tapping his head against the base of the neon and LED crucifix in the corner installation (with, lower down, books with blank pages, and forming the mound on which the ‘crucifix’ rests, ‘box-baskets’ (or ‘dou’斗)). Disparate installations have been joined by a poetic ritual narrative into a continuous artwork, a unification of the pieces in the chamber into a larger symbolic whole.
The Fourth and Final Exhibition
The pictures (pictures originally displayed in Arles, France, 2001). Photographs with painted surfaces, arranged into a triptych. The two on the left are done in the ‘Dualities’ style: left, with eyes closed, upright, on a white background; the right, with eyes open, upside-down, on a black background; the other, the third part on the far-right, offers a small eye-level screen, mounted on a mirror (reflecting the viewer and his or her background, which is formed out of the other, similarly mounted, images in the gallery). So the black and white means of expression common to the other artworks in this series of exhibitions, the building-up of the artwork on the base of a black and white photographic image, is continued from the Dualities series, but with pictures of convicts taking the place of the Tibetans featured in the previous art work. The small screen, offers the images of the convict again, followed by a colour image of them taken in prison, so a ‘mugshot’ with a caption in Chinese and English, stating their crime and date of incarceration, all are murderers and all apparently (unstated, but assumed) received the death penalty. Also added to the images, and lying beneath them, are small slats of wood with writing on them, these are modeled on similar slates the accused would have worn behind his or her head stuffed down the back of their shirt or otherwise attached to their head – listing their crimes… these slats are attached to the surface of the image- portrait often obscuring the face of the accused, and stacked against the wall below each triptych – further giving the sense of an installation.
The exception to the above is a single diptych featuring the artist himself, in similar ‘dualities’ style, one portrait right-side up, one upside down, but in colour, with text printed over the image, the left in English, the right in Chinese, recounting an episode from the artist’s childhood where he witnessed, and experienced the ambiguities of witnessing, that is taking part in, in ritual terms, a public execution (during the Cultural Revolution period). An experience marked both by horror and disgust, and fascination and collective euphoria, as is normal in many public ritual events… Antithetical public and private responses are not mutually exclusive, signifying different zones of experience which are often hard to unify – which perhaps we should not try to unify… but to be conscious of the dichotomy.
Installation. The installation at the centre of the last exhibition is made up of a cluster of upright wooden beams, taken from dwellings, and arranged into verticals to resemble a field of memorial posts, each with a metal box for a ‘head’, as it were; the box, with a glass lid, is empty, the back has been removed, so acting as an empty frame; the back panel of each box, each with photographic portrait image of one of the accused or condemned attached, is to be found at the base of the wooden beam on a plinth - as if a sculptural recreation of a beheading… The ‘content’ of the ‘head’ box having fallen, from head position or symbolic spirit presence, to memorial portrait such as found on grave stones or other kinds of grave memorials. From symbolic presence to symbolising absence. From present (life) to past (death). Surviving only in (our) memory. Each beam also has an indentation scooped out from its upper part, so acting as a kind of heart space…
Performance 4 (linked to, and set in, Exhibition 4).
The final performance piece takes place in two stages. In the first part, the ceremonial burning of the images mounted on the wall, all of which (with the exception of that of the artist and his boyhood recollections of an execution) were taken away in an old truck to be burnt: the pictures in their frames were first ‘mounted’ on a hill side, then thrown onto a fire lit in the centre of a field, the frames and ash were then carefully collected and brought back to the gallery.
In the second part, the artist worked on the sculpture/installation at the centre of the exhibition… the ash was placed in the boxes found on the base of each wooden beam column; each box has the portrait of the deceased, on the metal side; inside, behind the glass-side, we can see the black ashes within. Each box was then placed on the top of each beam, in ‘head’ position, so constituting a memorial, or stele, or ‘gravestone’. There was also a neon ‘spear’ which was thrust through a hole in the wooden beam, penetrating at about the level of the hollow scooped out of the beam, once perhaps in ‘face’ position, now (after the re-placing of the box with portrait in head position) in ‘heart’ position – a violent image which perhaps recalls the victim’s crime (we remember their victims, they are all murderers) as well as their end. A glowing spear of … revenge, reminder, deterrence, the crime and punishment inscribed onto the memorial…? (A ‘bad person’s memorial’/ ‘huairen jinianbei’/坏人纪念碑 is how the artist described them). This combination of post and neon ‘spear’ also resembles a crucifix, key icon of Western religious mythology and representative function in ritual practice (which has become the universal figure for guilt and absolution, for a scapegoat…), as also connoting the spearing of Christ’s side as a part of this narrative. Again, in the contrast between the natural materials and the neon tube, can we see the contrast between nature and culture, the latter represented by its shallowest bauble, the former by a fragment of dead nature - with the light of this culture as instrument of death… Furthermore: (in an important auto-biographical revelation, the artist confesses to having struck the head of one of the dead victims of a Cultural Revolution shooting as a child and so feels that a latter day expiation is necessary).
At the end of the exhibition, what remains, the installation at the centre, a memorial for… those once represented on the walls – what remains, on the walls, are the burnt-out picture frames, the burnt remains, charred black on white walls, and the mirror with its micro eye-level screen, like a blindfold, on which we see the victims and read their name and crime; surrounding them, is the mirror image of the room, with, centre stage, no longer the memorial, but ourselves, gazing at the mirror and at the eye level display which covers our face, a bandage over our eyes, yet another mask - ourselves in the place of the other, as others…
Last words…
In all the Beijing pieces, the art work builds, from photographic image to wall-mounted artwork with add-ons (paint, wood, cloth, neon, etc.), so from a two dimensional to a three dimensional art work; then to an installation work, taking central space, or occupying corners; to a performance piece in which the installations and wall-mounted works become the background, props or occasional focus for the artist’s actions… for the artist’s ends.
The Beijing exhibitions bring to mind the concept of bricolage as a feature of installation and performance art (not least in Derrida after Lévi-Strauss, and including Deleuze and Guattari). A variety of found objects, ‘ready-mades’ (also applicable is Heidegger’s analogous concept of ‘to-handedness’) and found images, like the photograph - even the contents of an entire exhibition - are re–employed… to solve problems and pose questions, interrogate myths and posit new pathways. And, after Derrida, recycling all matter of available things from the broken part of a culture to create new meaning. Installation is a form of bricolage (as is our first fully global art trend, or plateau, given its ubiquity, ‘Globalised Post-Conceptualism’). Regarding the making of significant meaning, of objects of significant meaning, out of nearby things for other, distant, that is, more rarified or philosophical ends – this methodology, by way of an apparent contrast, suggests the trope of metalepsis, where a present effect is linked to a distant cause, as a more general trope in the consideration of the photographic artwork or photographic ingredient in the artwork. Like documentary images whose distant origin has caused, or is read as causing, a present effect, the path of the trace, retraced, as it performs its work as an index – this interpretation of the image, an emphasis on its history overruling others (form, aesthetics). Then read as (distant) cause: but in interpretation (framing, understanding, giving genre…), it is the image itself that is the cause, the beginning of the chain of thought and meaning; the image, the presence of which is the evoking of the distant effect… (originary but now lost in time, swallowed up in the irreversibly lost past). A reversal at the heart of all reference and interpretation. So metalepsis, along with prosopropoeia (another figure from classical rhetoric, discussed elsewhere above) offer new insights on the relationship of referent to image in photography (especially black and white photography). Bricolage (or ‘to-handedness’) describe the role of the photograph in the inception and perception of the art work. The ends of the artist and the ends of the participants.
The rhetoric of ends; the rhetoric of last things (I).
End as beginning, as in the Eliot quote, suggests no final end, nor absolute nihilism, but an implied fresh start… So Great Darkness may be read as the last stage of confusion before a new beginning, an implied escape from parallel, co-implicating, religions and belief systems, or ‘beliefs’, into as yet uncharted territory… with (especially in the performance pieces) the artist as hero, performer, shaman, and sacrificial victim, perhaps representing the biographical, in the sense of a personal spiritual journey (if one may so speculate) as well as resonating on numerous artistic or cultural or philosophical levels. End of a period or end of a cycle… in any case a set of invocations calling into birth the new.
The rhetoric of ends; the rhetoric of last things (II).
Beyond last things as an aspect of religious rhetoric, and also of other systems of thought… these here regarded as equivalences, the same dead end, so declaring a bold ‘No’ to transcendental outsides: but at the same time, also declaring for a rejection of the inside, for modern life as it is - as it is constituted by industry and commerce and bureaucratic reason. So unlike most artists and many, maybe most, intellectuals, there is no Neo-Romanticism, no return to Nature or essences (popular culture as human nature versus city life, natural self versus alienated self, the rhetoric of the other, the exotic, especially in travel and fashion). So no re-turn to a transcendent as a ’gone beyond’ (or return to a pre-lapsarian ‘Golden Age’ as in most religion including secular religion). So no (unthinking) reaction against…, but a turning away and attempt to understand… (as opposed to a Romantic response which is a reaction and not a comprehension – the history of 20th century politics gives fair witness to this… and the disasters it brings).
All of the Beijing sequence of exhibitions asks to be read as one continuous creative process – a process representing the life work of the artist and his creative evolution. Indeed we are invited to comprehend the process of the art work, the progress of the art work, as one performance, one continuous performance process with ourselves as witnesses – or perhaps, as in the case of performance as ritual, as witness-participants. In the course of this process, the overall meaning of the ‘Beijing Sequence’ and also of all the performance pieces here described, we witness not only a becoming and a new beginning (whose content is left open) as in the repeated scenes of writing, washing and rewriting, whether on walls or on the body, but also an expiation and atonement. Indeed, throughout the performance, we see the dichotomy, division, tension between the role of the artist as shaman figure, the one who makes it happen, catalyst and MC, and the casting of the artist as sacrificial Christ-like figure, who takes on the sins of the past to cleanse them and begin anew… universal offering, sacrifice, scapegoat – ultimate exchange relation with all that is… and all that is not…
(‘The end is my beginning’)
…a beginning which has no end.
And so the page ends, the text’s ‘last word’ arrives. But the fold, the closing fold, does not return. For what has been unfolded continues…
Now approaching the step, threshold or final frame that will remove you from the text, stepping back into the flow of life, but carrying with you a trace, with in you a memory of what you have read, experienced, felt… carrying on the experience, the art work, the performance, a trace both affective and registered, a mark to accompany you on your way, an extension of the performance you have been a part of, and which you now continue, which you yourself continue, a performative ‘art-act’ which knows no limits…
* * *
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2017
[i] See ‘Light & Time: Vision, Image, Other’, in Jacopo Benci, Faraway & Luminous (British School at Rome Publications, London, 2007) pp. 282-307, for an earlier application of ritual theory to the image and to performance art. See further, Peter Nesteruk ‘Ritual, Sacrifice & Identity in Recent Political Drama’, Journal of Dramatic Theory & Criticism, XV. 1 (2000) pp. 21-42; and ‘Ritual & Identity in Twentieth Century American Drama’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism Vol.XIX.2 (2005) pp. 43-69, for the theory and politics of ritual forms.
[ii] Frazer’s Golden Bough, that compendious investigation into the archeology of ritual, all to explain one particular ritual mystery, may also be explained more simply - minimally, functionally. To justify (in Frazer’s particular instance) an act of killing, or for such a killing to become ritual, in effect a ritual sacrifice, a sacred frame is necessary; whence the ‘golden bough’ the perfectly placed (above, up in a tree) sacred object that signals the (imaginary) space/time of rituality (that gives us, here below, the right to continue with the rite). The two stages: first the staging, or the reframing of the space/time, for a period, as outside of normal space/time, the ritual temporality, evoking the outside of time, eternity, and that which dwells ‘there’ (in our imaginations, the immortals and their powers, a claim on which, an exchange, is to be made). The place of exchange, site of its staging is established (space become place). And then, the second stage, the staged… the exchange itself; the identity exchange, precisely changing the identity of the one carrying out the ritual killing, or sacrifice, or offering. Two steps, the frame and the content (the means of expression and the content of expression). Whence the ease of continuity… from ritual into art.
The framing of a given content is the signaling of its ritual force (signaling the onset of a special or sacred, sacrificial, exchange relation, to take place in a special space/time, that which marks the period and place of ritual). The form of the content is its organization, the structuring of the content of expression (its narrative or procedure). The function, signaled by the frame, shaped by the form (and defined by the content) is the identity-exchange relation. The force (the affect, affectivity or ‘effervescence’, to use Durkheim’s term) of the content is the ritual element; the degree of which is proportional to the identity exchange relation, our sense of self-recognition and community claiming, belonging or identification.
We might further note that all cultural material may be read for its identity exchange relations (or indeed anything at all, providing only that it is perceived by what is human, and everything is perceived by humans) as identity propositions… or claims… Indeed all repeated or intense cultural material has ritual force (range limited: Some) – and, or conversely, put otherwise: anything humans do has identity implications… (range unlimited: All).