Absence of Books and Prominence of Scenes —— Memories in the Exhibition Defending Memories
"The absence of this book cancels all the continuity at present, just as it avoids the inquiry contained in the book. It is not the inner part of the book, nor is it a continuous escape from meaning. On the contrary, although it surrounds the book, it is not so much outside as an external reference unrelated to the book. " (1) This is a passage of Blanchaud's comment on Malamei's works. For me, it happens to be the witness of our times. More and more books refer to things that have nothing to do with human life, and even lead us to a road of destruction and division rather than rebirth and friendship: more and more people think that books are meaningless to our mental health and turn their attention to popular culture with visual reading as the main body. History is ridiculed and neglected by modernization, and forgetting is sublimated into the virtue of contemporary people. In this context, the artists of "7 19 Artists' Studio Alliance" held an art exhibition of "Defending Memory" on the third floor of the former Sichuan Library on August 9, 1998, taking an eternal defense of memory as an eternal cause of "Defending Memory".
1 ... Thinking significance: the absence of books
Like books, libraries are not only a maze of glyphs, letters and characters, but also a place where human beings meet and reunite. There, people in the past are connected with people in the present, and people in the distance become neighbors with people in the vicinity. However, with modern people's worship of physical desires and more people's conversion from traditional atheism to theism, especially in the third world, libraries are becoming a cancer of cities. Whoever does not advocate cutting it from the center of the city is the enemy of progress and civilization; Whoever doesn't treat the shopping mall as a temple is blaspheming the sanctity of God. (2) Because everyone can be a temporary god there, except devout Christians. In the festive song of people cheering and praising commercial civilization, the Sichuan Provincial Library, which originally expected all the people present here, has now become an expectation for the sky and the earth. Except for the stubborn steel frame of the library and the huge indoor column that confirms an era, it is gradually disappearing from readers' memory.
Dai Guangyu's diary of installation behavior works 1994- 1988 evokes people's thinking about meaning through the absence of the book. "In the reading room of the library to be demolished, a boy squatted on the reading table and wrote something intently. At the other end of the table, opposite the boy, there is a picture of a girl the same age as the boy wearing a red scarf. However, she is not that boy's classmate, let alone that boy's peer. She is the boy's mother, a little girl (mother now), and always writes on the table like a boy. She left a picture of the boy when he was the same age ... The expressions of mother and son are exactly the same as the red scarf around her neck. The plane vertical shaft hanging on the wall is only the shadow of time. " (3) In the shadow, we can vaguely see a "savior" who once dominated the fate of the boy and his mother. He taught us the road to liberation, but on the way, he took us to Egypt, a place where Israel was once enslaved. This imaginary scene makes us think about whether the commercial civilization at the expense of no books and our past efforts to pursue happiness are destined to have historical significance in people's conscious life. Inspired by revolutionary beliefs, will mankind really interpret the continuation of historical diaries by blocking history? However, the braille-like traces left by the boy's writing behavior in the clear water pen have announced the future effect of this interpretation to us. In the days when the artist's right to become a monk was abolished, in the days when the ghost of the deceased became our only memory object, and today when people and even dreams are unified into a single illusion, the absence of books is only the fate that readers and authors must encounter together; The absence of the library is the victory of illiteracy in refusing enlightenment.
From Qin Shihuang to Stalin, people who call themselves "saviors" are bound to be enemies of books. Because books, after all, should record the meanness and ugliness of human nature, because in books, authors and readers can not only rejoice, but also become friends in need. How they wish that human beings had no books! To this end, they plotted: if they couldn't burn all the books, they would try burning the library; If the library can't be burned down, the author will be forced to become a prostitute to tamper with people's memory genes and transform those who have memories. But this book has its own tenacious will, and its existence and absence in history are not hidden in people's conscious life because of the death of the savior. The Bible, which was persecuted in history, has now become a best seller. The existence of books always calls for the affirmation of historical significance, just as the absence of books only negates this affirmation.
Zhang Hua froze books and plasma in ice. He chose books such as Reduction of Philosophy and Notes of the Wanderer as dialectical ones, which seemed to open up the argument function of books to us: "In a sense, the existence of books not only makes dialectical words come into being, but also makes them dialectical." (4) Writers and readers sometimes offer beautiful youth and even flesh and blood for an originally contradictory word. As a result, with the passage of time and the change of freezing climate, the ice melts into water destined to dry up, leaving traces that once again make the users of words feel empty. Here, due to people's dialectical thinking about meaning, the existence of books is the same as the non-existence of books, which may not bring people a full life. At least, in the depths of history, I still remember that the era when human beings had no books was still a model of a happy life. Otherwise, how can there be Lao Tzu's yearning for the ancient world and Rousseau's yearning for the natural state of mankind?
In the worship of knowledge, modern people regard books as idols in temples. However, knowledge is only the capital of pride. Therefore, Christopher Bacon, an English thinker in the17th century, said that "knowledge is power" and also warned that "excessive thirst for knowledge corrupts human beings" (5); Therefore, Yin Xiaofeng should carry out the behavior of "invisible, audible".
Seven clay pots with different diameters represent seven notes on the score. The author himself smashed his own collection of 300 Tang poems, an aesthetic dictionary written by the Soviet Union, and Entropy: A New World View, which expounded the second law of thermodynamics, one by one from the window next to the library on the third floor. Books regarded as Gao Gui by intellectuals of past dynasties have not screamed on the earth, flying all over the sky like human ashes, as if prisoners who escaped from the Gulag Islands were eager to breathe free air. Only those panes that have brought sunshine into the room countless times to help borrowers calmly look at the fate of pottery pots and listen to the sad roar of every pottery pot after it fell to the ground. Words seen before are produced as words heard because of people's conscious behavior. In this behavior, the book is not only absent, but also no longer present; People's thinking about meaning is not only denied, but also no longer affirmed. Because any closed system, with the passage of time, will inevitably tend to be chaotic, which may be the reason why the author chose "Di: A New World View" by Rifkin and others from thousands of books. Therefore, it is not inconceivable that books with symbols and words have now accepted the fate of being emptied. Science has proved that since the universe will be out of order, what about libraries made of reinforced concrete? Since everything will pass, what about books written by people with letters like ABC?
Therefore, we can only think about the scene from the absence of the book.
2. Thinking about the scene: the existence of books
If Yin Xiaofeng's artistic behavior is carried out by an old farmer on his dam, it becomes a social behavior: the same seven-mouthed clay pot is also his son's library, and books are also burned in the clay pot and then thrown out of the dam, but the scene is different, which distinguishes this social behavior from artistic behavior. The behavior of "invisible and audible words" is highlighted as the thinking of works because the artist actively completes such a scene in the library.
Each art form has its own unique way to realize the idea of the work, which is also the possibility of its concept intervention in contemporary art: theme replacement in experimental ink painting, installation art in material replacement and easel oil painting in color replacement, which is different from ecological art as an extension of earth art, because the latter extends the earth as the content of the scene to all natural landscapes and human landscapes. (6) This way that ecological art realizes the thinking of works is called situational prominence. In short, the difference in meaning brought by the change of scenes in ecological art is the root of the individuality of the works.
The value of "defending memory" art exhibition in the history of contemporary art lies in its practice of calling for the meaning of works by highlighting scenes. Scene is a social category in the logic of social value. As a spiritual being, it is an indispensable place in listening and speaking dialogue. The words that come and go in the dialogue and the listening and speaking horizons of the people present constitute the dialogue.
Background. It is different from the sleep context in this paper because the scene is present and temporal. It can only be understood by people present and cannot be copied. Ecological art borrows the concept of scene put forward by logical history when exploring the logic of social value. The reason lies in the dialogue between people and things and between people in each ecological art work. (7) Scene highlighting means that the artist highlights the practical significance of his works through scene selection. Among them, the setting of the scene becomes an internal link of artistic creation, which determines the effective scope and limit of the work.
Contrary to the diary 1994- 1998, Zhu Gang's "1m X 1m" directly restores the presence of the book to the source of the meaning of the work. As a continuation of the "Reading" series, he carefully read a self-made wordless book in the ground space surrounded by four wooden meters in front of the library borrowing desk. In the daily world, the common writing and reading behaviors of all mankind, as well as the presence of the author and the reader, are reduced to only reading behaviors and only readers, but the context generated by them and wordless books is still intact. In other words, the thinking of this work lies in: does the survival of this article necessarily depend on the author? Is the context of this article limited by the scene where the work was born? Just like listening and speaking, reading and writing are also real human behaviors. However, the development trend of today's visual culture is that the author and writing are more and more absent and neglected. The original reading function of the library has been recalled to people's conscious life because of the retirement of books and the disappearance of words in works, and has become a memory worthy of human memory.
In the art exhibition Defending Memory, the way of ecological art intervening in ideas is presented as the substitution of scene for context. There is no necessary connection between the presence of books and reading behavior, just as Zhu Gang's works erase the author from the presence of context. The implementation scene of Liu's Mummy is the library building. On the steel frame supporting the bookcase, a living body with various books and medical gauze is hung horizontally with thick ropes. If Zhu Gang's behavior is to force the author to be absent by the presence of a wordless book, then Mommy calls back the author's presence by the presence of the book. In fact, every book is just a trace of a person's life at different stages before becoming a historical mummy. Similarly, every library is a mummy pyramid wiped with writing paste. The reader's reading behavior there is precisely to remember the author himself hidden behind this dead mummy.
As a way for ecological art to intervene in ideas, scene highlighting requires artists not to have anything superfluous when setting scenes. If the whole scene can't do this, at least we should use the photographer's lens to simplify a single scene. However, this does not mean that the choice of materials can be ignored in the installation process of ecological art. From the perspective of visual effects and concept exploration, a variety of materials and
On works, it is better to choose those with typical connotations. Because the simplification of material replacement is not only the characteristic of installation art, but also the inherent stipulation of all ecological arts with installation as the medium. Liu's other work, x≠jj, as its medium, the diversity of books leads to the mutual digestion of ideas and visual acceptance.
In the same scene, the idea of the work is also presented through the presence of books. Dai Guangyu's Extreme Times captures this point and better conveys the attributes of ecological art, but the bowl in the historical text of-1914-1991year symbolizes the clear water in our living world. The materials are organically unified and integrated into the gradually weathered steel frame that has supported the bookcase, "to find the historical fragments sealed in the depths of the library and the dying heart of justice" (8), to awaken people's attention to memory and conscience. In fact, every book is looking forward to the entry of people's conscious life, which represents the author's expectation of how people become people, and thus his conscious life's expectation of * * * in everything and the other in everything.
Scene selection and scene setting are different means for ecological art to highlight ideas with scenes. This is no longer basic in pure installation engineering. Because installation art takes material replacement or material selection as its way of presenting ideas. Damien Hester, a British artist, created "One Thousand Years" in 1990, and chose two glass boxes for cultivating bacteria, which contained thousands of maggots and flies and propagated on a rotting cow's head. The work has angered the British audience, but no matter what scene it is displayed in, it will have the same acceptance effect among the audience. However, the scene difference between Christopher's parcel of Parliament Building and the besieged island he completed in Biscayne Bay near Miami constitutes the conceptual difference in visual effects and conceptual exploration between the two works. The scene of Zhou Bin in the library traces back to the historical roots of contemporary people suffering from amnesia. An era of instant pleasure and idolatry of information has accelerated the death of memory. Like many chefs in western restaurants, the author stood solemnly on the windowsill of the library, putting fresh vegetables, bloody pork and cherry red jam in various books, then painting the surface and throwing them into the garbage basket after being eaten by the people present. We can't help calling it "Big Hamburger". In this mindless age, can we expect things other than food and sex in people's memory? Physical pleasure, superficial life and the pursuit of privacy provide the main food for our spiritual life. The problem of modern China people lies not only in not reading (word illiteracy), but also in reading books that have nothing to do with spirit (cultural illiteracy). This may have fulfilled Darwin's theory of evolution: man is an animal with physical life!
Another painting by Zhou Bin, named "Forever Memory", consists of a piece of paper in a carton and several long printing papers connected to it and extending to one end. It can be seen from the occasional color of individual pieces of paper that the pigment dots seem to disappear like memories. In some special years of human history, no matter how people in the same group are forced to forget, we are still different from the instinctive reaction of animals, because we are always eager to find eternal memories in the eternity of memory.
Joining the art exhibition "Defending Memory with Writing Art" was inspired by the second Flantz Art Competition. This work directly uses intertextual texts to blur the scene of physical space into a humanistic scene corresponding to defending memory. It expands the range of problems that may be encountered in scene highlighting. Drawing lessons from Kafka's notes, the author continues to set the rules of the competition as hunger. Participants can't eat any food except water, and the one who has been hungry for the longest time wins the gold medal. From this point of view, it is obvious that only those who naturally starve to death seven days after the start of the competition, rather than voluntarily quit, can win the gold medal. The dialectical function of the text once again appears: the participating artists either starve to death and win the art gold medal, or they can't live. The relationship between art and death has been presented to the extreme in the scene setting of this text art: artists either die for art or live to give up art, which shows the dilemma of every artist in promoting contemporary art. Conservative artists admire the deceased's contribution to art, while avant-garde artists denounce ungodly who gave up the artist alive. The revelation of the second Flantz Art Competition shows that whether to live for art or to live for art constitutes the identity difference between artists and non-artists.
This is the most memorable thing in defending human memory!
Precautions:
1)4) See morris Blanchaud's No Books and Other Literary Essays in orpheus's Gaze, translated by Lydia davis, new york: Zhanshan Publishing House, 198 1.
2) It is said that the former Sichuan Library located in the center of Chengdu, China will be transformed into a commercial center in the near future. I hope people believe that this will always be a legend rather than a reality. Two years later, the library has been restored to its original appearance.
3)8) It is quoted from Dai Guangyu's Talking about My Two Works at the Art Exhibition of Defending Memory. See Diary 1994- 1998 and Extreme Age Text.
5) F. Bacon: Collected Works of Pei hen, page 43, Water and sky are one color, Commercial Press, 1986.
6) According to the ways in which contemporary art concepts are involved, I divide them into: easel oil painting, experimental ink painting, installation art, ecological art and sculpture art ... Because both behavior and thought are presented in various forms of contemporary art, they cannot be named as individual art forms.
7) For a detailed discussion of "scene" as a dialogue factor, see Chapter 8 "Social Value Logic" in my book History and Logic (to be published). In addition, the term "ecological art" I use includes three fields: natural ecology, social ecology and humanistic ecology, which is different from the common environmental art that only pays attention to nature. For details, please refer to my article "Theological Background of Ecological Art-Comment on the Concept Art Exhibition of People in Reproductive Age". I don't think ecology is the apposition of natural environment. "In essence, it can be divided into natural ecology-the material environment of human existence, social ecology-the external system of human existence and cultural ecology-the internal consciousness of human existence. The external system is the material mechanism for human beings to treat nature, and the internal consciousness refers to the spiritual attitude of human beings to examine nature. "