gwen's wonderland

Space Vs. Place

2007-11-02T01:33:00.001-07:00

One of the most important French thinkers and Marxist sociologists of the 20th century, Henri Lefebvre dedicated a great deal of his philosophical writings to understanding the importance of "space." To him, the production of space is the reproduction of social relations.

Lefebvre's main argument in The Production of Space is that "space" is a social product as well as a complex social construction. The production of urban space is fundamental to the reproduction of society, hence of capitalism itself. To Lefebvre, this space producing process is commanded by a hegemonic class as a tool to reproduce its dominance. As he concludes: "Social space is a social product - the space produced in a certain manner serves as a tool of thought and action. It is not only a means of production but also a means of control, and hence of domination/power."

To Lefebvre, city is not only a simple bunch of everyday life events and people gathering in a certain location, but the magnetic interaction between events and people (with gender, class, race and status differentiation), the interaction of infra/inter forces that attract to and repel from one another. It creates its own spatial practice. This complexity of energy, following through Lefebvre's concept, is the quintessential element of the space. With embracing everyday life and the ever expanding meanings, the deep transformation of "the city" into "the urban" culminates in the complete urbanization of society.

In terms of the site-specific meaning transformation, for art practice, public art and architecture would be two of the most proper forms to exemplify this notion of "space." The raison d'etre of an existing space determines its forms, functions and structures. Here I would like to refrence the case of Asian American woman artist and architect Maya Lin - by creating space and place, Lin provided a physical context for viewers, a new special experience. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., Lin's best-known and unquestionably the most-visited work of contemporary public art in the United States, has become a place of pilgrimage and healing, functioning as a spiritual sanctuary. As the critic April Kingsley described, the Memorial is an "avant la lettre," a "private place made for interiorizing values and universal experiences." Lin's work extended the meanings of a space.

Lefebvre defined "appropriation." As a spatial practice where nature has been modified in order to satisfy and to expand human needs and possibilities. Lefebvre wrote: "Appropriation should not be confused with a practice which is closely related to it but still distinct, namely 'diversion'." However, take the case of the Memorial, Lin's cunning design generates a space to facilitate and to "appropriate" a visitor's interior journey. For this reason, perhaps, it has been interpreted as a distinctly female approach.

Lin understands the power of bold and simple forms to originate the new meaning of space in a specific place. The wall of the monument is V-shaped, with one side pointing to the Lincoln Memorial and the other to the Washington Monument. She designed this site-specific work with hand-formed components, metaphoric content and, most importantly, with entrances inviting the public to interactively generate the meaning of the space. In this context, Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a production of space, which is meaningful by its own reproduction of social relations.

The Space between Art and Life

2007-11-02T01:26:00.000-07:00

The leading exhibition that Kirk Varnedoe (1946-2003) mounted as MOMA's director, "High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture," drew criticism from all corners of the art world. Varnedoe firstly examined the influence of Marcel Duchamp on two American artists, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Not only did Duchamp's ready-made broaden the meaning of art and aspire those who followed in his wake, but also Rauschenberg's famed dictum about working in "the space between art and life" did as well. Varnedoe asserted that maintaining the space between art and life is necessary to the very existence of art per se. Once the gap is bridged, everything could be art and, as a consequence, nothing is art. The quintessence of art is to keep an idealistic distance between life.

The space between art and life, however, is by some means ambiguious. As Varnedoe explained in the opening of the show: ''I thought that after primitivism, the relationship of high art to mass culture is one of the great subjects crucial to what made modern art modern - and is still the source of high contention and interest with younger artists today.'' This exhibition exemplified that high art could be found in low places, from Johns and Rauschenberg to Pop, Minimalism, Process Art, Earthworks and of course, comics. At the time of 1990, this concept was ambitious and yet dangerous because it placed Varnedoe in the middle between the modernist faithful who saw the exhibition as trendy pandering and the downtown crowd who regarded the notion of high art as arrogant and elitist.

The space between art and life is sometimes invisible. As Lia Gangitanoa, an independent curator who has engaged in alternative art scene for more then a decade, addressed in SFAI chestnut lecture hall on 12th Oct. : "I am searching for a new definition for 'alternative.' I think the real alternative for today is being able to attract a bunch of money in order to accomplish your artistic ideals." With this in mind, we might also need a new definition for "art" in this dynamic world economy. As of today Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Murakami Takashi and Damien Hirst by setting up their factories or companies for their artistic creation/production, became the new role models of craftsmanship: the art entrepreneur.

But the quintessence of art is still somewhere in there. Ellen Gallagher, for instance, shows the black and white bi-cultural tactic based on her experience of life. The repetition and revision are central to Gallagher's treatment of advertisements that she appropriates from popular magazine. By using the high and low cultural norms in the media of painting, drawing, comics, writing, film, performance...etc., Gallagher tries to expose identity and opens up a space of multiple identifications.

Takashi Murakami, to a certain extent, also attempted to blur the boundaries between high and low art. He knows about Andy Warhol style of American visual taste and yet he holds still the Asian Otaku spirit. This Otaku spirit was originally from a Japanese slang sometimes used pejoratively to refer to anti-social people with obsessive hobbies, most commonly comics or animation; hardcore otaku refers to fans of sci-fi, computer games. But in Murakami's definition, he as an Otaku is with a more transgressive sense in terms of "obscurant policy opposed by America." let me quote his words, it "further evolved from a Japanese obscurant mentality" after the World War II. [1] As he said explicitly: "It was nothing more than an obsequious gesture by a Japanese artist who assumed that a reference to Warhol would be better accepted by the American art scene."This counter-cultural maneuver of Murakami, the "Japanese Warhol" who ambitiously expends his "art business" in U.S., would also be the raison d'etre for Murakami as a real artist of this century.

Note:
[1]On the other hand, while the "otaku" trend diffused to other Asian areas like Korea, Taiwan or Hong Kong, it usually goes with Japanese comic industry with more senses of material fashion trends than the Asian collective post-war trauma, Taiwan and Hong Kong, especially, were at different political stance from Japan after the World War II.

In Cosplay Land: An Example of Asian Visual Culture

2007-11-02T00:56:00.000-07:00

“In play, man frees himself from sacred time and 'forgets' it in human time.”
--Giorgio Agamben, In Playland

“In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the truth is a moment of the false.”
-- Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

We are now live in an age of losing the epics. We no longer have our appetite for the everyday life stories which were commonly the themes of 19th -20th century story narrative. What stories we have now are mostly fictional, visually or textually, novel or comic or film; the international mass popularity of Harry Potter shows some hints. Does it mean that we contemporaries hardly stand the real world reality any more? Or are we already living in a period of unprecedented spectacle, information explosion environment?

Not only we desperately craving for the fictions, but we turn the fiction to reality. Based on my personal experience, one of the most popular subcultures of Asian new generation is "cosplay." The term "cosplay" by definition is "costume" plus "play", which means these people wearing home-made cosplay costumes to transfigure themselves into fictional characters from manga/comics or anime/animation. To some extent I thought it is a certain kind of shy geek's mode of self-expression. However the prevalence of cosplay groups in Asian cities like Tokyo, Taipei, H.K., Seoul, Bangkok, and often they cross-culturally interchange the information and internationally cooperated with some events, I am interested to search the meanings behind this childish adolescent phenomenon.

In the concept of Walter Benjamin's mimetic faculty, what these otakus[1] play and mimic is not history, but the history of fiction. These cosplayers with obsessive interests of anime(animation) and manga(comic) are the perfect cases in terms of Asian spectacle urban milieu- as in this post-cold-war globally capitalistic world they consummerize everything including their own bodies by attiring and fetishing themselves. But it is not only that the comic visual industry brain-wash them, but by mimetic the characters of comic figures, these teenagers take their stance actively entering in the fictional story and try to interpret and recreate it through their performance. It takes the body as a new individual.

Some cosplay clubs hold their events in most theatric places of the city like sightseeing spots or crowded shopping center. Cosplayers make the city as the theatrical scenery and literally characterizing themselves as actors. It contributes the already spectacle urban images much more surreal. They modelize the fictional characters as real self and copy the story plots into the real world, by holding the events gathering others with same visual obsession, they picture and document everyone's figure, outfit and every quasi-comic-visual image. These mimetic behaviors take place between the fiction and reality to create their own myth: they try to make the fiction alive and real, as a truth reflection of their own real-life.

It seems like we have no more real stories to tell in this spectacle society, even they are real they looks fable. Cosplay might be a superficial mimicry the façade of comic visualization, but psychically, it somehow shows the loss of childhood for new generation in this era of losing memories at an unpredictable speed. The youngers cannot help pursuing their childhood through setting the childish self-expression ritual in the alienated, consumerized world.

[1] otaku: "Otaku" is a derisive Japanese term now used internationally to refer to people with obsessive interests. In 2001 William Gibson explained his view of the term: "The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects."

Contemporary Art and Global Money

2007-11-02T00:43:00.000-07:00

It is a fine art and also a jewelry, with the potential artistic value and increasing market value as well, delicately gilded with platinum and diamonds by the world-famous artist Damien Hirst, "For the Love of God" is a must-buy collection.

If Marcel Duchamp acclaimed the urinal is art almost 100 years ago and it exactly goes into the leaf of modern art history that we have to study today, what else could not be called "art"? Damien Hirst's diamond skull is a grandiose altarpiece, expressing his love to God through his earthbound Mammon, managing to shine the theological aura as aesthetics glimpse in this age of mechanical reproduction.

The old myth is that artists are usually well-known by the public after they pass away. Until Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Murakami Takashi and of course Damien Hirst, they break this anti-artist stereotype and cross the role between artist and art entrepreneur and build up a new myth: "artist" are a new identity of celebrity, they are popular and controversial, if not notorious, after they become rich.

Facing the reality of today's visual art scene, depending on Art Review 1996 December issue, where 51% of the "100 worldwide power people" are art-economic administrators like gallerists and art dealers, while 49% includes curators, artists and art critics. I am more curious about how does art critic and historian today, through only the pen and texts, make influence to the contemporary ocular-centric society? Notwithstanding in the post-cold-war global capitalistic age, I cannot help envisioning the new definition for the art critic and historian to swing between market value and aesthetic value.