Interact with This: Jeppe Hein and Michael Lin at P.S.1
By James Westcott
Hein is a cheeky interactivist. This is his first New York exhibition, but he’s been throwing gallery goers off-balance in Europe with his minimalist-influenced installations for the last five years. At the 2003 Venice Bienalle, Hein made a fountain that was activated only when people walked through it. He made a gallery bench that starts moving when people sit down on it. He emptied out another gallery space in Copenhagan and installed a wall that slowly, almost imperceptibly, closed in on the people in the room. "Normally I work with the way people interfere or don’t interfere with the art work," he says enthusiastically. "I’m trying to break this distance between the art and the viewer."
Hein’s thematizes how a viewer changes a piece through his or her experience of it. He approaches this familiar solipsistic idea not as a crisis or as an unfortunate side effect of the work, but as a visible process that is the crux of the work itself. Take a walk in the forest at sunlight (2003) is a large smooth mirror ball that began rolling around the floor as soon as someone stepped in the gallery. No Presence (2003) is an elaborate neon light that only switches on as the viewer leaves the gallery, making absence the animating force. At the Biennale of Ceramics in contemporary Art in Italy, Hein made a piece that was destroyed when the viewer got too close. He stuck a plate to the wall and set up a trigger that would send the plate crashing to the floor whenever someone overstepped a mark. Every day for thirty days, Hein had to put up a fresh plate. He reconstructed the destroyed plate and displayed it in another room. But this is Hein’s point. The appetite for interaction is insatiable, and Hein loves tantalizing people.
"A big thing in my pieces is that you are mostly a part of it," says Hein. "But you are not directly a part of the Flying Cube. But for sure you would like to touch it." The piece teases the viewer, daring him to blow on the cube to make it spin, or to pull it and test the limits of the electromagnet’s range. However, unlike other pieces where destruction is incorporated in the artwork, any interaction would probably break the spell and make the cube fall. Despite the viewer’s interactive impulses – which are already sharpened in the tactile, experimental atmosphere of P.S.1 – the floating white cube must remain an autonomous, untouchable object. Unlike Hein’s other work, Flying Cube is stubbornly aloof, refusing to respond in any way to the viewer’s presence and resisting the interaction that it also seems to invite. The overarching literal embodiment of autonomy – the cube touches nothing and nothing may touch it – both activates and parodies these concepts. Hein’s work is maddening, and it’s also funny. But it mustn’t be too funny, he says: "It’s a fine border and you can’t step over it because then it’s just like entertainment. You have to be aware of that. It must have some context of critiquing, or questioning, the white cube."
Perhaps P.S.1, a champion of interactivity, isn’t the best place for such a critique of institutions that hold dear to the antiquated idea of artistic autonomy and that police the boundary between viewer and work. But perhaps P.S.1, as a venue dedicated to breaking down boundaries, is all that much more appropriate. It seems a pre-requisite at P.S.1 that there must be at least one work that requires those shoe-condoms and climbing inside a crawl space. At the Spring exhibit Justin Lowe’s Passage is that work: it’s a 60’s head trip through a hippy van and down into a strange astral tent, with warbling music reverberating throughout it. Interaction is great fun, but it doesn’t leave much space for either the work or the viewer to breathe. The problem with interaction is that it can quickly become a high-brow fairground ride. Hein never wants his work to be quite that much fun. For Hein, unlike Lowe, interaction doesn’t have to be physical: "I think interaction is just when something triggers you," he says. "It doesn’t have to be mechanical." Hein’s pure white cube may contain some delicate mechanisms inside, but the response to the piece is anything but mechanical. People in the room are confused and mesmerized by it. Many get close enough to smell it.
Taiwanese artist Michael Lin, who has an installation in the caf� at P.S.1, experiments with interaction in a very different way from Hein’s delicate, "don’t touch" (or "touch me and you destroy me") installation. Lin takes a floral pattern from some fabric he bought at a market in Taiwan and explodes the scale, painting the pattern on wooden boards that now seamlessly cover most of the floor in the caf� and then curve up the back wall like a skateboard ramp. The caf�’s tables and chairs are placed on the work and business carries on as usual. The viewer – or simply the caf�’s patron – cannot help but touch the work. The work is so integrated in the space that many viewers are unaware of their enclosure within Lin’s piece. "I have this argument with my friends all the time," Lin says. "I say my work is kind of there and it’s not there. They say: ‘What are you talking about? It’s 80 meters big and the flowers are 3 meters wide and it’s bright red!’ My work demands more attention than just a floor or a wall, but it is just a floor or just a wall."
Lin always chooses to make his work in the open, transitional spaces of galleries, museums, and public buildings. "The gallery space itself is like a film studio. You can manipulate the whole environment any way you want. But I like to work with the architecture of the public spaces." An installation Lin made for the 2001 Venice Bienalle was, characteristically, a dramatic and vivid intervention into that space. "It looked like something that could have been there anyway. It was a 16th century kind of building. The piece could have been an ornament on the wall already."
The pattern Lin chose for P.S.1 is a traditional Taiwanese fabric used on sheets for the bridal chamber on a wedding night. "People in Thailand would immediately know," he says. "It’s like I’m inviting people into my bed!" Lin style of interactivity is a gentle, embracing kind of connection that does anything but dictate a response. The work doesn’t use tricks, technology, or crawl spaces to immerse the viewer in the experience. "For me, just looking at a painting is an interaction. How people interact with my work is just by walking across a room or sitting there and eating something. I want it to be more everyday. It’s not really interactive. It fades, somehow, into the background. As soon as you lift your head, you’re looking at other people instead of the work. The work is omnipresent but then it disappears."
Both Hein and Lin share a vague dissatisfaction with the conventional gallery routine. "When you’re in a museum you look at the paintings and think ‘I like that, and I like that.’ But I’m trying to get above that," Hein says. "I think it’s interesting if you can make people more aware of where they are." Lin argues, "When we go into a gallery, we have a ritualized relationship to art. We contemplate. My work brings it back to the quotidian." He delights in evoking atmosphere that pervades a room: you interact with the work by being in it. You don’t have to do anything.
