Absence Performing: In-Between Too Much Order and Too Much Chaos
Beatrice Leanza
Li Songsong, Light Tank, 2004, installation, wood and neon lights, courtesy of the artist.
With von Neumann’s "Theory of Automata" (brought than to public fruition as AI) popularization in the mid-50s, the very last distance resisting human conceptual boundaries had been covered. And with phusis and techn� (natural and artificial) being swallowed up into the same complexity of the evolutionary process, a third category of discursive practice has opened up new philosophical speculations. Unprecedented forms of behavior, objects and methodologies eventually explained the phenomenology of Phase-Transition affecting any systems’ relationship.
This dynamic "in-between" is essentially what discloses a former order of things to the encounter with the rules and parameters of a potential and unknown one, bridging their negotiation in an indefinitely extended interval of uncertainty and unexpectedness. This silent harbour is the place where we stand with our perceived and supposedly truthful stances to size and ground our own ‘I’ in relation to the Other, beyond the boundaries of our own selfhood. In these terms, art historian Aby Warburg defines this segment of ‘oscillation’ as the only intervening space where the work of art can truly be assumed as a dynamic event, and where the viewer can thus meet the immediate and essential experience of its intrinsic image.
Pause, and effect. The middle ground taken here in account is a spatial/temporal hiatus of physical existence, which makes it possible for us to halt in the process of learning and face the theoretical framework we are embedded in, and in doing so, "liberate ourselves from the tyranny of modern power-structures, and to formulate a new mode of living in the world" (Foucault).
Art can help us regain the possession of this distance. This is particularly relevant today, when the potential loss of a human-made world is a frightening reality. Our precarious position has kept the system of fiction and artifice at bay–aesthetically defeated by the triumph of illusion and simulation. The persistence of a sleepless cultural machine has submerged narrative under media-consumption.
With a peculiar and off-stream series of installations, much diverging from his well-known works on canvas, Li Songsong lands back to the viewer the right to this transgression, or at least the time to ponder about the fixity of certain critical categories and models together with the unquestioned continuity of certain existing orders. These works enable our critical awareness, providing a space for an unhurried self-performance, where urgent issues of cultural ruptures in present China, reflections over ideological incongruity of social meritocracy and psychological backlashes of ineffectual economic utopias all fall in-between. The viewer and the art work.
On June 1, 2001, in the campus yard of Qinghua University (Beijing) eight horses had been stationed in front of the antiqued carved horse posts and left there for an entire day. This simple action, titled A Serendipitous Encounter, turned into an unrestrained site for spatial language experimentation. The reactions of the passers-by and casual onlookers built up a moment in itself where each single span of observation interlaced into a timeless plot suspended over ordinary reality, while still embedded in it. By inputting the ‘random object’ of the horse into a pre-existing container anchored on reliable contextual elements of time and space (the institute yard, a working day, the students, the school employees, etc), reality had lost itself as a referent and the power of personal explanation became uncontrolled into the contest for authority.
Like a mandatory act clashing over the steady parameters of life understanding, this mobilization of elementary perception, interrogates spiritual consciousness and individual cognitive models.
Such a concern lies on reasonable foundations, whereas the social configurations of ever-changing China are still disconnected and disorientated, representing an adaptation transfer of individualistic and collectivist constructs repeatedly propelling incoherent achievements and contrasting orientations: stressed self-cultivation, immediate gratification through material incentives, competitive attitude for functional gain are sided by reiterated campaigns for ‘spiritual civilization’ (launched in mid 90s) aimed at restoring morale, lauding of filial piety and self-sacrifice for the country.
Identity impotence, as revealed through diverse interdisciplinary studies, reflects an erasure of the distance between the subject and the projected image-the ideal-which is hurried by an in-phase-transition system where characteristics and models of dynamics still haven’t found a self-regulating mechanism. To this extent, the aphasic absence in the middle becomes the paradigmatic performance of a new physical language, where the fabulist idioms of social policy and personal semiotics are cleaned up from the existing space, and reformed.
Three years later in 2004, for a group show held in the city of Tianjn, Li Songsong realized Tank, a large-scale installation of neon-lights, which was positioned in the entrance building of the new development compound hosting the exhibition. The larger-than-life tank is a schematic rendering of a real one, consisting of a wooden skeleton covered with 500 luminous tubes.
The object here challenges another sort of powers relation, the one linking the consumerist iconosphere to that of self-assumption. Beautifully designed, graceful in its ineludible visual weight, the semiotic reference of this weapon machine is obfuscated by the embellishment of its essential and pure shape, mysterious in its apparition. Aesthetic turns fierce and threatening, our bewilderment arises in light of the violent volume of the symbol transformed into ‘life-ware.’ "In the midst of its glazing light, the work Tank poses the question to us: What would we still want then after having completed the invincible process to satisfy our desires? The work leaves a lasting impression," says Songsong.
This endeavor connects viewers in the overbearing continuity of the shared public space. The fantastic machine enlivens the living space, where the functions of the cultural and economic productive discourses ceaselessly confront, forcing us to a restless performance. In this scenario where the instability of references and the approximation of visual orders confuses the mind, transitions among spaces become fast and dispersive; pausing is a fundamental and indispensable practice that, filtering sensations and emotions throughout the power of an autonomous language of analysis, makes universality graspable. The back-step separating the viewer and the art work creates a suspended absent place, where tactics of adjustment are deployed and again the distance between the ‘I’ and the alien ‘Other’ is restored.
Wang Jianwei, a much appreciated multi-media artist, theoretician and curator, relates to the concept of interval as an event, touching complex platforms of conceptual disposal, of "the experiments of the future production methods and the use of urban functional space." He writes, "when the borderline between order and disorder becomes very flimsy, we can re-examine the order that we account for and believe in."
The spatial fractures, the discontinuity breaking the flat illusionism of pre-constructed aesthetical and cultural categories, is the measure of our fragile gaze, of the moment of epoch�, what the sceptics school of thought would call the "suspension of judgement."
By means of a third attempt, Li Songsong brings into this new realm of induced dynamics portrayal, the dimension of history and remembrance. Closer, as for the subject matter, to his works on canvas, The Gift from Undurkhan, is an installation realized in March 2005 for an exhibition entitled "In, Out or In-Between."
The piece was standing in a poorly lit environment, randomly positioned in the corner of the room together with other installations.
This "weirdo," as Songsong himself mocks it, is the approximate 3D rendering of a portion of an aircraft, contextualized by the title into the period of the Cultural Revolution, and referring to the unsuccessful attempt of Lin Biao, Ye Qun and Lin Liguo to flee the country to Mongolia on September 13, 1971.
The demise of the schematic forms of expression necessary to the aesthetical encapsulation of the work into a reality frame transfers us and the object into an estranged world of coexistence.
Songsong’s use of this opacity in representation imposes a voluntary approximation of its unity of sense, and simultaneously comments on the obscurity and lack of officially-voiced explanations about the historical fact. This performed absence of logical referentials is left for the viewer to verbalize. Here the search for truth ultimately interrogates the transposition enacted by the mind to the reality of a fact and the system that produced it.
The installation bears clear traces of an existing form, the welded aluminium is pierced with iron bolts; the wheeled legs, the three pipe outlets on the top of the craft and the illuminated belly all resemble the physicality of an "organism." Still, there is an halo of solace and estrangement spacing the object out of the cosmos, forcing the boundaries of structural patterning and organization beyond standard depiction. Comprehension and narration are separated, to be reformulated autonomously by the observer in the hesitance of its invisible coherence.
These works of Li Songsong open a ground for commentary, breaking off the insulated limits of art criticism, and by keeping the unique and singular outline of an autonomous world as see by the artist, they function as transitional domains open to flight and radical placement against universal formulas. To conclude, the words of Doris von Drathen seems paradigmatic to this extent: "having conceived the work of art as the insuperable and uncolonizable other in order to discover and preserve its intrinsic image, this treasure could then be adopted as an instrument of orientation in our time."
