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As a first-rate artist showing at a nice second-tier venue in the third world twice in the past six months, I can report back to my homies in NY with a comparison, and some helpful info. I have come to Beijing for a one-month Artist’s Residency at Red Gate Gallery Bei Gao Studios, fabricating work for my June 16-28 installation Self-Devolution at The Pickled Art Centre. Showing performance-video DVD projections last January at Blind Lemon in San Marcos, Guatemala, prepared me for tossing toilet paper in the wastebasket (not the loo), frequent electrical and water outages, unpotable water, open sewers, scary driving, etc, but although I was robbed at gunpoint by four men on a bus for half an hour outside of Guatemala City, here in China one’s person and possessions are quite safe. |
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Self-Devolution in Beijing – Barbara Rosenthal
As a first-rate artist showing at a nice second-tier venue in the third world twice in the past six months, I can report back to my homies in NY with a comparison, and some helpful info. I have come to Beijing for a one-month Artist’s Residency at Red Gate Gallery Bei Gao Studios, fabricating work for my June 16-28 installation Self-Devolution at The Pickled Art Centre. Showing performance-video DVD projections last January at Blind Lemon in San Marcos, Guatemala, prepared me for tossing toilet paper in the wastebasket (not the loo), frequent electrical and water outages, unpotable water, open sewers, scary driving, etc, but although I was robbed at gunpoint by four men on a bus for half an hour outside of Guatemala City, here in China one’s person and possessions are quite safe.
My iconoclastic ideas, surreal association of images, and unusual mix of materials make me difficult to understand by American viewers, and even more so by Chinese, particularly because my emphasis on “the discovery of self” is not a cultural concept here. They press for explanation, and we engage in the dialogue I’d hoped for. The notion that any art should need a literal explanation has always been anathema to me: Viewers have a job in the communication process – to lay themselves completely open and let every work of art reach inner centers. Since I don’t illustrate political, historical or literary themes, nothing should really need explanation or background. I ask viewers to look, breathe, feel, understand through one’s own subconscious.
In this installation, as you gaze up and through the lovely transparent forms cutting sailing planes through space, streaming downward, beckoning you to sashay through them, you might trip over ropes anchoring them to the floor, or garotte yourself by ropes between them. This hints of my world view, which you might identify with or compare to your own. Awe and tension, pleasure and discomfort, beauty and danger, distortion. I did not set out to illustrate “my view of life as being always tripped up when looking for exaltation;” this realization came after I made and hung the work. The many more choices and elements, particularly regarding internal body and wood-related imagery, lead to additional thoughts for both of us, when we open to them.
I flew to Beijing after ten days in Japan, three in Osaka visiting Ryousuke Cohen, a mail-artist I finally met after showing with for almost 30 years. What he is known for, besides his art-world-name (a goof on his real spelling Koen), is his concept of “copy-left,” or open-sourcing for art. He believes that once an artwork is created, it becomes just another viewable subject in the world, ripe for anyone to observe and re-depict, as if it were a pepper, or landscape, etc. Brian Wallace, the Australian director of Red Gate, met me in the Beijing Airport in front of the disturbingly ubiquitous Starbucks, where an iced coffee costs twice as much as a plentiful meal in a local restaurant. He took me by cab to meet the other residents, and by cab we travel everywhere that we don’t walk or bike. There is no way to find the bus routes, which, in Japan and Guatemala, were easy to navigate.
The Red Gate Residency Program, with live-work lofts in Bei Gao for artists, and apartments downtown for scholars, is well-run by Wallace; in the same Bei Gao compound, the Pickled Art Centre directed by Li Gang, an interesting artist himself, is less-so. The converted pickle-factory is a great space with high ceilings and a lovely courtyard, and well-known around Beijing, but work by several residents here was delayed by missed appointments, postponed materials delivery, etc, although Li Gang is accommodating and helpful in terms of realizing the physical installations and managing his staff.
Finding a digital printer who had the transparent and opaque surfaces I wanted, could insert grommets, and could work (in a very-reduced time frame) with my limited Mandarin (and dictionaries devoid of useful graphic arts terms) was a major problem, finally solved by, not the facilitators, but by another resident also desperately searching. We foud Wu Guoli: have your taxi-driver telephone 138-01329-328 for directions. He made beautiful posters, and then great prints up to 14 feet long and 36 inches wide.
Posters were pasted and postcards distributed throughout the Dashanzi 798 Art District, and both Red Gate and Pickled sent press info to their mailing lists. The show was hung by a crew of five led by Mr. Shen, a creative daredevil-on-ladder, and attended by many visitors from the artist-communities, press, and public. The evenings of my performance DVD’s from the mid-‘70’s to the present were fun but not as technically perfect as I’d have liked, and, in fact, even this installation (created on my Mac PowerBook from a selection of images I brought on CD-R, printed, and hung in only 10 days) is only a non-archival, somewhat dented version of what I’d like to more technically perfect and vary in future shows. I’m thinking about Sao Paolo for January ’07, and Berlin for June, but who knows what my installations there will actually be: my original proposals for China had utilized my clothing. Hang loose, you-all: make art from your soul and psyche, and understand it via same.
