| Representing the object and its re-use has marked important moments of modern and contemporary art from the historical avant-gardes to our days. By recontextualizing or subverting the object, artists have pushed the conventions of art and emphasized the ambiguity of the representation. |  |
Monica Piccioni
Representing the object and its re-use has marked important moments of modern and contemporary art from the historical avant-gardes to our days. By recontextualizing or subverting the object, artists have pushed the conventions of art and emphasized the ambiguity of the representation.
Inspired by the title of Luis Buñuel’s 1977s’ film Cet obscur objet du desir, this exhibition That Obscure Object of Desire developed as a context that deals with modes of presenting, interpreting, and relating to objects. It brings together a group of artists from China, Germany, Italy, and U.K., and intends to give a new twist to a widely known subject highlighting each artist’s individual aesthetic of the “object.” Their reappropriation shows interesting representative and performative potentials related to objects as well as the extent to which this subject may be fluid and mutable. The discourse on the object is also a pretext to engage in a dialogue about when we see something, when we do not see something, and what we think it is.
The video Kunstwerke 36 confronts viewers with multilayered references, from Martha Rosler’s classic piece Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) to images of 1960s’ 007 films and interiors of 1970’s apartments. Created by Alba D’Urbano and performer Tina Bara, it derives from a dream. Following the rhythm of a song adapted from the fragments of a lesson by Allen Ginzburg, the woman presents small household appliances through unexpected gestures that depart from the normal use of tools, and seem to respond to the guidelines of an unusual instruction manual. The performance subverts the role of the objects that become functional to the discourse of objectification. Another looped video, Passport Lahloh by Kiran Kaur Brar, documents a happening on the border between India and Pakistan. Setting up a stall at the market, the artist offers fake British passports to a quickly gathering crowd. Questioning the notion of identity, of a fixed cultural and political position, this work highlights the tension and ambiguity between the real object and the art object.
In Four Flags, Girolamo Marri creates a sketchy reproduction of Jasper Johns Three Flags. The piece includes in the picture a Chinese flag looming ominously behind the Stars and Stripes in the forefront. Reinterpreting the image of iconic objects, the artist reflects provocatively on the idea of a new world order and of new desires. Liu Ding’s small sculpture Mushroom materializes the idea of the desired object into the three-dimensional shape of a mushroom created from countless little capsules. Whereas the clusters of pills nourish our need for safety, the mushroom alludes to their poisonous risk. Another work Art is Everywhere reproduces a fridge he mistook as a work of art at London’s Tate Modern. A text recording his thoughts—similar to a meditation on this distortion—is added on the photographic object in the manner of ready-made. This verbal dimension stimulates, by insinuation, the viewer’s mind to perceive the work through short circuit of sight in favor of thinking.
In Zhao Liang’s black-and-white photographic series 1+1, pairs of objects standing against cracked walls are transformed by the artist’s camera into objects of surprising beauty. Posed as if suspended in time, they seem to come from some middle place and attract the viewer toward the mute world of things to the realm of unconsciousness. He imbues them with an oddly anthropomorphic presence, and a surrealist nature. We are gripped by the magic quality of these images, a quality we find in other works of the artist (documentaries, videos, photographs) who creates a peculiar poetic sense from everyday life, common things, and unprivileged people. Found objects recur in the practice of Meng Jin and Fang Er conveying a fantasy of space. In the photographic series Love Hotel, the settings are hotels, located in city suburbs or near highways where couples go for sexual intercourse. For many of their users, love hotels create a satisfaction feeling that their routine life cannot provide. By tying up the objects they found in the room, the artists engage in an intimate relation with the space and its furniture. Other works integrate the exhibition concept. A video sequence shows the interrelationship between the physical building, city space, light, obscurity, objects, and abandoned places that have lost their dynamic as spaces and exist in a state of in-between.
