wuwu-aaart
Critical Reflection
In Unit 2, I look specifically at the ongoing effects of a sudden and unexpected event, such as a death, on the living. I question the simplistic view of such events as a describable fact and analyze how events change towards a more open-ended uncertainty.
The shape of my prototype resembled a small pagoda, and the subject matter was related to the dead, so it reminded me of the sutra pagoda that originated in the Ancient Zhang Zhung era as a culture of animal spirit rituals, and I researched this.
Sutra streamers were initially made by fastening wool directly to branches and grasses. However, later they evolved into small square or angular or striped flags fixed in an orderly manner to the heads of doors, ropes, and branches, waving and swaying between the earth and the sky, creating a realm of connection to them. Sutra streamers are a symbol of the origin of life, a product of emotion and reason, a universal medium for communicating between the secular and spiritual worlds, and a vehicle for expressing people's good spiritual aspirations.
They have an archaic, muddy feel, pure and robust, having been baptized by uncountable storms and sunlight, traveling far away with the invisible gods of heaven. Nevertheless, I did not want to do the work into a ritual, so I incorporated similar elements to allow viewers to make their associations.
Sutra Pagoda in Tibet
The willow brings me a softness of touch, tension, and vitality that explores from the inside of the branch to the outside, a rebelliousness that I feel as I shape it with my hands, often scratching my face when I am careless. It is a youthful material in my eyes.
Furthermore, in the tradition of my homeland, the Qingming Festival is a festival to send mourning to the dead — one side of life, one side of death. At Qingming Festival, people had the custom of folding, wearing, and inserting willows, which can be woven into garlands and worn on the head or taken home and hung in the house.
Qingming Festival
The above research reminds me of Patrick Dougherty's practice of creating art from saplings as a building material, describing a sense of both power and fleetingness and the wonder and fragility of the world. Each of his works requires much work, hard physical labor, and ingenious imagination, and he focuses on collaborative reproduction with the natural and social environment. However, the life-cycle of the material also means that the work only lasts for a while. Like a flower bed, his work has a moment of splendor but eventually returns to the soil.
“It is intriguing to let them take on a natural lifecycle,” he says. “And there is a more central viewing with people who are heartfelt, sad, and find them a little endearing.” Dougherty has always appreciated this process and believes that the state of impermanence draws the viewer into a more intimate relationship with the sculpture.
He strives to bring about a 'logic of lines,' that is, to create a convincing illusion of lines flowing along the outer surface, giving the surface a sense of freedom and carefree movement. Dougherty attempts to make a work that does not look artificial, imitating the currents of air and water in nature, giving the work a more organic origin. He has always believed that following his own ideas and subtle feelings to create is more productive. Creativity often draws on unfortunate adventures, mistakes, or mishaps, and it is only later that one realizes that accidents are the critical starting point for work.
I am very much in tune with Dougherty's 'logic of the line.' In my practice, I focus on the twisting and interweaving of raffia and wicker, an action that is relatively repetitive and where the interaction between the materials is cumulative (without the interweaving of the lines of the layer below, there is nowhere to interweave the layer below). The aesthetic in the human eye is associated with conscious and purposeful repetition.
However, the impermanence of Dougherty's work is at odds with my desire to perpetuate the moment, and my emphasis falls on trying to break down a fading fact while also exploring a way to interpret events that continue to have an impact and change beyond what we can perceive as reality.
Finders Keepers, Patrick Dougherty, 2022, Jackson Hole Center for the Arts
Concerning fading and death, Paul Klee interprets death as a migration to the deepest levels of reality, as he says: "The objective world around us is not the only possible world, there are other worlds potentially out there," where he reveals the potential 'other existence.' In ‘Death and Fire’, one of his last works, the whole image is a symbol of a funeral ritual in which the ferryman takes the dead to another empire, where the aim is not to represent the visible (i.e., to reproduce visual entities) but to make visible the invisible, the force that permeates the visible.
Many of the subjects of the ferries and journeys are like depictions of the uncertainties of life's journey, and Klee's understanding of tragedy led him to think again about myths and monuments, to treat their forgotten, declining, resurfacing symbols in a critical and 'figurative' way, bringing fresco back in a more authentic way.
Paul Klee's teleological conception of death is thus experienced as the continuous approach of an inaccessible totality. The relationship between the subject and the other objects that appear on his canvases is constantly changing and in motion, shifting. He combines inner visions with the experience of the external world, where the energy and matter that moves on its own and is forced to move has the same importance as the creation of symbols.
Klee creates a world revealed through 'critical deformation' through coexisting incommensurable moments and landscapes, shifting curvatures, geological twists and turns, incompatible reversals, expansions, contractions, melting, and superfluities. "In an assemblage of shifting, vibrating, squeezing or splitting sensations, from this artist to the other, great creative feelings can manage to articulate and give birth to each other." (Gilles Deleuze)
The points at which we often empathize with other works of art are not visualized. Moreover, whenever an event changes, it does so at a completely different pace and at a different time, and it is only when it becomes slow or when it can be "held" in front of the eyes that it can be seen and felt.
Dead and Fire, Paul Klee, 1940, Klee Foundation, Bern
In Lois Patiño's film ‘Red Moon Tide’, Patiño seeks to reflect on a spiritual relationship with space. Inspired by the experience of a local diver who rescued countless bodies from maritime disasters, he depicts a community in a state of mystery and grief: the diver Rubio has disappeared, and the bodies of those lost at sea seem destined to remain in a kind of marine inferno. Inhabited by the living and the dead, real and imagined, this is a landscape caught between past and present, where ghostly figures draped in white sheets emerge from the memories of their loved ones, who speak in contemplative off-screen voices about the myths and local legends that haunt the region.
Conceptually and narratively, Patiño investigates what can be expressed through people who are paralyzed in space to explore different experiences of time. In this film, people are experiencing an inner time.
Another concept that becomes increasingly significant as the story of Rubio becomes known is the process of grieving and mourning. Rubio has helped bring many families back together because, according to legend, when a sailor loses at sea, he remains in hell and cannot go to the afterlife: alma en peña (the suffering soul) is its name. Thus Rubio rescues not only the bodies of these sailors but also their souls.
Two aspects of the grieving process in the film interested me: the physical absence of the bodies being experienced; and the presence of the ghosts of people seeing their friends and family members. The ghosts are part of this mourning process. From my personal experience, I also experienced the physical absence of a corpse when I was confronted with the death of a beloved pet, so the presence of ghosts in my work was a creative language for me.
Patiño thought a lot about the methods of phantom representation, a popular one with sheets, derived from the Middle Ages. They covered the dead as an act or ritual of farewell and goodbye. So when the phantom manifestation appears in a scene, it is an image of a corpse. In the film, one reflects on the process of mourning and the need to say goodbye to the body, it becomes part of this farewell ritual and appeasement of the apparitions. Getting them out of the way and going to the afterlife are both part of the ritual. The three women who appear in the film need to cover the bodies, trapped in the landscape and unable to move, as a way of saying goodbye. As we see in one of the scenes, a woman comes over and covers him with a sheet while a man is talking, and suddenly his voice disappears. It is a way of calming the spirit. Similarly, in my films, I am portrayed at the beginning and end with a conical prop over my head, coming out of the blur into some parallel dimension and leaving out of the calm as a farewell to my puppy.
Events change with every discovery that life brings me, so it constantly changes. "You have to expect the unexpected, or you will not recognize it when it comes." (Heraclitus) Like the flashback experience I document in the film, I am willing to stay open to uncertainty and possibility.
Red Moon Tide, Lois Patiño, 2020
Shamanism profoundly influences Joseph Beuys' artwork. In Shamanism, the shaman is considered a master of the mysteries and can enter the 'human-god' state and communicate with the spirit world. For Beuys, Shamanism is a natural philosophy of returning to a primordial state where all life can be harmonious. Beuys regarded his performance art as a means of educating and healing his audience.
In his 1965 performance artwork ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’, Beuys, with his head covered in honey and gold foil, one foot in a felt-soled shoe and the other in an iron-soled shoe, wanders the gallery for two hours with a dead rabbit in his arms, explaining in a quiet voice to the rabbit in his arms the museum's artworks. In this performance, Beuys acts as if he is acting as a shaman, communicating with the rabbit's spirit of the dead, Beuys says, "Even a dead animal has a stronger intuitive power than some people who are stubbornly rational." Through this performance, he hopes that people will return to their animal nature and evoke the ability to connect with nature. His interest in the generation, storage, and transmission of energy shows a great deal of reflection on the forces of nature.
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, Joseph Beuys, 1965, Courtesy Phaidon
In the book ‘Rituals of Rented Island’, I learned about some props' roles in performance art. Art is involved in creating illusions and reveals how such illusions are built - the basic codes and systems that create meaning and our ability to communicate in complex ways. For some artists, the subtle and hard-to-define interactions with what surrounds us become their work's unique focus and artistic medium. They use objects as props to interact with, objects that become props perhaps removed from their original context. In dealing with these new but very local boundaries, this deep concern with the neglected or seemingly small and trivial invariably challenges the meaning of any conventional art form.
Richard Foreman investigates the fundamental forces of self-consciousness, movement, and the haptic interaction of the material world. He explains, "These plays demonstrate our fantasy lives and how our mental pictures of the world come directly from the physical possibilities of the objects around us."
Rituals of Rented Island
Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama—Manhattan, 1970–1980
by Jay Sanders
Contributions by J. Hoberman
Sylvia Palacios Whitman's works have been described as somewhere between dance, ephemera, and theatre. They are simple, direct, playful, and effortless. The dances do not try too hard to be something. They are conscious bodies interacting with simple props, pausing time for the audience as we witness images appear and then disappear.
The piece of hers that struck me was 'Human Paper Coil' (1973). A dancer enters the space and constantly struggles to wrap herself in a large coil of brown craft paper. The focus is not on her physical agility or the final image of her becoming something with the coil. Wrestling with the material is an impossible task, and in my practice, I sincerely understand this. In creating a dialogue with the material or the props, the performer tries to conform to the feeling they bring to him or her, to give the body to the other and let the material lead him or her to the next step. When I wear a willow garment, it is as if my body expands several times. I enter a world of sensations in the contours of the garment: the delay and slowness of movement, the resistance of the air when walking or spinning, the inability to relax and feel like the structure is holding my body up. These experiences are a dialogue between the body and the material. Palacios Whitman does not exaggerate his work into a vaudeville comedy, leaving only the rustle of paper, the strangeness of the task, and the awareness of naturally making adjustments to the body that we cannot conceive of.
She has developed her unique performance style, using surrealist stage props such as giant hands, a volcano, mummies, an airplane, and giant paintings to create a visual theatre that demonstrates the sensitivity of performance in terms of surreal imagery and attention to space and props.
Human Paper Coil, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, 1973
I also feel the same way about Rebecca Horn's use of props. The body and its movements have always been a source of inspiration for Rebecca Horn's work. In her early performance work from the 1960s and 70s, this manifests itself in using objects that act as extensions of the body, opening up new perceptual experiences and acting as limitations.
In her piece 'Finger Gloves', they are worn like gloves but with fingers shaped as extensions of balsa wood and fabric. By seeing what she is touching and how she touches it, it feels as if her fingers are being stretched, creating the illusion in her mind that she is touching the thing that the extension is touching.
Furthermore, Horn's objects, including violins, suitcases, batons, ladders, pianos, feather fans, and metronomes, transcend their defining materiality and are constantly transformed into ever-changing metaphors that touch on mythological, historical, literary, and spiritual imagery. Each of Horn's installations is a step towards a complete breakdown of the boundaries of space and time, offering a glimpse into a materially liberated universe.
Finger Gloves, Rebecca Horn, 1972
Questions about the temporality of performance have inspired some of the most critical theoretical discussions and historical analyses - so much so that ephemerality is primarily understood as an intrinsic feature of the performance medium's identity, which exists in the inevitable fleetingness of time.
For example, Chris Burden's ‘Shoot 1971’ lasted only as long as the flight of a bullet. However, the photographs of the piece have not only allowed the work to persist through time but have also heightened the perception of its fleeting instantaneity, showing us, in effect, what we missed by not being there.
Nan Goldin's ongoing work, ’The Ballad of Sexual Dependency‘ (initiated in 1985), uses ever-growing and changing photographs to commemorate and demonstrate community building. Nevertheless, the repeatability of the slide show format and its display mode runs counter to the supposed immediacy of the experience depicted in the photographs.
I maintain the practice of questioning the occurrence of events as simply a describable fact while still looking for other ways to preserve this fleeting moment and thinking about how to present the impact and change that the moment brings.
Shoot 1971, Chris Burden , 1971
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Nan Goldin, 1985
References
· Rodenbeck, J.F. (2014) Radical prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the invention of happenings. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
· Ripions (2023) Human paper coil (1973) by Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Vimeo. Available at: https://vimeo.com/81907027 (Accessed: 24 May 2023).
· Deleuze, G. (2002) Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
· Deleuze, G., Galeta, R. and Tomlinson, H. (2014) The time-image. London: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing.
· Boy, J.D. (2020) ‘“the metropolis and the life of spirit” by Georg Simmel: A new translation’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 21(2), pp. 188–202. doi:10.1177/1468795x20980638.
· Cronk, J. (2020) ‘Interview: Lois Patiño’, FILM COMMENT. Film at Lincoln Center.
· Ulla von Brandenburg: How we live and what we share (2018) Louisiana Channel. Available at: https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/ulla-von-brandenburg-how-we-live-and-what-we-share (Accessed: 24 May 2023).
· Wolfe, S. (2017) ‘Stories of Iconic Artworks: Joseph Beuys’ I Like America and America Likes Me’, ARTLAND MAGAZINE.
· Goldberg, R. and Court, P. (2009) Everywhere and all at once: An anthology of writings on performa 07. Zürich: JRP/Ringier.
· Westerman, J. (no date) The dimensions of performance, Tate. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/dimensions-of-performance (Accessed: 24 May 2023).
· (No date) Patrick Dougherty. Available at: http://www.stickwork.net/ (Accessed: 24 May 2023).
· Feder, H. (2020) ‘Impermanence: An Interview with Sculptor Patrick Dougherty’, Orion Magazine.
· Finger gloves - rebecca horn - google arts & culture (no date) Google. Available at: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/finger-gloves-rebecca-horn/zwELgy0mTVgyyQ (Accessed: 24 May 2023).
· Rachel Whiteread (no date) Luhring Augustine. Available at: https://www.luhringaugustine.com/artists/rachel-whiteread#tab:thumbnails (Accessed: 24 May 2023).
· Sanders, J. and Hoberman, J. (2013) Rituals of rented island: Object theater, loft performance, and the new psychodrama - Manhattan, 1970-1980. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art.