CONTEXTS
<My Bed >
Artist: Tracey Emin
My bed originated in 1998. That year, AI min broke up with her boyfriend. She spent four days in bed. When she woke up, she turned the sleeping bed and nearby objects into artistic creations. When we stare at real-life, reality may not stand staring.
The reflection that this work gives me is that many of our lives revolve around specific scenes, such as beds and desks, but these ordinary scenes are personalized and unusual because of the different habits or personalities of each of us, the different combinations of objects, the wear, and tear of the objects, are all traces of a person.
<Performing Timeless Alex>
Artist: Eduardo Navarro
Eduardo Navarro works with similar ideas in the opposite direction in his 2015 performance piece Timeless Alex at the New Museum’s “Surround Audience” Triennial. The piece featured the artist crawling into an (artificial) turtle-skin suit and chicken-wire-frame carapace before meditating in an attempt to inhabit the consciousness of the reptile he imitates. Rather than invite viewers to speculate on the lives of other creatures, Navarro makes an avowed good-faith attempt to enter those lives himself, slowing his breathing and crawling around on all fours to complete the autohypnosis.
His self-reported identification with his subject took him to strange realms; as he’s said in an interview, “When I was doing the performance [I felt] that it wasn’t me trying to transform, but a turtle trying to become human.”
This artist's use of performance art has given me food for thought about whether we can really become other creatures if humans engage in forced self-hypnosis. His art form has inspired me and I may try performance art in my subsequent work for research and study.
<Chalkroom>
Artist: Laurie Anderson
Hs-Chien Huang
Anderson is particularly excited about the VR project, a collaboration with Taiwanese artist Hsin-Chien Huang. Visitors can experience two environments with goggles and a headset. In the first, “Aloft,” the walls of an airplane slowly fall away, leaving the visitor floating in the clouds. An array of objects hover around — a crow, a flower, a conch, a cellphone — and each can be grabbed and held onto. That’s when Anderson’s voice pops up, telling a story or quoting literature until you toss the object out into the sky.
A second <Chalkroom> environment, features phrases and song lyrics painted in white on black walls.
Laurie Anderson said: “VR is usually about, it’s gaming stuff and it’s shooting stuff, it’s usually a very brittle and bright aesthetic,” she says. “We’ve kind of made something that is full of shadows and darkness. For me, it’s completely a dream come true. Because it’s about what I’ve tried to do in every other thing I’ve ever made. Music or sculpture or film. To be completely bodiless.”
What strikes me about the artwork <chalkroom>is that it creates a closed space and creates and records more closely the distance between knowledge, between as interdisciplinary, and, again, like a relationship between objects, like a rotating relationship between objects, creating a similar relationship between objects and objects. The interlocking process, the unfolding, the overlapping and intermingling of the final roles of the 'exploration of life' that eventually takes us to the first, the settlement in the center. It is as if the words written in chalk in the work do not represent a vehicle for human memory-bearing, seemingly capable of enduring scrubbing generation, but seemingly fading instantly into black possibility.
<ADA>
Artist: Karina Smigla-Bobinski
ADA, a kinetic sculpture by Karina Smigla-Bobinski, stands out for being interactive and unpredictable; Imagine a giant ball that is filled with helium gas and its surface covered with charcoal spikes. The helium causes the ball to be suspended in the air and the charcoal sticks provide grips and a medium with which to create art.
Visitors get to push the ball, which moves freely in space because it is not attached to anything. As the ball comes into contact with the surrounding walls, the charcoal sticks draw ambiguous lines on them. The result of what is drawn is never predictable.
While the charcoal sticks come into contact with the white walls, every stroke is unique because of the direction in which the ball is thrust. The force applied, the level to which it is bent and the angle of contact with the wall. This is another way in which traces are brought about, and are artificial and uncontrollable.
Documentary: Anselm Kiefer
I've seen Anselm Kiefer's documentary, He talked about the process of painting, just like in the universe, it is always building, demolition and reconstruction, All the dead stars and others have always been like this, Who is responsible to whom, who is starting, We don't know. It seems that the traces of human existence are also like these paintings and the stars in the universe, born and constantly dismantled and rebuilt.
<ADA>
Artist: The Soul Trembles
“The Soul Trembles” references the artist’s earnest hope to deliver to others soul-trembling experiences derived from nameless emotions. Shiota Chiharu is known for performances and installations that express the intangible: memories, anxiety, dreams, silence and more. Often arising out of personal experience, her works have enthralled people all over the world and from all walks of life by questioning universal concepts such as identity, boundaries, and existence.
I can feel the thousands of threads entwined with the object in the work, as if the object is linked to a myriad of memories, psychedelic and fascinating.