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As Yue Su was finishing her Masters’ thesis (comparing and
contrasting gallery models in China and the USA), she was also in the process
of clearing out her apartment, with her roommate Tianqi Chen, for their
near-future move. As the living room
became more and more sparse an idea began to form. When they met Iris Xing, a photographer, and
learned about her idea for an installation piece, the idea for their “Chaos”
show, in their Roosevelt Island apartment, took root.
The idea of apartment galleries seems to be catching on in some
cities in China, and New York City, as a statement against the corporate models
under which some of the larger galleries are now being run. It’s also a protest against the process by
which ‘famous’ artists are selected and promoted by the economically powerful
galleries. Basically, apartment
galleries are a protest against the rabid commercialism and lust for fame one
often sees in contemporary art. A show
like “Chaos” tries to refocus on meaning and connection and not on money or
fame. At this show, I actually asked a
couple artists what they would charge if someone wanted to buy their art. One said, “I don’t know.” Another said, “A buck.” So this apartment gallery show was more about
community and the sharing of ideas and meaningful interaction than making a
profit.
Indeed, this apartment building actually has some real
diversity in it and some folks from the building who might not go to a
traditional Chelsea gallery even ventured over to take a look. So folks who might not see themselves as
Chelsea gallery hoppers felt comfortable about coming over to a neighbor’s
place and checking out Chelsea gallery quality art by three up-and-coming artists:
Iris Danlu Xing, Victoria Nikaveron and Xiaoyang Jin.
Iris Xing’s installation piece “Game Over” was the
inspiration for the concept and it is located in one of the darkened bedrooms
of the apartment. In her daily rides on
the subway she sees so many people playing various types of cell phone games as
they ride to work or school. She’s also
a bit near-sighted, so when she sneaks a peek at what her neighbors are doing
on their cell phones, she often gets a blurry impressionistic image of some
type of goofy, mindless video activity – little blocks falling, creatures
running through mazes etc. Then, after the effort to see what a neighbor is
doing, she often feels guilty that she surreptitiously struggled just to see
blurry blocks or a screen that says: “Game over!”
Indeed, she noticed that “Game over!” is usually displayed
after most cell phone games end and it is the point at which the person has to
choose whether to put the gizmo down or to continue another game. Invariably
Xing notices that the game is never really over as folks just seem to be
addicted to doing these mind-numbing activities. It’s as if they cannot even
spend 20 minutes with themselves alone with their own thoughts; every moment
has to be filled with some electronic stimulation. A person could be reading,
thinking, relaxing, memorizing a poem, jotting down journal entries – any
number of more meaningful and enriching activities, but, sadly, folks go for
the cheap, easy thing that provides no enrichment whatsoever. The morning transit is time to be thrown away
not precious time to be used.
So in the completely darkened bedroom you see a series of slides
dangling from a horizontal string and you are invited to use your own cell
phone to provide illumination through the slides to project an image onto the
nearby wall. After struggling to get the
right amount of illumination at the right distance and angle from each slide so
you can read the image on the wall, just as Xing struggled to spy on the images
on her fellow-riders’ cell phones, you realize that each slide is an image of
the ending of one of several different video games, the most prominent ending
being “Game over!” So your cell phone
itself is used as a means to illuminate the sign “Game over!” This seems to
represent a possible turning point where you have finally realized that you
have been doing something utterly stupid and that you can no longer go back to
this. It can also be a type of
admonition that, yes, the game is over, it should be over and now it’s time to
transition to something more relevant to life.
More broadly the artist can even be criticizing the over-reliance
on these electronic gizmos in our lives.
The internet and the iPhone and iPad etc. have provided a huge economic
boost and tons of entertainment, yet yearly test scores and the writing skills
of young people are in chronic decline. The
SAT test is now even being dumbed down for the internet generation’s lack of
high-level vocabulary. Just what are
these continuous electronic innovations giving us? So “Game over!” is not just an admonition
against stupid cell phone games but an admonition that ‘information technology’
might not really be meaningful information technology and that we may have
abandoned something that worked for something that is gratifying, makes life
“easier” but is, in reality, harmful.
Nikaveron had a few pieces of differing styles present, but
the piece you see pictured was my personal favorite. You see a lot of action in this piece and she
told me this work should be viewed more as process art than a representation of
anything. It basically expresses a
certain inner state she was in when she completed the work. You also see homage to Rauschenberg, the Abstract
Expressionists and Russian Constructivism in this piece. She explained that she did this work as an
experiment since she is attracted to collage but had never felt confident
enough about attempting it. I like the
use of the geometrical objects, implying order and reason and deductive logic,
combined with the messy and uncontrollable elements representing what can’t be
controlled through formal processes.
Xiaoyang Jin is a young experimental photographer who has a
lot of theory behind his work, yet the work, on its own, is visually
arresting. In fact, what he showed at
the Chaos show reminded me a bit of some of the work the experimental
film-maker Stan Brakhage did with Super-8 film.
At one point Brakhage abandoned the concept of using film to narrate or
represent and just scratched into the film stock itself with various sharp
objects and then developed the film and ran it through a projector. One then saw the colors from within the film
stock itself come out randomly in brilliant abstract displays. Like Brakhage, Jin uses a non-professional
type of film – he uses the photographic film that was/is used in Polaroid instant
cameras. He literally takes the unused cassette
of film and tears it open and then exposes the sheets of film to different
types of sea water.
For instance, in one amazing piece he exposed the film to
seawater from Coney Island and obtained a luscious and complex blue
composition. Jin then takes the results
of exposing the film and mounts the image on a type of transparency. This is important to Jin because ‘the screen’
on or through which we look at objects is an important aspect of his work. Here
the screen not only reveals an image but is viewable and noticeable itself. A thin fluorescent light is placed behind the
transparency to reveal the abstract image.
So he abandons the digital camera completely and goes back to the type
of film that was commonly used by everyday folks to record their lives (in the
pre-internet era) and extracts colors and designs from that film stock. He also
explained that the chemical treatment is often the result of some type of
physical journey and that the key to the meaning in the art is that the results
are totally unpredictable and uncontrollable. The artist shows a type of faith
in the process itself, that the process will produce a type of beauty and meaning
what we can’t produce through our own efforts.
