text by Achille Bonito Oliva
"Sculpture should be the becoming-corporal of places that, by opening a country and guarding it, keep around themselves something free which grants all things a home and men a dwelling amidst things" (Martin Heidegger).
This is H.H. Lim's philosophical emblem; it identifies the possibility of founding a place of art which is not restrained to the traditional genres nor tied to the simple reference of painting, sculpture, drawing and pure architecture.
In this case, a work of art is not the result of trespassing or linguistic interlacing, but rather of the foundation of a different art space where not only single linguistic strips matter. A Wagnerian drive crossed all the creative experiences of historic avant-gardes and some new avant-gardes of the second post-war period, as regards the possibility of an art capable of totalizing within itself a variety of languages different from each other and in any case woven in a spectacular interaction. A desire of almightiness crossed the creative process of art during the last decades of the XIXth century up to the experiences of this century. Language became the suitable tool to propose a comparison between art and life, meant as a field of complexity to which another complexity - the complexity of a work of art, consisting of relationships between different languages - can be opposed.
Art raises an aesthetic dam against the inertia of what exists or, at least, builds up an inside border along which it may be possible to travel within real space and time. Whereas, generally speaking, the experience of art founds a metaphoric temporality and spatiality, indicating a periplus of pure fantasy, on the contrary the construction of an interwoven place within the use of different languages allows a possibility of contemplative concreteness that substitutes the relationship with every-day life, even though only temporarily.
In some way, art becomes the possibility of pushing life towards a concrete impossibility of organizing itself as it is. A work of art founds a circular border within which real relationships and displacements take place. Displacement regards the artist's and viewer's psycho-sensorial experiences within a mobile relational field, realized by the complex system of signs created by its author.
The status of complexity becomes a component that accompanies the construction of a work which does not intend to challenge reality under the aspect of likelihood, but rather of an antagonistic opposition capable of generating astonishment and wonder. The historic and more recent avant-gardes of the second post-war period adopted such temptation as a possible attitude that introduces a further theme: the construction of works.
But, in order that it be a modern construction, for the artist it is necessary to introduce a relationship with inescapable technique. Technique takes on the task of founding a further production with respect to the one normally realized. Within a work it takes on the role of a tool compelled to serve a contemplative goal and of possible recording of a different relationship with the complexity of the world. Thus, the principle of frontal communication with a work, simply based upon a rational exchange, is unhinged, while a quite different intercourse is proposed, that brings about further implications. On the other hand, contemporary art faces the problem of time meant as acceleration and velocity, hindering the assumption of an impossible silent state of contemplation, simply fixed in the zone of mental look.
In this way, the adjustment of technique becomes a necessity for contemporary artists who, through complexity, introduce a sound deconcentration of elements involving viewers under several aspects. Thus, a work of art becomes a source of stimulus envisaging the complex field of unconscious drives. Representing that what cannot be said becomes an imperative for an artist, even for a present one, who is also favored by the evolution of contemporary art which decongested moralism in art, by displacing it onto the plane of a healthy nearby morality with a vital disinhibitory effect, mainly after the coming up of the international Transavanguardia art movement.
The totality of this position finds its possible foundation in a technical totality, within a work capable of rendering the representation of a complex use of several possible genres. Contemporary art can realize the goal of putting on the stage a suitable complexity only in this way.
While total art, in Romanticism, Symbolism and Surrealism, meets its effectuation through an intentional regression of images, now this is possible only through a displacement onto a speculative complexity, which does not let itself be intimidated by the use of technology, but rather uses it with a post-industrial and, hence, archaic maturity. For this reason, today's artists, completely free-and-easy and well aware of the non-linear progression of art, hint at a method by whose use complexity does not mean integration of genres, foundation of a compact work, but rather tending towards a work which results in a field of vibrating dissemination.
Lim's method becomes the constant element characterizing works of different origins, yet tied to each other by the need for a not mere and simple interdisciplinary border-crossing, but rather by one that is necessary to found an aesthetic peripeteia linked with a cognition process.
Environment art in the Sixties had widened the apertures of the experiences of historic avant-gardes, but also tied them to the construction of spaces where nothing exists except a staging of the processes of image shaping, a stiff analyticalness of the old North-American school with an Oriental inflection turned to a desire of emptiness.
Lim, on the contrary, shows a cognitive tension, that is also turned towards the taking-up of aspects well beyond simple formal concern, favoring the representation of contents, though these are formally transformed through a linguistic working-up.
The cognition process worked out by art does not only refer to the state of technical complexity but also to internal drives and inside needs belonging to an idea of the world. The maturity of these artists consists in the working-out of shapes that aggregate disparate elements given in mere association. On the contrary, during the Sixties and Seventies maturity seemed to consist in the integrating capability, apparently competing with the integrated complexity of the technological universe. Joining different elements together seemed to be the only way of competing with a world in which everything seemed to be structured in a suitable manner. These artists operate on a different wave length, based on an elaboration which does not tend to mask diversity, but rather to exhibit it in the problematic unity of the work of art, as a process of aggregation of different languages that require different treatments.
The new maturity of the art of 2000 consists of the fact that it requires broader technical skills and, at the same time, a mentality which does not believe in the integration of life and art, but rather in the possibility of creating a work of art made also of interstices fluctuating between shapes worked out by art and the pre-existing ones of life.
In this way, Lim's work of art becomes that Heideggerian place which must not be frontally contemplated like an old sculpture, but as a reserve field for a language capable of creating an actual home where viewers may fluctuate and breathe.
To grant men a home and to dwell among things means to be capable of being non-monolithic, but irregular up to the point that one moves along impalpable and relative coordinates, among reference points located asymmetrically to each other, with a fortunate spatial and temporal aphasia.
During the Sixties and Seventies Environment art had proposed spaces inhabited by an organic project of homogeneity, striving after the complete integration of each detail and mark within a container ruled by a principle of utopistic absoluteness. This absoluteness corresponded to an emptying, an elimination of any accidentality, which was swept away by a strong geometric tension. Lim, on the contrary, founds the possibility of a "home", meant as a wide relational space, a system open for different linguistic contributions, by simple juxtaposition. But juxtaposition leaves gaps, interstices in which there are vital spurious distances between different languages.
Spatial and temporal aphasia rises just from the physical outdistancnt attitudes of resistance made apparent or clear as daylight by a work's objective construction. Such a work is a device, and its internal working is made up by relations of single elements governed by the idea of complexity and at the same time of unity. To govern complexity through the construction of a linguistic method becomes an assumption for artists who do not want to pathetically duplicate the technological complexity of the universe but that of the relationship existing between an individual and his society, between a single person and the regulative body. Thus, a behavioral response is given through the production of a closed and durable shape. The durable feature of shape implies a sense of construction which does not want to be cancelled by the subsequent work, which does not want to metaphorically duplicate outside reality. Art means ambivalent movement gambling with presence and absence, contact and separation, erotism and detachment as not conflicting but complementary attitudes to assert different relationships with reality. "It is not possible to escape the world so well as through art and it is not possible to tie oneself with it more than through art" (Goethe). It is this attitude that indicates the artist's position who at the beginning, like in celestial mechanics where bodies move, starting from parabolas designed according to accelerations and decelerations, determined by attraction and repulsion fields. Such movements are certainly governed by a rule, i.e. by a pre-established system - but in this case, in the case of art, the rule is founded by the status of an artist's imagination and the subsequent reaction of viewers who choose the orbit most suitable to their own sensitivity.
"Imagine that in an underground house in the shape of a cave, with its entry open for light and as wide as the whole cave is, you see some men who have been there since their childhood, chained at legs and necks, so that they are compelled not to move at all and to look only in front of themselves, unable to turn their heads because of the chains. Behind their shoulders the light of a fire is shining, high and far away, between the fire and the prisoners there is an elevated way. Along this way imagine to see a little wall like those screens puppeteers put in front of spectators in order to show their puppets above them.
"Imagine along this wall, men who are carrying, objects of any kind which protrude from the edge - statues and other stone and wood figures shaped in different manners - and, as it is natural, some porters are speaking, others are silent.
"Do you think the prisoners in the cave can see anything else, besides first of all themselves and then their fellows, than the shadows projected by the fire onto the cave wall in front of them? Do you not think that, if these prisoners could talk with each other, they would call their visions real things? And if the prison had an echo from the front wall? Do you think that each time someone of the passers-by lets hear his voice, they would deem it otherwise than the shadow passing by?
"For such persons, summing up, truth cannot be anything else than that of the artificial shadows of objects" (Plato, Republic, VIIth book).
With respect to Plato's cave, Lim has the ease of Heidegger's home where all furniture is realized - not on the basis of the likelihood criterium, that hierarchically refers to the real-world model - but rather according to a selfsufficient order, corresponding to the nature of language, that is the real material on, and of, which the same home is made. Viewers do not have chained legs and necks and have no duties whatsoever nor do they respond to any slavery bond. Here they untie every knot, but not in the sense that they forget and drown in the panic sea of an elsewhere. Here, viewers keep the conditioned reflexes of their memory and sensitivity, but they adapt them to a different kind of circumnavigation among glidings and hindrances, which in any case maintain a sound distance between each other, a distance suitable to allow returns and displacements like in a dwelling, though this is an eccentric and not an every-day one.
For Lim, signs are not shadows of a language, but offspring and flesh of that specific substance, of which art is made, aiming at representing exemplariness. In this case, exemplariness is not controlled from only one point of view, through only one art genre, fixed upon a specific language, as a result piningly balanced between the fugitive and the durable, moment of perception and stasis of the form which stands any gaze.
The modernity of this position is given by the condition of the work of art which provides also for diversion and absence, just as a "being-there" is conceivable within the existence in which many signals cross experience according to a vital co-existence. "Writers - mainly poets - mostly let us think that they compose in a kind of splendid frenzy - of ecstatic intuition - and would certainly have shuddered with horror at the idea of allowing the public to throw a glance behind the scenes", to see "the painful cancelings and interpolations - in a word, wheels and gears - the hoists for scene changes - stairs and trapdoors, cock feathers, cosmetics and beauty-spots which in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred represent the accessories of the literary play-actor" (Edgar Allan Poe*).
Normally also viewers are under the illusion that ecstatic intuition matches ecstatic contemplation, a perfection of the moment of enjoyment symmetrical to the perfection of creation. A wandering path necessarily leads to a wandering cognition, to a process accomplished on the basis of a displacement which is never instantaneous, because it does not correspond to an optimal position of the hunter who settles down at the halt of the only line of sight. Here, the work of art is a circular one and viewers, who are not impaired at legs and necks, must accomplish manifold peripluses around themselves, going forward and backward according to the work's uneven path.
The path of art is uneven, it is made of peripeteias forward and backward in space and time. This mobility is the result of the excellent movement of language which is consolidated in form, where past, present and future are condensed. As far as this is concerned, Lim's work is never out of history.
"History is an angel who was blown back by the future. History is a big hip of trash and the angel would want to settle things that occurred in the past. But a strong wind blowing from Paradise pushes the angel towards the future. This wind is called progress" (Paul Klee, Angelus novus). But this is a progress different from that of the traditional avant-gardes. Because Lim is operating on the interlacement between East and West, analysis of creative processes and synthesis of forms. |
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