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| Alice’s Rabbit Hole: Everyday Life, Comprehensible and Incomprehensible |
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text by Jo Hsiao
‘Wake up, Alice dear!’
‘Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!’
Is the true meaning of real life simply the manifestation of realness? Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland offers us a metaphorical dreamscape that cleaves even closer to reality. Following a rabbit down a hole in a tree, Alice gets ensnarled in all manner of fantastical adventures, with talking animals, and a playing-card queen that lops off heads... Yet the world that appears down the rabbit hole is also filled with a gamut of emotions – happiness, pain, tragedy, wrath, astonishment. Told according to the logic of dreams, the story takes a turn from absurd reverie toward realness. The world within is drawn toward the authentic level of living. It is filled with the dreams we have about “real life.” Dreams constantly flow like hallucinations, and yet the character of Alice tenaciously survives by her rather down-to-earth instincts.
This exhibition ruminates on the fabrication of “realness” within daily life. Through the state of the here and now, it examines the condition of human living. Naked, mysterious, monotonous, complex – here, it cannot be completely absorbed at a single glance, and sometimes its innermost recesses remain veiled. Our lives may be insignificant, banal, an aggregate of beautiful and ugly things. Yet our lives confirm our life state, and become a form of collection within our lives. Grounded in the everyday, we seek to interpret a dynamic process involving how we manifest the dialectic of our own existence through the state that unfolds from ourselves and our relations with others and our environment.
A New Covenant between Artist and Collaborators
Today, artists take pleasure in exploring a new kind of creative perspective – relying on a collaborative relationship with participants (either viewers or a specially designated subject) to complete the work. An artwork is thus collectively expressed, condensing in form into a highly manipulable event, a statement that takes place in the present tense.
Without being told any game rules, the participants pass a ribbon in a clockwise direction. According to their pleasure, each person either sings or chants meaningless syllables, composed of consonants and vowels, which are written on the ribbon. Amidst the repetitively chanting, chiming voices, alternately powerful and soft, any spur-of-the-moment response by the audience becomes performance, and the differences between each performance results in unpredictability far richer in variation than ordinary theater. Ribbon Tape Machine is a performance project initiated by Chiwei Lin in 2004. It centers on transferring the power to recite and interpret music/verse to the participants. Agi Chen has built a website (www.agichen-united-islands.com) that enlists beloved comic book and cartoon characters. Eliminating their representational images and retaining only their colors, she transforms them into concentric circles and transmits these digital images to others, in an attempt to connect with participants through the internet and collectively create a database of cartoon memories.
The Exhibition as Performance
In 2013 Tino Sehgal won the Golden Lion at the Venice Art Biennale with a “non-object” artwork, which shattered the norm of spatial or performative art by having dancers move around on the floor while humming or beatboxing, precipitating chance encounters with visitors and thus constructing a scene of interpersonal interaction. Sehgal brought conceptual dance into the art museum, attempting to liberate art from the frameworks of object and performance.
When recited, a silent poem becomes sound. When accompanied by an improvisational performance on the accordion or piano, it becomes music. From the brief elegance of written verse to the richness of musical performance, Chieh-ting Hsieh’s sound installations generate a space crafted through listening. And when museum volunteers wear garments custom-made for them by an artist, they play the role of themselves in everyday life, but also become artworks to be gazed upon. Chih-Sheng Lai directly adopts “you” as the subject matter acted out in his works. The choreographers Chieh-hua Jeff Hsieh and I-Fen Tung have created a stage for visitors, allowing them to use their own bodily movements to interpret the directions they receive on earphones. Once immersed in the context of performance, the rationality of the design is heightened. Joyce Ho’s performance and installation work One Day opens a door for visitors every day. Entering the world that lies behind the door is like entering a theater, setting the mind and the body in a certain time and space.
The Exhibition as Reality Show
If an exhibition is a real scene, publicly revealing what is happening at a given moment, then the viewer is an eyewitness, beholding the event happening in the now. Such a manipulation of real situations is essentially based on time, and only on this foundation can everything that occurs suggest the possibility of becoming reality.
Yi-wei Keng takes inspiration from the Lharampa Geshe, the most learned monks in Tibetan Buddhism, who converse with the public on Buddhist wisdom in Lhasa’s Jokhang Temple. Five scholars of philosophy will gather in an art museum for a Lharampa “talk show”: three marathon discourses on the everydayness of “being-in-the-world” in chapters 34-38 of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. When our lives are edited and broadcast in real-time, any survival decision is transformed into reality in a “reality show,” thus denying the reality of everything off-screen. Cheng-ta Yu nakedly invokes a spectacle of contemporary society when self-existence morphs into entertainment. “It’s So Reality!” If life were merely a projection on a computer screen, how would we comprehend the state or form of life we were in? Over the course of 82 days, Kun-Ying Lin invites different people to share their day at work, streaming remote live images of their working day, each day a different protagonist. Ultimately, people must start from this situation and decide how to continue living, or escape the world in which they are trapped.
“Alice’s Rabbit Hole” is an exploration of hybrid forms in between exhibition and performance. It signals that an exhibition is not the “venue” or “stage” we perceive, but rather what transpires within it: installations, a series of performances, behaviors, events, or poetry, music, dance, sound or image. These designs may be configured or improvised. They may present performers arranged in advance, or unexpectedly engage visitors in a serendipitous encounter. But it all takes place with no written script. Visitors may join the scene as actors or collaborate with artists, or a dramatic event may take place before their eyes. When exhibitions go beyond the frame of the visual, what are they? Exhibitions? Performances? Actions? Events? Ultimately, they contain far more than the questions we ask. This demonstrates how today’s art constantly challenges our attitudes toward art itself. “Alice’s Rabbit Hole” is an attempt to cross the barriers dividing professional fields and engage in exchange and cooperation. It is a rumination on what things can be inserted into the formation process of an exhibition, and what things can ultimately emerge from it. The result is an embodiment of symbiosis.
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Alice’s Rabbit Hole
–Everyday Life, Comprehensible and Incomprehensible
Date: October 09, 2015 - January 10, 2016
Opening: 2015.10.09, 15:00PM
Venue: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Galleries 101, 102
Organizer: Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Curator by Jo Hsiao
Participating Artists：
Agi Chen, Joyce Ho, Lai Chih-Sheng, Lin Kun-Ying, Lin Chi-Wei, Yu Cheng-Ta
Hsieh Chieh-Ting, Keng Yi-Wei, Chieh-hua Jeff Hsieh, Tung I-Fen |
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