text by Wang Jun-Jieh
"Men can die without anxiety if they know that what they love is protected from misery and oblivion."
－Herbert Marcuse, in Eros and Civililation
"Project Rrose"is a series of work that pays homage to indifference. It also asks, again, the old outdated question: "What is art?" "Project Rrose" first began as a part of the international Artist in Residence Program at the Glenfiddich Distillery in Scotland using as a blueprint, the last large installation work by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) which was created in secret over a period of two decades entitled "Given: 1.The Waterfall, 2.The Illuminating Gas" (1946-66) that observe desire, sexuality, fear, mystery, nature and death by peeping through a small hole in the door of a Catalonian farmhouse. Duchamp's work catalyzed a series of fantasies suggesting that Eros exists in both what is seen and what is not seen. It is a continuous narrative imagination. That which is veiled and hidden from view is precisely the questions of civilization whose responses have long been covered up by quotidian trivialities. The same can be said when questioning the function of contemporary art. When there is no longer a pure aesthetic art, what remains besides visual stimuli, form and technique? Beyond a flow of capital, is that which remains merely a hollow shell that provokes the retinae?
Love and Death, the latest work in the "Project Rrose" series, appropriates obscure visual elements from Marcel Duchamp work "Given". In addition to animating these elements, there is an attempt to seek out the possible significance of what art/artist/artwork means in the contemporary context. Where the role of Art is located within an increasingly heterogeneous society becomes ambiguous, as it is ambiguous in the repression of Eros. Can Art in the contemporary context be liberated from repression? Perhaps the original source of Art can be found within Duchamp's response of sexuality, objects, and the ordinary affairs of daily life.
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