text by Wang Jun-Jieh
True Life, Love and Death
“My art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It’s a sort of constant euphoria.”－Marcel Duchamp 1
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) had used the female name Rrose Sélavy as an alias while made a try of travestism since the 1920. Duchamp’s disregard of traditional dogma and principle fully shows his intention of changing his identity. Not only his idea of ‘readymade’ has brought enormous influence to the contemporary art, most important of all, he also had made the art transcend the limit of culture over the long past, expressed the free attitude and questioned what else art could be talk about besides the retinal. What he had broken, at the same time the art had departed from the art, were those people who were still affected with visual beauty. As we are now in the cyberspace era, how to look on the fact that art can be the reflection of modernity. It not only responses the anti-art idea before the twenty-first century, but also can be make the thinking about the essence of art after Duchamp.
Project Rrose series is a salute to Marcel Duchamp. What else are left after the vision, forms and skills have been removed from art? Duchamp questioned that most of artwork has been controlled by visual languages, “Everything was becoming conceptual, that is, it depended on things other than the retina.” 2 What Duchamp mean was, apart from thinking, to return an artist back to the identity as a human, everything is performed in life. It’s the return to oneself, it’s a development and to contemporary art, it’s also an innovative language. Under this way of thinking, Project Rrose tries to divert the ideas from Duchamp, and at the same time discuss the essence of art’s existence, and also response the unreal living environment of the complicated modern society.
Project Rrose is based on the last large-sized installation work Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas, 1946-66) that Duchamp secretly spent 20 years on. Beyond this unexplained work, through the tiny hole of a wooden door in Catalunya, Spain, we get a glimpse of the scene, which is beyond our imagination. The obscurity of it is just like how Duchamp shocked contemporary art. Spliced Swiss scene and nude woman whose life is uncertain, show the audience scenes of space, nature, desire, eroticism, fear, and fantasy. Just as the title of the work, ‘being given’ is a symbol of ‘gift’, it has the relation between giver and receiver, and all of us are having our free imagination in this multi-dimensional virtual space.
Invited by Glennfiddich Distillery for the Artist in Resident Plan in 2009, subtitled Real Flux is Project Rrose’s first creation program. Associating with Duchamp’s work in thinking, it represents the basic desire of people’s inner world with the image based on Scottish scenery and the well-known whisky distillery. It could be a peep-through and also a fluid release. Just like the major elements ‘eroticism’ of Duchamp’s creation throughout his life, it leads viewers into different imaginary space to figure out who they are and the relation between the environment and themselves. “Everything can be based on an erotic climate without too much trouble. I believe in eroticism a lot, because it’s truly a rather widespread thing throughout the world, a thing that everyone understands.”3 Real Flux is composed of three parts: stock house gate of 45 Glennfiddich Distilleries, a four-minutes-and-14-seconds video, and two photos on a wall. Through the gate imagination is opened. Fluid whisky and spring water, association of Scottish Highlands and sexual desire, all represent the combination of people’s physical labor and desire in daily lives. Everything here seems plain and precious. As for art that was sentenced to death by Duchamp, what else it has left is nothing but true life, love and death.
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1. Pierre Cabanne, translated by Ron Padgett, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Da Capo Press, London, 1979, p.72
2. Ibid., p.39
3. Ibid., p.88
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