ZHU TIAN: GESTURE AND FREEFALL

 

“…every valorization is a verticalization.”     Gaston Bachelard    Air and Dreams

 

The idea that sculpture might merge with performance opens out multiple possibilities because of the two contradictory temporalities it entails. Connected to this is also working with conflicting gestural economies that announce the play of the subject and object. Historically this shift of the double articulation of matter and performance is closely related to the assertion of either feminist or transgressive subject positions. The work of Ana Mendieta, Lygia Clark, Valie Export and Marina Abramovic are each aesthetic practitioners that defined this shift in different ways.

Such shifts are part of a broader paradigmatic transformation that is invariably termed as post-medium art. Post medium art is when the field assumes a force over discrete objects and attention shifts to encounters, economies, events and networks. This implies that the field of art becomes redefined beyond the classical idea of the dialectic between figure and ground, introducing as a consequence, a new gestalt. Rather than the figure of push and pull there are folds and pulsations as part of the new possibilities.

Tian Zhu’s work comes out of this late modern tradition but the tone and gestures of her work are also distinctly novel. Tone is an important issue because it brings with it a lightness of touch in one moment, followed by modes of intensification that are composed of darker hues. What is at stake are ways of giving rise to authorial postures that are distinctly ambivalent. Whereas earlier generations appeared weighted by gestures of authenticity, in Zhu’s’s case postures are subject to a complex play of difference in ways that heighten ambiguity. If the subject of her work might have the immediate rhetoric related to fetishism (or even the sacrificial), there is a suspension mobilised in order not to fix the structure of signification in ways that would assert polemical readings. Part of the sense of performance is that it is played across both actual and virtual registers in order to open out vectors of anticipation and release. In this respect the politically incorrect is entertained with the same weight as the contrary. Commercial and high art cultures constantly clash, so the pornographic writing of a writer such as Georges Bataille exemplifies a model of culture ambivalence that find resonance in her art. The gaps opened between registers, always entails risk and in many ways each project is defined by the way the risk is endured in order that the regulated order of things might be broken down.

In the installation work ‘Dirty’ 2015 there is an explicit textual inspiration of Georges Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye’. The invitation is to enter a chamber in which

suspended and inflated skinned animals are connected through plastic hose piping. It is as if the spaces of brothels, experimental laboratories, S-M dungeons and avant-garde retail spaces are being spliced together within serialised orders of misrecognition. The idea of experiment, staging, traps, exchange, sacrifice all flow through networks or apparatus of intensification in order to figure the meeting point of infernal desires. It is humorous and deadly at the same time, a saturation of excess that leads inward to a palace of unwanted encounter with unnamed becoming. Like the novel that inspired the work there are a whole series of structures such as slippage, chains of heterogeneous associations, switches in realms, de-figurations, surprises through which erotic discharge is released.

Curiously intimate, curiously remote: an audience is left to choose as if a cost might be calculated. There is always a calculation of cost. In the work “Selling the Worthless” (2014) buyers could bid on any part of her body in a screened A4 sized copy. It utilised a smart phone messaging app and in turn recorded on video as an event. In some ways it was a performance about the recessional black hole of availability that connects the body, gesture and virtual networks to demonstrate how the lines between public and private are governed by the elasticity of means.

As mediation on objects of desire, ‘Babe’ (2013) takes a highly fetishized object, the high heel shoe and transposes an object bordering on the abject. The shoe that combines a pink rubbery flesh like appearance with black hair inserted into the surface. The work opens in several directions at once, one moment a critique of fetishism, the next as an intensification of erotic investment, then a post surrealist pun on transgression. Given all these possible routes, the object serves to suspend closure.

So many switches of registers: from word to image, from image to network, from subject to object, from apparatus to organism. The ground is removed from underneath the feet inducing a feeling that everything might be floating in an indeterminate space. Without perspective or order that introducing a delirium of shorts or an erotic’s of encounter in which the scrambling of sense becomes a principle of reality.

The world is saturated by things, networks, noise, images, transactions, connections, representations, broadcasts, machines that produce a density of dis-function within the milieus that might cling to autonomy as a half forgotten horizon of becoming. It is just so difficult to figure all of this because it is without ground. Without ground the figure might be conceived as closer to a pulsation as opposed to a form. In ‘Discourse, Figure’ by Jean-Francois Lyotard he conceives the figure as a force linked to desire. Dream is where desire dis-figures itself and this links to art because art is a refutation of discourse.

To free fall is to dis-figure perspectival certainty. On the question of art it is invariably the case that dis-figuring opens the possibility of a work. The artist falls into the pit created by this force and it is this force that deforms available reality in order to create an “unexpected fusion of images” without which there is no imagination.

The idea of risk or the performance of risk is central to her latest project based on the Felix Baumgartner freefall from the edge of the world. In his freefall he reached speeds of over 700 miles per hour. The exhibition ’04.19′ marks the actual time the fall took. To jump in such a manner defines a single gesture of radical otherness or desire to pass through a limit. It is also an intensely masculinist gesture: higher, faster, more spectacular, a freefall of pure expenditure. On the surface it is a most unlikely starting point but then this is what creates attraction because as an act it defines a limit endured.

What is it to project so far outside the experience of ordinary limit? How far do you need to go out in order to find that still point? The questions go round and around until the point of being still is reached and the presentation of art begins.

The exhibition is another example of how it is possible to establish exposure of regions of blindness. Exposure in this case is simply the body being thrown between the vectors of actuality and virtuality for all to witness. Events defined by different durations, shifts from absence into presence, probes into city space, connections and disconnections between bodies, negotiations and withdrawals, stretching time and interrupting time: all these things are scripted into the strategies of exposure. Rather than a determinate fall it is closer to a series of acts that are serialized as a mode of going astray. Nothing is set in place so what is exposed is displacement but displacement connected to mood that colours each act. This is close to an open work that comes out of the uncertainty of horizontally defined identity that secures being in place. Without security of place, a series of navigations begin but these navigations are based upon risk and these risks create new modes of punctuation. All that is left is the act of wandering from end to end. In all of this inertia is answered and with each gesture a fragile line is drawn, commas marked and question marks assembled. In all of this there is an exclusion of entrances and exits demarking the certainties of space and permanence of subjectivity that constitutes a ‘subjectum’ (with this being pressed under). Instead we are given over to someone or even something that arrives late on the scene inclining or declining this way or that, uncertain and experimental within the same breath.

An imaginary voice starts to write a text. It all occurs on the inside: “It is hot and humid and it is hard to breathe the air which is dense and sticky. I start to think of the frozen solitude of outer space, all the other ways of being breathless. I feel that I am falling, freefall, free fall falling. Everything is out of sight. I am out of sight falling fast. Fast as a body can fall. So fast. I wonder if anyone can hear my thoughts. My thoughts are spinning. I imagine my brains inside a washing machine. My thoughts bruise easily but when they do there is the possibility of poetry. I remember crazy things like trying to have conversations with chickens on my Grand Mother’s smallholding. That was a long time ago but it never left me. I wonder what those chickens thought of me. I could never talk of humans like that. Chickens have such intense eyes. Now I am flying though much faster than those chickens could ever imagine even when chased by a rabid dog. I wear lipstick now in memory of them. Humans think I wear lipstick to impress them but I wear it for all those deceased chickens. How quickly time goes. I have breasts now and dream of my brain spinning in the washing machine. I was taught to sit still at school. I remember that because it made me feel sore all over. I associate mathematics and writing with being still so I wanted to become a dancer instead. I dreamed of spinning through the air as if I was free from gravity. I wanted to be a fast girl so that is why I am tumbling towards the earth in free-fall. What a way to be born again.”

A voice is alone in space with nothing to show, the signs of being born again are not on the side of visibility.

Yet the collision goes on between sense and situation, phrases and images, body and structures, materiality and performance: sometimes on the side of arrest but also of refrain. Identity is never posited as stable or secure but always restless and on the move. All this accumulates with the flesh of the in between. Artists are ripe with flesh that cannot be seen.

Now she is driving through the streets of Xia Men with a parachute attached to her vehicle. What a mad thing to do. Sense is in free-fall, as the occasional witnesses do not quite believe their eyes. Perhaps not quite believing your eyes is like having them cleaned in order to look twice at all things. It is an invention of a way of being in a city, perhaps a way of announcing presence. Then she is hanging from a crane posing as a comic book like heroine, slapstick but not without the thought of falling. She pays the driver of the crane for his troubles but not without a bargaining process. Perhaps he is amused but what appears as the stupidity of artists as he goes back to work.

Her work is about little things, misunderstandings but it all adds up eventually. With which eye do you see? Can eyes become wooden? (Such strange questions, but if strange, then worth asking.) Questions draw lines, make shapes and even mark zones. Then it is possible to move in new ways. Tian is drawing lines, making shapes and moving in new ways. To perform is to do those things. Also to perform is to reveal through showing the relationship of showing to hiding. There is always something that cannot be seen. Performance is invariably the quest for secrets.

Working late into the night the shift between the noise of the day and the night-time hush is evident. Walking back each evening Tian notices groups of women lingering on the street. Looks are exchanged but they quickly vanish from the view of the outsider. A ritual of hide and seek is in evidence and curiousity and shame mix in the humid air. There is nothing much to say about this situation but thoughts about otherness linger. Silence might be a form of conversation or what appears as elusive is the starting point of form. On the balcony of the gallery neon lights are installed, clothes are hung and there is a tape recording of a melancholic love song that drifts into the still of the night. Where is she, this woman who displays all her clothes? Perhaps she lingers in a placeless place, stripped of definition, like the first woman she saw and responding by hiding from her glance by disappearing into shadow. What then is the gesture of such a work? Clothes that stand for a withdrawn body, encounters without exchange, a presentation of loss, interiority seeking evasion of presence: all these things are possible but sometimes there is no reason to work through definitions or strategy. Who is waiting there and for what, will something arrive, return or depart? Gesture simply points to something outside of itself or outside what is immediately apparent. Who said that the artist sells their soul? Anyway something happened, and perhaps continues to happen, but only the trace of clothing left in Xia Men hold fast to sentiments in circulation within those late exchanges of view. As a work it sits on the edge between something being there and not there, or even said and unsaid. More than anything it explores displacement of subjectivity. The work is an outcome of one eye seeing too much and the other eye in the act of turning away, seeing too little. Thus there is no proper measure for what is seen so what is felt is touched by this half-light. The touch of the actual work is then not only light but is also ambivalent. Something is performed but it is performed through the absence of the body. The sharp neon lights contrast with a diffuse and faded light of being.

There are no bodies to connect. The works speaks of solitude but with a voice that is diffuse. A song drifts into the night: that is all.

Three bodies are bound together in cling film. There is little circulation inside so the bodies become drenched with sweat. All of this type of encounter goes on for a whole year. There are a lot of ways to be bound in cling film: some intimate, some awkward, some tender, some humorous, some estranged. Curator and artist have never been so close. Usually the curator regulates the distance between the work, artist and him or herself but this time the artist is doing the regulating. It is a way of making the curator sweat. Anyway the curator has to accept the terms and conditions of the artist in this situation and try and stay cool.

Such a strange thing to spend a year doing but for an artist simply the exposure of so doing: after all they are made light by the flesh that is held in invisible reserve.

Such flesh is without measure. No translation is possible.