The Adventure of Discursive Art in Deep Time

–On Wang Jianwei’s Solo Exhibition “Treading in Sludge”

Lu Xinghua

 

In the Anthropocene, the framework of the current historical narrative, or that of art history, will be dissolved if the average temperature of the earth’s surface rises another 1.5 degrees Celsius.

–Latour

A According to Wang Jianwei’s Harman

Objects are submerged sleeping giants that store up infinite energy, not releasing all its energies at once.

–Harman

We can imagine that Wang is playing a game of Haman with himself, to use discursive positivism and object-oriented ontology, as a chessboard, to make his own work methodologically rigorous. It can be said that Harmonism is to Wang Jianwei what the Big Glass series is to Duchamp.

During the more than two months of preparation for the exhibition, the curators listened carefully to Wang Jianwei’s various entanglements with Harmanism in his creations, and the following is the aesthetic and artistic stance of Harmanism, summarized by Billion and jointly identified by them in the course of their discussions, that is evident in Wang Jianwei.

 

Beauty and Aesthetics

Aesthetics is the general theory of how objects differ from their own qualities. Shanghai is not beautiful, but the girls on its streets are; it is because of these girls that Shanghai is beautiful. The same is true among works of art: it is the sensual qualities in the work, played out by the viewer himself, that make the work beautiful.

Beauty is a theatrical consequence of the disappearance of the real object behind its own sensual qualities: it is in the network of actors at the exhibition that beauty is created.

Beauty is thus inseparable from theatricality. The works come to cooperate with the audience to form a new theater of their own, to grind out a new beauty with the audience.

Wang’s understanding of Harmanist aesthetics has two main points:

(1) Once you are going to look at it, the object will move back, or hold itself, and the work of art should never hook up with the audience, society, history, or culture;

(2) The relationship between the object and the individual characteristics it possesses is discrete.

Therefore, according to Wang, it does not matter whether in an exhibition, it is a painting or a sculpture, a readymade, a document, or a tangled web of various comments and even gossip. It is only when they are synthesized with the audience that they establish their own autonomy and depth.

A work of art must still contain “beauty”, even if it is a kind of beauty in the ruins of industry (in “Treading in Sludge”, Wang Jianwei uses industrial materials to realize the beauty in natural materials), even if it is a kind of morbid beauty in the face of global warming (the beauty of the discarded (as Timothy Morton puts it)), even if it is a kind of beauty in the face of global warming (the beauty of the discarded (as Timothy Morton puts it)). Even the pathological beauty of global warming (the beauty that Timothy Morton described in the 45,000 years of degradation of discarded plastic garbage bags) must be the beauty of the work itself, and should not be dependent on the strings of art history or the sublime of nature.

There is a third object that brings us beauty through the sublime, besides human beings and mountains and waves: the object that is the work of art; the work of art itself is capable of bringing beauty to the viewer in the same way that mountains and waves do.

This beauty is not vague and uncertain, but can be defined with certainty: the result of the rehearsal in the theater of the rift between the real object and its sensual qualities is that the spectator makes himself see this beauty, which is not pinned to the wall by the artist beforehand.

Various things about the object

The work of art is the object-self, and the object-self is the object. The work of art is the object. As an object, the work of art contains innumerable elements, and each element within it has a context of its own, and the latter are all objects, and they also contain innumerable objects within them: the universe, the firmament, the Cambrian …….

The work of art is a composite, for example, global warming is a work in which the human element is incorporated; global warming is the work of man, but man is also in the midst of global warming at the moment. The human being is always already in the work.

And the work as an object is always in that network of actors. The work of art can never be autonomous from the human being, which is why Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics should be rejected, as well as his treatment of the human being as a privileged observer and enjoyer of art.

The human being is the constituent of the work of art. “I am part of the work, and so I cannot exhaustively grasp the content of the work of art, because I am one of the components of the work. When I play Bach, I become a component of the work: I fall into a hermeneutic cycle, or into a network of actors about which the work is in flux in real time. One can never download enough Bach, and the more one listens to it, the richer it becomes, because “I” myself am inside the object or work.

 

 

Endosymbiosis

But the human subject is also an object, and must democratically coexist with non-human objects in a series of re-coexistences, endo-coexistences, according to Lynn Margulis. The viewer and the work of art they are confronted with are also equal objects, and a series of endosymbioses occurs between them. The viewer’s own social, political, economic, and psychological assumptions and interpretations of the work of art that confronts them are always self-contained, self-absorbed, and self-destructive, and always avoid this endosymbiosis. To bring the audience face to face with the work of art is precisely to make them abandon the latter. The viewer’s interpretation of the work of art, which is always first already an independent performance art, forms a third object outside of them and the one they are confronted with, and then forms with this third object another larger object, a larger work, to infinity.

Latour should be right, and Kant wrong: it is not possible to separate the world in this way, to say, on this side, the human mind, and on that side, all the rest of this world. It must be recognized that everything is an object, that the mind and the world are equal objects, that both have been drawn into that network of actors, and that both are being drawn further into it: ours, for example, is drawn into the process of global warming, and has become Gaia.

Art history is also an open network of actors, ready to be rehearsed by later works. In art history, the human being is also equally visible in front of the work like an object. In exhibitions, the viewer has only the status of a sculpture or a painting as an object. The viewer himself is only the object or the work. The relationship between the viewer and the work is that between object and object or work and work. And the relationship between them forms a new object and a new work.

It is necessary to oppose the following kind of art connectionism: it is necessary to say that this work is connected to a certain context or art historical event, and even go so far as to try to use this connection to define and package the work. This is an attempt to cheat. It is also important to reject the “internal relations” that artists and critics repeatedly claim are contained within and between works.

Margulies’ theory of symbiosis within a series is that the organelles are invaded by bacteria and viruses. The cell encourages this outsider to open up the possibility of horizontal symbiosis. Like the cell, a work of art does not have to be physical, hard, sustainable, or without human interaction (a little theater is okay), but it has to be more than its components put together, it has to have a deeper effect than its current surface, to be right. It must thus resist our overmining or undermining of it, that is, it must not be exhausted by any form of knowledge or any relation. The Courbet and Pollockian performance or behavior in front of the panel should be seen as an object in its own right. The work, the author and the “performance” together constitute a new work.

Contemporary art is not about producing knowledge. The artist produces knowledge for himself in the process of creation, which has nothing to do with the public. What is on display is an aesthetic installation, what Bernard Stiegler calls an aesthetic third depository.

 

Dragging contemporary art into a network of actors

According to Harmanism, the work of art must be “cold”, that is to say, it must be supported by what McLuhan called a cold medium: the information contained in it must be insufficient, and the viewer must bring in some of his or her own information in order for the work to be complete. Note that it is not unfinished. Byzantine decorative painting, Islamic art and Chinese landscape painting, the ones used by Kandinsky, Klee and Pollock, were all cold media, and therefore survived as long as they did, all needing a later audience to warm up their work. The West, on the other hand, is too hot for oil paintings, too hot for novels, and too hot for movies. It is only in contemporary art that video art and video art have cooled down a lot.

Artists want to turn clichés into archetypes; it’s an artist’s dream to turn a cliché into a new medium, to invent a new genre. The pioneering artist is not to find a better larger medium, such as Greenberg’s demand for a strenuous adherence to the flatness of the canvas, but to find a new medium at random, and then, with his or her own painstaking work, to demonstrate its use to the extreme. Sculpture and painting must therefore be discursive, speculative, andAdd
of leverage, of materials and techniques that are tried and tested and erected against each other.
Harman says that there are countless mediums that are reshaping human existence, not just one, as Heidegger says. The medium is always already the content: the old medium, once used by the great artists, becomes itself the new content, and the cliché must become a new archetype in their hands.
The objects contained in painting and in any genre of art each have their own medium, and these mediums are their contents left behind by the withdrawal of the objects that were once there. A network of actors contains all possible media. This is what the exhibition is about: dragging artworks into a network of actors. The history of art is a network of actors to be determined, to be re-determined again and again by each subsequent exhibition and by the arrival of new artistic actors. In this network of actors, and even in this Anthropocene, in the process of global warming, it is absolutely impossible to expect a work of art to travel through centuries, countries or countless galleries, or sometimes from one minute to the next, without breaking a sweat. Therefore, we should talk less about the relationship between a work of art and its context, and not get too hung up on the point of which qualities determine whether that work is good or bad, but rather stick more to a new version of formalism in art. Kant’s formalism says that man is autonomous from the world and nature. But it’s Latour who reminds us well: the ozone layer, sheep in electronic shackles, and global warming are all mixtures of man and nature, not what Kant said. So why can’t there be a mixture between paintings, sculptures and their viewers? It is only right that the viewer must also be thoroughly and equally alloyed with the work of art, that is, the object.
Therefore, the theatricality formed in the exhibition, in front of the work of art, is good. And theatricality is what Latour calls a network of actors. Art exhibitions begin or continue with a network of actors. The history of Chinese contemporary art is also a network of actors that has not yet finished connecting, and every new actor that comes in will completely change the nature of this network, which is currently passively waiting for the arrival of a new actor.
And relational aesthetics is bad because it denies the objecthood of the work of art, thus depriving the work of its autonomy, with a raw separation between the work and its author. So it is only right that we should not speak too much in terms of the context of the work, but rub the viewer into the dough that is the work: in the Anthropocene, in the process of global warming, the work of art and the viewer are kneaded into a network of actors, and art becomes that social sculpture that kneads the author into the work as well, and part of the geoengineering.
Metaphors
The work of art must say something, play with metaphors, in order to lure the viewer in. The work of art puts out the bait to get the viewer to fall for it. The tool of metaphor is primarily rhetoric.
Rhetoric is: saying only 30% and trying to get the audience to realize the other 70% or more. To create a work of art is to pursue that rhetoric. To collect works of art is to collect the power of the rhetoric that the artist uses in the work.
In the metaphor of the wine-dark sea in Homer’s epic poem, the main character is not the sea, nor the wine, but the audience facing the metaphor, “I”.
It is the work or the metaphor that forces “me”, the reader, to perform. It is “I” who has to go up and become the sea. It is the audience, the “I”, who has to be there for the metaphor to work. The work is formed because the “I” performs: this is the theatricality of the artwork and its exhibition, and this theatricality is the network of actors that is formed between the new audience and the work.

 

A successful metaphor creates a new object, a new work. Homer’s epic poem, “The sea as red as wine” is a metaphor, and it is a work of art. I read it and realized what kind of object is it? The sea? No, it’s not. The sea has retreated. Wine? Neither. Wine, as phenomenology says, comes to us to provide sensual qualities, not yet an object in itself, and if it were an object, it would be a mess: wine as red as the sea. That won’t do. So there is only one way out: you see, in the face of the metaphor of the work “the wine-red sea”, there is only one other real object on the spot, that is, “I” to act it out, and the audience acts out the metaphor. It is the audience, “I”, who is forced to play the role of the crimson sea. Therefore, the work must be a mixture between the spectator and the work. The spectator must play the real object that is lost in the metaphor of the work. I am an object, the sea lost in the metaphor is another object, and the whole metaphor is an object. The spectator plus the work is an object mixed into a new union, just as the reader plus the text forms a new object.

In the presence of a work of art, as soon as we use the metaphors within it, or go on to use our own metaphors in order to understand the work, we are trapped into the work, and are instead ensnared in it, and ruthlessly used by it.

Synthetics or Alloys

The work of art is a composite or alloy, so to speak. The “I” is also synthesized within the work, and alloyed with a separate object outside the “I”, the work of art, as it is usually called.

The work of art is a composite or alloy between the “I” and, say, The Maid of Avignon. Art is the means by which the object is brought before our eyes, by which I am synthesized with the work as a third object. Art always brings the object to us in this way: it asks us to look only at the object itself, without implicating its internal components (social reality, creative techniques, contextualization) and without caring about its external effects (social, political, historical, psychological consequences). Our encounter with the work leads us to fall into the third object, which is the third object, and our comments, too, are reflections made in this third landscape. I am the object, the work is the object, and the alloy between me and the work creates a third object which is equal to all three.

B According to Harman’s Wang Jianwei

Growing old is not a biological phenomenon, but is caused by biographical techniques. Growing old is due to the fact that we are over-adapted and relish the environment that no longer exists, and so the same ark that came to our rescue will come to plot against us.

–Harman

The history of Chinese contemporary art no longer fits Wang Jianwei, because like a sturgeon with a 200 million year history, whose evolutionary history will squeeze the 5,000 year old basket of Chinese history, he has passed through the chain of time that most of us have not been able to reach. He holds in his hands forty years of Chinese contemporary art.
According to the principle of Harmanism, there are at most five countable points of events in Wang Jianwei’s artistic biography, and looking at them, they are:
1- In the early 1990s, inspired by microphysics, Wang Jianwei began his efforts to extrapolate contemporary art to science and philosophy, and to see why Surrealism did what it did in the first place. This led to his subsequent one-two punch with Harmanism: science and art and philosophy are the same thing and should not be separated. Science and art are two parallel ways of confronting our objects.
Look closely: Wang Jianwei should be the one who combines science and art in the most indistinguishable way in the contemporary Chinese art world, instead of just shouting that he is going to combine science and art together. In this way, Wang, who has been working in the aftermath of the Cambrian Explosion, has easily moved from contemporary art to anthropocene art: he has created work strictly in accordance with his own agreed-upon geological time coordinates of planetary depth, breaking through the “contemporary” that we are accustomed to embracing. To say that he is only making “contemporary” art is too limited.
In Wang Jianwei’s work ecology, there is no science popularization, only everyone’s love for science, art and philosophy. There is also no popularization of art, only the love of art. And of course there is no philosophical popularization. So it is the love of the object, not the knowledge, that is the goal of making art. It’s not whether the experts send us accurate knowledge, but rather: how do we use a certain kind of knowledge to guide ourselves into a Proustian “Recovering Lost Time” kind of research, to pursue our own love of science and love of art.
At the age of 27-29 Margulies proposed that cells are symbiotic with mitochondria, which are far older than humans. Mentors and colleagues said she was on the wrong medication. She was unconvinced and, already a single mother of three, she began researching like crazy. She was guided by this knowledge of herself. The knowledge about the symbiosis of cells and mitochondria was her personal knowledge, and to this day there are tons of biologists who don’t believe this. And she was living for this knowledge of her own. This is how true artistic or biological knowledge exists. Between the cotton ball and the fire, it is my mind or God that makes them “burn”.
According to Donna Haraway, science art worldings constitute holographic biomes, making us holographic symbionts, enfolding scientists, artists, ordinary citizens, and nonhuman beings in each other’s projects, in each other’s lives, and in each other’s lives. each other needed in multiple, intense, physical, meaningful ways. Let each be a project in these deadly times. Corals and lichens were also the earliest pioneers of symbiosis on Earth, and without them, there would be no humans. We are all coral and we are all lichen. Coral reefs are undersea forests, just as the forest remnants described by Anqing on land. Also, the coral world is painfully beautiful, and it’s not just humans who are hurting; humans can’t be the only ones who understand the beauty of coral. The Arctic is in the midst of a geophysical and geopolitical storm. We should respond to this cataclysm with programs like “Treading in Sludge”.
2- The 1993-94 “Planting Program” was a year of cooperative planting with farmers. This enabled Wang Jianwei to find another beginning for his contemporary art work. Because the fieldwork was unpredictable and both partners were taking risks, he was confronted with the constant proliferation of his own documented objects, and for the first time felt strongly that the “object” was inscrutable and refused to be welcomed.

This is already using Harman’s object-oriented ontology. Objects are: the Great Cthulhu Monster or global warming; an electron and a black hole are also objects, equal and just as unfathomable. And art is a means of dealing with the various objects of the Anthropocene. With global warming, Latour says, we can tell in our politics what we want and what we don’t want. Harman says: Realize that with global warming or the Anthropocene comes art, which comes to our rescue in a different way. If global warming had not come, we would not have this post – contemporary art on our hands. Today, art has perhaps replaced nature as the newest frontier available to us. We go to battle global warming in our artistic endeavors, like Captain Ahab did in Moby Dick.
Art is also our new way of dealing with the Anthropocene itself, as Husserl and Freud’s teacher, Brentano, said in 1894: science and art are two different ways of dealing with objects, but they do not complement each other. In the Anthropocene, we can only resist and invent in art. In the current nanotechnology revolution and the production of smart objects, art will be the means of producing the attention, meaning and noise of the information society. This has long been the case in industrial societies: the Apple cell phone consists of immaterial-1 and immaterial-2. Its design and innovation takes place on top of immaterial-2. In the process of industrial design, art comes to provide the immaterial-2, that is, to provide complexity, metamorphosis and variation (displacement). Contemporary sculptors are also increasingly becoming mediators and spokespersons for things and objects. Sculpture and painting will be increasingly discursive in the Anthropocene. “Treading in Sludge” already shows this discursive tendency.
3- It was the practice of video art that gradually enabled Wang Jianwei to open up the overall space of his personal creation. He discovered that in front of the video machine, the subject was uncontrollable, and that the reality being filmed could not only not be captured and analyzed, but he also found that filming was further producing reality. Instead of capturing reality, the machine of videotaping is thereby creating more reality to be captured, creating endless additions. The image machine produces reality, is more and more helpful, the machine cannot help itself in the presence of the object every time.
The finished film, which later became Production, was selected for the 10th Documenta in Kassel in 1997. At that time, Catherine David, the curator of Documenta, asked Wang Jianwei to have a conversation with Godard, who was also participating in Documenta, and the title was set: “The Political Poetics of the Image”. Later on, due to the different considerations of both sides on this topic, the conversation did not take place in the end. But we knew afterwards that Godard wanted to use film to mess with reality, to rehearse it forever, and that film was the format he used to organize a new reality. What Wang is thinking about is the futility of filming reality or messing with it, because the camera always continues to produce reality, and the further production of images by the image machine makes reality even more of a mess. Contemporary art and the politics of cinema seem to be inextricably intertwined.
This led Wang to realize that the machine is entangled in the object when it becomes associated with it. Image machines or painters are within them or the objects they deal with.
It is not that he believes, as Godard does, that cinema is a political tool to disrupt reality, or that the medium is not good enough, but rather that he recognizes the uncontrollable and even non-knowledgeable nature of the photographed object, which he believes cannot be transcribed but only endlessly interpreted, that creates this gap between the image machine and the object.
This is very much an objectivist observation and operation: the object does not carry knowledge because it is real, so real that it cannot be stated in a sentence. The more it is explained, the more the object needs to continue to be explained. The object is inexplicable because it is real, so real that it can never be explained in propositions and discourses: this is how the discursive positivist attitude is applied to the creation of contemporary art.

4- In the exhibition “Screen”, Wang Jianwei was attracted by the fact that the exhibition of a painting can also be an act of espionage. This led him to move away from the idea, action, and event of contemporary art to the object. There is always a screen blocked between the object and the object. Looking from this side to that side always makes that side more mysterious, but by the time you shift to that side, the same thing happens.
There is always a screen between us and the real (reality). Isn’t the screen the very tool of “breaking” that the discursive positivist uses to break the connection (system), to break knowledge? What is in front of the screen? What is behind the screen? Which is the front and which is the back? If the front stage is beautiful, is the back stage not beautiful?
He made this discursive art into art theater, leading it to the Brussels Festival, London, Ireland and the Pompidou Festival of Experimental Theater. Elements of this discursive theater have been present in his subsequent exhibitions such as “Yellow Lights”, “Dirt” and “Cambrian”.

5- “Always, but not all”
The recent exhibition “Always, Not All” at Long March Space can be considered as Wang Jianwei’s own “Big Bathing Woman”, a prequel to “Treading in Sludge”.
In “Always, Not All”, one is asked not to manipulate the phenomenon, but to take the initiative to become a response to it. The artist is not painting or sculpting, but using the human body of the viewer as an antenna to receive and respond to what Heidegger calls the “presence of the present” on the earth from afar. At this time, in this kind of discursive sculpture or discursive painting, human beings themselves become the blue geological landscape, and the human body can only express its own position by following the overall harmony. The discursive work allows the poem of the world to resound through color, to reorganize everything, to establish harmony, to unify heaven and earth.
Like “Always, Not All”, “Treading in Sludge” is also about continuing to finalize the real geology beneath our feet. Geology is: something that comes out of the bottom, undisturbed and unaltered, like molten lava from a volcano. Geology is what Kant calls the self of things, and what Harman calls the things that come out of objects.
In “Treading in Sludge”, materials, industrial and natural, are suspended, leaving color alone to construct the world from both sides. By discursive sculpture or painting, Wang is referring to Wang’s treatment of material and form and aesthetics in a planetary space.
We have been irretrievably drawn into climate change, one of the consequences of the Cambrian explosion that brought us biodiversity and complexity. Bewildered by the planetary rows, we find that the primordial soup from which everything emerged is still with us. We are still nickel-based and half carbon-based and half silicon-based. Not only have we not been modern, and probably, we have not really been human, we are still human with something missing.
“Walking on Mud” is Wang Jianwei’s re-modulation and re-tuning of the world with color, the industrial paint, on the nickel body, to make the world again with color. Discursive art is an imminent adventure for mankind at this time. We must gamble ourselves out in this all-planetary space: this is the intention of Wang Jianwei’s discursive sculptures and paintings. He is thus one of the first contemporary Chinese artists to break into the art of the Anthropocene.
For the public, discursive art means that when confronted with a work of art, the public is not just an observer, but rather, they themselves become the chips on the casino table, or rather, they actively put themselves on the casino table. Entering the scene of “Treading in Sludge”, you will have this kind of sharp feeling of being thrown on the gambling table. For you are facing a planet-wide park of 16 discursive sculptures and paintings.