Bowen, Dore

English

SJSU ScholarWorks

San Jose State UniversitySJSU ScholarWorksFaculty Publications Art and Art History & Design DepartmentsJanuary 2005San Francisco. Exhibit: Irreducible: ContemporaryShort Form Video: California College of the Arts/Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, LoganGalleriesDore BowenSan Jose State University, dore.bowen@sjsu.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/artdesign_pubPart of the Art and Design Commons, and the Contemporary Art CommonsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Art and Art History & Design Departments at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been acceptedfor inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contactscholarworks@sjsu.edu.Recommended CitationDore Bowen. "San Francisco. Exhibit: Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video: California College of the Arts/Wattis Institute ofContemporary Art, Logan Galleries" Art Papers (2005): 56-57.Outing, 2000, the reflective inte-rior of an escalator catches the lastseconds of a figure's quick exit.Especially intriguing is Haley'sNegotiation, 2001, where a longshot reveals two figures becomingaware of one another as they nearan intersection at the base of theAngel's Flight funicular railway.Such images imply narratives,which are perhaps non-existent. Itis precisely this slippage betweenreality and fiction that sustains themyths and stories that allow thiscity to thrive.Leaving the subject entirelyout of the narrative furtherenhances a sense of ambivalenceand intrigue. In Mungo Thomson'svideo animation. The AmericanDesert (for Chuck Jones), 2002,the roadrunner and coyote charac-ters are poignantly absent—allthat is left is the stark and endlessdesert backdrop of their chase.Without subjects, however, thelandscape loses its meaning. Astrange urge takes over: needingto complete the narrative, theviewer slips into the role of themissing subject. This compulsionto fill in the blanks in order to bereleased from limbo is a threadthat runs through the exhibition.Veracity and fantasy collapsein David H. Bailey's powerfulinstallation. Pull Me from theWreckage, 2003- The piece sym-bolically traverses both land andhistory with long, narrow, andhorizontally-intersecting strips ofwood harnessed to vertical polesby rubber bands. The poles carrytiny wood billboards that start atone end of the platform by mark-ing certain world historical land-marks—World War I, Darwin, PrankLloyd Wright—to then focus onspecific struggles between man,society, and nature, as evidencedin Los Angeles—earthquakes,r io ts , emergency hous ing ,drought. From an aerial perspec-tive, the interrelatedness makesperfect sense. Navigating throughthe mess in his car, however, thelone Angeleno is shielded by aconceptual blind spot from anyunderstanding of cause and effect.As LA's sprawling topographyrelegates the Angeleno to a para-dox of isolated mobility, an exis-tential limbo emerges. It is both aphysical and a psychological noplace. Cleverly, The Lateral Slipattempts to shift awareness bypulling our perspective out of thegridlock and turning the details ofour surroundings into markers.—Christina KlineSAN FRANCISCOC u r a t e d b y R a l p h R u g o f f ,irreducible: Coritemporary ShortForm Video (California College ofthe Arts/Watt is Institute ofCon tempora ry A r t , LoganGalleries, January 19—March 19,2005) features works that focus ongesture rather than narrative ormetaphor. If they incorporate arange of reproductive media—including digital, video, film—theselected works forego the visualpyrotechnics found in the work of,for instance, Jeremy Blake and,instead, reference performance-inspired video from the 1960s and1970s by such notables as MarthaRosier, Bruce Nauman and VitoAcconci. A situation is recordedwithout explicit narrative intent;what occurs is a depiction of anunfolding event, situation, or per-formance.The pioneers of perfor-mance-video were concerned withthe artist's physical engagementwith the medium. Think of RemoteControl, 1971, an erotic encounterbetvi/een Acconci, in one box, andartist Kathy Dillon in a second box.The two bodies are linked by thevideo image as Acconci instructsDillon to tie herself up with rope,gesturing as though they were co-present, cajoling her to performhis commands. The image hingesthe artists' bodies, extendingAcconci's gesture and its signifyingvalence. The two artists are"hooked up" and the videoextends Acconci's sado-masochis-tic desire to capture, command,and bind Dillon.Working in a similar vein,Danish artist Mads Lynnerup'sUntying a Shoe With an Erection,2002, mediates a link between theartist's foot, hand, and penis.While the fixed-viewpoint imagedepicts only the artist's ankles,high-tops, and a string tied to oneshoelace, the wall text divulgesthe connection between the stringand the artist's penis, stating that amere two minutes is all it takes forhis masturbation to untie his lace.After reading this text, the viewer'simagination rises upward; yetunlike Remote Control, she is notafforded a glimpse of the sexualactivity.The term performance-videoonly inadequately describes cer-tain works in this exhibition. Myneologism "image-event" betterdescribes engagements with theimage as event, rather as an exten-sion of an event. For example.Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Returning a Sound, 2004, video projection, wideo transferredto OVD, 5 minutes 42 seconds (courtesy of the artists and Galerie Chants! Crousel, Paris)Chinese artist Song Dong'sWalking Through the Mirror, 2002,explores the conundrum producedwhen the separation betweenimage and event is threatened.This four-minute DVD projectionfeatures a bifurcated image: theleft side of the vertical framedepicts a square turquoise panelwhile, on the right, a group ofeager spectators—includingappropr ia te ly -c lad mi l i tarycadets—are gathered, framingmodern city architecture in thebackground. The artist approacheswith a sledgehammer and, in slowmotion, begins to strike the leftpanel. As he does the audiencebegins to quiver, the city to quake,eventually cracking and exposingthe image on the right to anotherview. In this split image, the vieweris witnessing the performancefrom two angles—a mirror's backand front. After collapsing the mir-ror from the back, and thus reveal-ing a second, reversed, andultimately shattered scenario on itsreflecting-side, the artist walksthrough the mirror's frame, havingdeconstructed (metaphorically ofcourse, for there is yet anothercamera recording the event) theimage-proscenium. If Song ham-mers away at illusionism he, likehis performance-video predeces-sors, nonetheless emerges a hero,walking through the shatteredframe and over the debris thatscatters his work's battlefield.South Korean artist Kimsoojastages A Home/ess Woman(Cairo), 2001, in a less didactic,though no less ingenious, manner.The camera records behind theartist's back, as she lies in a publicsquare, facing a stream ofbystanders who gather to watchher sprawled figure on the pave-ment. The spectators—alternatelylaughing, frowning with concern,or heckling with cohorts—create acommunity of sorts around theartist who, acting as a palimpsest,reveals the shifting and layeredattitudes toward the female figure,its public presence, and homelessin Cairo. In its subtle staging, thiswork suggests a curious logic—without the camera there wouldbe no event; without the eventthere would be no community,without the community therewould be no body under scrutiny.Interesting alternatives to theartist's primacy in the image-event—as hero or object—aresuggested in this exhibition aswell. In Returning a Sound, 2004,by Puerto Rican partners JenniferAllora and Guillermo Calzadilla, ayoung man rides a motorbikesporting a horn for a mufflerthrough Vieques~a small islandoff Puerto Rico. Unlike other worksin the exhibit, Reiurning a Soundhas a narrative thrust; it charts theyoung man's celebratory journeythrough a recently decommis-sioned U.S. Navy bomb-testingarea of the island. The droll ironyof this reverse-military salutebreaks the somber narrative withits spontaneity.Anri Sala's Mixed Behavior,2004, suggests an alternative tothe heroics of Walking Throughthe Mirror, In this nine minutevideo the artist-as-DJ mixes groovysounds under a rain-soaked tarp toaccompany the New Year's Evefireworks in Tirana, Albania. In56 ARTPAPERS.ORGWEST COASTMixed Behavior, the Albanian artiststeps back from his creative role towatch this scene with the viewer. Adocumentary sensibility is sug-gested: without fireworks, withouta cause for celebration, without thecity in the distance, there would beno light and, by extension, noimage. Before the artist enters thescene and after he leaves, theevent surely continues. Such worksprovide a counterpoint to both theperformance-videos created fourdecades ago. and the hopped-updigital wizardry often featured ingallenes today. Irreducible demon-strates that a new crop of artists iswilling to engage the image-eventon fresh terrain.—Dore BowenSTANFORD"Who is more beautiful—Chineseor foreigners?" "Have you evermade love to a western lady/manand is there any difference?" Theanswers to such questions arehumorously explored in Beijing-based Qiu Zhijie's interactive CD-ROM The West, 2000, one of themore lighthearted works includedin On the Edge: ContemporaryChinese Artists Encounter theWest [Cantor Arts Center, StanfordUniversity; January 26—May 1,2005). A group show featuringtwelve artists—five living outsideChina and seven living within—Onthe Edge is an important additionto the recent spate of China*focused contemporary art exhibi-tions to tour the Ü.S, from which itdiffers significantly in its thematicapproach.Independent scholar BrittaErickson has, in fact, organized Onthe Edge to show the bold andexperimental ways in whichChinese artists are dealing withtheir position in both the art worldand the geopolitical arena, givingweight to the view that art andpolitics are inseparable. The worksare organized and displayed inthree thematic sections: "TheWest through a Political Lens,""Cultural Méiange." and "Joiningthe Game: The Chinese ArtistMeets the World". Owing perhapsto its university setting, the showbears a considerably didactic tone.With her extensive knowl-edge and expertise in the field ofChinese con temporary art,Erickson selected an array ofstrong pieces by superior artists.Among these are Beijing-basedOiu Zhijie's mazelike CD-ROM,The West, which combines stockimages from newspapers and pop-ular media with video interviewclips and voiceover to form a half-factual, half-absurd montage thatdemonstrates that "the west"exists only within the realm of theimaginary. A solitary military air-craft glides over a body of water inShanghai-based artist ZhouTiehai's mesmerizing triptych,Civi7/zat(on, 2004. Airbrushed toperfection, its deceptively simplecomposition belies Zhou's inter-weaving of Song-Yuan (12th—^ 4thcentury) painting styles, contem-porary political subject matter (thepiane is modeled after the U.S.Navy EP-3 spy plane that was cap-tured in southern China in 2001),and a commercial technique.Other highlights include NewYork-based Zhang Huan's brilliantperformance My New York (orga-nized by the Whitney Museum in2002). inspired by his perceptionthat New Yorkers demonstratedextraordinary strength and deter-mination in the aftermath of the9/11 attacks, Zhang donned abodysuit of raw meat—transform-ing himself into an exaggeratedfleshy superhero—and walkedalong the street, releasing dovesoutside the Whitney Museum. Aseries of paintings and cutouts byBeijing/Hong Kong-based artistYan Lei, May I see your work?.1997, and The Curators. 2000,deftly links historical images withthe international art world's currentpower structures in his characteris-tically blurred paint-by-numbersstyle. Paradoxically, both Yan andZhou have made early careers outof pranksterism and biting criticismof the art world, propelling themthrough the biennial circuit andinto the homes of well-known for-eign collectors.Some selections, however,seem out of place given the over-all theme. Works like Beijing artistYin Xiuzhen's Portable City-Shenzhen, 2003, more aptly illus-trate the effects of globalization onideas of home, personal experi-ence and travel than specific west-ern art world concerns. Likewise,Xu Bing 's S q u a r e W o r dCalligraphy Classroom, 1994-1996, and Case Study ofTransference, 1994, are not onlyexceedingly familiar to interna-tional art audiences, but also seemto reiterate simplified assumptionsof "east" and "west," Indeed,naming a section ofthe exhibition"Cultural Mélange" is overlyreductive, implying a simple mix-Zhang Huan, My New York: It4. 2002. chromogenic print, 150 K 100 cm (reproduced by permissionof the artist; photo courtesy of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford Univereity}ing of two fixed elements to createa third. A comparison might bemade, here, between On the Edgeand The Amencan Effect (WhitneyMuseum of Art, 2003). Despitelaudable intentions to forge newground, both exhibitions occasion-ally rely on platitudes about thewest that undermine the sophisti-cation of the work. It is perhaps nocoincidence that the only twoChinese artists selected for theWhitney show—Zhou Tiehai andXing Danwen—are also featuredin the Stanford show, with XingDanwen exhibiting the same bodyof work.By now, it should be nosecret that the field of contempo-rary Chinese art has grown expo-nentially in recent years, resultingin increased attention from cura-tors, museums, galleries, and col-lectors operating within the globalart world. Similarly, it is no surprisethat the repercussions of recentpolitical incidents between theU.S, and China have yielded inno-vative works by Chinese artists.What is less clear, however, is thereasoning behind the curator'schoice of the umbrella term "thewest." One wonders about theideological position that situatescontemporary Chinese art practicein opposition to "the west." Couidthis approach inadvertently rein-force the very stereotypes and pre-sumptions that many of theseartists are seeking to dismantle?Are there not artists in China mak-ing work about events in China?Whether the exhibition is rig-orously developed around atheme or not. On the Edge:Contemporary Chinese ArtistsEncounter the West is an unques-tionably valuable educational toolfor newcomers interested in thefield of contemporary art. Theshow's several newly commis-sioned works by visiting artists andextensive catalog are to beadmired for their substantiveimport and will guarantee theimportance of this exhibition foryears to come,—Pauline J, YaoMAY/JUNE 2005 57Copyright of Art Papers Magazine is the property of Art Papers and its content may not be copied or emailed tomultiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, usersmay print, download, or email articles for individual use.

San Francisco. Exhibit: Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video: California College of the Arts/Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, Logan Galleries

San Jose State University

San Jose State University
SJSU ScholarWorks
Faculty Publications Art and Art History & Design Departments
January 2005
San Francisco. Exhibit: Irreducible: Contemporary
Short Form Video: California College of the Arts/
Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, Logan
Galleries
Dore Bowen
San Jose State University, dore.bowen@sjsu.edu
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/artdesign_pub
Part of the Art and Design Commons, and the Contemporary Art Commons
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Art and Art History & Design Departments at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been accepted
for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact
scholarworks@sjsu.edu.
Recommended Citation
Dore Bowen. "San Francisco. Exhibit: Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video: California College of the Arts/Wattis Institute of
Contemporary Art, Logan Galleries" Art Papers (2005): 56-57.
Outing, 2000, the reflective inte-
rior of an escalator catches the last
seconds of a figure's quick exit.
Especially intriguing is Haley's
Negotiation, 2001, where a long
shot reveals two figures becoming
aware of one another as they near
an intersection at the base of the
Angel's Flight funicular railway.
Such images imply narratives,
which are perhaps non-existent. It
is precisely this slippage between
reality and fiction that sustains the
myths and stories that allow this
city to thrive.
Leaving the subject entirely
out of the narrative further
enhances a sense of ambivalence
and intrigue. In Mungo Thomson's
video animation. The American
Desert (for Chuck Jones), 2002,
the roadrunner and coyote charac-
ters are poignantly absent—all
that is left is the stark and endless
desert backdrop of their chase.
Without subjects, however, the
landscape loses its meaning. A
strange urge takes over: needing
to complete the narrative, the
viewer slips into the role of the
missing subject. This compulsion
to fill in the blanks in order to be
released from limbo is a thread
that runs through the exhibition.
Veracity and fantasy collapse
in David H. Bailey's powerful
installation. Pull Me from the
Wreckage, 2003- The piece sym-
bolically traverses both land and
history with long, narrow, and
horizontally-intersecting strips of
wood harnessed to vertical poles
by rubber bands. The poles carry
tiny wood billboards that start at
one end of the platform by mark-
ing certain world historical land-
marks—World War I, Darwin, Prank
Lloyd Wright—to then focus on
specific struggles between man,
society, and nature, as evidenced
in Los Angeles—earthquakes,
r io ts , emergency hous ing ,
drought. From an aerial perspec-
tive, the interrelatedness makes
perfect sense. Navigating through
the mess in his car, however, the
lone Angeleno is shielded by a
conceptual blind spot from any
understanding of cause and effect.
As LA's sprawling topography
relegates the Angeleno to a para-
dox of isolated mobility, an exis-
tential limbo emerges. It is both a
physical and a psychological no
place. Cleverly, The Lateral Slip
attempts to shift awareness by
pulling our perspective out of the
gridlock and turning the details of
our surroundings into markers.
—Christina Kline
SAN FRANCISCO
C u r a t e d b y R a l p h R u g o f f ,
irreducible: Coritemporary Short
Form Video (California College of
the Arts/Watt is Institute of
Con tempora ry A r t , Logan
Galleries, January 19—March 19,
2005) features works that focus on
gesture rather than narrative or
metaphor. If they incorporate a
range of reproductive media—
including digital, video, film—the
selected works forego the visual
pyrotechnics found in the work of,
for instance, Jeremy Blake and,
instead, reference performance-
inspired video from the 1960s and
1970s by such notables as Martha
Rosier, Bruce Nauman and Vito
Acconci. A situation is recorded
without explicit narrative intent;
what occurs is a depiction of an
unfolding event, situation, or per-
formance.
The pioneers of perfor-
mance-video were concerned with
the artist's physical engagement
with the medium. Think of Remote
Control, 1971, an erotic encounter
betvi/een Acconci, in one box, and
artist Kathy Dillon in a second box.
The two bodies are linked by the
video image as Acconci instructs
Dillon to tie herself up with rope,
gesturing as though they were co-
present, cajoling her to perform
his commands. The image hinges
the artists' bodies, extending
Acconci's gesture and its signifying
valence. The two artists are
"hooked up" and the video
extends Acconci's sado-masochis-
tic desire to capture, command,
and bind Dillon.
Working in a similar vein,
Danish artist Mads Lynnerup's
Untying a Shoe With an Erection,
2002, mediates a link between the
artist's foot, hand, and penis.
While the fixed-viewpoint image
depicts only the artist's ankles,
high-tops, and a string tied to one
shoelace, the wall text divulges
the connection between the string
and the artist's penis, stating that a
mere two minutes is all it takes for
his masturbation to untie his lace.
After reading this text, the viewer's
imagination rises upward; yet
unlike Remote Control, she is not
afforded a glimpse of the sexual
activity.
The term performance-video
only inadequately describes cer-
tain works in this exhibition. My
neologism "image-event" better
describes engagements with the
image as event, rather as an exten-
sion of an event. For example.
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Returning a Sound, 2004, video projection, wideo transferred
to OVD, 5 minutes 42 seconds (courtesy of the artists and Galerie Chants! Crousel, Paris)
Chinese artist Song Dong's
Walking Through the Mirror, 2002,
explores the conundrum produced
when the separation between
image and event is threatened.
This four-minute DVD projection
features a bifurcated image: the
left side of the vertical frame
depicts a square turquoise panel
while, on the right, a group of
eager spectators—including
appropr ia te ly -c lad mi l i tary
cadets—are gathered, framing
modern city architecture in the
background. The artist approaches
with a sledgehammer and, in slow
motion, begins to strike the left
panel. As he does the audience
begins to quiver, the city to quake,
eventually cracking and exposing
the image on the right to another
view. In this split image, the viewer
is witnessing the performance
from two angles—a mirror's back
and front. After collapsing the mir-
ror from the back, and thus reveal-
ing a second, reversed, and
ultimately shattered scenario on its
reflecting-side, the artist walks
through the mirror's frame, having
deconstructed (metaphorically of
course, for there is yet another
camera recording the event) the
image-proscenium. If Song ham-
mers away at illusionism he, like
his performance-video predeces-
sors, nonetheless emerges a hero,
walking through the shattered
frame and over the debris that
scatters his work's battlefield.
South Korean artist Kimsooja
stages A Home/ess Woman
(Cairo), 2001, in a less didactic,
though no less ingenious, manner.
The camera records behind the
artist's back, as she lies in a public
square, facing a stream of
bystanders who gather to watch
her sprawled figure on the pave-
ment. The spectators—alternately
laughing, frowning with concern,
or heckling with cohorts—create a
community of sorts around the
artist who, acting as a palimpsest,
reveals the shifting and layered
attitudes toward the female figure,
its public presence, and homeless
in Cairo. In its subtle staging, this
work suggests a curious logic—
without the camera there would
be no event; without the event
there would be no community,
without the community there
would be no body under scrutiny.
Interesting alternatives to the
artist's primacy in the image-
event—as hero or object—are
suggested in this exhibition as
well. In Returning a Sound, 2004,
by Puerto Rican partners Jennifer
Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, a
young man rides a motorbike
sporting a horn for a muffler
through Vieques~a small island
off Puerto Rico. Unlike other works
in the exhibit, Reiurning a Sound
has a narrative thrust; it charts the
young man's celebratory journey
through a recently decommis-
sioned U.S. Navy bomb-testing
area of the island. The droll irony
of this reverse-military salute
breaks the somber narrative with
its spontaneity.
Anri Sala's Mixed Behavior,
2004, suggests an alternative to
the heroics of Walking Through
the Mirror, In this nine minute
video the artist-as-DJ mixes groovy
sounds under a rain-soaked tarp to
accompany the New Year's Eve
fireworks in Tirana, Albania. In
56 ARTPAPERS.ORG
WEST COAST
Mixed Behavior, the Albanian artist
steps back from his creative role to
watch this scene with the viewer. A
documentary sensibility is sug-
gested: without fireworks, without
a cause for celebration, without the
city in the distance, there would be
no light and, by extension, no
image. Before the artist enters the
scene and after he leaves, the
event surely continues. Such works
provide a counterpoint to both the
performance-videos created four
decades ago. and the hopped-up
digital wizardry often featured in
gallenes today. Irreducible demon-
strates that a new crop of artists is
willing to engage the image-event
on fresh terrain.
—Dore Bowen
STANFORD
"Who is more beautiful—Chinese
or foreigners?" "Have you ever
made love to a western lady/man
and is there any difference?" The
answers to such questions are
humorously explored in Beijing-
based Qiu Zhijie's interactive CD-
ROM The West, 2000, one of the
more lighthearted works included
in On the Edge: Contemporary
Chinese Artists Encounter the
West [Cantor Arts Center, Stanford
University; January 26—May 1,
2005). A group show featuring
twelve artists—five living outside
China and seven living within—On
the Edge is an important addition
to the recent spate of China*
focused contemporary art exhibi-
tions to tour the Ü.S, from which it
differs significantly in its thematic
approach.
Independent scholar Britta
Erickson has, in fact, organized On
the Edge to show the bold and
experimental ways in which
Chinese artists are dealing with
their position in both the art world
and the geopolitical arena, giving
weight to the view that art and
politics are inseparable. The works
are organized and displayed in
three thematic sections: "The
West through a Political Lens,"
"Cultural Méiange." and "Joining
the Game: The Chinese Artist
Meets the World". Owing perhaps
to its university setting, the show
bears a considerably didactic tone.
With her extensive knowl-
edge and expertise in the field of
Chinese con temporary art,
Erickson selected an array of
strong pieces by superior artists.
Among these are Beijing-based
Oiu Zhijie's mazelike CD-ROM,
The West, which combines stock
images from newspapers and pop-
ular media with video interview
clips and voiceover to form a half-
factual, half-absurd montage that
demonstrates that "the west"
exists only within the realm of the
imaginary. A solitary military air-
craft glides over a body of water in
Shanghai-based artist Zhou
Tiehai's mesmerizing triptych,
Civi7/zat(on, 2004. Airbrushed to
perfection, its deceptively simple
composition belies Zhou's inter-
weaving of Song-Yuan (12th—^ 4th
century) painting styles, contem-
porary political subject matter (the
piane is modeled after the U.S.
Navy EP-3 spy plane that was cap-
tured in southern China in 2001),
and a commercial technique.
Other highlights include New
York-based Zhang Huan's brilliant
performance My New York (orga-
nized by the Whitney Museum in
2002). inspired by his perception
that New Yorkers demonstrated
extraordinary strength and deter-
mination in the aftermath of the
9/11 attacks, Zhang donned a
bodysuit of raw meat—transform-
ing himself into an exaggerated
fleshy superhero—and walked
along the street, releasing doves
outside the Whitney Museum. A
series of paintings and cutouts by
Beijing/Hong Kong-based artist
Yan Lei, May I see your work?.
1997, and The Curators. 2000,
deftly links historical images with
the international art world's current
power structures in his characteris-
tically blurred paint-by-numbers
style. Paradoxically, both Yan and
Zhou have made early careers out
of pranksterism and biting criticism
of the art world, propelling them
through the biennial circuit and
into the homes of well-known for-
eign collectors.
Some selections, however,
seem out of place given the over-
all theme. Works like Beijing artist
Yin Xiuzhen's Portable City-
Shenzhen, 2003, more aptly illus-
trate the effects of globalization on
ideas of home, personal experi-
ence and travel than specific west-
ern art world concerns. Likewise,
Xu Bing 's S q u a r e W o r d
Calligraphy Classroom, 1994-
1996, and Case Study of
Transference, 1994, are not only
exceedingly familiar to interna-
tional art audiences, but also seem
to reiterate simplified assumptions
of "east" and "west," Indeed,
naming a section ofthe exhibition
"Cultural Mélange" is overly
reductive, implying a simple mix-
Zhang Huan, My New York: It4. 2002. chromogenic print, 150 K 100 cm (reproduced by permission
of the artist; photo courtesy of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford Univereity}
ing of two fixed elements to create
a third. A comparison might be
made, here, between On the Edge
and The Amencan Effect (Whitney
Museum of Art, 2003). Despite
laudable intentions to forge new
ground, both exhibitions occasion-
ally rely on platitudes about the
west that undermine the sophisti-
cation of the work. It is perhaps no
coincidence that the only two
Chinese artists selected for the
Whitney show—Zhou Tiehai and
Xing Danwen—are also featured
in the Stanford show, with Xing
Danwen exhibiting the same body
of work.
By now, it should be no
secret that the field of contempo-
rary Chinese art has grown expo-
nentially in recent years, resulting
in increased attention from cura-
tors, museums, galleries, and col-
lectors operating within the global
art world. Similarly, it is no surprise
that the repercussions of recent
political incidents between the
U.S, and China have yielded inno-
vative works by Chinese artists.
What is less clear, however, is the
reasoning behind the curator's
choice of the umbrella term "the
west." One wonders about the
ideological position that situates
contemporary Chinese art practice
in opposition to "the west." Couid
this approach inadvertently rein-
force the very stereotypes and pre-
sumptions that many of these
artists are seeking to dismantle?
Are there not artists in China mak-
ing work about events in China?
Whether the exhibition is rig-
orously developed around a
theme or not. On the Edge:
Contemporary Chinese Artists
Encounter the West is an unques-
tionably valuable educational tool
for newcomers interested in the
field of contemporary art. The
show's several newly commis-
sioned works by visiting artists and
extensive catalog are to be
admired for their substantive
import and will guarantee the
importance of this exhibition for
years to come,
—Pauline J, Yao
MAY/JUNE 2005 57
Copyright of Art Papers Magazine is the property of Art Papers and its content may not be copied or emailed to
multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users
may print, download, or email articles for individual use.


https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1070&amp;context=artdesign_pub

San Francisco. Exhibit: Irreducible: Contemporary Short Form Video: California College of the Arts/Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, Logan Galleries

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