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Critical Reflection
When I started Unit 3, The rockeries in the Chinese courtyards I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art inspired the stylistic elements of my work, which are the sculptures in front of Chinese buildings that contain profound intellectual pursuits. The stones mean to mimic nature in miniature, and this beauty is the subtle relationship between them and the things surrounding them.
Mi Fu, a painter in the Song Dynasty, set the aesthetic rules of "wrinkle, leakage, thinness and penetration" for the rockery. Among them, "wrinkle" is clumsiness; clumsiness is to remove the clever things, remove the purposeful things. Gardening is the creation of respect for the laws of nature, and it is a use of nature and the process of recreating nature. These histories make me think back to why rockery has become one of the wonders of traditional Chinese art. The reason is that in the view of the ancients, its beauty is the soul of the natural world and the soul of man into the results of the infiltration of the infection, is in the form of all things of the charm of the situation, the most artistic vitality, and infectious force.
My work attempts to create an abstract microcosm of our lives, in which there must be a blend of artificial controllable parts and unpredictable natural occurrences, and the fusion of the two makes our lives complete. At the same time, traditional Chinese aesthetics focuses on symbols and metaphors. The ancients had an extraordinary passion for bizarre shapes and objects. They believed in "using the tangible to represent the intangible, the finite to represent the infinite, and the fleeting to capture eternity." I have shaped my works in such a way that they interlace with holes, and the space between the real and the imaginary is intertwined, which provides infinite possibilities for the viewers' imagination when they see the works; some say it looks like a certain kind of words, some say it looks like the rise and fall of the sound wave, and some say it looks like a piece of landscape. These interpretations are the valuable feedback that I have received, and they allow me to see the different worlds and lives in the eyes of the viewers.
Tadeas Podracky inspires me in my creative thinking as an artist and designer whom I like very much. Podracky believes that we are a reflection of our environment. “We live in a world full of objects that we interact with every day, making our lives easier or harder. Some objects have become such a part of our subconscious and culture. Because of objects, we change our habits; we can say that things shape us as much as we shape them.” (Tadeas Podracky)
Because of my former experience as a designer as well, I cannot help but understand and identify with Podracky's perspective on things in life. We all come into contact with many things daily, and it is essential to consider them. Some traditional ways of approaching things and attitudes will change at some point. That is why it is always important to question established habits; when life is too fixed, we can lose sight of some of the details of perception and feedback and quickly stagnate.
When we stand outside ourselves and our lives and revisit them with a third perspective, seeing what has been or is happening, the feeling becomes different, perhaps more profound and clearer or more objective and sensible. My work can be interpreted as imagining such a scenario. Podracky's work Lost in Between explores the notion of displacement, using three fragments from objects in the Schloss Hollenegg and creating a new environment for them. Podracky feels overwhelmed as he explores these rooms that seem trapped in time, and for a moment, he feels like someone is still living there. It is a different experience of historical environments. However, he still cannot get emotionally close to many objects because they are so old that it is hard for people nowadays to understand them— in the same way, we cannot understand the behavior of prehistoric animals when we see fossils. That is why Podracky when he saw these dislodged fragments, decided to make an object that would revisit them by bringing them back to this environment with a new identity.
This method is also how I think about my work, as many things that happen suddenly in our lives take us by surprise and make us unable to understand the situation. When faced with this, we try to take on a new identity to consider the overall environment and the interactions between unpredictable events and the people involved, which can generate new feedback and perceptions.
Tadeas Podracky, Lost in Between, 2022
Tadeas Podracky, The Metamorphosis*, 2020
As I progressed, I realized that using materials according to their properties was vital, and it was also interesting to think about what kind of materials evoked emotion. Barbara Chase-Riboud's innovations in sculptural technique and materiality characterize the interplay between the folding of cast bronze or aluminum and the knotted, braided, looped, and woven coils of wool and silk. She combines materials of different qualities, such as hard and soft, light and heavy, tactile and rigid, but bronze remains the main thread in her work. “Bronze is timeless,” she said. “It’s imbued with history, and it’s the material of artisans of the Kingdom of Benin and the Baroque.”
Timeless is also why I chose bronze as the primary material for the work. I tried to create a work like a microcosm of the monument's continuous existence and therefore valued the bronze material as a constant and objective point of view in the change of time. The work combines bronze and wax, and the two materials have a process progression. Bronze is made from wax through the lost wax casting method, and this relationship between the generation and evolution of the materials is what I want to put into the work to make the viewer think about it.
Last year, the public sculptures exhibited in Serpentine "Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds" created a landscape highlighting the often overlooked individuals who continue to shape our impressions of the past and present. Whether through sculpture, painting, poetry, or fiction, Chase-Riboud invites us to question our assumptions and biases about historical narratives and other cultures and how we remember and commemorate individuals and events from the past. It is challenging for individuals to objectively examine these matters from a different perspective due to the limitations of their knowledge.
Therefore, it is essential to maintain a sense of questioning, even when considering our personal experiences. When we look back on them, our thoughts and physical feedback at the moment will be very different from when the event occurred. Still, the impact will spread over time, no longer focusing on a single point but becoming something flat or even three-dimensional, a habit, a subconscious reaction that subconsciously changes us in ourselves, and this is the focus of my attention and inquiry.
Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds, installation views, Serpentine North © Barbara Chase-Riboud 2022. Photo: © Jo Underhill, courtesy Serpentine.
Chase-Riboud’s “Africa Rising” (1998) at the Ted Weiss Federal Office Building in New York.
Carol M. Highsmith, commissioned through the Art in Architecture Program Fine Arts Collection, U.S. General Services Administration.
In the late 1930s, Alberto Giacometti was interested in representing the human figure in convincingly realistic spatial illusions. He wanted to depict the figure in such a way as to capture a noticeable sense of spatial distance so that we, as viewers, might analyse the artist's sense of distance from the model or inspire an encounter with the artwork. To create a sense of distance, Giacometti uses the mathematical method of " subtraction ".
This creative language inspires me. When I want the viewer to see the work from a third point of view, I have to think about creating work from a third point of view, out of the box and out of the habitual way of looking at things. I have abstracted and linked many events and then subtracted them to a whole, trying to let the audience guess and understand how we, as human beings, are in a passive position in the vein of life formed by the entanglement of time and events.
Moreover, although the sculpture was Alberto Giacometti's most outstanding achievement in life, in his view, drawings were not antithetical; Giacometti's drawings, sculptures, and sketches all stemmed from his unique view of the human figure and his observation of the weakness and vulnerability of the human being in the twentieth century. He combines the two so that in Giacometti's sculptures, one can feel the brushstrokes of drawing, and in his drawings, Giacometti emphasises the "modelling of the brushstrokes", which results in his works being full of ambiguities and metaphysical moods. Alberto Giacometti has impressed many writers who are interested in phenomenology and existentialism. Both philosophies contain ideas about self-consciousness and how we relate to other people. Alberto Giacometti's art is thought to powerfully capture the tone of melancholy, alienation and loneliness that these ideas suggest.
In Giacometti's City Square, the figures - "moving outlines", as Jean-Paul Sartre called them - step into space and seemingly rise out of nowhere. The work is a stunning exercise in creating the impression of a spacious landscape, revealing humanity's "common soul" of humanity as a never-ending back and forth between the distant past and the future. Fairfield Porter noted in a 1960 review for The Nation, "Giacometti was concerned with man's relationship to landscape and ground. He further argued that man, along with everything else, has a dual relationship with the environment, a link between the earth and the infinite."
City Square could be interpreted along its lines, depicting as it does humanity as a mere shadow of itself, existing halfway between being and nothingness. My work also continually emphasises that human beings are merely projections of their state, a vehicle for generating feedback to the outside world. The interplay between human beings and their external environment must be continually focused on and explored.
Alberto Giacometti, City Square, 1948
Alberto Giacometti, The Walking Man II (L’Homme Qui Marche II), 1960
In the work Rhythm 0, Marina Abramović placed 72 objects on the table, some fatal: a rose, a knife, a whip, and even a loaded pistol, among others. She took all the blame for her body and its state and, for six hours, put herself in the hands of the audience. The first movements of those around her were cautious and subtle. After a few hours, the crowd "became bolder"; they felt impunity and total savagery, and curiosity was replaced by aggression. They cut off Abramović's clothes, scratched and stabbed the naked body with thorns, and one of the visitors thrust a loaded pistol into her hand and pointed it at her neck.
There are many interpretations of Rhythm 0. Some of them are about the uncontrolled exposure of human cruelty in certain situations, and some of them land on feminism, while in this work, I am concerned with Abramović's most real physiological feedbacks when she faces these situations where she cannot foresee what is going to happen in the next second. While it is true that Abramovic allowed the audience to see her as an object during the performance, she began to fear when the performance descended into chaos and crisis. She started to cry and weep, and by the end of the performance, Abramović was topless, bleeding, and had tears streaming down her face.
As she walked towards the crowd, each step forward caused the audience to move backwards, even fleeing the gallery, and not a single person in the audience could dare to face their party's behavior. This work left a mark on the artist: when Abramović returned to her hotel after the performance, she could not stop thinking about the crazy things that had happened the whole night, and the wounds created by the audience seemed to ache suddenly, and she fell into extreme loneliness and fear. Looking in the mirror, she realized some of her hair had turned white. She said that she still has the scars of "Rhythm 0" and that for a long time, it was difficult to get rid of the feeling of fear.
It is as if human beings are faced with countless unpredictable events at a centralized point in time and are physically and mentally passive, at which point fear and crying are instinctive outlets for human beings. However, life may never treat us as living human beings, and we are just carbon-based organisms in the universe. Cruelty and uncontrollability are the true faces of life, just like these abusers, and we, as the receivers, can be said to be insignificant, defenseless, and with no way to escape. We are forced to face these and take on the wounds that life has brought to us and the part that it has molded in us.
“All human beings are always afraid of very simple things. We are afraid of suffering; we are afraid of pain; we are afraid of mortality. So I’m doing, I’m staging these kinds of fears in front of the audience. I’m using your energy, and with this energy, I can push my body as far as I can. And then I liberate myself from these fears.” (Marina Abramović)
Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 0, 1974
In a 1964 lecture, Marcel Duchamp recalled that "the experiment of the Three Standard stoppages was carried out in 1913," when he placed three canvases and then dropped three strings, each one meter long, from a height of one meter. The fall of the strings determined their position, and Duchamp secured them in place with varnish before cutting along the curve of each string. "The aim is to imprison and preserve forms obtained through chance, through my chance." He subverted the accepted standard and created a new unit of measurement from its accidental fall, and the strings fell differently each time.
This experiment of Duchamp's is a metaphor for chance events. From a macroscopic perspective, we can view all events as a meter-long string, where the changes that occur are simply a different gesture of each event descending. Each board cut with curved edges is like an abstract diary page, recording the countless uncertainties of the moment the string falls.
In the Research Festival work, I am still using drawing as a way to record unexpected events. Recording the moment things happen is hard, but Duchamp's work's methodology has inspired me.
Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages (Third Version), 1963 (replica of 1913-14 original)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb initially explored Black Swan events in the context of financial markets at the beginning of the 21st century and then broadened the scope to include historical, scientific, and other events. Taleb argues that while humans are adept at translating environmental stimuli into meaningful information, our view of the world tends to be narrow. Two tendencies make humans particularly vulnerable to black swan events: the first is the creation of narratives based on knowledge of the past, and the second is the notion that the past is a reliable predictor of the future. Taleb describes his main challenge as mapping his ideas of "robustification" and "antifragility," i.e., how to live and act in a world where we do not understand and to build robustness to black swan events.
Taleb's book "The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms" takes its title from the Greek myth of "The Bed of Procrustes", which tells the story of Procrustes, who, as lord of the manor demanded that his guest's height be the same as the length of the bed. If the guests were too tall, he cut their legs short with a sharp axe; if they were too short, he lengthened their bodies.
Because of the finite nature of knowledge, when humans encounter something we do not understand or know well, our solution is to "stretch" or "compress" our views of life and the world, forcing them to conform to mundane, preconceived, and artificially formulated concepts, categories and routines. These are the issues explored in the fable "The Bed of Procrustes," it is also a common theme in Taleb's work: the limitations of human knowledge and the prejudices and errors that come with such limitations.
While reading Taleb's book, I was also thinking about how these "stretched" or "compressed" soul-shaping processes are inevitable when we face opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we do not understand. We will always look for reasons to justify a sudden bad event after the fact to gain cognitive peace and quell our inner pain and remorse. However, we need to be made aware of this reversal of cause and effect. So, I will continue to explore the subtle changes in cognition that occur when people are affected by unpredictable events.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, November 30, 2010
During the tutorial with Yuchen about Research Festival, she suggested that she felt that my proposal mapping people's state of being in the face of unpredictable events was more about randomness by observing the tangible reactions of players when faced with an unknown number of points and witnessing the contents of a piece's falling position through a homebrew flying chess game I made. This perspective made me think further about the relationship between unpredictability and randomness.
From a statistical point of view, life can be viewed as a complex system of imperceptible inter-dependencies and non-linear responses, which can lead to unpredictable or non-intuitive results, such as Solitons, Chaos theory, and Singularities. Although "chaotic events" and "random events" are similar in feeling, they should not be confused; that is, the behaviour of a chaotic system is not random.
For example, many weather systems are chaotic, and small perturbations can lead to complex and varied outcomes for the entire system. With current technology, this non-linear nature of the weather is a stumbling block to long-term weather forecasting. In the realm of "black swans," the probability of rare events is not calculable because there are always limits to knowledge, no matter how sophisticated the science of statistics and risk management becomes. I think the reason why I am drawing the "chaotic" events I have faced in each square of my game board is that I want to complete some non-linear narrative in this complex system, where the content of the board acts as a "tiny perturbation" that allows the player to move forward or backward, and the result is affected. The game describes a combination of randomness and unpredictability.
The world does not expect us to understand it, and its fascination comes from our inability to understand it truly. Our bodies are informed about our surroundings, not by our logical mechanisms, intelligence, reasoning ability, or ability to calculate but by stress, which is transmitted to us through hormones or other information-transmitting mechanisms that we have not yet discovered. Mistakes and their consequences are also a message, and for young children, pain is the only risk management message as their logical reasoning still needs to be well developed. The functioning of complex systems depends entirely on information, and the best way to verify whether an object is alive or not in the system is to check whether it likes change.
If we are alive, we enjoy a certain degree of randomness and unpredictability; they are an integral part of real life. In our ancestral habitat, humans are stimulated by the natural environment, and primal feelings such as fear, hunger, and desire motivate us to explore and adapt to our surroundings. If we do not feel hungry, the delicacies will be tasteless; if we do not work hard, the results we get will be meaningless; in the same way, if we have not experienced pain, we will not know joy; if we have not experienced trials and tribulations, our beliefs will not be strong; if we are deprived of the unpredictability that comes with chaos, there is no point in living a ordinary life.
References
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· Hitti, N. (2020) ‘Tadeas Podracky’s The Metamorphosis furniture rejects mass-produced design’, Dezeen, 9 November. Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2020/11/09/tadeas-podracky-the-metamorphosis-furniture-design/ (Accessed: 29 October 2023).
· Çoban, O. (2023) ‘DIALOGUE: Tadeas Podracky | Experimental Designer’, Mercado.
· Nwangwa, S.N. (2022) ‘The Monumental Work and Life of Barbara Chase-Riboud’, The New York Times Style magazine.
· Glen, F. (ed.) (2023) Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite folds, Serpentine Galleries. Available at: https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/barbara-chase-riboud-infinite-folds/ (Accessed: 29 October 2023).
· Wolfe, S. (2017) ‘Alberto Giacometti – Art As a Means of Seeing’, ARTLAND MAGAZINE. Available at: https://magazine.artland.com/alberto-giacometti-art-as-a-means-of-seeing/ (Accessed: 29 October 2023).
· Bruun, M.W. (ed.) (2020) Giacometti Gallery, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Available at: https://louisiana.dk/en/exhibition/giacometti-salen/ (Accessed: 29 October 2023).
· O’Reilly, S. (2014) ‘Marina Abramovic: Three of the best’, RA Magazine, 19 June.
· Antignano, D.S. (2022) ‘La Crisi dello Spettatore in rhythm 0, Una performance di Marina Abramović’, Resistencias literarias. Los lenguajes contra la violencia., pp. 184–195. doi:10.2307/j.ctv36k5d14.17.
· Kuo, M. (ed.) (2020) Marcel Duchamp. 3 standard stoppages. Paris 1913-14 | moma, MOMA. Available at: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78990 (Accessed: 29 October 2023).
· Taleb, N.N. (2016) The bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and practical aphorisms. New York, NY: Random House.
· Taleb, N.N. (2012) Antifragile things that gain from disorder. New York, NY: Reactions Publishing Group Ltd.
· Taleb, N.N. (2010) The Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable. New York, NY: Random House.
· Hyndman, R.J. and Athanasopoulos, G. (2021) Forecasting: Principles and practice. Melbourne, Victoria: Otexts.