Ian Anüll_Take A Seat

坐坐

IAN ANÜLL TAKE A SEAT 《坐坐》2010, 橡胶, 共 22 个, 每个(高) 44 cm, 直径 30 cm, 墙面漆绘, 182 x 433 cm

“Take a Seat” 2010, rubber, 22 pcs, each (H) 44 cm, ø 30 cm, wall painting, 182 x 433 cm

敏锐的破坏 文：Gerhard Mack

杨安绿（阿绿 /Ian Anüll）的艺术创作将日常生活转译到作品中，将价值、生活状态呈现为可见之物。 2008年，艺术家杨安绿（生于1948年，生活在瑞士苏黎世）进驻北京麦勒画廊“艺术家驻地”工作室，第一次来到了中国。他走到街上，邀请碰到的路人在画布 上写上“中国制造”几个字。用中文写好的指南让沟通轻松了很多。作为回报，所有人都可以得到一板儿瑞士巧克力，杨安绿还额外准备了10 欧元另作酬谢，但 被他们拒绝了。中国不仅是地球上人口最多的国家，在过去几十年的全球化进程中，它也变成了众所周知的世界加工厂，产出的产品已经成为快产快销、质量成 疑的商品代名词。大多数时候， “中国制造”这个标签想告诉我们的是，这个人口“众”多的国家为全球生产着大“众”消费品。杨安绿却用一次行为艺术扭转了 这种滥调之辞，将人们的目光引向我们在庞大的人口基数中被忽略的个人。他在街上邀请了大约70 位中国人，让他们亲笔写下这个代表身份和出身的标签，并 在背面签名。他用的画布和颜料都是中国出产，这些作品的创作者既有民工，也有职业经理人，阶层、职业各异，年龄不等。个人笔迹成了世界上最具普遍意义 的贸易行为和划定身份的一种显现。这一点在与以下事实联系时尤为明显：书写是一种素描的形式，近代以来，在西方文化中，素描是表达艺术意图最直接的 手段；而在儒家中国，文字素描（书法）被认为是最高级的艺术形式。这组由路人创作的作品使艺术接近百姓，与街道的使用者路人发生联系，通过商品交换而 非艺术市场上通用的货币方式进行了结算。 在北京麦勒画廊举办的展览《坐坐》中，杨安绿将上述观念又向前推进了一步。他请中国的艺术家同行把“中国制造”写在白色的纸袋上，就像瑞士超市里印有 相似字样的购物纸袋一样，并签上名字。卖出作品的收入由画廊、杨安绿和参与的艺术家三方平分。在过去十年，当代艺术是中国最畅销的出口产品之一，很多 艺术家借着这棵大树早已树立了自己的品牌。将这一现象诉诸表达，同时回到身份标识的层面上，可能有些勉强。至少在杨安绿的这组作品里，参与者会将自 己定义为商品的生产者，又通过商品将自身的感知、想象、感觉和幻想转译到图像语言中。这些艺术家借助这组作品已将自己最为本真的一部分带向了市场。 杨安绿的艺术创作始终瞄准当下最核心的敏感区域，而经济领域是最显著的一环。资本结构如何决定我们审视生活的视角；货币作为通用的交换手段如何将 人与人的交流限定在供求条件之下；追求可实现的价格水平如何经常性地决定了一个东西的内在价值等等，都是杨安绿在大量作品中展示的关键。而作为艺术 家，他并没有运用批判者的手段。为了正面对抗社会基础，全球化现象出现以前，这个世界的各个角落已经太过紧密地联系在一起。拒绝什么很容易，但要引 导同时代人的目光去关注那些断裂和被摒弃之物，并探索其对我们感知的影响，却难得多。这只能通过运用一些小手段才能办到，又何况在我们这个嘲讽加 玩世的时代。杨安绿在这方面是个大师：他在纸币上钻孔，让纸币失去了公共意义上的价值，发问我们对它本来的期待是什么；他把非洲“机场艺术”生产的面 具等系列产品作为原创作品，不经意地提出复制和原创之间关系的问题；他找来旧明信片，盖上新章，不知不觉地将人们的关注引向过去和今天的夹缝中。 杨安绿采用一种平俗的、让人无法发觉的干涉方式。作为艺术家，他总是带着聊聊几件行李奔波各地，喜欢选用展览地提供的东西进行创作。他善于探索发 现，凭借对材料敏锐可靠的感知将发现的物质或精神材料进行转换。他使用的材料不脱离其来源，却被引入到另一种关系中，或者说艺术的意义系统中。如此 一来，这些材料就可以挑衅它们曾经属于的世界。对此，展览中的第二组以“风格”为主题的作品提供了范例。常见的布告牌上用当地语言写着“风格”二字， 重新定义了展示它的语境。 “风格”这个概念表示了隶属一个社会文化上层建筑的属性，没有风格或者不知风格为何物的被排除出去：它是一把打开日常生活 密码的钥匙，无论是以何种显现方式，可能与北京当地的煤球进行的“能源对话”，或是摩洛哥的几何地板模型，抑或是上海某家鞋店的收款台标牌。写着“风 格”二字的牌子在每个语境中都作为转译者存在，做出评论的姿态，却又显出一副在搞小破坏的样子。 这一切都能在我们的意识中发出无声的巨响，杨安绿为展览《坐坐》制作的凳子证明了这一点。凳子的外形与瑞士警察射击游行者使用的橡胶子弹一致。子弹 外形被夸张地放大成了一种无害的设计物，可以毫无顾忌地融入到宜家家居卖场或者艺术收藏家的豪宅里。对世界各地有关民主的理解的发问与艺术联系起 来，让人想到了1979年瓦尔特·德·马里亚用500块铜体制作的西方艺术标志性作品《断裂的公里线》，也是杨安绿在作品中对话的对象。他的作品里，有政治、 有美学，有简单、有复杂，可以触摸的使用对象与无法锤测的哲学发问之间只相隔着一个想象的距离。

翻译：苏伟

Subtle Sabotage

by Gerhard Mack

Ian Anüll’s art transforms the everyday, while simultaneously making it possible to perceive the values and conditions we live with from day to day.

During his first visit to the People’s Republic of China—a sojourn as artist-in-residence at Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing in 2008—Ian Anüll (*1948, lives in Zurich, Switzerland) asked passersby on the street to write the words “Made in China” on pieces of canvas. A tutorial in Chinese made it easier for the artist to communicate with the project’s participants. In return, each person received a bar of Swiss chocolate; when the artist offered each participant ten euros, they all refused. China is not only the most populous country on earth, but during the past decade of globalization, it has established itself as the world’s workshop, whose products are synonymous with speedily manufactured, cheap goods of frequently doubtful quality. At the very least, the label “Made in China” implies that this country, with its masses of people, produces mass-manufactured products for everyone else around the globe. Anüll’s art action reverses this cliché and instead draws attention to the individual human being, who can be easily forgotten in light of the large numbers of other people.

About seventy times, Anüll asked individual Chinese people to write out the label in their own handwriting; afterward, each one signed the canvas on the back. Both the canvas and the paint were made in China, and the authors of the works ranged from construction workers to managers—all belonged to different social classes, professions, and age groups. The label identifying a product’s country of origin, which is the most ordinary thing in world trade, was given a unique feature: the handwriting of individual persons. This has even more impact when we remember that writing is a kind of drawing, and that, since the start of the early modern era, our Western culture has considered drawing to be the most direct expression of artistic intention, whereas, in Confucian China, calligraphy was regarded as one of the highest of all the arts. In this group of works, art comes to the street, amalgamating everyday objects, and— unlike the situation of the art market—it is not paid for with the universal accounting unit of money; instead, an exchange of goods takes place.

In his exhibition “TAKE A SEAT”, at Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing, Anüll takes the situation a step further: he asks fellow artists from China to write “Made in China” on white paper (of the sort used for grocery bags in Switzerland) and then to add their signatures. Any profits from sales are split three ways, among the gallery, Anüll, and the other artists. Contemporary art has been one of China’s big exports for a good ten years, and many artists have established their own “brands” under this general rubric. Expressing this, while at the same time retreating behind a label that designates origin, probably takes some courage and effort. Every participant defines himself—at least, in Anüll’s group of works—as a producer of goods, which are nothing more than each artist’s own perceptions, ideas, emotions, and visions, all translated into visual language. These artists point out that they are taking a deeply personal part of themselves to market.

Anüll’s art always targets the heart of the present-day, and right now, that heart beats inside the economy. In countless works, the artist has shown how the capitalist structure influences our views of life; how money, as a general medium of exchange, subjects human interaction to the conditions of supply and demand; and how we often determine the inner worth of something by measuring it against its price. As an artist, however, Anüll does not operate as a critic. Even before globalization, the world was already too strongly interconnected for anyone to confront the fundamentals of society head-on. It is easy to reject something, but much harder to influence perceptions by making people look at places where there are distortions and ruptures. In our age of ironic cynicism, this can actually only be accomplished by shifting things around slightly. Anüll is a master at this. He punches holes in paper currency, making the bills clearly worthless, while allowing us to wonder how we might have used it to indulge ourselves; he treats serially manufactured products—like the masks available at African airports—as if they were originals, and thus nonchalantly brings up the issue of the relationship between a copy and an original; he has new postmarks stamped onto old postcards, thus subtly guiding our attention to the time that has passed between then and now.

These interventions are always nearly trivial, and often they are not immediately apparent. As an artist, Anüll travels light. He prefers the things he finds at the exhibition site. He is someone who discovers things, and he uses his infallible sense of material qualities to transform these intangible or tangible found pieces. His materials generally cling to their origins and yet they are transferred to another context, in which the meaning of art is examined.

Out of this, the things that come from the everyday world take on the capacity to irritate or disturb. The second group of works in this show, the “style” works, is paradigmatic of this ability. The word “style” is written in different languages on a plain panel, and wherever it is shown, it redefines the context in which it is displayed. “Style” is a concept that signals membership in the upper classes and excludes those who have no style or do not know what the fashionable style happens to be at the moment; here, it becomes the key that opens up everyday codes. Examples might be the “energy dialogue” with the briquette pieces in Beijing, a geometrical floor pattern in Morocco, or a cashier’s sign in a shoe shop in Shanghai. Each time, the “style” panel transforms the situation, providing a commentary that seems like a little act of sabotage.

The fact that, when it detonates, it can make an incredible noise in our minds, becomes clear when we see the stools that Anüll has had made for “TAKE A SEAT”. In form, they resemble the rubber bullets Swiss police shoot at demonstrators. Monstrously enlarged, they mutate into harmless designer objects, which could easily fit into an IKEA environment or into the most expensive homes of art collectors. Questions about the ways that democracy is viewed in different zones around the world are linked to art, when we recall, for instance, the five hundred pieces of Walter de Maria’s sculpture, “The Broken Kilometer” 1979, an icon of Western art, which the artist mentions in a conversation. In Ian Anüll’s work, the political and the aesthetic, the simple and the complex, the tangible object and the unfathomable philosophical question are separated by a mere associative thought.

Translator: Allison Plath-Moseley

《风格系列》1995-2010 布面喷墨 每幅 80 x 120 cm “Serie Style” 1995-2010 inkjet-print on canvas each 80 x 120 cm

《克林顿 96, 风格系列》1996 “Clinton 96, Serie Style” 1996

《北京 10, 风格系列》2010 “Beijing 10, Serie Style” 2010

《巴黎 99, 风格系列》1999 “Paris 99, Serie Style” 1999

《维也那 95, 风格系列》1995 “Vienna 95, Serie Style” 1995

《北京 10, 风格系列》2010 “Beijing 10, Serie Style” 2010

《剑桥 96, 风格系列》1996 “Cambridge 96, Serie Style” 1996

《北京 08, 风格系列》2008 “Beijing 08, Serie Style” 2008

《上海 08, 风格系列》2008 “Shanghai 08, Serie Style” 2008

《布达佩斯 95, 风格系列》1995 “Budapest 95, Serie Style” 1995

《莫斯科 04, 风格系列》2004 “Moscow 04, Serie Style” 2004

《马拉喀什 04, 风格系列》2004 “Marrakesh 04, Serie Style” 2004

《马拉喀什 04, 风格系列》2004 “Marrakesh 04, Serie Style” 2004

《上海 08, 风格系列》2008 “Shanghai 08, Serie Style” 2008

《北京 08, 风格系列》2008 “Beijing 08, Serie Style” 2008

《北京 10, 风格系列》2010 “Beijing 10, Serie Style” 2010

《上海 08, 风格系列》2008 “Shanghai 08, Serie Style” 2008

《北京 08, 风格系列》2008 “Beijing 08, Serie Style” 2008

《苏黎世 04, 风格系列》2004 “Zurich 04, Serie Style” 2004

《中国制造》2010 纸袋水墨 每只49 x 53 cm “Made in China” 2010 ink on paperbag each 49 x 53 cm

《何云昌, 中国制造》2010 “He Yunchang, Made in China” 2010

《李松松, 中国制造》2010 “Li Songsong, Made in China” 2010

《刘鼎, 中国制造》2010 “Liu Ding, Made in China” 2010

《刘野, 中国制造》2010 “Liu Ye, Made in China” 2010

《聂幕, 中国制造》2010 “Nie Nu, Made in China” 2010

《王兴伟, 中国制造》2010 “Wang Xingwei, Made in China” 2010

《夏星, 中国制造》2010 “Xia Xing, Made in China” 2010

《谢南星, 中国制造》2010 “Xie Nanxing, Made in China” 2010

Ian Anüll 1948 born in Sempach, Switzerland

lives in Zurich, Switzerland

Selected Solo Exhibitions 2010 “TAKE A SEAT”, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne, Beijing, China

1990 Damon-Brandt Gallery, New York, United States

“Rien ne va plus” Helmaus Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

“Ian Anüll”, Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland

Halle Sud, Geneva, Switzerland

2008 Art Unlimited, Art Basel 39, Basel, Switzerland

Unge Kunstneres Samfund, Oslo, Norway

Mai 36 Galerie, Lucerne, Switzerland

“Made in China”, Abbt Projects, Zurich, Switzerland

2007 Gran Via Project by Ultimate Records, Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland

1989 Galerie M/2, Vevey, Switzerland

Galerie Peter Bläuer, Basel, Switzerland

2006 “Aller/Retour”, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris, France

Galerie Brigitta Rosenberg, Zurich, Switzerland

2005 Kunsthalle Giessen, Giessen, Germany

Galerie Camille von Scholz, Brussels, Belgium

1988 Galerie M/2, Vevey, Switzerland

“Recorded, Ian Anüll Tamas Komoroczky”, Lada project, Berlin, Germany

Galerie Soucasného Umení, Ceské Budejovice, Czech Republic

2003 Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Solothurn, Switzerland

Galerie CC, Graz, Austria

2002 PS Project Space, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Galerie Grita Insam, Vienna, Austria

Mai 36 Galerie, Lucerne, Switzerland

Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland

2000 Galerie Luciano Fasciati, Chur, Switzerland

1987 Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg, Germany

1999 Galerie David Pestorius, Berlin, Germany

Foto Forum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

1986 Centre Genevois de Gravure Contemporaine, Geneva, Switzerland

Galerie MDJ art contemporain, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

1998 Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland 1997 David Pestorius Gallery, Brisbane, Australia 1996 Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland 1995 Ruth Bachofner Gallery (Absolut L.A. International Biennial Invitational), Los Angeles, United States

Galerie Patrick Roy, Lausanne, Switzerland

CBD Gallery, Sidney, Australia

Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand

1994 Maison des Jeunes, Art Contemporain, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Galerie Patrick Roy, Lausanne, Switzerland

Circolo Vecchio (with John Nixon), Verduno, Italy

1993 Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg, Germany

Centre Genevois de Gravure Contemporaine, Geneva, Switzerland

Galerie Editions Camille von Scholz, Brussels, Belgium

“Aquarelle”, Graphische Sammlung der Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule Zürich (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland

Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich, Switzerland

Galerie Francesca Pia, Bern, Switzerland

1992 Fri-Art, Centre d'art contemporain, Fribourg, Switzerland 1991 The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland

Insam Gleicher Gallery, Chicago, United States

Galerie Brigitta Rosenberg, Zurich, Switzerland

Kunstverein Schaffhausen, Schaffhausen, Switzerland

1984 Galerie Brigitta Rosenberg, Zurich, Switzerland

出版：麦勒画廊 北京-卢森为Ian Anüll个展“坐坐”而出版, 展出于中国北京麦勒画廊 北京-卢森 2010 年 5月22日至 7月 9日 编辑：麦勒画廊 北京-卢森; 文章：Gerhard Mack; 翻译：Allison Plath-Moseley（英文）, 苏伟（中文）; 校对：申彤（中文）; 设计：李建辉; 摄影：Oak Taylor-Smith © 2010 麦勒画廊 北京-卢森, Ian Anüll 未经出版人的书面许可, 本书所有内容不可用于任何形式及目的, 包括但不限于图片复印、抄录或其他信息存储及文字转换的复制及传播。 印刷：中国北京 Publisher: Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne on the occasion of Ian Anüll’s solo exhibition “TAKE A SEAT” at Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing, China, from May 22 to July 9, 2010 Editor: Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne; Text: Gerhard Mack; Translators: Allison Plath-Moseley (E), Su Wei (C); Copy Editor: Anya Shen (C); Designer: Li Jianhui; Photography: Oak Taylor-Smith © 2010 Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne, Ian Anüll All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including but not limited to photocopying, transcribing or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

Printed in China 麦勒画廊, 北京市朝阳区草场地104号, 邮编 100015, 电话 + 86 10 643 333 93 Galerie Urs Meile, no.104, Caochangdi, Chaoyang District, PRC -100015 Beijing,T+ 86 10 643 333 93 Galerie Urs Meile, Rosenberghöhe 4, 6004 Lucerne, Switzerland, T+ 41 41 420 33 18 galerie@galerieursmeile.com, www.galerieursmeile.com