Undefined Revolution Sun Xun Five Foot Shelf Fiona Jardine Proposal for a Warehouse or Towards a Museum of Reorganisation James Hutchinson
3 March – 8 April 2012
How to Turn the World by Hand via Beijing, Edinburgh, Istanbul Collective presents three projects, which form a conclusion of our international research project How to Turn the World by Hand.
How to Turn the World by Hand was initiated by Collective and has been a yearlong, collaboration between Collective – Edinburgh, Arrow Factory – Beijing, and PiST/// – Istanbul and feeds into an ongoing dialogue around trade and global movements with regards to contemporary art production and presentation in the three locations of each organisation. The project involved each organisation making and presenting work in each other's space and city in a clockwise movement around the world, mirroring the movements of international trade moving from East to West. Arrow Factory presented Mobile Bazaar in Collective, James Hutchinson presented Proposal For A Warehouse or Towards A Museum Of Reorganisation in PiST///, Fiona Jardine was resident in Beijing and finally, PiST/// presented in Arrow Factory’s Beijing space. Collective invited Chinese artist Sun Xun, and Glasgow based artists James Hutchinson and Fiona Jardine to exhibit their work and research processes in the gallery spaces. All three of the artists have engaged with trade, not in capital commodities but through knowledge. Sun Xun’s ephemeral wall paintings and hand-drawn animations are erased after the duration of an exhibition or in the filming process, questioning the value of drawing and the art object, while James Hutchinson’s crates consider the implications of globalisation of works and movement of ideas and finally Fiona 2
Jardine’s research project looks at how we hold and share knowledge.
Undefined Revolution by Chinese artist Sun Xun combines a new temporary wall painting specially created for Collective with seven animations. Sun Xun is one of a new generation of Chinese artists who produce politically engaged work. Using a wide array of materials and techniques including charcoal, newspaper and montage, he takes the viewer through human landscapes where the personal often becomes the political. Drawing from eclectic subject matters such as world history, politics and natural elements, Sun Xun’s work investigates the construction and narration of history through the process of drawing. Sun Xun began making animated films during his print-making degree. This new medium allowed him to explore the rapidly changing world he saw around him. He developed a technique of sequence animation; creating highly detailed drawing, recording his work, erasing the drawing and drawing again, through this repetitive process he creates a body of work, which evolves into his films.
Proposal For A Warehouse or Towards A Museum Of Reorganisation by James Hutchinson addresses the transformation of objects as they move through spaces, carried by the flow of capitalism, and consider how the spaces they move through are themselves transformed to accommodate the flow.
transformation is taking (or has taken) place; a transformation requiring coercive reorganisation at great human or social cost. The crates are made with materials sourced locally (or materials with local significance) and with the help of people who currently live in the locations in question. Each crate has been designed so that, when padded on the inside, it could in principle, be used to safely transport Robert Morris's 1961 work, Box With The Sound Of Its Own Making. Locations for the production of previous crates includes Fordlandia, Brazil and Colbost, Skye; two of the crates shown in Collective have been specially created for How to Turn the World by Hand, one by James himself in Istanbul and one by Wang Youcheng in Beijing.
Five Foot Shelf is the first presentation of a recurring project developed by Fiona Jardine as a consequence of her involvement with How to Turn the World by Hand and a subsequent period of stay in Beijing. Five Foot Shelf takes its title from a prizewinning bibliography — a five foot shelf — produced by W. Reginald Wheeler in 1917. Wheeler’s bibliography was intended as an "authoritative list of books which might serve as a foundation for a library dealing with all phases of Chinese life, art, trade, finance, customs, politics, international relations and history.” Five Foot Shelf aims to generate comparisons between the processes of knowledge and trade, playing with notions of visibility, reliability and legality: circuits of production, encoding and storage.
Sun Xun was born in Fuxin in Liaoning province, China. He currently lives and works in Beijing. He graduated from Print-making at the China Academy of Fine Arts and established π Animation Studio in 2006. James Hutchinson was born in Southport and received his BA(Hons) in Fine Art from Leeds Metropolitan University in 2000 and his MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2011. Prior to moving to Glasgow, he was co-Director of the self-initiated curatorial practice The Salford Restoration Office. Fiona Jardine was born in Galashiels and lives in Glasgow. She gained a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee in 1998 and a MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2003. She is currently pursuing PhD research into ‘signature’ at the University of Wolverhampton.
The project takes the form of a number of shipping crates, each produced in a location where a rapid economic 3
How To Turn The World By Hand? Beijing | Edinburgh | Istanbul By Jenny Richards How to Turn the World by Hand is a project conceived in early 2011, in the midst of the Campaign Against Arts Cuts in England. Whilst Scotland may have been in the waiting room for funding restrictions, Collective was also working through a local dilemma. The City of Edinburgh Council had decided to sell the building Collective had occupied for the last 15 years.1 This push provoked a concerted effort on the part of the organisation to identify and investigate its present location and its position within wider networks of trade and capital. This provided the backdrop for an overarching, year-long programme around an embodied organisational critique in collaboration with PiST, Istanbul and Arrow Factory, Beijing. What was designed was an experimental exercise which engaged in those practices and discourses (namely commercial activity) that all three spaces have an implicit relationship with (all are based in ‘commercial’ shop units), but which they have distanced themselves from by designating themselves as ‘not-for-profit’. In this methodology HTTTWBH could be seen to draw on Fredric Jameson’s proposal for cognitive mapping2 as a way to chart the global social and economic forces we find ourselves caught within.3 An analysis to orientate and locate oneself not only geographically but within a global constellation of cultural coordinates. So how might making these movements of trade and capital visible be pertinent to Collective? What could a series of projects that explored relationships of trade between the three locations unveil?
4
For the purposes of brevity, I will focus on two parts of Collective's mutable activities which have taken place over the year. The first — the takeover of Collective in April 2010, when overnight, the ‘art’ evacuated and ‘products’ moved in, and the building was returned to a commercial enterprise. Contrary to the slick vitrines evident in new boutiques, this shop was a back alley market with a jumbled concoction of merchandise. Appropriately called the Mobile Bazaar, wares were materially transported as the luggage of artist Rania Ho, not dissimilar to the tactics of the travelling salesman. Key to the exchange at the subtly branded SHOP AND MARKET was dialogue. Rather than slipping in and out as you would in a gallery, in this 'shop' the trader asked the customer to discuss the value they were prepared to put on products they desired; swapping accumulation for conversation. This transformation commented on not only Collective’s relationship to the art market, but also the rapid change of the historically independent and alternative Edinburgh street Collective is situated on, which in the past years has seen record and book shops leave its quarters, giving way to colonising tartan tourist traps. The space was co-opted as a testing ground for an alternative criticality, which played out further in the 'shop’s' Feral Trade Café. The café, a project by artist Kate Rich, acts as a parasite to art and its global biennale path, mule-ing the cultural elite and reappropriating air miles for an ‘import/ export’ business of food stuffs. Congregating at the new ‘shop and café’ at 22-28 Cockburn
Fiona Jardine, Five Foot Shelf, installation view, 2012.
St, goods such as coffee from America and tea from China were served by the previous front of house gallery assistant, now barista and cultural mapper. Customers were drawn into narratives which traced the complex route of their commodities all visualised in the makeshift café crates and table tops. Now part shop, part café and part distribution hub, this parody, fuelled debate around current modes of production, distribution and consumption. These timely reflections were at the core of HTTTWBH and were further explored in a series of workshops by Fiona Jardine and Anna McLauchlan entitled Manufacturing Authenticity. Situated to unpick the techniques operating in the valuation of the art object, questions moved from the material fetish of obsolete technologies, to the homogeneity of institutional practice and forms of cultural capital.
Whilst on local terrain these critical experiments were captured and shared easily. It was the globe trotting of the project back along the historic silk route that expanded this analysis to the East. This leads me on to the next trajectory of the project that took place in the project’s offshoot branch, known to most as artistrun space PiST, Istanbul. This part of the project, in its struggle to run smoothly, revealed much about the global forces we were engaging with, exposing state political and juridical systems as well as the global narrative of capitalism in a new light. The project in Istanbul centred around James Hutchinson’s ongoing work, Proposal for a Warehouse or Towards a Museum of Reorganisation, commissioning the building of art shipping crates (specifically designed to carry the Robert Morris work, Box with the Sound of its Own Making) in locations
5
subject to an intense economic imperative and consequently social reorganisation and suffering. The project has led James to Fordlandia, the Scottish Highlands and now… to Istanbul and Beijing. The production of a crate in Istanbul drew on Can Altay and Philipp Misselwitz’s collaborative research project, Diwan,4 which has traced the rapid gentrification of central Istanbul through the depletion of self built city centre dwellings named Gecekondu.5 Since the liberalisation of the economy, the cleansing of informal housing has seen the continual expropriation of communities pushed out to isolated high-rise developments on the peripheries of the city. But, on arrival and even before driving past the multiple tower blocks (or TOKI cities) on Istanbul’s outskirts, James’ collection of crates had got stuck. Situated, as we understood, in the bureaucratic no man's land of Istanbul’s customs warehouse, the crates were classified as ‘not to be released’. Whilst the right papers were present, the Turkish custom and trade officials were not convinced. Why would one want to transport an empty crate? If an object’s use cannot be categorised it must be detained. Unable to set the works free, James embarked on Istanbul’s assemblage, and sought out mobile trading sites that had sprung up to sell materials discarded in the dismantling of the Gecekondus. This formed a specific geographical rendering of the city and the constellation of economies within it. Wood gathered, he travelled back to PiST where the Istanbul crate was built overnight and re-coded for export, making its first journey without its identical counterparts. Whilst stressful at the time, the immobilisation of the crate spoke of more troubling scenarios concerning the transnational movement of peoples under the guise of globalisation and increased social mobility. When bureaucracy entangles the crates, they become a compass for unmasking capitalist flows and state 6
policies. Even whilst writing this text, there is another crate in China waiting to be released, post fumigation and interrogation. Reminiscent of Brâncusi’s Bird in Space customs debacle in 1926,6 what both cases have in common is the capacity for art to confound existing state structures and in their negotiation unveil their mechanisms. In China goods like the iPhone are often produced in factories in which, when Apple’s contracted day finishes at 5pm, workers continue to produce for a further two hours on the equivalent HiPhone. The exact same product, but with a couple of bonus applications and crucially without the branding of Apple, is thus sold more cheaply. They call this Shanzhai, where goods are appropriated and produced, with added extras, for a lower cost. This could be paralleled with current expectations on artistic production which look for greater ‘outcomes’ on increasingly tighter budgets. In this sense, HTTTWBH can be seen in response to these developments, grappling to unveil the pulls of capital in order to find new spaces for collective working, the sharing of knowledge and experimentation. If capitalism feeds off alienation and abstraction, then HTTTWBH piggy backs it with a HiPhone camera, repurposing these flows publicly as critical experimentation. 1 The building has now been sold and will be transformed into new apartments and a hotel. 2 Jameson, F. (1990): ‘Cognitive Mapping’. In: Nelson, C./Grossberg, L. [ed]. ‘Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture’, University of Illinois Press (S. 347-60; m. Diskussion) 3 To‘enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole’. Jameson, F. (1991): ‘Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, Verso. 4 http://www.princeclausfund.org/fr/library/library/diwanfour-cities-in-the-middle-east.html 5 Translated as ‘built overnight’. 6 In which a crate storing a bronze sculpture was held up and charged with customs duty on its raw material, rather than being exempt from this charge when classified as art. The court battle drew in experts to testify for both the defence and the prosecution of the authenticity of the art object.
James Hutchinson, Proposal for a Warehouse or Towards a Museum of Reorganisation, ongoing.
7
Container for the Contained By Dominic Paterson Travel, of course, means ‘politics’ in the end, politics first of all, politics and little else, the fascinated analysis of the geopolitical backdrop, for one can only measure the political dimension by crossing a frontier…1 A small schoolgirl asked me the other day if I could give her an example of metonymy. (There are several kinds of metonymies you must recall, but the one that will come to mind most easily, I think, is Container for the Thing Contained.)2
1. To turn the world by hand? A collective endeavour if ever there was one! We are perhaps more used to hearing that money makes the world go round, and of course today this phrase brings to mind not so much the passing of money between hands but flows of digitised information which shift credit default swaps, Collatoralised Debt Obligations (CDOs), and other arcane financial instruments, around in a globalised economy. This economy seems not only utterly remote from any form of handcraft or manual labour but also literally and figuratively ungraspable. High frequency trading is run by computer ‘matching engines’ which link algorithmic programmes set up to buy and sell at particular thresholds; trades happen in microseconds, far faster than the sharpest human reaction times. As Donald Mackenzie3 explains, this temporal acceleration has altered the geographic organisation of markets, and created new zones of concentrated but invisible economic power, displaced from the old symbolic centres of capital. “The matching engines of the New York Stock Exchange, for example,
8
aren’t in the exchange’s century-old Broad Street headquarters with its Corinthian columns and sculptures, but in a giant new 400,000-square-foot plain-brick data centre in Mahwah, New Jersey, 30 miles from downtown Manhattan. Nobody minds you taking photos of the Broad Street building’s striking neoclassical façade, but try photographing the Mahwah data centre and you’ll find the police quickly taking an interest: it’s classed as part of the critical infrastructure of the United States.” Traders pay a premium to have their computers located at Mahwah so that precious microseconds aren’t lost while data is sent from one city to another. 2. The vast box-like centre at Mahwah whose contents are unknown and perhaps unknowable (in the sheer scale and speed of data processed there, amounting to millions of trading messages per second) is an apt figure for the financial products that were at the heart of the ‘credit crunch’. As Mackenzie explains, a key factor that provoked the banking crisis was the impossibility of accurately costing the risk attached to products whose actual contents were obscure: “What happened from 1999 onwards was that mortgagebacked securities, which already represented one layer of packaging of debt, started to be repackaged into CDOs, thus creating a Russian doll product: a tranched, packaged product each component of which was itself a tranche of a packaged product.”4 3. The shipping container is a material counterpart to the boxes within boxes of CDOs. From its introduction in New York in the 1950s it has played a crucial
role in enabling globalised trade: “the world's ports handle the equivalent of 60 million standard 40-foot containers of imported goods each year. Millions more containers cross borders by truck or train or are shipped in purely domestic trade. The phenomenon of ‘globalisation’, now a part of everyday vocabulary, is a direct result of the cost savings created by the container revolution.”5 In their 2010 film The Forgotten Space, Allan Sekula and Noël Burch offer an analysis of containerised shipping as a counter-discourse to the paeans to virtual, immaterial trade as a system in which ‘money begets money’. Containerisation allows the infrastructure of capital, its factories and depots, to themselves become migratory, seeking out cheaper labour in Asia, for example. “The boxes are everywhere, mobile and anonymous, their contents hidden from view […] We are told by the apologists of globalisation that this accelerated flow is indispensable for our continued prosperity and for the deferred future prosperity of those who labour so far away. But perhaps, this is a case for Pandora, or for her more clairvoyant sister, Cassandra.”6 5. James Hutchinson’s Proposal for a Warehouse or Towards a Museum of Reorganisation echoes and makes visible the passage of objects (including art objects) through space and across borders in a global economy. Hutchinson’s project operates through the collaborative production of shipping crates for a specific object, Robert Morris’s 1961 Box with the Sound of Its Own Making. This piece is one of a number of pieces in which Morris drew explicitly on the legacy of Marcel Duchamp; in this instance it is Duchamp’s 1916 With Hidden Noise that is evoked. Duchamp’s piece consists of a ball of twine fixed between two copper plates, containing an object placed inside it by his patron, Walter Arensberg. Duchamp had, apparently, avoided finding out what that
object was, perhaps to satirise the notion that it is the artist who places a hidden or latent meaning at the core of a work, but also to shift the mode of apprehension of the work from the visual to the aural, for himself as for the spectator. Morris’s piece operates similar shifts, aiming “to dispel the idea of secrecy, substituting instead the experience of an intelligible process and its duration”.7 Box with the Sound of Its Own Making consists of a wooden cube, 24.8 x 24.8 x 24.8 cm, which contains a speaker that plays back a tape recording of Morris sawing, hammering and sanding the cube into existence. Morris’s persistent concern to make the process of making evident in his practice, rather than producing art objects separable from that process, is thus economically embodied in this box. 6. On February 27th 1961 Morris wrote to John Cage to update him on his recent activities, providing a numbered list of works, the fifth of which is described as “The Box With the Sound of its Own Making Inside”.8 Cage, Morris later reported, paid a visit to his studio and saw the work: “I turned it on . . . and he wouldn't listen to me. He sat and listened to it for three hours and that was really impressive to me. He just sat there.”9 7. Cage’s attention to ‘readymade' sound and to duration was influenced not only by his understanding of the implications of Duchamp’s work, but also by his interest in Eastern philosophy and practice. His attendance at the lectures given by Daisetz Suzuki at Columbia University in the 1950s was crucial to Cage’s reception of this thought, as he acknowledged in a talk given in Darmstadt in September 1958: “In the course of a lecture last winter at Columbia, Suzuki said that there was a difference between Oriental thinking and European thinking, that in European thinking things are seen as causing one
9
time that Eastern philosophies spread into Western culture. “Therein resides the highest speculative identity of opposites in today's global civilisation: although ‘Western Buddhism’ presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of the capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement.”11
Sun Xun, Undefined Revolution, installation view, 2012.
another and having effects, whereas in Oriental thinking this seeing of cause and effect is not emphasised but instead one makes an identification with what is here and now. He then spoke of two qualities: unimpededness and interpenetration. Now this unimpededness is seeing that in all of space each thing and each human being is at the centre and furthermore that each one being at the centre is the most honoured one of all. Interpenetration means that each one of these most honoured ones of all is moving out in all directions penetrating and being penetrated by every other one no matter what the time or what the space. So that when one says there is no cause and effect, what is meant is that there are an incalculable infinity of causes and effects, and everything in time and space is related to every other thing in time and space.”10
10
8. Fiona Jardine’s Five Foot Shelf takes its title from a bibliography compiled by W. Reginald Wheeler in 1917 as a primer on Chinese culture which was awarded first place in a competition run by the periodical Millard’s Review of the Far East. The twenty-fifth book on the list was in fact a work by Suzuki, his 1914 A Brief History of Early Chinese Philosophy. Wheeler’s ‘five foot shelf’ offers a self-education in Chinese culture, art, philosophy — a laudable goal. It is interesting to note, however, that amongst those who judged the competition won by Wheeler was the Commercial Attaché of the American Legation in Peking. Cage’s enthusiasm for ‘interpenetration’ and ‘unimpededness’ might, then, be read in relation to this longer history of globalised trade. In our own time, Slavoj Žižek has suggested, this interpenetration of cultures takes the form of the triumph of the Western economic model at the same
9. Jardine adopts the presentational frame of PowerPoint to link her research in China to the writing of Jacques Derrida, and especially to his book Dissemination, which she annotates, underlines and overlays with other texts. Dissemination begins with Derrida’s deconstruction of that scholarly gesture of beginning which is the preface.12 The preface is one of the framing devices to which Derrida’s work paid close attention, insisting that such devices did not, despite appearances, secure a division of inside and outside, of container and contained, work and outwork. Drawing on Derrida’s writing, Annette Michelson reads Robert Morris as engaged in ‘disframing’ — “a process that eventually produces the questioning and disturbance of the space and institution of exhibition”.13 “The frame labours indeed,” Derrida writes.14 It works to produce the work as distinct from what lies beyond it. The work usually done by the frame to efface its own labour is made visible and contestable by such ‘disframing’. 10. Sun Xun has written of the way his work engages with contemporary China’s relation to its own past in terms which resonate with Derrida’s attention to the porosity of the frame: “We are used to creating a boundary between the present and the past. But actually, history has no such boundary.”15 His wall paintings and animations convey precisely a sense of layered temporality and historical complexity that is often effaced in accounts of globalisation
(both pro and anti). How to Turn the World by Hand as a whole questions the way in which we locate and disseminate art works as discrete objects in the world, drawing attention to boundaries and containers at a time when the constitutive role they play is ever harder to see.
1 Jacques Derrida, ‘Correspondence: Letters and Postcards (Extracts)’ in Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida, Counterpaths: Traveling with Jacques Derrida, trans. David Wills, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 23. 2 James Thurber, ‘Here Lies Miss Groby’, in Vintage Thurber, Vol. I, (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), p. 45. 3 Donald Mackenzie, ‘How to Make Money in Microseconds’, London Review of Books, Vol. 33 No. 10, (19 May 2011), p. 16. 4 Donald Mackenzie, ‘All Those Arrows’, London Review of Books, Vol. 31 No. 12, (25 June 2009), p. 20. 5 Marc Levinson, ‘Container Shipping and the Decline of New York, 1955-1975’ The Business History Review, Vol. 80 No. 1 (Spring, 2006), p. 50. 6 Allan Sekula and Noël Burch, ‘Notes for a Film’, http:// www.theforgottenspace.net/static/notes.html (accessed 16/3/12) 7 Kimberley Paice, ‘Catalogue’, in Robert Morris: The Mind-Body Problem, (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994), p. 104. 8 Robert Morris, ‘Letters to John Cage,’ October, Vol. 81. (Summer, 1997), p. 74. 9 Ibid., fn. 14. 10 John Cage, ‘Composition as Process’, in Silence: Lectures and Writings, (London: Marion Boyars, 1978), pp. 46-7. 11 Slavoj �i�ek, On Belief, (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 12. 12 Jacques Derrida, ‘Outwork, prefacing’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 1-67. 13 Annette Michelson, ‘Frameworks’, in Robert Morris: The Mind-Body Problem, op. cit. 14 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 75. 15 Sun Xun, ‘500 words’, Artforum, (August, 2008), http:// artforum.com/words/id=20899 (accessed 18/3/12)
11
Collective is committed to supporting new visual art through a programme of exhibitions, projects and commissions. Originally established as an artist run organisation in 1984, Collective is an international organisation for the production, research, presentation and distribution of contemporary art and culture with a specific focus on new visual art and practices. We aim to foster, support and debate new work and practices in a way which is of mutual benefit to artists and audiences. See the future of visual art today.
Collective 22–28 Cockburn Street Edinburgh EH1 1NY t: +44 (0) 131 220 1260 w: www.collectivegallery.net e: mail@collectivegallery.net
Cover image Kate Rich, Feral Trade CafĂŠ @ Collective, 2011.