INTELLIGENTSIA 智先画廊 ZINE
June 2015
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INTELLIGENTSIA MANIFESTO Intelligentsia explores the relationship between art and life, between concepts and creation. Intelligentsia is a space for the conception and diffusion of ideas and their manifestation in the realm of contemporary art. Intelligentsia presents ideas in the form of texts, publications, images, pictures, photographs, paintings, performances, videos, objects, events. Intelligentsia offers collectible materials that communicate the ideas of artistic production. Intelligentsia creates a space for positions and oppositions, for dialogue and contradictions. Intelligentsia is a platform for converging projects, juxtaposing narratives, and conflicting art. Intelligentsia recognizes that diversity of projects create an intelligence of contemporary art. Intelligentsia is concerned with artistic production and artistic process. Intelligentsia is fueled with the intellectual discourse of art. Intelligentsia presents events as artistic production. Intelligentsia is an independent art space in Beijing.
智先 画廊 宣言 智先探索艺术与生活，观念与创作的关系。 概念在这一空间中孕育和传播，并以当代艺术的方式得以展现。 智先的思想通过文本、出版物、影像、图片、摄影、油画、表演、视频、物体、活动的形式呈现。 智先提供具有收藏意义的素材，传播艺术生产的理念。 智先的空间兼容了立场与对峙，对话与矛盾。 智先作为开放的平台，兼有趋同的项目、并置的叙事、冲突的艺术。 智先认识到当代艺术的智慧源于项目的多样性。 智先关注艺术生产及其产生过程。 智先以艺术的思辨讨论为驱动。 智先将活动作为一种艺术生产。 智先是位于北京的独立艺术空间。
PROPOSITIONS TOWARD A PERFORMATIVE MATERIALISM Christopher Rey Perez
Previous Page Ada Sokol Breathing No. 1 Single Chanel Video Loop 2015 Next Page: Ada Sokol Breathing No. 1 and Metta Heaven Single Chanel Video Loop 2015 Jeff Miller & Thomas Schimdt Recycle China Series #2 Coal, Aluminium 2012 Serge Attukwei Clottey Social Sculpture C-Print on Archival Art Paper 2015 Wang Guangle Coffin Paint 150503 Acrylic on Canvas 2015
No. 46 What is Matter? June 6, 2015 Wang Guangle Serge Attukwei Clottey Ada Sokol Jeff Miller & Thomas Schmidt
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This is a time-based ecology
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I am here on this fucked-up earth
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Nature is a petty idealist system
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Ideally I would perform with the waste of the world
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The processing of form cannot annihilate base matter
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I will not police neither living nor dead body
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A complex set of sensations fails to obfuscate the inhuman
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I am a golem painting the subterfuge of my spiritual self
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Accreted experience will not exhaust material expenditure
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I hope I am not entirely alone or lost in narrative
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Psycho-consumption can also become tradition and culture
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My environment recycles your experience of the local
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Coffins and yellow gallons are not dialectical antagonisms
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An appropriate response to “same shit” is “still shit”
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The life and work of decomposition resists euphemism
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I am not sorry for replicating yet another ideology
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Objective reality is a problematic of art insofar problematics are the objective reality of architecture
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I work in a landfill of future Internet
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What is matter does not have to be experienced
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I want to negate exchange-value as do fossil fuels, aluminum, and spit
REN DER MAT TER
Unidentified Visual Objects seems to be a description that fits Aoto Oouchi’s aesthetic world. His UVO’s are material experiments on a computer screen. Tridimensional sculptures, they are observed always in the same angle as in an idealized state of expectation. The works are consumed, altered, liked and reblogged online, thus creating a new form of exhibition space: computer as white box. Garcia Frankowski interviews Aoto Oouchi
Interview with Aoto Oouchi by Garcia Frankowski
Garcia Frankowski: We would like to start asking about your background. When and how did you decide to become an artist? Aoto Oouchi: My grandfather started to teach me how to paint and fix frescos when I was 15. With 24, when my daughter was born I started to work as a designer in Vienna and stopped doing art altogether. Later i decided that it was time for me to go back into art. That was four years ago.
So after you started to work with your grandfather on frescoes and other restoration works, did you go to Art School too, to continue your education on art? Yes, I went to the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna. I studied photography and later switched to painting. Why did you choose photography at first? And what made you change to painting again? I felt I was not ready yet to let go on my old ideas of painting because I had a traditional background, and because honestly, I had trouble with how painting was perceived in art schools. I didn’t want to mess up my view upon it. So you started producing what you call net-art since 2011. Where you still in art school when that happened? What did this new medium offer you, compared to the medium of painting or photography?
Yes I was still at school. First of all, it was nice to have a non-smelling room. When you paint you always have to use those fixatives, strong varnishes. I used to work with its typical tools, Photoshop, Sculpting Software, Illustrator, etc, and I was used to handle digital workspace. I tried to completely break the aesthetics of common advertisement. I didn’t want to aim for the good looks, or produce what was right to do; I really wanted to break everything I knew to free myself out of this consumerist process of being a designer. I had such anger towards this past that I really wanted to blow it up. What was the first work like? What was the image like? Or what did you try to address? It was really the idea of making the shittiest artwork ever. I really wanted to make the ugliest, the most inaccessible piece I could do. It was not about going for the most harmonious, nice and sellable thing, it was the opposite. I couldn’t succeed at the beginning, because my eye had been trained to go for harmony, for middles, for “good” color combinations. So I was really searching for a way to mess up with aesthetics. I didn’t know that there was already this emerging way of „new aesthetics“, I had no idea that it started to exist around 2011. But at that time, I also began to be interested in music called ‘Vaporwave’. It was a perfect fit because of how they produce their music. It was completely unprofessional in a way. They took out a very short part of a commercial or a short part of an answering machine, slowed it down, stretched it and looped it for a couple of minutes. The people who started it were young, and loved what they were doing, they just wanted to produce something what they loved. This was a type of philosophy, which motivated me to produce in a similar way in the visual field. This influence was pretty important for me back then. When you talked about deconstructing the aesthetics in your art projects, do you think that net-art succeeded to do so or did netart just created a new type of visual acceptances? At the beginning the question of breaking the rules of aesthetics was a personal one, but later when I discovered that other people were going for a specific type of visual style, very uncommon and very unfamiliar for that time, then off course I entered another realm which had common agreements between artists, and it became not about breaking the rules anymore but more about establishing a way of seeing things differently. The more people do it, the more it becomes just another way of pop. But at the beginning the main motivation was to break it, and I’m still trying to break common acceptance. So the ultimate goal would be to do something that is not accepted? I don’t see that as an absolute, but more as a motivation to produce. Everybody needs some gasoline to burn, and for me the gasoline is to break certain visual styles for myself. So when I get used to something, I want to break it again. This is the infinite part of it, that’s how I can keep it going… Do you think that the potential of this form of art can survive outside of a screen of a computer? For example, when new media arrived it was new because it was more about the technology than
the content sometimes, so it gets to a point when new media is not so new anymore. Do you think that net-art will confront some similar challenge, and how do you think it can overcome it or will it be the end of net-art to become something else? Or does net-art have the potential to evolve in a more physical space beyond the screen of a computer? I think that net-art is quite physical already, because what you perceive is the light coming out of the screen which is a physical entity, so it’s in the physical world in that sense. Off course I understand what you mean, probably its acceptance in the broader meaning of art, or broader meaning of everyday-ness. Beyond the question of acceptance, it would be the same question, as ‘can a painting become more than a painting’. Does netart exist beyond the medium of the computer? A painting is per se an image from the outside that you hang in an interior space, a home, etc. So it’s a way to see something you cannot usually see in these spaces, to bring it to the viewer. Right now we use these devices in a very similar way, we are in a space from which we cannot access certain places and therefore we use this type of technology to access it, whatever it is or wherever it is. It can be immersive in different degrees. So I think that we already agreed that it is useful because of us changing from mammals to inceptive creatures, because we all go more towards a centralistic view of things than living a “normal” mammal - life. Mammals tend to raise a child as survival of being, but right now we are more following a centralistic view where there would be a big Ant queen putting out the eggs, therefore we would need this type of technology to have this new type of social view, which is what we try to accept now. Since the objective changes, would the receptor of this project be different from the viewer of your previous works of art, as when you were painting for example? Are you addressing to the same people experimenting with this new media or does this project is meant for another type of public? Right now it’s for people who can’t afford to pay for paintings for example. I think that net-art is for a public who have free access or who can afford to have Internet, and this targets a range of people around the globe. I wouldn’t say it targets everybody because that wouldn’t be true; it’s just a richer part of the population. But it’s neither the 1 percent of the richest persons; it would be more for the 40 percent who have this technology available. We are interested in those two contrasting forces which seem to be dealing with different matters but still relate to each other; for example in one hand, you are having several shows in around the world right now, with artists that are dealing with different mediums like paintings, installations, or sculptures, but on the other hand new websites, platforms on the internet emerges where you can see paintings too, blog them, re-blog them, even art works which were made by old-masters. In a way, do you see any conflict between those two, by the acceptance of one into the commodity of art as into the art market, or maybe would all art have become net-art then?
What I see is that you always have to challenge viewers, but viewers can also be curators, or viewers can be buyers. At the same time, museum directors and gallery owners also need to be challenged by this type of art and they also need to find ways to deal with it. But if you just avoid confronting it then you don’t deal with it. This doesn’t mean that the artists would stop producing or being more or less successful, the major ones being more successful than the medium ones off course, but I like the idea that there is this possibility of influence upon the institutions. I think that they are now trying to find new ways to sell art. I’m not saying that I’m hoping for a big digital sell-out bubble, I’m hoping more for the big bubble than the sell-out, so at one point everything would burst again, that would be fantastic. But right now what we have to do and what I like to do is challenge institutions by sending them digital art. Most of them are quite puzzled with the question of how to show it and what to do with it. The first question they ask is how do I sell it? The second question is, how should it be shown? Is it a picture? Is it an animation? How long should it last for? etc. It’s mainly hilarious in a way because if you think about it, everybody nowadays has a screen in his pocket and therefore can easily watch it. That represents the challenge. The challenge would be why do we still need the institutions? Why do we still need to be explaining art to those people? But on the other hand, don’t you feel that the concept of net-art has this universal value meaning that everything can be absorb into it? Now in a way, you don’t need to go physically to see a painting, or any other piece of art? Exactly, that’s what they do anyway… Viewers can just browse through 500 pictures a day, through Instagram, Tumblr, etc. People got used to this extremely fast style of viewing images and if in between all this there is an image of an actually painting of a famous master, they will perceive it the same way as they perceive a Nike show floating over water, that’s to say in mili-seconds, but that’s the nice thing about it. The question, which really interests me the most, would be why people agree on certain types of styles in the Internet? Why does suddenly a palm tree become a symbol? Or marble? Or other recent types of aesthetics? Why do people agree to it? Why does it become a value? That’s a personal thing I like to play with, that’s why I take some of this symbols out the blog sphere for a certain amount of time before I put them back in, so I can see if the change I made changed or not the perception of those symbols. But does it have to do more with the public you are addressing? Or with the work of art? Or with the sense of hurry that people have to look at things? Maybe you don’t have the same reaction but does it mean that the project is not as powerful? Maybe the people are just busy looking at the new kitty online… Of course that’s totally fair and that’s the beauty of it. Everything becomes a very neutral image until people agree with it or not. So basically everything is grey until people say ‘I think that it’s a little bit darker than the rest’ or ‘it’s a little brighter than the rest’. Therefore it gets pushed. All of a sud-
den, the more people agree up to a certain point that the image changes, the grey changes into something else. What I do is that I look at this type of greyness level, which is a little different to the neutral one, I take it and I try to re-contextualize it. Then I put it back and see if it can hold this level of acceptance or if it loses it again and turn grey again. I think that that’s all we do. We look at people who have influence in the Internet, people whose styles we like, people whom we like what they do. We follow them and try to accept what they are looking at. Then, ourselves we also have followers who look at what we are doing and accept what we are looking at. So that’s the scheme. I think what it can do is that it creates a constant view changer; it always brings something else in focus. Do you think that the very nature of the medium is evolving? Have you seen in the past years an evolution? Or has it remain the same since we still look at the computer in the same way? No I think that there was an evolution there, maybe one and half years ago, and now I have the feeling that it’s declining and that there’s only a few producers left in this type of field. I think that a lot of people just gave up. They thought that it was the big thing. Then people from the art world would pick up a few of these aesthetics and use them in paintings, in sculptures, in installations, etc. But now it feels like nobody really found the solution on how to sell it… And if there’s no selling point the energy goes out of it, people lose interest, powerful people lose interest. If they don’t push it that’s fine, but it’s still needs a level of power in a different way, not necessarily in the money aspect, but in the power of acceptance, which they can support, so that this change of grey would be still happening. It is not dependent on the medium, it is not dependent on the social networks, it is dependent on the openness, availability and accessibility of the Internet. Being in China that’s a topic which we can talk about. There’s a lot of net-artists here, even with the downs of the Internet situation, how is that possible? Why would that happen? Does it make sense to produce net-art in a place where Internet is not easy to deal with? As a producer it is not that important for me. In my case I don’t work with so much input, I work with a few symbols, I work with a few objects, I work with a few color shades, and then I create something. So I don’t need that much amount of data every time. But for example, if somebody is a netart curator, I guess it would be a bigger issue. For me, I can deal with the everydayness of the Internet, normal mail consummation, normal Internet consummation can give me what I need. As Internet evolves, with new devices allowing people to connect in different ways, like google glasses, pads, watches, etc. Do you think that it can have an effect on the way people produce art? To be displayed or produced with those type of technology? I think that this question falls more under the new media category as depending on the hardware, its usage and novelty. I know that net-artists like to crash this technology, mix it up and change it a bit. Personally, I’m not that interested in it, I’m more interested in the common acceptance
of aesthetics and common acceptance of an agreement, creating values out of data… This is not really dependent on technology. Of course if you agree on images displayed with different resolution there is a difference and something to find out. But my main interest is more about the content, the possibility of an agreement and not how it’s displayed. Though I think that this is very interesting for people who want to show it, put shows together, or people who want to question the political influence of certain technologies. It’s just a different type of school, or net-art school. Do you foresee any possible evolution in your practice? Are you planning to keep on working with the same tools, the same strategy? Or maybe use different medium? What we understand in what you explained is that you interest is not so much about the medium but more about a message, a philosophy behind the work, so why that type of art? Do you think it could potentially evolve into something else, as the question of acceptance can be asked with pretty much everything that relates to the art world and especially as aesthetics are concern? Do you see any substantial changes or adaptation in this sense? First of all, we all know that nowadays we are all using the Internet, so netart is a very obsolete term, because it just means that somebody is using what everybody uses all the time. We are already living in it. I could not say that this is what I do, it’s just a basic usage, like using a chair to paint. But about my work and the question of evolving, I would like more to develop it towards where I come from. I worked for fifteen years as a designer for big global brands and I understand what it means to create value out of nothing, and this plays into the field of what I am actually doing right now with my projects, it’s creation out of agreement. I want to go a bit more into that and work more with how commercial entities work, how advertisement work, and how you can shape meanings, how you can shape values, it’s like making gold out of iron. This part is interesting. For me it’s not so important what I use to achieve it, if I produce sculpture or if I produce a digital work, as long as it fits to the consumption of our times. For example sculpture is a very slow way of producing and a slow way of consuming; therefore it adds a political language to it. To produce a sculpture you need a room which means that you need somebody with a room, a then you need material, which means that other people have to produce it. There so much involved which is not what I want to touch because it is not what I want to say. I’m more interested in free accessible art right now and what most of us can access. It’s quick to produce and quick to consume, therefore I choose this medium for that. But if in five years, if there would be something quicker to produce and quicker to consume I would switch to it. But it will be visual. We feel that there’s a sort of going back in your process. First you started by destroying everything and trying to break away from your background, but now it seems like you want to come back to it in certain extents. Would it be from the same perspective? Yes, I think it’s the same perspective from the start but not so much in the punk aspect anymore as wanting to destroy. I think that I want to work with it in order to make a point, and not against it to make a point. I think that it’s more interesting to seduce someone with advertisement in the name of art, than just to point out how evil all consumerism is.
MEMORY MONUMENTS, MASTERING MATTER Garcia Frankowski
No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since looking at the matter more closely, we always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist, or are at least in the process of formation –Karl Marx, The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Everything flows and nothing stays. –Heraclitus
Previous Page: Oliver Haidutschek Untitled Installation 2015
Rhetorical Materialism 关于物质性的修辞 April 4, 2014 CCA & Intelligentsia Gallery Jason Mena Ren Zhitian Wu Ding Xiao Xiao Garcia Frankowski Ophelia S. Chan Oliver Haidutschek Pavel Kiselev
Monumento, memento, monstrum. Memory manufactures motifs. Motifs mold memories. Multiple memories make more monuments, museums, myths. Monuments morph museums. Museums make myths. Myths modify minced memories. Memories morph material myths making megaliths, messianic mirages, Manichean machines. Materialism mobilizes masses, motivating misinterpreted missions. Marcel mastered members modestly made, mirroring masterfully Malevich’s minimalist militant mutiny. Mindless misreading makes messages misinterpreted memories. Material matter multiplies. Matching mass, memory motivates making more. Making more masters memory, makes material monuments, masters manufacturing matter.
Wir fรถrdern Wendigkeit! -Daniel Stubenvoll, 2014
TEN POINTS ON THE SUBLIME OBJECT Garcia Frankowski
The Sublime Object 崇高客体 March 7, 2015 Star Gallery & Intelligentsia Gallery Troyka Union Lena Tsibisova Olga Rodina Anastasia Soboleva Wang Yinfan Chen Xi Oliver Haidutschek Garcia Frankowski Daniel Stubenvoll Camille Ayme
1 The sublime is formless. Its formlessness displays in its discontinuous properties an intrinsic dialectical nature. 2 In the Kantian dynamic and mathematic sense of superiority, the sublime performs reciprocally between our understanding of that which we find in nature as being understood and comprehended, and that which goes beyond or under the rubric of reason, the laws of logic and structure of values. 3 When Wittgenstein affirmed that a logical picture of facts is a thought because in a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses, he concluded that the general form of a proposition is: This is how things stand. Since the Sublime is formless, the Sublime is an antiproposition, the Sublime stands in a no-place. 4 Once the possibility of empirical recognition is established, and objects, experiences and phenomena are subsumed under the grip of our ontological power of denomination, the sublime disappears. The formlessness of the anti-proposition is transformed in figures with logico-pictorial form. On the contrary, the potential of awe and fear, admiration and terror in front of the unknown in contrast to evidence, facts and given assumptions creates space for the Sublime Object’s anti-propositional pictures. 5 The disambiguation of a concept implies a forced landing in territory of reason, while the sublime object clears the lane for takeoff beyond the grasp of any theory of comprehension. The Sublime Object presents the pursuit of searching as praxis, as object and objective are anchored in territories beyond the limits of our judgment in relation of the faculties of our imagination and our understanding. 6 The Sublime Object presents both propositions and anti-propositions in order to highlight by way of the understood that which stands in defiance of the structure of reason. 7 For every object as picture in common with what it depicts, there’s an object devoid of logico-pictorial form. The Sublime Object lies in the fulcrum of this dichotomy creating a composition of propositions and antipropositions, between objective and non-objective. 8 A Composition of anti-propositions is a proposition in the form of a thought-picture in the same way that the composition exists as a nonpicture of the world and occupies the non-territory beyond its limits. The non-objectivity of anti-propositions allows sequential objects to be read in non-sequential narratives. It creates a non-objectivity of objects. 9 The Sublime is in the picture and in the object of the picture when the picture lacks logico-pictorial form. Non-objectivity can be found in the picture as the unintelligible language of the picture. When language goes beyond the limits of the world, it becomes anti-language since its symbols are devoid of thought figures and its pictures don’t deliver any logico-pictorial form. 10 The object of the Sublime consists on creating pictures of the formless and restructuring the world by means of anti-logic, by constructing reasonless anti-propositional pictures. The object of the sublime lies in its nonobjectivity both as anti-object in its concrete, logico-pictorial form and in its lack of definite objective.
TEN POINTS ON THE WORKS IN THE SUBLIME OBJECT
1 The Works in the Sublime Object deal with both the Sublime and the dialectic of its Object and objective. 2 The Works in the Sublime Object are arranged in a dialectical relationship to each other, to the viewer and to the space that contains them. Overall, the resulting installation of the Sublime Object is compositional in its nonproposition, and propositional in its compositional thought picture. 3 The Pictures in the Sublime Object, both static and moving are simultaneously propositions and anti-propositions. They deal with the Sublime and with logic in their autonomy and in the collective subjectivity of their relationship to each other, the viewer and the space that contains them. 4 The Pictures in the Sublime object are both, propositional in their thoughtpicture capacities, and non-propositional in their non-logico-pictorial performance. 5 The Paintings and artifacts in the Sublime Object deal with logico-pictorial issues but also with formless values. Ideas, concepts and motifs stand with and against each other, reacting to one another and remaining autonomously indifferent. 6 A Picture of a picture is not necessarily a picture as thought figure. A group of formless pictures could form a logico-pictorial picture. In the installation a group of thought figures develops into the formlessness of the Sublime Object. 7 The Sublime Object is experienced in a dialectical environment created with a composition of propositional logico-pictorial thought figures, and non-propositional pictures. The combinations in this composition of propositional logico-pictorial figures and non-propositional forms are boundless and can be found as follows: logico-pictorial proposition→ nonobjective figure; logico-pictorial proposition → non-objective figure; logicopictorial proposition → logico-pictorial proposition; non-objective figure → non-objective figure. In all its variations the combination can result in logico-pictorial propositions and as the Sublime object. 8 Not all sequences are narratives; nor they try to deliver the picture of a proposition. The Object can be the structure of the proposition. However, the Sublime Object is non-propositional in its structure and the multiple combinations of its compositional logico-pictorial figures and non-propositional forms are possible configurations of both propositions and the object of the Sublime . 9 Poetry is a composition structured with thought-figures. Poetry as antistructure is sublime. The Sublime Object is poetry as structure in its compositional arrangement. 10 The Sublime Object is its own dialectic. It exists as both objective thought figures and anti-propositional non-objectivity.
DOCILE REFRACTIONS, OBJECTS IN LAMENT James D. Poborsa
Like politicians, who relieve us of the bothersome responsibility of power, contemporary art, with its incoherent artifice, relieves us of the grasp of meaning through the spectacle of nonsense. This explains its proliferation: independent of any aesthetic value, it is ensured of prospering in function of its insignificance and vanity. Just as politicians persist despite the absence of any representation or credibility. Art and the art market therefore flourish to the extent that they decay: they are the modern charnel houses of culture and simulacra. -Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays No.10 Twisted Modernist Fantasies 扭曲的现代主义幻想 March 7, 2015 Wang Sishun Xiao Xiao Chen Xi Jason Mena Camille Ayme
If we adhere to Baudrillard’s callous rendering of the contemporary, with its monotonous schisms wrought upon an indifferent, docile public, what chasms remain to be wrenched open, and what spaces explored, amid the pitter patter of contemporary production? What mundane interventions enable us to extricate ourselves from the artifice of this superfluous deduction? Are we not all enmeshed in the fraud of the new - a cunning trick to alleviate our tactile boredoms and promote ourselves as inheritors of an elusive, undefinable modernity? Waiting in the open, there is always distance. Not between subject and object, for that distance has long since been obliterated, but between the trespass of the object within an ill-defined present, and its tendentious historical valuation. Codifying the transtemporal rupture that defines our aberrant modernity in epistemic terms is as useless as lamenting the decline of autochthonous forms of subjectivity. The levelling of time by the rapacious march of modernity relates an untimely mediation, in which language equivocates, and meaning dissolves. Within this transformation, definitions of value are as fraudulent as the pontifications of those for whom disruption, negation, and subversion form the benchmark of the new. While for Matei Calinescu, the avant-garde represented the ‘cutting edge of modernity,’ this over-determined category has surely by now been reduced to another empty signifier - an enervating, listless simulation of itself. If we are to move beyond this tedious disclosure, then we must rethink the category of the contemporary as a space within which subversion and reversion co-exist as so many refracted schisms, forcing us ruminate upon the desultory aftereffects of modernity’s neglect. The historians may lament the escalating divide and voluminous production within the contemporary arts, even if they unwittingly called it into being with their disciplinary categories, but trespassing upon history is the purchase of the contemporary. It’s ubiquity and diffusion disrupts its influence, though also forms the transtemporal subterfuge that disconnects each gaze from any singular reading, as with so many twisted modernist fantasies. In these open spaces, cautious interventions into the tedium of the quotidian remain our only possibility. The detached photographic gaze of Xiao Xiao 萧潇 presents us with a singular framing of the quotidian as the symbolic speculation of a dejected, remote interiority. Windows frame our forlorn gaze, glaring out at the munificent spectacle which looms beyond our vacant interiors, as spires of callous concrete fill the grid upon which we project our facile desires. As with so many vapid, thoughtless manifestations of the urban environment, we remain enthralled by these captivating visions, though always cautiously remote. This distance forms an opening into our errant interiority, as while outside there is progress, inside we lament. We lament how it frames us; how it forces us under it, scrapping pathos for power, and texture for the harshness of its form. This melancholic reflection need not be meticulously framed, for as with Chen Xi’s 陈熹 shattering of the visual field, the obfuscation of form gazes back at us, splintered and diffuse, as with so many of our illusions. When our objects gaze back, they draw us in, as with Camille Ayme’s tantalising spinning rims, revealing an enthralling, hallucinatory realism. With each rotation and subtle modulation of light, we are drawn further in. Captivating, they return visions of the urban sprawl they hide from our gaze, while performing an eidetic evisceration of all that enframes the absurdity of the everyday. And we cannot escape. For we have become our own burden, A representational, etymological farce, Progressing cautiously onwards… Ad infinitum… together with, time.
Previous Page: Camille Ayme Inglewood Pigment print on paper 2014 Above: Camille Ayme LAX kinematik Single Chanel HD Video 2015
ON FUKEIRON AND METAL Christopher Rey Perez
I haven’t revolted enough to warrant these accouterments and sex toys What I want to share are the minor details of customer dissatisfaction filtered through the metallurgy of time My plan is to arrange the modern out of sequence and find its place of convulsion and perversity In 1972 three members of the Japanese Red Army assisted in a plane hijacking at Lod Airport Let’s imagine that we are in an economy of morphemes, now what is your currency? Metal was involved in the attack as well as territory and reflection on failure in history Obviously, this violence shall be addressed but we should also focus on our wages Some say that victimhood designates goodness and that this twists modernity’s logic I bring this up because there are some languages available to metal just like there are ones that become totalities of form An indeterminate boundless lowrider shunting time-constraints from the reality-window suburbia that’s the confusion of (ahistorical) tongues It’s exciting to imagine and yet I worry about approximating the body-sensation of these excesses through art’s ability to outlast the dead What is propaganda? Let’s pretend the terrain of modernism is a theater evoking not only all the languages like Chinese and Swahili but also repeated iterations of my sex By referencing the body I am trying to find paralinguistic comparatives of vulgate A sheet of metal takes part in this exchange just like Japanese militant communists in Palestine The citizen somnambulates through the vulgus and I mean she flattens into the land’s urbanizing pace And I do not contend that pure, innocent communities were the prerogative of those whom today I call my ancestors, and from whom I am only descended after detour and voyage Open your browser Masao Adachi was a member of the Japanese Red Army but also a modernizer of filmic landscape theory you can view on YouTube Adachi’s theory of fukeiron claims that landscape itself exposes the structural violence of the political clime My fantasy also includes landscape as the declension made by modernization’s estranging tongue Yes I acknowledge a degree of relation to terror but we should also focus on how language necessitates hegemony and what’s unsaid in its gasp ‘I will get me cars and money but first I need metal Metal accumulating into the eventuality of something outside that window Because my love is for the ambiguity between struggle and fantasy My intentions sometimes belie the hormonal patina of the anxious; I began with the toil of orgasm and am now moving toward a being of violent spark fueled by the irreducible difference of vulgar bodies In The Red Army-PFLP: Declaration of World War, a kuffiyeh, a dog, the desert, appear In Twisted Modernist Fantasies, variations on these objects A whole landscape, in fact, the progress of its panorama
Text Contributions by: Jason Mena The Confusion of Tongues Pigment print on Paper 2010-2014
Cover: Aoto Oouchi Untitled 3D Sculpture 2015
Back Cover: Ophelia S. Chan Hiroshima Mon Amour Video 2015
Intelligentsia Zine No.2 July 2015 Matter Editors: Garcia Frankowski Design: Garcia Frankowski Cover: Aoto Oouchi Back Cover: Ophelia S. Chan First published in 2015 by Intelligentsia Gallery Dong Wang Hutong #11, Beijing intelligentsiagallery.com Thanks to: Michelle Garnaut; Geisel Cabrera; Hao Chen / 陈昊; Ophelia S. Chan, Jacob Dreyer, Christopher Rey Perez, James D. Poborsa, Zhang Yanping / 张燕平; Ronald Frankowski, Joao Dias Pereira, Christian Melz; Li Shan, Amanda Zhang / 小静; Kai Nan / 南 开; Guido Tesio; Annie Wang; Natasha Qin / 覃美律; Xu Ruiyu / 徐瑞钰 All contents, images and texts of this publication remain property of their respective authors.
Charles de Cloitre Christopher Rey Perez Garcia Frankowski Hao Chen 陈昊 Ophelia S. Chan 陳秀煒 James D. Poborsa
Contents: INTELLIGENTSIA MANIFESTO 智先 画廊 宣言 PROPOSITIONS TOWARD A PERFORMATIVE MATERIALISM by Christopher Rey Perez RENDER Interview with Aoto Oouchi MEMORY MONUMENTS, MASTERING MATTER. by Garcia Frankowski WIR FÖRDERN WENDIGKEIT!
by Daniel Stubenvoll TEN POINTS ON THE SUBLIME OBJECT by Garcia Frankowski TEN POINTS ON THE WORKS IN THE SUBLIME OBJECT by Garcia Frankowski DOCILE REFRACTIONS, OBJECTS IN LAMENT by James D. Poborsa ON FUKEIRON AND METAL by Chrisopher Rey Perez
Artists: Camille Ayme Chen Xi 陈熹 Garcia Frankowski Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski Daniel Stubenvoll Jason Mena Ophelia S. Chan 陳秀煒 Pavel Kiselev Ren Zhitian 任芷田 Troyka Union Olga Rodina, Anastasia Soboleva & Lena Tsibizova Wang Sishun 王思顺 Wang Guangle 王光乐 Wang Yifan 王一凡 Wu Ding 吴鼎 Xiao Xiao 萧潇