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The Frontline embarks on an ambitious project of building a kiln and a kitchen near the prefabricated house of the Wang family. Through this project, the members of the Frontline thoroughly change the spatial attributes of the protest site by rearranging the use of the space. They kindle a warm fire on the pile of debris, and thereby make the protest site a place for a more extensive public discussion and richer imagination. In addition, the Frontline continuously conducts guerrilla warfare at every protest site. Such a keeping moving mode further develops the power of inspiring public resistance, namely a freely and comprehensively disseminating power that constitutes the positive subjectivity of the resistance.
Soft Revolution Strategies of the “Cooking at the Frontline”
Strategy Four: Interweave Words, Images, and Actions
by Tang Kai-Jun
First published in Chinese on Very View 06
Cooking at the Frontline Member (Source: Cooking at the Frontline blog: http://cooking-at-the-front-line.blogspot.tw/)
“Supermarkets replaced orchards and convenient stores replaced governments. Uninteresting and tedious works day after day eliminate the differences between us. We work as machines that have no rights to stop operating until the moment we fall down and are abandoned together with other components. We are deprived of our dreams and desires by loans in exchange for a cage that allows us to comfortably masturbate in front of the world through a screen and wait for the boost of the cage’s price…If you find all of these as extremely absurd, join us on the frontline to reseize our power of life and the environment that belongs to us.” —Cooking at the Frontline
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it creates a representative who analyzes and remonstrates about the problems of the modern society. Those who wear masks appear in every occasion of resistance and speak for the disadvantaged groups. Second, it symbolizes the power of resistance. Third, it creates a sense of mystery that attracts a greater number of people to know more about the Frontline. Fourth, as the Frontline claims, it creates the notion that everyone can be a revolutionist. As a result, masks become a symbol of the artistic group and cruise around the sites where resistance takes place. We must understand that “the faces under the masks represent nothing. The Frontline is nothing but a belief.” Anyone who wears a mask can be a member of the Frontline. The only thing in common among the members is their passionate devotion to revolution.
The Frontline keeps using its blog and Facebook page to embed various metaphors and stories in their recipes and transmit their ideals to revolutionists and the audience with images, words, and music. The lyrics of “A Lifelong Party” read as the following: “Before the appearance of dinosaurs / we organized a party / Everyone who attends the party wears a mask / The fire in the kiln keeps burning for three days and three nights /…/ Several generations elapsed / Nowadays we meet at the frontline / and recall the forgotten language in a trance / Several generations elapsed / We meet here / and gradually retrieve our lost intuition / With the wine brewed next year / and the bread named Tomorrow / we celebrate your dream fulfilled yesterday.” The lyrics explicate all the actions and expectations of the Frontline so far. Filled with emotions and imaginations, the lyrics affect and connect the feelings of the public and audience on-site. The action of “15 Kilogram Flour, 900 Gram Yeast, and a Poem” also presents a series of touching words and images: “…All the oppressed / defend your cherished things with your life…Come on, all the oppressed, we resemble the rising dough / in the age when there was no convenient commercial-use yeast, we must carefully treat every step from the cultivation of the yeast and the development of the old dough starter to the control over temperature and humidity /…/ Ah! The dough! The yeast that helps you ferment has expanded /…/ Ah! The dough! Decide quickly to rise well.” These lines of the poem demonstrate the importance of self-reliant production against the capitalist mode of production and encourage the oppressed to stand up and resist the oppressor. The language, actions, and images created by the Frontline keep impacting the concept of revolution in the mind of ordinary people, and thereby make social movements no longer serious and unfamiliar to them. The language possesses the power of inspiration and expression, and is therefore capable of creating a new life and a new production relationship. The poetic and metaphorical pages of recipes, together with the sophisticatedly designed images, implicitly indicate the accusation against and contemplation of contemporary social life. In the meantime, they demonstrate the support for the victims of urban renewal, those who are forced to move due to the eastward shift of the railway tracks, the indigenous peoples who lose their traditional realms, migrant workers, new inhabitants, homosexuals, the streams blocked by dams, fallow lands, and the people who cannot afford to buy a house. This is a soft resistance power expressed in a way rich in emotion. In the intertwined writing of actions, words, and images, the term “revolution” acquires multiple meanings. The basis of social movements is therefore shifted to the connection of feelings and the search for new public relations.
Strategy Two: Restructure the Meaning of Labor The most distinctive characteristic of contemporary capitalism is that all the people living in the capitalist system are convinced that their fate is linked with capitalists. Governments and capitalists use various means to force us to believe that everything is so far so good and there is nothing to be resisted. All we have to do is obey the trend and the given game rules. In face of the pressure in modern life, we have no additional energy to ponder over the degree of absurdity and the possible change in the inequality in labor market, the guidelines of real estate market, the elimination system of capitalism, and the fact that everything can be bought over by capitalism and the market. Around August 2010, the artistic group “Cooking at the Frontline” was established. With a specific way of writing and action, it appeals to the public for adopting extraordinary resistant strategies against the absurdity and inequality nowadays progressively. Strategy One: A Public Revolution—“We can be anyone” “We / are not terrorists / but disadvantaged nobodies / we put on masks to show you our existence and voice / we can be anyone.” —Cooking at the Frontline It is a revolution in which the disadvantaged nobodies confront state apparatus and capitalism. Masks are the must-have when the Frontline is in action. The mask conveys multiple meanings. First,
p5 Listen to the Nuclear Power—The Sound of Resistance
In a capitalist society, the proletariat refers to the workers directly or indirectly exploited and dominated by the capitalists. A given set of rules and relationships of production dictate all forms of labor. The Frontline’s actions such as “Let Me Cook a Meal for You” and the construction and function of its kiln no. 14 redefine the meaning of “labor.” In the action of “The Guerilla Recipes: The Ginseng Vegetable Rice for Urban Renewal,” the members of the Frontline use basic tools to shed sunlight again on the vestibule of the Wang family’s house in Shilin destroyed by excavators. The goal of the painstaking project is to cook a meal for the Wang family and the protesters. During the construction of the kiln, the mode of their labor no longer passively follows the capitalist definition of production. The Frontline not only attempts to break the dominant economic and social rules through its labor mode, but also tries to transcend every regulatory dimensions of modern capitalism, and thereby produces the power of emancipation. It is an immediate social force as well as a concept of collective action. The products of the Frontline’s labor are not commodities or objects with economic values anymore, but a posture and power of resistance. Such a distinctive type of labor becomes the basis for the formulation of a new concept, which demonstrates autonomous productivity that refuses to serve the capitalist society. The Frontline constructs its subjectivity through its own labor. Meanwhile, it develops an alternative way of life. Strategy Three: Change the Attributes of the Protest Site
Tang Kai-Jun, art critic and curator, obtained her Masters degree from Taipei National University of the Arts in Art History.
1. Hereafter, “the Frontline.” 2. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 2001, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chinese edition is translated by Li Shangyuan, published by Businessweekly in 2002.
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Illusion, Image, Reality—Wang Ya-Hui’s “Leaf Holes” and “When I look at the moon” by Kuan-Ting Wang First published in Chinese on Very View 07
Wang Ya-Hui’s “Leaf Holes” and “When I look at the moon” are now exhibiting in “True Illusion, Illusory Truth—Contemporary Art Beyond Ordinary Experience” at Taipei Fine Arts Museum. In these two works, Wang uses strange images to disturb our visual perception, stirs up the inconsistencies of perception, reality, and image through illusion, and creates another kind of image reality.
In the evening, beside the riverbank, on the winding road in the neighborhood, in the sky the bright full moon hangs. In “When I look at the moon”, audiences are first greeted by such a familiar scene: on the way returning home or towards a certain place, people either stop to look at the round, bright full moon in the sky, or take a quick peek and continue on. This familiar scene is first broken by the unnatural rippling of the moon’s reflection on the river; then, the moon begins to skip unusually in the evening sky. At the same time, a swinging thread can be vaguely made out under the moon. This is when people realize this is a fictional moon, a balloon illuminated by spotlight. In the end, the artist enters the scene and cuts off the thread tied to the balloon, allowing the fabricated moon to fly rapidly out of the frame, which ends the breaking disturbance, and the scene once again returns to stability and familiarity.
In this moving image, the most surprising segment (or the most unnerving segment) is when we realize that fictional moon is actually our misrecognition, and the problem hidden behind this misrecognition is: why were we so sure that the luminous body was, as a matter-of-fact, the moon, rather than any other possible object? With this question, we look back and reexamine the sense of surprise we have watching this work, and discover that there are two aspects to this shock. First, it is misrecognition of the superficial appearance that originates from visual similarity; second, it is misrecognition of memory, as our recognition of a certain thing and the feelings that ensue all come from a certain impression or a certain topical framework that has deposited and solidified in our memory. To us, whether it is our own physical experience or a scene we have seen via other media, all the images of “When I look at the moon” originate from a familiar scene, a scene that summons memory, so that we can recognize the elements in the scene without even thinking. But in these images, memory and familiarity become the main causes of misrecognition.
Familiarity and clarity with the world are an important aspect of daily life, allowing our body to participate in the world coherently. With familiarity, we do not need to put in extra attention when our eyes glide over objects; however, this has also compressed the significance of the objects, turning them into invisible presences as our body participates in the world. In “When I look at the moon”, when the
p6 Let’s Talk About Feelings during “Trial Period”
balloon drastically moves, this artificial moon becomes the crack between memory and recognition, lacerating the familiarity and peace that exist in daily life.
Another work, “Leaf Holes”, is a series of digital images. Wang Ya-Hui places leaves with holes in geometric shapes in front of buildings, so the viewers can see the buildings through the holes. The images of the buildings are beyond focus and are rather blurry compared to the leaves. These still life pictures seem to be synthetized collage images at first; but when looked at closely, viewers will realize that the buildings are actually behind the leaves, far in the back, just that when people look at these pictures, they have the illusion that these buildings are in front of the holes of the leaves. The spatial distance between objects is eliminated in flat images, or even, this spatial distance is overturned in the images. Wang is not creating simulated images of certain objects, and the illusion created by the images is no longer a kind of visual perception that simulates reality; rather, through the images, a new spatial feeling is created, and the images themselves have become another reality.
It could be said that “Leaf Holes” is an alternative reality created through illusion, and as we look at these pictures, we experience the sentiment of our thoughts and perceptions breaking apart (or the breaking apart of our internal consciousness). Even though, we can still tell that the buildings are behind the leaf holes a long distance back, since we can simultaneously see the buildings in their entireness outside of the holes and the blurry images of the buildings, but when we switch our focus onto the holes, we cannot overturn the visual sensation that the buildings seem to be in front of the holes.
“Leaf Holes” and “When I look at the moon” display the instability and complexity of the visible world. In everyday life, perceptions should maintain a harmonic relationship with our knowledge of things; the operation of our body and mind always tries to overlook the instability and complexity. Nonetheless, by generating experience of illusion, Wang’s works break the harmony between perceptions and the real world, and shatter our transparent relationship with the world and the compression of significance. Through the inharmonic slide between image and reality, the visible becomes suspicious, thus creating in the interface of image an alternative reality that stings everyday knowledge.
Installing exhibition in VT Artsalon Taipei, Taiwan
Kuan-Ting Wang, currently freelance writer, graduated from Fu Jen Catholic University Department of Sociology, and obtained her Masters degree from Graduate institute of Sociology, Tunghai University .