17. Douglas Gordon, Every time you think of me, you die, a little (2003)

EVERY TIME YOU THINK OF ME, I DIE, A LITTLE(Exhibition View)

THE MEMENTO MORI IN THE WORKS OF ANDY WARHOL AND DOUGLAS GORDON

GEGENWART

28.09.2013–27.04.2014

he exhibition investigated the death motif, memento mori in contemporary art. Revolve around Andy Warhol and Douglas Gordon’s works (along with some younger artist like Wolfgang Tillmans). I couldn’t find too much information on this show but this exhibition view intrigued me, at first I was confused by ‘I’ in the exhibition title and ‘you’ in the text here. This sort of subtle cunning and humour are not rare in his practice. The switch of ‘you’ to ‘I’ indicate the interrelationship between self and other. I immediately recognise the interweaving state this text suggest, as what Freud explained about the tasks of mourning. This is a process of withdrawing, or attaching in some other cases, libido from or to the dead object.

Déjà-Vu, 2000

Video, 3 projections, black and white, and sound

His other works like Déjà-Vu (2000) where the character was trapped in a relentless retelling of his doomed fate reminded me of how Foster commented on Warhol’s ‘I like boring things’ and coined ‘traumatic realism’. However in Douglas’s work, the vast usage of found footage in cinema and his great interest in deconstructing the (fake) magic of cinema made it a ‘traumatic alternative realism’.

16. Bill Viola, Tiny Deaths (1993)

Bill Viola,

Tiny Deaths (video still), 1993

Video, 3 projections, black and white and sound

The haunting images of death

The transformation from existence to none, the diminishment of the physicality...

De-contextualization in order to foreground the vicissitude.

Distance and nearness are attributes of bodies The journeyings of spirits are after another sort. You journeyed from the embryo state to rationality without footsteps or stages or change of place, The journey of the soul involves not time and place. And my body learnt from the soul its mode of journeying, Now my body has renounced the bodily mode of journeying. It journeys secretly and without form, though under a form. 

Jallaludin Rumi (1207-73), The Masnavi [extracted in Robert Violette ed., Bill Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, London 1995] 

The body as the unconscious. The body as mind. Landscape as the body. The mind as landscape. The dissolution of the self in the breakdown of inside/outside. The skin as conceptual membrane. Pain as knowledge. Pain as beauty. Satisfaction as stupification (as catatonia). The mortification of the appetites.

Bill Viola, note,1 January 1987 [in Robert Violette ed., Bill Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, London 1995]

15. Sophie Calle, ‘Rachel, Monique’

Sophie Calle,

VIEW OF THE EXHIBITION "RACHEL, MONIQUE, 2010",

Friche du Palais de Tokyo Paris (France), 2010

Extremely touched by this body of works. All over the world in Venice, New York and Paris, there were several edition of ‘Rachel, Monique’, among them my fav is the one in Palais de Tokyo. It was held in the basement which was still under construction during that time, for the duration of only 8 days. Spaces like church or a white cube gallery might seem to be a more suitable setting for installing works mourning for the death of the artist. But here in this un-facilitated and raw construction site, it’s eerie that senses of decaying and thriving are in the air at the same time. It is a state of yet-to-be-done. Whether it’s going to be built up, or torn down is frozen in these short eight days, leaving a great imaginative potential for the viewers. It is an open text for reading.

I guess the agony I feel in this work is the background story for rationalising this work. Calle suggested in the interview at Paula cooper Gallery, and also in some documentations you could find in the exhibition. That this is a mother that enjoyed attentions, longed for being the subject of her daughter’s artistic practice, and at the same time, always not satisfied of her short appearance in her works. If she was not like this, she would never make works that utilising her death. However, in comparison to the craving for such attention, now what presented here is a fulfilled space for such wishes but also an absence of her life. This made me very sentimental about this exhibition.

The video Impossible to catch death shot at the deathbed is a powerful work. This was firstly shown in 2007 Venice Biennale in her ‘Take Care of Yourself’. It didn’t directly affiliate to that project but at the persuasion of the curator, she presented this work. What touched me is she mentioned she couldn’t watch this work (surprisingly like Song Dong’s forever sealed videotape of touching his father’s corpse), when she went through the post-production, it was acceptable for viewing, as during this process it was dehumanised, impersonalised. But when she finished installing, she couldn’t watch it again, she left it there for others to watch.

This sense of being unable to watch is what I was addressing in my work I don’t see, I don’t remember, I don’t mourn. I very much can relate. Beyond that, I realised the power of video in such subject matter. In another interview (https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/8992/1/sophie-calles-rachel-monique), she mentioned we are so inhabited of accepting the description of death and bereavement in literature, painting and even photography, but ‘Yet, with a moving image it is different. In the case of my mother’s video, perhaps it was the fact that at the beginning she isn’t dead, but then, she is. At the beginning, if you look closely, you can see her breathing for the last time.’

This enlightens me a lot, as video holds the time-based quality of documenting the presence, not only at that very moment, but in a moving, changing fashion. Which death in itself means an interrupt of changing, the end of it, an absolute static. There’s this conflict of the natures in two mediums (if death can be seen as a medium).

Image courtesy:

https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Sophie_Calle/1/view-of-the-exhibition-rachel-monique-2010-at-friche-du-palais-de-tokyo-paris-france-2010/1000002753