Contemporary Chinese Art- another kind of view
DSL Collection
Thing's Rights and Power of Ignorance
More information on the works
More information on the works
Wu Shanzhuan, Things Rights and Power of Ignorance, [Multimedia installation, 2006
"For a moment one feels tempted to think of having erroneously stepped into the backyard of the exhibition building landing up between the garbage bins. Realizing that not, the gaze falls upon an over-dimensioned kind of cushion piled up against the wall. Printed on the cushion, a large stamp-like pattern with a stylized waste bin in the middle reads: Wuquan - wuzhi de lichuang, which simply translates as The right of objects - The power of ignorance.
This installation is based on a revised version of the United Nation?s Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. In 1994 Wu and the Iclandic artist Inga Svala Thorsdottir, at that time both based in Hamburg, rewrote the thirty articles of the Declaration in a way that it now applies to living as well as to inanimate things, i.e. humans, animals, plants and basically everything else. Together with a seal-like logo Thing?s Right(s) they got these articles printed in Chinese and English on the garbage bins and thus created an installation that easily can be adjusted to varying exhibition surroundings. Furthermore it is in the spirit of the artist that visitors carry the bins around, and maybe even take them outside. The bilingual print and the mobility of the waste bins both correlate with the artist?s intention to grant as much access to these ideas as possible to as many people as can be reached. Although the rework of the declaration was already developed in the middle 1990s, the installation came to display in 2006 in the newly opened A Yellow Box in Qingpu: Contemporary Art and Architecture in a Chinese Space, which is a kind of outpost of the Visual Culture Research Centre of the China Academy of Art in the outskirts of Shanghai.
Wu Shanzhuan was one of the early avant-garde installation artists of the first generation. He came to prominence in 1987 with his work Red Humor - Red Characters. It consisted of a chamber, the walls of which were covered with writing. Like many works of the time, this still was a reflection on the Cultural Revolution, here on the infamous big character posters. Together with Xu Bing and Gu Wenda, Wu questioned the reliability and trustworthiness of language and writing. Whereas Gu and Xu created new and unintelligible characters, Wu combined and juxtaposed meaningless sentences while maintaining some of the outer form of the poster. Since then Wu has migrated to Germany, where he continued to explore the reliability of the word although this was not always obvious at first sight in his works, which might take the form of a drawing, a photograph, an installation or a performance. In 2005 Wu returned to China, where the Qingpu installation was one of his first public exhibitions."
Christof Buetnner
? When Wu Shanzhuan went to the West in 1990, he got to know Inga Svala Th6rsd6ttir in Reykjavik, Iceland. She had seen Marcel Duchamp's snow shovel in Paris, the title of which, ln Advance of the Broken Arm, delivered an ironic pseudo-explanation for its lack of function as a readymade.
Skeptical towards the public role of art, she thought that the museum and the public endowed works of art with a 'golden touch', which rendered them unusable. From that viewpoint, one should put Duchamp's Fauntoin into use again. 'The fountain needs water', was Wu Shanzhuan's laughing comment, 'but it's for men, not far women'. He proposed to take on that role. A short time later, they both moved to Hamburg to take up further studies at the Hochschule f?r Bildende Kunst.
Since the early 1960s, artist pairs have been nothing unusual in the West. Although there was an intense understanding over artistic concepts between Inga Svala and Wu, the way they worked also allowed personal artistic autonomy. Between 1990 and 2001, ideas moved back and forth between them with the rapidity of ping-pong balls, leaving their marks on mutual artistic concepts and exhibitions.
Early on in the course of Inga Svala and Wu's collaboration, their discussion about 'the state of things' condensed for them into the concept of Thing's Right(s). The starting point was the United Nation's 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, which was triggered by the shock of contemporary history. As the preamble goes, 'disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind'. It was now time for a declaration of Thing's Right(s) in order to combat the 'disregard and contempt' of their rights. This idea was reflected in many of Wu and Inga Svala's artistic projects. In 1995 they drew up an official declaration of Thing's Right(s) and worked intensively on the translation of Human Rights into Thing's Right(s). This treatise appeared in 1999 as a miniature codex, which could fit like a secret dispatch into the smallest purse.
On the cover was the Thing's Right(s) logo, affixed with Shanzhuan's 'the perfect bracket', and on the back was the copyright: '? Thor's Daughter's Pulverization Service/Red Humour International'.
One might think it a neo-Dadaist prank to simply replace each mention of 'ail human beings', 'everyone', 'no one', 'man and woman', 'family', 'people' and 'human personality' in the Declaration of Human Rights with 'thing', 'things' or 'all things'. The artists, though, as the self-appointed declarers of Thing's Right(s), carefully analyzed it all, laid out glossaries, searched for synonyms and explained the relation of Thing's Right(s) with individual art projects.
This undertaking took months, and it became evident that Thing's Right(s) carried and spurred on almost ail of their artistic activities. The mini-dialogue 'Wu says: "Sister today no water." / Sister replies: "Powdered water." , led to the project Second Hand Water - Second Hand Reality, which overlapped with Thing's Right(s). I will therefore use Thing's Right(s) as the starting point for this account of the artists' collaboration.
The language in which the things get a chance to speak is much more arduous than that of the Declaration of Human Rights. It is difficult for things to operate with the speech of humans, and the authors, who have appointed themselves as spokespeople for the rights of things, don't cut it short with commanding eloquence. Let's quote 'Article 1 ': 'All of it is being been at large and identical in matter position and right(s). All of it is being endowed with a matter of course and existence and should be being acted towards one and another in a matter of object hood.' Thing's Right(s) is drawn up in an antiquated language; 'is being been' instead of 'has been' or 'is being'. Clumsy past tense forms also mark the following article: 'Shall be being made', 'shall not be being', 'shall be being been', 'has being had'. This antiquation refers to two important factors: on one hand, Thing's Right(s), although formulated later than the Declaration of Human Rights, is older. This can be gathered from Wu Shanzhuan's
Tourist Information: 'Extra ( ... ) he (Wu) and many other persons came to earth later than many other creatures.' On the other hand, the gerund 'being' corresponds with the 'inertia' of the things, which don't just move from one place to the next, unless in a process of 'effective change'.
With the help of the artists' glossary, one comes closer to the differences between Human Rights and Thing's Right(s). 'Born Free' becomes 'being at large', 'freedom' becomes 'inertia', 'slavery' becomes 'monotony or monitude', making one think of mono-cultures. 'Degradation' becomes 'over ?object' and 'under-object', our schism between upheld fetishes and worthless stuff. 'Exile' becomes 'ejection', our modern problem with waste. 'Unemployment' becomes 'surrounding less', a non-site of the 'thing(s)'. 'Development' becomes 'evolution', 'human persona lit y' becomes 'matter of material objectivity'. (Is it really 50 bad for 'human beings' to be 'objects' as well?) 'To enjoy the arts' becomes the somewhat surprising 'to be effective being of the forms', the original 'affective' becoming 'effective'. Looking at Thing's Right(s) like one looks in the shards of a distorting mirror, one sees oneself observed from the perspective of things. The translators' later idea - to replace the formulation 'ail things' with 'ail of it' - stresses with the 'it' the 'each one', thereby gaining rights for each and every thing.
The things have forms of organization and specific qualities. 'At large' is their 'matter position'. They speak through 'vibration', possess instead of religion a 'specific gravity' , their 'materiality' is their 'limitation of the power of being'. They have 'complex directions' and can follow out 'motional acts', as well as sustain 'passive effects'. They can 'concentrate' or 'connect' and share with us the 'universal and identical space-time'. They have 'invisible' and 'untouchable functions', a very explosive problem of modern processes. The 'need of mattering' is humorously conferred on them, and their ability of 'surfacing', 'containing' and 'timing' is spoken of. Institutionally, they are organized in 'The World's Thing ship', a parallel to the United Nations. In this 'Thing ship' there is a 'relationship of existences', 'identical reflection of existences' and a 'resisting over- and under-position'. Their 'at large' is 'being within everywhere'. They have 'the right(s) of active being' and the 'non ?compassable organic effects', and of course a 'relationship of being together', as well as the 'right to an objectivity' and 'to change its object of full time'. They are' entitled to reflection', a matter process of their 'vibration' and have the 'right to ho Id up appearance' - summa sum arum: the right to an 'at large evolution of its objectivity'.
Once one has read into this arduous but fascinating stammering of Thing's Right(s), questions and memories arise. First, in one of Honor? Daumier's lithographs from around 1870, civil judges are portrayed as they sit in judgement on things with unspeakable zealousness. What crime had these things? ?
committed ? in question are social - if they are guilty, more like anti-social - things, such as kitchen and household utensils, pots, pans, brooms and shovels. Had they refused to serve, behaved in an unmarketable way; had they disturbed human self-satisfaction, were their outclassed users affected? in any case, after the replacement of the philosophy of nature with the natural sciences, the rights and forms of contracts of things fell into oblivion.
Secondly, over 2000 years ago, Lucretius expounded the forms of the con tract with nature in his philosophy of poem 'De Rerum Natura'.
This highly modern 'alliance of nature' begins with particles, which, whizzing through empty space with an incredible velocity, either cause disastrous cosmic accidents or, in successful collisions, make nuclear marriages possible, more highly organized, material contractual forms a permanent process, which leads to the rights and contracts of human beings. Nothing is insured in the process, everything can dissolve again. However, as long as human beings don't speed up this process, the cosmic contract-carousel could still turn a long astronomical while. According to Lucretius, there were rights and contracts between things as well as between human beings; the structure was the same, only the latter caused so many problems.
Thirdly, in the past, it was dangerous to interfere with the rights of nature. The gods were observing and demanded heavy sacrifice were those rights to be injured. Hence, one of the central tasks of the process of civilization was damage limitation - restricting the amount of sacrifice which had to be offered. Let us refer to the damage limitations that led to an astonishing compromise between Thing's Right(s) and Human Rights. Ovid's Metamorphoses tells the story of the Roman priest Numa wringing limitations on the degree of sacrifice out of Jupiter, the god of thunder. Numa handles the god's atavistic, unlimited power with clever displays of human wit and comes to damage limitations with a single request: 'Instead of paying sacrifice we demand the use,' in legal terms, 'usufruct', of natural things. Having the use of something does presuppose maintenance and conservation. That is how the idea of a balance between the rights of humans and of things originated. in the declaration of Thing's Right(s) this intention was updated: forma (form), with the more pointed Formosa, was a Latin word for 'beauty'. Art, articulated in Thing's Right(s) as 'to be effective being of forms', bridges the ages in a remarkable way. 'Nothing can escape from form', wrote Wu in his Tourist Information.
By Ursula Panhans-B?hler
Ursula Panhans-B?hler 1 Wu Shanzhuan's Red Humour International and Inga Svala Thorsd?ttir's Thor's Daughter's Pulverization Service
"For a moment one feels tempted to think of having erroneously stepped into the backyard of the exhibition building landing up between the garbage bins. Realizing that not, the gaze falls upon an over-dimensioned kind of cushion piled up against the wall. Printed on the cushion, a large stamp-like pattern with a stylized waste bin in the middle reads: Wuquan - wuzhi de lichuang, which simply translates as The right of objects - The power of ignorance.
This installation is based on a revised version of the United Nation?s Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. In 1994 Wu and the Iclandic artist Inga Svala Thorsdottir, at that time both based in Hamburg, rewrote the thirty articles of the Declaration in a way that it now applies to living as well as to inanimate things, i.e. humans, animals, plants and basically everything else. Together with a seal-like logo Thing?s Right(s) they got these articles printed in Chinese and English on the garbage bins and thus created an installation that easily can be adjusted to varying exhibition surroundings. Furthermore it is in the spirit of the artist that visitors carry the bins around, and maybe even take them outside. The bilingual print and the mobility of the waste bins both correlate with the artist?s intention to grant as much access to these ideas as possible to as many people as can be reached. Although the rework of the declaration was already developed in the middle 1990s, the installation came to display in 2006 in the newly opened A Yellow Box in Qingpu: Contemporary Art and Architecture in a Chinese Space, which is a kind of outpost of the Visual Culture Research Centre of the China Academy of Art in the outskirts of Shanghai.
Wu Shanzhuan was one of the early avant-garde installation artists of the first generation. He came to prominence in 1987 with his work Red Humor - Red Characters. It consisted of a chamber, the walls of which were covered with writing. Like many works of the time, this still was a reflection on the Cultural Revolution, here on the infamous big character posters. Together with Xu Bing and Gu Wenda, Wu questioned the reliability and trustworthiness of language and writing. Whereas Gu and Xu created new and unintelligible characters, Wu combined and juxtaposed meaningless sentences while maintaining some of the outer form of the poster. Since then Wu has migrated to Germany, where he continued to explore the reliability of the word although this was not always obvious at first sight in his works, which might take the form of a drawing, a photograph, an installation or a performance. In 2005 Wu returned to China, where the Qingpu installation was one of his first public exhibitions."
Christof Buetnner
? When Wu Shanzhuan went to the West in 1990, he got to know Inga Svala Th6rsd6ttir in Reykjavik, Iceland. She had seen Marcel Duchamp's snow shovel in Paris, the title of which, ln Advance of the Broken Arm, delivered an ironic pseudo-explanation for its lack of function as a readymade.
Skeptical towards the public role of art, she thought that the museum and the public endowed works of art with a 'golden touch', which rendered them unusable. From that viewpoint, one should put Duchamp's Fauntoin into use again. 'The fountain needs water', was Wu Shanzhuan's laughing comment, 'but it's for men, not far women'. He proposed to take on that role. A short time later, they both moved to Hamburg to take up further studies at the Hochschule f?r Bildende Kunst.
Since the early 1960s, artist pairs have been nothing unusual in the West. Although there was an intense understanding over artistic concepts between Inga Svala and Wu, the way they worked also allowed personal artistic autonomy. Between 1990 and 2001, ideas moved back and forth between them with the rapidity of ping-pong balls, leaving their marks on mutual artistic concepts and exhibitions.
Early on in the course of Inga Svala and Wu's collaboration, their discussion about 'the state of things' condensed for them into the concept of Thing's Right(s). The starting point was the United Nation's 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, which was triggered by the shock of contemporary history. As the preamble goes, 'disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind'. It was now time for a declaration of Thing's Right(s) in order to combat the 'disregard and contempt' of their rights. This idea was reflected in many of Wu and Inga Svala's artistic projects. In 1995 they drew up an official declaration of Thing's Right(s) and worked intensively on the translation of Human Rights into Thing's Right(s). This treatise appeared in 1999 as a miniature codex, which could fit like a secret dispatch into the smallest purse.
On the cover was the Thing's Right(s) logo, affixed with Shanzhuan's 'the perfect bracket', and on the back was the copyright: '? Thor's Daughter's Pulverization Service/Red Humour International'.
One might think it a neo-Dadaist prank to simply replace each mention of 'ail human beings', 'everyone', 'no one', 'man and woman', 'family', 'people' and 'human personality' in the Declaration of Human Rights with 'thing', 'things' or 'all things'. The artists, though, as the self-appointed declarers of Thing's Right(s), carefully analyzed it all, laid out glossaries, searched for synonyms and explained the relation of Thing's Right(s) with individual art projects.
This undertaking took months, and it became evident that Thing's Right(s) carried and spurred on almost ail of their artistic activities. The mini-dialogue 'Wu says: "Sister today no water." / Sister replies: "Powdered water." , led to the project Second Hand Water - Second Hand Reality, which overlapped with Thing's Right(s). I will therefore use Thing's Right(s) as the starting point for this account of the artists' collaboration.
The language in which the things get a chance to speak is much more arduous than that of the Declaration of Human Rights. It is difficult for things to operate with the speech of humans, and the authors, who have appointed themselves as spokespeople for the rights of things, don't cut it short with commanding eloquence. Let's quote 'Article 1 ': 'All of it is being been at large and identical in matter position and right(s). All of it is being endowed with a matter of course and existence and should be being acted towards one and another in a matter of object hood.' Thing's Right(s) is drawn up in an antiquated language; 'is being been' instead of 'has been' or 'is being'. Clumsy past tense forms also mark the following article: 'Shall be being made', 'shall not be being', 'shall be being been', 'has being had'. This antiquation refers to two important factors: on one hand, Thing's Right(s), although formulated later than the Declaration of Human Rights, is older. This can be gathered from Wu Shanzhuan's
Tourist Information: 'Extra ( ... ) he (Wu) and many other persons came to earth later than many other creatures.' On the other hand, the gerund 'being' corresponds with the 'inertia' of the things, which don't just move from one place to the next, unless in a process of 'effective change'.
With the help of the artists' glossary, one comes closer to the differences between Human Rights and Thing's Right(s). 'Born Free' becomes 'being at large', 'freedom' becomes 'inertia', 'slavery' becomes 'monotony or monitude', making one think of mono-cultures. 'Degradation' becomes 'over ?object' and 'under-object', our schism between upheld fetishes and worthless stuff. 'Exile' becomes 'ejection', our modern problem with waste. 'Unemployment' becomes 'surrounding less', a non-site of the 'thing(s)'. 'Development' becomes 'evolution', 'human persona lit y' becomes 'matter of material objectivity'. (Is it really 50 bad for 'human beings' to be 'objects' as well?) 'To enjoy the arts' becomes the somewhat surprising 'to be effective being of the forms', the original 'affective' becoming 'effective'. Looking at Thing's Right(s) like one looks in the shards of a distorting mirror, one sees oneself observed from the perspective of things. The translators' later idea - to replace the formulation 'ail things' with 'ail of it' - stresses with the 'it' the 'each one', thereby gaining rights for each and every thing.
The things have forms of organization and specific qualities. 'At large' is their 'matter position'. They speak through 'vibration', possess instead of religion a 'specific gravity' , their 'materiality' is their 'limitation of the power of being'. They have 'complex directions' and can follow out 'motional acts', as well as sustain 'passive effects'. They can 'concentrate' or 'connect' and share with us the 'universal and identical space-time'. They have 'invisible' and 'untouchable functions', a very explosive problem of modern processes. The 'need of mattering' is humorously conferred on them, and their ability of 'surfacing', 'containing' and 'timing' is spoken of. Institutionally, they are organized in 'The World's Thing ship', a parallel to the United Nations. In this 'Thing ship' there is a 'relationship of existences', 'identical reflection of existences' and a 'resisting over- and under-position'. Their 'at large' is 'being within everywhere'. They have 'the right(s) of active being' and the 'non ?compassable organic effects', and of course a 'relationship of being together', as well as the 'right to an objectivity' and 'to change its object of full time'. They are' entitled to reflection', a matter process of their 'vibration' and have the 'right to ho Id up appearance' - summa sum arum: the right to an 'at large evolution of its objectivity'.
Once one has read into this arduous but fascinating stammering of Thing's Right(s), questions and memories arise. First, in one of Honor? Daumier's lithographs from around 1870, civil judges are portrayed as they sit in judgement on things with unspeakable zealousness. What crime had these things? ?
committed ? in question are social - if they are guilty, more like anti-social - things, such as kitchen and household utensils, pots, pans, brooms and shovels. Had they refused to serve, behaved in an unmarketable way; had they disturbed human self-satisfaction, were their outclassed users affected? in any case, after the replacement of the philosophy of nature with the natural sciences, the rights and forms of contracts of things fell into oblivion.
Secondly, over 2000 years ago, Lucretius expounded the forms of the con tract with nature in his philosophy of poem 'De Rerum Natura'.
This highly modern 'alliance of nature' begins with particles, which, whizzing through empty space with an incredible velocity, either cause disastrous cosmic accidents or, in successful collisions, make nuclear marriages possible, more highly organized, material contractual forms a permanent process, which leads to the rights and contracts of human beings. Nothing is insured in the process, everything can dissolve again. However, as long as human beings don't speed up this process, the cosmic contract-carousel could still turn a long astronomical while. According to Lucretius, there were rights and contracts between things as well as between human beings; the structure was the same, only the latter caused so many problems.
Thirdly, in the past, it was dangerous to interfere with the rights of nature. The gods were observing and demanded heavy sacrifice were those rights to be injured. Hence, one of the central tasks of the process of civilization was damage limitation - restricting the amount of sacrifice which had to be offered. Let us refer to the damage limitations that led to an astonishing compromise between Thing's Right(s) and Human Rights. Ovid's Metamorphoses tells the story of the Roman priest Numa wringing limitations on the degree of sacrifice out of Jupiter, the god of thunder. Numa handles the god's atavistic, unlimited power with clever displays of human wit and comes to damage limitations with a single request: 'Instead of paying sacrifice we demand the use,' in legal terms, 'usufruct', of natural things. Having the use of something does presuppose maintenance and conservation. That is how the idea of a balance between the rights of humans and of things originated. in the declaration of Thing's Right(s) this intention was updated: forma (form), with the more pointed Formosa, was a Latin word for 'beauty'. Art, articulated in Thing's Right(s) as 'to be effective being of forms', bridges the ages in a remarkable way. 'Nothing can escape from form', wrote Wu in his Tourist Information.
By Ursula Panhans-B?hler
Ursula Panhans-B?hler 1 Wu Shanzhuan's Red Humour International and Inga Svala Thorsd?ttir's Thor's Daughter's Pulverization Service
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Wu Shanzhuan, Inga Svala Thorsdottir