艺术家苍鑫于2000年开始的行为摄影“身份互换”系列就体现了对隐含于风格和形式之外的现实社会的诠释。他的行为“过程”既将“自我”与“他者”并置于同一空间,又使主观与客观形成了一种互动关系。在人类学方法的基础上,他以游客身份去接触生活和工作在不同社区的人,进行社会调查和编码。在对话和交流过程中,他与不同职业、不同身份、不同阶级、不同性别的人、不同年龄的人合影,他们包括:拾破烂者、饭店酒楼漂亮的女服务员、铜铁工人、厨师、医院大夫、大学生、京剧演员、精神病人、门卫、屠夫等等。他采用了非常简单的合影方法来书写着艺术理念。艺术家与他者的合影组成了多元社会的连接点。苍鑫的艺术观念可以追溯两个源头:一个是现代艺术鼻祖马塞尔·杜尚的男扮女装;一个是中国“文革”时期流行的合影。其实,所不同的是,苍鑫的行为摄影将我们的视线带入真实的社会空间和日常生活空间。他的作品意义在于,艺术创作不再是解决和谐的审美,而是直接把艺术转化为人的生存状态,生命状态再转化成艺术,并直接介入了不同“他者”的生活空间和社会空间。因此,在这些图像中,可以认识和解读人的精神状态与日常生活空间及社会环境的关系。
人的身份衡量以服饰作为基本的标志和象征,尤其体现于各种各样的职业,那么,职业服装也规定了不同人在社会中的地位、阶级和等级。这些规定无形地控制着每个人的生活空间或社会空间。虽然艺术家穿上了他者具有“规定性”和象征职业特点的服装,自己装扮成他者的身份,而他者脱去职业装,裸露的身体并没有改变其固有的身份。因为这是艺术家观念在现实社会中的虚拟和预设的自我与真实的他者。
苍鑫的行为则通过艺术实践关注到了空间生产、身份的可变性。这些互动的结果就导致愈来愈不稳定和难以预言。每个人在日常生活中都在翻译文化差异,艺术家将空间化批评概念融入到社会生活,将社会境况和精神主观性之间相结合,重新写作和再规划了社会空间,他的作品意义就在于诠释了社会空间功能作为身体活动或表现语境的空间转变为主观性和精神状态生产的空间。这种空间生产最终还是在社会关系中发生着作用。空间实践包涵了各个方面的社会元素和实践活动。对混杂性的认识,并非像其他人那样,他并不是在永恒价值范畴内界定文化身份,而是强调了文化和身份总是处于流动的和转化的状态。艺术家正是在这样的基础上不断地转译自我与他者的生存状态秩序、平等、阶层、混乱、虚弱、无力和混合等重新解码和编码。这里,我仅以例举一件作品来说明。苍鑫探访了一位长期在城市中的拾废品者,他穿上了拾废品者的衣服,而拾废品者则露出了身体,二人拍了张合影。在这幅行为摄影中,他们的背后环境充满着堆积如山的废纸,及每天工作必备的三轮车。所有这一切清晰地揭示了他的物质生活水平,这种“边缘”的社会环境也暗示了人的生存状态、社会地位和身份。这样的日常生活空间几乎很少受关注甚至常常处于人们遗忘的角落。尽管拾废品者脱去着装而无意识地模糊了其身份特征,身体外表的修改最终仍无法改变自我在社会中的位置。在主体性与社会空间的关系中,艺术家强化了主观与客观的悖论,理想与现实的冲突。它难以摆脱约定,社会秩序和规定仍然使自我恢复原位。艺术家视每个生活细节为艺术表现的元素,赋予诗意和意义,然而,艺术家大胆地抵抗了逻辑化的东西,不以对象化的东西作为遵循艺术的法则,而在观念上主观想象、任意组合、修改和创造。他的作品再现了差异性、空间、真实与表演,使这些概念范畴和内涵产生了微妙的错位,混乱和反常的生活片断被主观地重新控制和编造,另一方面,主流图像包含了权力话语的支配作用,诸如:操纵正义的欲望,操纵平等的欲望和操纵命运的欲望。
任何人在生理意义上的身体难以改动,而人的身份不是可变的、流动的。因此,艺术家主观地打扮成了他者,但这种虚拟不是真实的他者身份,而他的修改替换了原来身份规定的自我,无法修改精神。尽管他者脱去了规定其社会地位的“符号”服装,但他们裸露的身躯并没有在根本上改变限定的社会文化身份。
Existence in Translation
Huang Du
The series of performance photographs Identity Exchange started by Cang Xin in the year 2000 embody an interpretation of social reality beyond style and form. In his performance process he puts“self” and“other” together in the same space, combining the subjective with the objective to form an interactive relation. In the form of an anthropological study, he takes on the identity of a tourist and makes contact with people who live and work in different communities, carrying out a social survey, coding and decoding. In the process of dialogue and exchange, he has his picture taken together with people of different occupation, status, sex and age, including trash collectors, pretty restaurant waitresses, hotel attendants, steel workers, chefs, hospital doctors, university students, Beijing opera performers, mental patients, guards and butchers. The joint portraits of artist and“other”that are the result of his simple“group photography”method form social links of a pluralist nature. The concepts behind Cang Xin’s art can be traced back to two sources; one is a work by Marcel Duchamp in which the artist photographs himself dressed as a woman, and the other is the group photographs so popular in China during the Cultural Revolution. Cang Xin’s performance photographs are different in that they draw our line of vision into the spaces of real society and ordinary life. The significance of his work lies in that artistic creation is no longer an aesthetics of resolved harmony, but a direct transformation of art into life and life into art again, that directly engages with various “other”spaces in both life and art. In these images it is possible to recognise and decipher the relationship between people’s mental states, their everyday living spaces and their social environment.
The clothes people wear can be used as a basic symbol and criterion on which to judge their identity, in particular when the clothes are a reflection of their profession. The clothes people wear when working dictate their status, class and rank in society; they are definitive properties that invisibly control everyone’s life and social space. The artist puts on the other person’s clothes - the“definitive property”and symbol of their profession - disguising himself in an“other”identity. But even though the other person has taken off his or her work clothes, the exposed body does not alter its innate identity. A virtual self and a real other is the supposition on which the concept of the artist in real society is based.
In his art practice Cang Xin pays close attention to the creation of space and the changeability of identity. The outcome of his interactions becomes increasingly unstable and difficult to predict. Everyone in his or her everyday life interprets cultural differences, but the artist enters social life via the critical concept of spatialisation, merging together social conditions and mental subjectivity, rewriting and reprogramming social spaces. His work draws meaning from its explanation of the function of social space, transforming spaces that serve as contexts for bodily activity or expression into spaces created by a subjective mentality. In practice these spaces include all social elements and practical activities, and affect social relations. As for his understanding of hybridity, he is not like other artists who define cultural identity within the scope of eternal values, he instead emphasises that culture and identity are in a constant state of flux and change. On this basis the artist is constantly interpreting the states of existence of self and other, engaging in a new encrypting and decoding of order, equality, social strata, chaos, weakness, powerlessness, hybridity and so on.
Here I will use one of the works from the series to explain in more detail: Cang Xin visited a scrap collector who had lived in the city for a long time; he put on his clothes, leaving the scrap collector himself half naked, and they were then photographed together. The background of the photograph consists of towering heaps of waste paper, and the bicycle cart indispensable to man’s work. These things together clearly reveal his material quality of life, and the“marginal”social environment hints at his living conditions, social status and identity. He exists in a corner of everyday life that people rarely give attention to and generally forget all about. Though the scrap collector had removed most of his“uniform”, unconsciously blurring his identity, his altered outward appearance ultimately cannot change his social position. In the relationship between subjectivity and social space, the artist strengthens the paradox between subjective and objective, and the conflict between ideals and reality. It is difficult to free oneself from the established; social order and rules conspire to return the self to its original position. The artist sees every detail of life as an element of artistic expression, endowed with poetic quality and meaning, and he boldly resists adhering to logic or objectivity in his art, creating and adjusting his concepts according to subjective imagination and free association. Discrepancies in social strata, space, the real and the performed, all are reproduced in his work, causing a slight dislocation of conceptual categories and connotations. Chaotic and abnormal fragments of life are subjectively brought back under control and reinvented. Looking at it in another way, mainstream images are by implication subject to the controlling effect of power discourse; for example, the desire to control justice, the desire to control equality and the desire to control destiny.