The show of Fischili and Weiss at the Guggenheim was my favorite art exhibition among all that I have been to. It resonates with me to such a degree that bothers, making me wish to have been born earlier and been part of the collaboration. I recognized this resonance first with the drawings of structures, which is how I have always been thinking about the universe but doubt if we can actually do that to understand the whole. And then through out the many sections there is an overall plain, neutral but compelling tone, that of a documentary of real life. The presentations of life are barely manipulated, which usually are for the purpose of becoming art, yet made dramatic simply by focusing on the insignificant scenes that are not “interesting” or “special” for an art project. It becomes clearer to me as I see the TV installation playing multiple mundane scenes at the same time and later the clay sculptures, that there is a notion that we are always looking for something higher or someone we should better become from elsewhere, but what is valuable is what we really are, what we do. We produce the collective knowledge as we experiencing things, subjectively assigned with good or bad feelings. But the collective knowledge from above is really nonjudgmental, unlimited, accepting everything that exists.
The video of how things go makes such a theatrical version of a physical experiment. As there is no man involved it bears a neutral feeling, as if “so these happened but then what”. However at the same time many of the objects seem to have feelings and characters, as you see the tire rolling down shaking or a balloon being filled and approaching explosion, which makes it kind of a metaphor of a human life, how continuous but curious all the experience happens.
The “subjective sculptures” are a collection made for everyone, scenes from everyone’s life, so there is just so much to relate. In the sculpted scenes, which are of course inevitably only examples from way too many, there are anonymous people living their lives, some looking stupid, failing at their intention, and some enjoying happy moments they happen to be in, and (there is the artists’ intention to include) people guessing about the origin of their lives and the universe, aliens, significant figures within philosophy science, the higher thing. I saw everyone reacting to these sculptures fully in their own way, linking their previous memories, unlike perhaps in other art exhibitions trying to line up with what they are supposed to understand and judge on. Scenes within the sculptures appear almost not filtered or edited. In other words when they are scenes in one person’s life, they are wanted, unwanted, happy, sad, exciting, disappointing, significant, boring. These are reactions added to the initially neutral stories. As the collection draws all the knowledge into one place, people revisit many old memories, experience other individual’s stories, be reminded how big the universe is, or perhaps experience a glimpse of what a collective knowledge feels like. There Iies the dual of existence as individual and the whole. Within the plain titles there is a sense of observing life experience from far without the habitual judging, but with more acceptance and compassion.
With the notion of unedited life scenes, it was also an extraordinary experience for me to watch the picture slides on the two big TV screens and people’s behaviors around me. Everything comes into the art, in other words the boundary of what is being observed. After a while of watching, a Chinese man says “this size of the tv should fit perfectly in our living room”. An old couple hold hands and sit down next to me, chatting some useless words back and forth. A restless guy gets bored by the sightseeing photos and walks away. I see the Forbidden City and remember waiting in line under a burning sun, but my feeling bad is really just an illusion attached from the past.
The dark room with projected questions is the last thing left to see. It feels crazy what I have been reading and thinking is somehow all coming closer together here, being with the two artists with a similar quest, even though the questions we ask do not 100% overlay. Why do we experience what we experience? How do things work? Why do we suffer or feel happy and are they meaningful? Among the millions of thoughts in my mind what are the ones pointing at something and what are just garbage? And in their words, “Is the world there when I'm not? How much resistance does truth take? Can I punish the world by ignoring it? Is resistance useless”, among many more.
Obvious this could have been an interpretation to my own pleasure, but anyways, I would say it is about all, all the thoughts/realities that exist. We know there is the whole. The question is probably still how and why.