无厘头 ◐ woollyhead

最近纽约的Guggenheim艺术馆有个满有意思的 叫做 "theanyspacewhatever" 的展览..可惜没有亲自去参观, 不过网上有许许多多的资料可以"弥补"一下。其中一门课正在念 Walter Benjamin 的一篇经典文章，正好觉得他的一些想法和这个艺术展有些关联。

Walter Benjamin,  1892-1940

一个想法很独特、有生之年却一直不被学术界接受的犹太思想家

The Work of Art in the Age of ‘theanyspacewhatever’

   The New York Guggenheim Museum is currently home to an exhibition entitled theanyspacewhatever, the collaborative effort of ten loosely affiliated contemporary artists. The idiosyncratic exhibition as a whole has attracted much comment, with Carsten Höller’s Revolving Hotel Room enjoying an especial monopoly on media attention. While Höller’s piece is on view in a more conventional fashion during the day, by night the artistic installation becomes a fully operative ‘room’ in which visitors (who place bookings in advance and pay a fee like they would at any other hotel) literally stay the night at the Guggenheim. I couldn’t help thinking of this peculiar exhibit when reading Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, for his essay provides an intriguing lens through which to grapple with such a show, and such an artwork; Benjamin’s piece is at its most riveting when depicting major shifts in the style of the production of art, the viewer’s relationship to it, and the very “mode of human sense perception.”

   Firstly, the question of why Revolving Hotel Room has garnered such attention is an interesting one to consider alongside Benjamin’s essay. The installation, according to the Guggenheim’s official website, consists of three “outfitted, superimposed turning glass discs mounted onto a fourth disc that all turn harmoniously at a very slow speed.” Upon these glass discs are placed pieces of furniture (a bed, a table, two chairs etc), intended to constitute the trappings of a simple hotel room. Ironically devoid of any walls (which are usually what define a room), the piece thus indirectly appropriates the walls of the exhibition as its own, whilst the pieces of furniture, other than having sleekly pared silhouettes, are not of exceptional note and would hardly excite a media frenzy. Surely, then, it is not the objects in themselves which demand such reverence or attention here: for the most part, one would not think it the least interesting or disturbing if you remarked that last night you had slept on a bed. The shock value of the piece —what immediately disturbs or delights, depending on your inclination— is that actual members of the public can sleep on an artwork. (It’s not just any old bed, though it looks just like one). And what’s more, in a museum! (A highly esteemed one at that). This bed, and these hotel-room-objects, are notable, therefore, simply because they are in a museum and thus positioned as artwork. Not to mention, one is not ‘supposed’ to sleep on artworks, or in museums…This is undoubtedly the most common gut reaction to Revolving Hotel Room of the average museumgoer, used to roped-off sections, maintaining a respectful distance from the art on display, and being shooed out of the museum come closing time. 

     All this irresistibly brings to mind Benjamin’s concept of the ‘aura’ of an artwork. One of the central concepts in this essay is his idea of the aura, and how technological developments, namely mechanical reproduction, affect it. Like the word itself as understood in everyday contexts (the authoritative ‘aura’ of a person, for example), the term as Benjamin uses it is hazy and vague, lacking in definition. However, one has at least a clear sense that this ‘aura’ is inextricably connected to the singularity of an artwork: its unique “presence in time and space”, its “unique existence at the place where it happens to be”. In other words, artworks of yore (pre-mechanical reproducibility) were each handcrafted at some particular point in the weave of time and space. For Benjamin, the aura also involves a “unique phenomenon of a distance” that imbues the work with a ritualistic significance and authority — thus distant “however close it may be."  In this way technology, such as the ability to mechanically reproduce ‘copies’ of artworks, causes the aura to “wither”, effectively substituting “a plurality of copies for a unique existence”, whittling the authority and ritualistic aura of artworks by making them “meet the beholder halfway”, such as a photograph or a phonograph record being made available for enjoyment in the convenience of one’s own drawing room. With this particular piece then, it is possible to see Höller as intentionally heightening the viewer’s experience of this ‘ritual value’ of the artwork, i.e. its ‘aura’ (a bed in a museum is no longer ‘merely’ a bed; it attains additional significance through the cultural authority of the museum); then pointedly shattering the aura by setting up the piece so that people can literally live in it, use it, and moreover ‘trespass’ a traditionally hallowed space during hours of the day that usually render it off-limits. Benjamin’s wording helps sum up the processes at work here beautifully, for does this piece not result in a kind of “shattering of tradition”, a sort of “liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage”? At the same time however, the very splash that Revolving Hotel Room has made seems to hint on one level that, even well into the age of mechanical reproducibility, the aura of the artwork is still alive and thriving. Why else would this installation of a tiny (and otherwise ordinary) hotel room be so attention-grabbing? Why else would people perceive pleasure and novelty to be had in the ‘consumption’ of the piece? For Höller to be able to fracture it, there has to be a ‘palpable’ aura in the first place. It seems, then, that more is at stake in the aura of artwork than its manner of production.

     Benjamin is also surprisingly relevant to this contemporary art show when he reflects on the destruction of the aura as a result of the “desire of the contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly.” What artwork could be pulled closer to oneself, and be more intimate, than a bed that one sleeps in? And this mass desire for closeness, as can be seen from the piece’s financial success, is very much at work. In fact, the official Guggenheim theanyspacewhatever webpage is headlined with “SOLD OUT”, itself subtitled by the distinctly advertising pitch-esque: “Take part in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend the night in one of the worlds’ most distinguished museums.” Further research reveals that “rates range from $259 (student rate on Monday evenings) to $799 on holiday weekends.” In the terms of Benjamin’s essay, then, the cult value of the artwork has been noticeably displaced here by its exhibition value. At first, he notes, for cult objects “what mattered was their existence, not their being on view”. Then, shaped by modern technologies, artworks underwent a “qualitative transformation of its nature” wherein the “absolute emphasis” shifts towards an artwork’s ‘exhibition value’, i.e. what Bertolt Brecht describes as the transforming of the work into a commodity. This dynamic is blatantly at play in theanyspacewhatever. Not only is the ‘hotel room’ fully booked through to the end of the exhibition, the exhibit as a whole is sponsored none too discreetly by ‘HUGO BOSS’ (proclaimed by the sleek lettering on the official website), while the amenity products for overnight stay are provided by ‘(MALIN+GOETZ)’ and the ‘hotel champagne’ by ‘Pommery’. Just as Benjamin laments the actor becoming a wholly commodified presence in the age of technologies, has the artwork become a wholly commodified thing here? Especially in such a case, where designer labels and corporations collaborate as much as artists do on the making of a piece, how can Revolving Hotel Room as performed and experienced possibly retain a sense of any “integral whole”? But most problematic about this piece are the steep prices: the ‘student rate’ of $259 for a night, for example, is exorbitant for the vast majority of students. Meanwhile, the briskly sold-out nature of the exhibit demonstrates that these high prices have nevertheless not detracted from the ‘desire’ of the masses to be (/buy) part of this experience. They do however lead one to question the motives and intentions involved. If the intention of the artwork is to open up and reshape the relationships between viewers and ‘museums’ and ‘art’, then why is it so pointedly limited to a certain income level or social background? This surely further alienates certain museum-goers than even before: newly aware of such extensions of exhibition space, these viewers surely are also made aware that, because of the exclusiveness and expensiveness of it at all, they are excluded. And if exploring and re-shaping such art-viewer relationships is not the point of the artwork, then what are the motives of the Guggenheim curators, and the artist? And what are the intentions and desires of those who do land a coveted overnight stay in Revolving Hotel Room, those members of the “contemporary masses” that desire that closeness of things?

    Just as Benjamin expresses concern at the commoditization and alienation that results from new technologies, yet is very excited about these technologies’ emancipating potential (“to burst this prison-world asunder”), the Guggenheim art show is replete with possibilities despite such questions. The title of the show itself comes from the “any-space-whatever”, a term coined by Gilles Deleuze (who appropriated it in turn from his compatriot Pascal Auge). The Deleuzian ‘any-space-whatever’ is a “perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity…so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways”, a space of “virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible” (Cinema 1).  Like ‘aura’, however, the concept is not clearly defined and carries differing shades of connotation. For participating artist Liam Gillick (who suggested the title), the anyspacewhatever is the “part of a narrative that will do to keep things moving”, like a random cinematic shot “so fleeting and innocuous that it doesn't disturb the flow." Thus the exhibit has been arranged and curated with this vision in mind: winding spaces, unexpected lettering around corners that suddenly appear and then disappear when you move on, and the harnessing of technology for a ‘flow’ that is nevertheless composed of ‘fleeting and innocuous’ shots, such as the winking LED stars in Angela Bulloch’s participating piece Firmamental Night Sky: Oculus 12.  Thus the viewer’s perception itself becomes part of the experience of the artwork and the exhibit, making it a fundamentally perspectival engagement, with each individual’s own apperception and ‘linkages’. Benjamin’s discussion of the “new mode of participation” similarly emphasizes the role of the spectator in this promising era of de-ritualized art: the viewer is no longer subordinate to the artwork, but is rather put “in the position of the critic” as an “examiner”.  Even the ‘distractedness’ of a modern viewer, Benjamin suggests, can be a powerful thing, for most things in everyday life are perceived far more through habit and “unconscious optics” than active, conscious contemplation and concentration. The viewer is therefore accorded much more agency by Benjamin, who stresses that new technologies will exploit but also encourage the flowering of such agency; and questions the commonplace that “art demands concentration”, thus the general masses are somehow unworthy of appreciating it. Particularly in the case of the Revolving Hotel Room, the viewer in fact goes so far as to engage in a direct and “tactile appropriation” of the artwork. The implications of such forms of engagement are highlighted by the fact that ‘viewer’ is much too limpid a term for what takes place.

    Perhaps, in the future, viewers/spectators will no longer be called as such, but will be conceived of as ‘experiencers’, or similarly broader and more active terms. Contemporary art exhibits such as theanyspacewhatever are exploring daring, groundbreaking new ways for people to interact with art; while these processes and forms of interaction benefit from the analytical lens of Benjamin’s concept of the ‘aura’ and new conceptions of the ‘spectator’s’ relationship to art. Similarly, Benjamin’s concerns also apply: what kinds of directions are these potentially emancipating possibilities actually taking? At least on one level, as Revolving Hotel Room shows, there is the danger of reducing the art object into a ‘commodity fetish’, both more and less than what it should be. These are but a few of the concerns worth raising, and the possibilities to excite, any ‘experiencer’ of art, however 'distracted'.
 

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Works cited (last accessed: Nov 15, 08):
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view-now/anyspace/revolving-hotel-room
http://gothamist.com/2008/10/15/revolving_hotel_room_lets_you_sleep.php
http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/9903/offscreen_essays/deleuze1.html
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/28/arts/light.php?page=1
and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin.

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A couple of interesting places to visit:
Jerry Saltz Spends a Night in the Guggenheim
http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/51998/
New York Magazine feature-writer talks about a "one-night stand" with the Guggenheim.

Has an excellent video of the exhibition,starting with Angela Bulloch's piece Firmamental Night Sky: Oculus 12
http://vernissage.tv/blog/tag/angela-bulloch/

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One last Hmmm...

I wonder：本雅明的"aura"这个概念是怎么翻译成中文的呢? "气质"? 光晕? 灵气?……