POSTPHOTOISM

{{Post-Ruin-ism: Keywords}} YANG XIAOBIN {Broken} There are things broken, as long as there are people. People disorder the world while they organize it. The Post-Ruin-ist visions are the broken, disordered corners of the world. {Post-Abstract Art} Let’s conjure up Kandinsky, Miro, Pollock, Tàpies and Rothko from shabby alleys and stained construction sites. {Abstract/Concrete} Whether Mondrian’s abstract squares and lines or van Gogh’s concrete sunflowers and starry skies, they are, after all, material pigments. Post-abstract art seizes concrete scratches, paints, or plaster... or god knows what... on walls, doors, fences and ground. But it is exactly the materials that are constitutive of the objects. The objective materials, not the subjective ideas. Yet the concrete materials appear as abstract art. {Trace} A concept from Derrida: histories that can hardly be concealed. Histories always show up inadvertently from the smeared surfaces. {Usure} Another Derridean concept: deletions and modifications within histories, which show up more traces. Histories appear as alternative versions in the process of effacing, rubbing and smearing. Not coincidentally, Lacan has coined the word lituraterre to indicate the space of effacement. {Post-Ruin} Ruin is the broken reality, the most common theme of modern art. Walter Benjamin’s angel witnesses how the debris of historical ruin flies skyward in the redemptive storm. {Post-Wound} Wound is the broken flesh, as the body in the sense of modern art. {Isms} Why can the social become an ism? Why can commune become an ism? Why can capital become an ism? Why can the modern become an ism? Why can the real become an ism? Why can the symbol become an ism? Why can the empire become an ism? Why can the colonial become an ism? The overflow of isms has been a sociocultural anomaly since the 20th century. So, let it keep overflowing. Talk about isms as much as possible until we get hopelessly tired. {Interjection, Onomatopoeia} Our sighs (alas), our agony (ouch), our surprise (oops), our disgust (ugh), our embarrassment (ahem), our shock (phew)... Are these voices closely linked to our mood and feeling not more worthy of being elevated to the position of ism? {Contingency} No intentional artwork, but only contingently left traces. {Styleless} But, could dilapidation be a kind of style? Does God have a style? Do monkeys and peacocks, both created by God, belong to the same style? (Or, is organism itself, as a creature, a kind of style?) {Play} Aimless or meaningless play. Marx’s ideal has been realized eventually: labor not for production. {Lazy Art (or Scavenging)} Since other people have done it, why bother to do it with my own brush and knife? Not robbery, just scavenging. {Subjectivity} Who is the subject of Post-Ruin-ism? If the desiring subject carries out the desire of the other (as Lacan finds out), subjectivity means a completion of fulfilling the other’s desire. If vitality and breath exist, they also represent the bodily expression of someone else. {Amateur} Amateurish equipment and technique correspond to the nature of disposal and casualness of the objects. Baudrillard, with his camera, shows aesthetic professionality through technical amateurishness. {The Quotidian} No quotidian fetishism. Just capture the avant-garde power hidden in the daily visual elements. Fundamentally, this is an anti-quotidian act, since the “quotidian” conceals the wonders of life. In this sense, Post-Ruin-ism means aletheia (“truth” or “disclosure” in ancient Greek philosophy). {Grassroot Art?} No moral implications. Not voicing in lieu of the lower class. Simply maintain the grassroot act as art: sand blasting from construction workers, spray paint from car repairers, holes punched by wandering juveniles, impact marks made by porters... {Hearing} You can even hear the jarring scratches on the iron door, the splashes of cement on the metal fence, or the rustling noise of ads and posters being torn down perfunctorily. {Ready-Made (Lack of Originality)} Duchamp allows us to revive everything dead in reality into living art. It all depends on how to grasp the “significant form” (Clive Bell) in reality. {Trash} (Rauschenberg once got mad, because the janitor threw his artwork into the trash bin.) By contrast, the artsy nature of trash is doubtless. {New/Old, Beautiful/Ugly} (When people pay attention to the shiny skyscrapers, my vision focuses on the rusted dents, sharp scratches, accidental brush marks, splashed cement drops, peeled off paint...at the construction site.) {Historicity} A historical segment has congealed: you do not know when it was formed, who left the trace, or how it was broken like this; but you can somehow feel the history of its (continuous or successive) formations, its changes from goodness to badness. This is thus a kind of hoary art, recording the decline of the world. Mottlement is not solely made by God’s hand. Humankind is making various kinds of mottlement, always.