Unframed7 - lee wen 李文

P10
10 Perumal Road
Singapore
Tel/Fax: 62940041

April 6, to 13, 2004 ( by appointment )

Performance 8pm, Tuesday, April 6, 2004

“unframed¬7” is a performance conceived in 7 parts. A 7 days exhibition of unframed works accompanies it and is being organized in 7 days. It is a response to the increasing sophistication and proliferation of contemporary art productions, which inevitably, submissively take a form to fit within the framework of our social structure. A social structure that demands cultural production to be entertaining, entertaining and entertaining almost taking priority over mind and soul. Becoming more complex, yet threatening to over-simplify due to populist desires, Technically challenged and yet rigidified as if to frighteningly mirror the forces based on the globalize market-based society we have evolved into.

1)    4'33" ( a rendition of John Cage’s composition by a non-musician )
2)    Read
3)    I promise not to make boring art.
4)    Desires
5)    A and E
6)    PoMoEmo
7)    Rusty

“to be on the edge of the void, to radicalise human experience; as close as possible to the unpresentable; to be precise and faithful; to discern the fractures; vacillate the law, its dysfunctioning; its deviation.”

-       Adapted from the writing of Joao Maria Gusmao

p.12 Veneer/folheado catalogue, Belfast, Catalyst Arts 2003

NOTES / SCORES FOR:
“unframed¬7” is a performance conceived in 7 parts. 

1)     4'33" ( a rendition of John Cage’s composition by a non-musician)

-        silence in 3 X movements - 30", 2'23" (143”) , and 1'40" (100”)

-        Make a white ring of talcum powder or flour on the floor

-        different postures of 1) sitting on chair in ring 2) lying down feet in ring and 3) standing in ring.

-        Ring service bell to start each movement

-        Bow like a dancer or musician at end of last movement.

-        Conceived in 1947 written in 1952

-        saw Rauschenberg's white paintings in 1951

-        indeterminacy and chance

-        Art is not an escape from life, but rather an introduction to it.—Cage

-        Interpenetration

-        Music is about changing the mind -- not to understand, but to be aware

-        music as a metaphor for the way a society should behave

-        ecological significance

-        In 1962, Cage wrote a 4'33" No. 2, which is also titled 0'00", "to be performed in any way by anyone".

2)     Read

-        readings, fr internet/ book/ newspapers

-        quotations from

①         Yu Qiuyu

②         Amartya Sen

③         Cage

④        Suntzu

⑤         ChuangTzu

⑥         Dutton

⑦         Fanon

⑧         Gary Snyder

-        burn

3)     I promise not to make boring art.

-        count / write 1 to 10 on the floor with chalk

-        write on white card board/

-        improvise with board around the space and make slow “boring” movements

4)     Desires

-        all is desire is social vs. desire as cause of suffering

-        using pails, cage, shoes, gas, mask, coal, running shorts etc.

5)     A and E

-        Drummer’s lament

-        The laws are too harsh

6)     PoMoEmo

-        stockings, flour, clogs

-        post modern emotions vis-à-vis indeterminate truths and lost of individuality/self

-        music – of moon gas.

7)     (R/L)usty

-        Lust for life

-        lust and hurt

-        love and hate

-        bananas and condoms/ condom over banana and chew it over the rubber…string to tie my underwear to minimum and then the body…

-        music tswana voices rain songs.

Vacuum the floor with durian between each part

Texts for READING


Wang Wei was a true genius both in poetry and painting. The distinctive line between poetry and painting as drawn by Lessing and other Western scholars did not bother Wang Wei a bit as he seemed to stroll back and forth between the two fields of arts with ease. Sadly, the palace in Chang'an only had a very narrow side door for artists who must bow their heads like servants to their powerful masters when getting in and out to provide entertainment for the rulers. The God of History, that old man with long gray beard, was so saddened that he could only look away when confronting such a phenomenon. Then he had to devote to the family records of all the kings and emperors while his hands and head shaking with age and disbelief. In our history, arts were not allowed to take too many chapters, our aspiration and appreciation for beauty are also kept to a minimum.

As a result, the colors of paintings from every corner of the states and kingdoms started to darken. And Yangguan has never received any line of poetry with tenderness and warmth. There have been more men of letters departing for the outside of Yangguan but none of them had been more than who they really were: demoted officials and exiled dissidents.

- Yangguan Snow

Yu Qiuyu 1995

But culture is very important in our lives. It's very important in my life, and hopefully it's very important in yours. Given that fact, and given the fact that we don't lead lives that are compartmentalized, our culture must have influence on everything else we do. Some of the deprivations we look at in development could be cultural deprivations. Major battles have been fought in the world on cultural grounds -- the Crusades, for example. If one takes the view that just because one cannot measure cultural output in the same way that one would measure the production of tomatoes or the value of the GNP per head, that therefore cultures are uninteresting, I think that is a big mistake. The fact that novels or poetry are not precisely measurable like kilograms of milk or flour does not mean that they are not amenable to analytical investigation. Quite often, when people say that something is not precise enough, they are just underestimating the reach of mathematics. Mathematics is one of the greatest glories of humanity, and its reach is not confined to the things that we did in college -- the differential equations and applied differentiable functions and so forth. I think that's a slander not just on culture but also on mathematics.

- An interview with Amartya Sen, economist and author of Development as Freedom

December , 1999 The Atlantic Monthly.

Art may be practiced in one way or another, so that it reinforces the ego in its likes and dislikes, or so that it opens that mind to the world outside, and outside inside. Since the forties and through the study with D.T. Suzuki of the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, I've thought of music as a means of changing the mind. I saw art not as something that consisted of a communication from the artist to an audience but rather as an activity of sounds in which the artist found a way to let the sounds be themselves. And, in being themselves, to open the minds of people who made them or listened to them to other possibilities than they had previously considered.33

John Cage conversation with Bill Womack (1979),

p.42 in Kostelanetz, Richard, 1988 ed., Conversing with Cage, New York: Limelight.

17.  According as circumstances are favorable,  one should

modify one's plans.

18.  All warfare is based on deception.

19.  Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable;  when

using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near,  we

must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away,  we

must make him believe we are near.

20.  Hold out baits to entice the enemy.  Feign disorder,

and crush him.

Sun-tzu Art of War

Translation by Lionel Giles

First Published in 1910

If a man is crossing the river and an empty boat collides with his skiff, even  though he is a bad-tempered man he will not become very angry. But if he sees a  man in the other boat he will scream and shout and curse at the man to steer  clear. If you can empty your own boat crossing the river of the world, no one  will oppose you, no one will seek to harm you. Thus is the perfect man - his  boat is empty.

Chuang-Tzu

My main concern is to ask, why should we have a theatre of ideas? The theatre of entertainment is unproblematic: though it has an important place in cultural life, it is undemanding, having the essential purpose of amusement. The theatre of ideas, on the other hand, is a theatre that provokes us to think about morality, human relations, history, or politics. What place does a theatre of ideas have in our lives, and what is the aesthetic or philosophical attitude we should take toward it? In order to approach this issue, I want to give the briefest sketch of two lines of thought that have come down through the history of aesthetics.

The first line is most famously represented by Plato, whose respect for the power of art was so great that he thought it would have to be rigorously censored and controlled in his ideal republic. For Plato, as for the Greeks generally, art was mimesis, an imitation or representation of reality. As artists were apt to get their representations of reality wrong, art was not only in danger of spreading ignorance and misinformation, but of weakening the very fabric of society. Plato did not ban all art from the republic - painting and sculpture, if we read carefully, are not generally excluded. His main targets were the narrative arts of poetry and drama, which were to be admitted to the republic only in censored form, as hymns to the gods and praises of noble people (607a). He objects to a freely practiced poetic and dramatic art because the actors themselves must imitate vulgar subjects and shameful behavior, and the power of their performances may influence the audience to surrender to wayward and inferior feelings. By exciting peoples feelings, poetic and dramatic artists upset or destroy the proper balance of the individual soul, and this in turn upsets the balance required for the efficient running of the state.

Freedom and the Theatre of Ideas

Address to the Russian Institute of Aesthetics, January 1990

 Denis Dutton

The natives who are anxious for the culture of their country and who wish to give to it a universal dimension ought not therefore to place their confidence in the single principle of inevitable, undifferentiated independence written into the consciousness of the people in order to achieve their task. The liberation of the nation is one thing; the methods and popular content of the fight are another. It seems to me that the future of national culture and its riches are equally also part and parcel of the values which have ordained the struggle for freedom.

And now it is time to denounce certain pharisees. National claims, it is here and there stated, are a phase that humanity has left behind. It is the day of great concerted actions, and retarded nationalists ought in consequence to set their mistakes aright. We, however, consider that the mistake, which may have very serious consequences, lies in wishing to skip the national period. If culture is the expression of national consciousness, I will not hesitate to affirm that in the case with which we are dealing it is the national consciousness which is the most elaborate form of culture.

-  Speech by Frantz Fanon at the Congress of Black African Writers, 1959

Since it doesn't seem practical or even desirable to think that direct bloody force will achieve much, it would be best to consider this a continuing "revolution of consciousness" which will be won not by guns but by seizing the key images, myths, archetypes, eschatologies, and ecstasies so that life won't seem worth living unless one is on the transforming energy's side.

New schools, new classes, walking in the woods and cleaning up the streets. Create an awareness of "self" which includes the social and natural environment. Consider what specific language forms, symbolic systems, and social institutions constitute obstacles to ecological awareness. Let no one be ignorant of the facts of biology and related disciplines; bring up our children as part of the wild-life. Some communities can establish themselves in backwater rural areas and flourish -- others maintain themselves in urban centers -- and the two types work together, a two-way flow of experience, people, money, and home-grown vegetables.

Investigate new lifestyles. Work with political-minded people where it helps, hoping to enlarge their vision, and with people of all varieties of politics or thought at whatever point they become aware of environmental urgencies. Master the archaic and the primitive as models of basic nature-related cultures -- as well as the most imaginative extensions of science -- and build a community where these two vectors cross. 

We are the first human beings in history to have all of humanity's culture and previous experience available to our study -- the first members of a civilized society since the early Neolithic to wish to look clearly into the eyes of the wild and see our selfhood, our family, there. We have these advantages to set off the obvious disadvantages of being as screwed up as we are -- which gives us a fair chance to penetrate into some of the riddles of ourselves and the universe. 

"Four Changes" 1970

Gary Snyder