1 00:00:08,100 --> 00:00:14,760 What did this explosion represent to you beyond its mere spectacle? 2 00:00:14,760 --> 00:00:23,420 This question? Was posed to Sibel Chang by the art critic of Tunisia in an interview 2002. 3 00:00:23,420 --> 00:00:30,080 The explosion to which they're referring is features movement to Project for Extraterrestrials Number Nine, 4 00:00:30,080 --> 00:00:41,000 an event of 1992 which saw he placed himself at the very centre vast concentric rings of explosives in a field in Germany. 5 00:00:41,000 --> 00:00:43,580 Oh, come to see his response to this question. 6 00:00:43,580 --> 00:00:53,060 At the very end of my paper, what really interests me is there's a throwaway formulation, mere spectacle. 7 00:00:53,060 --> 00:00:56,780 But behind it lies a Western tradition, a tradition in many ways, 8 00:00:56,780 --> 00:01:06,890 a western tradition of critical and philosophical suspicion of spectacle that goes back some two and a half thousand years, at least. 9 00:01:06,890 --> 00:01:17,270 And today, I hope to suggest some of the ways in which size art and his explosion events, especially encounter and speak back to that tradition. 10 00:01:17,270 --> 00:01:29,330 So his work that is takes us towards a radically different understanding of the spectacular in which spectacle is not and never can be mere. 11 00:01:29,330 --> 00:01:35,240 But in order to make this claim of first say something about size relationship to the theatre 12 00:01:35,240 --> 00:01:42,470 and how I see his art as addressing questions of what theatre a performance is and does, 13 00:01:42,470 --> 00:01:48,470 I'm not a specialist in Chinese art. Rather, I'm a scholar of performance and theatre history, 14 00:01:48,470 --> 00:01:59,490 and I spend much of my time grappling with how the embodied and most especially the visual constitution of theatre, makes us think and act and feel. 15 00:01:59,490 --> 00:02:06,810 And it's in these terms that I find size work so compelling and moving to. 16 00:02:06,810 --> 00:02:17,130 Psystar has been profoundly shaped by his lifelong engagement with a variety of theatrical ideas and theatrical practises by theatrical practises. 17 00:02:17,130 --> 00:02:25,920 A mean performance in its broadest sense as a concept that encompasses both formal drama, something we might see on the stage in a theatre. 18 00:02:25,920 --> 00:02:36,010 And also every day ritual. In terms of the latter, gunpowder explosions are social occasions or as part of religious ceremonies, 19 00:02:36,010 --> 00:02:42,820 were woven into the fabric of his daily life growing up in Fujian province in China. 20 00:02:42,820 --> 00:02:52,040 So reminds us the sound and flash of firecrackers mock every rites of passage from birth to death. 21 00:02:52,040 --> 00:03:00,290 Moreover, infusion, especially marionette puppetry, has long flourished as an art form at the nexus of religion, 22 00:03:00,290 --> 00:03:05,210 history and social customs, social customs and culture. 23 00:03:05,210 --> 00:03:17,640 Indeed, the famed Quanzhou Marinette troupe, established in size home city in 1952, performs around the world to this day. 24 00:03:17,640 --> 00:03:22,740 Equally, as David has already mentioned, so his father, a manager at a local bookstore, 25 00:03:22,740 --> 00:03:27,900 brought home copies of plays by the likes of Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller. 26 00:03:27,900 --> 00:03:34,080 And so he became himself a member of the municipal propaganda team, essentially a theatre troupe. 27 00:03:34,080 --> 00:03:39,480 And indeed, again, as David's noted, also worked as an actor. 28 00:03:39,480 --> 00:03:44,850 Most formative of all were the four years from 1991 to 1995. 29 00:03:44,850 --> 00:03:56,530 So I spent at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, where he worked in the design department under General Benny. 30 00:03:56,530 --> 00:04:04,500 A sigh recalls in most Chinese institutes, you study the traditional Chinese painting or traditional oil painting, 31 00:04:04,500 --> 00:04:09,630 but theatre school is different because your concerns are more conceptual. 32 00:04:09,630 --> 00:04:14,910 You discuss materials, you space, time lights and audience reception. 33 00:04:14,910 --> 00:04:19,980 You make proposals, develop your ideas and you learn to work as part of a team. 34 00:04:19,980 --> 00:04:26,790 You're asked to grasp the whole process, from proposal to budget to production and presentation. 35 00:04:26,790 --> 00:04:36,330 Theatre is based on time, how your work is revealed in time, how it develops and proceeds how the audience is engaged. 36 00:04:36,330 --> 00:04:42,400 These ideas laid the foundation for my art practise. 37 00:04:42,400 --> 00:04:52,900 Materiality communality, design process, space, light time. 38 00:04:52,900 --> 00:05:00,700 Audience response. These are the theatrical coordinates of size art. 39 00:05:00,700 --> 00:05:04,750 When we watched the creation of one of his gunpowder paintings, for instance, 40 00:05:04,750 --> 00:05:12,760 we see a group of practitioners at work and the self generating energy of such cooperation. 41 00:05:12,760 --> 00:05:16,840 And in the exertions and constant motion of his team of assistants who helped to 42 00:05:16,840 --> 00:05:21,820 perhaps you prepare the kind of gunpowder to stencils and with particular alacrity, 43 00:05:21,820 --> 00:05:31,660 extinguish any lingering flames after ignition. We witness to a drama of bodies moving across and interacting within a given space. 44 00:05:31,660 --> 00:05:40,080 And with given materials. Size art, the lens of theatre reminds us, is always an embodied one. 45 00:05:40,080 --> 00:05:47,930 It's an art in which process is form, and that process includes not only the kinaesthetic of transformed matter, 46 00:05:47,930 --> 00:05:52,640 but also the kinaesthetic of the makers bodies. 47 00:05:52,640 --> 00:06:02,300 It is further an art, I think, enabled in part by the logic of Griffey size explosion events have often been described, 48 00:06:02,300 --> 00:06:12,410 not least by the artist himself, as using the sky as a sort of vast canvas on which images can be painted by means of pyrotechnics. 49 00:06:12,410 --> 00:06:22,460 But this manner of understanding such spectacles ultimately pulls them, I think, towards exactly the two dimensionality that they emphatically resist. 50 00:06:22,460 --> 00:06:33,350 For instance, Black Ceremony realised at Doha in 2011 saw the synchronised explosions of coloured powder, 51 00:06:33,350 --> 00:06:41,510 which gave to the sky the quality of a large perspect time of space akin to a kind of stage in the sky. 52 00:06:41,510 --> 00:06:51,440 The effect was especially striking. Dare I say dramatic, because the cloudless, pristine blue of Qatar's sky appears almost flat, 53 00:06:51,440 --> 00:06:58,900 with the explosions creating a sudden sense not only of colour, but of depth and of geometry. 54 00:06:58,900 --> 00:07:04,440 The explosions aren't just sculptural, they're almost architectural. 55 00:07:04,440 --> 00:07:12,210 In the words of one critic, many 20th century stenographers conceived of the theatre set as quote, 56 00:07:12,210 --> 00:07:21,240 a unified work of art, a kinetic obstruction of architectural masses, darkness, shadows and light. 57 00:07:21,240 --> 00:07:28,110 Doesn't this also describe black ceremony? CI uses light sound, 58 00:07:28,110 --> 00:07:40,170 a distribution of matter and a sensitivity to the nature of a given location to map out to bring into being a unified space of performance, 59 00:07:40,170 --> 00:07:46,420 a space of play in the many overlapping meanings of that word. 60 00:07:46,420 --> 00:07:52,270 Only here, performance resides itself in the very process of that mapping out, 61 00:07:52,270 --> 00:07:57,910 performance is manifest in the very act of creating the space it inhabits. 62 00:07:57,910 --> 00:08:02,820 This is theatre making as theatre. 63 00:08:02,820 --> 00:08:11,580 This takes us, I think, to another of the vectors of performance that Sy learns to harness while at the Shanghai Theatre Academy time. 64 00:08:11,580 --> 00:08:17,200 I've already touched upon process as form insights work. 65 00:08:17,200 --> 00:08:28,780 Notably, he's spoken of turning, looking at sculpture into looking at making sculpture, using that very process as a work of art. 66 00:08:28,780 --> 00:08:34,300 The statement was white that this statement was made in reference to Venice Rent Collection Courtyard. 67 00:08:34,300 --> 00:08:42,610 The award winning installation at the Venice Biennale in 1999, which saw Sy, as David's already mentioned, bringing a team of artisans, 68 00:08:42,610 --> 00:08:53,900 artisans, sculptures, sculptures to recreate the 108 life-size figures of one of China's most famous works of socialist realist sculpture. 69 00:08:53,900 --> 00:08:59,540 But the idea of looking at making what I think we might regard as a useful definition of 70 00:08:59,540 --> 00:09:07,280 performance itself is equally central to his explosion events and his gunpowder canvases. 71 00:09:07,280 --> 00:09:13,460 Where we see something come into being and then seemingly disappear. 72 00:09:13,460 --> 00:09:19,700 And this disappearing is significant. Well, the temporality of performance is one, 73 00:09:19,700 --> 00:09:28,580 at least as we've always assumed of impermanence or performance is ephemeral on the power of its presence. 74 00:09:28,580 --> 00:09:40,260 The fact of its happening right here right now before us lies in part in our knowledge that at some point it will cease to be. 75 00:09:40,260 --> 00:09:44,730 Theatre is an art of loss of negotiating loss. 76 00:09:44,730 --> 00:09:52,900 Theatre is an art of memory, of negotiating acts of memory and remembrance. 77 00:09:52,900 --> 00:10:02,860 So he is drawn to fireworks, not only for their unpredictability, but for their transience, that sensational momentary terrorists. 78 00:10:02,860 --> 00:10:09,250 We have photographs and video footage of a black ceremony. 79 00:10:09,250 --> 00:10:19,510 But aren't these simply records of an event as long finished records that can never give us or recreate the experience of that event itself, 80 00:10:19,510 --> 00:10:21,190 at least until recently? 81 00:10:21,190 --> 00:10:30,160 This has been the inevitable lament of historians of performance who Joseph Roach reminds us with with a wink tend in their writing 82 00:10:30,160 --> 00:10:40,240 to fall back on the same anecdote of irretrievable loss to mourn what can be found in or contained by the Archives of Performance, 83 00:10:40,240 --> 00:10:47,350 the archives of the event. But recently, we started to rethink these ideas. 84 00:10:47,350 --> 00:11:01,180 In 2011, Rebecca Schneider's book Performing remains challenged this logic for Schneider The Binaries of Past vs. present life vs. Archive. 85 00:11:01,180 --> 00:11:06,160 That a long, structured considerations of performance are false. 86 00:11:06,160 --> 00:11:13,000 And I think her insights allow us to see size work in an interestingly different way. 87 00:11:13,000 --> 00:11:21,280 History like performance, Schneider insists, ought not to concern itself with an attempt to recover a pure past. 88 00:11:21,280 --> 00:11:24,790 Such an idea of a pure past is itself a fiction. 89 00:11:24,790 --> 00:11:35,440 Rather, history like performance should concern itself with an ongoing re-enactment of the past within an always unfolding present. 90 00:11:35,440 --> 00:11:40,280 And this is just what size work achieves. 91 00:11:40,280 --> 00:11:49,850 His gunpowder drawings collapse, the ontological distinction between the event and its record by making the traces of explosion, 92 00:11:49,850 --> 00:12:00,580 the patterns of burnt matter of ash and smoke, an object that is itself spectacular, that engages and moves us in the moment. 93 00:12:00,580 --> 00:12:11,200 Sized gunpowder paintings, once an archaeology of the event and an event in themselves always still happening. 94 00:12:11,200 --> 00:12:21,760 Likewise, in explosion events are often not just meditations on history, but wilful and playful re-enactments of it. 95 00:12:21,760 --> 00:12:26,080 Take, for instance, and we've already seen a number of these images. 96 00:12:26,080 --> 00:12:33,460 Take, for instance, his series The Century of Mushroom Clouds project for the 20th century of Nineteen ninety five to six, 97 00:12:33,460 --> 00:12:39,400 where he detonated handheld explosive devices at symbolic sites across the United States, 98 00:12:39,400 --> 00:12:45,690 Manhattan, the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the Nevada test site. 99 00:12:45,690 --> 00:12:51,510 In doing so, he reactivated the cultural and historical charge of the landscapes, 100 00:12:51,510 --> 00:12:58,710 making visible the continued conceptual power of the mushroom cloud in a present still defined 101 00:12:58,710 --> 00:13:08,890 seemingly invisibly by the use of nuclear technology as a political and military deterrent. 102 00:13:08,890 --> 00:13:19,320 Or. Consider size transformation earlier this year of the amphitheatre at Pompei into an explosion studio, 103 00:13:19,320 --> 00:13:28,230 into this amphitheatre rigged with coloured gunpowder. He placed canvases of various sizes, copies of antique sculpture and other objects, 104 00:13:28,230 --> 00:13:33,180 all of which were remade in a subsequent explosion, given new colour. 105 00:13:33,180 --> 00:13:43,230 A new form. And then excavated as ruins, which formed the core of size solo exhibition at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. 106 00:13:43,230 --> 00:13:49,950 And some of these objects are in the exhibition here. 107 00:13:49,950 --> 00:14:00,180 As the official website for the event described it, an explosion of gunpowder and coloured smoke in Pompey's amphitheatre will reignite 108 00:14:00,180 --> 00:14:05,700 the tragic and vital dynamics of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in a timeless, 109 00:14:05,700 --> 00:14:12,880 poetic journey that tells the story of the destruction and rebirth of Pompeii. 110 00:14:12,880 --> 00:14:19,630 Once again, just as Rebecca Schneider suggests, performance engages the memory of the past, 111 00:14:19,630 --> 00:14:31,590 rather performance engages the memory to offer the past as a as a continuously negotiable present, as a continuously felt present. 112 00:14:31,590 --> 00:14:42,310 As Alfonso Rousseau, director of the archaeological park Pompeii put it, Sy showed that Pompeii is a place of the contemporary. 113 00:14:42,310 --> 00:14:51,880 Not for nothing. Asi insisted that the job of the artist is to create time space tunnels. 114 00:14:51,880 --> 00:14:58,660 That we can experience these explosion events only through digital recordings and photographs. 115 00:14:58,660 --> 00:15:12,220 They are performances always oriented towards their own mediation, their own circulation size art interrogates media age precisely by embracing it. 116 00:15:12,220 --> 00:15:20,950 His explosion events and the creation of his gunpowder paintings readily lend themselves to the circulation and sharing of videos. 117 00:15:20,950 --> 00:15:28,870 Through YouTube, you can spend hours and hours on YouTube enthralled with the videos of size, 118 00:15:28,870 --> 00:15:38,740 explosion events and the creation of his gunpowder drawings. This is especially the case with Sky, another of 2015, 119 00:15:38,740 --> 00:15:43,930 in which flames make a dazzling and miraculous climb towards the heavens by means 120 00:15:43,930 --> 00:15:50,230 of a 500 metre ladder rigged with explosives and held aloft by a huge balloon. 121 00:15:50,230 --> 00:16:03,750 The event itself was staged in secret in Hillview Island Harbour and in Gwangju at dawn at 4:45 in the morning. 122 00:16:03,750 --> 00:16:07,410 Yet when footage of the event was leaked online, 123 00:16:07,410 --> 00:16:18,280 it was viewed some 30 million times in just a few days and is indeed is now the subject of a documentary available on Netflix. 124 00:16:18,280 --> 00:16:27,110 As David Jocelyn's has written. Even they film and film and video have not been his primary medium size art, 125 00:16:27,110 --> 00:16:32,930 maybe regarded as enacting media explosions in the negotiations he orchestrates, 126 00:16:32,930 --> 00:16:39,080 have everything to do with facing the overwhelming pace at which we receive visual information 127 00:16:39,080 --> 00:16:46,720 and the exhilarating and sometimes terrifying volatility with which images may be consumed. 128 00:16:46,720 --> 00:16:50,400 This insight opens up the question of audience. 129 00:16:50,400 --> 00:16:58,790 Another one of those theatrical coordinates and returns me finally to the matter of spectacle with which I began. 130 00:16:58,790 --> 00:17:04,280 What does it mean to speak of mere spectacle? 131 00:17:04,280 --> 00:17:08,390 The formulation is ultimately platonic in origin. 132 00:17:08,390 --> 00:17:18,950 It takes us all the way back to the famous allegory of the cave in Plato's Republic, they're in the same dialogue in which Plato denounces theatre. 133 00:17:18,950 --> 00:17:26,600 He likens those who depend only on their senses to prisoners chained for life inside a cave and seeing 134 00:17:26,600 --> 00:17:35,260 only the shadows cast by real objects shadows the prisoners take to be the objects themselves. 135 00:17:35,260 --> 00:17:42,250 Even Aristotle's poetics of work, of course, especially concerned to evaluate the theatre, 136 00:17:42,250 --> 00:17:53,320 even Aristotle's poetics places plot, mythos and speech Lexus above spectacle obsess to appeal to the eye. 137 00:17:53,320 --> 00:17:58,540 Aristotle cautions in artistic. In the West, 138 00:17:58,540 --> 00:18:11,620 this tradition of casting spectacle as the other of contemplation of reason of action encompasses such thinkers as Augustine Rousseau new catch marks, 139 00:18:11,620 --> 00:18:24,390 but its master spokesman is De Boer. In divorce, 1967, book Society of the Spectacle Spectacle is that which renders us passive. 140 00:18:24,390 --> 00:18:28,740 It transfixed is us with the illusory fiction of representation. 141 00:18:28,740 --> 00:18:37,020 It's supplants and puts us at a distance from the real, from the realities of the economy, from the realities of society. 142 00:18:37,020 --> 00:18:44,610 Ideology that is false consciousness is spectacle for the viewer. 143 00:18:44,610 --> 00:18:49,500 This conception of spectacle is so deeply embedded within our culture that it's part 144 00:18:49,500 --> 00:18:54,570 of our everyday speech when we say that someone is making a spectacle of themselves. 145 00:18:54,570 --> 00:19:02,370 It's never a good thing and it quietly pervades the language of aesthetics, too. 146 00:19:02,370 --> 00:19:18,630 Hence, Octavio Zayas mere spectacle or equally, David Joscelyn writing of what lies beneath spectacular surfaces of Sighs Art. 147 00:19:18,630 --> 00:19:30,480 Indeed, for Michael Friede spectacle with its direct address to its attempt to solicit the applause of the viewer is the very negation of modern art. 148 00:19:30,480 --> 00:19:43,240 As Fred wrote in 1967, the success even the survival of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theatre. 149 00:19:43,240 --> 00:19:50,080 But saw his body of work absolutely rejects this disavowal of theatricality and spectacle. 150 00:19:50,080 --> 00:20:01,000 It debunks it literally explodes the entrenched notion of spectacle as slight as superficial as empty of content as destruction. 151 00:20:01,000 --> 00:20:11,950 Works such as Black Ceremony and Sky Ladder show the experience of wonder and fear, however momentary is rich and cognitively complex. 152 00:20:11,950 --> 00:20:19,720 Size explosion events are a visceral events and the release of energy in their violence in that contingency. 153 00:20:19,720 --> 00:20:28,330 They are deeply sensory and indeed sensual experiences, even or perhaps especially on film. 154 00:20:28,330 --> 00:20:36,640 But such experiences work spectators as much rationally and perceptually as emotionally. 155 00:20:36,640 --> 00:20:48,310 Black ceremony, as I suggested earlier, gives us the sky as a space of movement, of zoom, of geometry and in a way as a space of tactility. 156 00:20:48,310 --> 00:20:53,860 To watch it is to see and to feel and to know the sky differently, 157 00:20:53,860 --> 00:21:03,700 and a new study shows as a spectacle is, or at least can be on epistemology a way of knowing. 158 00:21:03,700 --> 00:21:11,610 This has to do with, of course, with knowing the world and the universe in which we live and of which we are a part. 159 00:21:11,610 --> 00:21:17,250 But it's also I think about better knowing our own senses and the role they. 160 00:21:17,250 --> 00:21:23,520 And above all, the eye and the ear play in our learning and our feeling. 161 00:21:23,520 --> 00:21:30,200 What I'm really saying is that much of size work is spectacle about spectatorship. 162 00:21:30,200 --> 00:21:40,960 It's about the act of looking. The French philosopher Jacques Valencia has called for an art that abolishes the boundary between those 163 00:21:40,960 --> 00:21:47,890 who act and those who look a boundary with its attendant binaries of knowledge versus ignorance, 164 00:21:47,890 --> 00:21:55,870 activity vs. passivity that he regards as having been long foundational to aesthetic theory and practise, 165 00:21:55,870 --> 00:22:01,460 and indeed long foundational to political thought to. 166 00:22:01,460 --> 00:22:09,470 Being a spectator is not some sorry being a spectator, Raunchier argues, countering not only the ball, 167 00:22:09,470 --> 00:22:17,150 but in fact also the likes of Bertolt Brecht is not some passive condition that we should transform into activity. 168 00:22:17,150 --> 00:22:25,670 It is our normal situation. We also learn and teach, act and know as spectators. 169 00:22:25,670 --> 00:22:34,460 Forensic art shouldn't seek to instruct the spectator or transmit something predetermined a message, 170 00:22:34,460 --> 00:22:44,090 a feeling rather art must seek to establish an equality between maker and spectator. 171 00:22:44,090 --> 00:22:47,600 The emancipated spectator, Ron Cierre proposes, 172 00:22:47,600 --> 00:23:00,490 is that once a performer deploying her skills and a spectator observing what these skills might produce in a new context, amongst other spectators. 173 00:23:00,490 --> 00:23:08,150 In size art, we find indeed, we are such emancipated spectators. 174 00:23:08,150 --> 00:23:15,780 Today's question. What did this explosion represent for you beyond its mere spectacle? 175 00:23:15,780 --> 00:23:25,890 Sy responded, I was interested in comparing the physiological effects before, during and after the explosion. 176 00:23:25,890 --> 00:23:36,480 Foetus movement, too, was concerned with how spectacle works upon our bodies and minds, sat at the centre of the rings of explosives. 177 00:23:36,480 --> 00:23:46,740 Sy was hooked up to an electrocardiography and an electro phonograph to measure his heart and brain responses as ignition occurred. 178 00:23:46,740 --> 00:23:50,760 He was simultaneously the artist and the spectator. 179 00:23:50,760 --> 00:23:58,590 Someone creating something new, something creating something to be seen and someone doing the seeing. 180 00:23:58,590 --> 00:24:03,040 Of course, in that video we saw at the start rewind. 181 00:24:03,040 --> 00:24:08,460 Interestingly, Sy says that he creates things that he wants to see. 182 00:24:08,460 --> 00:24:15,530 I think that absolutely captures this dynamic between the maker and the spectator in his work. 183 00:24:15,530 --> 00:24:26,240 Similarly, in the documentary Sky Ladder, we witness size enraptured, deeply emotional reaction to his own creation. 184 00:24:26,240 --> 00:24:35,150 He experienced the event as a spectator in Ranchi as dynamic, counter, intuitive sense of that word. 185 00:24:35,150 --> 00:24:47,210 And when we watch footage of size creating his gunpowder paintings or his explosion events, the gathered audience are part of what's happening. 186 00:24:47,210 --> 00:24:55,480 There's something being created on sculpture on the ground there, as much as there is something being created in the sky. 187 00:24:55,480 --> 00:25:01,280 What is being performed is a spectacle of looking itself. 188 00:25:01,280 --> 00:25:09,080 To understand this, I think, is to understand why PSI is drawn to venues. 189 00:25:09,080 --> 00:25:14,120 The 2008 Olympics in Beijing, most notably and the media. 190 00:25:14,120 --> 00:25:23,990 YouTube Netflix that can reach audiences of millions because Spectacles mass appeal so denigrated by cultural 191 00:25:23,990 --> 00:25:34,670 critics is essential to the ideas and acts of seeing a beholding at his art is playing with and most crucially, 192 00:25:34,670 --> 00:25:47,136 enabling in new ways. Thank you.