What did this explosion represent to you beyond its mere spectacle?
This question? Was posed to Sibel Chang by the art critic of Tunisia in an interview 2002.
The explosion to which they're referring is features movement to Project for Extraterrestrials Number Nine,
an event of 1992 which saw he placed himself at the very centre vast concentric rings of explosives in a field in Germany.
Oh, come to see his response to this question.
At the very end of my paper, what really interests me is there's a throwaway formulation, mere spectacle.
But behind it lies a Western tradition, a tradition in many ways,
a western tradition of critical and philosophical suspicion of spectacle that goes back some two and a half thousand years, at least.
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.
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.
But in order to make this claim of first say something about size relationship to the theatre
and how I see his art as addressing questions of what theatre a performance is and does,
I'm not a specialist in Chinese art. Rather, I'm a scholar of performance and theatre history,
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.
And it's in these terms that I find size work so compelling and moving to.
Psystar has been profoundly shaped by his lifelong engagement with a variety of theatrical ideas and theatrical practises by theatrical practises.
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.
And also every day ritual. In terms of the latter, gunpowder explosions are social occasions or as part of religious ceremonies,
were woven into the fabric of his daily life growing up in Fujian province in China.
So reminds us the sound and flash of firecrackers mock every rites of passage from birth to death.
Moreover, infusion, especially marionette puppetry, has long flourished as an art form at the nexus of religion,
history and social customs, social customs and culture.
Indeed, the famed Quanzhou Marinette troupe, established in size home city in 1952, performs around the world to this day.
Equally, as David has already mentioned, so his father, a manager at a local bookstore,
brought home copies of plays by the likes of Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller.
And so he became himself a member of the municipal propaganda team, essentially a theatre troupe.
And indeed, again, as David's noted, also worked as an actor.
Most formative of all were the four years from 1991 to 1995.
So I spent at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, where he worked in the design department under General Benny.
A sigh recalls in most Chinese institutes, you study the traditional Chinese painting or traditional oil painting,
but theatre school is different because your concerns are more conceptual.
You discuss materials, you space, time lights and audience reception.
You make proposals, develop your ideas and you learn to work as part of a team.
You're asked to grasp the whole process, from proposal to budget to production and presentation.
Theatre is based on time, how your work is revealed in time, how it develops and proceeds how the audience is engaged.
These ideas laid the foundation for my art practise.
Materiality communality, design process, space, light time.
Audience response. These are the theatrical coordinates of size art.
When we watched the creation of one of his gunpowder paintings, for instance,
we see a group of practitioners at work and the self generating energy of such cooperation.
And in the exertions and constant motion of his team of assistants who helped to
perhaps you prepare the kind of gunpowder to stencils and with particular alacrity,
extinguish any lingering flames after ignition. We witness to a drama of bodies moving across and interacting within a given space.
And with given materials. Size art, the lens of theatre reminds us, is always an embodied one.
It's an art in which process is form, and that process includes not only the kinaesthetic of transformed matter,
but also the kinaesthetic of the makers bodies.
It is further an art, I think, enabled in part by the logic of Griffey size explosion events have often been described,
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.
But this manner of understanding such spectacles ultimately pulls them, I think, towards exactly the two dimensionality that they emphatically resist.
For instance, Black Ceremony realised at Doha in 2011 saw the synchronised explosions of coloured powder,
which gave to the sky the quality of a large perspect time of space akin to a kind of stage in the sky.
The effect was especially striking. Dare I say dramatic, because the cloudless, pristine blue of Qatar's sky appears almost flat,
with the explosions creating a sudden sense not only of colour, but of depth and of geometry.
The explosions aren't just sculptural, they're almost architectural.
In the words of one critic, many 20th century stenographers conceived of the theatre set as quote,
a unified work of art, a kinetic obstruction of architectural masses, darkness, shadows and light.
Doesn't this also describe black ceremony? CI uses light sound,
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,
a space of play in the many overlapping meanings of that word.
Only here, performance resides itself in the very process of that mapping out,
performance is manifest in the very act of creating the space it inhabits.
This is theatre making as theatre.
This takes us, I think, to another of the vectors of performance that Sy learns to harness while at the Shanghai Theatre Academy time.
I've already touched upon process as form insights work.
Notably, he's spoken of turning, looking at sculpture into looking at making sculpture, using that very process as a work of art.
The statement was white that this statement was made in reference to Venice Rent Collection Courtyard.
The award winning installation at the Venice Biennale in 1999, which saw Sy, as David's already mentioned, bringing a team of artisans,
artisans, sculptures, sculptures to recreate the 108 life-size figures of one of China's most famous works of socialist realist sculpture.
But the idea of looking at making what I think we might regard as a useful definition of
performance itself is equally central to his explosion events and his gunpowder canvases.
Where we see something come into being and then seemingly disappear.
And this disappearing is significant. Well, the temporality of performance is one,
at least as we've always assumed of impermanence or performance is ephemeral on the power of its presence.
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.
Theatre is an art of loss of negotiating loss.
Theatre is an art of memory, of negotiating acts of memory and remembrance.
So he is drawn to fireworks, not only for their unpredictability, but for their transience, that sensational momentary terrorists.
We have photographs and video footage of a black ceremony.
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,
at least until recently?
This has been the inevitable lament of historians of performance who Joseph Roach reminds us with with a wink tend in their writing
to fall back on the same anecdote of irretrievable loss to mourn what can be found in or contained by the Archives of Performance,
the archives of the event. But recently, we started to rethink these ideas.
In 2011, Rebecca Schneider's book Performing remains challenged this logic for Schneider The Binaries of Past vs. present life vs. Archive.
That a long, structured considerations of performance are false.
And I think her insights allow us to see size work in an interestingly different way.
History like performance, Schneider insists, ought not to concern itself with an attempt to recover a pure past.
Such an idea of a pure past is itself a fiction.
Rather, history like performance should concern itself with an ongoing re-enactment of the past within an always unfolding present.
And this is just what size work achieves.
His gunpowder drawings collapse, the ontological distinction between the event and its record by making the traces of explosion,
the patterns of burnt matter of ash and smoke, an object that is itself spectacular, that engages and moves us in the moment.
Sized gunpowder paintings, once an archaeology of the event and an event in themselves always still happening.
Likewise, in explosion events are often not just meditations on history, but wilful and playful re-enactments of it.
Take, for instance, and we've already seen a number of these images.
Take, for instance, his series The Century of Mushroom Clouds project for the 20th century of Nineteen ninety five to six,
where he detonated handheld explosive devices at symbolic sites across the United States,
Manhattan, the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the Nevada test site.
In doing so, he reactivated the cultural and historical charge of the landscapes,
making visible the continued conceptual power of the mushroom cloud in a present still defined
seemingly invisibly by the use of nuclear technology as a political and military deterrent.
Or. Consider size transformation earlier this year of the amphitheatre at Pompei into an explosion studio,
into this amphitheatre rigged with coloured gunpowder. He placed canvases of various sizes, copies of antique sculpture and other objects,
all of which were remade in a subsequent explosion, given new colour.
A new form. And then excavated as ruins, which formed the core of size solo exhibition at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.
And some of these objects are in the exhibition here.
As the official website for the event described it, an explosion of gunpowder and coloured smoke in Pompey's amphitheatre will reignite
the tragic and vital dynamics of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in a timeless,
poetic journey that tells the story of the destruction and rebirth of Pompeii.
Once again, just as Rebecca Schneider suggests, performance engages the memory of the past,
rather performance engages the memory to offer the past as a as a continuously negotiable present, as a continuously felt present.
As Alfonso Rousseau, director of the archaeological park Pompeii put it, Sy showed that Pompeii is a place of the contemporary.
Not for nothing. Asi insisted that the job of the artist is to create time space tunnels.
That we can experience these explosion events only through digital recordings and photographs.
They are performances always oriented towards their own mediation, their own circulation size art interrogates media age precisely by embracing it.
His explosion events and the creation of his gunpowder paintings readily lend themselves to the circulation and sharing of videos.
Through YouTube, you can spend hours and hours on YouTube enthralled with the videos of size,
explosion events and the creation of his gunpowder drawings. This is especially the case with Sky, another of 2015,
in which flames make a dazzling and miraculous climb towards the heavens by means
of a 500 metre ladder rigged with explosives and held aloft by a huge balloon.
The event itself was staged in secret in Hillview Island Harbour and in Gwangju at dawn at 4:45 in the morning.
Yet when footage of the event was leaked online,
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.
As David Jocelyn's has written. Even they film and film and video have not been his primary medium size art,
maybe regarded as enacting media explosions in the negotiations he orchestrates,
have everything to do with facing the overwhelming pace at which we receive visual information
and the exhilarating and sometimes terrifying volatility with which images may be consumed.
This insight opens up the question of audience.
Another one of those theatrical coordinates and returns me finally to the matter of spectacle with which I began.
What does it mean to speak of mere spectacle?
The formulation is ultimately platonic in origin.
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.
He likens those who depend only on their senses to prisoners chained for life inside a cave and seeing
only the shadows cast by real objects shadows the prisoners take to be the objects themselves.
Even Aristotle's poetics of work, of course, especially concerned to evaluate the theatre,
even Aristotle's poetics places plot, mythos and speech Lexus above spectacle obsess to appeal to the eye.
Aristotle cautions in artistic. In the West,
this tradition of casting spectacle as the other of contemplation of reason of action encompasses such thinkers as Augustine Rousseau new catch marks,
but its master spokesman is De Boer. In divorce, 1967, book Society of the Spectacle Spectacle is that which renders us passive.
It transfixed is us with the illusory fiction of representation.
It's supplants and puts us at a distance from the real, from the realities of the economy, from the realities of society.
Ideology that is false consciousness is spectacle for the viewer.
This conception of spectacle is so deeply embedded within our culture that it's part
of our everyday speech when we say that someone is making a spectacle of themselves.
It's never a good thing and it quietly pervades the language of aesthetics, too.
Hence, Octavio Zayas mere spectacle or equally, David Joscelyn writing of what lies beneath spectacular surfaces of Sighs Art.
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.
As Fred wrote in 1967, the success even the survival of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theatre.
But saw his body of work absolutely rejects this disavowal of theatricality and spectacle.
It debunks it literally explodes the entrenched notion of spectacle as slight as superficial as empty of content as destruction.
Works such as Black Ceremony and Sky Ladder show the experience of wonder and fear, however momentary is rich and cognitively complex.
Size explosion events are a visceral events and the release of energy in their violence in that contingency.
They are deeply sensory and indeed sensual experiences, even or perhaps especially on film.
But such experiences work spectators as much rationally and perceptually as emotionally.
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.
To watch it is to see and to feel and to know the sky differently,
and a new study shows as a spectacle is, or at least can be on epistemology a way of knowing.
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.
But it's also I think about better knowing our own senses and the role they.
And above all, the eye and the ear play in our learning and our feeling.
What I'm really saying is that much of size work is spectacle about spectatorship.
It's about the act of looking. The French philosopher Jacques Valencia has called for an art that abolishes the boundary between those
who act and those who look a boundary with its attendant binaries of knowledge versus ignorance,
activity vs. passivity that he regards as having been long foundational to aesthetic theory and practise,
and indeed long foundational to political thought to.
Being a spectator is not some sorry being a spectator, Raunchier argues, countering not only the ball,
but in fact also the likes of Bertolt Brecht is not some passive condition that we should transform into activity.
It is our normal situation. We also learn and teach, act and know as spectators.
Forensic art shouldn't seek to instruct the spectator or transmit something predetermined a message,
a feeling rather art must seek to establish an equality between maker and spectator.
The emancipated spectator, Ron Cierre proposes,
is that once a performer deploying her skills and a spectator observing what these skills might produce in a new context, amongst other spectators.
In size art, we find indeed, we are such emancipated spectators.
Today's question. What did this explosion represent for you beyond its mere spectacle?
Sy responded, I was interested in comparing the physiological effects before, during and after the explosion.
Foetus movement, too, was concerned with how spectacle works upon our bodies and minds, sat at the centre of the rings of explosives.
Sy was hooked up to an electrocardiography and an electro phonograph to measure his heart and brain responses as ignition occurred.
He was simultaneously the artist and the spectator.
Someone creating something new, something creating something to be seen and someone doing the seeing.
Of course, in that video we saw at the start rewind.
Interestingly, Sy says that he creates things that he wants to see.
I think that absolutely captures this dynamic between the maker and the spectator in his work.
Similarly, in the documentary Sky Ladder, we witness size enraptured, deeply emotional reaction to his own creation.
He experienced the event as a spectator in Ranchi as dynamic, counter, intuitive sense of that word.
And when we watch footage of size creating his gunpowder paintings or his explosion events, the gathered audience are part of what's happening.
There's something being created on sculpture on the ground there, as much as there is something being created in the sky.
What is being performed is a spectacle of looking itself.
To understand this, I think, is to understand why PSI is drawn to venues.
The 2008 Olympics in Beijing, most notably and the media.
YouTube Netflix that can reach audiences of millions because Spectacles mass appeal so denigrated by cultural
critics is essential to the ideas and acts of seeing a beholding at his art is playing with and most crucially,
enabling in new ways. Thank you.