Text_ Yoshiyuki Chao (Independent Curator)
Poster of the exhibition "The Principles of Hope"
Luo Xiaoming, from the Department of Cultural Studies at Shanghai University, wrote the article "Grammar concerning the Future" for an exhibition aggregated by the grammar of the "future"— the group exhibition "The Principles of Hope", and as one of the general curators of the exhibition, she wrote: "For a period of time, the grammatical issue of the 'future' did not need to be discussed. She points out that dreams and the future are an unquestionable set of relationships. However, when Sigmund · During Sigmund Freud's time as a psychiatrist in Vienna, many young boys told him about the same nightmare about horses,[1] and the relationship between dreams and the future was already a reflection of reality. Today, 120 years later, what does "future" mean? If "future" has unfortunately become a fashion consumed quarterly by the world of capital, a machine with no threshold and unlimited withdrawals, or "future" has meant that there is no future... A lot of people won't agree with that. At the very least, a group of young curators from diverse professional backgrounds would not agree, and they were driven by the urge to clarify the spectrum of "hope." Since 2016, even I have produced a series of manifestos on the "future", whether it is discussing the "future literature" or using the "futuristic ritual" as a framework for curatorial action. The proof that the "future" is not a propositional composition in the experience of many thinkers, but that these are just the right ones that drive a desire and are fulfilled when the awareness of the problem moves toward clarity.
Liam · Jan, "Camouflage "Dance" (2021), Dance Performance Film Still Frame, 5'
Images courtesy of the artist
"The Principle of Hope" was exhibited at the Middle Art Museum in Beijing from October 2021 to February 2022, with a title derived from the German philosopher Ernst Schwarzkopf. Ernst Bloch's post-World War II book of the same name grew out of a vision to answer the confusion of reality and expand the spectrum of hope. The curatorial team (Huang Wenlong, Zhu Siyu, Yin Shuai, Liang Ugwa, Zhang Ligeng, Zhou Boya) made it clear that the future form is not as homogeneous as the iPhone advertisement presents, nor is it an "invisible movement" of Chinese futurism. In his curatorial essay "The Abandoned Future", Yin Shuai pointed out: "In fact, this exhibition is more directed towards history. The "future" was repeatedly proposed, produced, verified, failed, and looked back in the past 20th century, and after that, it took decades for mankind to rely on the fallacy about it.
Borrowing Camus's philosophical metaphor of "Sisyphus pushing a boulder against the gods", Huang Wenlong and Zhu Siyu believe that the "future" is a state that will come in a meaningless repetition but never comes, a most positive state about "hope". Rising enthusiasm corresponds to the impotence of love. Liang and Zhou Boya initially wanted to discuss an app called "AI Boyfriend". In the modern people's psychiatric syndrome, AI men/girlfriends bring some emotional release to many young people, but they are more aware of the side effects - there have been many cultural products that reproduce this, such as the otaku protagonist in the movie "Her" fell in love with the computer operating system, and in the Netflix episode "Black Mirror", the robot replaced the heroine's dead boyfriend to bring her comfort. Although the results have been known, the impulse to use it is still impossible to restrain – the dilemma of modern human emotion is a set of classic contemporary paradoxes.
What the Company is trying to discuss is how beliefs about the future have been constantly established, collapsed, and rebuilt along with the great development of capitalism in the 20th century and the two world wars, and how a thread of modernity based on progressism has brought a repulsion to the imagination of the "future" to the whole world. What is terrible is not that utopia shows its opposite, but that it disappears ever since. Zhang Ligeng focused on the monopolistic infrastructure of the Internet, which grew and dominated the imagination of life after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In his curatorial essay "Data Transformation "Law": Artistic and Dynamic Resistance, he quoted Bloch's view that art, as "the manifestation of utopian consciousness, is a symbol of reality that has not yet been formed." After the human information editing and processing ability is greatly enhanced by computers, recoding becomes more diverse and rapid; after unlocking the "medium is information", "power will" and "knowledge-power", the construction of self-identity, power, and property in digital networks leaves artists with a huge space. Thus, at various levels, an incomplete genealogy of "hope" (the future) is painstakingly sketched.
In a corner of the "Principle of Hope" exhibition site, the picture is provided by the Middle Art Museum
The curators of The Principles of Hope, who come from different fields such as computing, documentary studies, law, visual arts and curation, and economics, decided to present their chosen works indiscriminately under the grand "futurology" proposition. His works cover contemporary art, fiction texts, drama, animation, magazines, poetry, music, traditional woodcuts, documentaries, etc., while the less obvious exhibition structure makes the exhibition feel like an infinitely expanding network. If this unintentionally woven structure is a deliberate arrangement, we try to examine it through a post-structural cluster of stars about "hope" or "future."
In the exhibition, in addition to the album cover printed with the word "Dawn" and the self-prologue text of Wang Xiyan in the book "The Loss of God" published in 1983, you can also see Meng Jinghui's early drama "Waiting for God" (1991), one of the representative works of Chinese avant-garde drama. According to Meng Jinghui, avant-garde drama is the product of a specific historical stage. This drama born after the fall of the Berlin Wall responded to the mental state of the youth at that time: the times have suffered a hard turn, is it to let go of memories and embrace the "future"? Or save the thoughts? The two-hour, rough-quality theatrical video is clearly not about presenting the significance of Waiting for Godot itself in the anti-linguistic and anti-Rutgers-centric dimensions. Here, "the future" is a proverb of a particular era. Nearly a decade later, on New Year's Day of the Millennium, the artist Datong Da Zhang (formerly known as Zhang Shengquan) committed suicide in his apartment to express his resistance to the art world moving towards the infinity of capital.
As early as 1993 to 1998, Datong Dazhang should have clearly felt the change of the "audience" in the art field: from the original "you, me, and him" to a circle dominated by the center of power. Art no longer waits, nor does it see the "audience" it should meet, that is, "hope." I also had the pleasure of seeing Francis in a corner of the exhibition hall. Francis Als' 2020 new work, The Forbidden Pace. The leading artist, who uses a long time of labor as a major artist in grammar, recreates his last day of quarantine on Hong Kong's Lamma Island in this 3-minute, 22-second short film. The artist buries a foreshadowing in it: he paces the roof covered with a cloth, and finally removes the cloth, and the world becomes clear. "Future" is a backward sentence that is said by the image.
Xper.Xr, Enchanting Music (1992), CD, Size Variable / Murmur (1992), magazine
16.4cmx 27.2cm
Images courtesy of the artist and the empty gallery
In the video work "Dow Did the Right Thing", Mr. Good pretends to be the head of the Dow Chemical Factory and receives compensation from the Dow Chemical Factory he inherited, which is typical of the use of absurd methods to achieve social intervention. But does anyone pay for this moral venture, or can moral "hope" win the bet? Either way, in the video, Dow's stock has evaporated by 200 million. In the 20th century, this worldwide farce was not an isolated case, it was also reminiscent of a broadcast by the American Columbia Broadcasting Corporation (CBS) on October 30, 1938: the announcer introduced the director Orson W. Bush. Orson Welles, according to Herbert M. George · Wells's novel Star Wars is adapted from the radio drama of the same name, interspersed with a fictional report of an alien invasion of Earth. This report caused social uproar, and the experience of losing common sense happened again and again, and people had already delivered their "future" in the shrouded information channel.
In addition, Lei Lei's animation work "Color Rubik's Cube and Ping-Pong Ball" is also quite frightening, as a "post-80s" author when watching this work, he has a similar feeling as when watching the animation film "Rubik's Cube Building". The Cube Mansion is made up of 26 cities located in a Rubik's Cube cube, where powerful social metaphors make the Rubik's Cube itself a mirror device of some kind of "future" that reflects reality. The video work "Sixty Star Chasing Woman: I Want to Marry Jin Dong and Live Bravely Once" is completely from reality, edited from the program "Happiness Formula" of Jiangxi Television City Channel. Happiness is supposed to give "hope", so it seems unkind to poke through reality. Just as in the hit TV series "An Jia", after the house buying agent played by Sun Li punctured the fraud of the feng shui master, the big money in the play said: "You slandered my feng shui master, you smashed my faith." Once the love-hate love and hatred of ordinary people are withdrawn from reality, they become abstract "hopes" beyond finiteness, involving the realm of God.
In the work "Sub-Alpine Land", Feng Kehui looks at the sub-alpine land, the region where utopia once arrived, and in the reality that the "hope" of the future has been hit, "it was wrong at the beginning!" Local residents tell the truth about the "future" in the past. Liam · Liam Young's dance performance film "Dance in Disguise" is about the post-pandemic era, and the soundtrack of this work is scattered in the exhibition hall, and the sad heart tone invades the consciousness, like a lament of the times. If it weren't for the end of the movie "Cinema Paradiso", where the protagonist Orfredo cut all the kiss scenes and handed them to the little boy Dodo, we almost forgot that there has been such a ridiculous and harsh censorship in the history of cinema. When reality is like Skynet, human creation becomes so organic. No "future" is itself "hope"! Pauline · Pauline Julier and Nicholas Nicolas Chapoulier's creative site before the 2020 Lockdown of Rome makes the drone drop a banner that says Tout Ira Bien (Everything will be fine) and make people laugh. Poetry is a method of "hope".
Pauline · Ullier and Nicholas · Chaplier, "Everything Will Be All Right" (2020), video, 8'55"
Produced by the Geneva Cantonal Foundation for Contemporary Art, the pictures were provided by the artist
Can the "future" itself be the method? Looking back on the thrilling and absurd days and nights since the COVID-19 pandemic, we are already in a state of flux. "The virus has become no longer terrible, more terrible is social death" became the consensus of most people, and it drove us to ask for the "future" again. From a traditional sociological perspective, "future-driven" economic dynamics have long been an important question since the 20th century – the first revolving around World War II and the second with the fall of the Berlin Wall. So how will arguments with the "future" as a method come to human knowledge? As stated in the book The Future God of the Romantics: Lectures on the New Mythology, Dionysus was still beloved by the Romantics—"The world picture of religion was shattered and shattered by rationalist thought, but dionysus' worship became the only religious hope that could be continued, and he was the 'god of the future' (god of the future), at the end of a mythological process, which preserved the basis of religious hope for future generations under conditions of existence oriented by reason. [2] The "god of the future" has always been crucial to the existence of new myths and the spirit of modern society.
The Future God of the Romantics: Lectures on Neo-Mythology
Frank / by
Li Shuangzhi / Translation
East China Normal University Press, 2011
In His Theory of Creation Evolution, Henri Bergson lists many models of being and non-being, "in any case we can feel things from the outside and from the inside." [3] The human spirit cannot truly be empty in judging a thing that exists, because the relationship between being and non-being is fundamentally dynamic, and matter is only part of the mental movement and has its lifespan. The "future" is certainly not a variety of forms that matter can represent, it exists in spiritual activity. Star writer Yuval · Harari's A Brief History of the Future was all the rage, and in the book, the author narrates the past, present, and future of Homo sapiens in three parts—"Homo sapiens conquers the world," "Homo sapiens gives meaning to the world," and "Homo sapiens loses control." From an informational/algorithmic perspective, human history is surprisingly short.
If homo sapiens is upgraded to god-man through genetic modification and the human brain connected to computers, we are faced with the reality that information explosion, accelerated communication, and globalization have led to the expansion of information sources, and information has disintegrated the community on which "humanism" depends. Harari's perspective is a good medicine, and what he wants to express is that historical research cannot point to the future, and from the perspective of information, the salvation of mankind will surely gain a new destiny. In the field of literature, the French writer Maurice Maurice Blanchot's collection of essays, The Book of the Future, has profoundly influenced post-structuralist thought and has been admired by literary creators to this day. The book also illustrates the ultimate anxiety of writing: in the history of ultimate literature, after the witty experiments of Bloch, Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and others, writing became incapable of taking shape. How to regain the most fascinating experience that literature has to offer? The words in the movement guarantee a distance from which they can see themselves: "The power of literature is not in presentation, but in the creative absence of something, and with the power of absence, it is present." [4] A literary work without literary characteristics points to the future, and a book with an eternal opening will eventually become a "book of the future".
The Book of the Future
Maurice Brownshaw / Author
Zhao Lingcen / Translation
Nanjing University Publishing 2015
A large number of theories about the "future" have reshaped history. In the description of the past, the narration of the "future" makes the existence of the future necessarily reasonable, and in this way sweeps the world. Illusions of the future also guide the present. Today, we lament that the futuristic machine in the movie "Dune" seems to have come from the steampunk era 40 years ago, and the chosen son Paul Paul Atreides was the Lawrence of Arabia. Reason, Spirit, Philosophy, Religion, Information/Algorithms, Literature, Poetry... The methodology of the "future" is as described in james What James P. Carse calls "infinite games" – for the sake of perpetuating games, infinite games are about eternity. The future becomes a way to perpetuate the future. The future leaves from temporal coordinates. The future will be a ritual. The future is Zen, the Maitreya Buddha (future Buddha).
Notes
[1] When Freud was a doctor, he investigated that many of the young boys' dreams related to horses were actually related to the image of their father, resulting in many clinical cases, based on which he later wrote "The Interpretation of Dreams".
Frank. The Future God of the Romantics: Lectures on Neo-Mythology[M]. Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 2011: 5.
[3] Henry Bergson. Creation evolution[M]. Nanjing: Yilin Publishing House, 2011: 230.
YU Gengyun. The Words of the Prophets, The Sorcerers of Literature[N]. The Economic Observer. 2016-3-28.
(Originally published in Xinrui Weekly, No. 66, original titled "A Promising Cluster of Stars and a Timeless Future: From the Exhibition 'The Principle of Hope'")
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