Original title: Goshka Makuga, Centennial Mansion Staged "After the Fall of Mankind"
On March 22, 2019, Goshka Macuga, known as the "Artist of The Artist", curated the exhibition "What Have I Been?" (What Was I?) opened at the Century-Old Mansion Rong Mansion in Shanghai. Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1967, the artist now lives and works in London. The exhibition brings together 26 works of art selected by the artist and showcases two of her recently completed sculptures and three collages completed in 2018. In the exhibition, Makuga is adept at translating the works of different artists into their own narratives, which are constantly approaching the realm of self-destruction, and the viewer is like an informational archaeology to explore them.
"Then and then, just now". In the movie "Let the Bullets Fly", Zhang Mazi, played by Jiang Wen, and Huang Silang, played by Zhou Runfa, look at each other at the dinner table of the Western-style old mansion, and there is a mysterious mystery behind the surface of the silence, and in the time and space of history and the present, there are also uninterrupted relationships and dialogues between different identities, classes and individuals, full of metaphors and symbolic narrative language.
In the old bungalow built for a hundred years and heavily restored, everything seems to have become obscure in history and the present. In the interlacing of old tiles and carved wooden beams, the civilizations of those years and the years of civilization are in harmony with each other, and they are restored a hundred years later, and the echoes of history echo leisurely in the old mansion.
Born and raised in Poland, Makuga, who did not leave her homeland until 1989, looks unusually serious, like a book or museum keeper — a high degree of unity with her creative and exhibition style. For example, in the booklet dedicated to the editor of this exhibition, she continues to use a large number of documents and works, as long as sixty or seventy pages of manuals seem to be a data retrieval path and information, recording the past of human history, and the timeline and information data are intertwined with each other by Marcu's supergroup approach.
Goshka Macuga, Photo by Francesco Pizzo
Prada House GOSHKA MACUGA "What have I been?" Exhibition site; Photographed by Alessandro Wang, Installation view of Prada Rong Zhai GOSHKA MACUGA "What Was I?"; Photography: Alessandro Wang
Makuga's work spans sculpture, installation, photography, architecture, and design. This time, the exhibition focuses on key issues such as time, beginning and end, collapse and revival. In Lu Mingjun's view, Makuga has the innate texture and energy of Eastern European artists, and she has always maintained a rational passion and calm madness, through the sometimes witty and witty and sometimes simple and childish language, "collage" those deep historical and current political events into a ritual or drama full of imagination and original kinetic energy.
"The impact of this framework resonated throughout the exhibition throughout the presentation and references to mnemonic systems." The central exhibit of this exhibition is the multimedia robot "To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scrolls", a fully designed "artificial man" conceived by Makuga for his 2016 exhibition in Milan." He "has a captivating voice and can perform movements like a "natural" creature by turning his head, blinking, and moving his hands. In an iron box, he recites or rehearses his monologues—made up of fragments of many important speeches—"claiming to be a repository of human language, though "forgetting for whom this knowledge is preserved": in such a situation, the human perspective is no longer valid during this period of understanding by robots. He also seemed to be a radio that had lost its signal or was running out of power, hissing to convey the glimmer of those apocalyptic days.
With this in mind, the entire exhibition tells the story of how, in an increasingly imaginable future, a future in which humanity has become extinct, the robot becomes the owner of the historic building of the House of Glory, showcasing his private art collection and objects: 26 selected works of art, including several masterpieces of Italian art from 1958 to 1993, and three recent collages of "Discrete Models" in Makuga. These works create a kind of home environment and intimate residence, where robots create their own future space. In this space, all kinds of traces of "human" life are left in each room.
Among them, the different voices of different artists' works are organized under the organization of Makuga, full of speculations and concerns about the present and the future. They not only reflect human life, the future of human beings, but also echo each other's views in construction. Most of these works are masterpieces of poor art that combine elements and symbolism of everyday life, and while the art form breaks through the limits of daily life, it also constructs different responses of the human spirit to the times through the combination of artists' perspectives. At the same time, these works create a family environment and intimate residence where robots can create their own future "beings."
Interestingly, in the artist's view, after the extreme impact of human beings on the earth's climate, geology and ecosystems, that is, the post-apocalyptic anthropocene era, science will develop to the brink of collapse, and technological achievements will become worthless tools - in Liu Cixin or most science fiction works, before the end of the world, art often shrinks and technology occupies all value; however, after the end of the world, what human beings have been struggling to pursue has become the most useless thing. In this case, the robot, which exists as the last abandoned humanoid being, lives in the Vinh Mansion: his fragmented movements and voices are his final attempts at communication, while no one witnesses his intermittent self-talk.
It repeats the great speeches of historical politicians, philosophers, and screenwriters—such as Roy's monologue "Attacking a Burning Spaceship" at the end of Blade Runner (1982), and Hal's famous song "Chrysanthemum Bell (A Tandem Bicycle)" sung by Hal 9,000 before his death in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). And the language itself, in the artist's view, is the best shortcut to expanding the mind, and it supports the functions of the mind. In the rickety of the Tower of Babel, Marcouga sees the art of rhetoric and artificial memory as tools that are complexly related, organized, and cognitively enhanced.
language! It's just what people say! How terrible they are! How clear, vivid, and cruel! People can't get rid of them. However, they have a subtle magic! They seem to give the invisible something a malleable shape, play their own music, and are even as pleasant as a violin or a rut. It's just what people say! Is there anything as real as words?
—Alan Turing, Computers and Intelligence (1950)
In contrast to language, there are traces of real things. However, are the traces of the information age still so obvious and valid? As far as the stories woven in this exhibition are concerned, the intermittent classic speeches have been shattered, and only the real-world material collections have been preserved.
On the floor where the robot is located are Displayed Makuga's new works: they are related to computer programming and instructions recently proposed by the historian and software scientist Stephen Wolfram, based on the theories of the British mathematician Ada Lovelace in the first half of the 19th century. These collages form patterns that break through information and echo the programs and geometric constructions of artists in the room, including Nanda Vigo, Grazia Varisco and Jan Schoonhoven.
In the same room as the robot, there are works by experimental artists from The German Zero, Italian Abstraction and the 1950s and 1970s, such as Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni.
Going up are Richard Artschwager, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Mario Merz, Salvatore Scarpitta and Rachel A series of installations and sculptures by artists such as Whiteread, which combine everyday objects and functional elements to suggest the possibilities of post-human daily life.
The works of Lucio Fontana, FrancescoLo Savio and Turi Simeti bear witness to how the physical and symbolic limits of the canvas are pushed, connecting art with reality and nature. In the mezzanine space of the upper and lower floors, two portraits of Walter De Maria and Llyn Foulkes remind people of the body and its absence, while one by Vincenzo Agnetti evokes a consciousness of "language beyond language."
Giuseppe Uncini,Cementarmato, 1960,concrete, iron,Courtesy Fondazione Prada
Goshka Macuga，Discrete Model No 006, 2018，paper collage，Collection of the Artist, London
Salvatore Scarpitta，Cairn Sled, 1974，bandages, wood, mixed media，Photo: Roberto Marossi，Courtesy Fondazione Prada
Vincenzo Agnetti,Oltre il linguaggio, 1970,2 emulsified canvases,Courtesy Fondazione Prada
Walter De Maria，Silver Portrait of Dorian Gray, 1965，velvet, wood, silver，Photo: Attilio Maranzano，Courtesy Fondazione Prada
The rooms and corridors of the entire Rong Mansion are twisted and turned, metaphorically referring to the various entanglements and thoughts of human beings about the era (the end). Compared with the artist's past exhibitions and works, a trace of heterogeneous tension is presented in this field: the apocalyptic atmosphere of technology/ruin/futurism in this exhibition is not strong, the calm and exquisite temperament of Rongzhai itself seems to be too well preserved in the entire "post-anthropocene", and the classic minimalist and poor works of art that have been washed by the market wave seem to have a certain misalignment with the artist's sense of grandeur and future archaeology.
And near the exit, Neon's work "What Have I Been?" Hanging on the door. This introspective question, from Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818), encapsulates the entire exhibition experience and is the origin of the exhibition's theme.
Frankenstein
Who am I? What was I once to be? The English passage implies that the robot knows that it is not really human, and it is still talking about its own ideas, but the human is no longer there, and the power contained in language and speech is still valid? The question of one's own identity is desperately insisted upon by humans and robots at the same time and in the present moment.
What was I?
I，Robot.
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