HER KIND 创 | 意料之外

意料之外

文 | Alia Lin

“我有与生俱来的艺术天赋…我有幸福美妙的婚姻…我有两个儿子…我有令人期待和羡慕的未来…我将拥有艺术家已经拥有和想要拥有的一切…”。摘自曹雨的视频作品《我有》（2017）。在视频中这位艺术家毫无羞耻感地大声历数自己的成就和抱负。这四十句令人羡慕又气恼的句子在展厅里不停地重复。《我有》招致了嫉妒甚至愤恨，不仅是因为它揭露了普遍的价值观，使参观者意识到她们所没能拥有的，也是因为艺术家颠覆了一个人应该谦虚这一实际上对女性来说更具有约束力的、公认的准则。对艺术家来说，挑战和打破被认为理所当然的观念是至关重要的。

曹雨 / 我有（视频截图） / 单频高清录像 彩色，有声 / 4'22'' / 2017

曹雨的大部分作品直接或间接地涉及人的身体，有时候使用与人体相关的，从乳汁、尿液、头发到文胸及皮靴之类的材料。虽然被认为使用“女性材料”，但这位艺术家把自己与其他艺术家区别开来。她的作品并不强调男性和女性之间的生理差异，比如喷射的乳汁（《泉》，2015）也是隐喻男性喷射体液的能量，是与布鲁斯·瑙曼的作品《喷泉自画像》的对话¹；而作品《女艺术家》（2017）中大尺度放大的身份证则减少以至忽略“性别：女”所象征的基本信息。特别是头发紧密联系到女性身份，让人联想到脆弱，在艺术作品中使用头发常常象征着女性的身体。比如莫娜·哈透姆在头巾上的头发刺绣图案和安德里安·派普从1985年持续到现在收集的一罐罐头发（《我将会成为什么》）。然而在《世界暂时如此》（2017）中，曹雨用一整根她自己的头发把两块大理石系在一起，全靠这根头发，两块石头才没有互相倾倒。这根头发纤细的几乎看不见，完全与身体联想无关，以至于被认为仅仅是一种易得的结实材料。

曹雨 / 世界暂时如此 / 一根长头发（艺术家本人的）、大理石 / 89×60×38cm，74×50×33cm / 2018

曹雨 / 世界暂时如此，局部

《泉》是曹雨2015年的毕业作品，既没有强调性别的差异，也没有否认她的女性经验，呈现的是两个被不停挤压的乳房，像喷泉一样喷射出乳汁。对女性艺术来说，母性总是灵感的主要来源。这段视频是她生产后不久拍摄的，记录了出奶的整个过程。艺术家只是展示了一对乳房，她颠覆了参观者的凝视，并把为人母者的身体转变为梅兰妮克莱因所称的“部分客体”。因为没有被理想化的母性观念所束缚，她的乳房并不是永久地满足婴儿的“好客体”，相反，它们被转化为“坏客体”，成为艺术的工具。用力地挤压，被认为哺育用的乳汁喷涌而出直至干涸。干瘪的乳房引发了失去“珍爱客体”的抑郁的焦虑，正如《母亲》系列（2016）中一样。《母亲》是一件艺术家为她的母亲创作的作品，包括一块穿孔的画布，一条从其内部做成的通道向外面伸出来，代表阴道和脐带。在这里，“母亲”又一次被降为“部分客体”。阴道被撕裂、缝合，脐带被割裂，隐喻着婴儿与母体的剧烈分离。

曹雨 / Mother NO.1 / 亚麻布、木框 /（120+31）×80×15cm / 2016

曹雨 / Mother NO.1，局部

艺术家不仅展示自己的身体并从中获取材料，她还把其他常见的材料当作身体的一部分来对待。对曹雨来说，一个戳出的孔洞和伸出的亚麻布通道相当于阴道和脐带，画布同样可视作人的皮肤。看到一块空白的画布如此完美以至需要扯出里面的丝线，她的《细节》系列（2017）就如此这般留下疤痕。然而在同样创作于2017年的《画布》系列中，艺术家用签字笔描画画布上面的每一条线。强调画布的物质性的同时，描画的过程异常的费力，无异于一种冥想。《细节》和《画布》是克莱因所称的偏执-分裂位置和抑郁位置两种心理位置相互作用的适当表现。从偏执-分裂位置转换到抑郁位置，人会经历由于自身的破坏性幻想造成的损失，然后努力抑制这种攻击性并寻求修复²。所以，如果说《细节》是曹雨的破坏性幻想在画布上的表现，那么《画布》可以被视为她对其进行的费力的修复。

曹雨 / 细节 NO.1 / 画布 / 152×121cm / 2017

曹雨 / 画布170602-170919 / 布面签字笔 / 450×190×15cm / 2017

不再允许参观者保持超然和无虑的状态，曹雨的作品充分调动了参观者包括视觉、嗅觉、听觉和触觉在内的感官。她作品中的施虐倾向，常令参观者不适和反感。正像《我有》是一种持续的听觉攻击一样，曹雨的作品对参观者的多重感官发起进攻。例如，喷射出的乳汁和用尿液和出的面团（《劳动者》，2017）在视觉上会产生极度不适和强烈反感；用乳汁凝结成黏土形态并沾有艺术家的手印，散发出令人厌恶的强烈气味（《艺术家制造》，2016）；在作品《肉味》（2017）中，经参观者想象和转化放大后的，隐藏在洗手间后面带有人体相关的各种莫名其妙的声响，严重冒犯了人的听觉。而在作品《困惑的浪漫》（2017）中，参观者无意识不可避免地触摸到的门把手后的凡士林都令她们产生触觉和心理上的厌恶。

曹雨 / 劳动者 / 单频高清录像 彩色，无声 / 2017

曹雨 / 艺术家制造 / 母乳（艺术家本人的） / 2016

曹雨 / 肉味/ 声音装置 / 2017

曹雨 / 困惑的浪漫/ 凡士林、纸巾 / 2017

人的头发、尿液，特别是乳汁都是禁忌材料，很少使用。由取自艺术家身体的材料制成的艺术作品特别令人厌恶，它们令人想起茱莉娅·克里斯蒂瓦所称之为的“卑贱”。卑贱，根据克里斯蒂瓦的说法，是对自我和他者的排斥。这不仅仅是身体对不洁的厌恶，而且是对“身份、体系和秩序”³的困扰。当头发、尿液、乳汁从身体分离后，它们就不再被视为自身的一部分，然而它们也不被视为他物。这些身体材料是对文化和已建立的社会秩序的威胁。卑贱介于“两者之间、模棱两可、含混”⁴的特性使它令人既排斥又着迷。

此外，作品如《彩云NO.1》（2017）和《活着，没什么好解释的》（2017）需要参观者直接或通过对身体相关的推测进行接触。《彩云NO.1》由缝合在一起的许多文胸组成，形成了铺在地面上的像地毯一样的柔软表面，艺术家有意让参观者经过时踩上去。参观者被迫作出是直接穿过文胸地毯还是绕过去的抉择。一方面，踏上文胸会引发幼儿时期对乳房的破坏性幻想，由于害怕毁坏乳房又产生内疚感；另一方面，参观者会预先感受到疼痛，于是选择绕道而行，远离负罪感。无论如何，参观者都被抑郁的焦虑所占据。至于《活着，没什么好解释的》，作品展示的一双被坚硬的钢筋穿透的皮靴（艺术家的最爱）体现的是通过对身体相关的推测进行的接触。参观者会无意识地把她本人投射到作品当中。尽管是以一种放松的姿态站立在那里，她们还是会从视觉心理上被稍微动一下都将痛苦难忍这样的意识所困。

曹雨 / 彩云NO.1/ 黑色文胸 / 10×300×345cm / 2017

曹雨 / 活着，没什么好解释的 / 皮靴、螺纹钢、水泥 / 145×120×120cm / 2017

曹雨自由地表达了自己的攻击性，将自己的破坏性幻想投射到她的作品和参观者身上，使人在生理上和心理上都产生焦虑。她的作品没有什么是观众意料之中的，艺术家试图打乱秩序，推翻所有那些被视为理所当然的。不仅仅是她对材料的选择，还有她的艺术方法。尽管使用了女性的材料，但她的作品并没有宣扬女性的个人经验，也没有回避她的女性身份，她真正地把女性的独特性巧妙地转化为了艺术。

1  瑞秋·里兹·沃洛赫，《曹雨：有水蛇腰的艺术家肖像》，引自《曹雨：我有水蛇腰》（北京：麦勒画廊，2017），6。

2  梅兰妮·克莱因，《论躁郁状态的心理成因》，选自《梅兰妮·克莱因选集》， Melanie Klein,"A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States",in the Selected Melanie Klein,ed.Juliet Mitchell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 124.

3  茱莉娅·克里斯蒂瓦，《恐怖的权利：论卑贱》，Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans.Leon S.Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.

4  同上。

THE UNEXPECTED

Alia Lin

“I have innate artistic talent…I have a happy and lovely marriage… I have two sons…I have a promising, envy-inducing future… I will have everything an artist has or could ever want…” Excerpted from Cao Yu’s video work I Have (2017), in which the artist loudly and shamelessly recites her accomplishments and ambitions, these forty enviable and irritating sentences repeatedly fill the gallery. I Have induces jealousy, and even resentfulness, not only because it reveals what is important in the universal value and reminds the viewers what they do not have, but also because the artist subverts the accepted norms that one should be modest and humble, which in fact regulates women more than men. Challenging and breaking what has been taken for granted is crucial to the artist.

Most of Cao Yu’s works concern the human body, both directly and indirectly, sometimes with materials referencing the body that range from breast milk and urine to hair, brassiere to leather boots. Despite her use of the assumed “feminine materials”, the artist separates herself from the other artists as her works do not stress the biological differences between women and men, that the squirting breast milk (Fountain, 2015) is also a portrayal of the “male power of spurting bodily fluids” and in direct conversation with Bruce Neuman’s Self-Portrait as a Fountain,¹ while the enlarged identification card (the Female Artist, 2017) to a massive scale reduces her identity to the basic information that all the “Gender: Female” signified is lost. In particular, hair has been closely linked to the female identity, associated with fragility, and the use of hair in an artwork often signifies the woman’s body, like Mona Hatoum’s hair embroidery on a keffieh and Adrian Piper’s jars of collected hair (What Will Become of Me, 1985-ongoing). However, in the World is Like This for Now (2017), Cao uses a single hair of her own to tie together two pieces of marble that would otherwise fall on each other. Genuinely thin and nearly invisible, the hair is removed from all personal associations that it is regarded as merely an easily obtained strong material.

Neither stressing gendered difference nor denying her feminine experience, Fountain, the graduation piece Cao Yu created in 2015, presents two breasts being squeezed repeatedly, spurting milk like a fountain. Motherhood has always been a central source of inspiration for women’s art, and this video work was shot soon after she gave birth, documenting the entire process of milking. Showing only the breasts, the artist subverts the viewers’ gaze and transforms the mother’s body into what Melanie Klein terms the “part-objects”. Not constrained by the idealized motherhood that is always nurturing, her breasts are not the “good objects” that satisfy the infant perpetually. Instead, they are turned into artistic tools, the “bad objects”. Squeezing hard, the supposedly nurturing breast milk ejaculates violently until it dries up. The emptied breasts bring about depressive anxiety of losing the “loved object”, the same as in the Mother series (2016). Mother, a piece the artist made for her mother, contains a perforated canvas with a tunnel made out of its own entrails extruded from behind, representing the vagina and the umbilical cord. Here, the “mother” is again reduced to a part-object. The vagina is torn and stitched, the umbilical cord cut—it is the point where the baby violently separates from the mother’s body.

Not only does the artist display and take materials from her own body, but she also treats other common materials as if they are body parts. As a poked hole and an extruded linen tunnel is equivalent to a vagina and an umbilical cord, to Cao, the canvas may as well be the human skin. Seeing a blank canvas as so “perfect” that needs to have its threads torn out, her Detail series (2017) are marked with scars. Whereas the Canvas series, also created in 2017, in which the artist traces each individual threads of the canvas with a pen. Emphasizing the canvas’ materiality itself, the process is extremely laborious, no different from a kind of meditation. Detail and Canvas are an apt demonstration of the interplay between the two positions that Klein calls the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. Shifting from the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position, one experiences a loss to ones own destructive fantasies and then struggles to suppress aggression and seek reparation.² Therefore, if Detail is Cao’s destructive fantasies acting out onto a canvas, then Canvas can be seen as her onerous effort to repair it.

Allowing no more the viewers to remain detached and secure, Cao Yu’s works mobilize the viewers’ senses, including senses of seeing, smelling, hearing, and touching. Often repulsive to the viewers, her works are somewhat sadistic. As I Have is a constant aural attack, Cao’s works assault the viewers on multiple senses. For instance, the spurting breast milk and the stream of urine that kneads flour into dough (the Labourer, 2017) visually arouse unease and revulsion; the condensed breast milk that squeezed into an organic clay-like shape while retaining the artist’s hand prints (Artist Manufacturing, 2016), give off a strong and unpleasant smell; the sound installation of bodily noise hidden in the bathroom (the Flesh Flavour, 2017), transformed and magnified by the viewer’s imagination, which turns the sound of eating a tomato into kissing and hands clapping into spanking, violates the ears; the vaseline behind the door handle (Perplexing Romance, 2017) that the viewers unknowingly yet inevitably have to touch and cover their fingers with cause tactile and psychological repulsion.

Human hair, urine, and especially breast milk are tabooed materials that have rarely been using. Artworks made of materials taken from the artist’s body are repulsive in particular for they recall what Julia Kristeva calls the abject. Abjection, according to Kristeva, is a repulsion of the self and the other. It is not just a physical disgust of uncleanliness, but “what disturbs identity, system, order.”³ When the hair, urine, and breast milk is separated from the body, they are no longer seen as part of the self, yet they are not the other either. Such bodily materials are a threat to culture and the established social order, causing the revulsion. Abjection is “the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”⁴ that it simultaneously repels and fascinates.

Furthermore, works such as the Colorful Clouds No. 1 (2017) and Living, Nothing to Explain (2017) call for the viewers’ bodily engagement, either directly or through bodily projections. The Colorful Clouds No. 1 is made up of black brassieres stitched together, forming a carpet-like soft surface laid over the floor that the artist have intended for the viewers to step on while passing by. The viewers are forced to make a decision of either walking through the brassiere carpet or around it. On one hand, stepping onto the brassieres enacts infantile destructive fantasies over the breasts, yet fear of destroying the breasts give rise to guilt. On the other hand, projecting the pain beforehand, the viewer may choose to make a detour out of guilt. The viewer is thus consumed with depressive anxiety either way. As for Living, Nothing to Explain, featuring a pair of leather boots (the artist’s favorite) impaled on rigid metal rods, engages the viewer’s body rather indirectly. Upon encounter, the viewer involuntarily projects her own body into the work. Even though standing in a leisurely posture, the viewer is visually and psychologically trapped that a slight movement can be agonizing.

Expressing her aggression freely, Cao Yu projects her destructive fantasies onto her works and the viewers, inflicting anxiety both physically and psychologically. Nothing is quite as expected, the artist intends to disrupt the order and overturn all that has been taken for granted, not only with her choices of materials but her artistic methods as well—a canvas is not really a canvas, but a painting becomes the canvas. In spite of her use of feminine materials, Cao’s works do not publicize women’s private experience. Neither does she avoid her female identity that she turns women’s uniqueness into art ingeniously.

1 Rachel Rits-Volloch, “Cao Yu: Portrait of the Artist with an Hourglass Waist,” in Cao Yu: I Have an Hourglass Waist (Beijing: Galerie Urs Meile, 2017), 7.

2 Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed.Juliet Mitchell (Hamrmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 124.

3 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press,1982), 4.

4 Ibid.

关于艺术家

曹雨，1988年生于中国辽宁。2011年毕业于中央美术学院雕塑系，获学士学位；2016年毕业于中央美术学院雕塑系，获硕士学位。

 

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