HOW VISION | 丹尼尔·阿尔轩：“记住未来”

“记住未来”

作者：史蒂文·马蒂奇奥

丹尼尔·阿尔轩的作品中有一种坚定的、几乎偏执的即时性。它们运用一系列逼真的形式、基本材料和建筑式的介入呈现在我们眼前。他创造的奇形怪状的物品和形象被推入所谓的“我们的”空间中；含蓄但坚定地引起我们的注意——即使它们的意图，相对来说，仍旧不清晰。然而，正是在这种介入当中，在观者接受了阿尔轩通过作品发出的娴静而严肃的邀请后，便能在身体缺席的表现中强烈地感受到一种内心的迷失。以《遮蔽的形象》(Hooded Figure)(2015) 这件作品为例，其中，只有半个标题向我们展现了面前的内容。一个有力的既“在场”也“不在场”的综合体让这个神秘的、被皱折遮盖的形象生动起来，它像是对画廊空间表面的延伸——让身体轮廓以清晰的几何形状回归到这些白色墙壁之中。

展览现场图"MOVING ARCHITECTURE"于 VDNH Moscow (Russia), 2017，图片致谢艺术家与贝浩登画廊

就像电影里隐形人的形象是通过在其难以捉摸的身上扔一条毯子来呈现的一样，我们认知阿尔轩创作的那些被遮蔽的人物形象是通过对其缺失的身体进行想象填充完善的。是这些朦胧的抽象假设了我们所感知到的，而不是直接看见被隐藏的部分。反过来，戏剧性的帷幔及时地增强了现场感，同时也唤起了对未来和过去的感知，加深了我们对这个形象的理解。被塑造的面料和戏剧性的褶皱同时跨越了多个维度进行叙事——一块用于遮盖的布，生命的迷失，一种对被覆盖对象的热切期待——都在精湛的技术和景观中大放异彩。在阿尔轩有所暗示的面纱背后，他聚集了历史感和未来感——艺术家为“幽灵”的观看者们赋予了一个令人不安却具有根本意义的立足点。

HIDING FIGURE，玻璃纤维、油漆、接缝化合物、人体模型、织物和鞋，2011，图片致谢艺术家与贝浩登画廊

从自然灾害到种族暴乱，大多数改变生活的事件所造成的影响都比事件本身的发生持续得更久——渗透到被称为创伤和痕迹的无形状态中。在阿尔轩的个人历史中，一个现在众所周知的闪光点是，孩提时代的他和他的家人几乎丧生于1992年、那场袭卷了他的家乡迈阿密的飓风安德鲁。墙壁坍塌，窗户破碎，一切像雾一样被无情地席卷。蜷缩在壁橱里的他回忆到：“那种感受像是建筑被肢解——它是快速且充满暴力的。”阿尔轩担心这次事件将成为定义他对结构扭曲实践的唯一依据，但实际上，经历为他留下的印记从根本上改变了我们对建筑物和身体感知完整性的认识。几十年后，深入到这个不断进化形成的遗留场景——现在而言是缺席的时刻，他用碎玻璃和大理石塑造了一系列全身自画像，而这仍在继续进行。尝试克服原有的缺点、断层和疤痕是对物质转化的比喻，“采用玻璃就是在于这种破碎的无用材料本身”，阿尔轩说到，“然而，却能被重新改造为有意义和有目的的东西。”比起纪念性，他紧随其后创作的形象更具思考价值，它们笨拙、令人困惑，仿佛刚从冬眠期中走出来。它们已然“进化”得完整而沉重，却缺乏相应的立足点——对方向的寻找。它们自身的困境推动它们回到一种逃亡的原型状态，这就是被我们称为的现实。

丹尼尔·阿尔轩于贝浩登（香港）个展“Fictional Archeology” 现场, 2015，图片致谢艺术家与贝浩登画廊

阿尔轩开玩笑地将自己称为科学家和伪考古学家，而他持续创造的这些充满哀愁的形象像是在与希腊哲学家柏拉图、及其对真理的永恒追求所进行的哲学对话。在现代非常有名的柏拉图的洞穴论中，他以特别的视觉术语表达了这种追求，描述了对被囚禁在地下的悲惨俘虏的感官操纵。在他极有影响力的文本《理想国》（公元前380年）中，我们可以读到这样的形象，他们在生理和心理的枷锁中度过一生：观察物体背后所投射出的阴影，并相信这些幻影即是现实。而当一名囚犯挣脱出来并走出地面，他被阳光刺痛了双眼并发现了一个崭新的世界——第一次看见真相，并开始努力去理解它的意义。对于柏拉图而言，这是因人而异的，但也是启蒙的必经之路：将身体从纯粹的感官知觉中解放出来，去怀抱仅存在于内心的更广大的真理。

PYRITE HANDS IN PRAYER, 黄铁矿、黑石、水石，2015，图片致谢艺术家与贝浩登画廊

阿尔轩创造的形象展现了这种由启蒙带来的困惑的多个阶段：眼睛被遮挡着，转移开的、疲惫的和焦躁不安的凝视，在思想中迷失，它们都是艺术家内心感受的表现。有一次，为了给这些人物形象建模，他将自己包裹在石膏中待了4、5个小时。然而，这让他感觉到了仿佛置身洞穴深处那般让人窒息的黑暗和束缚。与柏拉图理论相仿的另一方面是，阿尔轩本人几乎是完全的色盲——他将眼中缺失色度的所见转化成从阴影走向光明的过程。正是在数码阴影开始成为“现实”，而物质的原本形态日渐濒危的当下，很显然，阿尔轩对柏拉图的理念进行了调整。他重建的这些形象不仅仅像是探问虚幻的试金石，更像是在我们朝着云数据的未来大步行进的过程中，对物质存在的虚拟。这些形象是碎玻璃、地质材料——和我们将会再次讨论的——正在老化的媒介产品，它们并不只是在怀旧，还是21世纪思想的催化剂，即时游走于过去和未来之间。

ASH ERODED 16MM FILM PROJECTOR, 火山灰、碎玻璃、石膏，2013，图片致谢艺术家与贝浩登画廊

废墟和文物是对过去生活方式的写照——作为人类造物方式的证据，反之亦然，它们塑造了人类的生活方式。在过去的一年，阿尔轩和工作室的团队将各种各样的现代文化产物——它们有着被淘汰的DNA——变为破碎的旧物，“像是石化的木头或庞贝古城里的旧物一样被保留”。从电话，相机，麦克风，录像带到电影放映机，轮胎，键盘和音箱，他已经用火山灰，黑曜石，炭灰和粉晶等地质原料以钙化的形式生产了将近3,000件20至21世纪的物品。虽然它们作为考古挖掘成果被随同展示似乎有点为时过早，但是毫无疑问，物质物件越来越多地在进步的名义下被超越，甚至被淘汰。云端——基于技术、流媒体、虚拟身份、电子书、体验经济和后国家概念的公民共同推动着一个去物质化的未来，真实变得越发缥缈。面对视野中这种无形但步步逼近的现状，阿尔轩膨胀的时光宝盒展现了这种对表面伪装的反抗：痴狂地用尘埃复制（再复制）现代的设备，伪造一个坚实的庇护所。

SEATED FIGURE, 碎玻璃、树脂，2014，图片致谢艺术家与贝浩登画廊

工业媒体时代的这种升华是否类似于柏拉图洞穴理论中的囚犯之于阴影，满足于自身的无知和自满？沉入地底的地质物件和流行文化带来的舒适感是可以理解的，阿尔轩解释道：“我以一种尽量不介入的方式来处理空间和我的作品计划。使用一些我们已经了解的东西却让它们做一些不该做的事……重新制造或改造它们，赋予它们新的目的和可能性。”通过这样做，他强调了在制模和收藏过程中引起转化的关键元素——保留翻盖手机和足球的视觉相似性，但同时剥夺它们的实用性。这些物件不再具有它们原先被设置的功能，但随着它们的流通价值被它们的社会价值削弱，在建构这些老化的淘汰物的过程中——从实际上和象征意义上——它们都变成了思想的催化剂；就像穿过洞穴的光束。随着使用价值的撤销，这些新生的旧物唤起了人们对过去的使用记忆，但也预示在往后的日子它们同样会被替代。它们在过去和现在的地位充其量都只是暂时的。因此，这种丰满的缺席感让我们回归到之前对阿尔轩的遮蔽形象的讨论中，当下成为一个需要沉思和填空的开放性问题。就像他对建筑及其绝对性的熵处理一样，当下也永远不是静态或稳定的——只要提供立足点便能迈向光明。

"REMEMBER THE FUTURE"

BY STEVEN MATIJCIO

There is an assertive, almost intractable immediacy to the work of Daniel Arsham. It arrests our eyes and confronts our bodies through an array of lifelike forms, elemental materials and architectural interventions.His objects, figures and engineering oddities push into what is purportedly "our" space; implicitly, but insistently demanding attention – even as their intention remains comparatively unclear.And yet it is in this engagement, in the acceptance of Arsham's demure invitation offered in and through his work, that a visceral absence asserts itself as strongly as that which is physically present. Take as an example Hooded Figure (2015), where only half of the title’s suggested content stands before us. A potent synthesis of 'there' and 'not there' animates this mysteriously draped figure as it stretches the skin of the gallery space – returning the body in/to the otherwise clean geometry of these white walls.

VIEW OF THE EXHIBITION "MOVING ARCHITECTURE" at VDNH Moscow (Russia), 2017，Courtesy the artist and Perrotin

And just like the Invisible Man is revealed in movies by tossing a blanket over his elusive body, our cognition of Arsham's cloaked forms pivots upon the imaginary insertion of the missing body into this visual equation. These ghostly abstractions assume meaning we sense, rather than see the person they conceal.In turn, the because theatrical drapery expands our interpretation of this figure in time, thickening the present with concurrent evocations of both future and past. Pooling fabric and dramatic folds span multiple narratives at once – suggesting a shroud and life lost, at the same timethey speak to the fervent anticipation that accompanies a cloaked prize, grandly revealed in a flash of showmanship and spectacle. At this nexus – where both histories and hunches congregate behind Arsham's veil of suggestion – the artist gives ghosts an unnerving, but ultimately insightful footprint.

VIEW OF THE EXHIBITION "MOVING ARCHITECTURE" at VDNH Moscow (Russia), 2017，Courtesy the artist and Perrotin

From natural disasters to race riots, the aftermath of most life-altering events lingers exponentially longer than the event itself – seeping deep into the intangible tissue known as trauma and trace. In a now well-known flashpoint of Arsham's personal history, we learn that as a child he and his family barely survived Hurricane Andrew as the storm ripped through their Miami home in 1992. Huddled in a closet as walls collapsed, windows shattered and insulation swirled like mist, he remembers, "The experience was one of architectural dismemberment – it was quick and violent." And while Arsham is wary of positioning this event as the sole foundation of his structure-bending practice, the wreckage he experienced fundamentally altered the perceived solidity of both the buildings and bodies we live. Decades later, deep into the evolving legacy of this formative – but now absent moment, he fashions an ongoing series of full-body self-portraits out of crushed glass and marble. Seeking to overcome inherent frailties, fault lines and scars as matter-turned-metaphor, "The glass is really about taking this broken useless material," in the words of Arsham, "and reforming it back into something that has intention and purpose." His ensuing avatars are more meditative than monumental, standing ponderous and bewildered as if they had just emerged from hibernation. They have been made whole and hefty but lack the corresponding footing – searching for orientation as their plight propels them back to an archetypal quest for the fugitive condition we call reality.

Formless Figure, Fiberglass, paint, and joint compound, 198.1×185.4×73.7cm, 2015,Courtesy the artist and Perrotin                                          

Arsham has playfully described himself as a scientist and pseudo-archaeologist, but his continued production of these pensive surrogates speaks to a philosophical dialogue with the Greek philosopher Plato and his timeless quest for truth.Plato expressed this pursuit in especially visual terms in the now iconic Allegory of the Cave, which describes the perceptual manipulation of woeful captives imprisoned beneath the earth's crust. First told in his seminal treatise, The Republic (380 BC), we learn of people who have spent their entire lives in physical and psychological chains: watching the shadows cast from objects parading behind, believing these phantoms to be reality. When one prisoner breaks free and makes his way to the surface, he is blinded by the sun and overcome with a world newly discovered – seeing truth for the first time, but struggling to apprehend its implications. For Plato this was the jagged, but necessary path to enlightenment: liberating the body from purely sensory perception to embrace the greater truth that can reside only in the mind.

View of Daniel Arsham’s solo exhibition "Fictional Archeology" at Perrotin Hong Kong, 2015，Photo: Joyce Yung，Courtesy the Artist and Perrotin

Arsham's figures embody multiple stages of this luminous disorientation, shielding their eyes, gazes averted, exhausted and restless, lost in thought as manifestations of the artist's mind. He encases himself in plaster for 4-5 hours at a time to fashion the molds for these figures, evoking the suffocating darkness and restraints endured by those deep inside the cave. In another twist of Platonic alignment, Arsham himself is almost entirely color blind – turning the absence of chroma in his eyes into a journey across the spectrum of shadow to light. And yet it is in the dawn of the present, in an era where digital shadows have become our presiding "reality" and materiality grows endangered, that Arsham makes a pronounced adjustment to Plato's ideals. His reconstituted figures are less illusory apparitions than touchstones to a physical existence that continues to recede as we advance towards a cloud-based future. These figures are one with shattered glass, geological materials and – as we will now discuss – aging media objects, not as nostalgic soothers, but as catalysts for the 21st century mind to travel backwards and forwards at once.

View of Daniel Arsham’s solo exhibition "Welcome to the Future" at Locust Projects Miami (USA), 2014 ，Courtesy the Artist and Perrotin

Ruins and artifacts are the portrait of a past way of life – enduring as evidence of the way mankind shaped apparatuses, and the ways they in turn, shaped us. Over the past year, Arsham and his studio have turned a variety of modern cultural objects – with obsolescence built into their DNA – into crumbling relics "preserved like petrified wood or the figures of Pompeii." From phones, cameras, microphones and VHS tapes to film projectors, tires, keyboards and boomboxes he has produced close to 3,000 calcified effigies of the 20th and 21st centuries from earthly substances like volcanic ash, obsidian, carbon dust and rose quartz. And while their accompanying presentation as an archaeological dig may seem slightly premature, there is no question that the physical object has been increasingly cast as abject and that which must be surpassed in the name of progress.Cloud- based technologies, streaming media, virtual identities, e-books, experience economies and the post-nation citizen collectively advance a dematerialized future where the real grows increasingly ethereal. Facing this intangible, but rapidly approaching horizon, Arsham's swelling time capsule takes on the ostensible guise of resistance: obsessively copying (and re-copying) contemporary devices with elemental dust to forge a sanctuary of solid ground.

View of Daniel Arsham’s solo exhibition "3018" at Perrotin New York, 2018，Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli ，Courtesy the Artist and Perrotin

Is this sublimation of the industrial-media age akin to the way the prisoners of Plato's Cave cavort with shadows, content in their ignorance and complacency? A retreat into the bedrock of earthly matter and the comforts of pop culture would be understandable, but Arsham explains, "I approach projects and spaces in a way that I try not to add anything to them, but instead take something we already know and make it do something that it shouldn't . . . Remake or reform it, giving it new purpose and possibility." In so doing, he highlights the crucial element of transformation in this casting and collection process – retaining the visual resemblance of flip phones and footballs but stripping them of utility. These objects no longer function as they were originally intended, but as their societal value erodes their currency is reconstituted as these aging pariahs are cast – literally and figuratively – as catalysts of the mind; as the light beyond the Cave. With present purpose evacuated, these nascent relics evoke memories of past uses and projections of what will take their place in the days ahead. Their position in the here and now is nothing more than tentative at best.As such, in this fertile absence that returns Arsham's aforementioned veiled figures to the conversation, the present becomes an open question to ponder and populate. And like his entropic treatment of architecture and its absolutes, this present is never static or stable – providing just enough footing to climb towards the brightness.

昊美术馆（上海） 

HOW ART MUSEUM (SHANGHAI)

昊美术馆（上海），图片?昊美术馆

昊美术馆（上海）是具备当代艺术收藏、陈列、研究和教育功能的全新文化机构，坐落于上海浦东，共有三层展览和活动空间，总面积约7000平方米，于2017年9月正式对外开放。昊美术馆首创“夜间美术馆”的运营模式，常规对外开放时间为周二至周五下午1点至夜间10点，周末及节假日开放时间为上午10点至夜间10点。此举能让更多观众在工作之余前来美术馆观展，昊美术馆也举办“国际策展人驻留项目”、“户外电影节”、“雕塑公园”等国际交流项目和户外活动，以此建立全新的艺术综合体和浦东新地标。

昊美术馆（温州） 

HOW ART MUSEUM (WENZHOU)

昊美术馆（温州），图片?昊美术馆

昊美术馆（温州）延续昊美术馆（上海）的“夜间美术馆”运营模式，是浙江省首家"夜间美术馆"，常规对外开放时间为下午1点到夜间10点，周末及节假日开放时间将向前延长为上午10点至夜间10点。昊美术馆（温州）将持续为公众呈现丰富的公共教育及户外艺术项目，引领融合艺术、设计、科技的全新生活方式。

昊美术馆（上海）  

HOW ART MUSEUM (SHANGHAI)

昊美术馆（温州）  

HOW ART MUSEUM (WENZHOU)

昊美术馆（上海）  

HOW ART MUSEUM (SHANGHAI)

昊美术馆（温州）  

HOW ART MUSEUM (WENZHOU)