Approach | Readymades in Reverse

Wang Yuyang, 2009.? Wang Yuyang Studio

Exhibition view of Electricity, “Tonight I shall mediate on that which I am”，Long Museum, 2015 ? Wang Yuyang Studio

It is in The Narrative of a Stack of Paper (2013), as the very title suggests that Wang explicitly invokes the notion of a grammar-or narrative-of data.  This work represents storage or accumulation as an epic of translation or transposition.  As Robin Peckham has stated, “many of [Wang’s] works revolve around systems of transmission and reception; although these explorations find a natural home within new media circles, his work rarely reflects the techniques and aesthetics that characterize the latter category.”[2] To make The Narrative of a Stack of Paper, Wang visited a workshop in Tengchong, Yunnan where he videotaped the traditional process of paper produced from mulberry bark.  As Zhan Xuhua writes, “This particular type of handmade paper is normally used for religious rituals by local residents who draw amulets on it to expel evil and pay for peace.”[3]  Wang’s initial procedure of media storage (videotaping the process of paper making) was subsequently transposed into a new format:  each video frame was reproduced in miniature, arranged a sequence of lines, moving from the top edge to the bottom of individual sheets of mulberry paper.  Too small to be read as intelligible images, these tiny individual frames are arrayed in tightly packed lines, which resemble an electronic raster organizing a field of pixels.  Finally, the registration of 15,136,728 frames, which in the videotape are viewed sequentially, is spatialized and thus made accessible to vision simultaneously across 180 pages exhibited in a grid on the wall.  Several distinct “narratives” are staged by this work.  First, there is a cyclical procedure, a kind of feedback loop where the process of making mulberry paper as captured and mediated by video, is transposed onto actual mulberry paper as the ground for the digital reproduction of video frames.  On the one hand, nothing changes: we move from paper to paper. But on the other hand, everything changes as “mulberry paper” shifts from the object of representation to the ground of representation.  Second, in The Narrative of a Stack of Paper Wang dramatizes a grammar of scalar shifts in which, for instance, the video frame behaves like a pixel while the sheets of mulberry paper, arrayed in a grid, appear like frames of video. This involves a third procedural narrative that affects a shift from a temporal register (video) to a spatial one (grid of pages).  The videotape unfolds in time and thus can never be grasped as a thing existing simultaneously in space.  This is exactly what is accomplished by “storing” the videotape as a sequence of frames, which are all available to present, if not easily visible, at once in the grid of prints on mulberry paper.  Here Wang encodes a theory of objects in relation to the procedures of their making:  the process is buried, like illegible pixels in the final product, but is inaccessible to our understanding—in short, we cannot comprehend this transposed videotape, even though we can see it in its entirety.   This observation leads to the fourth “narrative” of a stack of paper (or a pile of data) present in this work:  we move from a process of labor which has its own organic and deeply traditional procedures of sequential making, to a process of accumulation, which resembles a mute series of monochromatic drawings.  In this complex work the spectacle of storage is shown to be both profoundly abstract and ultimately illegible.

Exhibition view of The Narrative of a Stack of Paper, “Tonight I shall mediate on that which I am”，Long Museum, 2015. ? Wang Yuyang Studio

The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler has developed a provocative theory of information storage.  In his book For a New Critique of Political Economy for instance, he asserts that, “the extraordinary mnesic power of digital networks makes us aware of the immensity of human memory, which appears to have become infinitely recoverable and accessible.”[4] Unlike many technology enthusiasts and apologists, however, Stiegler sees this capacity for storage as a deeply troubling alienation of human knowledge from human beings, leaving us bereft of a fundamental form of independence.   Just as the labor of making mulberry paper moves from being a traditional skill with strong cultural associations to a spectacle of seemingly blank pages in Wang’s Narrative of a Stack of Paper, Stiegler understands the storage of information as a kind of externalization of our knowledge, which ultimately oppresses rather than aids us.  Indeed, he provocatively describes this externalization of memory as a form of proleterianization:  “the proletariat are those economic actors who are without knowledge because they are without memory:  their memory has passed into the machine that reproduces gestures that the proletariat no longer needs to know—they must simply serve the reproductive machine and thus, once again, they become serfs.”[5]  Indeed this procedure is, for Stiegler, deeply involved in the kind of “grammar” of information that I have been describing in Wang’s work:

Exhibition view of 2 in 1 Series,  “Tonight I shall mediate on that which I am”，Long Museum, 2015 ? Wang Yuyang Studio

In recent years a wide range of revisionist philosophical projects have emerged dedicated to understanding how objects behave in the world. These perspectives, proceeding under the contested labels of “speculative realism,” “vital materialism,” or “thing theory,” are complex and often contradictory but share a concern with how non-human things possess forms of being and types of agency independent of their human makers or users.  These philosophies pose two questions that have proven relevant to a wide range contemporary artists and critics:  first, they explore the capacity for objects to exist outside subjective, human perception, and second, they consider how assemblages of things (which may and often do incorporate human elements) exert agency among themselves.  The first of these questions centers on the concept of correlationism—a presumption that, as humans, we know the world exclusively through the filter of our own perception, and hence objects cannot truly exist apart from our sensory and discursive knowledge of them.[11]  A wide range of thinkers associated with Speculative Realism, including Quentin Meillassoux, Reza Negarestani, Graham Harman and many others have asserted that human-object correlation should not be privileged over other kinds of relations—such as those among things. According to this line of reasoning, objects are not for us (indeed, thinking this way is a form of imperialism directed toward the non-human world) but rather they possess histories (or pre-histories) as well as agencies that exceed human consciousness.[12] The effects of confederations of objects (and humans) on the other hand, as explored by thinkers like Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, lie in how heterogeneous assemblages may create conditions and consequences that are irreducible to any one of their components, let alone a single human will. In her book Vibrant Matter, Bennett analyzes a catastrophic 2003 blackout in North America as an event arising not from the intentions or behavior of any discrete protagonist, but from a dynamic combination of factors as diverse as government regulation, the physics of electricity, and human consumption patterns, whose outcomes could not have been anticipated in advance.  In explaining her advocacy of assemblage as a concept, Bennett writes that “the rubric of material agency inherent in assemblages] is likely to be a stronger counter to human exceptionalism, to, that is, the human tendency to understand the degree to which people, animals, artifacts, technologies, and elemental forces share powers and operate in dissonant conjunction with each other.”[13]  Like the critique of correlationism associated with speculative realism, thinking with assemblages displaces the centrality of the human.[14]  Indeed, such a de-centering has a strong ethical valence at a time when, on the one hand, as Stiegler puts it, our knowledge is being alienated from us through its extraction by and storage in machines, and on the other, we are facing complex challenges like global warming, which, though triggered by human behaviors, functions through what Bennett identifies as distributed agencies.

Wang’s art engages deeply with the decentering of human agency and the autotelic potentiality of objects.  As the artist put it in an interview of 2011, “The objective of all my efforts and trials is to let things deliver their own meaning or let works tell themselves.”[15] He has pursued this objective in two quite distinct ways:  by giving objects the appearance of independent life, and by letting a privileged form of information accumulation--the database--speak for itself by generating artworks through a software program that draws both on databases Wang compiled himself as well as the Internet.  Mouth (2015), in which a startlingly realistic simulation of that organ is embedded in what looks like a small painting hung on the wall, is a particularly visceral assertion of the artwork’s independence.   As a viewer approaches this seemingly innocuous piece, a sensor is triggered causing the mouth to spit in his or her face.  The shock and revulsion involved in being subjected to this gesture cannot be understated:  the art object is rejecting and humiliating s/he who, according to a correlationist perspective, is responsible for giving it life. 

Exhibition view of Mouth,  “Tonight I shall mediate on that which I am”，Long Museum, 2015 ? Wang Yuyang Studio

Above: Breath-Financial Department, Below: Breath-The Books are Being Read, “Tonight I shall mediate on that which I am” Exhibition view，Long Museum, 2015 ? Wang Yuyang Studio

“It seems to me that a totally objective vision becomes like death, or at least a lack of life.  As soon as we analyze we trace the outline of life in the objects.  But life is not this analysis.  It is what is left behind, what is hidden, what is unseen by the instruments.  It can be inferred behind the data, by the data’s very form revealing the missing part that it will never attain, which forms in parallel with its actions.  Myth and science come together here around life.  Without this life the objects physically and metaphorically collapse and become formless.”[17]

Wang Yuyang, Invisible Sculpture, 2010, gold-plated metal, white marble, stainless steel, dimensions variable. ? Wang Yuyang Studio

[WANG Yuyang#] is a software suite that emulates the entire process of artistic creation:  it autonomously researches in various social media networks and from a vast database of textual resources to conceive and create the content of the artwork and determines the relevant visual forms and material choices as well as titling the emerging artwork.

Exhibition view of Fountain,  “Tonight I shall mediate on that which I am”，Long Museum, 2015 ? Wang Yuyang Studio

It seems no coincidence that Wang should title a work Fountain, the name of Duchamp’s most famous readymade.  And indeed, like Duchamp’s rotated Urinal, Wang’s Fountain is executed in porcelain.  But the differences between these works, made almost exactly a century apart, are more signficant than their similarities: they exemplify an important shift in the relation between objects and discourse over the last one hundred years.  For Duchamp, the readymade was produced through the agency of an inscription, which could transport an object conceptually from one context (that of the men’s room for instance) into another (such as the art exhibition).  In his statement on the readymades published in his Green Box, Duchamp writes:

Specifications for “Readymades”.

by planning for a moment to come (on such a day, such a date such a minute), “to inscribe a readymade”--The readymade can later be looked for.--(with all kinds of delays)

The important thing then is just this matter of timing, this snapshot effect, like a speech delivered on no matter what occasion but at such and such an hour.  It is a kind of rendezvous.[18]

This text establishes three principles fundamental to the readymade:  first, what brings a readymade into being, as I have already mentioned, is its inscription. It is through the application of a discursive tag that the value of a material thing is shifted.  Second, as conceptual art later insisted, the concept of the readymade is not only separable from its materialization, but also presumes the possibility of many different, perhaps even infinite numbers of iterations (and indeed Fountain did assume a wide variety of forms in the course of Duchamp’s life).[19]   And finally, third, the readymade is characterized by temporal slippages:  it is both conceived in advance “for a moment to come,” and executed belatedly, “later looked for.”  As Duchamp puts it, “The important thing then is just this matter of timing.” Works like Wang’s Fountain, along with the entire WANG Yuyang# project proceed from a different relationship between object and inscription.  If Duchamp’s readymades projected an inscription onto an existing thing in order to relocate it conceptually, Wang’s works make the inscription itself (as a particular configuration of data produced by software) into a thing.  Unlike readymades, which exist as objects before their nomination by the artist, in Wang’s case it is the inscription that pre-exists as a software program, and it is the objective form of this protocol that “can be later looked for” through access to databases.  Such “readymades in reverse” result in the alien forms exemplified by Wang’s Fountain. 

Duchamp’s second principle—that a single concept may generate innumerable manifestations—is equally true of the products of WANG Yuyang#.  But whereas Duchamp reiterated Fountain several times in distinctly different ways between 1917 and 1964 each iteration carried forward the same object type--a urinal.  The successive instantiations of WANG Yuyang#, on the other hand, are all dramatically different objects and aggregates.  This multiplicity is the effect of what I have called the epistemology of search:  

“what now matters most is not the production of new content but its retrieval in intelligible patterns through acts of reframing, capturing, reiterating and documenting.  What counts, in other words, is how widely and easily images connect:  not only to messages, but to other social currencies like capital, real estate, politics, and so on.  In economies of image overproduction connectivity is key.  This is the Epistemology of Search.”[20]

Symbiosis - Tact (2016 - 2025), originally made with Wang Yuyang#,  “Chaosmosis” Exhibition View, 798CUBE, 2025. ? Wang Yuyang Studio

To Duchamp’s third principle of temporal slippage, Wang’s work, like much recent art both in China and elsewhere in the world, introduces a more properly historical form of anachronism.  This is evident in a series of sculptures that address one of Wang’s persistent themes-the moon. Artificial Moon (2007), for instance, is composed of some 10,000 light bulbs, and when illuminated emits a painfully blinding light.  This piece is often associated with a contemporaneous series of works that address the Apollo moon-landing program, and like those, its composition of prosaic elements serves to desublimate a heavenly body that has been the object of poetry, legend and speculation for millennia.  In an interview in 2007 Wang declared:

“For a long time, I have been interested in the Chinese ancient legend about Chang’e’s trip to the moon.  From then on, the moon has always been mysterious to me.

Later, I read about America’s moon landing on July 20 1969, which deeply impressed me.  The legend of Cheng’e and America’s moon exploration both seem legendary, but both are questionable.”[21]

To mention the Chinese goddess of the moon in the same breath as Apollo 11, and to link them both to a giant menacing globe of artificial light is to produce a type of anachronism very different from Duchamp’s play of anticipation and delay.  In doing so, Wang “assembles” conflicting temporalities (ancient China, mid-twentieth century America), but also very different epistemological values—legend versus science--both of which the artist finds “questionable”:  “So how true are these two legends?  Is there any connection between these two?  These are the questions I really explore.”[22]  Whereas Duchamp assumes a neutral, even universal concept of time that may be navigated forwards and backwards at will, Wang’s concept is saturated with historical and cultural difference: it is a time of competing legends but also an index of the incommensurable cultural encounters characteristic of globalization. 

Duchamp’s readymades are significant because they opened the commodity form to two kinds of questioning:  how discourse defines (and hence potentially redefines) objects, and how this unstable relationship is driven by a contest among competing, and often conflicting values, such as that between the utility of indoor plumbing and the prestige of art - or, in the case Wang’s series of works addressing the moon, the contradictory valences of Chinese legend versus American technology.   The commodity is perhaps the most ubiquitous and powerful format to arise alongside capitalism-demonstrating its instability has profound aesthetic, theoretical and even political significance.  Wang makes the commodity uncanny by giving it life and agency - not the simulated animism that advertising projects onto products to make them desirable but, rather, a hard, recalcitrant alternative existence rendering things alien to their human producers. In Wang’s art, object worlds retreat from their observers, disrupting the orthodox hierarchy that sets humans above things is put in reverse.

Notes：

[1] Artist’s note (2009) in Wang Yuyang 2001-2013 (Hong Kong: Blue Kingfisher Limited, Timezone 8, 013), 254.

[2] Robin Peckham, “51 m2#16: Wang Yuyang” [please typeset the “2” in superscript as in “squared”], in Wang Yuyang, p. 236.

[3] Zhan Xuhua, “Preface to Solo Exhibition, Objects of Fantasy, Inigo Rooms, Cultural Institute, Kings College of London (2013), in Wang Yuyang, p. 81.

[4] Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, trans by Daniel Ross (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010; originally published as Pour une nouvelle critique de l’économie politique, éditions Galilée, 2009): 30.

[5] Ibid., 35.

[6] Ibid., 33-34.

[7] See my After Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013)

[8] It is interesting to note here that Stiegler does not restrict such proletarianization to members of what would traditionally be called the working class.  On the contrary, he writes, “the elites have themselves been proletarianized, that is, deprived of knowledge of their own logic and by their own logic—a logic reduced to calculation without remainder and leading as well to a market of fools.” Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, 47.

[9] In many of his works Wang materializes light, and particularly romantic forms of planetary light (sun and moon).  In Sunrise (2015), for instance a fluorescent tube is periodically “expelled” into the air from an elastic platform creating a startling and menacing version of the rising of light.  His best-known materialization of a luminous body is his Artificial Moon (2007) composed of some 10,000 light bulbs.

[10] See Donna J. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto:  Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-181 and Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan?_Meets_OncoMouse? (New York: Routldedge, 1997).

[11] Quentin Meillassoux defines correlation as follows:  “By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only

ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.  We will henceforth call correlationism any current of thought which maintains the unsurpassable character of the correlation so defined.” He goes on to say, “Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independent of one another.”  Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans by Ray Brassier (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008), p. 5.  I would like to thank Armen Avanessian for sharing his perspective on Speculative Realist thinking with me and introducing me to its fundamental concepts.

[12] A fundamental proof of this, for Meillassoux, is the capacity of scientists to gain knowledge of geological eras that predate human life: “I will call ‘ancestral’ any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species—or even anterior to every recognized form of life on earth.” The “ancestral” invalidates any compulsory correlation of subject and object since the epochs in question preceded the emergence of humans as witnesses.  If we can thus develop forms of knowledge that are not routed through the architecture of perception, then the necessity of correlation-which Meillassoux understands as either implicit or explicit in every modern philosophy-is undermined. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans by Ray Brassier (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008), 10.  This note and my discussion of speculative realism is drawn from my “Body Bags,” in Susanne Pfeffer, Speculations on Anonymous Materials (K?ln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther K?nig, 2015), pp TK, as book is forthcoming in October

[13] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter; A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 34.

[14] For a good introduction to Latour’s perspective see his Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

[15] Yang Juan, “Let Things Tell,” interview with Wang Yuyang, April 22, 2011 in Wang Yuyang, p. 154.

[16] Edward Sanderson, “Wang Yuyang,” (2011) in Wang Yuyang, p. 137.

[17] Ibid, pp. 138-39.

[18] This text was published in Duchamp’s Green Box.  See Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973): 32.

[19] For a full accounting of the many iterations of Fountain see William A. Camfield, Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (Houston: Menil Collection, 1989).

[20] Joselit, After Art, 55-56.

[21] Li Zhenhua interview with Wang Yuyang, April 9, 2007 in Wang Yuyang, p. 402.

[22] Ibid, p. 402.