Concretations: survey

The final chapter draws on new wave science fiction, the later speculative fiction of J. G. Ballard, and what I might suggest is the latter’s absurdist cousin, Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Both are distinctly entropic and post-end-of-the-world scenarios, where the privilege of the middle-English middle classes continues in social conventions and comfort until encountering others. Many of Ballard’s protagonists are psychologists[1] or analysts, a particular branch of thought that is at once scientific in its laboratory studies and speculative in its therapeutic application on the couch. On the other hand, Adams’s anti-hero Arthur Dent seems like a candidate for therapy, even dressed throughout his interstellar travels in his pyjamas and dressing gown. The setting of different forms of institutions of leisure that apply a veneer of civility to life also appears frequently within SF worlds, usually as means of top-down control. But in Ballard’s world, in particular, they are more like masks that disguise the brutal primitive forces that swirl beneath ‘developed’ modern cultures. According to Mannheim, and many that have followed him in developing the sociology of knowledge, institutions are reflections of the ideology in which they stand.[2] While highly criticised by Adorno, among others, the sociology of knowledge has nevertheless become ingrained in cultural studies for moving knowledge away from empiricism to being facets of the social sphere, and therefore influential within museum practices. And in this sense the museum has become a fiction of its own, an imaginary space that represents thought.

In the fourth chapter, the museum is a vital mise en scène. Currently there are various museums that represent different ideologies within their specific cultural settings. From the traditional Hegelian museum that demonstrates a development of culture, a genealogy if you will materialised within the collections, to the ‘new’ museums where collections are eschewed in favour of event-based programmes and the development of cultural capital, there is a strong discourse, if not battle, over what form an institution might take to be relevant to contemporary life and its diverse publics. What is envisaged here is a museum that represents this development itself, with multiple ideologies represented in different galleries. It leads to the question: how might a museum represent not only its own way of thinking but also others’ ways of thinking without falling into an ethnographic point of view? As with the difficulty of imagining three dimensions for a two-dimensional point of view, an institution thinking outside its own culture is something of an impossibility. To raise the possibility of an institution that represents its own history, or links the natural, social, and discursive realm together (that is a Latourian, complex one), is simply to produce another ideology. The difficulty with analysing an institutional structure is that, in fact, all institutions are more complex than they at first appear to be. While the architecture and collections are built around particular concepts, the visiting public, the community around it, and the work of different departments in education and libraries and archives frequently corrupt and digress from a museum’s core goals and beliefs. And as institutions unto themselves, few artists working today would have a practice that could be paired down to the real, the social, or the discursive alone. It is in this sense that the island becomes the leading metaphor: the island as an enclosed ecology; the island as a living utopian/dystopian social sphere; the island as a practice.

Back to Chapter three - Go to Postscript

Concretations: landmarks

There is a sense of this being a confessional. Writing this text was a rather self-indulgent exercise and one that was a welcome punctum of activity within an otherwise rather inactive period in Taiwan. It is not without critical reflection, as many of the ex-pats who live in Taiwan adopt a rather laid-back lifestyle. Taiwan was recently elected the number one place to live as a foreigner for its ease. But life on the island is accompanied by a sense of ennui. This is an issue consistently raised by Yu-Chen Wang within her work and in discussion of her practice. The contrast between life in the UK and Taiwan was part of her reasoning for inviting me to write the essay. We share a rejection of our homeland and an enthusiasm for our adopted homes, albeit in opposite directions. It should be noted that nostalgia as a syndrome is defined as a longing for home, not, in fact, a longing for the past. 

The description is drawn from the natural environment of Taiwan, and its history is somewhat in parallel with the fictional island. Its economy was highly successful in manufacturing in the late twentieth century – so successful that it has developed to the point that manufacture is no longer competitive causing a near ‘extinction’ of industry. Taiwan is attempting to transition to a creative and tourism-based industry, although this is fraught with various infrastructural problems. Environmentally, there is a significant problem with sea and air pollution, which is frequently visible. The sea pollution in this story, however, is drawn from a concurrent news report of an algal bloom on the Chilean coast. Transposed to this narrative it is a reference to Ballard’s Vermillion Sands. 

Among the socio-political problems in Taiwan are ‘mosquito projects’ that have operated in this way. Mosquito projects are publicly funded building projects, frequently developments of leisure complexes, which have not reached completion. Notoriously, many of these projects have been means of fraudulent uses of public funding by corrupt officials.

The village scene combines various aspects of Wang’s sculptures and drawings, which she has likened to the hodgepodge architecture of Taiwan that is almost universally added to by its residents. In her description of her drawing practice, Yu-Chen Wang described how her memories of these assemblages have informed her drawing practice as air-conditioning, advertising signs, and plants that thread their way through buildings in frequently precarious manners. The water rising from the road is also taken from a video work by Wang. A result of natural forces overwhelming public services, it echoes the sense of a tussle between the natural and artificial environment.

I’d spent almost a month in the spa. Frequent massages and hot springs, as well as esoteric forms of rejuvenation based in quasi-medical science carried out by real men and woman, had occupied my time, as had the real work of studying the journals of previous scientists who had visited the island before me. Research often seemed to unfold like this, a constant delay until the flurry of activity required to bring it together as a deadline approached. There may be some oneiric underbelly to intellectual work, I thought somewhat idly, taking a mental note to think that through carefully later. But right now it seemed wasteful not to appreciate the view.

The spa lay on the mountaintop where the air was clean and sunlight clear. Below, billows of smoky fog congregated in the valleys, and then cleared again over the ocean. An extinction-level event had taken place almost three generations before, decimating the flora and fauna of the island. But it had gone through something of a rebirth since, its nature and culture rejuvenated. The few remnants of organic life that had survived the extinction had rapidly mutated, adapting to survive at a rate that defied genetic evolution’s usual generational pace. Bacterial forms had bloomed turning water and sand a vermillion red, their cells

than intrigued me. Still, the superimposition of foreign and local, or rather the indistinguishable nature between the two, resonated with my ethnographic training and as I left in search of the coffee shop I was able to consider how language, translation, nature, and culture, and all these apparent differentials productively congealed into a solid matter in the GEGONGDN. As I sipped on a rather acidic brew I found myself running a keepsake through my fingers, something I had picked up in the souvenir shop nearby. At once an adventurer landing on the island, a part of the hybrid tribe, and a tourist, my thoughts and memories were as knotted as a nest in a hedgerow. Perhaps this island is simply an exhibition, or perhaps it is a nexus of non-knowledge, memory, and silence.

traumas, but the multinational tourism companies were afraid that the histories they told might put off customers, and so discouraged any visits. This intrigued me more, and so thanks to my charming waiter, I made my escape through a service entrance, and found a taxi waiting outside.

The vehicle was a rather jagged beast, somewhere between a scooter and a boat on wheels. One headlight was red and the other green, echoing the old conventions of sea vessels when the ocean was still navigable. Another nod to heritage I thought, starting to see the web of commercialisation spreading across Monstrado like the famous copper network. Once underway the taxi was clearly a bit of a jalopy, bouncing along on air pockets from its stuttering turbines as we wound our way down towards the township passing equally contingent enclaves of houses. At various points, wires and pipes burst out of the ground and up the sides of buildings. Occasionally, water rose from the road hinting at the islands equally unplanned infrastructure. 

The GEGONGDN museum abstractly echoed the vernacular architecture of Monstrado, raw concrete boxes stacked on one another jutting out in various directions. Inside there

surprisingly lucid passage that belied the descent to savagery that followed, a descent better charted in his illustrations of plants that veered off into abstraction.

The second gallery I entered was named Pi-Er, translated as ‘The Second Monarch’, and referred to a possibly mythical machine that stood at the centre of indigenous life on the island. The Second Monarch coordinated but didn’t govern. Most tribes or cultures we might consider ‘pre-modern’ would have revered it as a god, but on Monstrado it was not seen as transcendental – it simply was. The machine’s autonomy gave it a sense of authority but not of devotion. The Second Monarch was, therefore synonymous with the movements of the seasons on the island, the world as a whole and the passage of the heavens binding them together as the tree of life would be to a pagan.

Although no proof of its existence had been found on the island, it appeared to have influenced a research team that arrived more than two centuries after the first. Practising psycho-science, it is claimed they had ‘contracted’ the island’s ideology like a virus, then transmitted it to machines who globally converted from production of goods to the production of leisure thereby founding our current

appeared to be no attendants so I set to navigating its map for points of interest. This proved next to impossible for the gallery plan showed a large white space simply bound by north, south, east, and west leaving me doing little more than hunting snarks, which I already knew to be extinct in these parts. So instead I followed my nose.

The first gallery was named Yi-Oh, a transliteration of the local argot. I believe it referred to the first world as the display cases held artefacts from the arrival of Europeans in the nineteenth century who had met a rather sticky end. After feasting on the island’s psychotropic fruits, the crew of the Saudade fell into delirium that drove them into two factions, one declaring red to be the superior colour, the other siding with green. A battle had been played overseen by a scientist who acted as judge, jury, and occasionally executioner. With each round, the winners were decapitated and their heads stuck on sticks on a cliff. This was repeated until only the scientist remained, who somehow managed to behead himself and join the rest of the gruesome retinue. I couldn’t help finding a perverse symmetry in this self-extinction with the collapsed civilisation of Easter Island. I’d been reading the extracts from the scientist’s journal. He had dutifully recorded his first intoxication by the fruit in a

Chapter four: concretisation

Imprisoned by four walls

To the north, the crystal of non-knowledge

A landscape to be invented

To the south, reflective memory

To the east, the mirror

To the west, stone and the song of silence

I wrote messages, but received no reply

I woke with this refrain cycling through my mind, its melody lost but with a metre that synced with the throbbing pain in my head. Reluctantly I opened my eyes to the bright sunlight. Rather than four walls there were only three. Instead of a crystal of non-knowledge to the north, the ocean view stretched out from my room’s balcony. By my side was a half-drained cocktail. The pages of the upturned book I had been reading before falling into my nap had crinkled where they had soaked up the pooled water running down onto the table from my glass.

society. There were numerous theories as to what it was: a natural Babbage machine, the stenography of the gods, or a mediating device between dimensions. It was the last that seemed the most plausible to me, as on a certain scale and at a certain speed our space appears to be little more than an infra-thin surface of a greater cosmic one. Regardless, it is said that the Second Monarch withered once its seeds had been carried away. And with it the island succumbed to its transformation.

The final gallery I walked through was named Jia-Ke. I read that this means false family, a concept that remained elusive to me but is essential to life on the island. Fortunately there was an invigilator, although the girl seemed to be guarding an empty room. On request, she gave a friendly explanation of how the GEGONGDN had commissioned an international artist to produce a monument to the machine. Their proposal had been to encourage discourse as a collectable medium. It was an intriguing notion, and its lack of spectacle gave way to curiosity and reflection as I realised that I too was engaged in the work. Bound up in the network of this exhibition I was part of this island’s discourse simply by being there and asking my ignorant questions. Aesthetics were never my strong point and contemporary art, in particular, had usually troubled more

giganticised to be macroscopic. Other more complex organisms had responded by miniaturisation – birds barely bigger than cockroaches now found niches within the fragile ecosystem previously unimagined. Meanwhile the unusual infrastructure of copper wiring on the island had provided the resources for another form of monstrous colonisation, the ever-expanding market for tourism being perfectly suited to exploiting a pre-wired tropical land.

While it was undoubtedly idyllic in the confines of the resort, I yearned for some kind of distraction from the nostalgic image constructed by the heritage industry. Everything here was framed and contained, at a distance. And so I conspired with one of the staff, a waiter with whom I had flirted over breakfast, to escape and visit the GEGONGDN, the island’s museum. While all the tour brochures mentioned it as a ‘must-see’ destination, there seemed to be no way of actually reaching it. The normally fluent reception staff’s English seemed to fail whenever I mentioned the place. My conspirator intimated that a scandal had engulfed the museum, and that a chain of embezzlement had left the island sinking in debt. Rather than see the project mosquitoed, the local community had rallied to maintain it as a place to exorcise the island’s

Concretations: field notes

The ‘jalopy’ is part of an installation and performance by Wang and Andro Semeiko, her partner. In their search for unending happiness they use the object as car. As mentioned in the former chapter, Wang frequently uses childlike play to ask what objects can be, and this is one such example, made from wood, piping, and concrete mixing equipment. The performance, ‘An Unending Search for a Happy End’ fictionalises Yu-Chen Wang’s relationship with Semeiko.