Postscript: towards an island taxonomy

While the essay is a mediation of sorts on Yu-Chen Wang’s work and exhibition, it is also a meditation on certain conditions of curating and criticality in contemporary art. Fiction is a valid and significant part of the curator’s role in creating the narrative that anchors the work within the cultural imagination, and, in that sense, imagination is one of the contemporary curator’s key tools.

Pascal Geilen notes that ‘Because we can distinguish between the real world and the imagined, or fictional “reality“, change and innovation are within the realm of human possibility. Regardless of whether such change means progression or regression, our ability to oscillate between non-fiction and fiction is crucial in imagining other worlds, in being creative, in presenting different models of society or in addressing ecological issues.’[1] In narrative one can simultaneously create the capacity for creative thinking that is as crucial for audiences for contemporary art and culture at large as it is for artists in their studios. This is due to the complexity of culture, its nuances and self-referential nature that I discussed in the introduction in reference to ironic SF reboots. For our singular identities are located within networks of cultural meanings. To curate, therefore, is as much about creating a narrative around the exhibition as it is in creating the narrative of an artist’s life, and locating his or her work within a genealogy of art history. There are enclosures, of course, and institutions create certain constraints, some physical, some economic, some historical, and some ideological. A completely open space would be as redundant as a blank map. Some constraints are required for orientation to do more than express opinion – that is, to say to think critically rather than express personal preference. Writers such as the Oulipo group, the Dogma filmmakers, or Pistoletto's notion of ‘Indolus’ all invoke difficulties that provoke creative forms of escape to inspire their creativity. In this respect, to curate an exhibition today, to build a narrative, is to create an imaginary island, not to let the public roam free in space. It is a contemporary condition that is somewhat ironic in its very nature. Richard Rorty describes the protagonist of such a time as an ‘contingent ironist’, one able to accept the conditions one finds oneself within and deal constructively with their contradictions.[2] He also identifies the novel as the model for how this kind of thinking has become endemic in late capitalist culture. That is not to say such a model is problem free. This pervasive mind-set has created chimeras that, Chantal Mouffe warns us, ‘rely on the joint forces of advertising and the “creative industries” for producing fantasy worlds through which the identity of the consumer is constructed. To buy something today is to enter into a specific world, to identify with a certain culture and become part of the imagined community.’[3] But she also identifies cultural institutions as the places in which resistance to these forces can be instigated, where politics can be reimagined. This places exhibitions and exhibition making at an important nexus in bringing together research (artistic or otherwise) and fiction to make significant impacts on our current culture, which is rather lost at sea. Such ‘fiction-based research’ is being conceived (itself perhaps a sub-genre of artistic research) as a way in which empathy can be built between the reader and the research. However, I would claim there is another more significant function of fiction as research. Narrative contains a method of constructing knowledge today by actively defining the world in which it is posited – the laws, limitations, and internal logics that govern its evolution. That this should have become personified in the character of the curator today is inherent in how exhibition making is a significant act, where narratives unfold between the real, social, and discursive spaces. But that is also to acknowledge that the curator is a fictional role; he or she is a character as much as the gentleman scientists or explorers in the history of SF – the real and the imaginary ones.

Back to Chapter four

Towards an island taxonomy: landmarks

The postscript was not included in the exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, but it was featured in the subsequent presentation of the exhibition at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester. While the narrative was part of the process of the original exhibition and accumulated through the show, it seemed appropriate to include some kind of key to the references in the later archival presentation as a continuation of the narrative, with observations brought home and beginning to be historicised.

Among the most prevalent narrative forms in today’s culture is science fiction, a broad genre that has its own evolutionary track. From its origins in the gothic literature of Frankenstein, through the golden and silver ages of futuristic space travel to the dystopian speculative worlds from Ballard to P. D. James, science fiction is one of the few refuges of thinking about the future in the present. As a genre, it combines facts – genuine possibilities as suggested by scientific discovery – with pure imagination. There are phyla and subphyla of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ science fiction; species and subspecies of gold, silver, and new wave SF, and the more recent speculative and climate fictions. All present their own distinct utopian and dystopian visions.

These forms of narrative are a theme, I believe, that emerges throughout Yu-Chen Wang’s practice. And, when invited to write a critical response to this exhibition, I took a creative writing approach to draw together a number of distinct ideas, some observational, some theoretical. It contains references to art, science, and literature, and the history of art, the history of science, and the history of literature. As a novelistic form it would be counterproductive and futile to explain it fully, just as it would be to ‘explain’ Yu-Chen Wang’s work. But some description of the form and content may be interesting to those curious and patient enough to

Mostrando/Monstrado

Name given to the island by the ship’s crew. The original name is a hybrid word of the Portuguese mostrado meaning ‘exhibition’, and the old English ‘strand’ meaning beach. In the narrative, over time the name has corrupted to sound more like monster. A similar corruption is evidenced in the English word demonstration, which has its etymological roots in mostrar

Saudade

Name of the ship in Chapter one; a Brazilian/Portuguese form of nostalgia that is untranslatable into English.

Sixteenth of a Persian rug

This literary device is used by David Quammen in the introduction to The Song of the Dodo. This ecological essay talks about island biogeography and its affects on those enclosed within it, limiting biodiversity exponentially. 

Snarks

An imaginary animal from the Lewis Carroll poem The Hunting of the Snark.

Kingdom: Monstrando

Alfred Russel Wallace

Nineteenth-century natural scientist in part responsible for the theory of evolution having inspired published papers with Darwin prior to The Origin of the Species. He worked in the Amazon and Indonesia where the Wallace Line marks the division between two distinct communities of fauna with origins in Asia and Australasia. At the border of enlightenment thinking he remained committed to spiritualism alongside his scientific studies. He contracted malaria during an expedition and his diaries contain lucid and fantastical writing from bouts of the disease. He was an inspiration to Joseph Conrad who kept a copy of The Malay Archipelago by his bedside.

Alice

Chief scientist in Chapter three, named after Lewis Carroll’s most famous character. There are further references to Carroll’s writing where nonsense is a method for confusing the boundaries between people with images and language, a feature that frequently runs through Yu-Chen Wang’s practice in the composites of machine and character – most notably the personification of linotype.

have reached this point. In keeping with the scientific theme of the narrative, below are the beginnings of a taxonomy of the island I have constructed around Wang’s exhibition, or at least the narratives that run through it. In turn, I imagine this to be the unfinished catalogue of species that the first botanist left behind and the psychologist in the concluding chapter looks at in the museum. 

Postscript: towards an island taxonomy

As a curator I have found it increasingly difficult to view art in isolation. Instead my point of view, like many of those critically viewing contemporary art, has drifted to ‘reading’ the exhibition as a whole. This is not to devalue the individual work of art per se, but a tendency towards viewing art within a network of meanings – an ecology, of sorts, of an island one lands on when entering the gallery.

Whether written in lines of history in the museums of yesteryear or spatially as a more contemporary system of nodes, a key aspect of any exhibition is its narrative. This is a curatorial tool, and also a present condition of everyday life. Narratives exist in marketing. Embedded in products and brands as lifestyles, they organise our senses of self, as well as the world around us. The facts of history have been replaced by interwoven strings of stories. This is at least one of the ways in which curating has found itself so central to contemporary culture. The narrative may be as fictional as it is factual, but truth is there in a contingent state.

Blank map

These appear twice. First, as the museum floor plan and, second, referred to in the story of our nineteenth-century protagonist being lost in the doldrums. It is taken from Lewis Carroll’s poem The Hunting of the Snark. Obviously useless, it is also known as one of the first instances of image being used instead of language as a narrative device in a book.

Island biogeography

A subspecies of ecology that causes evolution, island biogeography looks at the effects of limitations on an environment on its flora and fauna. It is known that creating enclosures can cause small species to become large, and large species to shrink in scale to accommodate themselves within the ecology. This is due in part to limited gene pools and in part due to limited resources.

Models in models

The model within a model ad infinitum is a hybrid reference to the one inside Yu-Chen Wang’s display, and tangentially to Lewis Carroll. In Alice through the Looking-Glass she encounters a map so detailed that she finds herself looking at the map marked on it, which renders it useless.

Stay thou in thy place

A quotation from a character in Edwin Abbott’s Flatland warning the protagonist not to transgress his existence in two dimensions. Abbott’s book is a satire on utopianism and social hierarchies, mirroring aspects of Wang’s practice. Utopia, included in paperback form in Wang’s display, is sometimes considered a foundational text in science fiction. The cover of her edition shows Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, the story of which also interweaves architecture, language, and society on a utopian/dystopian axis.

To the north … ,

The lyrics are taken from the poem ‘Envoi’ by Octavio Paz. However, it is included as a secondary reference, as it is quoted at the start of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. In turn it locates the mirror that appears in Yu-Chen Wang’s exhibition as part of the installation.

Vermillion Sands

The pollution in the final chapter turns the beach and sea vermillion. This refers to the Vermillion Sands short stories by J. G. Ballard, a satire on modern society. This form of speculative fiction is considered ‘new wave’ science fiction, and Ballard was one of its chief exponents, exploring the psycho-social sphere. It is the genre-space of the final chapter.