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Gallery
Review on the Paradise Institute
The
contemporary art piece I am doing my review on is the Paradise Institute,
presented by at the Power Plant. It
is produced by the artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, originally for
the Canadian Pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale. Because of its
revolutionary combination of sculpture, installation, performance, with audio
and video art, viewing it is an unforgettable experience to have been through.
To me, it is a rejection of the mainstream, also presents many
controversial and even disturbing concepts regarding the relationships between
fiction and reality, and resembles a cubist collage.
My personal definitions of the line between reality and fiction has thus
been questioned.
First, I
will provide an objective, physical description of the work. The audience is
invited to sit on the balcony of the 20th century movie theater, an
optical illusion created by the installation of rows of miniature seats and a
mall movie and screen in a converging space. High quality headphones are
assigned to each viewer seating on the ¡°balcony¡± of the theater looking
down. In the 13-minute presentation starts, two seemingly parallel spaces, the
movie and the theater, are run with constant connections to each other.
With all
the media used in this piece, there must be interesting interactions between
them, and how they compliment to each other definitely plays a great role in the
over all complexity of the piece. The
types of media, as mentioned above, include audio, video, performance and
sculpture, are all brought together to form this multimedia installation.
The sculptural part of the piece is the easiest to identify and has a
simple function: the miniature seats are there to depict the appearance of a
movie theatre. The performance,
audio and video presentations, however, are carefully placed into each other to
give the piece multiple dimensions. The
performances of the two main characters in the movies show ambiguous
relationship between a man and a woman, filled with sexual desire and unease.
A parallel man-woman relationship is also present in the theatre.
Each scene in the movie is weaved into audio feedbacks of background
interactions of the theater, which in turn is backed up by the movie itself.
For an example, a scene of a house in the movie is followed by a voice in
the theatre asking whether the stove is turned off at home, which is then
followed by a house caught on fire on the movie screen.
Therefore the whole 13 minutes consists of a continuous intertwining of
the movie and the theatre. One,
without the other, would not persist and further develop.
I think
the most unforgettable part of experiencing this installation, is its ability to
cause immediate reactions in me. Because
the piece has combined elements of everyday life, our memories and past
experiences, it is our instinct to react to it naturally.
Even though I have realized the voices around me where ¡°fake¡±, it was
still very attempting every time for me to turn my head to look at the direction
in which the voices are coming from. A
violent cell phone ring behind me has caused my annoyance, before I reminded
myself it was only part of the art piece. I
literally have to force myself from to not making any instinctive reactions.
Because of these elements that would cause our instinctive reactions,
this piece of art poses some interesting ideas regarding reality and fiction.
Having
described how ¡°real¡± the piece is, it is now necessary to point out its
fictional qualities. The whole
piece, actually, is attempting to erase the line between what are believed to be
reality and fiction. A movie,
conventionally, is of course a symbol of fiction.
However, the artist has constantly taken the characters and scenes from
movie and put them into the theater. A
burning house in the movie would be connected to the sound of the theater also
burning and cracking. Conversely,
the conversations originally happening in the theatre also show up in the movie. Reality and Fiction is therefore blended into one.
The fact that we make instinctive reactions to things that we often
experience, as I have identified in the previous paragraph, gives another
understanding of real versus fictional: we trust our senses to define what is
real, but it might not be at all. The
essence of this piece lies in these pointed out confusions between reality and
fiction.
Through
this piece, the artist rejects the mainstream, or the Hollywood definition of
movies. The movie has no narrative
plot, no clarified beginning nor end. The
movie is very fragmented, it seems to be jumping in and out of several parallel
plots with no sense of chronological order.
There is always the element of surprise. Even though the audiences might
still attempt to find connections and put together one continuous story for
these pieces, the intention of the artist is to reject the necessity of
narrative qualities attached to movies.
I was
attempted to compare the Paradise Institute with a cubist collage once I stepped
out of the piece, and coincidentally this thought is also found on the
description of the piece done by The Power Plant. They both gather pieces of
rather unrelated ideas, weave them together in their simplest forms. They both have no obvious narrative value, nor do they pay
association to time. These pieces
of ideas are often purposely brought to contradict, or question each other.
Each element in the Paradise Institute fade into another without
distinctive boarders in between, much like the bottles and guitars in a
Picasso¡¯s collage. The woman
beside you whining about a stove left on at home, following by house on fire on
the movie screen, corresponded by the sound of the theatre caught on fire, is an
example of how things run into each other.
Also, the two spaces, the movie and the theater, acts as a
multidimensional version of perhaps, Braque¡¯s canvas.
The objects in Braque¡¯s cubist paintings, similarly, move into and out
of the space that is defined on the canvas, appearing the several depths to the
eye. Whereas, the Paradise
Institute, elements are moved back and forth between the movie and the theater,
or appearing in both spaces at the same time.
A character originally in the movie actually ends up in the theater
amongst the audiences at the end. Nothing
has a place where it is ¡°suppose to be found¡± according to logic.
The third similarity is the bold mixing of different media. Cubism collages, for its time, was an unusual mixture of
materials that are not conventionally associated.
Each medium in the Paradise Institute is repeatedly used in modern art,
alone, or frequently combined with one another, but infrequently combined with
this degree of magnitude. I would say it is most closely related to modern
theatrical performances, but with a sculpture added to transform the theatre
into a part of the piece itself. From
my limited understanding of cubism collages, the Paradise Institute poses very
interesting similarities with them. Instead just visually, it is a cubist piece
to a full range of our senses.
Personally, I like this piece very much, not only
because it has many contradictions that are debatable and questionable, also it
does affect my subjective view of reality versus fiction.
There are questions posed by this piece that are only up for debate,
without reaching definite answers that can satisfy every body.
For example, the question of whether the movie has a continuous narrating
intention? In this essay, I argued that the artists have intended with none, but
it is debatable. A faceless man is
shot coming out of a van, followed another man in a hospital. It is our habit to
make connections and draw conclusions from these potentially separate scenes.
However, the most impact that this piece has made on me is that it
questioned my trust of what is real and what is not.
The line between reality and fiction disappears, once we realize that
they both come to us through our senses, and are modified by our past
experiences. Our senses can be
fooled, and our experiences can make us biased.
There is then, no absolute reality to look for, because our minds can
only perceives in a relative and subjective way.
It is indeed, a philosophical piece of art.
I
have chosen to do my review on this piece, because of it is full of complexity
in every aspect. It is a mixture of
a variety of medium, carefully interconnected; a new way of a cubist
presentation; and poses philosophical question that has reached me in a personal
level. A quote taken from Wayne
Baerwaldt¡¯s review for The Power Plant gives an excellent description of this
piece, in relation to its title
Realities
turn out to be fictive, and the fictive has a lot to say about realities.
Just the title of
the
work is a paradox for ways of perceiving the world-romantic associations with
the word
¡®paradise¡¯
are juxtaposed the rational of the word ¡®institute¡¯-the work itself is full
of
ambiguities
and disturbances that take us on an uncertain but spellbinding journey.
