Callum M. Strong essay

A conversation with the 'The Chain',  by Callum M Strong.
from the exhibition Still Present Adam Art Gallery 2005.

(in which the author imagines a dialogue with the 31 photographs of pairs)

A1. What do you mean that I'm a photograph in the Adam Art Gallery? Can't you see we're prisoners in cells here, cells I tell you!

A2. I would have thought you'd have remembered by now, I explained to you in London, Southhampton, Daytona, Fukuoka, even at the 25th Sao Paulo Biennial and back home in Taipei - we are the exhibition 'The Chain'.   Don't you remember Chien-Chi Chang coming to take our picture? We had to stay still, but you kept yanking on our chain. Now look at you, you've gone all blurry!

A1. Well my mum used to say I'd travel far but I never thought I'd see the world and to think all because I lost my marbles and ended up in a mental institution.

A2. OK, ok look. We are the mad monks of Lung Fa Tang, a Buddhist temple in Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan. The cells you pointed out are the photo frames and the only institution here is the Victoria University of Wellington.

B1.  Ssssshhhh you two, someones coming.
B2. Ssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
The varnished wooden floorboards are a tessellated pattern that weaves a path through the corridor of light. Like a fashion show of permutations of robe attire, the black and white life size images of pairs of men chained together stand silently waiting. Each image is contained by a silver frame each crowned by a pinnacle of light that rises up the gallery wall, a diffraction from the individual spot lights.

According to the quantum mechanics of renowned physicist Richard Feynman, light does not bounce off surfaces like a ball off the wall. Rather the photon (a particle of light) is absorbed into an atomic structure raising the energy level until a new photon is ejected.  We are beings of light living in the constant flux of transformation. Perhaps then the old cliché of the camera capturing a part our soul has some truth after all?

A1.  Ha, I'm right! Prisoners, captured… but, but the camera stole my soul?
 
Who said that?

A1.  It makes sense now! Chien-Chi Chang stole my soul, put me in a cell, chained me to you and then got that pair opposite to stare at us for months on end. It's no wonder that I'm insane!

A2.  Oh no, here we go again.

Man I really have to stop getting stoned before I go to an exhibition. I'm starting to hear voices in my head. Not to mention how unnerving the basement level of this building can be, with the environmental control systems rumbling in the background, vibrating the floor as if I was in a giant machine…

C1.  Excuse me, excuse me sir. According to Pascal, everyone's a little bit insane, even if you think you are normal then that is a type of insanity too.

C2.  And, according to Jermiah (29:26), "for every man that is mad, maketh himself a prophet".

C1.  One should appear to be a beast in order to become an angel?

C2.  Yes, and in St Augustine's words, if when calling yourself wise, you become a fool, call yourself a fool and you become wise.

Well at least these voices are beginning to make sense, even if they speak a Western tongue. 

D1. Who are you? What are doing here? Why have you got a hundred and twenty nine eyes?

I'm an art history student, writing an essay for a primitivism paper which will double as a piece for the Chartwell Trust Student Art Writing Prize. You'll have to excuse the mashed up thoughts but I'm trying to kill two birds with one stone. But I don't quite…

D2. That's an awful saying. Better to say you're enlightening two monks with one chain!

Hmmmm. Anyway, where was I? Photography, art, madness…

E1.  Maybe you should start at the beginning.

Ah yes, it was Daguerre who unleashed the objective exactitude upon art. From that moment on wrote Charles Baudelaire, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism, took hold of these new sun-worshippers.

E2. I went blind staring at the sun.

Walter Benjamin argued that photographers documenting and cataloguing the world, producing copy upon copy destroyed the authentic and the originality of art.  Catalogues of cultures, nature, even images of the insane became collections to ascertain scientific truth.

F1. Truth, there is no higher religion than truth! 
But objective visual reality was never enough for the artists. Look at the loosely painted unfinished works of Expressionism, the alternative paradoxical or ridiculousness of Surrealist vision. Think of the fascination with the art of the exotic other; children; and the mentally ill in Primitivist thought. The depths of Abstraction even! Were not all these reactions against the mechanical eye? The camera that never lies, never could quite tell the truth it would seem.

G1. Well what about us! Listen to this poem by Liu An - the western Han prince whose painted screen spoke out.
 
G2.  Displayed on your left and right
   Placed close to your head and feet,
   If I don't find a benevolent man in you,
   I might as well be a piece of rotten wood. 

For all their talking these photos speak with the silence of a stone statue. They are nameless faces that confront us through the veil of prejudice or find empathy in our eyes, revealing themselves only in our higher states of morality and intellect.  To paraphrase Keener, "When we pity them, we reflect upon our own disappointment. When we laugh, our hearts inform us that they are not more ridiculous than ourselves." 

H1.  Nor let the rich the lowest slave disdain
 H2.  He's equally a link in nature's chain;
 H1.  Labours to the same end, joins in one view;
 H2.  And both alike the will divine pursue.

I1.  You fucken barstard with all this, with all this bloody Western trope you're fucken forgetting that this is a Buddhist temple in Taiwan!

I2.  Hehe! This troupe that temple this Taiwan. All t's. But no swearing brother please.

Sorry. Yes back to this history common to many religions. Where mad monks play the fool and iconoclasts whose shocking behaviour is a paradoxical device for getting closer to ones God.

J1.  For getting closer to ones self?

J2.  For getting closer to ones no-self!

J1. Is this chain just a series of steel links?

J2. A link is only a link because of the emptiness between!

So the links of the steel chain are not chains of imprisonment. Just as a chain of mountains can be a bridge across the land, or a chain can be made of joyful daisies…

K1.  Don't get too attached. Those daisies will wilt and decay. That is the suffering of life.

K2. But if you're going to be attached to anything then the best thing is to be attached to someone who is walking the path to enlightenment.

But what of the padlock, does the master not hold the key?

L1. Our master Ki Lun-Tai is a Bodhisattva, an enlightened being who has delayed his own passage to nirvana in order to return to Earth as a teacher to help others. 

L2.  So because Taiwanese society has deemed our condition an illness we were sent here. Ki Lun-Tai chained us in pairs so we can help each other out of our karmic situation, by giving us the responsibility of being the caretakers of Taiwan's largest chicken farm.

So the chain is a symbol of compassion to lead from the chain of negative cause and effect.

M1.  But what I don't understand is how can we be insane when our entire country is all caught up in post colonial schizophrenia, we're not Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, or aborigines, but Taiwanese, Taiwanese! 

M2. Identity is ephemeral! Have you not seen the pasted-paper sculpture in Taiwan?   For forty years the Chinese communists extinguished the flames of our ceremonies, the custom of burning paper objects to maintain continuity with the deceased. But once again we send these gifts to our ancestors. For even when we are gone we may still need help in the spirit world.

Even when I am gone, for the final hour of this exhibition has drawn to a close, I know this conversation could go on for ever. Being at the end of a process that has transformed people from light to film, to print, to light, to eyes, the whole comprised feels like the beginning of a work to create the compassionate mind.

N1. After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns. There is movement but it is not brought about by force...The movement is natural, arising spontaneously. For this reason the transformation of the old becomes easy. The old is discarded and the new is introduced. Both measures accord with the time, therefore no harm results.

N2. I Ching 'the chain'

Bibliography:

Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre. 'The Salon of 1859' reprinted in Charvet, P.E. Selected writings on Art and Artists.  Penguin Books, England, 1972.

Benjamin Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Arendt, Hannah. Pimlico, London, 1999.

Ed. Chen E.K.Y, Williams Jack F & Wong Joseph. Taiwan : economy, society and history. Centre of Asian Studies, Hong Kong, 1991.

Clegg, Brian. Light Years : the extraordinary story of mankind's fascination with light .Piaktus, London,2002.

Hung, Wu. The Double Screen. Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting. Reaktion Books Ltd. London 1996.

Keener, Frederick M. The Chain of Becoming. Columbia University Press, New York, 1983.

Laing, E.J & Liu, H.H. Up in Flames. The Ephemeral Art of Pasted-Paper Sculpture in Taiwan. Stanford University Press, California. 2004.

Ed. Remer, Ashley. Still Present. Adam Art Gallery Te Paataka Toi. Victoria University of Wellington. 2005

Stroumsa, Guy G. Madness and Divinization in Early Christian Monasticism in Ed. Shulman D & Stroumsa G. Self and Self-Transformation in the History of Religions. Oxford University Press, New York, 2002.

About the Author:

Callum M Strong is a student of Victoria University of Wellington. Callum will complete a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Art History in 2005.