Paul Chan in the Uncertain States of America
A letter from Hans Ulrich Obrist to Hou Hanru
Dear Hanru
Last night, as I was writing a bit about Paul Chan, I suddenly decided to send it to you.
If we can steal software, we should
The exhibition Uncertain States of America, at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, reinvents the problematic exhibition genre which surveys a specific scene in a specific country. Also of note is the strong return of politically motivated work. The Hong Kong-born artist Paul Chan, who lives in NY, is one of the main protagonists of a new political art movement in the USA.
Chan got his start in Internet-based experimental film and video and was strongly influenced by the filmmaker Chris Marker. Those first experiments with digital-video work, were part animation, part documentary, part video essays. Chris Marker and his film Sans Soleil (1982) became a real anchor point for Chan, as he told me, “I think when you are young you want to imitate. ‘Imitation is a crisis’ is a phrase that comes to mind and I think they are imitations of a particular kind of video and film essay that was pioneered by Marker that combines all the things that we talked about. I think through the power of aesthetics you reduce and complicate issues of history, power, politics, and the social. I did a long sixty-minute video essay on the culture of aliens in the United States, and given that we are so afraid of immigrants here, I connected the social with the extraordinary and the fantastical. I think maybe this idea has been carried over in the animation work now.”
What is interesting is the Chris Marker link between documentary and fiction. In Chan’s more recent animation work, there are still elements of his early documentary work: animation can do its job, and single-channel video – like the video-essays – can do another. The video he made in reaction to the re-election of George Bush in November 2004 was essentially a documentary with animation that takes up the division of the US between what they call the Blue States and the Red States as its theme. Chan’s connection to documentary still exists, but specifically in a single-channel world.
Refusing to update his software, Chan develops more and more animations using outdated software. Chan says, “I think if we can steal software, we should, and so I haven’t updated my software in at least three years and I keep my computer as close to a pristine year 2000 state as I can. And when you put everything in a computer you can pretty much do anything, so I wanted to test the limits to see what exactly I can and cannot do. Animation became one of the paths to doing that.”
Chan works to articulate a particular idea of truth or reality back to the world again through the medium of drawing. Like many other artists right now, Chan’s alignment with drawing comes from the idea that photography and video have no relation to truth or fact and only power at this point. No budget! His only concern is time, only time, and his work could be considered a performance. Yes, it is like a performance. His body is the measure of the limit of what he can do and he is going to push that limit.
‘We are at our most transgressive when we fail’
Using overhead projectors and old LCD screens, Chan cobbles together scraps from old laptops that people have thrown away, using a developing-country strategy of recycling technology for uses in places where it’s not supposed to be used. And Chan refuses to ask for help: “Mistakes teach you more than anything. There is this beautiful line written by Adam Phillips, ‘We are at our most transgressive when we fail.’ He thinks the fear of failure becomes, in a strange way, a fear of growing and changing and so you have to throw yourself in situations whereby you don’t know what you’re going to do.”
Using these self-made machines/projectors, Chan’s work often takes the form of installations: narrations which testify to a critical view on the world. The evocation of a paradise which turns into an apocalypse, his animation film Happiness (finally) after 35,000 years of Civilization – after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier (2002/2003) presents Darger and Fourier in search of a utopia. The 19th century theoretician Fourier had invented a society of ‘phalansteries’ based on cooperative work and free play. The visionary outsider artist Henry Darger in the 20th century developed a world of small innocent girls who succumbed and participated in violent acts. The animation film of Chan superimposes Fourier’s philosophy with Darger’s hallucinatory universe. As in all of Chan’s work, there is the link to the body: “If animation is an image over time then I have to connect to that kind of decay, but I have no way to measure that except my own body. You can’t draw decay; it’s just a representation of decay, and my body becomes a kind of barometer of decay and the drawings actually change in terms of form.”
Chan describes his way of working as ‘de-linking’, a term coined by the Egyptian economist Samir Amin who realized that the true power of the Middle East lies in the informal economies of barter and exchange. With ‘de-linking’ you don’t have to be connected. Chan is part of the second generation of the Internet age, a generation of people who believe that interconnectedness is not necessarily good, but more of a burden. The more I connect, the more I feel tethered to something I can neither control nor predict. ‘De-linking’ means minimum phone and email contact: Chan resists having a cell phone and rarely answers his office and home phone.
‘De-linking’ also leads us to Etienne Balibar’s idea of de-centering and dislocation (which I have discussed in an essay on Leon Golub). Golub and Chan also share an interest in outsider artists. Chan’s interest in outsider artists leads us to his interest in outsider political groups, activist groups who work beyond the law. Outsider artists love of formal laws of compositional form so much that they have to break with it. And, in a way, great activist groups do this too: they love the law so much that they have to crush it. Chan points out that the queer rights group Act Up uses a lot of the rhetoric of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It is clear that the Bill of Rights was not written for everyone; it was written for and by old white men (read: property owners). But it was written with the kind of flourish and ideological promise that made it appear to have been written for everyone. So Act Up reminds us of the promise of the Bill of Rights: “You say everyone should be equal; then I am everyone.”
The artist must always be the ‘enemy’
When I asked Chan about his link to the anti-globalization movement, he told me:
“I am a political vagabond. In ’98, ’99 when I came to New York, the heat of the political movements was anti-globalization, Seattle, the WTO, the World Bank protest. ATAC was the organization we really revered for their organizing in France and, of course, Le Monde Diplomatique was their media instrument. So we felt we knew them fairly intimately. I was one of the founding members of New York IndyMedia.”
When I asked him about his connections to Voices of Wilderness, Paul told me about a trip he made to Iraq with Kathy Kelly:
“I didn’t go there to make work, but I brought a camera with me and then realized that you couldn’t really talk about politics because you were still under Saddam’s regime, so we talked about other things, like popular culture. Global popular culture is literally global, so we didn’t talk about Saddam, but we would talk about film director John Woo…. I think through culture, you can start to talk about politics allegorically, so you would talk about the politicization of John Woo films. In the end, I came back with footage, but I didn’t think about making a video piece. I just used it for presentations and anti-war talks before the war began because people really didn’t know what Iraq was like. … But after the war started and the occupation began, I was motivated to bring the video footage into another life beyond the presentation, and so I made it into a video. And throughout the editing I thought about what Adorno said: you follow the object. You don’t make the object, the object makes you. So I followed the trajectory of what the images in the video looked like, which had a very intimate home movie-like feel.”
When I asked Chan to tell me about his most recent single-channel video against Bush called Now Promise Now Threat, the artist told me:
“It’s the enemy thing. All my single-channel works are essentially me being the enemy. And this new video is me going back to the perceived enemy of the US, which is not outside now but inside, the Red State stuff, the poor farmers, the racist storefront owner, who Blue States like New York and California believed have fucked the country. But we are not political people, we are artists, so our job, our aesthetic responsibility, is always to be the enemy. It’s almost like a Christian idea, but I don’t want to say that because I don’t want to be Christian. ‘Love your enemy’ is an old phrase but it’s not that necessarily; it’s that you mimic the enemy, you become them in a way. You sleep with the enemy maybe is a more seductive way of putting it.”
When I asked Chan if he believes that art can be critical in the 21st century he answered:
“There are actually two streams: I think, in a way, that the Situationists ‘won’. Since ‘Nam [Vietnam], what we call political art has been steadily retreating from museums and galleries, and gaining a foothold on the streets. And so you can answer that question by saying, ‘Yes, political art is here; it’s just not in museums and galleries.’ The heat of that kind of work has been taken onto the streets and in a non-institutional context, so even if political art isn’t necessarily being shown, like the works of Leon Golub, they still exist. Those of us who have been doing hard-core organizing can see that. That doesn’t mean that trade unions have been completely transformed to think about the aesthetics; it only means that the younger generation of activists is very aware of the aestheticizing potential of motivating signs to do their work for them. But in the opposite direction, within the institutions like museums and galleries, I think art that engages with the social and the political invariably comes from a sense of desperation. I think in America it’s a fairly desperate-feeling time, so everything is motivated by a desire to articulate that desperation, whether it’s affirmative or negative. Even paintings have the political potential of articulating, of visualizing, this desperation.”
Let me know what you think.
Hans Ulrich
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Originally printed in ART iT No.11 Spring/Summer 2006