Monday, March 24, 2008

The Impossibility of....

TEXT CONTRIBUTION
29 Mar 2008, Hong Kong
(This is an unedited draft. Cite only from the printed brochure.)

Yeung Yang reflects on reasons for declining the curators' invitation to show an earlier gesture as an artwork in the exhibition, Hong Kong Anarchitecture Bananas.


The impossibility of showing without hiding a “work”[1]

by Yeung Yang


I am not ready. I want everything. I want nothing.

Night

`“Continue. Don’t run out of breath. Your body is not the same today as yesterday. Your body remembers. You don’t need to remember, to store up yesterday like capital in your head. Your memory? Your body reveals yesterday in what it wants today.”[2]

That night, it was the height of an erection my body aspired to. It was the height of an erection my body disgusted at. I climbed, fearing fall. I ran, fearing loss. My fingers clattered on the keyboard, fearing silence. It was too white, too dark, I wanted to touch it, fearing “all”.

I wanted you to want to scream like I wanted to scream. I wanted your scream to glide. I wanted to shake you up like I would the lifeless body of a beloved.

Day

You asked me for a “work” of which I was a fleeting part. I refused. It is difficult. “Why difficult? Because one must refuse not only the worst but also what seems reasonable, a solution one could call felicitous.”[3]

In broad daylight, I have no a sense of dimension of my body in relation to your gesture of recollection.

InonebreathIcommunicatetoyouweightproximitythicknessthatcombineto
resemblethememoryofthatnightthatbelongstoapastthatcannotstopexertingits
claimonthedaylayingbareandexposedandrumblingsoitrefusestoservebutremains inconcilationwithbrevity.

“Open your lips, but do not open them simply. I do not open them simply…From your/my lips, several songs, several ways of saying echo each other. For one is never separable from the other. You/I are always several at the same time.”[4]

The “work” was the result of surrendering to the certainty of embarrassment. The surrendering was possible by splitting embarrassment into two kinds: first, the embarrassment of not “doing” anything, and second, the embarrassment of stumbling, failing, and appearing squeamish in face of uniformed and armed authority. When split, the certainty of embarrassment becomes real. The “work” began when a split second of spontaneity squeezed out of that reality.

Night

“Tell me a story, Pew.

What kind of story, child?
A story with a happy ending.
There’s no such thing in all the world.
As a happy ending?
As an ending.”[5]


Notes:
1] See curatorial writing of this brochure mentioning the “work”, and South China Morning Post report Nov 19, 2006.
[2] Irigaray, Luce, “When Our Lips Speak Together” in Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1980, vol.6, no.1, pg.76.
[3] Blanchot, Maurice, “Refusal” in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, 111-2.
[4] Irigaray, 1980, p.72
[5] Winterson, Jeanette, Lighthouse Keeping, London: Harper Perennial, 2005:49.

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