-Ism
“In the violence of overcoming,
in the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, in the excess of raptures that shatter me,
I seize on the similarity between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me,
between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy!”
— Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros
To reveal and expose intimate, vulnerable moments in personal life to the extreme—almost radically:
Humiliation, inferiority, jealousy, chaos, and hate.;
The pain, the scars, the lack, and the openness.
To use the body as the medium/container, blurring the boundary between subject and object;
To desire, to portray, to elaborate, to interrogate, to contradict, to deconstruct.;
The language outside of language.
To penetrate and tear apart public space and the hypocritical social rules and so-called common sense constructed under capitalism, which isolate and suppress people.
Like tears bursting out of burning eyes with ecstasy.
To get naked and howl,
In a form close to love.
Pipilotti Rist’s Mother Floor (1996)
The rotating camera captures the artist’s nude body rolling and crawling in a vague and enclosed room. The camera zooms in from the flamboyant, wild purple and orange floor to the artist's face, from the hysteric, hungry expression to the brightly painted pink lips, entering the mouth, then exiting through the anus, zooming out. The artist continues to rotate her body, repeating this loop. Exposing the insides of a young woman's body seems to be even more intimate, to the point of being terrifying and disgusting. It reveals an exposure more extreme than nudity. The mouth-anus metaphor confuses the functional roles of the two organs. Its subtlety lies not in sexualizing an ordinary object but in pushing the potential for the object commonly sexualized in symbolism to an extreme, thus dissolving this sexualization. This is a ruthless expose from a female perspective on the concept of pornography under patriarchal narrative, as if to say that pornography is not about nudity but rather about a carefully calculated lack of full exposure, a kind of deliberate concealment.
Mother Floor (1996)
Robert Gober’s Untitled (1992)
Robert Gober’s works usually have clear yet ambiguous metaphors, and he rarely speaks about them. Beeswax is a metaphorical material, evoking the oils produced by the human body. Gober injects a sense of physicality into everyday objects, imbuing them with personal experiences and subjective narratives. This breaks down their functional roles, reconstructs their meaning, and redefines their purpose in subtle, open ways. His deeply personal emotion dissolves the coldness of mass-produced objects within a consumerist society. This breaking down reveals a process where these objects point toward another possibility. His personal narrative’s intervention in objects echoes the way these items transform the body, carrying some form of bodily transition.
Untitled, Robert Gober, 1992
“I saw this shoe in the middle of East 10th Street early one morning. It had a poignancy as if a little girl had lost it and was still walking around the city with one shoe. I’m sure the reality is that it was in the garbage and the garbage was ransacked or sloppily loaded into the garbage truck and that the shoe was abandoned because it was unwanted or outgrown.” —Robert Gober
Adrian Piper’s What Will Become of Me (1985)
Hair, skin flakes, nails—when these bodily leftovers that are produced continuously throughout a person’s life are carefully collected, a strange yet familiar sense of contradiction arises. Piper preserves them in jars, presented with a calm detachment in a public space. To a stranger, it feels almost too frank and intimate. I am suddenly placed, with almost no preparation, into the details and traces of someone’s life over many years. I feel an indescribable calm yet intense sadness, almost without needing to see the equally intimate typewritten documents alongside. They recount personal trauma and statements of intent about the handling of the artist’s work after their passing. This was my first impression upon seeing the piece. This sense of tragic grandeur is similar to Heidegger's concept of being-toward-death. When the tiny, intensely private moments of personal life are juxtaposed with the inescapable tragedy of death and placed before me, they shed new light on the details in my own life that I had overlooked or deemed meaningless. It turns out they had existed with such weight all along.
What Will Become of Me, Adrian Piper, 1985, ongoing
Yining Fang, 2025
