It is the second week after the Christmas, as the time seems droning toward my ears all the time, rendering the fervor of ticking, toward the brooding thereafter. Redolent to the assertation from the tutorial with my tutor, he averted that I should make review of the projects I have already made, to ruminate about other spectacles able to further develop the idea. The utterance is very cogent to me as my verve to make stuffs is inexorable to some extent, which I might conceive to attain this review after I accomplishes all the 28 works commissioned.
Aside from those prose-like whining, regarding to my recent lotus of making, concentric on the progression of the casting workshop project, I tilt to cast the materials I collected by chance such as Toy Guns, Crab Shell, Oyster Shell, Toy cars and so on, akin to the surrealism approach to resonate the correlation between them in a psychological manner. Inspired by Dora Maar’s exhibition in the Tate Modern and Picasso’s six Glass of Abstine, both of the artists profess the same principle of the uncanniness to some extent, as associated with Dora Maar, her surreal photomontage making spurs my thought dominantly, deploying collage to make a seemingly coherent yet anomalous image, alongside the Abstine glass casting from Picasso, the exploitation of readymade spoon contained with the context of the cast outcomes of sugar cube and the glass, a tenuous sense of commensurability within an obvious absurdity to this context.
My first part of the project has already been accomplished, as the performance of ‘starving artist’ who eat my cast outcomes of crab shell and oyster (by melted sugar) is quite auspicious. The effect of the sugar casting admittedly did not align with my anticipation, as the solidity of the outcome is unstable and mutable with the superficial sugar liquid on, very sticky but succeeding to cast the original shape of the crab and the oyster out at least. The performance was taken in the photography studio assisted with my friend, and the duration of the performance per se was more protracted than my usual film documentation because of my desire to play with time. The potency from the work ‘Set a Good Corner’ by Bruce Newman cannot be overlooked toward this practice, the length of the video always is arbitrary yet for him, the time is terminated when the job is done abutting to my concept which the licking movement from my body, it is the oblique interaction of the object toward the final target to deform and reconfigure the sculpture, and also the performance is ended when I feel a teeming saturation of the uptake of the sugar.
Whereas this concept is quite equivocal and unable to be the main thing I yearn to express. Another kernel aspect is my thinking of the partaking itself, as every day, everyone has already achieved the conflation of those edible objects with their body, particularly in my homeland, encompassing the cuisines made of offal, visceral, or other erratic ingredients for the western culture. Those objects, initially pertain a palpable segregation from the corporeal body of the human being, but they confront such convulsive and imposed coalescence by the action of the eating which is defined to be the most biologically pivotal to subsist the being. Therefore, I mulled about the investigation and the quiddity of this action by such performance to eat an art work in such deliberate way. The slow process of the vanishing of the sculptural form, it disfigures or reforms the sugar sculptures by my tongue, which is also an intriguing experiment to concern with the value of art work, rendering this functionality to be edible.
The reasons to allocate the crab shell Alginate model and the oyster’s one attributes to the original context and axiom of their presence. The shell is merely the remnant part after the motion of the partaking by human being, leading to further invocation of death and corpse. I re-bestow the shells with the further edibility by the sugar casting, upending their context to be only the abandoned remnant without further usage, which makes comparison to those contemporary artists like Jeff Koon’s Vacuum Cleaner or other artistic manipulation of the ready-made that just removed the original use-value of the objects off by the placement in the gallery space without further narrative to review them by further operation like my deed.
The edited video documentation is lasting for verge on 7 minutes, such duration of either the destruction of an edible art work or the creation of this new piece. However, in the end, the form of the sugar outcome itself seems not changed much, yet there are some finger prints at the bottom with the prints of my teeth atop as well, as the credence of my trace and attempt to eat it. This is just the first potion of the casting workshop making as I will make melting sculpture or other context playing of the wax outcomes in the morrow.
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