恋爱的人就是艺术家

方璐作品

2012年9月8日至10月24日

北京艺术家方璐的录像装置作品《恋爱的人就是艺术家》，用恋爱状态中产生的特异行为，把图像制作和拍摄的行动结合到一起 。箭厂空间的展览现场，碎屑四布的凌乱的空间中随意摆放着几部电视机，里面分别播放着艺术家用拍摄于胡同中的数千张照片制作成的四段幻灯片。这些图像展示一个孤单的女性角色从事各种日常活动，如买菜或喝酸奶；但这些日常行为很快变得怪异而荒谬，被一些虚构的游戏和场景所统摄，而后者并不产生任何可见的效果或达到某种现实的目的。和艺术创作的过程不无相似，这些表面无意义的举动源于人的内在失衡，这些失衡揭示了人的世界观，并影响着他们和现实的相互关系。方璐作品的灵感来源于法国哲学家罗兰·巴特的论文《恋人絮语》（A Lover’s Discourse），该论文试图为恋爱的非理性和无法自拔找到合理的解释。在罗兰·巴特片段化的行文中，他将恋爱状态和艺术家的状态相提并论，认为两者都依赖于一种“影像—剧目”（image-repertoire）的修辞方式——也就是恋爱的主体在其中构造自身的图片仓库或电影胶片。 方璐作品中的恋爱的人——一个因恋爱而失衡的年轻女人——她本身就是作品中无数图片累积的主题，同时象征着吞噬和覆灭。

和艺术家的实践一致，这件作品将注意力引向它自身的创作方式，也就是对镜头的意识及其矛盾角色的认知：它既是“客观” 的目击者，又是能操纵感情并产生新体验形式的工具。方璐不断地探讨日常活动与行为的上演和重新排演，镜头在这里重新检验了身体与思想、物质和精神之间，以及意识和无意识之间的基本联系。

方璐，1981年生于广州，2007年在旧金山艺术学院新类型系获得硕士学位。她曾在北京空间站（2010年），广州博尔赫斯书店当代艺术机构（2011年）举办个展。她参加了深圳雕塑双年展（2012年）和中央美术学院美术馆“未来展”（2012年）等大型群展。方璐是录像局的共同创始人之一，这是位于北京和广州的独立录像档案机构。

Amorous Acts

Fang Lu

September 8 – October 24, 2012

Beijing-based artist Fang Lu’s video installation Amorous Acts brings together acts of image-making and recording with the idiosyncratic behaviors associated with a lovesick state of mind. Four slideshows composed out of thousands of images shot in the surrounding hutongs run on television monitors scattered throughout Arrow Factory’s debris-filled rundown space. The images depict a lone female figure going about her daily activities of buying vegetables and eating yoghurt; but before long these mundane tasks turn towards the kooky and nonsensical as the items become immersed in fictional games and scenarios that yield no discernible outcome nor serve any functional purpose. Not unlike the artistic process, these apparently meaningless gestures are founded upon internal imbalances that inform an individual’s perspective on the world and impact their encounters with reality. Amorous Acts takes its cue from A Lover’s Discourse, a treatise by French theorist Roland Barthes that attempts to rationalize the irrational emotion of love and its all-consuming state of being. In his fragmented text Barthes likens of the state of being in love to that of an artist, and relies on a rhetorical device known as the “image-repertoire”—a storehouse or theatrical stock of images onto which the amorous subject inscribes him or herself. The amorous subject of Fang Lu’s installation—a young woman whose lovesick state sets her somewhat off-kilter—is herself the subject of an accumulation of images that signifies simultaneous engulfment and annihilation.

In keeping with Fang’s practice, Amorous Acts draws explicit attention to the methods and means of its own making, namely an awareness of the camera and its conflicted role as both “objective” witness and a tool capable of manipulating emotions to elicit new forms of experience. Her continued investigations into staging and re-staging mundane actions and behaviors for the camera serve here to re-examine fundamental connections between body and mind, psychic and physical, conscious and unconscious.

Fang Lu (b.1981, Guangzhou) received her MFA from the New Genres department at the San Francisco Arts Institute in 2007. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Space Station, Beijing (2010), Borges Libreria Institute of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou (2011); and recently in large group exhibitions such as the Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial (2012) and CAFAM Future Exhibition (2012). She is co-founder of Video Bureau, an independent video archive resource in Beijing and Guangzhou.