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| 漫长的沉睡——对严培明作品中死亡主题的几点观察... |
| admin + 2007/8/28 15:43 【论坛浏览】 |
 gzqdqygpgzqdqygp gzqdqygp 漫长的沉睡gzqdqygp ——对严培明作品中死亡主题的几点观察gzqdqygp Fabian Stechgzqdqygp gzqdqygp 幻想自身之死是去体验现实,目睹他人之死是在体验情感的宣泄。gzqdqygp ——克尔凯郭尔gzqdqygp gzqdqygp 艺术家和死亡gzqdqygp gzqdqygp 艺术家们对关于自身死亡的联想充满着矛盾。非艺术家们大都惧怕死亡，他们基本上同意死亡的现实意义指向的是他人的死亡，好像冥冥中接受了伊壁鸠鲁致美诺西斯的信中对人类两种面对死亡时状态的阐述：要么我们活着，死亡是与我们无关的，因为“死亡”此时并不存在；要么我们已经死去，死亡仍然与我们无关，因为“我们”此时亦已不存在了。唯有通过他人他物，我们才能体验“事物不再继续存在”的事实。死亡在我们身外、我们周围，一刻不停地发生，而我们也只能通过看到相关的画面获取对它的认知，比如媒体上传播的死亡现场图片或亲友们和亲近朋友死去时悼念过程的照片等。对死亡的恐惧从而因为其不可体验性而不断加剧。严培明提及过自己这种恐惧的感觉，在早期，他就对有朝一日的不复存在打抱不平，并曾被这恐惧感打入绝望的深渊。gzqdqygp gzqdqygp 艺术家对死亡的矛盾其根源在于：他在惧怕死亡的同时也在渴望着它。死亡的那一刻是艺术家名誉的巅峰。从物质的角度，艺术家作品的售价将在那一时刻飙升到前所未有的高度。艺术家对死亡的期望遮掩了他在活着时从自己作品中汲取的满足感，正如埃利亚斯·卡内提所说：“活着，意味着作品与其创造者的合而为一。”gzqdqygp gzqdqygp 在严培明2003年的作品《太平间的自画像》中，这一点也许表现的更明确。在这幅作品中，严培明抛弃了对自己面部的塑造以取得认同的方式，换句话说，他没有去塑造那个跟大家认识的严培明长像接近的形象，而只是画了一副只露着双脚的裹尸布下的躯体。身体和面部都是被遮盖的，只用两只脚——这全身上下也许是最无名的部分来说话。接下来就是大众和后人对作品的评价：“埋葬你丈夫之人的脚，已到门口，他们也要把你抬出去。”（出自《圣经》）通过选择这种“无名”的方式塑造自己的形象，艺术家超越了把自己的躯体当作一具尸体的禁忌；死亡的喻意使得这幅作品让观看者联系到自己的死亡的各种可能性。同时，裹尸布下的尸体这一场景也建立了作品和影像之间的联系。难道不是有很多的电影作品以这样的场景开头吗：布帘拉开，一具尸体被展现，而他的死因也即将被揭开。gzqdqygp gzqdqygp 自我解剖gzqdqygp gzqdqygp 虽然“自我解剖”即把自己当做一个死尸进行肖像塑造的方式在经典绘画中有诸多先行者 --——库尔贝1844年的自画像作品《受伤的男子》就是个例子，还有恩索尔的一些画作，以及奥斯卡·柯柯式加的《自画像，死亡》，而严培明的作品却不归于传统。其作品在他父亲去世后不久问世，并与他一位最亲密家庭成员的死亡有关。对严培明来说，他父亲的死给他带来了暗示：“你就是死亡名单中的下一个，就这么简单。当父亲还活着的时候，你从来不会想到自己的死亡，想到死亡时也会自然而然的把父亲放在自己的前面。但是父亲一死，你就会对你自己说：就这样了，我就是下一个要死去的人。”因此他的自画像实际上拥有双重根源：除了艺术史的上下文，家庭的观念以及家庭作为构成社会的基本单元的存在，以及个人是如何在家庭的环境下生存的，这些也都是具有决定性的影响因素。家庭也是生生不息的生存繁衍之线的象征，人在这条线的某一处得以立足，并实现儿子对父亲的继承。这也就解释了严培明将这幅自画像描述成“一个关于他的存在的寓言故事，一个有一天将会成真的寓言故事”的原因。这里的“寓言故事”带着一个故事被流传被续写的特征。一个无名的故事，一个所有人一样的故事，一个只需要被家族赐予名字的具体意义的故事。gzqdqygp gzqdqygp 像在自画像中裹尸布在画面中托起那无尽的白色一样，白色是艺术家在这一短暂时期里调色板的主打色。严培明为父亲完成了两幅肖像，《艺术家父亲的葬礼》和《艺术家父亲在太平间》，这两幅作品都在他父亲的实际死亡后声名大噪。后来完成于2003年10月25日和11月5日的两幅均命名为《父亲葬礼上的花圈》的作品是专为葬礼而作。前一时间是他父亲去世的日子，而后者则是举行葬礼的日子。白色是配合花圈主题的主导色彩，而严培明作品中常见的色彩对比也不见了。这两幅作品中的白色泛着微光，几乎很难成相。似乎死亡本身就在抗拒着利用技术手段进行再现，而这两幅画也只有看原作才能感受到其中的力量。根据中国的色彩的象征意义，白色比黑色更代表死亡的气氛。由此我们不难看出，要么，严培明就如很多被长时间放逐在自己的源文化地之外的人一样，在两种文化的斡旋中如鱼得水只取所需，要么，就是在面对死亡这一主题时，他的中国根终究轻松的主导了他对色彩象征意义的把握。gzqdqygp gzqdqygp 然而，连绵不断的“白色套白色”毕竟比对比强烈的用色更有效的烘托了死亡的气氛。2004年的作品《新娘》也反映了两种不同文化碰撞后白色终究指向了死亡而不是处子、圣洁等意象的现象。这幅画基于一张无名女士的照片。从表面上看，严培明似乎在画的过程中无意的受到了莫奈的《死床上的卡米尔》的影响，事实上他采用了黑白两色和完全不同的笔触，以及从垂直到平面的一个大的翻转。他突破了莫奈对色彩的运用。画中女人的脸和双手最终是若隐若现的消失在一片白色中。gzqdqygp gzqdqygp 在创作他父亲在太平间的肖像时，严培明建立了一种他和他以往塑造的相同情景下其他人的联系。尤其是那些在死床上的毛泽东的一系列肖像，包括两幅彩色布面油画，以及2003年的《玛丽莲》和2001年的《无名死尸》作品。这些传奇人物的形象和严培明及其父亲的形象之间的混杂不单单出现在这一组特定的作品中，在他的其他肖像画的关联中也呈现了这样的特点。而对象和对象之间特征相互覆盖的原因是什么？或者只是因为观看者肤浅的观察使他们根本无法领悟到其中的不同之处? 这也许暗示了严培明一定是在细节处呈现足了各对象的独特性的，他的注意力在于每张脸的个性（即使只是用一具被单子覆盖的尸体来展现），但是这些不同之处很容易被粗心的观看者错过，也容易因为整齐划一的媒体传播形式、对象的姿势以及作品的主题等因素被忽略。这里，我们不禁怀疑严培明在又一次面对他内心的矛盾。个性和共性是不可分割、互相转换的两面。严培明作品中的形象塑造于是被抽象化了，并未被刻意的剥离开来。并非只是相同的主题在混淆视听，观看者在不同的距离观看作品时获得的视觉感受也容易迷惑他们的眼睛。在近处呈现的抽象图案会随着观察距离的增加变得清晰和与众不同，既而回归到大幅画面的归纳性，想象一下严培明还是个小男孩，画画的时候，需要退到很远看才能把握好整体的画面形态。gzqdqygp gzqdqygp 凌迟gzqdqygp gzqdqygp 严培明作品中与死亡的关联不仅在主题和对象上，在其表达形式和实现过程上也有所体现。利用相片作为绘画素材意味着事件的唯一性已经被破坏，它被再造了。罗兰‧巴特甚至把摄影技术的发明与现代社会中的死亡危机联系起来，认为摄影就是在制造一种“苍白的死亡”。严培明有大量的画作始于摄影作品，也受到器材功能或者人们称之为“构图”的效果的制约。那些相片似乎被拓印在画布上，而绘画结构并未给它们赋予更加深层的含义，因为某些内涵已然被他们本身的结构否决了。原本的氛围已无迹可寻。gzqdqygp 严培明在创作主题上的频繁重复和其作品的系列性也不断的将他的绘画作品向大量产制的影像媒体推近。看起来他甚至是想尝试利用手工成就摄影技术中机器成就的一切。严培明为尼塞福尔·涅普斯Chalon-sur-Sane 摄影馆作的一幅画是始于摄影作品的。这个展览馆印制了为数不多的一些图片，展示了一种中国的死刑，称“凌迟”，囚犯被缓慢的肢解。这些摄于20世纪初的图片中的一张曾经激发巴塔耶创造了《情欲的泪水》中的一系列形象。“凌迟”一词由两个汉字组成：“凌”指欺压或虐待，“迟”指延误或托长。严培明从“凌迟”这一立体镜像中采用蒙太奇的手法来实现绘画过程的大量生产，分别截取在“三个男人站在一躺于地面的形体之后”这一事件的连贯场景中的瞬间。作品以另一幅数码照片为引子，那幅照片的画面中，这组人聚集在一个放有被肢解的尸体的篮子周围，并被众多围观者包围。而在这里，最重要的转变只在于相片在成为绘画作品时构图的转变。围观者们——根据卡内提的阐释，因为害怕与尸体的身体接触而聚集在一起的人们——在严培明的画中被取消了，剩下的只是站在裸体女尸前面的三个男人。男人的衣着也没有了原本的异国风味。现在处于视觉焦点的并不是这场事件本身，而是男人们眼光所指的方向。三人中只有一个正视着女人，另外两个则直盯着观看者。作品从而使其对象自己观看着自己。即使他们的面部并未呈现欧洲人的特征，严培明从来不曾可以避免赋予这些对象特定的文化背景。通过男人从处于主导宇宙的致高地位对已毫无焦点可言的女尸的俯视行为，严培明揭示了人类对挑战残忍极限的欲望。这里不见巴塔耶的快乐，唯有伤感。巴塔耶曾将这个当代展览馆的起源和断头台的发明相联系。断头台使得死亡机械化，泛化，与“凌迟”的拖延之痛想比较，还能够与生在同一时刻发生。而且比起缓慢的“凌迟”，断头台使得在展览馆展示死亡更有可能实现。gzqdqygp gzqdqygp 观看者与死亡gzqdqygp gzqdqygp 在曼海姆美术馆的墙上，马奈的《枪杀皇帝马克西米连》旁边悬挂着另一幅以死亡为中心思想的绘画作品。《越共的中国区》创作自一幅由一名美国军官拍摄的越南大兵被执行死刑时的照片。两幅作品都以同样有力的方式向我们传达：人类对死亡的恐惧都源于这样一个事实，即从死亡那一时刻，生命的意义将不复存在。最终的无意义总是教人想要拖延死亡的精确时辰。这一点使得那些起死回生的神话故事幻化着光彩，虽然从来没人能够解释得出新生是如何形成，而死后到底会发生什么也是不得而知的。gzqdqygp 骷髅是艺术家们几个世纪以来在死亡主题上惯用的元素。在格哈德·里希特之后，严培明再次将它从其静止存在的传统中解放出来，对其进行肖像塑造。关于他塑造的骷髅像，严培明说，是对人最终必定死亡这一事实的不断思考将他引入这个体裁的。他经常像摄影师照大头像一样，利用骷髅为死亡描画一个近景。西班牙作家弗郎西斯科曾经写到，“死亡开口对人们说话，他说他的外表并非骷髅，每个人自己的死亡都蕴藏在自己现存的形态中。”也许这正和严培明在他的骷髅肖像中想要传达的信息不谋而合。gzqdqygp 克尔凯郭尔在1845年写下这样的话时无疑是正确的：“对死亡持笼统的观念只会扰乱人心，这就和总想要刻意的制造大致的生活经历一样。”人永远不可能逃避最终面对死亡的那一刻。严培明的绘画是对这种面对的见证，观看他的作品，每个人都会对自己的必死的命运进行品玩和冥想，以更坚强的面对他人死亡时的个人体验，并对自己的死亡不再陌生。因为“我们到底是否快乐的活过，终究还是由自己决定的”。gzqdqygp  gzqdqygpgzqdqygp The Big Sleepgzqdqygp The Big Sleepgzqdqygp Observations on the Motif of Death in the Paintings by Yan Pei-Minggzqdqygp gzqdqygp By Fabian Stechgzqdqygp gzqdqygp gzqdqygp To imagine oneself dead is to experience reality; to be a witness at the death of another is to experience emotion. gzqdqygp Kierkegaardgzqdqygp gzqdqygp The Artist and Death gzqdqygp gzqdqygp Artists have an ambivalent relationship with their own death. People who are not artists are afraid of death and agree with society that death only means the death of someone else. It is as if they have taken the advice of Epicurus, who in his letter to Menoeceus identifies two states of being: either we are alive, in which case death does not concern us because it does not exist, or we are dead, in which case death does not concern us because we do not exist. The fact of something no longer existing is one we can only experience through another. Death only ever happens outside ourselves; it is happening all around us and we only ever see the pictures of it, pictures of horrors in the media or private pictures of mourning over the loss of people who were close to us. The fear of death arises out of the fact that it is denied us as an experience. Yan Pei-Ming describes this feeling of fear of death when he relates that, from an early age, he found the fact of one day no longer existing unjust and that the very thought reduced him to tears of despair. gzqdqygp gzqdqygp The artist’s ambivalent relationship towards death is rooted in the fact that he not only fears death but at the same time desires it. For at the moment of his death the artist reaches the pinnacle of his fame. In material terms this is reflected in the fact that prices for an artist’s works soar to unforeseen heights once he or she is dead. The artist’s death wish overshadows his satisfaction, expressed through his body of works, at “living on”, as Elias Canetti puts it: for in “living on”, the work becomes the representative of the one who created it. gzqdqygp gzqdqygp This idea perhaps comes best to the fore in Ming’s Self-portrait in the Morgue of 2003. Ming portrays himself in this painting no longer as a person who can be identified from his face, in other words from his resemblance to the man we know as Yan Pei-Ming, but rather as a body draped in a shroud with only the feet showing. The body and face of the dead artist are not visible and are represented only by the feet, probably the most anonymous part of the body. What remains is the work and its evaluation by the public and posterity: “Behold, the feet of them which have buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out.” By choosing to portray his own body in this anonymous fashion, the artist bypasses the taboo of depicting one’s own body as dead; the painting becomes a general allegory of death and puts the viewer in touch with the possibility of his own death. At the same time, the anonymity of the shrouded body establishes a reference to cinema and film. Do not countless films open with a scene in which a sheet is drawn back to reveal a corpse whose death remains to be explained? gzqdqygp gzqdqygp Self-autopsygzqdqygp gzqdqygp Although self-autopsy, i.e. the idea of depicting oneself as dead, has forerunners in the fine arts – Courbet’s self-portrait as the wounded L’homme blessé of 1844 is one example, as are drawings by James Ensor and Oskar Kokoschka’s Myself, dead – Ming’s painting does not belong exclusively to this tradition. It arose shortly before the death of his father and hence results from his encounter with the death of one of his closest family members. For Ming, the implications of his father’s death are these: “You’re next in line, it’s as simple as that. When your father’s still alive, it stops you from worrying about your own death. As long as your father is still living, if you think about dying, you put him before you. But when he’s dead, you say to yourself: that’s it, I’m next.” His self-portrait is therefore of dual origin: alongside its art-historical context, the concept of the family and the family as social institution, how one lives within the family, also plays a decisive role. Family also implies a line in which one stands and from which succession results, passing here from father to son. This also explains why Ming describes this self-portrait “as a fiction on his own existence, a fiction that will one day come true”. In this definition, fiction has the character of a story that will be passed down and continued. A story that, at the formal level, is anonymous and the same for everyone, and that only acquires a specific meaning within the family with the granting of names. The ambiguity that the artist feels about death thus also appears in the fiction, too. gzqdqygp gzqdqygp Like the white shroud that in the self-portrait seems to rise up to infinity, whites dominate the palette of all the paintings from this brief period. Ming painted two final portraits of his father, Funeral of the Artist’s Father and Artist’s Father in the Morgue, which arose shortly before his actual death. Two further paintings of 25 October 2003 and 5 November 2003, both entitled Father’s Funeral Flowers, are dedicated to the funeral. The date of the first painting thereby corresponds to the day his father died, the second to the day of the funeral. White is the dominant colour in the flower motifs, and the often forceful contrasts found in Ming’s bi-chromatic paintings are absent. There is a shimmering quality to the white in the two funeral paintings that makes them extremely difficult to photograph. As if death wanted to defend itself against reproduction by technological means, the paintings remain accessible only through experiencing the originals. Ming explains the white in these pictures in terms of Chinese colour symbolism, according to which white carries much stronger connotations of death than black. From this one can conclude either that Ming, like many who have lived in prolonged exile from their original homeland, is skilfully playing with the advantages and disadvantages of owning two cultural backgrounds, or that the colour symbolism from his Chinese roots inevitably emerges more strongly at the moment of death. gzqdqygp gzqdqygp At the same time, however, the unbroken colour of the almost white-in-white paintings underlines the state of death more strongly than a clearly differentiated palette of multiple contrasts. The painting The Bride of 2004 similarly plays with the dual system of cultural reference and redirects the white of virginity into an allegory of death. In the painting, which is based on the photograph of an anonymous woman, Ming appears to draw unconsciously upon Claude Monet’s Camille on her Deathbed, which he changes with a reduction of the palette to blacks and whites, a completely different brushstroke and a rotation of the motif on its axis from the vertical to the horizontal, and which he frees from Monet’s reflections upon colour. The women’s face and hands make one last appearance before dissolving into an unbroken white. gzqdqygp gzqdqygp In painting his father in the morgue, Ming establishes a connection between him and other individuals that he has depicted in a similar position. He is thus linked in particular with Mao, whom Ming similarly painted on his deathbed in a whole series of pictures, including two polychrome canvases, but also with the picture Marilyn of 2003 and an anonymous corpse of 2001. This mixing of mythical figures with the person of Ming and the person of his father occurs not just within this specific group of works, but also appears in the portraits. What is the reason for this merging of one subject into another? Is it simply that the viewer fails to recognize the differences between them accurately enough, because his gaze is too superficial? That would imply that Ming clearly details such differences and that he is concerned with the individuality of each face (even in the case of bodies laid out after death and covered by a sheet), but that they escape the viewer through lack of attention or as a result of the uniformity of the medium, the poses and the motifs. It is to be suspected, however, that Ming is once again working with ambivalence. The individual becomes the general, just as the general becomes the individual. Figuration in Ming’s painting thereby dissolves into abstraction, without either being clearly separate. It is not just the motifs that merge and so fuse the role of father with that of the son and mythical figures; something similar also takes place in the viewer’s perception at different distances from the painting. What appears close up to be an abstract pattern becomes clear and individualised as the viewer moves further away from the canvas, only to revert to the generalisation of a giant poster, such as Ming painted as a boy in China, when the enormous format is seen from a large distance. gzqdqygp gzqdqygp Lingchigzqdqygp gzqdqygp Ming’s painting makes reference to death not just in its motifs and subjects, but also through its form and execution. The use of photographs as a starting-point for painting means that the singularity of the event is already lost: it has already been reproduced. Barthes even associates the invention of photography with the crisis of death in our society and refers to photography as la Mort plate (flat Death). Ming’s pictures, many of which start from photographs, are also subject to a mechanism or an effect that one might call screening. The pictures appear to hover on the surface of the canvas; not even their paint structure lends them depth, something already negated by their composition. All form of aura is absent. gzqdqygp gzqdqygp Ming’s frequent repetition of identical motifs and his work on series also bring his painting close to the reproductive medium of photography. It is as if he is trying to achieve with manual means what photography can do mechanically. A picture that Ming painted for the Musée Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône takes up the role of photography as a starting-point for painting. The museum houses rare prints of a Chinese method of execution called lingchi, in which the body is slowly dismembered. One of these photographs from the early 20th century inspired a number of images in Bataille’s Tears of Eros. The Chinese word lingchi is made up of two characters: ling signifies to humiliate or treat badly, and chi to delay or protract. Ming deploys a photomontage, constructed from the lingchi stereoscopes, to confront the reproduction technology with painting. The montage takes an excerpt from a sequence in which three men are seen standing behind a figure lying on the ground. The work was prefaced by a digital photomontage in which the group is assembled around the basket with the dismembered body and surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. However, the most important changes only occur with the translation of the composition into paint. The crowd – gathered, according to Canetti, out of the fear of physical contact – disappears in Ming’s painting. Remaining are three men in front of the naked body of a woman lying on the ground. The men’s clothing has lost its exotic character. What now seems to be central is no longer the actual event, but rather the direction in which the men are looking. Only one man is looking at the woman; the other two direct their gaze towards the viewer. The picture thereby makes its subject the act of seeing itself. Even if the faces reveal no European features, Yan Pei-Ming nevertheless avoids assigning them to any specific cultural sphere. In the man looking down from his universal position of dominance at the sightless object of the woman’s body, Ming holds up the human desire to watch even the greatest cruelty. No further trace of Bataille’s ecstasy; only melancholy remains. Georges Bataille linked the origins of the modern museum with the invention of the guillotine, by which death is mechanized and always the same, and in which – in contrast to the protracted nature of lingchi – life and death occur in the same moment. Inscribed within the framework of the guillotine, it becomes possible to exhibit in a museum even the slow death that is lingchi.gzqdqygp gzqdqygp The Viewer and Deathgzqdqygp gzqdqygp Next to the final version of Edouard Manet’s Execution of Emperor Maximilian in Mannheim Museum there hangs another painting with death as its central focus. Chinese District in Saigon is based on a photograph showing the execution of a Vietcong fighter by an American officer. Both paintings convey in a particularly powerful manner where man’s fear of death lies: at the moment of death to be unable to give one’s life any further meaning. The finality of meaninglessness leads man always to call for a postponement of the precise moment of death. This also sheds light on the many popular tales in which death is overcome and life given new meaning, although it is never explained what this meaning consists of and what happens after death has been put off. gzqdqygp The motif of the skull is one that artists through the centuries have employed to illustrate death. Ming, like Gerhard Richter before him, liberates it from the context of the still life and offers it to portraiture. Ming has said of these skull portraits that the idea of being condemned to die is frequently what draws him to this genre. As a pendant to the portrait, Ming often treats the skull, in analogy to film, to give a close-up of death. In a text by Francisco de Quevedos, Death addresses man and explains that he does not in fact have the appearance of a skeleton, but rather that each person in his present form is his own Death. This might also be the message of Ming’s skull pictures. gzqdqygp Kierkegaard was surely right when he wrote in 1845: “The general view of death only confuses the thinking, just as does the intention of having experiences in general.” Man cannot avoid the confrontation with his own death. Ming’s paintings are witnesses to such a confrontation, in front of which each viewer must contemplate his own mortality, in order to face up to the individual experience of another and to get used to the idea of his own death. For “whether we have been happy is decided only at our end”. |
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