Perception and the Art Object: The Art of
Michael Zheng
by Terri Cohn
One significant legacy of the perceptual vocabulary of Minimalism
has been artists’ continued exploration of the phenomenological
experience of objects in relationship to architectural space, and
the dismantling of a fixed position for the viewer. Forty years after
Minimalism’s initial inception, artists continue to address
notions of immutable visual and material relations, and to explore
ways in which space, objects and perception interrelate--inflected
by Conceptual art’s primacy of ideas--to form an aesthetic experience.
It is in this realm of investigation that Michael Zheng creates performative
situations, subtle spatial interventions, and discrete works that
pose questions about the social, philosophical, and corporeal relationship
of art to individuals. The systems he devises and disrupts to achieve
this become the space in which his works manifest, on material, conceptual,
and experiential levels.
Zheng’s inquiry into the structural aspects of systems and how
they impact people is a critical facet of his artistic interests.
The form the work takes creates alliances between the performative,
formal/mathematical, and social realms of inquiry, revealing the natural
link of his artistic sensibilities with facets of Systems- and Actions-based
Conceptual art. This is evident in some of his site- specific installations
such as Media Shower (Pardon Me), which was commissioned
for the 2006 Emerge exhibition in San Francisco. Zheng’s
work made physical references to the 1974 kidnapping of newspaper
heiress Patty Hearst by the guerrilla Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA),
a response to the exhibition’s setting in the Warfield Building
(originally the offices of the San Francisco Examiner, a newspaper).
The formal aspects of the work—which included red, white and
blue paper strips printed with “Pardon Me” on one side,
and various reprinted images from Examiner newspaper coverage of the
SLA bank robbery and more recent terrorist images of the Iraq war
and 9/11—created esoteric and more universal social links with
the public below as the strips fell to Market Street from red boxes
Zheng installed in windows on the fourth floor of the building. Zheng
intensified his interventionist methodologies and intended statement
concerning the highly mediated nature of the Hearst story and the
dialectic of terrorism by appearing at the exhibition’s opening
event dressed in black, wearing a balaclava, and brandishing a nail
gun. The intended absurdity and Dada-like nature of this performance
became clear as he yelled gibberish and used his device to adhere
red, white and blue paper strips to the gallery wall, creating a chance
composition.
The inherently multifarious relationship of social, aesthetic, and
conceptual intentions in this work-which blurs boundaries between
our expectations of the art , its material realization, and the role
of the artist –is central to Zheng’s sensibilities and
a number of his artistic projects. One of the most complex in this
genre is Four on One – Curators Create, Artist Curates,
which Zheng created as part of the 2006 Garage Biennial1.
In this instance, he used the invitation to curate an exhibition as
an opportunity to question the structural aspects of the art system
by creating a show about curating rather than simply curating an exhibition.
His approach, which involved the installation of four one-week exhibitions
of a single artist, curated by four curators, obscured his intentions
and raised such questions as, is he the artist using curators and
another artist as his raw material? Or, acting in his role as artist/curator,
was he attempting to deconstruct the authority of curators to shape
art movements and the effect of curatorial choices on the art being
presented?2
This is an area that has long been explored and subverted by artists
in various ways. Most analogous in relationship to Four on One,
which again allowed Zheng to explore ideas concerning chance in composition,
is John Cage’s exhibition Rolywholyover: A Circus.
While both Zheng’s and Cage’s projects were taking issue,
in part, with exhibition venues, curators, and their presentation
methods, Cage’s intent was also to create a composition for
a museum setting by applying chance operations according to the same
rules and structure he used in creating music or visual art. By contrast,
in Four on One, Zheng shifted Cage’s paradigm to expose
the role of the curator as creator, placing high demand on the artist.
In this way, the project ultimately commented less on curatorial authority
and more on how an artist/curator can create conditions that simulate
some art world circumstances.
One of the most significant facets of this project was the perceived
ambiguity of Zheng’s intentions, the confusion created by his
purposeful elusiveness, and the breadth of ensuing dialogue—the
buzz—that emerged in the art community as the exhibition unfolded.
In some of his other related site- or situation-specific works--including
Art for Sale! (which was part of the 9th Baltic Triennial
of International Art: Black Market); and Zheng’s Untitled
installation of 88 banners for his MFA thesis exhibition—he
stimulated this buzz by acquiring permission to subvert and comment
on the social intentions and material nature of these exhibitions.
Masterful about these projects is the way in which Zheng’s interventions—replete
with the contradictions inherent in the structure and implementation
of the works and the issues they address--are his art. The concerns
Zheng addresses bring to mind Guy Debord’s prophetic warning
in Society of the Spectacle, of capitalist society and the
culture at large becoming the ultimate commodity.
Zheng’s ongoing questioning of his multi-tiered relationship
to the gallery system sometimes manifests as exploration of its inherent
physical dualities. This central concern is clearly evident with the
installations and discrete works work that comprised Zheng’s
exhibition As the Butterfly Said to Chuang Tzu, where he
deliberately complicated our experience of the distinctions between
the gallery space and what we perceive as the art. In works like Hole
in the Wall, he played with this perceptual ambiguity by attaching
an unframed photograph of a hole he had punched in the gallery wall
over the same area, leaving visible the tiniest portion of the cavity.
With The Pillar, where Zheng sheathed an existing pillar
with unfinished plywood, he even more radically poses the contradictory
nature of such physical manipulations and their unclear status as
objects. This project evokes ideas explored by Yves Klein in his 1958
exhibition Le Vide (the Void)—held at Galerie Iris
Clert in Paris-- which Klein described as his “project of eliminating
the visible art object altogether.” Klein’s vision of
the artist of the future was one who would “only leave his vibration
in a space, to be picked up later by the immaterial antennae of others
working there…opening the door to the age of immateriality.”3
In light of the heavily commodified tendencies of twenty-first century
art and institutional practices, Zheng’s iteration of these
premises today continue the subversive artistic project of creating
spaces of reflection for the viewing public.
Consistently important in these works is Zheng’s relationship
to physical and psychic space, and by extension, his interest in the
effect of works on audience or the “social body.” Both
his performance- and his object-based works express the key importance
of the body. This area of artistic inquiry most clearly exposes the
psychological component of Zheng’s artistic vision, as these
works often manifest as acts of endurance. Some of the performance
works present the appearance—but not the actual threat—of
danger. These include Stare, a piece that involved the artist
and a volunteer at a time maintaining eye contact for a total of eight
hours, a process that culminated with the artist in tears; and Groundbreaking,
for which Zheng had assistants bury him with his head in the earth
and his bare butt sticking up out of the ground for two hours. While
Zheng created both of these performances during a period of personal
crisis and need for catharsis, they also implicate the viewer and
insist on their participation in experiences of physical and psychological
duress. In a performance context, they raise social, philosophical,
and perceptual questions similar to those posed by Zheng’s object-based
works.
With these works, Zheng again comments in various ways on the intrinsic
nature of being an artist. As part of the process of performing Stare,
Zheng drew dark circles around his eyes, which he described as means
to “objectify” himself. As an extension of this thinking,
his body, emotions, and psychological state become “materials
to create interpersonal sculptures.” With somewhat more paradoxical
and humorous intentions, Zheng describes Groundbreaking as
a response to the art world pressure to “break new ground,”
which he does here by creating an in-your-face sculpture of his ass
in the air.4 By contrast, Zheng’s endurance performance Geographical
Center of Europe, which took place on July 27, 2004 at that supposed
location in Lithuania, has far more political intentions. Standing
between the two official monuments that mark the supposed Center(s)
of Europe (this spot has also been declared at locations in Ukraine
and Slovakia), Zheng whistled the phrase “Center of Europe”
in Morse Code for nine consecutive hours. This sustained, repetitive
action has a venerable alliance with the work of such artists as Bruce
Nauman, whose time-based performances like Slow Angle Walk (Beckett
Walk), 1968 and Bouncing in the Corner, No. 2: Upside Down,
1969, express significant facets of his artistic identity and intentions.
The physical demand explored in and required by these works is regularly
evident in Zheng’s perceptual approach to sculpture. A good
illustration of this is The Chair, a work that requires the
viewer to bend down to read a text under its seat through gaps in
the wood. Zheng plays with the liminal space between the demand placed
on the viewer and the reward they receive in the work, in this case
with the label text which states, “Chair made by artist
Patrick Wilson based solely on the photograph of Kosuth’s Chair
piece that I provided him.” Similarly, for his 2004
Untitled image/text installation, the viewer must stoop to
read a small passage, printed with a tiny font and hung 3’ from
the floor. After finally deciphering the narrative, which reads “My
3 year-old daughter holds a branch to the sky and says, ‘It’s
the same!’”, the viewer must turn to look up and
see a photograph of upraised leaves, hung one inch from the ceiling.
Ironically, the type and level of questioning Zheng
consistently poses with his work sets up series of challenges for
himself and others to experience, understand, and resolve. Yet, this
process—or gauntlet—Zheng structures must be understood
in the larger context of his philosophical world view, poetically
expressed in philosopher Chuang Tzu’s statement, which Zheng
used as the defining concept for is 2006 exhibition As the Butterfly
Said to Chuang Tzu,
Long ago, a certain Chuang Tzu
dreamt he was a butterfly—a butterfly fluttering here and there
on a whim, happy and carefree, knowing nothing of Chuang Tzu. Then
all of a sudden he woke to find that he was, beyond all doubt, Chuang
Tzu. Who knows if it was Chuang Tzu dreaming a butterfly, or a butterfly
dreaming Chuang Tzu?5
Like Chuang Tzu, Zheng’s work expresses his understanding
that much of the meaning of the world is bound up in apparent contradictions.
His art expresses his desire and commitment to explore and resolve
them through his material, perceptual, and philosophical inquiries.
Notes:
1 The Garage Biennial is a project of San Francisco-based
artist/curator Justin Hoover.
2 The artist chosen for Four on One was Stephanie Syjuco, and the
curators included Clark Buckner, Joyce Grimm, Steven Wolf, and me.
3 Thomas McEvilley, Yves Klein 1928-1962: A Retrospective. (Houston:
Institute for the Arts, Rice University, 1982), 50.
4 Quoted passages in this paragraph from Michael Zheng’s website,
http://michaelzheng.org.
5 Chuang Tzu, The Inner Chapters, 4th century B.C.E.
Terri Cohn is a San Francisco-based
writer, curator, and art historian. She is a Faculty Lecturer at the
San Franciscso Art Institute, and teaches modern and contemporary
art seminars at the University of California, Berkeley, Extension.
