Beatrix Pang seeks to explore the notions of time, history and memories in contemporary urban life of a city. Beatrix has worn a polar bear mask on the street to induce interaction and interview the strangers about their encounters in a day, telling a thing/ story about their live experience in Portland. Their stories are audio recorded and people's reaction to her weird performance is presented in pictures as photo documentation. In the meantime, she is undertaking a tumblelog, "Bear wants your story" to keep collecting stories from different walks of life in this city. (http://bearwantsyourstory.tk/). Besides, some key characters from the art and cultural community in Portland are scheduled to have video interview, talking about their creations, inspirations and views on Portland. This part will be an on-going project.
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Most of the people have experienced being stopped on the street and expected to answer questions concerning financial loan, internet service, charity donation, fitness membership or directions.
To be asked to tell a story about themselves and their living place presents a challenge (or an absurd) and creates a totally different relationship with the person who posed the question. The bizarre request was being 'captured' as a sound recording by a complete stranger through a cup phone. It was an intimate gesture yet it was opened to the others who were on the street. Meanwhile, the situation created a distance from both sides: speaking and listening.
Perhaps the fascination in the relationship between the Portland locals and their 'stories' (or just phrases) lies in their confidence to reveal themselves to strangers, and the stories of different people were "recorded" .
Bear Wants Your Story presents an unsuccessful communication between the Bear and the Portlanders as a result; on the other hand, the project experimenting the possibility of documentation.
--Beatrix Pang
大部份人都有在街上被截停的經驗，當中被問及有關借貸、網絡服務、慈善捐款、健身會籍或者只是簡單的問路。
那麼被問到要說一個故事，一個關於他們自己與及他們所居住地方的故事，則既會成為一個挑戰(或者是一件荒唐的事)，亦會建立一個與被訪者截然不同的關係。透過一個膠杯電話，這一個奇怪的請求就被一個徹底的陌生人以錄音記錄下來。整件事似是一個很親密的姿態，但同時卻是在公開的給所有當時經過的路人。而這處境也產生了說話與聆聽上兩邊的距離。
或許，波特蘭市民與他們的「故事」(或者只是片言片語)的魅力是來自他們那份敢於展現自己的信心，與及那些被記錄下來的不同人的故事。
《熊要你故事》示範了熊跟波特蘭市民一個失效的溝通；另一方面，這計畫正實驗著紀錄方法的可能性。
彭倩幗 (中文翻譯:陳偉長)
Changing habits - Bear Wants Your Story
Due to the requirement of brevity, I propose three contexts of reading Bear Wants Your Story, and one imaginary rebuttal from the outside. I start with the rebuttal.
By now, Nicolas Bourriaud’s thesis of relational aesthetics (first published in 1998) has been much quoted to refer to contemporary art presented in Western institutions like museums and biennales since the 1990s. Artistic activities are found to have moved from being object-based or experience-based to striving to achieve connections between the artists and other people, giving instructions for specific encounters. I would like to propose that Bear Wants Your Story (thereafter Bear) is otherwise. A work that takes place on the streets, in public space, is always already relational – since when are encounters on the streets not an art of relating to the contingent? One may even propose it is Bear that reveals the limitations of Bourriaud’s theory, which leads to the three proposed readings. They all affirm the relational quality of Bear, but enables the relational to be specified.
First, the relation between the speaking and listening. Consider a work by Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Alien Staff (1992-97), part of his Mouth Piece projects. It is a device for the presentation of self - a stick, with a small video monitor on the top and loudspeaker showing prerecorded conversation of the user-speaker. Public and contemporary art scholar Patricia Phillips describes it as “[offering] an insistent representation of needs and experiences,” (“Approaches to a path” in Public Art Review 12 no.1, Fall/Winter, 2000) making the systematic and structured silencing of these individuals impossible. The question of “who speaks” has long captured the attention of art and cultural practitioners, in terms of whose voices are heard at the expense of others. The moment of granting voice becomes a related and sticky issue – when only the privileged (armed with recording devices) can give time and (social and political) place to voices of the subjugated, what does it mean to the struggle for an equality of voices, a question not just of who speaks, but when and how? As much as Bear wants to listen, she is demanded to speak to explain, and to record and accumulate, in the name of art.
Second, the relation between the artist and strangers. In 1969, Vito Acconci performed Following Piece, in which Acconci chose an individual on the street to follow through the streets of New York. In the same essay, Phillips describes his work in terms of “path as art” with reference to urban planner Kevin Lynch’s ideas of people’s perceptions of cities. Phillips says that in Acconci’s work, “the process of following the path of a stranger suggested the complexity of a social contract. If sometimes unconsciously, we all lead and follow those unknown. To be part of the public is to accept one’s role as a stranger.” The social contract has undergone massive changes in terms of the technologization of everyday life. One school of thought may even argue there is no more social contract, assuming that the “social” requires face to face encounters, which are increasingly substituted by internet connections. While Bear does not trace paths anonymously, it inserts a node, in which, like Acconci, she is both active (reaching out) and passive (following / awaiting others’ moves). This leads to the last context – stranger-to-stranger relation.
Bear emphasizes the strangeness of any social contract and makes it visible, too. The artist makes a cluster of decisions that serve as preventive measures to ensure the strange is not easily familiarized – preventing her ethnicity and gendered from determining the contract and preventing the work from becoming documentary. Radically put, she attempts to inhabit the limits of human contact by creating a node, to borrow Lynch again, in which strangers connect as strange by refraining from offering anything behind the masquerade.
In Hong Kong, we routinely hear chatters about artists being exotic creatures available to be watched and measured in zoo cages. On the other hand, the artist continues to be subjected to social expectations – say something, make something, entertain. It is understandable the “artist” always feels displaced. Carter Radcliff has a point in saying that “At extremes, empathy leads poets to take themselves as creatures other than human or even as things.” (Critical Mess: art critics on the state of their practice, edited by Raphael Rubinstein, Lenox, Mass.: Hard Press, 2006)
The three plus one contexts are quite different. But they share a common thread – alienation and estrangement as a general social and species-condition and a specific condition for an artist thriving in a society that has interests in calling her strange. Bear is an attempt to seek and to perpetually defer being sought, and it is precisely in this deferral that there is ample room for the work to be developed.
Due to the requirement of brevity, I propose three contexts of reading Bear Wants Your Story, and one imaginary rebuttal from the outside. I start with the rebuttal.
By now, Nicolas Bourriaud’s thesis of relational aesthetics (first published in 1998) has been much quoted to refer to contemporary art presented in Western institutions like museums and biennales since the 1990s. Artistic activities are found to have moved from being object-based or experience-based to striving to achieve connections between the artists and other people, giving instructions for specific encounters. I would like to propose that Bear Wants Your Story (thereafter Bear) is otherwise. A work that takes place on the streets, in public space, is always already relational – since when are encounters on the streets not an art of relating to the contingent? One may even propose it is Bear that reveals the limitations of Bourriaud’s theory, which leads to the three proposed readings. They all affirm the relational quality of Bear, but enables the relational to be specified.
First, the relation between the speaking and listening. Consider a work by Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Alien Staff (1992-97), part of his Mouth Piece projects. It is a device for the presentation of self - a stick, with a small video monitor on the top and loudspeaker showing prerecorded conversation of the user-speaker. Public and contemporary art scholar Patricia Phillips describes it as “[offering] an insistent representation of needs and experiences,” (“Approaches to a path” in Public Art Review 12 no.1, Fall/Winter, 2000) making the systematic and structured silencing of these individuals impossible. The question of “who speaks” has long captured the attention of art and cultural practitioners, in terms of whose voices are heard at the expense of others. The moment of granting voice becomes a related and sticky issue – when only the privileged (armed with recording devices) can give time and (social and political) place to voices of the subjugated, what does it mean to the struggle for an equality of voices, a question not just of who speaks, but when and how? As much as Bear wants to listen, she is demanded to speak to explain, and to record and accumulate, in the name of art.
Second, the relation between the artist and strangers. In 1969, Vito Acconci performed Following Piece, in which Acconci chose an individual on the street to follow through the streets of New York. In the same essay, Phillips describes his work in terms of “path as art” with reference to urban planner Kevin Lynch’s ideas of people’s perceptions of cities. Phillips says that in Acconci’s work, “the process of following the path of a stranger suggested the complexity of a social contract. If sometimes unconsciously, we all lead and follow those unknown. To be part of the public is to accept one’s role as a stranger.” The social contract has undergone massive changes in terms of the technologization of everyday life. One school of thought may even argue there is no more social contract, assuming that the “social” requires face to face encounters, which are increasingly substituted by internet connections. While Bear does not trace paths anonymously, it inserts a node, in which, like Acconci, she is both active (reaching out) and passive (following / awaiting others’ moves). This leads to the last context – stranger-to-stranger relation.
Bear emphasizes the strangeness of any social contract and makes it visible, too. The artist makes a cluster of decisions that serve as preventive measures to ensure the strange is not easily familiarized – preventing her ethnicity and gendered from determining the contract and preventing the work from becoming documentary. Radically put, she attempts to inhabit the limits of human contact by creating a node, to borrow Lynch again, in which strangers connect as strange by refraining from offering anything behind the masquerade.
In Hong Kong, we routinely hear chatters about artists being exotic creatures available to be watched and measured in zoo cages. On the other hand, the artist continues to be subjected to social expectations – say something, make something, entertain. It is understandable the “artist” always feels displaced. Carter Radcliff has a point in saying that “At extremes, empathy leads poets to take themselves as creatures other than human or even as things.” (Critical Mess: art critics on the state of their practice, edited by Raphael Rubinstein, Lenox, Mass.: Hard Press, 2006)
The three plus one contexts are quite different. But they share a common thread – alienation and estrangement as a general social and species-condition and a specific condition for an artist thriving in a society that has interests in calling her strange. Bear is an attempt to seek and to perpetually defer being sought, and it is precisely in this deferral that there is ample room for the work to be developed.
Yeung Yang
(Yeung Yang is an independent curator and freelance writer. She teaches at tertiary institutions. She recently founded soundpocket to promote sound art and cultures of listening. http://www.soundpocket.org.hk/)
(Yeung Yang is an independent curator and freelance writer. She teaches at tertiary institutions. She recently founded soundpocket to promote sound art and cultures of listening. http://www.soundpocket.org.hk/)
熊: 議方位於契約
由於篇幅關係，我試提出三幅供閱讀《熊要你故事》（Bear Wants Your Story）的脈絡，與及一個空想出來的外來反證。而我將從反證開始。
由於篇幅關係，我試提出三幅供閱讀《熊要你故事》（Bear Wants Your Story）的脈絡，與及一個空想出來的外來反證。而我將從反證開始。
至今，尼古拉斯．波瑞奧德（Nicolas Bourriaud）的關係美學論文（首刊於1998年）常被引用於解釋自九十年代起，在藝術館及雙年展等西方建制中展出的當代藝術創作。藝術活動從以往的物件和經驗為本，轉移至設計指示去製造獨特的接觸可能，著力為藝術家與他人建立關係。我認為，《熊要你故事》（下稱《熊》）卻是另一種情況。在街上這種公共空間發生的創作，從一開始就必定是關係性的。所有在街上的接觸都無可避免地和整件作品構成藝術關係。甚至乎，我們可以說《熊》是在檢驗波瑞奧德的理論的限制，並以此引伸出三種閱讀可能。它們均肯定了《熊》裡的關係性質，但令到它的關係性更加具體。
第一，有關說話和聆聽的關係。試考量裏奇．沃迪克梓口（Krzysztof Wodiczko）在Month Piece 計劃裡的作品Alien Staff (1992-97)。作為一件自我表現的裝置，它是一根頂部裝了小電視和揚聲器的手杖，播放著持杖者預先錄好的說話。公共與當代藝術學者派翠西亞‧菲利普斯（Patricia Phillips）形容它「（提供了）一個需求與經驗的無間斷再現」，( “Approaches to a path” 於 Public Art Review 12 no.1，秋／冬，2000)令到它接觸的個體們無法達至有系統和結構上的禁言。「誰說話」是藝術與文化工作者長期關注的問題：究竟誰的聲音因誰的特權而被壓制？被給予發言權的剎那變成一件與此相關而又令人困擾的事情：當只有持（手握錄影裝置的）特權者能施予在下者時間與（社會及政治上的）地方去發言。這對於平等發言的鬥爭究竟有何意義？這不單是誰可以發言的問題，還有何時及如何發言。就如《熊》一般，以藝術之名，她需要透過說話去解釋，去紀錄和累積。
第二，有關藝術家與陌生人們的關係。在１９６９年，維托．阿孔奇 (Vito Acconci) 進行了Following Piece表演。阿孔奇在紐約街頭隨意地找一位路人去跟蹤，而大部份時間他都察覺不到正在被跟蹤。在同一篇論文中，菲利普斯基於城市規劃師凱文．林奇（Kevin Lynch）關於人們如何感知城市的意念，而以「路徑作為藝術」去形容阿孔奇的作品。菲利普斯認為阿孔奇的作品「跟蹤一位陌生人行走路徑的過程，顯現出一起社會契約的複雜性。有意或無意地，我們所有人都在跟隨和帶領著不認識的人，作為公眾的一部份就是要接受陌生人的角色。」社會契約隨著每天生活的科技化而發生重大改變。假設社會交往是需要面對面接觸的話，某學派甚至認為社會契約已經不再存在，因為面對面接觸已經愈發被互聯網代替。《熊》雖然沒有去跟蹤陌生人，但卻為他們嵌入了一個接點，像阿孔奇一樣，《熊》是既主動（接觸他人）也同時是被動（跟從／等待他人的行動）。這牽引我們到最後的一幅脈絡：陌生人與陌生人的關係。
《熊》強調各樣社會契約中的陌生性，並把它們顯露出來。創作者作出了一連串的決定去防止這陌生的情況能輕易地消減，例如防止以她的族裔和性別去斷定這契約，與及防止這件作品變成一種紀錄形式。從根本上，她嘗試棲居於人與人之間接觸的極限，在此，陌生人拒絕披露面具後的一切，相互間如此陌生地連繫地來。
在香港，我們常聽到人們把藝術家當成可以放在動物園籠中觀賞和研究的奇珍異獸。另方面，藝術家卻繼續被社會給予某些期許：要說什麼、做什麼和娛樂大眾。難怪藝術家們常常覺得自己身處於錯置的狀態。Carter Radcliff 說的有道理：「在極端情況，移情作用使詩人把自己當成非人的生物，甚至是一件物件。」(Critical Mess: art critics on the state of their practice, edited by Raphael Rubinstein, Lenox, Mass.: Hard Press, 2006)
這三加一的脈絡彼此之間有很多不同，但它們的共通點源於：
異化與疏離作為一個普遍的社會狀況，同時也是藝術家具有的獨特條件去戰勝一個想馴服她的陌生性的社會。《熊》一方面嘗試接觸，但又永恆地推延被接觸到的可能，正有鑒於這延遲狀態，這作品還有充裕的空間去繼續發展。
楊陽 (中文翻譯:何禹旃)(作者為獨立策展人及業餘作家，並任教大專院校；近來成立soundpocket獨立組織推動聲聽藝術。http://www.soundpocket.org.hk/)
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