The dream of art in the work of the Gao Brothers

ACHILLE BONITO OLIVA

The work of the Gao Brothers is generated by a multimedia poetics that draws upon diverse languages such as performance, photography, painting and sculpture. In the international art scenario the Gao Brothers occupy a space that pursues the need for social communication and exchange through art.

The fact that photography is the medium used to document their performances, organised in public and private spaces through the use of the body, is far from incidental. Their body art is not a flaunting of the nude, but rather a laying bare of humanity itself so as to lead it, through embrace, to a condition of dialogue and exchange.

The work of the Gao Brothers has a crucial social significance in that it seeks to place the observer in a condition of awareness of the importance of the other. The “other” may be man or woman, a policeman or a prostitute, in a state of either harmonious encounter or of confrontation. The latest production of the Gao Brothers is triggered by the meshing of photography and painting, and portrays an underground world, that of sex on payment, unmasked by the representatives of the law and humiliated by the harsh gaze of the police. Here again, evident and underscored, is the importance of the body, at once the nerve centre of pleasure and the target of potential violence and humiliation. Essentially, the work of the Gao Brothers has a marked anthropological emphasis, in that it aims at stressing the role of art as the only process capable of liberating contemporary man from the bondage of technical materialism and power.

The Gao Brothers use history as a conductor and amplifier of creative activity, which is alone capable of delivering the individual from the partiality of current existence, restoring him or her to a dimension of totality in which the anthropological urges of man can be rediscovered. Several of the recurrent themes of Romantic culture (death, nature, the concept of the solitary hero) are taken up again and proposed in a neo-Humanist approach that attributes to art the significance of communication.

Art is morphed into the bond between individual conscience and social memory, a memory understood as collective unconscious that absorbs all and destroys nothing. Only the artist (the leader) has the charismatic power to weld these two elements, which is why the traces of his personal presence (linked to creativity) become the links to be preserved and displayed. This flaunting becomes an occasion of ethical necessity, through which the Gao Brothers document the tension and the struggle to rescue matter from the initial chaos in which it lives and bring it to a state of formal evidence and awareness.

The exemplary quality lies in the movement of the individual conscience that tends to unhinge the partial and separate truths of bourgeois knowledge, where the only evolution has been the revolution of technical intelligence. This concept of knowledge has hampered the overall development of the human being. The methodology has served technical progress only at the expense of history, acting upon man in an authoritarian manner.

The notion of art fostered by the Gao Brothers tends to posit itself as permanent creativity and a welding of the different moments of existence. While Novalis, Goethe, Schiller and Schopenauer saw this tension as an attempt to meld man with transcendental forces through a method, not of analysis but of synthesis better suited to contemplate the supernatural, the struggle of the Gao Brothers instead consists of the will of the hero to conduct a first-person attack on matter in order to bring it to the light of consciousness. Because art is not an image of movement but a liberating process. Thus they engage all their energies, including the body, to Socratically address the space of life and establish a relation of communication with the community. However this communication does not unfurl in a preferential manner solely upwards, towards the human, but also downwards, towards plants and animals, towards nature.

The Gao Brothers intend to mould reality like the will and expression of a vision of the world in which will, thought and feeling finally come together. Thus the works become traces and the pretext for ushering others into the Socratic space of the dialogue.

The space and the fixed role are the prerogative of man set at the centre as a catalyst of vital social energies that would otherwise be dispersed in all directions.                   

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Figure is the focal axis of the Gao Brothers art and is occupying the core of their visual language as it is able to bring out the desire for power the way it is expressed by their imaginary world. This desire is performed and expressed trough living sculpture and photography. Within the framing of the picture their figures are different and constantly changing, using the human body to assume different positions and meaning to the eyes of the viewer. As they are always capable of unleashing seduction and dazzling.

That is because art is incapable of keeping its language on the level of common comunication, is, in other words, unable to speak through the masks worn in our daily life and has to adopt new and unexpected forms. Seduction gushes up from the need of creating an opening and a flash of lightning in the motionless realism of daily life. It generates therefore a sense of wonder that is able to tear apart its horizontal impermeability.

Figure is the eccentric assumption of a specific appearance supporting the urge for art. The desire of provideing themselves with a weapon capable to deafeat the contemplative vulgarty of mankind is giving to their work its peculiar eroticism. It speaks of a mankind lost in a world where the system is dictated by other figures which are not pretending but openly declaring their need for consuming goods sketching this way the great image of the economy.

Their art lets us catch sight of other economical structures which are supported by the bursting power of imagination, a power capable of trapping in the long halting for the astonishment, in the pose of wonder, the eye of the viewer.Their work is constructed through a special way of using photography which is capable of isolating the scene from the surrounding just like the scene of a film blocked on a single frame. The setting of the scene may be an architectural image or the one of a more traditional painting as well as the one of a cupboard or some daily objects; the presence of these elements are meant to hold within the scene silent actors.

For the Gao Brothers the human figure is needed to accentuate the threshold, the natural mark between the apparitions of art from other kind of apparitions. In their work in fact the presence of human body has its specific quality in is being explicitly a pure apparition. This appearance has a constantly different character, it presents itself with specific costumes which invite the sight to stay wide open and crossed through by a silent flash. Its power lies in proposing itself as an action which requires no effort, its splendour in a setting that never denote difficulties; on the contrary it shows a sort of natural relaying in the concentrated instant of a photographic image.

Figure in the Gao Brothers’ work it is generating a lack of balance between their own image and the one belonging to an external world; Art has its own peculiar capacity of correcting itself and adjust the bursting gesture of the initial appearing. This makes their art able to establish a socializing relation in the very moment in which contemplation starts.

 The human figure is the way to rectify the course, it is the sign (symptom) of a peculiar bent: that is operating between the need of cathastrophe and a “systematic wisdom”, that is between the need of provoking a break in texture of society and the desire to donate their art to society itself. Art has to find its own weapon against an initial inertia. There is a peculiar “serenity” of the act of comunicating which art has to alter by setting new “turbolences”. The human figure is the tool to enlarge two bottlenecks between two ends obstructing the comunication.

 Turbulences are given by the revelation of the image which is capable of tearing apart expectations and introducing a language bent to a specific expressive need reaveling alerting elements.

Figure is then the disturbing presence, it determinetes the sign of alert through the whole social language and imaginary. At the same time the desire for a profound relation with the world take the highest importance in the act of producing  art, with the power of a systematic wisdom, tends to correct the initial provocation and correct as well the solitary and radical violence of the individual imaginary.

 Human figure is used to produce a wedge, an opening, between the serenity of daily social comunication and the turbulence generated by the artistic action, in order to encourage an appearing of the figure which would stimulate admiration rather than fear and incomprehension. The disguise could nevertheless make use of different masks capable of generating terror sometimes. The goal is always to achieve a temporary suspention of the defensive barriers of common tastes. This achivement would then allow the glorious entry in the world under an admired sight ready to perceive the differences.

The art of the Gao Brothers does not tolerate indifference, the distraction, the sight fallen in a motionless condition. For this reason figure always introduces the idea of beauty that, as Leon Battista Alberti sayed, is always a form of defence. It is a defence against the daily idleness and the possibility of suffering a setback from unconcerned sight which can resist the light of the appearing figure. Surprice as well as the legendary eccentricity of art, are the tactical moves of a strategy meant to reinforce the difference of the image of art in contrast with other sorts of images.

I ask art to help me escape from the society of human beings and to introduce me to another kind of society.(C. L. Levy-Strauss) This is not a desire of escaping, it is not an attempt of running away from reality, on the contrary is an attempt to introduce themselves in an another space, to enlarge an opening which seems normally to be blocked.

Art corrects the short sight and introduce a way of looking that is no longer frontal but deep and differentiated, a curved sight. That is the way we can face the insuperable frontal facade of the reality and assalt them from behind. The Gao Brothers operate to produce such openings, to move the sight towards a curve which gives the possibility of an assault beside the chance of getting around the reality.

Art is the practice of this movement using the weapon of many figures which are the tactical arsenal of the artist to relate himself with the world. It is a relation which certainly is moved by ambivalent urges, by a desire capable of bringing him towards a specific condition of his spirit, at the crossing point of emotional swings which can finally define his identity and his exhistentialist chance.

“Are you just an observer or are you one which needs to get involved?” ( F. Nitzsche). The answer of the artist to the question is certainly affirmative as they expose their hands the one of a person who is aduse of getting personally involved, kind of hands which might still be in pain and swollen by the work. This is the premises of the creation of their human figures, of those machines for producing reppresentations; the fundamental act of making art.

Obviously the construction of this kind of reppresentation is not a linear and smooth process but a one going through difficult moments and deletings. The representation machine is composed by many different parts, some of them cannot be completely mastered by the artists which has to accept the presence of uncontrolled elements. These elements can have a spontaneous increasing presence and role which can take the artist from the back. Human figure is the result of a creative excitement which goes through the imaginery world of the artist putting him in a condition of turning himself into the tool of a creation process.

Human figure is for the Gao Brothers a splendid example of a nostalgic feeling; the nostalgia for the unity of art and life that the artist is not actually  aiming to reach again. Unity is a sort of constrained procedure, a pretence used by the creative process for starting a march towards its goal. Art uses the biological trickery of establishing a series of goals in order to make it possible to organize its creative process. In reality art uses a demiurge operating model , an aware and uniform process.

“Staging different situation and adding other elements meanwhile breaking up the one you invented yourself deserves praise”. (G.Comanini) Human figure is the result of this sort of manipulation, of a work going from leap to leap,by mixing different elements which are not all planned by the artist and by his cerative strategy. There are other factors involved in the creation process, signing the artistic process and its realization which is the coagulation point of the artistic tension, the place where are crash and melt the different fragments of the imaginery.

The ecstasy is the state of mind which allows the artist to combine and raise the figure; the very expressive core of the work. From the amazement comes the possibility of renouncing to any defence and to accept in one’s own hands the fragments originating from bright and dark recesses. The techical skill is the necessary requirement to face and stand the sudden appearance of human figure appearing to the eyes of the artist from different contemporaneous sources.

In the work of the Gao Brothers human figure is never repeatable as it is not repeatable the process generating its peculiar definition. It is possible to recognize the specific character of its disguise (costumes) but  only to be able to guess the origin of the creative process.

Artists can add a certain amount of pretence using a techical skill for improving the definition of the image, but it cannot fill up himself the leftover space among the different fragments composing a work of art. The presence of those fragments marks the signs which are capable of distorting the basic unity of the work; on the contrary they define an irregular path which will never allow us to deduct the origin of their work.

Knowledge becomes, in this way a useless instrument , it stops at the surface where the signs lay, where the figure assumes its iconic values but it cannot go any further, it cannot look far enough. It cannot follow the curves of the thinkng process required to spy under the surface of art.

Artist is not therefore a departure terminal but it is a transit station because their figures have their origin in other precincts. It exists a methaphisics of human figure which does not let its knowledge transpass a well defined limit, that can, at the most, stay within the boundaries of a semiotic of grace, of the power of the sight caressing the smooth surfacs of the human figure.

Here the human eye besieges the image, it is courting its feature but without getting in contact or involved with any of its gesture and movements, with that interior action which has generated its presence.

Truth in art is the human figure, crystal clear and indisputable, flaunted to the external views of art as well as to one belonging to the artist. Human figure is therefore not only the result of a pure mental skill, of a rational knowledge handed down indefinitely, but it is the result of a  chain association.

The Gao Brothers cannot hand over the knowledge about the process leading them to the use of human figure, because it made of a mix of rational and imponderable factors. Their lack of knowledge allows their technical skill to proceed naturally towards the elaboration of the final results.

The affirmation of the work of art is not the affirmation of the artist, it only means a further move to a subsequent level: the human figure, in which it goes finally lost the memory of all the work done. The loss of memory corresponds with the loss of awarness, of the legendary clearness of mind typical of the common human being and of his dayly actions.

This is the reason why the creative action is irrepeatable as it lays in a tension that looses its memory of its origin in the moment it comes into being. Now the contemplating scene is filled up with the figure and it obscures the requirement of any justification, because time, outside the bewitching of a work of art, does not exist.

Human figure in the work of the Gao Brothers is always reppresenting a previous movement, because, as Nitzsche says, movement is always a symtom of a inner life movement, as the thought is the sign of a thinking activity. Therefore the only possibilty of art is to produce the movement of its own turbulence, the media capable of giving shape to it and realizing its indisputable evidence.Through this presence and starting from this incontrovertible presence it is possible to be lead to a the moment of ectsasy, to an ecstatic impact with the work of art.

The simulacrum of the human figure is the foundation of the existence of art, it produces the ambigous identity of artists which can accept to be the media of an inner movement which would otherwise remain hidden to the view of the world.

The final work of The Gao Brothers illustrates the dream of art, that is to create in the instant in which the image appear, an iconografic eternity running from East to West and viceversa to assert its universal character.