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Observations & Interventions opened April seventh at Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel. The show consists of Ding Ren’s B-sides and rarities, as she puts it, from her graduate work at from George Washington University. Her work is strongly influenced by Fluxus, an art movement that dates back to the 1960s and which obstinately refused marketability or even coherence. Humor is an essential Fluxus tool, as a means of mocking the status quo and toying with the audience’s expectations. In the exhibition at Montpelier Arts Center, Ren presents a disposable water bottle and a plastic cup on a pedestal, entitled Mungo Thomson’s Water. The wall text informs us that the bottle and cup were left behind after a studio visit with Ren.
But Ren’s work is more than tongue-in-cheek. Her art practice is about carefully watching the world and archiving what she sees. Ren is searching for alignments. They are not grand alignments laden with significance but rather the chance alignments that occur every day. The show’s title cut, Observations Piece, presents neatly framed sheets of typing paper on which she has printed with a manual typewriter coincident events. They read like short, free-verse poems: “October 21, 2008/12:10 pm/A fire engine passes by at the same moment a phone number is being said. The phone number is not heard.” And, “October 22, 2008/6:00 pm/Two individuals sitting next to each other shift in their seats simultaneously.”
In her Found Shopping List Alignment Ren juxtaposes her own shopping list from a specific day with the shopping list she found in whatever basket or cart she used at the store. There is no congruence in items, but the juxtaposition makes us think about two people who almost come into contact on a specific day, brought to the same store to purchase needed items, before they go their separate ways. Far from being grand these alignments are banal, and the affect of Ren’s work is somewhat sad; she pays attention to record what she sees, and the coincidences that emerge are silent, opaque. A meaningful connection between players seems possible, but ultimately the confrontation is empty of significance.
I spoke with Ren at her opening. She’s friendly and articulate. She related a story about one of her critiques in grad school– her painter classmate decided that while his tool is his brush, Ren’s is her index finger. She points. But there is also a meta-pointing, if you will. In Found Library Book Intervention (Alberro), Ren has merely scanned pages from a library book, Alexander Alberro’s Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity , and framed the images for presentation. The first scan shows the list of illustrations where Ren found underlined sections of one of the illustration’s titles: Variable Piece. The second shows the corresponding plate and the pertinent text. The illustration shows the instructions for Douglas Heubler’s 1968 work Variable Piece #1, a piece whose outcome depends not on any talent of the artist himself but on audience participation and chance operations. On the facing page “ceding of artistic control over the process of production” has been underlined. Ren is drawing from a tradition of conceptual artists who reject the idea of the artist as an object maker who works in the studio. Ren is more interested in an art practice whose labors are bound up with the peripheral aspects of existence.
If we can think of the world as a text, we can think of Ren’s work as an underlining of specific details that interest her. And if we can understand highlighting information in a book to be art just as a painted still-life is art, then we’ve brought our attention to art itself. Ren’s written statement about Observations & Interventions warns that in order to understand her work, “the viewer must look carefully and might have to extend his or her notions of what art is.” The essential characteristic about art, then, is not the medium (be it paint, metal, photography, pencil), but rather the critical thinking involved that allows the artist to deliver a new perspective to her audience. Ren did at one time approach art in a more traditional manner– she was trained as a photographer in her undergrad. But we might say that, since then, Ren has left off making art to make art about making art.
Several pieces in Ren’s show are interventions into the gallery space itself. Window Intervention II (Trace) consists of several brown amorphous figures cut from brown paper, hung up on the glass of the recessed window. The work’s materials list informs us that the shapes are tracings of the brown patches in the grass seen outside the window. For Window Interventions III (Edge) Ren chose a window that has apparently become so soiled or etched by some outside agent that it is barely possible to see beyond it, out into the yard. So Ren has applied tiny vinyl lettering to the window itself, in the form of a list, to let us know that outside the window there is dirt, grass, hay, mulch, railing, rock, sidewalk, sky, trees, and wire. Once again there is an alignment here, not between viewer and art object but between the viewer and the mere space in which he stands (along with Ren’s wit).
In her work Asian Tourist Performance Ren hangs out around popular sights in Washington DC and approaches Asian tourists to ask whether they wouldn’t like her to take their picture. The tourists gratefully comply and hand their camera over to Ren. While they pose in front of whichever monument for the classic tourist shot, Ren’s assistant photographs the entire situation from an anonymous distance. Each interaction is photographed twice–once while Ren snaps the tourists, and once while Ren hands the camera back to them. On the face of it, these photographs are playing with the stereotype of the tech-geek Asian tourist. Looking at the pairs of photos, I’m struck by the people in the background, the passersby. In the first photo, beyond Ren and the tourists, we see two women walking and talking together, stage left, if you will. In the next photo they’ve passed Ren and the tourists and approach the picture plane. In another pair, in the first photo, a dog has just entered the picture frame, from stage right. In the second photo the dog has emerged entirely into view, along with his owner. Asian Tourist Performance takes us to the site of our nation’s great monuments and shifts the focus from grand architecture to the chance encounter of strangers.
Ren also spoke with me about what she sees as the failure of Fluxus art. Despite its intentions it wound up in collections like any other art object. Perhaps to escape this contradiction herself and to push the beyond work that looks so much like the Fluxus work of the 1960s, Ren will find new ways of working. Maybe she will construct situations or events too big or too slippery to be so neatly presented in the white cube. She certainly seems capable. Or maybe she will bring her sense of craft under scrutiny and find a way to make more technically satisfying works without betraying her ideals.
Ding Ren: Observations & Interventions
April 7–May 3, 2010
Montpelier Arts Center
9652 Muirkirk Road
Laurel, Maryland 20708
410-792-0664
http://www.pgparks.com/Things_To_Do/Arts/Montpelier_Arts_Center/Exhibitions.htm
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