New York. For many years Paul Chan was a controversial darling of the art world, but now a growing number of commentators consider his works trivial and commercial. Chan never tires of stressing that there is a distinction between his political activities and artistic work. However, it is virtually impossible to maintain this differentiation in the light, for example, of his staging of Samuel Beckett’s »Waiting for Godot« in November 2007 in New Orleans, in which Chan tried through art to draw attention to the deplorable state of affairs in the flood-ravaged city. Or how is one to understand the »People’s Guide to the Republican National Convention« (2004) – a town plan complete with manual, which aimed to help demonstrators protesting against the annual meeting of Bush’s Republicans in New York to find their way about, yet did so by artfully packing practical information within metaphors and images? The »Tin Drum Trilogy« (2003) too, a series of photos and films about Bagdad a few months before the beginning of the war, cannot readily be separated from the reason for his one-month stay in Iraq, which he spent with »Voices in the Wilderness«, an activist group that has been protesting against US economic sanctions since 1996 and has been hammered with hefty fines for its support of the Iraqi civilian population.
However in many of Chan’s other computer-generated animation films, photo series and video installations, the political allusions produce an easy-to-digest mix dotted with hip pop references, humour and sex. It has therefore been argued that his art works are perfectly attuned to marketing interests, as their enormous entertainment value is given political legitimacy by Chan’s political activism. This criticism was expressed in particular with reference to the »Lights« series, which Chan has been working on since 2005 and which is now being shown for the first time as a completed project in the Serpentine Gallery, London, moving on subsequently to New York’s New Museum. Chan intends to ensure that his art, in contrast to his political activism, is consciously ambiguous and thus cannot be instrumentalised for political ends, but instead asks questions without supplying ready answers. In keeping with this, the seven light installations do indeed refrain from explicit political references. Yet perhaps these sinister installations create an even more oppressive atmosphere of threat and destruction precisely because the political references in »7 Lights« are not really made tangible and therefore cannot be simply categorised and ticked off. It is precisely this oppressive ambience that succeeds in bleakly conjuring up links to the current situation.
In contrast to Chan’s other works, »7 Lights« is a room-scale installation that adheres to strict formal criteria. He projects seven films in various formats onto the walls or the floor. In formal and conceptual terms »1st Light« and »2nd Light«, set apart in a separate space and projected onto the floor, form a duo. In contrast »4th Light« is cast from below upwards onto the wall like a searching spotlight, whilst in »5th Light« the triangular excerpt of the image on the floor is reflected again on the wall. The most complex staging is given to »3rd Light«, which is directed onto a mirror on the ceiling; this mirror which reflects the film onto the floor, where it is once again disrupted by a table, which references the table in Leonardo’s »Last Supper«. Despite these varying formats, the seven films form a homogenous group. All the films are silent and all but one run for 14 minutes. Each film shows shadowy outlines of objects proceeding at a gentle pace in a linear movement across a plane, moving through the entire pictorial surface vertically (sometimes also horizontally) whilst passing by the black outlines of electricity pylons, trees or seas of flags. The stark black-white contrast of the silhouettes is only interrupted at the beginning and end of each passage, when the reddish glow of the sun appears to hint at the cycle of sunrise and sunset.
This is ultimately a cycle of destruction, in which objects are slowly dissected into their individual parts whilst sailing in silence through the room. The landscapes they float past in the process create an equally apocalyptic mood, with trees stripped of leaves, ravens perched on their branches, or the electricity pylons that simultaneously recall crosses and gallows. A direct evocation of the notion of catastrophe and 11th September is to be found in the human silhouettes which appear at irregular intervals in all of the films, plummeting rapidly downwards in the opposite direction to the objects. The result is a spectacle of death and decay, in which associations with the seven days of creation and the end of time in the apocalypse are virtually impossible to ignore. Scepticism about cognition and hence about progress go hand-in-hand with this pessimistic projection of the world. Although the self-destructive objects do not form a rigidly definable unit, the cars, trains, weapons, mobile phones and i-Pods are symbols of rapid technological development in the (post-)modern era. Yet, just as in Plato’s allegory of the cave, we see only the shadows and representations of the objects. That means that we perceive reality only superficially and indirectly, which is additionally underscored in »3rd Light« by the reflection of the shadow that is cast and repeatedly refracted by the table. With his archaic shadow images, Chan also calls into question the age of technology’s promise of progress and the gain in knowledge it offers. What’s more, in their apparent forward motion all these technical aids leave a trail of burnt earth behind them and the victims pile up along the way before these devices also finally disintegrate. Given the gap between technical development and reactionary political ideology, which gapes ever wider, Chan’s striking apocalyptic scenario unfortunately appears, despite all criticism, to be all too realistic.
Translated by Helen Ferguson