For over the past ten years I have been defining
and redefining 'temples' of my own with combinations of three major
elements: space, light, and the presence or absence of the human body.
My sculptural practice began in 1996 with an attempt to understand
a type of illusion I called 'counter-form illusions'. Here, sculptures
that were an equivalent to a mould of the human body were lit in a
very specific way and result in concave space being perceived as convex.
These works necessitated the creation of installations to control viewing
points, in order to maximize the illusion, while positing my work in
spiritual and cultural contexts through the use of tapered tunnels.
Recently, the tunnel has become more significant as I am aware that
the tunnel itself can represent the human body, or parts of it; and
this is evident in my HAL-O and naut-i series.
The HAL-O and naut-i series, began in 2007, makes a quantum leap from installations; installations
rely heavily on the gallery space and its lighting conditions while
now my free-standing or wall sculptures have almost total control of
their own internal spaces and light. The exteriors of these works,
especially HAL-O, suggest solid impenetrable objects. My inspiration
is the mysterious and enigmatic monolith from Stanley Kubrick's 2001:
Space Odyssey, as well as Piranesi's imaginary prisons and Kurt Schwitter's
Merzbau. HAL-O is the monolith being penetrated, to reveal a haunting
space. The move from concealed to revealed space challenges the viewer
to consider what it means to treat revelation as a form of truth.
My
works are typically balanced on a hocus-pocus tightrope as they seduce
the visual perceptions of the audience and engage them with seductive
spatial experiences. But with everything in its right place, viewers
become aware that what I have done is simply invite them to contemplate
their own bodies and, ultimately, their own impermanence.
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Interior Horizons
Lawrence Chua
“It is easy, starting with the worm,
to consider ironically an animal, a fish, a monkey, a man, as a tube with
two orifices, anal and buccal: the nostrils, the eyes, the ears, the brain
represent the complications of the buccal orifice; the penis, the testicles,
or the female organs that correspond to them, are the complication of the
anal. In these conditions, the violent thrusts that come form the interior
of the body can be indifferently rejected to one extremity or the other,
and they are discharged, in fact, where they meet the weakest resistance.
All the ornaments of the head, of whatever type, mean the generalized privilege
of the oral extremity; one can only contrast them with the
decorative riches of the excremental extremity of apes.”
--Georges Bataille, “The
Pineal Eye,” Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927-1939
(University
of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1985), p. 88.
I had always considered
my body a sort of home until I fell seriously ill. For over a year, all
the things in which I believed seemed to fail me over and again: Chinese
medicine, Western medicine, and then religion. Time and again my body failed
to live up to the logic of these systems to which I had once been faithful.
My body seemed so willful and malicious at times, failing me at precisely
the moments that I needed it to perform. Just as I thought my body was
repairing itself, it would show me just how little I knew of the way that
it functioned. My body felt as if it were a strange new country where I
could not even discern the fundamentals of the language. Doctors tried
to map out this country. Cameras invaded my body and attempted to render
it in visual terms. The images that they produced, while textbook-familiar,
revealed nothing.
Be Takerng Pattanopas’ sculptures remind us of
the uncanny spaces that we inhabit in the global capitalist economy. Freud
used the term unheimlich or “unhomely” to refer to the fundamental
propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become de-familiarized,
de-realized, as if in a dream. In Pattanopas’s work, what appears
at first to be familiar to the point of being mundane becomes something
unsettling and strange upon closer examination. While there is much about
Pattanopas’s work that points literally to the human
body, it also rises above metaphor to pose difficult questions
about the quality of space in global capitalism.
In “Hal-O”, the solidness of the sculpture’s
steel exterior gives way to a play on depth and perception. The monolithic
exterior gives way to a series of sensual folds as the viewer’s
eye is lead along a series of meandering tunnels. Although the
immediate reference of “Hal-O” is
the enigmatic computer in Stanley Kubrick’s film, “2001:
A Space Odyssey”, the series conjures less obvious similarities
to aspects of religious architecture as well as contemporary art. Three
references that come to mind are the tunnels attributed to King Ku Na at
Wat Umong (Chiang Mai, ca. 1380 C.E.); the interstitial spaces of Gordon
Matta-Clark like “A W-Hole House: Datum Cut, 1973”;
and the way the eye is conducted in Marcel Duchamp’s “Étant
Donnés”. At
Wat Umong, pilgrims enter a series of connected tunnels underneath
a hill. While the daily activities of the wat are usually conducted
in pavilions closer to the temple entrance, the tunnels themselves
remain the key architectural focus and the namesake of the complex.
Fragments of paintings adorn the walls; their narrative meanings
have faded long ago. In Matta-Clark’s
work, the interior spaces of common dwellings are opened up to the exterior,
breaking down the boundaries between private and public life. In Duchamp’s
diorama, the viewer’s eye is conducted through a crack in a doorway
to a woman’s naked torso lying in a field. Invariably, the eye falls
on the woman’s vagina. One gets the sense that one is looking
at something one is not supposed to see but it is impossible to
look away.
In all of these precedents, the act of seeing is more than an intellectual
exercise. Pattanopas similarly produces an environment in which
the act of viewing becomes a sensual exercise. The transitory space of
the body is grasped in a compelling, visceral way. The tunnels in “Hal-O” are
conduits into other, heretofore unseen spaces. These dream spaces,
at once familiar and alien, are transitional territories between
inside and out, between the solidness of the sculpture’s exterior
and the curious worlds that inhabit its interior. Susan Buck-Morss, writing
about Walter Benjamin’s master work, the Arcades Project,
reminds us that the 19th-century covered shopping arcades that inspired
Benjamin were the precise material replica of the internal unconscious
of the dreaming collective. All the errors of bourgeois consciousness could
be found there as well as all of its utopian dreams.
Pattanopas’s work invites viewers to
consider not only the impermanent quality of the human form, but
the kind of home such a form might inhabit. What does a home in
the world today look like? What are the strange new dream spaces
opened up by global capitalism? The history of capitalism has been
a process of interiorization. Nearly everything has been brought
under the roof of the market place. Global capitalism today demands
that our bodies be in many places at the same time. Time and again
the body is called on to perform according to this rigorous logic.
And time and again it fails. What are these places where the body
fails the demands of the market place and instead produces its
own logic?
In the Visuddhimagga, Buddhaghosa’s 5th century
commentary on the Tipitaka, the body is compared
to a maternity home, a hospital, a charnel ground, a privy
and a urinal, a host shared by many creatures who live in
dependence on all its parts and organs and feed on them.
Be Pattanopas’ work draws out the tension between this view and the
ways that global capitalism values the space of the body as something akin
to real estate. At once solid and porous, finite and endless, Pattanopas’s
work is a meditation on the ever moving and ultimately unknowable
worlds that continue to open up within us.
Lawrence Chua is a widely published cultural critic and author of the novel
Gold by the Inch (Grove Press 1999), set in SE Asia. He is currently completing
research on Thai architectural history in the College of Architecture,
Art and Planning of Cornell University and is based in the Faculty of Architecture
of Chulalongkorn University throughout the academic year of 2008-09.