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Created: April 13, 2003
Latest Update: April 13, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Courtesy of the Artist
Taken from NY Times, April 13, 2003
Wang Jian Wei's video "Living Elsewhere" at the Walker Art Center.

The Lived Experience of Resettlement

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, April 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

In the process of checking on art reviews that are opening around the country, I came across Roberta Smith's review of some new festivals.

From When Exhibitions Have More to Say Than to Show By Roberta Smith, Sunday, April 13, 2003. New York Times. Arts and Entertainment Section. At p. AR 31:

"With a litany that would fit legions of aspiring artists, a label introduces Can Altay, also from Turkey, as having been "influenced by Georges Bataille's ideas on transgression, Michel Foucault's ideas on power and non-normalitivity, Henri Lefebvre's conceptions of social space, and art history." His work, "Minibar," which encompasses slides, an audiotape, a table, chairs and current books on architecture, deals with "the transgressive use of semipublic spaces by young people," as exemplified by "the impromptu gathering places around and in between buildings in Ankara." In other words, the millenniums-old tradition of hanging out.
Scroll about two-thirds of the way down the file.

Mr. Altay's work pinpoints a problem that plagues festival art at any scale: too much of it is not only documentary, but barely documentary at all. For good documentary heading toward art, the show provides Wang Jian Wei's "Living Elsewhere," a 62-minute video that follows the daily life of several Chinese families living illegally in the abandoned, unfinished villas of a gated community in the Sichuan province. The squatters are peasants who forsook farming for jobs in the city and, finding none, have basically re-established their rural existence in the urban landscape, raising crops in empty lots. Unadorned by music, voice-overs or even much in the way of dialogue, the piece brings a quiet artistry to its immeasurably dignified account of persistence and adaptability."

What attracted me immediately to the article some of it was intelligible to the non-professional artist, and that issues cropped up on visual sociology, or the role that art plays in interpreting our lived experience in ways that we can sometimes grasp it better than with words. One of pieces that impressed Ms.Smith at the Walker Art center was that of Wang Jian Wie, an hour long video on resettlement. What I would like you to notice is that Ms. Smith suggests that this video is "good documentary heading toward art." Now, what does that really mean?

At this point, I'm going to ask you to link to Prof. Howard Becker's site, to an article in which he addresses that very issue: Visual Sociology: Art or sociology? More later . . . jeanne