They talk about love like this: the intimate and heartbreaking art of love

It's Valentine's Day again, and the topic of "love and intimacy" has once again returned to people's field of vision, and has gained countless narrative concerns in the name of festivals year after year. /kloc-Although Valentine's Day in February of 0/4 originated from the Christian tradition, the appeal and inflammatory characteristics of love can cross different cultural contexts and make it escape from the private sphere to the public's field of vision. Love is a doomed talent, which is enriched in the overlapping dialogue of intimate love, * * *, human love and public love; Love also bears the burden of history and culture. The reason why it has become one of the important motifs of people's creation and research is precisely because the form of language is tied up with our lifestyle and social experience.

People are no strangers to love literature and film and television works. Today, we want to put forward some alternative views on love here: how do exhibits in museums and art galleries become condensed images of love? What do artists observe and think about contemporary love? Can love be associated with more public social care?

Intimacy is love. Cloud Painting jointly launched the global video art exhibition "The Art of Love: Intimacy", which was exhibited in Hall 2, Today Art Museum, 2065 438+065 438+ from October 24th, 2009/KLOC-0 to February 24th, 2065, presenting contemporary artists' eager thinking and active exploration of intimacy in the form of visual media. The exhibition not only covers the works of famous artists such as marina abramovic, Yayoi Kusama and Yoko Ono Lennon, but also explores the diversified expression of "love" with bold and innovative performances and artistic installations from the perspective of women's emotional experience. At the same time, the exhibition also exhibited a group of experimental and futuristic video works, aiming to explore the shaping of intimate relationships by social networks, virtual spaces and consumerism, as a response and reflection on countless new forms of intimacy in contemporary times.

Heartbreaking is also love. From June 2065438 to June 2008, the world's first and most prestigious Croatian Broken Heart Museum ushered in its 50th global tour in Shanghai, attracting many tourists from China. This is the first time that it has held an exhibition in China. Located in the upper city of Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, this heartbreaking museum was born in 2006, with more than 65,438+0,000 exhibits donated by lovelorn people all over the world, and was awarded the "Most Creative Museum Award in Europe" in 2065,438+065,438+0. Stica and Deren Grubisic, the co-founders of Heartbroken Museum, were originally a couple. When they broke up, they had the idea of "placing once intimate and priceless memories". Their original intention of setting up the Broken Heart Museum is to deal with the relationship that has ended with a more poetic solution.

Croatian heartbreak museum

20 1 1, The Broken Heart Museum of the same name was officially published and listed. This book contains 200 collections, each with a description of the donor, telling the story behind the exhibition. Last year, the Chinese version of heartbroken pavilion was published in June+10, 5438, presenting 200 "research specimens of human lovelorn psychology" to domestic readers.

Contemporary forms of intimacy: pornographic clips and heartbreaking objects

Love letters, love poems and face-to-face confessions, people are used to and prefer to express their feelings in words and language, because it can intuitively convey the feelings of the confessor and is also the default orthodox communication mode. It is not easy to translate abstract and ambiguous emotions into a language with both sound and form. Moreover, the beauty of emotion often lies in its unspeakable characteristics, but this kind of fatigue is also a sweet burden that lovers are willing to bear. The way of expressing emotions and the media carrying them have also been transformed by the changes of times, regions and customs. Even the most basic text communication is no longer limited to making a fuss between paper and pen. In contemporary times, digital media technology, social network and artificial intelligence all participate in the translation of love, which also makes modern people's emotional expression more diverse and three-dimensional. Many exhibits in "The Art of Love: Intimacy" show the modernity of the package in intimacy.

The monologue theater exhibited Tracy Emin's series "Promise to Love You". Using neon lights as the medium of expression is Tracy Emin's typical creative style, which also creates her alternative writing of love sentences. The Commitment to Love You consists of several electronic screens, and each screen has a classic confession, such as "When I hold you, I hold your heart", "Love is what you want" and "I listen to the ocean and hear all about you". Neon tubes are bent into handwritten fonts, splicing these feelings and ideas related to love. Similarly, there is the video installation work Liu Shiyuan's Love Poem of Promise to Love You. This work confuses nine love poems from ancient and modern countries and reassembles them into a highly abstract long poem. This long poem was translated into thirteen languages and presented to the audience in the form of video scrolling. Although this reorganized poem has no coherent narrative and profound meaning, everyone can understand that it is telling a story about love.

Tracy Emin's "Promise to Love You"

Liu Shi Garden's image installation work "Love Poetry"

These confessions and love poems are just like love. In essence, they are both confusing and cohesive. Just as roland barthes repeatedly analyzed the dialectical relationship between love and language in Whispering Between Lovers-"I love you. This particular situation does not refer to love confession or vows of eternal love, but to the repeated call of love itself. "As a structuralist, Bart interprets love experiences and emotional stories between lovers as a montage game of language, and depicts many classic love situations with symbolic symbols. When language overloads emotional energy, it also leads to the ambiguous road of love.

A lover's whisper

Wang Wupeirong translated roland barthes.

Shanghai People's Publishing House 20 16-7

Cheng Ran's video installation "Letter" is on display in the Future Theater. This work, performed by Carina Lau, presents a beautiful woman's inner monologue. She shuttled through the bustling city, telling the audience some hazy thoughts and mixed memories. Carina Lau's monologue was inspired by a fraudulent email received by Cheng Ran, which was an invitation letter full of provocative statements and ambiguous invitations. Images strengthen the expressive force of words, and through the actor's self-report performance, the messy words are naturally spliced into a three-dimensional image of a woman-lonely, mysterious and full of temptation. She is not only the habitual imagination of urban people on the image of lust, but also reflects the complex relationship between material life and spiritual world.

Cheng Ran's video device "Xin"

In addition to language, objects are also an important medium to carry feelings. The collection of the Broken Heart Museum shows many attempts to materialize abstract intimacy. For example, a note that says "pay attention to me", a pair of red sneakers that don't fit, and a turtle pendant for his wife and the object of an affair. In the introduction of the Broken Heart Museum, Olinka visca wrote that they hoped that the Broken Heart Museum would become a safe for all lost and painful love memories. Although tangible things will eventually dissipate, they are more reliable than fleeting feelings and specious memories, which is why many people give each other things when they are in love and regard them as the confirmation and support of their feelings. As the signifier of emotion, things are meaningful, and at some special moments, they even play or replace the emotion itself.

White gentleman shoes: "I am very happy, and I don't have to wear these white gentleman shoes from time to time to please her."

Therefore, Stica and Grubisic tried to help people complete the ceremony of "farewell to this relationship" by "displaying" these objects. However, the originality of the heartbroken museum, or its modernity, lies in the founder unifying all the objects under the theme of "lovelorn" and "heartbroken" to commemorate an imperfect, painful and even devastating life experience in a solemn way. The destruction of the "happy reunion" story and the perfect narrative style also reflects a certain trend of thought in our time: to treat the incomplete but true life picture with a direct attitude. As a cultural institution to build a meaningful life order and collective identity for a specific group, the museum's choice of "heartbreak" and the positive feedback from participants also reflect the importance of "affirming suffering" and "starting over" in contemporary values.

Broken heart museum: a research specimen of human lovelorn psychology.

[g] Olinka Wei Stica Drazen, translated by Wang.

Unread artists Beijing United Publishing Company 20 18- 10

Body and presence: love and art become the artist's life itself.

Love closely connects people, which requires participants to devote themselves wholeheartedly and remain "present" in the discourse framework of "love". However, the fast pace of modern work and life makes the time cost of "love" so high. At the same time, as Cheng Ran's work Letter reveals, the boundary between virtual experience and real emotion becomes blurred, and "love" seems to be an elusive and erratic flicker. "Visualizing time and love" is the response of Serbian action art marina abramovic to this "love crisis". Through this activity, she is also exploring the meaning of love to herself.

At the turn of spring and summer from 20/kloc to 0/0, marina abramovic held a large-scale retrospective exhibition "Marina Abramovich: Artist Present" at new york Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and she herself participated in the performance art project of "Artist Present". During the three months of the exhibition, Abramovich sat on a wooden chair every day, waiting for the audience to take turns sitting opposite her. Both sides are forbidden to communicate through language or body movements, only through eye contact. There are countless people who signed up for this performance art experiment, especially those who came from the other side of the ocean. Onlookers have been blocking the venue, and many viewers were moved to tears in a short silence. The * * * of this exhibition is the reunion of Abramovich and his former lover and art partner Lei Wu. Two people who haven't been in contact for more than 20 years have reached a settlement by holding hands with tears at both ends of the wooden table. The documentary "Marina Abramovich: Artist Present" tracks the whole process of this exhibition and reviews the love and hate between marina abramovic and Lei Wu.

Abramovich and Lei Wu met again in the performance of The Artist is Present.

The Art of Love: Intimacy The Eternal Theatre presented this documentary to the audience. At the same time, the exhibition also includes two performance art video works "Surplus Energy" and "Lovers: Walking on the Great Wall" jointly produced by Abramovich and Leo when they were young. The spark and artistic energy brought by their meeting greatly enriched the emotional tension in their works, and made the motif of "love and intimacy" closely intertwined with their artistic creation throughout their lives. The surplus energy shows the fragility and uncertainty of intimate relationship and the fear and trauma brought by the relationship to both sides in the form of physical confrontation. Lovers: Walking on the Great Wall is more like a farewell ceremony-the two started from Shanhaiguan and Jiayuguan respectively and spent three months together. After meeting in Erlang Mountain, Shaanxi Province, the two embraced and said goodbye, and there was no contact from then on.

The work "Residual Energy * * * by Abramovich and Leo"

For Abramovich, love is both a topic of artistic expression and a source of artistic creativity. She said in the documentary that her body is the theme, object and medium of her works. She not only explores the boundary of the relationship between men and women by challenging the physical limit, but also creates a "love space" through "physical presence". In her view, the meaning of "the artist is present" is that anyone sitting opposite her can have a direct, unique and close connection with her and get attention and respect. This is a rebellion against a world that is too fast. She asks people to slow down. Abramovich and the participants in Silent Gaze gave each other unconditional love and attention, which brought her an "incredible sense of relaxation and harmony". In these adventurous and experimental creative practices, love and art become the artist's life itself.

Great love: a social force beyond personal feelings

The meaning of love to individuals is varied. For the donors of the Heartbroken Museum exhibits, love is an unforgettable sexual experience or a stable spiritual support. In marina abramovic's eyes, love and art go hand in hand forever. But is love a personal experience in the private sphere? Is there a more general significance? Raymond Henry Williams, a scholar of cultural studies, invented the term "the structure of feeling", emphasizing the unshaped social consciousness and vivid experience in the process-the human feeling we experience is not entirely the result of "subjective sensibility", but also influenced by specific social experiences and social relations. Different from rigorous academic analysis, people and artists who practice love in their daily lives explain the social significance of love in a more intuitive and aesthetic way.

Dog collar lamp, spring mattress, tibia screw, Galileo thermometer, crossword puzzle ... The exhibits in Broken Heart Museum are both plain and absurd, but each exhibit has the characteristics of * * * *: telling an extremely private emotional experience without modification. They show the real life moments of people all over the world in the past 100 years, and also reflect the political, ethical and social problems of their times.

With the idea that selfless love can change the world, Yoko Ono Lennon and John Lennon once turned their honeymoon from 65438 to 0969 into an anti-war action. At that time, the Vietnam War had lasted 14 years. The two held "bed sports" at the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam and the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal to promote "love, not war". This is an unprecedented performance art performance. During the action, the couple met the media, politicians, fans and others in bed in their pajamas to talk about human rights and war.

Yoko Ono Lennon and John Lennon's "In Bed" Anti-war Performance Art Performance

The video recording "Bed-in for Peace" of this action was also exhibited at the Action Theatre, which also recreated the scene of this performance-a big bed with musical instruments and flowers in a hotel room covered with anti-war slogans. In the documentary, Lennon defined their seemingly radical actions as daily attempts: "Just like selling soap, some people will say it's useless, so you can also do something useful that you can do. Because no one has ever tried peace, acquiescence to violence is the only way. One day, people will know that peace and violence are different. " Forty-eight years later, Yoko Ono Lennon once again recalled the "in bed" action initiated by her and John Lennon, and admitted that "John and I were naive when we were at 1969", but she also believed that "this movie is very powerful, and we can all hear what we said at that time." This monologue letter was also exhibited as an exhibit. Belief and pursuit of peace and goodwill make love no longer confined to a private emotion, but transformed into a broader social force. Love, combined with the anti-war social trend of thought in the 1960s, has a more diversified public orientation.

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