加拉·波拉斯-金：相异性的政治
翻译：李安琪
2015年时，艺术家加拉·波拉斯-金（Gala Porras-Kim）于ebay上购买了一块被公证过的古陶瓷碎片（公元900年，来自美国西北部）。在进行了一次结果无效的科学鉴定后，艺术家使用缝隙填补这一文物修复手段将这块碎片融入了她认为合理的复原版本，在推断碎片背后的历史时，同时反映出博物馆学实践中存在的武断情况。艺术家随即将这件复原品捐赠给了并不收藏古文物的Hammer美术馆，使其从一小段民族志证据摇身一变成为当代艺术。波拉斯-金意在探究物件和地点的历史编纂过程，并且将艺术物件视作一件认知工具，以用来探索其具有的潜能。这也回应了艺术史学家权美媛（Miwon Kwon) “无处不在的文化置换状况与民族学的局部操作”观点。
今年秋季，波拉斯-金再次涉足文化权威话题，将在洛杉矶郡立美术馆、墨西哥城的Labor画廊、和洛杉矶的Commonwealth & Council画廊开展一次新的项目。话题中心将围绕一组编汇了235件陶瓷墓葬俑和容器的作品（约公元前200-公元500年，来自墨西哥太平洋沿岸的科利马州，纳亚里特州，和哈利斯科州）。这组藏品由Proctor Stafford通过多次购置建立，在1986年时出售给了收藏范围广泛的洛杉矶郡立美术馆。按仅有的出处记载，Stafford的名字出现在了超过300张作品标签和教育文字中。在与洛杉矶时报1987年的采访里，Stafford表示他的使命是将这些墨西哥陪葬品展示为“真正的艺术品”。
在洛杉矶郡立美术馆的群展“恶行的普遍历史”中，波拉斯-金制作了一组通过规范研究科利马州古器物以反映其古文化风貌的作品。这件绘画索引描绘了109件科利马州陶瓷作品，按照比例大小排列。而在这件作品的标签上，Stafford的名字未被提及。与绘画并列放置的是六件波拉斯-金制作的粘土雕塑，它们的造型参照了常见于科利马州出土的陶器的外观。预视到这些雕塑在未来会被视作手工艺品，艺术家便将卫星地位设备安装在了这六件作品上，用来追溯它们的出处和跟踪它们的迁移。正如盖蒂基金会的CEO James Cuno表示，郡立美术馆“鼓励与他者产生身份认同”，在其如百科全书般的收藏环境中，这些民族学的物件被转变成了艺术品。波拉斯-金也采用了同样的作者控制权逻辑，将古董的复制品放置于郡立美术馆的当代艺术馆内。艺术家把它们转化为当代艺术的同时，也将Stafford转化为一位同杜尚一般的达达主义艺术家。在展览期间，美术馆还会组织俩次位于古美洲艺术展厅的导览活动。其中一次导览将由美术馆的一位策展人带领，而另外一次则由波拉斯-金主持。艺术家会更新导览介绍，尽可能去除或减少这些古墨西哥艺术品与Stafford的名字产生关联。艺术家认为，当美术馆公开肯定一位西方藏家与文物之间的收藏关系时，不但会为Stafford所谓的对墨西哥艺术的“发现“进行进一步佐证，更是放任古艺术文化产权被肆意掠夺。美术馆这种问题重重的作品命名条款也使得这些陶瓷作品被和它们来自同一时期、同一地点的文物区分开来。波拉斯-金向美术馆提交了一份申请，要求查阅Stafford当年提出的条件并提议美术馆重新考虑作品命名方式，但是都被驳回了。
在郡立美术馆大肆宣扬Stafford藏品“审美的优越性”的同时，波拉斯-金则想要挑战这种设定：她象征性地将描绘纳亚里特州文化遗产的作品遣送回墨西哥城的Labor画廊。在她位于Commonwealth & Council画廊的展览中，艺术家会继续探索语言发音和视觉象征之间的符号学关系。展览除了一件根据Stafford收藏的哈利斯科州陶器所创作的大型绘画索引作品之外，还有一套描绘了堆砌在一起的墨西哥西部物件的黑铅绘画。这套黑铅作品里的每一个物件都代表了本土语言的一个音节，并且填补了一个组句里的空缺，有如一套变了形的记忆系统。艺术家还制作了一些可以任意叠放的陶瓷作品。观众可以与其互动，组装成他们自己构造出的语言组句。在殖民议题中，使用拉丁文抄写古代本土语言正在加快语言种类的退化和本土身份的消除，而观众们创作出的这些新词汇则标志了艺术家对此现象的抵抗。波拉斯-金的理念正符合了休斯敦美术馆策展人Mari Carmen Ramírez的观点：“在表现拉美（裔）身份中一个岌岌可危的情况是调度身份这个错误的构想。它正被一些利益团体所利用。”
在2016年由洛杉矶文化部组织的双年展Current: LA Water中，波拉斯-金将她对这种情况的观察延伸至竞争激烈的都市社会空间里来。她在洛杉矶的Marina Del Rey湿地树立起牌匾以告示这片土地曾经埋葬了土著通瓦印第安人，揭示了房地产开发商为了在这片土地上建造新的高级公寓，便直接清除了这些遗骸的法律漏洞。无需多说，她的牌匾遭到了开发商以及其背后一位重要政客支持者的反对。
波拉斯-金作品中重塑和重组的行为使其注意力转向了政治中他性的偏好，这阐释了周边文化、文明的身份中涵盖的一些特定概念。她对民族学和艺术的双重探究使得她可以运用这俩种领域的方法论来为作品的社会、伦理、政治、以及审美的角度进行叙事性的创作。这种方式促使观者用辩证的方式来思考自己理解了什么，并且是如何去理解的。波拉斯-金叙事中的主角是历史，是存在于我们被强行认知范围外的历史，是从Homi Bhabha提出的第三空间衍生出的历史：在第三空间中，权威概念里的西方浮夸词藻被干预和取代了。
-加拉·波拉斯-金在1984年出生于一个由韩裔母亲与哥伦比亚裔父亲组成的家庭，是一位在洛杉矶专注研究身份的阈限空间，破解文化知识性和权威性概念的艺术家。她的众多作品都探索了在新殖民时期的语境里，中美洲以及韩国文化的语言、视觉表达方式。
Gala Porras-Kim: Politics of Alterity
Danielle Shang
In 2015, Gala Porras-Kim bought a “certified” ancient potsherd (CE 900) from the American southwest on eBay. After putting it through a futile scientific analysis for authentication, she applied the gap-filling conservation treatment to reconstruct a proposed “original” object to which the fragment might have belonged, speculating on the shard’s possible history and underlining the arbitrariness of museological practices. She then donated the reconstruction to the Hammer Museum, a museum without any antiquities, allowing it to fluidly metamorphose from ethnographic evidence to contemporary art. Porras-Kim’s work delves into the historiography of objects and places, exploring the potential of the art object as an epistemological tool in response to what art historian Miwon Kwon calls “the pervasive conditions of cultural displacement and ethnography’s partial mode of operation.”
This fall, Porras-Kim approaches cultural authority again, with a project that spans three venues: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Labor Gallery in Mexico City, and Commonwealth & Council Gallery in LA. At the center of the debate is a compilation of 235 ancient ceramic burial figurines and vessels (approximately 200 BCE - CE 500) from Colima, Nayarit, and Jalisco on Mexico’s Pacific Coast. The collection was first amassed by Proctor Stafford through various acquisitions, then sold to the encyclopedic museum LACMA in 1986. Stafford, whose name clutters over 300 labels and didactic texts as the sole provenance credited, told The LA Times in 1987 that his mission was to show these ancient Mexican funerary objects as “indeed fine art.”
For LACMA’s group exhibition “A Universal History of Infamy,” Porras-Kim produced a drawing indexing 109 Colima ceramics, organized by scale, to illuminate the ancient culture of Colima through the formal analysis of its artifacts. On the label of the drawing, Stafford’s name is omitted. Juxtaposed with it are six clay sculptures created by the artist referencing shapes commonly found in Colima ceramics. GPS devices are attached to these sculptures to track their migrations, assisting with provenance in case they become artifacts in the future. Within the context of this encyclopedic art museum that, according to James Cuno, CEO of the Getty Foundation, “encourage[s] identification with others in the world,” these ethnographic items are converted into art. Employing the same logic of authorial control, Porras-Kim places representations of antiquity in the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA to transform them into contemporary art, and to turn Stafford into a Duchampian artist. In addition, two tours to the gallery of the Art of the Ancient Americas will be given during the show: one regular tour by a museum curator, and the other by Porras-Kim with proposed descriptions updated to remove or minimize the association of these ancient Mexican artifacts with Stafford’s name. To the artist, publicly crediting a single western collector validates both Stafford’s “discovery” of Mexico’s past and the looting of ancient artifacts. The problematic naming protocol also arbitrarily demarcates these ceramics from others from the same period of time and region. Porras-Kim’s requests to access Stafford’s original stipulations and reconsider the museum’s classification system have been denied.
LACMA boasts the “aesthetic superiority” of this collection; Porras-Kim wants to challenge this assumption by symbolically repatriating depictions of Nayarit’s cultural property to Mexico City’s Labor Gallery. For her exhibition at Commonwealth & Council, she will continue exploring semiotic correlations between linguistic sounds and visual representations. Aside from a large index drawing of Jalisco ceramics from the Stafford Collection, a set of graphite drawings of stacked west Mexican objects will be on display, resembling a transmutative mnemonic system with each object signifying a syllable of indigenous tonal languages and making up a score in combination. She is also producing several stackable ceramics with which the viewer can interact, assembling his or her own configuration of a linguistic sequence. This hypothetical lexical resource marks the artist’s resistance to the colonial discourse of transcribing ancient indigenous languages in Latin orthography, which has contributed to the deterioration of the languages and the erasure of indigenous identity. Porras-Kim echoes Mari Carmen Ramírez, curator of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in that “what is at stake in the representation of Latin American and Latino identity is a fallacious construct—a mise en scene of identity—at the service of specific interest groups.”
During 2016’s Current:LA Water, a biennial organized by the Department of Cultural Affairs featuring public art along the Los Angeles River, Porras-Kim extended this observation into contested urban social space. She created signage in the wetlands of Marina Del Rey marking the sacred burial grounds of the Native American Tongva tribe in situ, as well as detailing the legal loopholes that the real estate developer took advantage of to remove skeletal remains and eventually plunder the land for luxury condominiums. Needless to say, the artist’s signage was protested by the developer, who was backed by a prominent politician.
Porras-Kim’s gestural device of reframing and transfiguring commands attention to bias in the politics of alterity where it sets forth particular notions of identity for peripheral cultures and civilizations. Her engagement with both ethnography and art allows her to appropriate methodologies from both fields to weave narratives highlighting the gravity of social, ethical, political, and aesthetic conditions of the subject, inviting us to critically contemplate what we know and how we know it. The protagonist in her narratives is history, a history that exists outside the parameters of imposed knowledge and emerges from the Third Space, proposed by Homi Bhabha, where the western rhetoric of authority is intervened and displaced.
-Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984), born to a Korean mother and a Colombian father, is a Los Angeles-based artist whose practice is anchored in the liminal space of identity, problematizing the notions of cultural knowledgeability and authority. Many of her works explore linguistic and visual representations of Mesoamerican and Korean cultures in the neocolonial era.
原文及译文同期发表在LEAP艺术界杂志2017秋冬刊/8-12月合刊的第284至286页。
Both the original English essay by Danielle Shang and the Chinese translation by Anqi Li are published on the LEAP Magazine, 2017 Fall/Winter Issues, from page 284 to 286.
