eternal sunshine, 2011-2012

In Eternal Sunshine at the Minsheng Museum of Art, Shanghai, Marc Lafia in his solo show presents a series of works that reflect network culture’s restructuring of the subject in contemporary society. In network culture mankind’s relationship to media has changed from one of representation to presentation; and from contemplation to embodiment. In the main space of the exhibition, the artist has transformed the virtual domain of online social networks, e.g. facebook, twitter, weibo, etc. into a large scale, interactive installation. This vivacious work involving video, sculptures, and audience participation brings together a number of techno-social concerns that have been central to Lafia’s career as artist, filmmaker and information architect. In particular his interest in how we are all part of an elaborate program that is as real as it is virtual.

Presented along with this installation, specially designed for the Minsheng Art Museum, are Lafia’s print and video works that investigate how subjectivities, once constructed through nation states and cinematic representation have changed over time to become a global condition in which the individual now represents him/herself through social media in the network.

All of the works in Eternal Sunshine are active metaphors of a technocratic society enmeshed in online media. They critique this new cultural order as an ecstatic artifice. In this order, mediated by personal
computer networks, normative values are reproduced as consumable objects and the individual’s identity is played like a pawn. On the one side we see the community, empathy and transcendence that the
global network inspires. On the other side we see how yesterday’s dystopic world looks utopic today and how concepts such as open, transparent, non-hierarchical, and participatory are mere pretenses to empowerment and inclusion. Moreover Eternal Sunshine looks at how we produce and constitute a new community, and how representation therein is a condition that is always and already performative and how our network world has created new senses of ourselves, of history, time, desire and love.

If we look at the proliferation of collaborative art practices today, it seems that many no longer have the oppositional and anti-authoritarian punch they had in the late 1960s and 1970s – when radical theatre, community arts and critical pedagogy emerged in opposition to dominant modes of social control. Today participation is used by business as a tool for improving efficiency and workforce morale; it is all pervasive in the mass-media in the form of reality television; and it is a privileged medium for government funding agencies seeking to create the impression of social inclusion. Collaborative practices need to take this knot of conventions on board if they are to have critical bite.

It would argue that the best socially collaborative art does not derive from a superegoic injunction to “love thy neighbor,” but from the position of “do not give up on your desire.” In other words, pursue your unconscious desire, as far as you can.
It would argue that the best socially collaborative art does not derive from a superegoic injunction to “love thy neighbor,” but from the position of “do not give up on your desire.” In other words, pursue your unconscious desire, as far as you can.

Claire-Bishop_Antagonism-and-Relational-Aesthetics