Hochi Lau, Emergency Exit, 2021, video, 19 min.
Back in 2003, when I was an educator at the Guggenheim Museum, I gave guided tours of Matthew Barneys’ The Cremaster Cycle— one of the most dizzyingly hermetic bodies of work I had ever studied. To me personally, the show verged on the insane and the unabashedly narcissistic, and I was struggling to find ways to make audiences connect with the work. One day, a group of Mormon missionaries came to see the exhibition and joined one of my tours. I was very nervous, certain that the odd, quasi-sexual imagery in the work would offend or at least disturb them. But instead, to my great surprise, they were the ones who gave me the tour: Barney went to college in Salt Lake City and because of his experiences there he had interspersed Mormon symbolism all over the Cremaster series. The Mormon group was excitedly pointing out every reference in the photographs, videos, and sculptures to me, showing me how they all connected. They understood the work better than me because it viscerally connected with their life.
Over the years I have learned that our relationship with inscrutable works is often conditioned by the way we see ourselves. If we experience an artwork that we do not understand, the common reaction is to consider whether the disconnect stems from a) our inability to grasp a context that we should be aware about, b) the artist deliberate or unconscious tendency toward being cryptic. If we sense that the hermetic aspect of the work is purposeless, and if we consider ourselves knowledgeable enough to make that determination, then we are likely to dismiss it as nonsense or bad art. In other words, you feel you have been had as a viewer, you move to dismiss the work.
But at the same time, the expectation that artworks should always give themselves to you as a viewer is a novice’s perspective. As museum educator, the typical request I would get from novice museum visitors was to simply “explain” the work, as if each artwork had a downloadable, equivalent text version that the visitor could walk away with, a list of ingredients that suddenly would make everything clear. The truth, for better or worse as those of us who belong to this world know, is that art works can never be encapsulated in any which way, which holds truer the more compelling and captivating they are. So, the work of meaning production is in fact a collaboration, with the artist on one end making the work and the viewer, on the other, committing to derive meaning from it. As Muntadas’ famous artwork states, “Warning: perception requires engagement.” This, I believe, was also the point made by artist Simone Leigh a few years back to her critics, arguing that if they were unwilling or unable to read certain theoretical post-colonial writings and familiarize themselves the political histories around African and Black art that she was referencing they should refrain from claiming to understand, and therefore claiming to have an informed opinion on, her work.
As a teenager, I was often mystified and unable to understand works that would have been accessible to an educated adult audience. But I was immensely fascinated by the shroud of mystery that I saw in famously dense works. I was greatly attracted, for example, by epigraphs and end notes in poems. I was obsessed with T.S. Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land and the various epigraphs the author employed at the top of several of the poems in the book. Of course, I did not understand them, but I was moved by their erudition and my certainty (maybe I should instead call it “modernist faith”) that others had certainty on that T. S. Eliot was driving at. Primarily, it was my belief in what the famous Bruce Nauman piece states, “the true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.”
Bruce Nauman, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, 1967, neon and clear glass tubing suspension supports; 149.86 x 139.7 x 5.08 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Inspired in writings like these, I liberally employed epigraphs and notes in my own youthful writings, most of which were just pretentious attempts at intellectual brilliance that pretty much meant nothing. Sometimes my professors, reading my papers, would be puzzled by my weird epigraphs that had little to no connection with the paper itself. They would look at me and say: “what the hell is this?”
The practice of unnecessary obliqueness, as we know, is not limited to teenage homework. The anxiety and insecurity that we might feel about our ideas being too commonplace or simple often translates into developing elaborate language and labyrinthine references. In 2000, poet Mónica de la Torre and artist Terence Gower collaborated in creating an entertaining book titled Appendices, Illustrations and Notes, which parodies academic, self-referential jargon that seems to have as its main goal the purpose of being taken seriously, and to make otherwise banal or superficial language appear complex and refined.
But of course, the various forces that push us to be cryptic as artists are multiple.
The case of Barney’s work is in fact in line with the modernist-romantic tradition of creating a mythology of the self, which references that indeed seem mystical in nature but that ultimately are all sourced from a biographical base that later becomes universalized (not to dissimilar, perhaps, to Joseph Beuys and his own hermetic work). I personally am less interested in Barney’s biographical references than in the visual-narrative process by which the artist turns them into allegories of reproduction, birth, death, and rebirth.
Then there are cases where opacity is not only warranted but indispensable for the artwork to even exist, and the primary set of works in this category are those produced under conditions of censorship.
I often think of the Latin American tradition of intellectual opacity as a form of resistance in dictatorships. The Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn is often a go-to reference for me in that regard. Dittborn’s Pinturas Aeropostales, (airmail paintings) that he conceived to be able to freely circulate around the world, are works full of multi-layered imagery, constructed with a Baroque logic that conveys a certain, if oblique, socio-political critique, but not one done in such overt from that would have landed him in hot water with government censors.
Censorship and the repressive state are often a context that produces greatly imaginative responses from artists. Cuba, for instance, has a long tradition of artists who have constructed complex poetics in their language so that the work can allow an “official” and pro-Cuban reading as well as a potentially critical one, but the very ambivalence of the work also makes it difficult to censor. This was the strategy employed by Tania Bruguera with her work “Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version)”, presented at the Havana Biennial in 2009, ostensibly reproducing and quoting a speech given by Fidel Castro while holding a white dove, when the performance was a statement about the curtailing of freedom of expression in Cuba.
A recent piece by a young artist that I was recently confronted with in that regard is Emergency Exit (2021) by the Hong Kong artist Ho Chi Lau. I met Hochi as part of a studio visit while he was still a student at Carnegie Mellon University, and Emergency Exit was his thesis project.
Lau is an artist who explores visual paradoxes, and his site-specific work often is designed to emphasize contradictions and illusion.
For his thesis exhibition he was randomly assigned a wall of the student gallery that had, annoyingly at the very center, an emergency exit. So, he designed the entire work around that element, creating a projection of two additional emergency exits with signs such as “Moon / Well” “Sunrise/Sunset”, and “Bless/Bliss”. The doors (that is, the video projections) open onto hallways that lead to other doors, but which are often blocked by various objects.
The work struck me in various ways. I thought of the logic puzzle of the honest and dishonest guard, which goes like this: one door leads to freedom and the other leads to certain death. There is one guard next to either door. One always tells lies and the other always tells the truth, but you don’t know who is who. You can only ask one question to one of them. What would you ask?
Lau describes his work as an “ongoing research on interface, illusion, and interpretation.” In his statement about the work, he says the following about emergency exits:
“If you stare at an emergency exit long enough, you start imagining the possible spaces behind it. Supposedly, the spaces are only being used and experienced when there is an emergency. These lifesaving doors are always just there waiting to be run across when it matters.”
Lau’s work, in its cryptic form, is in my view a powerful statement about the encroachment of freedom in Hong Kong: a story about false choices, about false exits, about the unexpected obstructions we encounter while we try to act independently.
The question is again what we really mean by “understanding” artworks. The way we pose the question is what may make it unanswerable for several reasons. One of them may be that understanding is not a process of translation or mathematical precision, and that language can be a limitation when we recur to it by default, for understanding can sometimes be a visceral process. We might understand something at a very deep level, but that doesn’t mean that we can verbally articulate what we are understanding or why we understand it. And yet some works just can’t be understood viscerally, but if and only if one has done the intellectual work to appreciate them. Opacity in art is thus governed by a certain faith and a certain logic.
Around those teenage years when I was irresponsibly quoting epigraphs left and right, I listened to a radio conversation with the Mexican writer Salvador Elizondo about the problem of “no se entiende” (“[the work that one] can’t understand”). Elizondo, one of the most influential Latin American writers of the 60s generation, had an aesthetic aligned with the nouveau roman. His postmodern, experimental style combines narrative, obscure references and metafiction and metalepsis heavily intertwined.
In the conversation, as I recall, Elizondo, true to form, resisted narrow interpretive theories of art and defended the idea that works need to be allowed complexity for multiple readings— an argument that Umberto Eco makes in his watershed 1962 book The Open Work.
At the conclusion of the debate, while discussing Mallarmé and as his interlocutor pressed him for rules of meaning-making, Elizondo in the end exploded in exasperation, saying, in his final statement, that as far as great artworks are concerned one simply cannot aspire to ever “understand” them:
—“It’s like the stars. Can you understand the stars? In order to understand the stars one would need to be insane!”— he shouted.
And then, after an awkward silence:
—“Or an astronomer”.