Project Rrose: Love and Death
Wang Jun-Jieh
王俊傑
Production date
2011
Object Detail
Media
video (color, sound)
Measurements
8 min 37 sec
Notes
The second part of a trilogy, this is an 8:37-minute video inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s final, and most mysterious, work – Étant donnés. Described by the artist Jasper Johns as ‘the strangest work of art in any museum’, it was created secretly between 1946 and 1966, while the world assumed that Duchamp had given up making art in favour of playing chess. Duchamp’s work (in English, Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas . . .) is a bizarre peep-show. The viewer looks through two holes at eye level in a pair of old double wooden doors, found by the artist in Catalonia. Inside, a naked woman lies, her legs spread open, on twigs and bracken. The life-sized mannequin holds an old-fashioned gas lamp raised high in her left hand – we cannot see her face. Behind her, a re-touched photograph of a verdant landscape provides an eerie backdrop to her spread-eagled nakedness. A flickering light powered by a motor simulates a waterfall, which appears to gush into a lake. The effect is disturbing, positioning audience members as creepy voyeurs, gazing at something clandestine and forbidden.
Wang Jun-Jieh appropriates Duchamp’s work to create his own meditation on desire and the nature of art. His video opens with a pair of steel doors, with two large holes emitting strong beams of light: this time, it seems, we are inside, rather than on the outside looking in. The original inspiration was the different warehouse doors that Wang photographed at the Glenfiddich Distillery, where the work began to take shape. The ‘Rrose’ in the title is Rrose Sélavy, Marcel Duchamp’s female alter-ego, whose name may be also read as ‘éros, c’est la vie’. The video shows a pond at dusk, a bright yellow toy duck bobbing on its surface, with plastic goldfish floating on their sides, as if dead. The camera pans across them, and then across ripples in the water and wet reeds and grasses, in extreme close-up. We hear thunder, and the croaking of small frogs. We’ve been lulled into a false sense of security: suddenly the sound becomes purely mechanical and we see, in enormous close-up, a bright pink vibrator lying in the grass, whirring away uselessly.
In Wang Jun-Jieh’s homage to Duchamp we see three naked bodies entwined, limbs entangled, languorously caressing. One woman holds aloft the gas lamp: if the title wasn’t already a giveaway, now Wang’s allusion to the original work – Duchamp’s urtext – becomes clear. The gas lamp falls to the ground, and flames lick across the dry grass. The fire catches fast, sending showers of sparks and burning fragments into the air, followed by curving, drifting wisps and curls of smoke. Claustrophobic, erotic, and a little disturbing, Project Rrose: Love and Death also reveals Wang’s characteristic sense of humour: the imagery of sexual build-up and release is as obvious as Hitchcock’s train entering a tunnel in North by Northwest or exploding fireworks in To Catch a Thief. Wang Jun-Jieh, with his love of film history, is certainly aware of these cinematic precedents.
Wang Jun-Jieh appropriates Duchamp’s work to create his own meditation on desire and the nature of art. His video opens with a pair of steel doors, with two large holes emitting strong beams of light: this time, it seems, we are inside, rather than on the outside looking in. The original inspiration was the different warehouse doors that Wang photographed at the Glenfiddich Distillery, where the work began to take shape. The ‘Rrose’ in the title is Rrose Sélavy, Marcel Duchamp’s female alter-ego, whose name may be also read as ‘éros, c’est la vie’. The video shows a pond at dusk, a bright yellow toy duck bobbing on its surface, with plastic goldfish floating on their sides, as if dead. The camera pans across them, and then across ripples in the water and wet reeds and grasses, in extreme close-up. We hear thunder, and the croaking of small frogs. We’ve been lulled into a false sense of security: suddenly the sound becomes purely mechanical and we see, in enormous close-up, a bright pink vibrator lying in the grass, whirring away uselessly.
In Wang Jun-Jieh’s homage to Duchamp we see three naked bodies entwined, limbs entangled, languorously caressing. One woman holds aloft the gas lamp: if the title wasn’t already a giveaway, now Wang’s allusion to the original work – Duchamp’s urtext – becomes clear. The gas lamp falls to the ground, and flames lick across the dry grass. The fire catches fast, sending showers of sparks and burning fragments into the air, followed by curving, drifting wisps and curls of smoke. Claustrophobic, erotic, and a little disturbing, Project Rrose: Love and Death also reveals Wang’s characteristic sense of humour: the imagery of sexual build-up and release is as obvious as Hitchcock’s train entering a tunnel in North by Northwest or exploding fireworks in To Catch a Thief. Wang Jun-Jieh, with his love of film history, is certainly aware of these cinematic precedents.
Accession number
2011.098