女人总是美丽的
作者:陈侗
相关展览:《女人总是美丽的》,博尔赫斯书店,广州,中国,1999
女人生来就是艺术。
女人与照片。是的,我们认识女人,尤其是漂亮的女人,都是通过照片。女人使照片增多,照片使女人的存在越来越重要。我想我说的不止是时尚杂志上的女人照片,也包括像杨勇所拍的这一类从未被杂志刊用过的女人的照片。未被刊用并不证明这照片不重要,与拍照片相比,杨勇更喜欢的是女人。
这既不是恭维也不是抵毁。喜欢女人成了杨勇生活中的一件事情,如果没有这件事情,杨勇不会喜欢艺术(固然这是他现在理解的艺术,其中不包括对自达芬奇到雷诺阿的圣洁传统的继承)。
杨勇的天赋或许就在于——如同大多数人不敢言明的那样——知道男人应当如何充分地表达对于女人的占有欲。这些女人,不管曾经干过什么或没干过什么,不管生得有多美或有多丑,总是那么招眼,让人产生占有的欲望。女人如同现实,并不比我们看见的更多或更少,我们看见的是一种态度,或者说,是女人在让我们看一种态度。这个态度曾经是那样地隐蔽,而现在,它又罩上了一层不应有的防护剂,杨勇的工作似乎就是一遍遍地将其稀释直至挥发。
作为一般意义上的艺术家,杨勇的不合格是他从未确立过心目中的女人形象。他接受所有的女人,指望她们在照片上表现出一种让男人产生抗拒的威力。当然,不是因为这些影像的普通让人在艺术的这一头感到失落,恰恰相反,男人那被挑拨的情欲所能找到的准确解答是照片上的女人无不与他心目中的形象发生抵触,但同时又念念不忘。
于是,在杨勇的照片前,我们不得不检查自己一贯的态度:所有的趣味只是一种艺术趣味。如果趣味的改变不由艺术内部发生,那么,杨勇用自动相机所获得的结论就是:主观意识的改进只需要更换系统内部的一个零件;当然是彻底更换,否则观看就变得如同触摸一般。
当致力于搜寻男性观众对这些照片可能有的感觉时,我发现最容易犯的错误仍然是将表面的快感搁置一旁不顾,而偏要深究照片背后的东西。其实,如果不是相应地走一条回避风格——哪怕是当代艺术中典型的反讽手法——的路线,杨勇照片上的女人不会显得如此美丽。终究艺术还存在或者说一直存在某些不被挖掘的丰富性。在这里,杨勇通过一种介乎清晰与模糊之间的直接呈视,逐步动摇着一个出于长期观看所培养的固定观念。但他究竟要把人们引向哪里,从美丽女人的身上是找不到答案的。艺术之于人就如同女人占有了男人的眼睛之后又被男人占有,困惑而又无休无止。
Women Are Beautiful, Always and Forever
Author: Chen Tong
Related Exhibition: “Women Are Beautiful, Always and Forever”, Libreria Borges, Gaungzhou, China, 1999
Women were born to be art.
Women and photos. Yes, we'd like to know women, especially beautiful women, but always by photos. Women take a lot of photos, and photos make women more important than before. I'm sure what I'd like to point out is not only the photos of girls on fashion magazines, but the photos taken by Yang Yong which are never published by magazines, which, however, doesn't follow that they are not important. Yang Yong prefers women rather than taking photos.
This is neither compliment nor bespatter. Loving women becomes a part of Yang Yong's life. Without this, Yang won't like art. Certainly this is the art he understood by now, which doesn't include his inheritance from Leonardo da Vinci and Renoir.
Yang Yong's genius is probably that he knows how to express men's desire to control woman, which most people don't dare to declare. These women, no matter what they have done or what they haven't done, no matter how beautiful or ugly they are, can always attract men's attention and arouse their desires to have them. Women, just like reality, are never more or less than what we have seen. What we have gotten is a kind of attitude, in other words, it is the women that make us have a sort of attitude. That has been hidden so deeply at one time, by now, it is covered by a layer of paint. Yang Yong's works seem to dilute it again and again until the paint can be volatilized.
As an artist in a common sense, Yang Yong's disqualification is that he never establishes image of women in his heart. He accepts all kinds of women, expecting they can show the might that can make men resist. Certainly, the disappointment does not result from the ordinary images. On the contrary, the exact answer why men's desire have been aroused is that the women on photos clash the images in his heart, at the same time bear in mind constantly.
So, we have to examine our consistent attitude in front of Yang Yong's photo. All the interests are only those of art. If the change of interest doesn't happen inside the art, Yang Yong concludes with his auto camera that the improvement on subjective sense only needs to replace a piece of hardware of the system. Of course it is a total replacement, or viewing is the same with touching.
When I apply myself to search what men might feel about the pictures, I found the common mistake is still leave alone the large charge of the surface and go into them seriously. Actually, if Yang didn't choose this appropriate route, which evades even the typical satire in modern arts, the women in Yang's works wouldn't get so beautiful. Art has its unexplored varieties.
Here, YangYong gradually shakes the fixed point of view that comes into being for a long time by showing directly between distinct and indistinct. We cannot find the answer from the beautiful women as to where he is willing to lead us. To human beings, art is just like women attracting men and then occupied by men. We feel confused and endlessly.