Indexingthe Moon: Mind Set Art Center

Curator｜Hongjohn Lin
Indexing the Moon as the Archive Fever

The archive always works, and a priori, against itself

-- Jacques Derrida

Indexing the Moon, the new production of conceptual artist Shi Jin Hua, is the sequel of his 2010 Taipei Biennial participating piece, Taipei Biennial Exhibition Space Auction, which allowed participants to organize exhibition once they got the bid. Located on the ground floor of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the exhibition space was hold by the bidder for three consecutive shows during the Biennial time. The whole process, including the very space itself, was claimed by the artist as a piece of art work and presented in Indexing the Moon, borrowed from the title of a 17th Zen classic in referencing to the unsayable wisdom. Shi has fabricated a paradoxical situation for a possible collection, which is located in the actual museum space and can be archived by the museum itself. Shi is always interesting in creating highly conceptual work to show the axiomatic relation of art found in everyday life and to render it politicality, mainly because the cultural production itself can determine our social relation and can regulate our inner perception of art.

In this case, the archive is not something collected from the outside of a museum, but from the within. The piece constantly defines the boundary of what we can recognize as artwork through reconfiguring the topology of the exhibition, much in line of Smithson’s notions of the site and non-site. Shi gives it a contemporary touch and broaden these issues, including the outsourcing performativity, the social matrix of cultural production, and the mechanism of exhibition. Most importantly, the work prompts us to ask who can actually own the exhibition space and the arts as well. Shi has offered a cultural production is nothing but the circulation, consumption, and accumulation of various arts in the field, where different positions and trajectories are taken and projected. Especially for the ideology of the white cube, every show has to make it new, and the old one is doomed to be forgotten—the contemporary spectator are trained to have the exhibition amnesia.

Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever writes that the etymological meaning of the word archive, arkhe, has double significations, to commence and to command. Therefore, the archive always goes against its grain and deconstructs itself. The fever is a pun for the delirious desire and the symptom from the very irrationality, much like the unrecognizable traces and marks in the second layer of Der wonderblock. In Indexing the Moon, Shi is pushing the limit of the archive to indicate the objecthood of an artwork, where its true function is to index the real of art which lies in the elsewhere.