媒介操作下的历史记忆--亚洲档案艺术与近代殖民历史反思

Mediation and Historical Memory: Asian Archival Art and Reflections on Modern Colonial History

本文以陈旻、库斯诺和陈界仁的作品为中心探讨亚洲当代档案艺术如何通过媒介操作对近代殖民历史进行反思。档案艺术以历史存留的现成媒介材料为对象,从媒介物走向媒介操作,在主体、媒材和作品之间斡旋调节,同时突出媒介的物质性与媒介性,形成一幅媒介与信息、物与叙事、影像与已逝生命交融一体的历史图景。历史的叙述与记忆依赖于媒介,媒介操作召唤出往昔历史的记忆,艺术家通过激活作为"死后生命"的影像,打开封闭的历史时空,将被遗忘的近代亚洲殖民历史的肉身经验再度复活,提示我们正视迄今仍位于亚洲地缘政治核心地带的殖民结构。最终,每一种媒介操作都会反过来指向自身,在殖民主义与媒介操作的紧密联系中,档案的建构性、知识的生产性与媒介的不透明性被暴露出来。

This paper will base on the artworks of Chen Min, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno and Chen Chieh-jen, to discuss how contemporary art reflects on the modern colonial history through mediations. By employing ready-made media materials handed down in history, archival art moves from medium to mediation, mediates between the subjects, media materials and the artistic works, and at the same time, highlights the materiality and mediality of media, forming a historical picture, where media and the message, objects and narrations, images and the deceased form a unified entity all together. While the narrative and memory of history rely on media, mediation can summon the memory of the past. Artists can activate the images and turn them into "afterlife" to open the sealed historical spacetime, resurrect the forgotten experience of modern colonial history in Asia, and finally alarm us to face the colonial structure, which is nowadays still at the core of Asian geopolitics. Ultimately, every kind of mediation would revert back to the media itself. The construction of archive, the production of knowledge and the opacity of media are revealed by the close connection between colonialism and mediation.