by Tan Boon Hui

“What people are not longer prepared for is seeing as an experience that takes place in time, they have ceased to believe that a painting or sculpture is a structure with a meaning that unfolds as we look. This endangered experience is not a matter of imagining a narrative…We need to see particular elements, and see that they add up in ways that become more com-
plex…as we look and look some more”
Jed Perl, (2000) ‘The Art of Seeing’ pp.52

Unbelievably silent for a group of 6 to 8 year olds, they sat, stood or squatted, at the entrance of the National Museum’s second floor balcony space. After about five agonising minutes, the students gave a collective gasp and giggled as a fully formed bubble floated into the air infront of them. The bubble, almost a metre in diam-
eter, floated in the space for several seconds, before bursting into a cloud of soapy mist.

Iris Buchholz’s kinetic installation is an artwork that could only have been produced in our contemporary era, when art has cast off its need to well ‘look’ like art. The notion of what is art in the contemporary and how it differs from the art of prior periods has been most forcefully argued by Arthur Danto in publications such as After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Danto:1997). Danto argues that ‘contemporary’ ‘designates less a period than what happens after there are no more periods in some master narrative of art, and less a style of making art than a style of using styles’ (Danto: 1997;10). It is only in the contemporary, when art is freed from its obligation to certain formal properties, that this installation could have been conceived. Traces of Loss is the artist’s recreation of the ubiquitous children’s toy
the soap bubble blower. At the same time, the installation is not exactly a ‘readymade’, from the complex machinery that drives the moving arm with its hoop at its extremity, to the alche-
mical adaptations to the soap liquid formula that had to be made to achieve a stable large-
sized bubble, the technical achievements of
the installation are feats of engineering
in themselves.

The conceptualist lesson of emphasizing the role of non-compositional ways to manifest a work of art is realized here through the way this artwork recontextualises the common commer-
cial bubble blower toy. One can speak of how this installation embodies, and expresses, through its mechanical and visual properties, certain concepts that are of aesthetic interest, thereby marking it clearly as ‘art’ rather than a commonplace object (Danto:2007). In her earlier film installation Like a Tear in the Ocean, Buchholz filmed a sequence of hand held flag signals at night using reflective material. In the dim lighting, the flag create a dance of light. Like the current installation, this earlier work’s meaning had to be appreciated in the context
in which viewers brought to an otherwise mun-
dane set of objects and actions. The flag signs were supposed to communicate words that ‘re-
flect both Europe’s historical field of conscious-
ness and the internal conflicting emotions of an individual that generate political thought and action’. The success of this communication depends on the ability of the receiver to decode the message, which is in turn dependent on the code of the specific culture (Buchholz:2005;3).

In the programme notes that accompanied the premiere of Traces of Loss, the installation is said to draw upon: ‘(T)races of memory, success and failure, loss and vulnerability, life and death, and human existence in its emotional diversity…’. Buchholz in her artist’s statement attempts also to relate the work to the com-
missioning festival’s theme of Art and Family by asserting that:

‘Ancestors, death and mourning are part of our lives. The shadows of the past may inspire or frighten us, but whatever the case, we all share them and they leave their traces on us and our lives.’ (Artist statement).

The idea or fear of loss and the memory traces that this loss leaves us is expressed with arching poetry in the installation’s use of chance and indeterminacy. This is one of those rare art-
works that have failure built into its core and indeed, its aesthetic power to move viewers is
a direct result of its susceptibility to failure.
Due to the fragility of the bubbles, any sudden air movements or even slight variations in the turning of the mechanical arm of the work would cause the bubbles to burst even before they are fully formed, which was quite frequent. To the gallery visitor, this indeterminacy was what made each bubble, when it does happen, all the more precious and moving. In essence, the visitor waits for the moment when the universe aligns itself to our desires and wishes. The installation demands patience and a will-
ingness on the part of the viewer to see how particular elements slowly add up and mesh together into a sublime whole. Since the middle of the 20^th century, ‘duration’ has been ac-
cepted as one of the features of art alongside the spatial dimensions of width, height and depth (Sayre: 2006;118). As in some seminal video works by artists like Bill Viola or Shirin Neshat, the temporal unfolding of the work’s meaning is here a primary source of suspense and pleasure, and not of boredom. We are transfixed by not what we see in the artwork
at any moment but what comes after, by the unending series of moments coming into being.
The use of this common children’s toy as the model for the artwork allows the artist to tap into an already rich source of memories and attendant recollections of the joys and sorrows of our childhood. Loss and hope for the fleeting moment of realization thus lie at the heart of this artwork. The pleasures that art make possi-
ble are felt keenly here while at the same time, it is clear that these aesthetic pleasures derive from the context which the visitor brings to
the experience of the work. As Wendy Steiner argues so eloquently in her ode to aesthetic pleasure The Scandal of Pleasure (Steiner: 1995; 80), art is valuable and enjoyable because view-
ers treat it with special value, not solely because this value is inherent in the art object. She could have been referring to this work.

Tan Boon Hui
Curator, Art-On-Site
National Museum of Singapore

References
Buchholz, I (2005) Like a Tear in the Ocean, documentation of film installation work in Brussels, Stuttgart, 2005

Danto, A.C. (1997) After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton University Press: New Jersey, USA.

Danto, A.C. (2007) ‘The Transfiguration Transfigured: Concluding Remarks’, Online Conference in Aesthetics: Arthur Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace-25 Years Late’, http://artmind.typepad.com/onlineconference/2007/02/arthur_danto_co.html" http://artmind.typepad.com/onlineconference/2007/02/arthur_danto_co.html

Perl, J (2000) ‘The Art of Seeing’, Drawing Us In: How We Experience Visual Art, eds Chesman D. & E. Chiang, Beacon Press: Boston, pp. 51–67.

Sayre, H.M. (2006) ‘1990–2005: In the Clutches of Time’, A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, Jones, A. (ed), Blackwell: Maldon, pp. 107-124.

Steiner, W (1995) The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.