伟大的2008在北京已然落幕，留给我们的问题是：这一年到底铸造了什么。现代主义建筑杰作散见于城市周边各处，这些神殿里供奉的是一种新的城市状态，社会主义的一个新阶段，一种尚未命名的政府统治形式。新的消费设施已充分就位，餐厅、酒店、商场开足马力全力运转，试图将此之外的混乱置之脑后。首都的人民揉揉眼睛，终于从六十年间从未间断的意识形态幻梦中苏醒过来。聂幕在草场地的工作室四四方方，像一块灰砖。她坐在数码绘画板旁边，前面是一台MacPro电脑，而她手里拿的是她一年以来的绘画工具：一支塑料尖笔和最新版的Adobe llustrator 图形制作软件。工作室外，听得到村里大型犬的吠声。
聂幕2008年的作品名字很简单，就叫“数码绘画”，好奇的观众可能一下看不明白。远看紧致的构图充满张力，颇具表现主义神韵，颜色也支离破碎，但实际上这是最重要的一点：它们是一层一层的数码手绘图案的堆积，一层相当于一天的工作量，每一层都是单独完成的。这些涂层的图像来源有时是聂幕上网时看到的新闻照片，有时是儿时的回忆，有时是常见的文化符号，有时是某一代人司空见惯的普通事物，有时甚至单纯源于艺术家毫不相干的设计感。同样，图案颜色也可能直接取自其他数码图像，或者是她从数码色轮上用鼠标点取的。“黑色总是000，”她说，“每种颜色都有编号；它们之间的关系永远不会变。”她改变每幅画的大小，即分辨率，将每日工作成果的面积放大或缩小，即使她的实体绘制范围绝不会超过A4纸大小的数位板。有时，她在单个构图上复制自己的图像元素，用的是最简单的电脑操作技法：Ctrl-C（复制）和Ctrl-V（粘贴）。
聂幕喜欢清楚明确的笔触，认为在这方面电脑比人脑做得更好。“人会受自己判断的影响，”她说，“但电脑不带任何感情色彩。”她喜欢在不同分辨率的图案之间玩透视游戏，这让她回想起那些关于错觉制造技巧和图像合成才干的经典问题。她喜欢具有无限复制潜能的大杂烩，这要回溯到她在中央美院的版画学习生涯。她喜欢那种虽然是单个图案被用于拼接成更大的构图，但是从数位板上那些不协调的水平和垂直边缘线上仍然可以看到绘制当天留下的痕迹。她喜欢笔画之间无意识的删除或数据丢失的可能性。她喜欢只有当她喊停时，这些画作才得以真正存在，决定某幅作品“完成”的是一系列美学标准和主观原则不可言说的混合。
然而，对图层进行组织排序这项看似简单的步骤正是数码绘画的精髓所在。图层叠加这道最后工序意味着作品的成形，就是在这一步，聂幕展示了最近艺术创作中最重要的矛盾之一，即个人意志或品味与某些外部标准之间的冲突，其表现手法类似评批家Jörg Heiser提出的所谓“抉择之绘画”（the painting of decisions）。但这种矛盾似乎更进一步，已经超出了当代艺术的范畴。每一次叠加都完全遮蔽了下面的内容，但每一个图像都只不过如此：它们是漂浮的，彻底抽离了传统绘画中我们熟悉的支撑物。聂幕的数码绘画是其他绘画的合并，每一幅都漏洞百出。它们是有关记忆和控制的绘画，最终可见的表面只有一个，这些图像让我们看到什么可以透过叠层最终浮现而什么不可以。因此，叠加行为变成了意志的运用，变成了一种裁决，决定了哪些在上哪些在下，哪些元素可以覆盖另一些。整个过程开始越来越像──也许对2008年的北京来说不失为一个恰当的比喻──历史的书写或城市的规划。
聂幕最终决定以两种截然不同的方式回应此矛盾，一种是有意在前景中突出一个可辨认的图像轮廓，另一种则是对时间流逝进行日记式的记录。前者相对直接，用的是她所熟知的传统绘画原则，讲究平衡和美，最终掌握决定权的是艺术家本人。在这些篇幅较小的作品中，表面以下的层次基本相当于一种装饰，一种衬托有意义的中心部分的抽象背景。后者，也就是基于时间创作的作品，理解起来更加困难一些。“我想在安排图层叠加的时候没有任何选择余地，不经过任何设计，一个东西没了就是没了，就这么简单，”她沉思一会儿，很快补充道，“但我希望关键的元素不要消失。所以这种语言里存在两种倾向。”就算艺术家的观念创作冲动是仅根据时间顺序组织这些日记式的绘画，其他因素也不可避免地会介入其中；举例来说：制作四幅一套的作品，每一幅代表一个季节的创作成果，按春夏秋冬的顺序排列。她以其中一幅色彩强烈的京剧脸谱画为例，这幅画是朱红色的，完成于夏末秋初，如果严格按照时间顺序叠加，最后的成品就会是一张单纯的脸谱画。因此，这幅脸谱被提前安插到图像流里，让那些技术上说应该早于它的画盖住它艳丽的颜色。“到最后，”她总结说，“还是有选择余地的。”
最后，聂幕决定摒弃以季节为框架的做法，只按图层数量升序组织她的绘画：11，29，70，100。最后的“100”，也是本次展览展出的作品，既是对之前一切的总结，也是对一切的删除。这本记录不断变化的情感与兴趣的日记现在已不可读，而这就是一个人的2008。
One Woman’s 2008
· --Philip Tinari on Nie Mu’s “Digital Paintings”
By Philip Tinari
The epic year of 2008 has finally drawn to a close in Beijing, and now we are left to ask what it has wrought. Modernist architectural masterpieces dot the fringes of the city, temples to a new urban condition, a new stage of socialism, a new governmentality that has not quite yet been named. A new consumer infrastructure has been set in place, its restaurants and hotels and shopping centers churning in attempted oblivion to the chaos beyond. The people of the capital rub their eyes, awaking from the latest in a sixty-year progression of ideological reveries. In a boxy grey-brick studio in the village of Caochangdi, Nie Mu sits at her digital drawing board, in front of her MacPro computer, making paintings with a plastic stylus and the latest version of Adobe Illustrator, as she has all year. Outside, the giant village dogs bark.
Titled simply “digital paintings,” Nie Mu’s 2008 works do not immediately reveal themselves to the curious. What appear from afar as tense, expressionistic compositions in a fragmented palette are—and this is the main thing—compilations formed from layer upon layer of digital freehand drawings, each a day’s work, each completed separately. These individual layers draw their source material sometimes from news photos she sees while browsing the Internet, sometimes from childhood memories or cultural and generational commonplaces, sometimes simply from her own discrete sense of design. Colors, likewise, may come directly from other digital images, or she may select them with a click at the digital color wheel. “Black is always 000,” she says, “and every other shade has a number; the relations among them never change.” She varies the size, which is to say the resolution, of each drawing, altering the digital scale of each day’s work even as her physical parameters never exceed this A4-sized plastic board. Sometimes she reproduces her own elements across a single composition with the simplest of digital tactics: Ctrl-C for copy, Ctrl-V for paste.
Nie Mu likes the definitive brush strokes that a computer seems better suited to make than a human. “People have their judgments,” she says, “but the computer is unsentimental.” She likes the play of perspective among images of different resolutions, the way it echoes classical questions of illusionistic gamesmanship and compositional acumen. She likes the bricolage of potentially infinite reproducibility, which takes her back to her Central Academy training as a printmaker. She likes the way that even once pieced together into larger compositions, each component image still reveals the traces of its making in the jarring vertical and horizontal edges it retains from the day she drew it, alone, on the plastic board. She likes how the possibility of accidental deletion, data loss, looms over her every brushstroke. She likes how these paintings exist only when she says stop, deciding based on some ineffable alchemy of aesthetic criteria and arbitrary principles that a given work is “done.”
But it is in the deceptively simple step of organizing and ordering the component layers for printing is where the digital paintings reveal their stakes. This final act of layering is the stage where the composition takes shape, and it is here that Nie Mu plays out one of the key tensions of recent art, between individual will or taste and some external set of criteria, in something like what critic Jörg Heiser has called “the painting of decisions.” And yet the tension seems to go even further than the sphere of contemporary art. Each marking totally obscures everything below it, but every image is only that: a floating image, completely lacking what traditional painting knows as support. Nie Mu’s digital paintings are amalgamations of other paintings, each full of holes. They are paintings of memory and control, paintings about what is and is not allowed to show through and appear on the final, single visible plane of the surface. And so the act of layering becomes an exertion of will, a verdict about what is allowed to cover what else, in a process that begins to seem—perhaps appropriately for Beijing in 2008—a lot like writing a history or planning a city.
Nie Mu has ultimately decided to respond to this tension in two distinct ways, creating some paintings that consciously foreground a recognizable figurative gesture, and others that serve as diaristic records of the passage of time. The former are relatively straightforward, structured according to principles she knows from an older standard of painting, something that has to do with balance and beauty, something that rests finally on the artist’s judgment. In these smaller works, the layers below serve mostly as adornment, an abstract background to a central, meaningful flourish. The latter, time-based works present more difficulties. “I want to arrange the layers without any choice, without any contrivance, such that if something is gone, it’s simply gone,” she muses, but quickly turns to say, “and yet I hope the key elements don’t disappear. Those are the two tendencies of this language.” Even if the conceptual impulse is to organize these diaristic paintings with recourse only to chronology—creating, say, a suite of four paintings each compiling a season’s efforts, spring, summer, autumn, and winter—other factors cannot but enter into play. She cites the example of one particularly strong Peking Opera mask, painted in vermilion late into the summer. If that painting were arranged chronologically, it would become nothing but a painting of a mask. And so the mask is inserted into the flow earlier, and compositions that technically predate it obscure it. “In the end,” she concludes, “there are still choices.”
Finally, Nie Mu decides to abandon the seasonal framework and organize her paintings based solely on an ascending number of layers: 11, 29, 70, 100. The final “100,” shown in this exhibition, is both the summation and the obliteration of everything that has gone before it. A now imperceptible diary of shifting emotions and interests, this is one woman’s 2008.
皖公网安备 34010402700602号
