Fangmeng Liu
Counterproductive Situations- Bracketing off the paradox and dilemma of will in installations
Summary
Delving into Counterproductive Situations commonly encountered in life where one has the willingness or unwillingness towards a certain result, taking actions to achieve or avoid it but obtains the counterproductive unintentional result brought by the will itself, the study focuses on the paradox and dilemma of will emerged from these situations by unfolding two specific cases: active forgetting as remembering, and attempting to be continent as akrasia.
Installations (including static installations, interactive installations, kinetic sculptures, and large-scale installations) are perceived as prosthetics of will that transform will into action and certain force. By reproducing counterproductive situations in a documentary approach, the vacillation and weakness of will are captured while the competence of will is manifested through its failure to be trapped in the paradoxes, forming a self-mockery. The sense of humor and unexpected satire emerged from that lie in the heart of the practices.
As conceptual art appears as the main form of her practices, the resulting work is a synthesis of philosophical poetics, aphoristic writing, and installation in which I address the issues of will, the will to will, akrasia, desire and reason, uncertainty and futility, determinism, fate and luck in a broader contemporary art context.
Keywords:
Will, Paradox, Dilemma, Forgetting, Akrasia, Failure, Installation, Moving Image, Humor.
Additional info
Counterproductive situations are where:
A> One has a willingness or an unwillingness towards certain results,
B> Takes actions trying to achieve such results or avoid unintended results,
C> Obtains unintended and unwanted results in the opposite.
D> The unintended result is due to B's actions and A's willingness: A (+B) leads to C
E> If there is no willingness or unwillingness from A and corresponding actions from B, there is a high probability that the expected outcome will be achieved.
Additional remarks:
F> If one represses the willingness or unwillingness in step A to avoid D, it will also backfire and result in C.
G> F leads to C because F inherently is a kind of A
The phenomena of Counterproductive Situations are ABC. As the issue of counterproductive situation is the issue of will, the paradox of will and dilemma of will lies in the phenomena. Since paradoxes are self-contradictory situations while dilemma forces people to make choices they may not want to make, navigating the tension between undesirable alternatives, The Paradox of Will is what D and E imply, whereas The Dilemma of Will is people have to choose between facing the undesirable result directly and counterproductive situations (ABC). Thus, I discuss the dilemma that the will faced by unfolding the paradox of will in the context of counterproductive situations.
In these awkward situations, we constantly witness while repeating the failures of our own will - not the futility of will but its power to fail. In my research, I aim to bracket off the empty square of counterproductive situations where the will can’t enter, otherwise it would be trapped in the paradox and therefore doomed to fail.
Starting from the analysis of the dual intertwined counterproductive situation in Oedipus Rex, the set of propositions above is proposed to distinguish it from other normal failures. Based on the 100 counterproductive cases collected, three distinctions are made within them in terms of the avoidability of the result as well as causal relationships between will and results, classifying the cases into three types: Luck-induced counterproductive situation, Fate-induced counterproductive situation and Reflexive counterproductive situation which is the main research subject. Installation No Entry! Counterproductive Situations Warning! (2024) as the collective portrait of failures of wills serves as a metaphor for counterproductive situations.
The crux of the paradox of will is unpacked by two specific reflexive counterproductive situations: active forgetting as remembering and attempting to be continent as akrasia. The former indicates that any volitional attempts to forget undesirable unforgettable memories deepen the memory instead which can be seen in A Forgetting Machine (2023), and Finally, Evidence Has Been Erased Completely(2023). The latter signifies that the will to overcome the weakness of will makes the continent even more impossible. Pills(2024), The Seven Meters of My Vacillation(2024), Recipes of My Weaknesses of Will (2024), and Everything's Locked Up (2024)are practices under the subtopic.
The inevitability of the failures of will in reflexive counterproductive situations can be attributed to logical reasoning rather than luck or fate since the negation of anything contains in its very structure an affirmation of it. On the other hand, all those attempts of will in reflexive counterproductive situations are against the weight of time. These weights of time are themselves in the shadows until the will arises to confront them, they weigh heavily on the will, enveloping it and incarnating into a heavier stream, solidifying like magma wrapped around bulls and sheep. The failures of will in reflexive counterproductive situations are not due to underestimating the weight of memories or old wills, but regarding the confrontation as a horizontal wrist wrestling rather than something vertical as attempts to erase and negate their existence point to its temporal weight, causing them to fall from the top with gravity and squash the will at this moment.
Humor is an inevitable landing point for my research and practice since counterproductive situations are inherently ludicrous, as people are kidnapped by their own will to witness their failures while being powerless to do anything about that predicament. Thus, the faithful presentation of such situations is destined to be humorous. Additionally, installations are applied as prosthetics to demonstrate invisible wills, showcasing the competence of will revealed from its failure in which deeper humor lies. On this basis, I practiced the expression of humor by making a series of non-interactive installations in terms of Luck-induced and Fate-induced counterproductive situations such as Nailed It(2024), and Nothing Ever Happened(2024).
No Entry! Counterproductive Situations Warning! (2024))
Installation,160*160*5 cm (size variable), bricks.
An installation consisting of 100 bricks, each of which has one counterproductive case printed on it encircles a square as a metaphor for the failure of will: there exists a field where the will cannot intervene, otherwise it's doomed to failure. The material attributes of the bricks indicate that it's not a naturally formed barrier, but rather a roadblock and signpost that the artist has put up based on personal experiences after countless setbacks, news, mythology, literature, and hearsay.
Fundamentally, apart from these 100 specific incidents, the will to build a barrier of and with failures are destined to fail, which constitutes a structural failure where the vulnerability of will is not only transferred to the hard bricks but also transferred to them, forming a sense of self mockery rather than a pity party zone.
The Seven Meters of My Vacillation (2024)
Installation and moving image, 375*25*35cm, wood, printers, and Arduino.
An installation that captures the intangible vacillation of the will. Every time I want to quit smoking, I turn the wrench in the installation to the left, and it will print out a sentence “I decide to quit smoking for the xx time.” And every time I starts smoking again, I turn the wrench to the right and it will print out a sentence "I smoke again for the xx time."
In line with the different ways in which I quit smoking and resume smoking in the moving image, the length of sentences printed by this installation fully demonstrates the vacillation of will- repeatedly swinging between two decisions, and often acting against my best judgement. The decisions I ever made on both sides constitute a seven-meter vacillation of will in which the dilemma of will is shown in a humorous way.
Pills (2024)
Installation, 50*45*5cm, Aluminum, empty blister pack, cigarette butts, plastic board.
A diary of the conflicting wills which is shown as always acting against the best judgment. The akrasia is reflected in repeated failure of will that although I care about my health as I kept taking the vitamin Well-women one capsule per day, I can’t quit smoking every day knowing beyond a shallow doubt that it harms my lungs. Collected 180 cigarette butts I smoked and tucked them into the space of 12 well-women blister packs, a brand-new blister pack of pills is made. The illness of will presented in the form of pills constitutes a humor of the blatant and unresolvable failure.
A Forgetting Machine (2023)
Interactive installation, 45*30*25cm, wood, mild steel, and nails.
A Forgetting Machine is an interactive installation which delves into the paradox that attempting to forget unwanted memories deepens the memory instead. This ironic counterproductive effect reflects memories as traces in time, where the attempts of erasure paradoxically reinforce them.
People can engage with the machine by pulling the pen attached on the box to inscribe memories they wish to forget. This action activates a pulley system that raises a stamp block. When people release the pen, the stamp block will drive the nails into the wood block, imprinting the trace of "FORGOT".
During the process, the will to forget unwanted memories is transformed into the power of imprinting, and a tension lies between the "FORGOT" as both textual erasure and physical trace. The will to erase traces ironically deepens it instead, mirroring the experience that attempting to forget unwanted memories intensifies them. The absurdity experienced during interaction expose human will to a greater context of time and gravity, revealing the impossibility of forgetting and illuminating the interconnectedness of traces and time, anti-traces and gravity.
Nailed it (2024)
Kinetic sculpture, 60*60*30cm, Wood, mild steel, hammer, and Arduino.
An installation in which a hammer repeatedly keeps smashing downwards whilst rotating 360 degrees. Unfortunately, it never hits any of the 12 nails but only hits the gaps between the nails, and thus I played a word game in the title of the work Nailed It and the eternal cycle of the hammer’s failure.
