“ Declaration ”

About “ Declaration ”

“Declaration” was made for an on-campus installation art exhibition on “freedom”. Quite straightforwardly, we built a tunnelway using frames, and with black and white stripes evocative of prison uniforms, and thus incarceration. When the audience crossed through the tunnel, they were experiencing for themselves the definition of breaking through constraints and the difficulties in the fight for freedom. The piece was installed in the middle of the alley between the male and female dormitories, which in a sense alluded to the sense of oppression and imprisonment imposed by the cramped and overcrowded dorm rooms.

Audience Participation

During the exhibition, the piece drew negative comments on the NTNU public social website “Kobeshida” (or NTNU Hate, a website on which people express their discontent about the school), which stated this piece coming out of nowhere had occupied their living space and blocked their way. In defense against their complaint of inconvenience, the artists retorted that the audience did not know how to appreciate artworks, and that since the work had been made not mainly for aesthetic purposes, the audience and residents could not identify it as a piece of art. By the end of the exhibition, audience had started to go to great lengths to restore their right of way by moving and bending the work, claiming it to be their way of fighting for freedom.

Reflections on “ Declaration ”

The negative comments similarly evoked our anger, and artists and their audience were unable to calmly discuss the incident. There was a great gap between their complaint of intrusion upon their lives and our claim of the meaning of the piece: we could not understand why they would not read the introduction on the work, whereas they could not comprehend how these tremendous hurdles could actually be a piece of installation art.

After a few months we were finally able to regain our calm and reflect on ourselves: maybe it was true that we failed to make the audience feel otherwise than obstructed, ill at ease, and kept out with barricades, and though they moved and vandalized the piece in protest, it could actually be their way of fighting against restrictions and pleading for freedom. Maybe this indeed was how the work had inspired them to fight for their own freedom.

We all learned a lesson in this incident that in the making of public art the artist has to take into account how the work can “exist in harmony” with its setting, as public artworks are only for display but have to interact with their backdrops and the people around them in the long term. Also, it was only then that we realized our works had never before been taken out of our comfort zones to be in contact with real audience, so we never had a chance to consider how others would appreciate and understand our artworks. In a sense, we also learned to break out the confines of artistic life and involve the world outside.