聲音的拓樸式外交－－論余政達的「語音－藝術」

黃建宏



余政達屬於沒有經歷過解嚴前後劇烈的「認同」論戰的世代，但卻身處面對最多不同族群之共生問題的時代，也因此，他創作的特色就在於他的藝術想像能夠在脫離歷史脈絡的狀況下，與歷史脈絡極為清晰而深刻的社會現實進行對話。他的創作從〈腹語者〉（2007）、〈她是我阿姨〉（2008）一直到〈附身【聲】者：介紹〉（2008）中明確地出現了一個焦點，論者將這個焦點稱為「自我分裂的政治性暗示」，其形式是一種「mise-en-l'abîme」：製造出得以生產不同意義的裂縫。例如〈腹語者〉與〈附身【聲】者：介紹〉創作者匿身於正向面對攝影機的發聲者（或說敘述者）之後，提供「語音」和「文本」，語言的權力關係與身體的權力關係之間出現了一種倒錯關係，或說〈她是我阿姨〉中對於因缺乏歷史聯繫而分裂的影音進行重新縫合，可是該縫合卻相對地凸顯出內在的無法縫合。其中的「政治性暗示」成為一種無意中「出現」的政治意識或政治性，這種無意中的「出現」就是存在於事件與現象中的「生命政治」（bio-politique）痕跡；換言之，「逃逸－暗示」得以在作品所操作的各種「自我分裂」形式中，例如用親屬關係指稱歇斯底里的激情示威者，或說，用異鄉人的身體與聲音講述自己的「虛構」，不斷創造出各種「皺摺」（pli），政治性就出現在構成皺摺的兩側薄片之間，出現在逃逸所繞行出的「間距」（écart）裡。無疑地，這個間距是在想像運行中出現的剩餘空間，它使得藝術家的政治關懷變得曖昧不明，儘管通過這繞行表達出對於政治的「冷感」，但余政達並不因此而隔絕於「政治性」之外，相反地，他的創作讓這些間距成為「潛在」（virtuel）連繫，連繫到一種沒有確認任何想像物（imaginaire）的想像起始。這種新式的政治藝術──不要求政治意識形態與藝術意圖之間的同一性──直接面對著一種「外交」之外的「外交」。　


外交，除了作為一種國際關係的巨型描繪之外，在個體的想像建構中則是一個涉及數（國家的集體性再現）與延伸（跨越國界）的問題。但這樣的差距一直以「投射」（幾何學）的方式來完成個體與國家間在外交事務中的同一性；余政達新近的作品〈附身【聲】者：梁美蘭與艾蜜莉蘇〉（2009）延續著2008年的〈附身【聲】者：介紹〉開啟了另一種「數」的問題，換句話說以不具名的自己以及無法確定國籍同一性的他者作為延伸的單位，在〈附身【聲】者：介紹〉中以自身與他者的鄰近關係，友善的合作關係與發音不斷出現滑移之間有著強烈的拉扯，他通過數（發聲個體）自身的複合與分化勾勒出另一種連結。換句話說，他並不處理數與數之間幾何學式的投射關係，相對地，它讓個體與個體之間的連結被移譯為個體內在的分化，而表現出一種外交架構下的單一數，或說是一種微型外交。這種通過「交換語音」的「話語」甚至行為與「歌聲」所進行的拓樸式外交，跟經由文字與契約的委任制所完成的投影式外交（或說巨觀式外交）正好形成強烈的對比，甚至可能從其中形成一種藝術面對政治所給出的對抗關係。

從〈附身【聲】者：介紹〉（2008）中的對話層次，我們可以更為清晰地切入余政達創作中所提供的可能性，黑影人的話語引導不僅僅是「翻譯」與「他治」（hétéronomie）的形式再現，更為豐富的則是互動中所產生的張力，以及置身某種制約中主體姿態的抵抗──複製、對話、挪用與脫離──，並且在身體的再現配置中，讓身體的再現連結上生命與政治的相關問題，余政達的黑影人，並不單純地作為「劇作家」或「偶戲師傅」，同時是相當於一只面具的分裂症病人，「分裂」成為避開投影式外交，而試圖以「破風」、「走音」的語言滲透「身體之間」。然而，在2009年的新作〈附身【聲】者：梁美蘭與艾蜜莉蘇〉中除了延續〈附身【聲】者：介紹〉的鄰接式外交的主題之外，還匯集了〈她是我阿姨〉（2008）中用虛構完成的鄰接行動。他在金萬萬大樓這棟菲律賓工作者所聚集的場所，找到了幾位自願的受訪者或說「合作者」，除了進行勞動狀況與移民經驗的調查之外，藝術家同時實驗著新的「分裂」形式。他不再匿身於「發言人」身後，請發言人敘述出藝術家依據發言人的身分與狀態所建立的「虛構」，而立於不再是發言人的受訪人面前，藏身於鏡頭背後進行提問，也不再為受訪人虛構其話語，相對地，他蒐集著發言人的真實描述；語言間的滑移不再發生於意義之外的語音「揣摩」，而發生於「對質」之中，發生在為了表達意義而出現的語音交雜與走音；再則，藝術家安排的歌唱錄像，形成了一個極為不同的「解放」情境，歌聲的介入帶進了另一種勞動者的身體，一種在現實中「逃離」勞動條件的身體，在另一種語言中將自己從勞動與移民的現實中解放出來的行為，不再將勞動者身體的努力框限在一具先決被「悲情化」或「邊緣化」的容貌或身形，而是將受訪者移置到一種臨時的「酒神」時刻。

這些「類－記錄」能夠使作品逃離紀錄片者，並非鏡頭的風格式語言或是影像攝製的倫理界定，而是受訪者的「走音」與敘述中在不同語言間的「移轉」，以及面對術家提問語言的一種「不得不」的表演，這兩個因為語音與語言所產生的行為面向，這些語音的問題帶出了另一種表現性，這表現性引領我們脫離了一些慣常出現的議題式影像，觸及另一種當下臨場的「勞動」，一種「純為自身」的勞動：外籍工作者在工作地最為缺乏的不正是「表達自身」的時刻。而藝術家也在這臨時性的時刻裡，參與著另一種世界的演出：一種迴避著菁英外交辭令的「破話語」外交。

The Topological Foreign Affairs of Voice The “Phono – Art” of Cheng-Ta Yu

Huang Chien-Hung



Cheng-Ta Yu belongs to a generation too young to have experienced the severe battle of public opinion that raged around the question of “identity” in Taiwan during and after the 1987 lifting of martial law. Nonetheless, he lives in an era framed by a host of problems surrounding the coexistence of different ethnic groups, and because of this, the special quality of his art lies in his artistic imagination being able, in a state removed from historical developments, to engage in a highly limpid and profound dialogue with the realities of society regarding history. In his works Ventriloquism (2007), She is My Aunt (2008) and Ventriloquists: Introduction (2008), a focal point clearly emerged, which commentators have characterised as “self-fracturing political intimation”. Its form is a kind of mise-en-l'abîme: creating fissures that generate disparate meanings. For example, in Ventriloquism and Ventriloquists: Introduction, Yu hides behind a featured “speaker” who directly faces the camera, and it is in fact Yu that then provides “voice” and “text”. A kind of inverted relationship appears between the power relationships of language and the power relationships of the body. Similarly, in She is My Aunt, audio and video that have developed dissonance due to a lack of historical connection are stitched back together, yet they also correspondingly highlight an internal inability to reunite. The political allusions in Yu's works become a non-deliberate "surfacing" of political consciousness, or political nature. What unintentionally appears are the traces of a bio-politique that exists between incidents and phenomena. In other words, "evasion – implication" must exist within the various kinds of "self-fracturing" forms conjured in the work. For example, using familial relations to reference the extreme display of hysteria, or perhaps using the bodies and voices of outsiders to depict one’s own "fiction", constantly creating a kind of fold, in which politicality appears in the contrast between the two sides of the fold that is formed, and also in the gap carved-out by evasive circumnavigation. Indubitably, this gap is the extra space that appears in the activation of the imagination. It causes the artist’s political concern to become vague – through this circumnavigation the artist’s “cold feelings” toward politics are expressed, yet Yu does not consequently erect a barrier blocking out “politicality”. On the contrary, his creations allow these gaps to form virtual connections, by bringing together starting points for notions that are entirely unsubstantiated and imaginary. This new form of political art – which does not demand a homogeneity between political ideology and artistic image – directly addresses a form of “foreign affairs” extraneous to foreign affairs.

In addition to creating a giant portrait of international relations, the notion of foreign affairs, in individual imaginative constructions, is an issue that involves numbers (the collective re-creation of countries) and extension (the transcendence of national boundaries). But such discrepancy has always made use of a “projective” (geometrical) method to complete the uniformity between the individual and the country in foreign affairs. Yu’s latest work, Ventriloquists : Liang Mei-Lan and Emily Su is an expansion of his 2008 undertaking, Ventriloquists: Introduction, which embarked on an exploration of a different kind of “numerical” problem. In other words, in Ventriloquists: Introduction, an unnamed self and an other, whose common nationality is unverifiable, serve as the units of extension that shift between friendly cooperative relations and the slips of vocalisation. Through numbers (vocalising individuals) the contours of a different, compound, fissured form of the self are sketched out. In other words, the artist does not treat the geometrical projective relationships between number and number, but rather allows the connections between individual and individual to be rendered as internal differentiations, expressing a single numerality within the framework of foreign relations, or a kind of micro-foreign affairs. This “language” achieved through an “exchange of voice” or even the topological foreign affairs undertaken through behaviour and the “singing voice”, form a powerful contrast with the foreign affairs achieved through text and contract within the system of designated appointment (or, one might say, macro-foreign affairs), or even possibly an oppositional relationship formed as art confronts politics.

From the level of dialogue in Ventriloquists: Introduction, we can more clearly access the possibilities afforded in the works of Yu. The speech of the “human shadow” elicits not merely the re-representation of forms of “translation” and “heteronomy”, but even more fully, the tension produced through interaction, and a subjective posture of resistance when placed in a certain state of restriction – replication, dialogue, appropriation and severance – and moreover, accompanied with the reproduction of the body, allowing the reproduction of the body to connect to issues related to life and politics, Yu’s “human shadow” serves not simply as “scriptwriter” or “puppet master”, but also as a mask-like schizophrenic, whose “split” eschews projectivist foreign relations, attempting to permeate the “body” with sounds that are distorted and off-key. Yet in his new work of 2009, Ventriloquists: Liang Mei-Lan and Emily Su, Yu not only expands on the theme of proximal foreign affairs that he explored in Ventriloquists: Introduction, he also brings together the proximal action achieved through fiction that he employed in She is My Aunt. At Taipei’s Won Won Building, where Filipino labourers often congregate, Yu found several willing interviewees, or “collaborators”. In addition to doing a survey of their labour conditions and the experience of being an immigrant, the artist also experimented with a new “split” form. He no longer hides behind an “enunciator”, who is asked to narrate the “fiction” that the artist has constructed based on the speaker’s status and state, but instead Yu hides behind the camera and asks questions while standing in front of the interviewee. He also no longer invents fictional language on behalf of the interviewee, but correspondingly collects real descriptions from the speakers. Slips in language no longer occur in “inferences” of vocalisation beyond the sphere of denotative meaning, but rather emanate from “confrontation”, from convoluted vocalisations and off-key sounds that occur in order to express meaning. Furthermore, the artist arranges videos of singing, forming an extremely different scenario of “liberation”. The introduction of song incites a different bodily expression in the labourer, a body set within reality yet “escaping” the conditions of labour. Using a different kind of language, a form of behaviour liberating oneself from the realities of labour and immigration, the hard work of the labourer’s body is no longer framed within a predetermined “tragic” or “marginalised” appearance or form; instead, the interviewee is relocated to an extemporaneous “dithyrambic” moment.

These “type – documentations” are what allow the work to transcend the status of a documentary, not the lens’ stylistic language or the theoretical delineation produced by the images. Because of the behavioural facets engendered by voice and language in the interviewee’s “off-key” vocalisations and narrations in the “transpositions” between different languages, and the performances they “can’t help” but give in response to the artist’s interrogative language, these issues of vocalisation incite a different kind of expressiveness. This expressiveness leads us to move beyond the limited number of topical images that customarily appear, and touch upon an alternative form of immediately present “labour”, a kind of “purely personal” labour: a moment when foreign workers at their place of work do not lack “self-expression”. And in a spontaneous moment, the artist takes part in the acting-out of a different kind of world: a foreign affairs of “broken language” that veers clear of elitist diplomatic rhetoric.