The Actant Doesn’t Speak: Configuring a Law for Research on Humans

Abstract

The author of these lines was neither a physicist, nor an alchemist nor even a charlatan. Xiao Yu, a Chinese artist who has gained much attention in Western countries precisely as a consequence of his startling artistic positions, wrote this description of his work. Xiao Yu became the object of a major controversy in Switzerland when a suit referring specifically to his installation was brought against the Kunstmuseum (the museum of fine arts) in Bern. The installation, Ruan, was displayed in the museum on the occasion of an exhibit of Chinese contemporary art (entitled Mahjong) in 2005. For this work, the artist had sewn the head of a human foetus onto a pigeon carcass and, thus, created a chimera (see Figure 1). Journalist Adrien De Riedmatten took offence when he visited the exhibit, and subsequently brought criminal charges against the museum based on the portrayal of violence, cruelty to animals and ‘for disturbing the peace of the dead’.

I combine the chickens, ducks, rabbits and mice according to my own rules in order to evoke the conditioned reflex in my audience about the absurdity of human rules and the perplexity, which paralyzes our thinking. This is why some viewers associate my stitched-together mice with the rules of marriage or military, my assembled animal groups with social classes … The appearance of emotional symptoms drives people to thinking, but is in itself not deadly. (Kunstmuseum Bern, 2005b)