冷與熱——以雕塑之名

Fever and Cold: In the Name of Sculpture

早在1993年，呂清夫便曾以〈十年來臺灣現代雕塑之走向：一個雕塑公園熱的年代〉一文，指出當時臺灣的「現代雕塑」遭遇了朝向景觀的發展，其形式標誌於台座的取消，但這些觀察無非凸顯了某種有別於雕塑存有論的政治經濟因素的宏觀存在，另一方面，90年代初卻也是臺灣當代藝術的初始階段，置身於斯時情境下的雕塑，卻也擁有較諸當時多半侷限於學院的當代藝術潮流一個更早地遭遇了公共性的條件。劉柏村1994年受國美館委託的公共藝術作品〈人與房子關係－－不安〉可以視為這種情境下的時代產物，以景觀之名回應著時代的大他者期許，然而，這種被預期成為景觀的雕塑還是先要擁有某種「熱」－－這種「熱」有其傾向與主觀層面，倘若我們將焦點轉向90年代學院內部，其實不難發現，在高等藝術教育領域的雕塑存有論一直隱含著某種穿梭於框架內外的感知構造－－〈人與房子關係－－不安〉一作中被過度凸顯的框架，乃至劉柏村1997年後的「金剛」系列創作，在在凸顯了在偏冷的雕塑存有論議題的旁邊，仍存在著某種冷與熱持續交錯的當代雕塑特質，一方面是延續自現代主義的自由造型理念，另一方面卻是平行於前者的某種「後設」特徵，而從更年輕一代的藝術家的雕塑實踐來看，框架的後設性質則逐步地轉換為某種反身性思考的源泉，我們或可將冷與熱視為雕塑存有論迄今的重要殘留。

As early as 1993, Ching-Fu Lu noted in his essay Taiwanese Modern Sculpture in the Past Decade: An Era of Sculpture Park Fever that modern sculpture in Taiwan at the time was being turned into a part of the landscape, with its form marked by the disappearance of the pedestal; however, these observations only highlighted the existence of certain macroscopic political and economic factors separate from the ontology of sculpture. Also, the early 1990s was when contemporary art began to emerge in Taiwan, thus sculpture within this context had an earlier encounter with external, public conditions than contemporary art trends that were mostly confined to art academies then. Commissioned by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Po- Chun Liu's work of public art Man Vs. House-- Anxiety (1994) can be regarded as a product of the aforementioned context, responding to the expectations of the greater Other as a part of the landscape. Nevertheless, this kind of sculpture, expected to become part of the landscape, must first possess a certain“heat”-- a kind of heat that has its own inclination and subjectivity. Were we to shift our focus to art academies in the 1990s, it would not, in fact, be difficult to find that, within the academies, the ontology of sculpture in higher art education has always implied a certain kind of perceptual structure that weaves in and out of the framework. Everything from the over-emphasized framework in Po-Chun Liu’s Man Vs. House-- Anxiety to his Jin Gang series (from 1997 onwards) highlights the fact that next to the“colder”ontology of sculpture, a certain interplay of“fever”and“cold”still exists in contemporary sculpture, which is on the one hand a continuation of the modernist concept of free form, and on the other a metafeature parallel to the former. As shown by the practices of a younger generation of sculptors, the“meta”nature of the framework has been gradually transformed into the source of a kind of reflexive thinking, so perhaps we can consider this“fever”and“cold”as an important remnant of the ontology of sculpture thus far.