Rockbund Art Museum 上海外滩美术馆

The Rockbund Art Museum is very pleased to present the first institutional solo exhibition in China by the renowned German artist Tobias Rehberger. If you don’t use your eyes to see, you will use them to cry will be on display from 23 March to 26 May, 2019. Rehberger’s multifaceted work has been instrumental to expanding the possibilities of sculpture, spanning a diverse range of fields that include design, architecture, and conceptual art. The exhibition looks to showcase newly commissioned works and site-specific installations created especially for the Rockbund Art Museum. Through an array of visually confounding objects and environments, Rehberger continues to pioneer a range of production techniques and forms of social intervention that explore how we interact with space and perceive the connection between everyday life and art.

Born in 1966, Esslingen, Germany, the Frankfurt-based Rehberger was a student of Martin Kippenberger and Thomas Bayrle, and is noted for later contributions that place him among a generation of artists in the 90s whose cross-disciplinary approaches redefined ideas of shared authorship and controlled chance as a catalyst for making art. Larys Frogier, Director of the Rockbund, anticipates Rehberger’s exhibition as follows: “During the exhibition, the artist will transform the building of our institution into a space that looks to appeal to passersby or those who rarely venture into the museum. Through the transition of moving from the outside into the exhibition, the audience will be immersed into a dazzling alternative world that subverts the boundaries of these different realities. By intervening onto our museum structure, Rehberger re-routes the logic of our social norms, therefore opening up new entry points to imagine how art can fuse together with our life.”

The exhibition’s title, If you don’t use your eyes to see, you will use them to cry, is a truism that expresses the connection between how we choose to see the world and the importance of this decision in defining the quality of our experience and engagement with it. Adept at incorporating public environments and everyday objects into his work, Rehberger brings a butcher shop, flower arrangements, a teahouse, a bar, and public signage to occupy the different floors of the Museum. Many of these works play with notions of collective memory and cultural displacement, highlighting the way ideas circulate and transform in new contexts.

Outside of the museum, a neon sign hints at the fully functional "butcher shop" that now sits on the first floor. On the second floor is Vase Portrait series (1997 to 2016), an “exhibition within an exhibition,” in which a collection of more than 50 uniquely composed flower-adorned sculptures form an homage to and reveal the aesthetic quirks of a community of artists and friends associated with the artist. A teahouse on the third floor incorporates Western misinterpretations of a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, the design of the structure diverging from the procedures of this highly-prescribed ritual to create a new type of gathering. On the fourth floor, the artist has created an impressive display of LED light sculptures that mimic the commercial signage systems found in outdoor public spaces. Free Coffee Free Parking Freedom (plug & play version) (2018) invites the audience to remotely control the brightness and level of noise in the space as the lights synchronize to music played from a mobile phone. The fifth-floor mezzanine will display a new iteration of the artist’s ongoing Pixels series (2019), which asks the viewer to constantly adjust his or her distance in relation to a vivid sequence of monochrome mosaic tiles. Depending on one's perspective, the work appears alternately as an abstract composition of colors or a panoramic landscape of images.

In Rehberger’s exhibition, viewers are treated to a multisensory aesthetic experience where the artworks are enriched with new meaning through the act of seeing and engaging. Occupying the entire top-floor of the museum， Forbidden in heaven, useless in hell (El Redomon version) (2019) is a social artwork that functions as a bar. Conceived in collaboration with the Shanghai-based bar Blackbird, the bar is open only at night. From ceiling to floor, and extending to the furniture, the entire surfaces of the bar have been covered by the artist—an evolution of his series inspired by ‘dazzle’ camouflage, a motif that has formed the basis of many of his projects including his Golden Lion-winning installation at the 53rd Venice Biennale.

Marking a unique site-specific public commission for the museum, the audience can therefore drink at a bar boasting an impressive view of a giant indoor “sun sculpture,” which blinks on and off according to the rise and set of the sun in El Redomon, Argentina, which is positioned on the exact opposite point of the globe to Shanghai. The collaboration between the Rehberger and Blackbird also extends to the first floor butcher shop with another artwork that gives the opportunity for viewers to not only look at, but also to enjoy a menu of meat-based items that can be eaten on-site or taken away. As co-curator Billy Tang remarks, a “key concern running throughout the floors of the museum is a desire to challenge the segmentation of art by mixing it with other areas of society. The exhibition includes the essential input of a wide list of collaborators—florists, artists, craftsmen, butchers, or bartenders—and each of these elements brings something unpredictable. There are works that go beyond our typical opening time and this challenges our habit of trying to grasp the entire exhibition in a single moment.”

For the duration of If you don’t use your eyes to see, you will use them to cry, Rockbund Art Museum will host a series of public programming and educational events further expanding on the themes explored in the exhibition.

2019年3月23日到5月26日，上海外滩美术馆将很荣幸地举办世界知名的德国艺术家托比亚斯·雷贝格（Tobias Rehberger）在中国的首次机构个展：“如果你的眼睛不用来看，就会用来哭”（If you don’t use your eyes to see, you will use them to cry）。雷贝格多重维度的创作将雕塑的可能性延伸至设计、建筑、观念艺术等诸多领域。此次展览将特别展示艺术家为上海外滩美术馆量身定做的数件全新委托作品和大型场域装置。通过创造一系列令人眼花缭乱的物件和环境，雷贝格持续开拓新的生产技术和社会干预形式，探索我们如何与空间互动并感知日常生活与艺术之间的联系。

现居法兰克福的托比亚斯·雷贝格1966年生于德国埃斯林根，师从马丁·基彭伯格（Martin Kippenberger）和托马斯·拜勒（Thomas Bayrle）。在九十年代，雷贝格和他的同代艺术家们跨领域的工作方式重新定义了共有作者权、控制下的偶然性作为艺术创作的催化剂等概念，并获得世界声誉。上海外滩美术馆馆长拉瑞斯·弗洛乔在谈及雷贝格的展览时说：“在展览期间，美术馆将被艺术家转变为路人、或平时鲜少走入美术馆的人也会好奇的场所。从美术馆的室外进入，观众随即被美术馆令人炫目的世界所包围，不同现实的界限被颠覆。通过介入美术馆的结构，雷贝格重设了社会规范的逻辑，从而开辟了想象艺术如何与生活交融在一起的切入点。”

展览的英文标题译为“如果你不用你的眼睛去看，那就用它们去哭泣”，表达了我们选择如何看这个世界与这个决定如何影响我们的经验和参与之间的联系。雷贝格擅长以公共场所或日常使用的物件为创作元素，在美术馆各个楼层分别设立了肉铺、花艺、茶馆、酒吧和公共招牌等。其中许多作品探索了集体记忆和文化迁移的概念，突显了概念在不同语境中流通和转变的方式。

悬挂于门口的霓虹灯招牌暗示着一家“肉铺”出其不意地出现在美术馆一层。展览的二楼是一个“个展中的群展”，名为《肖像花瓶》系列（1997-2016年）的50件独特的花艺雕塑作品呈现了雷贝格与其身边的艺术家和友人的美学奇想，也是雷贝格对他们的致敬。而三楼的茶馆（2019年）则吸取了西方人对于日本茶道的误解，全新设计的结构与茶道这种高度制式化的传统仪式大相径庭，一种新的聚会模式由此产生。走进四楼展厅，艺术家仿照户外公共空间中的商业招牌，使用LED灯塑造了名为《免费咖啡免费泊车自由（随插即玩版本）》（2018年）的灯光雕塑，观众可以通过手机来遥控作品所在空间的明暗和声响，灯光与手机上播放的音乐同步。环绕着五楼四壁的是艺术家正在进行的《像素》系列（2019年）的最新版本，观众需要不断调整角度和距离，识别由单色马赛克砖组成的、被像素化的消费图像。根据观众视角的不同，这件作品时而是抽象的色块，时而化作全景的景观。

在雷贝格的展览中，观众通过多重感官的审美体验，在观看作品的同时也不断改变着作品的面貌，其观看与参与赋予作品新的含义。占据美术馆顶层的是一间酒吧，也是一件社会雕塑。与上海本地的酒吧Blackbird合作，这间酒吧只在夜晚营业。从天花板、地板到家具，酒吧的所有表面都被艺术家的图案覆盖，延续了他以炫目的迷彩为灵感的系列创作。雷贝格的许多作品都以这一主题为基础，其中包括他在第53届威尼斯双年展上获得金狮奖的装置作品。

在这一独特的、场域特定的公共作品中，观众可以一边在酒吧喝酒一边欣赏巨型室内“日光雕塑”。雕塑的光芒随着阿根廷埃尔雷多蒙镇的日出日落而闪烁。埃尔雷多蒙处于上海在地球上正好相反的位置。雷贝格和Blackbird的合作也扩展到了一楼的肉铺，观众不仅能够观赏这件作品，还能在现场食用或打包带走一系列肉类产品。正如资深策展人曾明俊所言：“贯穿美术馆各个楼层的关键意图是通过将艺术与其他社会领域相结合来挑战艺术的细分化。展览包括广泛的合作者：花艺师、艺术家、手艺人、肉贩、建筑师或调酒师，他们其中每一个人的重要参与都带来了不可预知的情境。有些作品逾越了美术馆的常规开放时间，而这也挑战了我们试图在一个单一的时刻领略全部展览的习惯。”

“如果你的眼睛不用来看，就会用来哭”展览期间，上海外滩美术馆将举办一系列公共教育活动，以进一步探讨展览中涵盖的话题。