Not Another Art History Paper
Faye Gleisser & Ding Ren Conversation Piece
2008

Ding says I’m being complicit this semester and I think we all are. We talk in her dark-room-studio turned conceptual art/photography storage cell. Boyfriend’s drum set pushed against the wall. A triangular pile of red balloon shards on the floor and the smell of photo chemicals loosely outside.    
                                                  
We talk about sound proofing the cinder block walls that broadcast I WISH I HAD THOUGHT OF THAT in black paper cut-outs.

We talk about people.

Because identity is of interest to critics.

We talk about cameras.
We talk about space.

Ding hasn’t realized the ideal environment for her art just yet. Maybe one day a book, but for now shadow boxes on the wall. For now I just like construction paper. For now My art is thinking.

This is what spring break looks like for an artist and an aspiring art historian.

This semester, Ding has been avoiding the places she’s expected, filling the spaces she doesn’t necessarily belong. This semester she’s been unhinging the kinds of plots that all students wish they had conjured up first.

We can call them social and institutional interventions.

Once a week Ding attends a class that she has not registered for. Economics. Business law. Ding catches limited liability partnership parameters and steps out of her artist shoes for a moment. For the final exam she signs her name “Bose Wo” which translates to “not me” in Chinese. Somewhere a teaching assistant pours over a class roster and panics.

Another intervention sits materialized on the counter: framed documentation of Ding’s “Replacement Performance Project,” an endeavor that allowed her to contract art-minded people to fill her seat in an obligatory MFA Critical Practices Class. Despite Vito Acconci being too busy to serve as part of the anti-establishment apparatus, Ding’s contracted artistic personas enhanced the critiques and enlivened conversation: So Ding could cut paper. 

And the hallway was forested with empty squares. And everyone was happy.

Yet, sitting on the floor of her conceptual art stock yard, Ding confides: I think the trajectory of art is wrong. And I would have to agree. All we can think about is complicity these days. The contracts are an inflammatory condition. Complicity as infestation. Inevitably, somewhere, someday a reversal must occur—less will have to become more again. There will be a paring down. A Scissors- replace-process determination. This precipitation stirs Ding’s art. Gets it going. Like John Cage, she too is working with the silence, making something from the wake of complicity’s nothing. Her work says not me as it walks from here to there. 

And I can’t help but follow it.