“The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, an art which one can see has let itself be thrown by the explosions of the last week, which is forever gathering up its limbs after yesterday’s crash. The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, holding fast to the intellect of their time, bleeding from hands and hearts.”
– Dada Manifesto, 1918
Nearly a century after Tristan Tzara penned these polemical words, arguing for an art that bleeds along with society, we continue to live in a blatantly violent age in which the duality of politics – veering between reason and irrationality, prudence and excess, action and impotence – plays out in our seemingly mundane lives. In my work, a cartoon character, the Blob, is quietly blown up, hung, slashed and bruised. She hovers in a state of tension between naïve play and nameless cruelty. As the initiator of these conditions, the character functions for me as agar in a Petri dish, a seemingly neutral vehicle for the mingling and festering of my own fears and anxieties. My work is driven by an impulse towards the political, the personal, and the absurd. Living in a cultural moment that readily renders trauma monumental and in the collective, I am loath to create works that are didactic and point to ready ideologies. Rather, I am more likely to harness the tools of satire to subvert traditional political and cultural commentary and representations of violence.
- Audrey Chan, 2004
Click to view images:
The French Blob comics, 2002-4
BA Thesis Exhibition, 2004
Photo series, 2005