Andrea Liu

Andrea Liu is a New York/Berlin-based artist/critic whose work often deals with rendering critical theory performative, the friction of the image/text binary, and problematizing the seamless ideological production (and ingestion) of images. Her work inhabits an interdisciplinary no man’s land where a clear demarcation between theory, text, performance, or image disintegrates; working in hybrid dyads such as theory/performance, text/performance, text/image, performance/political speech, dance/political speech.

Since 2007 she was awarded/attended 16 artist residencies, including Atlantic Center for the Arts, Museum of Fine Arts Houston Core, Jacob’s Pillow, Ox-Bow (Art Institute of Chicago), Millay Colony, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Art & Law Program, ZKU-Berlin, Christiania Researcher-in-Residence, Homesession Barcelona, Centrale Fies Liveworks Performance Act Award, and was a core participant in Anton Vidokle’s New Museum Nightschool. Her performance/work has been shown at S.A.L.E. Docks (collateral event of 56th Venice Biennial), Dixon Place, Artists Space (Movement Research Dance Improv Festival), Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, NGBK, Flutgraben, Jan Van Eyck Academie Alumni Conference, the Affect Factory (NYU Performance Studies Conf), and she was director/founder of “Counterhegemony: Art in a Social Context” Fellowship Program. She received her undergraduate education at Yale and thereafter studied literary criticism at Centre Parisien D’Etudes Critiques.

After leaving the museum, The Viewer, the Spectator, the Observer, the Perceiver, and the Eye all go to a bar at the corner. The Viewer orders a martini (dry), the Spectator orders a Heineken, the Observer orders white wine, the Perceiver is allergic to alcohol, and the Eye orders a vodka. The Eye — so pretentious — talks about modernism’s self-reflexivity. The Spectator just came back from shopping at the Mall where she bought a rayon blouse on sale, she just wants a selfie with a Picasso. The Viewer we have no information on, he-she was just a statistic in the "How to Increase Audiences at Museums" 76 page report in the blue binder.

Fast forward 30 years, the Viewer, The Spectator, the Observer, the Perceiver and the Eye have all been superannuated. Nobody needs them now, they are SOOOOOO 1992. Now we have the Twitter Freak, the Power User, I-Post-Therefore-I-Am, the Instagram Sycophant, and the Benevolent Cloud.

"Theory Monster: I Post, Therefore I Am", a solo exhibition of Andrea Liu at La Centrale Galerie, looks at the ontology of audience formation and perception through the prism of our global, uncharted and extemporaneous digitized/online mass collectivity. The exhibition deals with the mass global transition from an analogue spectatorship to a digital spectatorship, the affective space of the screen, the exteriorized projections of the self implicit in the construction of the cyber "I", and the culture of instantaneity. One of modernism’s signature features was the reflection on its medium incorporated into the work of visual art itself (à la Clement Greenberg’s medium specificity). Dance’s "postmodernism" was visual art’s "modernism"; it was not until its postmodernist era that dance reflected on its medium within the work itself. Now has come the time for social media to reflect on itself as a medium and incorporate this self-reflexivity into the medium itself.

This exhibition also includes two performances :
Cyber-selfing the "I" and the I/Me Cyber-couplet (Nov 2nd, 5 PM)
“Visitor One Thru Eight” (Nov 5, 6PM)

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THEORY MONSTER: I POST, THEREFORE I AM

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