Event 3: Jeanine Oleson: Conduct Matters

           Last week, I went to Hammer Museum, and saw the exhibition from Jeanine Oleson. Jeanine Oleson is a New York artist working with photography, performance, film, video, sound and installation. Also, she explores themes in many different areas, such as audience, language, spirituality and music. Oleson is interested in certain materials and their transformation through process, such as copper. She is trying to explore the relationship of language to matter and matter to body.

            The title of this exhibition is Conduct Matters. Oleson was interested in copper as an elemental material of great mystery, also she thought copper was also a product of late capitalism’s design and control. In this exhibition, there is a video at the first, and the video is about a three – channel work that follows four characters as they explore caves, refineries. This video shows how late capitalism has isolated workers and disconnected them from nature and the land. After this video, a character gives a speech outside of a mine, and she speaks about site specificity and geological time. In the speech, a question asked by Oleson over and over again, which is “what dose it mean to feel with our bodies?” To explore this question, she and her colleagues set a textile on the floor, a television screen and a clay speaker, all of which are connected through copper wires. They tried to connect everything together.

            The Conduct Matter exhibition was fantastic. I am a biology major student, and before I saw this exhibition, I only know that copper is a conduct matters and it used in our daily life. I have never considered it can also as a conduct that can connect out body to the nature and everything. Actually, after this exhibition, what I understand is that Oleson are trying to find a matter that can connect everything together, not only limited by copper. Also, through this matter, human can fulfill that people can involve themselves in the nature and society, and they can know their value in this society. Also, she is trying to eliminate discrimination in the whole world. No matter what the job are you doing, you have the position and right in the society. No matter what the society structure is, people should have connection with the nature and society, and no one can be isolated from the world.