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Frame the Framer:
The Analytical Loop in "Excavating"
The Installation “Excavating the Ruins” is a project to resume the institutional analysis which involves a quasi-museum look of displaying photographs. A well-like brick construction containing photographs taken from a historical plantation ruins is surrounded by pedestals topped with glass cases. The subject matter of the encased photographs are signs taken from the same site, with one reading “Well- Exact Use Unknown.” Over on the background, similar photographs of the signs are pinned on the wall and centered by black bottomless boxframes. As an ensemble, they attempt to represent the process of excavation with artifacts (both the signs and the photographs  of signs) and a model of reconstructed site (connotatively or symbolically). The work started with a fascination about the semiotic relationship between the signifier (the vehicle that conveys meaning) and the signified (the message that is being conveyed), and alluded to the human activity of planting signs, including the categorical work in museology. Noticing the signifier is essentially about the frame in this case, the institutional framing then came to be in focus and was held under scrutiny.
Signs: The Map of Meaning
As an extension of the museal classification, the signs from the  site indicate an attempt to incorporate (reduce) the heterogeneity of the places into similar rectangularly framed texts that endorse meaning to its receiver. With most of the artifacts and building being destroyed and ceased to exist, the receivers are often the empty space where the objects used to be located, in other words, the sign is constructing a virtual rendering for the space. So, whether one reads “This well supplied water for...” in front of a brick hole or “Flambeau Kettle” on a flat ground with no obvious trace of any construction, it is the sign that maps the function of the space - the factory facility it once was, or the museum object in a historical ruins now. Eugenio Donato provides us with insight to this system in his essay about museology:
The set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe. The fiction is that a repeated metonymic displacement of fragment for totality, object to label, series of objects to series of labels, can still produce a representation which is somehow adequate to a nonlinguistic universe... Should the fiction disappear, there is nothing left of the museum but “bric-a-brac...” a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects (which are incapable of substituting themselves either metonymically for the original objects or the metaphorically for their representation.
Frames: Means to make sign
In this sense, the signs in the installation, articulated as the series of labels in Donato’s, can epitomize the framing process by the institution , which surfaces as the subject under deconstruction in my work. The signs, therefore, are isolated by the installation as artifacts, recorded and framed parodically by photographs taken with a plastic camera and printed full-frame (a traditional photography trope that indicates an uncropped, “original” image). The use of plastic camera is a reductivist gesture to enhance the notion of archive which also resonates the act of photographing the banal, visually insignificant signs. The printed frame, on the other hand, signifies the tradition that sanctifies  the legitimacy for an art object. Both kind of institutionalization are further framed, preserved, and connotatively analyzed by the procedure of quasi-ethnographic display. Moreover, at the end of the wall pieces, one empty frame is followed by a black square painted on the wall, revealing that all the prints are not only framed by the boxes, but alone with those boxes they are also attached to the gallery wall, another framing device.
Looping the Analysis
The repetitive reflexive practice to frame the framer is a try to build up the conscious of where one is in relation to these parameters for both the artist  and the viewer. It is an unveiling of the institutional coding of art and artifacts - to demystify the “fiction,” which one takes for granted that the classification and ordering through this coding can produce a universal, understandable truth or representation. However, the installation can still be argued as situating in the center of this fiction, but the preemptive reflexivity, hopefully, could prevent the work from reflecting such authority that it intends to critique. The assumption for  trancendentality in André Malraux’s “Museum without walls” is an example of rejecting the art properties as objects, and using photography’s indifferent reproduction to emancipate the pattern of talent from the work’s original function and identity. But when photography enters the museum as a new legitimate art medium, its privilege as the pure vessel in this homogenizing show is undermined. Trying to avoid that problem in “Excavating,” the photographs of the “normal” aesthetic picture taken from the ruins were resting in the well of “exact purpose unknown.” The act of recouping significance from existed entity by photographic reproduction is then put under interrogation, which logically allude to the products made by the same mechanical process displayed on the pedestals and the walls. This makes the photographic framing itself an anthropological subject to be studied, and becoming one of the link in the loop of this analysis.
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