Elad Lassry
RESTRUCTURED HISTORIES
By Akira Rachi
Bell Peppers (2012), C-print, painted frame, 29.2 x 36.8 x 3.8 cm. All images: Unless otherwise noted, courtesy Elad Lassry and Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo.
Interview:
ART iT: You are best known for your photographs, but actually have a diverse practice that spans films, sculptural objects and performance. Seeing your exhibition here at Rat Hole Gallery, what struck me is that in your works the frame acts like a container into which any kind of image can be placed. Can you explain more about the relationship between image and frame in your work, as well as how you select the images that you use?
EL: I began the process of questioning the relationship between image and frame in school. I would create image archives, collecting images from different sources and genres - images made for commercial purposes, like headshots and publicity shots; images from instructional books and text books; images from manuals and so on. Then, in considering all of these images, I would start by locating the aspects that I found to be problematic or questionable. Sometimes, when I found a particularly haunted image, I would use it as I had found it. But when an image didn't exactly fit my questions, and instead revoked the questions I wanted to emphasize, I would respond by making a picture of my own.
What I noticed is that I was responding with my own archive, making my own pictures in response to archives that had entered into circulation and been affirmed or recognized by other institutions or authorities. And the frame became a way to articulate this condition of making new pictures that are the ghosts of hundreds of other pictures. I wanted my pictures to have the quality of the readymade or something that already exists in the world. There had to be a duality to them: they are singular and exist in the frame, but at the same time, the frame is also a host for a picture that can change.
ART iT: What led you to start using this kind of frame?
EL: I was not interested in photography so much as I was in pictures. It was a troubling position for me, because I was surrounding myself with pictures, but my rationale for this diverged from what Modernist notions of photography find to be curious about pictures. As such, in displaying my pictures, I was tempted to respond with something that would evoke a shelf, although I didn't want to resort to such an easy solution.
At the same time, I found the color frames to be problematic. They were almost embarrassing, and still are. They are potentially ugly or overdone, too chunky, too suggestive of mass production or of toys, but I was interested in using that to challenge the photo. I wanted to make the photo carry the frame and still find an existence. The frame became a sculpture and an object, as well as a trap and obstacle for myself.
The first time I made the pictures I thought of the frame as a way to negate them from the status of photography. As opposed to it unequivocally being the subject, the C-print would become a façade for the box; the frame would claim a presence equal to that of the image. In the work there is a resetting of ideas: why is this a frame and this a photo?
Left: Collie (Brown) (2012), foil on offset prints on paper, painted frames, painted metal poles, ceramic beads, ribbons; three framed works, each 27.3 x 19.7 x 3.8 cm; installation 53.3 x 95.9 x 35.6 cm. Right: Bouquet (2012), charcoal drawing, walnut frame, 36.8 x 29.2 x 3.8 cm. Bottom: Installation view, Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo, 2012.
ART iT: I understand the problematic aspects of using colored frames, but in making the works you also use specially colored backdrops. I get the feeling that something is compressed in that color which responds to the subject of the photograph.
EL: The seamless background is interesting because it has such a multiple history. On the one hand, it now has connotations of consumerism, commercial photography, advertising and so on. On the other, it recalls early experiments in photography and portraiture. So in the work there is a back-and-forth between several economies and institutions, and the different ways photography is used in the world.
Also, through the histories that are addressed in the work, I'm exploring what kind of engagement is possible with pictures now and what kind of experiences we can have with them. You have the eye and the brain. The eye sees the object in front of it, while the brain interprets that image based on a set of knowledge: the human eye only needs a few dots for the brain to recognize a face. And this leads to the question of how much of what we see has been compromised or adjusted by our minds. The connection between the mind and eye offers a really curious space for resetting.
ART iT: I think this also affects the exhibition space. Actually, when I entered the gallery and surveyed the space, I was confused as to where I should focus first.
EL: That's good to hear. In the show I included recent works in which I have started challenging the medium by skipping photography altogether. My previous works attempted to dismantle the built-in quality that comes with the picture and now I am questioning whether this dismantling can be applied to something like a charcoal drawing, which comes with a different set of histories and problems. Collie (Brown), for example, also plays with the idea of using analog means to reflect the cyber-like, imaginary space the photo occupies.
I think what I try to do in the work is to talk about contemporary concerns, but claim them through analog methods. This points to the problem with a picture that cannot be explained by one condition - it cannot be because of digitization or because of authorship. It points to the philosophical questions around photography and how from its inception the picture has offered a haunted space.
Moving between these multiple problems allows the viewer to reset, re-experience and revisit the action of looking without escaping into knowable, already processed problems. It's almost like a set of obstacles that the viewer has to navigate. The designated space that is marked by a ribbon net extending from the wall in Collie (Brown) was a way for me to playfully suggest the 3D-like property that a picture can take, and of course in this case it happens to be that of a collie dog – the cinematic dog, Lassie - which comes with its own history of being in TV shows and movies. I'm trying to open up this portrait and ask, within the legacy of Lassie and within the decorative space that I create for these images, could it still be considered a portrait of a dog?
Both: Installation view, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, 2012. Courtesy Elad Lassry and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.
ART iT: Even in your still images, especially the double-exposed images and diptychs, there are some moving elements, which remind me of Muybridge's motion studies. Were you interested in the relationship between still and moving images from the start?
EL: Yes, absolutely. I was interested in exploring them and working with them at the same time. I think of the pictures becoming films and the films becoming pictures. Obviously, film is a series of pictures, and when you consider the space in between each frame, you also have to account for an afterimage. This is the space in film where the mind compensates, and I think this effect also happens when you look at a series of photos. You shift between two photos to create a third photo. Sometimes a photo of a man and a photo of a dog can become a photo of a man and a dog and vice versa.
ART iT: This structure is also apparent in films like Zebra and Woman (2007).
EL: Yes. Even the films raise questions on the history of portraiture sitting and an awareness of the apparatus, like when the cameras used to have long exposures and people really had to sit still for their portraits to be taken. So the portraits always vacillate between the idea of the headshot - ubiquitous, meaningless commercial pictures - and these potential portraits. There is always the possibility that it does capture something, yet at the same time, it's never clear to what extent that possibility exists. There's a suggestion of, say, a resurrection of the picture, the picture reclaiming a space that we don't know; but it's an exploration, not a strategy.
ART iT: The movement of the camera in your films is also compelling in the way that it makes viewers aware of the existence of the frame.
EL: It comes from an awareness of Structuralist film and the moment of working with film outside of the cinematic structure, whereby the viewer doesn't have a predetermined condition for how to watch the film. Viewers can walk around and choose their own experiences. Also, because the films are on a loop, viewers can enter and exit at will and choose the beginning and end. The film is really treated as a picture, and of course it's a projection, but in a way I'm also treating the pictures as projections, in that they echo multiple histories and shift within their frames. That's the kind of movement that happens. Even when it’s just one image, they almost channel more than they can handle. Maybe they've been through too much.
ART iT: In your exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles in 2012, you incorporated a wave-like obstruction running across the exhibition space that alternately obscured and revealed the line of photographs on the wall behind it. This also seems to emphasize the connection between serial photography and moving images.
EL: Yes. I was interested in the idea that the installation could become a motion picture. With the performance I do now, I'm looking at what part of the apparatus can be eliminated while trying to create an experience that feels mediated - as if it's been through a lens-based apparatus - even though it hasn't. Similarly, with the exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, if you walked through it, you would become conscious of how the conditions of mediation look and could then hopefully retrieve them.
Both: Untitled (Ghost) (2011), 35mm color film, silent, 18 min. Courtesy Elad Lassry and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.
ART iT: Returning to the topic of film, you use dance in films like Untitled (Ghost) (2011). Can you explain your interest in choreography?
EL: My interest in choreography has to do with the human subject as a form, with dance being this occasion where a troupe - a collective - essentially make a picture with their bodies and, in doing so, abandon themselves as individual subjects.
In all of the films with dancers, there is a back-and-forth between the dancer reclaiming herself as a subject and a break to sequences of portraits. A lot of the tension with dance happens for me in this duality. On the one hand, the body serves the making of a picture, while on the other it is a human subject and its representation has both a force and history that distracts from the picture.
There's also a cultural aspect that comes with it, which is a very challenging thing to dismantle. It's a challenge to take dance and ask it to be considered as a purely formal image that's divorced from its connotations, whether it's the history of ballet or the socio-economical context and so on. So there is an attempt in these pieces to aggravate these histories, extract that picture and recondition it.
ART iT: But it seems that more than simply being conscious of history, you also try to challenge and expand it.
EL: Yes. I think history is an education, but in terms of the possibilities of experience, it's also a trap, so there is ambivalence in terms of my relationship to history. I believe in histories that are multiple and not linear. They are there and they are relevant, but I think of them with a sense of rhythm that can shift around: restructured histories.
Left: Four Braids (Yellow) (2012), C-print, painted frame, 36.8 x 29.2 x 3.8 cm. Right: Plinth (Blue Liquid) (2012), silver gelatin print on C-print, painted frame, 36.8 x 29.2 x 3.8 cm. Bottom: Untitled (LF Green Bed) (2012), beech wood, paint, 71.1 x 91.4 x 51.8 cm.
ART iT: Previously you have said that you want to avoid doing simple appropriation.
EL: What I meant is that, when I use appropriation, I'm not overwhelmed by the act of appropriating. The focus is not so much on authorship. I'm more interested in the presence of the image itself and what it means once it’s in the space. I think the act of appropriation can overwhelm some works, preventing them from being considered in terms of what happens after appropriation.
ART iT: It's similar to the way you reactivate specific images or pictures from those already in circulation.
EL: Exactly – by making them singular again. Many times, a picture that has been in circulation will become a unique piece through the addition of a stamped foil or a silkscreen. The picture reclaims itself as singular, even though it's an image that’s been circulating.
ART iT: Given this process of returning images to singularity from circulation, how do the different images in your archive relate to each other?
EL: In my case, there is the option that the photographs don't relate to each other at all. If they do, it's probably through a thread of vocabularies and art historical canons that have already been established - for example, typologies - the sense that there is a "type" photograph. There are several threads that suggest the potential for a standard, the potential for something that has been accepted and has some kind of collective agreement upon it. But it's a dormant faculty that creates this impossible typology. I think the connection is mostly cultural and relies on a series of accepted visual ideas within culture.
Elad Lassry: Restructured Histories
By Akira Rachi
Bell Peppers (2012), C-print, painted frame, 29.2 x 36.8 x 3.8 cm. All images: Unless otherwise noted, courtesy Elad Lassry and Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo.
Interview:
ART iT: You are best known for your photographs, but actually have a diverse practice that spans films, sculptural objects and performance. Seeing your exhibition here at Rat Hole Gallery, what struck me is that in your works the frame acts like a container into which any kind of image can be placed. Can you explain more about the relationship between image and frame in your work, as well as how you select the images that you use?
EL: I began the process of questioning the relationship between image and frame in school. I would create image archives, collecting images from different sources and genres - images made for commercial purposes, like headshots and publicity shots; images from instructional books and text books; images from manuals and so on. Then, in considering all of these images, I would start by locating the aspects that I found to be problematic or questionable. Sometimes, when I found a particularly haunted image, I would use it as I had found it. But when an image didn't exactly fit my questions, and instead revoked the questions I wanted to emphasize, I would respond by making a picture of my own.
What I noticed is that I was responding with my own archive, making my own pictures in response to archives that had entered into circulation and been affirmed or recognized by other institutions or authorities. And the frame became a way to articulate this condition of making new pictures that are the ghosts of hundreds of other pictures. I wanted my pictures to have the quality of the readymade or something that already exists in the world. There had to be a duality to them: they are singular and exist in the frame, but at the same time, the frame is also a host for a picture that can change.
ART iT: What led you to start using this kind of frame?
EL: I was not interested in photography so much as I was in pictures. It was a troubling position for me, because I was surrounding myself with pictures, but my rationale for this diverged from what Modernist notions of photography find to be curious about pictures. As such, in displaying my pictures, I was tempted to respond with something that would evoke a shelf, although I didn't want to resort to such an easy solution.
At the same time, I found the color frames to be problematic. They were almost embarrassing, and still are. They are potentially ugly or overdone, too chunky, too suggestive of mass production or of toys, but I was interested in using that to challenge the photo. I wanted to make the photo carry the frame and still find an existence. The frame became a sculpture and an object, as well as a trap and obstacle for myself.
The first time I made the pictures I thought of the frame as a way to negate them from the status of photography. As opposed to it unequivocally being the subject, the C-print would become a façade for the box; the frame would claim a presence equal to that of the image. In the work there is a resetting of ideas: why is this a frame and this a photo?
Left: Collie (Brown) (2012), foil on offset prints on paper, painted frames, painted metal poles, ceramic beads, ribbons; three framed works, each 27.3 x 19.7 x 3.8 cm; installation 53.3 x 95.9 x 35.6 cm. Right: Bouquet (2012), charcoal drawing, walnut frame, 36.8 x 29.2 x 3.8 cm. Bottom: Installation view, Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo, 2012.
ART iT: I understand the problematic aspects of using colored frames, but in making the works you also use specially colored backdrops. I get the feeling that something is compressed in that color which responds to the subject of the photograph.
EL: The seamless background is interesting because it has such a multiple history. On the one hand, it now has connotations of consumerism, commercial photography, advertising and so on. On the other, it recalls early experiments in photography and portraiture. So in the work there is a back-and-forth between several economies and institutions, and the different ways photography is used in the world.
Also, through the histories that are addressed in the work, I'm exploring what kind of engagement is possible with pictures now and what kind of experiences we can have with them. You have the eye and the brain. The eye sees the object in front of it, while the brain interprets that image based on a set of knowledge: the human eye only needs a few dots for the brain to recognize a face. And this leads to the question of how much of what we see has been compromised or adjusted by our minds. The connection between the mind and eye offers a really curious space for resetting.
ART iT: I think this also affects the exhibition space. Actually, when I entered the gallery and surveyed the space, I was confused as to where I should focus first.
EL: That's good to hear. In the show I included recent works in which I have started challenging the medium by skipping photography altogether. My previous works attempted to dismantle the built-in quality that comes with the picture and now I am questioning whether this dismantling can be applied to something like a charcoal drawing, which comes with a different set of histories and problems. Collie (Brown), for example, also plays with the idea of using analog means to reflect the cyber-like, imaginary space the photo occupies.
I think what I try to do in the work is to talk about contemporary concerns, but claim them through analog methods. This points to the problem with a picture that cannot be explained by one condition - it cannot be because of digitization or because of authorship. It points to the philosophical questions around photography and how from its inception the picture has offered a haunted space.
Moving between these multiple problems allows the viewer to reset, re-experience and revisit the action of looking without escaping into knowable, already processed problems. It's almost like a set of obstacles that the viewer has to navigate. The designated space that is marked by a ribbon net extending from the wall in Collie (Brown) was a way for me to playfully suggest the 3D-like property that a picture can take, and of course in this case it happens to be that of a collie dog – the cinematic dog, Lassie - which comes with its own history of being in TV shows and movies. I'm trying to open up this portrait and ask, within the legacy of Lassie and within the decorative space that I create for these images, could it still be considered a portrait of a dog?
Both: Installation view, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, 2012. Courtesy Elad Lassry and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.
ART iT: Even in your still images, especially the double-exposed images and diptychs, there are some moving elements, which remind me of Muybridge's motion studies. Were you interested in the relationship between still and moving images from the start?
EL: Yes, absolutely. I was interested in exploring them and working with them at the same time. I think of the pictures becoming films and the films becoming pictures. Obviously, film is a series of pictures, and when you consider the space in between each frame, you also have to account for an afterimage. This is the space in film where the mind compensates, and I think this effect also happens when you look at a series of photos. You shift between two photos to create a third photo. Sometimes a photo of a man and a photo of a dog can become a photo of a man and a dog and vice versa.
ART iT: This structure is also apparent in films like Zebra and Woman (2007).
EL: Yes. Even the films raise questions on the history of portraiture sitting and an awareness of the apparatus, like when the cameras used to have long exposures and people really had to sit still for their portraits to be taken. So the portraits always vacillate between the idea of the headshot - ubiquitous, meaningless commercial pictures - and these potential portraits. There is always the possibility that it does capture something, yet at the same time, it's never clear to what extent that possibility exists. There's a suggestion of, say, a resurrection of the picture, the picture reclaiming a space that we don't know; but it's an exploration, not a strategy.
ART iT: The movement of the camera in your films is also compelling in the way that it makes viewers aware of the existence of the frame.
EL: It comes from an awareness of Structuralist film and the moment of working with film outside of the cinematic structure, whereby the viewer doesn't have a predetermined condition for how to watch the film. Viewers can walk around and choose their own experiences. Also, because the films are on a loop, viewers can enter and exit at will and choose the beginning and end. The film is really treated as a picture, and of course it's a projection, but in a way I'm also treating the pictures as projections, in that they echo multiple histories and shift within their frames. That's the kind of movement that happens. Even when it’s just one image, they almost channel more than they can handle. Maybe they've been through too much.
ART iT: In your exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles in 2012, you incorporated a wave-like obstruction running across the exhibition space that alternately obscured and revealed the line of photographs on the wall behind it. This also seems to emphasize the connection between serial photography and moving images.
EL: Yes. I was interested in the idea that the installation could become a motion picture. With the performance I do now, I'm looking at what part of the apparatus can be eliminated while trying to create an experience that feels mediated - as if it's been through a lens-based apparatus - even though it hasn't. Similarly, with the exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, if you walked through it, you would become conscious of how the conditions of mediation look and could then hopefully retrieve them.
Both: Untitled (Ghost) (2011), 35mm color film, silent, 18 min. Courtesy Elad Lassry and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.
ART iT: Returning to the topic of film, you use dance in films like Untitled (Ghost) (2011). Can you explain your interest in choreography?
EL: My interest in choreography has to do with the human subject as a form, with dance being this occasion where a troupe - a collective - essentially make a picture with their bodies and, in doing so, abandon themselves as individual subjects.
In all of the films with dancers, there is a back-and-forth between the dancer reclaiming herself as a subject and a break to sequences of portraits. A lot of the tension with dance happens for me in this duality. On the one hand, the body serves the making of a picture, while on the other it is a human subject and its representation has both a force and history that distracts from the picture.
There's also a cultural aspect that comes with it, which is a very challenging thing to dismantle. It's a challenge to take dance and ask it to be considered as a purely formal image that's divorced from its connotations, whether it's the history of ballet or the socio-economical context and so on. So there is an attempt in these pieces to aggravate these histories, extract that picture and recondition it.
ART iT: But it seems that more than simply being conscious of history, you also try to challenge and expand it.
EL: Yes. I think history is an education, but in terms of the possibilities of experience, it's also a trap, so there is ambivalence in terms of my relationship to history. I believe in histories that are multiple and not linear. They are there and they are relevant, but I think of them with a sense of rhythm that can shift around: restructured histories.
Left: Four Braids (Yellow) (2012), C-print, painted frame, 36.8 x 29.2 x 3.8 cm. Right: Plinth (Blue Liquid) (2012), silver gelatin print on C-print, painted frame, 36.8 x 29.2 x 3.8 cm. Bottom: Untitled (LF Green Bed) (2012), beech wood, paint, 71.1 x 91.4 x 51.8 cm.
ART iT: Previously you have said that you want to avoid doing simple appropriation.
EL: What I meant is that, when I use appropriation, I'm not overwhelmed by the act of appropriating. The focus is not so much on authorship. I'm more interested in the presence of the image itself and what it means once it’s in the space. I think the act of appropriation can overwhelm some works, preventing them from being considered in terms of what happens after appropriation.
ART iT: It's similar to the way you reactivate specific images or pictures from those already in circulation.
EL: Exactly – by making them singular again. Many times, a picture that has been in circulation will become a unique piece through the addition of a stamped foil or a silkscreen. The picture reclaims itself as singular, even though it's an image that’s been circulating.
ART iT: Given this process of returning images to singularity from circulation, how do the different images in your archive relate to each other?
EL: In my case, there is the option that the photographs don't relate to each other at all. If they do, it's probably through a thread of vocabularies and art historical canons that have already been established - for example, typologies - the sense that there is a "type" photograph. There are several threads that suggest the potential for a standard, the potential for something that has been accepted and has some kind of collective agreement upon it. But it's a dormant faculty that creates this impossible typology. I think the connection is mostly cultural and relies on a series of accepted visual ideas within culture.
Elad Lassry: Restructured Histories
Makoto Aida
ALL TOO HUMAN
By Andrew Maerkle
The video of a man calling himself Bin Laden staying in Japan (2005), video, 8 min, 14 sec. All Images: Courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo.
Interview:
ART iT: Your work is often discussed in terms of "simulation art," or the appropriation of existing works and styles. What does simulation art mean to you?
MA: Simulation art was one of the trends when I was studying at university and just starting my career, and I think that's where it influenced me the most. I don't have any great need to express my "inner voice," so the idea of starting from nothing with a blank canvas and putting my soul into the work doesn't appeal to me. Rather, I am better suited to starting with a preexisting form or work, and mixing that premise with my impressions of contemporary society to reconstitute a new image, as it allows me to establish some distance from myself and work in a more objective way. It could be classical art or contemporary manga or advertising, but as long as I have some kind of base or springboard then it's easier for me to make something.
ART iT: Yet, reflecting on the more than 20 years of your career, I would say that you have taken a decidedly unique approach to simulation art.
MA: When I was young, Nihonga Japanese-style painting had an authoritative social status - this was also during the bubble economy - and I heard that such works were being sold for ridiculously high sums of money. Perhaps out of youthful insolence, I wanted to shake up the value of Nihonga, and made all kinds of works challenging that establishment. Works like those from the Dog (1989- ) series depicting girls with amputated limbs, emerged from this mentality: one point was to use an established cultural genre like Nihonga to depict crass and shocking images. Now that Nihonga is no longer so dominant, my interest has gradually shifted elsewhere, and my desire to upend the values of the system, or, say, the art establishment, has weakened. Recently I made a painting with heaps of dead salaryman figures, Ash Color Mountains (2009-11), but rather than being motivated by a desire to overturn the traditional values of East Asian ink painting, it was simply the method that I used for the work.
Top: Installation view of works from "War Picture Returns" series in the exhibition "Aida Makoto: Monument for Nothing" at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, November 2012 to March 2013. Photo Watanabe Osamu, courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Bottom: Beautiful Flag (War Picture Returns) (1995), Pair of two-panel folding screens / charcoal, self-made paint with Japanese glue, acrylic on fusuma (sliding door), hinges, 174 x 170 cm (each). Takahashi Collection, Tokyo (Deposit Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo).
ART iT: For many people, this exhibition has been the first opportunity to see the entire "War Picture Returns" series exhibited together in one room, and it underscores how precisely you reference historical genres of painting like Nihonga, Bijinga pictures of young women and the Sensoga genre of propagandistic "war pictures" made in Japan during World War II. When you make such works - for example, the war pictures series - how much research do you put into the styles you reference>
MA: I don't really do much research. Regarding genres like Nihonga, when I was young I would visit places like the National Museum in Tokyo or the Yamatane Museum, which specializes in Nihonga, or I would look at art books. But I never read the captions, so I never had a precise idea of the artist names or the work dates. I absorbed whatever I did simply from looking in a casual way, but nothing so serious as the way a researcher might have viewed the works.
In the case of "War Picture Returns," I came up with the title of the series after I had already started making the works. The theme of the series is the Pacific War, so really a more appropriate title would have been something like "The Pacific War Series." It's just that I didn't want to put too much effort into coming up with a title, so I thought that if I added "Returns" to "War Picture," then I could give it a contemporary twist. And then it was after I came up with the title that I decided I should have a proper look at the "war pictures" genre. At the time, there were no war pictures on public view, but at the museum library I found a number of black-and-white catalogs that had been published during the war era. There were about four massive volumes, among which were the catalogs from the so-called "Seisen (Holy War) Art Exhibition" series organized during the war years, and they probably contained just about everything there is of the war pictures genre. I was looking for some kind of idea or an existing painting that I could turn into my own, although ultimately there wasn't so much to work with. Rather than depictions of fierce fighting, most of the works were fairly reserved depictions, most likely painted after black-and-white photographs sent from the front, of soldiers resting in the jungle or something like that. Of the few truly characteristic works, the most powerful was Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita's Final Fighting on Attu (1943), with its messy depiction of a final banzai charge. This painting was completely distinct from the rest of the genre. For me, it provided the base for Ohkimi no henikoso shiname - Let's Die at the Emperor's Feet (War Picture Returns) (1996), and also served as a reference for the works Zaku (War Picture Returns - Side B) (2005) and Ash Color Mountains.
MONUMENT FOR NOTHING IV (2012), acrylic, paper on plywood, wood bolt, 570 x 750 cm. Installation view, "Aida Makoto: Monument for Nothing" at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2012-13. Photo Watanabe Osamu, courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
ART iT: "War Picture Returns" deals with themes that have not been fully discussed in postwar Japanese society, and which have not really been represented in postwar Japanese art, and perhaps it is the framework of the war pictures genre, which itself has been suppressed, that makes this possible. Yet, your works also maintain a politically ambiguous position in regard to the politically sensitive issues they address.
In that sense I would like to know more about one of the works you made for this exhibition, Monument for Nothing IV (2013), a massive collage made from printouts of Twitter commentary on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and its social repercussions. On the one hand the title and format of the work suggest that you do not take such popular expressions of political sentiment seriously. On the other hand, many visitors to the exhibition take time to read the Twitter messages, creating an opportunity to reflect on the state of political expression in Japan. Can you discuss why you wanted to make this work?
MA: One characteristic of my work is that it deals with social themes, but is not intended as a tool or medium for instigating specific social action, nor does it seek to bring about social change. Clearly, this stance is quite different from that of artists like Joseph Beuys, who did seek to shake up society. It's not that I think this is necessarily a good disposition on my part, but I strongly believe it is best when a work is fixed and "unmoving."
With this work dealing with the March 11 disaster, there are a number of people who are angry that I used their Twitter messages without any permission, but it doesn't bother me at all. First, I had no grand aspirations for this work. It's just that I thought this was something that had to be in the exhibition. Basically, I thought it would be strange if a Japanese artist having a major exhibition in Japan so soon after this kind of disaster did not address it in some way. At the same time, I don't like to follow blindly, nor am I the type to go to the disaster area and volunteer or anything like that - I haven't not gone there. I have received a high proportion of my information about the earthquake, tsunami and, in particular, the nuclear disaster from Twitter. Of course this necessarily includes disinformation, abusive invectives and rifts between people, but in any case the core of my experience of the nuclear disaster has been mediated by Twitter. So I think it's possible to say that work is a self-portrait, or a reflection and document of the impressions regarding the Fukushima nuclear disaster of a Japanese man who has never been there in person. I think many other Japanese people could relate to it. That's why I avoided making judgments on the tweets that I selected, and avoided applying my personal opinions or original aesthetic sensibility to the work.
With the uproar about it on Twitter, I'm not sure when I would next display the work, but simply in having exhibited it on this occasion, I think it's perfectly fine if it isn't seen for the next 10 or 20 years. There's no way to tell how people might feel 20 or 30 years from now, but I think it's reasonable to expect it will be quite different from today, and this was also one of the considerations in making the work.
ART iT: You mentioned that simulation provides a means for you to make art in an objective way, although your works deal with different social issues. How do you feel about the political potential of art in general?
MA: Maybe I'm shirking my responsibility, but I'm a kind of Pierrot. I make people upset, I make them laugh, I annoy them, and that's what I'm good at. There are artists who take a more serious position in attempting to effect social change, and I think they provide a necessary balance to what I do. I am fully committed to my role as a Pierrot, and I hope the other artists also fully apply themselves to what they do.
Top: I-DE-A (2000), video, 62 min 3 sec. Bottom: Uguisudani-zu (Picture of Uguisudani) (1990), Japanese mineral pigment, acrylic on sex phone calling cards mounted on panel, 190 x 245 cm. Collection of Watai Yuki.
ART iT: Perverse sexuality is a recurring theme in your works, but as the sex chirashi in Uguisudani-zu (1990) and the video I-DE-A (2000) suggest, a large part of sexuality is tied up in mechanisms of false advertising and fantastic idealizations that are never realized, or can be quite disappointing when they are realized. In art, sex is perhaps the ultimate conceptual motif. Can you discuss more about your attraction to sexual topics in your works?
MA: I want for all my works to respond in some way to the reality of contemporary Japan. Currently, sexuality in Japan has changed in the 20-plus years between when I started my career and the present, but one consistent characteristic of Japanese sexuality in comparison to those of other countries is, as you say, the fantastic element. I was already aware of this to a certain extent from a relatively young age, and more then simply making erotic drawings or paintings, I wanted to reflect the characteristics of Japanese sexuality, including those that are pathological. To this end, I took up an almost ethnographic perspective on the Japanese people, although I myself grew up with images from erotic manga comics and shoujo youth idols, just like anybody else, so I can also relate in that sense. When I see a manga drawing of a girl with huge eyes, it's not out of the question that I too would get excited. It's a love-hate thing: sometimes I'm drawn to it and other times disgusted by it, or, in relation to the rest of the world, ashamed by it, but also proud of it. Perhaps it's thanks to these two-dimensional fantasies that the incidence of rape is lower than it would be otherwise. If everybody can even more unashamedly jack off to these fantasies, then maybe that's for the greater good, although of course we also have to think about population decline as well.
In any case, even when I think about these sexual issues, I am also thinking about the real problems in Japan. To be sure, when I use sexual imagery, it's not like I'm really thinking earnestly about how to incorporate some kind of idea into it. I try to work by impulse and intuition. With the protests about the sensitive nature of some of the works in the Mori exhibition, maybe I will have to start thinking earnestly about it. But ultimately sex is simply a major theme in the history of civilization, and is one of the most important characteristics that distinguishes humans from other animals, so it's natural for it to be a theme in art. Not that it's 100 percent necessary, but I think it's far stranger still to avoid sex altogether, and I will continue dealing with it in my work.
Makoto Aida's work was on view in the exhibition "Monument for Nothing" at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, from November 17, 2012, to March 31, 2013.
Makoto Aida: All Too Human
By Andrew Maerkle
The video of a man calling himself Bin Laden staying in Japan (2005), video, 8 min, 14 sec. All Images: Courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo.
Interview:
ART iT: Your work is often discussed in terms of "simulation art," or the appropriation of existing works and styles. What does simulation art mean to you?
MA: Simulation art was one of the trends when I was studying at university and just starting my career, and I think that's where it influenced me the most. I don't have any great need to express my "inner voice," so the idea of starting from nothing with a blank canvas and putting my soul into the work doesn't appeal to me. Rather, I am better suited to starting with a preexisting form or work, and mixing that premise with my impressions of contemporary society to reconstitute a new image, as it allows me to establish some distance from myself and work in a more objective way. It could be classical art or contemporary manga or advertising, but as long as I have some kind of base or springboard then it's easier for me to make something.
ART iT: Yet, reflecting on the more than 20 years of your career, I would say that you have taken a decidedly unique approach to simulation art.
MA: When I was young, Nihonga Japanese-style painting had an authoritative social status - this was also during the bubble economy - and I heard that such works were being sold for ridiculously high sums of money. Perhaps out of youthful insolence, I wanted to shake up the value of Nihonga, and made all kinds of works challenging that establishment. Works like those from the Dog (1989- ) series depicting girls with amputated limbs, emerged from this mentality: one point was to use an established cultural genre like Nihonga to depict crass and shocking images. Now that Nihonga is no longer so dominant, my interest has gradually shifted elsewhere, and my desire to upend the values of the system, or, say, the art establishment, has weakened. Recently I made a painting with heaps of dead salaryman figures, Ash Color Mountains (2009-11), but rather than being motivated by a desire to overturn the traditional values of East Asian ink painting, it was simply the method that I used for the work.
Top: Installation view of works from "War Picture Returns" series in the exhibition "Aida Makoto: Monument for Nothing" at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, November 2012 to March 2013. Photo Watanabe Osamu, courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Bottom: Beautiful Flag (War Picture Returns) (1995), Pair of two-panel folding screens / charcoal, self-made paint with Japanese glue, acrylic on fusuma (sliding door), hinges, 174 x 170 cm (each). Takahashi Collection, Tokyo (Deposit Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo).
ART iT: For many people, this exhibition has been the first opportunity to see the entire "War Picture Returns" series exhibited together in one room, and it underscores how precisely you reference historical genres of painting like Nihonga, Bijinga pictures of young women and the Sensoga genre of propagandistic "war pictures" made in Japan during World War II. When you make such works - for example, the war pictures series - how much research do you put into the styles you reference>
MA: I don't really do much research. Regarding genres like Nihonga, when I was young I would visit places like the National Museum in Tokyo or the Yamatane Museum, which specializes in Nihonga, or I would look at art books. But I never read the captions, so I never had a precise idea of the artist names or the work dates. I absorbed whatever I did simply from looking in a casual way, but nothing so serious as the way a researcher might have viewed the works.
In the case of "War Picture Returns," I came up with the title of the series after I had already started making the works. The theme of the series is the Pacific War, so really a more appropriate title would have been something like "The Pacific War Series." It's just that I didn't want to put too much effort into coming up with a title, so I thought that if I added "Returns" to "War Picture," then I could give it a contemporary twist. And then it was after I came up with the title that I decided I should have a proper look at the "war pictures" genre. At the time, there were no war pictures on public view, but at the museum library I found a number of black-and-white catalogs that had been published during the war era. There were about four massive volumes, among which were the catalogs from the so-called "Seisen (Holy War) Art Exhibition" series organized during the war years, and they probably contained just about everything there is of the war pictures genre. I was looking for some kind of idea or an existing painting that I could turn into my own, although ultimately there wasn't so much to work with. Rather than depictions of fierce fighting, most of the works were fairly reserved depictions, most likely painted after black-and-white photographs sent from the front, of soldiers resting in the jungle or something like that. Of the few truly characteristic works, the most powerful was Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita's Final Fighting on Attu (1943), with its messy depiction of a final banzai charge. This painting was completely distinct from the rest of the genre. For me, it provided the base for Ohkimi no henikoso shiname - Let's Die at the Emperor's Feet (War Picture Returns) (1996), and also served as a reference for the works Zaku (War Picture Returns - Side B) (2005) and Ash Color Mountains.
MONUMENT FOR NOTHING IV (2012), acrylic, paper on plywood, wood bolt, 570 x 750 cm. Installation view, "Aida Makoto: Monument for Nothing" at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2012-13. Photo Watanabe Osamu, courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
ART iT: "War Picture Returns" deals with themes that have not been fully discussed in postwar Japanese society, and which have not really been represented in postwar Japanese art, and perhaps it is the framework of the war pictures genre, which itself has been suppressed, that makes this possible. Yet, your works also maintain a politically ambiguous position in regard to the politically sensitive issues they address.
In that sense I would like to know more about one of the works you made for this exhibition, Monument for Nothing IV (2013), a massive collage made from printouts of Twitter commentary on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and its social repercussions. On the one hand the title and format of the work suggest that you do not take such popular expressions of political sentiment seriously. On the other hand, many visitors to the exhibition take time to read the Twitter messages, creating an opportunity to reflect on the state of political expression in Japan. Can you discuss why you wanted to make this work?
MA: One characteristic of my work is that it deals with social themes, but is not intended as a tool or medium for instigating specific social action, nor does it seek to bring about social change. Clearly, this stance is quite different from that of artists like Joseph Beuys, who did seek to shake up society. It's not that I think this is necessarily a good disposition on my part, but I strongly believe it is best when a work is fixed and "unmoving."
With this work dealing with the March 11 disaster, there are a number of people who are angry that I used their Twitter messages without any permission, but it doesn't bother me at all. First, I had no grand aspirations for this work. It's just that I thought this was something that had to be in the exhibition. Basically, I thought it would be strange if a Japanese artist having a major exhibition in Japan so soon after this kind of disaster did not address it in some way. At the same time, I don't like to follow blindly, nor am I the type to go to the disaster area and volunteer or anything like that - I haven't not gone there. I have received a high proportion of my information about the earthquake, tsunami and, in particular, the nuclear disaster from Twitter. Of course this necessarily includes disinformation, abusive invectives and rifts between people, but in any case the core of my experience of the nuclear disaster has been mediated by Twitter. So I think it's possible to say that work is a self-portrait, or a reflection and document of the impressions regarding the Fukushima nuclear disaster of a Japanese man who has never been there in person. I think many other Japanese people could relate to it. That's why I avoided making judgments on the tweets that I selected, and avoided applying my personal opinions or original aesthetic sensibility to the work.
With the uproar about it on Twitter, I'm not sure when I would next display the work, but simply in having exhibited it on this occasion, I think it's perfectly fine if it isn't seen for the next 10 or 20 years. There's no way to tell how people might feel 20 or 30 years from now, but I think it's reasonable to expect it will be quite different from today, and this was also one of the considerations in making the work.
ART iT: You mentioned that simulation provides a means for you to make art in an objective way, although your works deal with different social issues. How do you feel about the political potential of art in general?
MA: Maybe I'm shirking my responsibility, but I'm a kind of Pierrot. I make people upset, I make them laugh, I annoy them, and that's what I'm good at. There are artists who take a more serious position in attempting to effect social change, and I think they provide a necessary balance to what I do. I am fully committed to my role as a Pierrot, and I hope the other artists also fully apply themselves to what they do.
Top: I-DE-A (2000), video, 62 min 3 sec. Bottom: Uguisudani-zu (Picture of Uguisudani) (1990), Japanese mineral pigment, acrylic on sex phone calling cards mounted on panel, 190 x 245 cm. Collection of Watai Yuki.
ART iT: Perverse sexuality is a recurring theme in your works, but as the sex chirashi in Uguisudani-zu (1990) and the video I-DE-A (2000) suggest, a large part of sexuality is tied up in mechanisms of false advertising and fantastic idealizations that are never realized, or can be quite disappointing when they are realized. In art, sex is perhaps the ultimate conceptual motif. Can you discuss more about your attraction to sexual topics in your works?
MA: I want for all my works to respond in some way to the reality of contemporary Japan. Currently, sexuality in Japan has changed in the 20-plus years between when I started my career and the present, but one consistent characteristic of Japanese sexuality in comparison to those of other countries is, as you say, the fantastic element. I was already aware of this to a certain extent from a relatively young age, and more then simply making erotic drawings or paintings, I wanted to reflect the characteristics of Japanese sexuality, including those that are pathological. To this end, I took up an almost ethnographic perspective on the Japanese people, although I myself grew up with images from erotic manga comics and shoujo youth idols, just like anybody else, so I can also relate in that sense. When I see a manga drawing of a girl with huge eyes, it's not out of the question that I too would get excited. It's a love-hate thing: sometimes I'm drawn to it and other times disgusted by it, or, in relation to the rest of the world, ashamed by it, but also proud of it. Perhaps it's thanks to these two-dimensional fantasies that the incidence of rape is lower than it would be otherwise. If everybody can even more unashamedly jack off to these fantasies, then maybe that's for the greater good, although of course we also have to think about population decline as well.
In any case, even when I think about these sexual issues, I am also thinking about the real problems in Japan. To be sure, when I use sexual imagery, it's not like I'm really thinking earnestly about how to incorporate some kind of idea into it. I try to work by impulse and intuition. With the protests about the sensitive nature of some of the works in the Mori exhibition, maybe I will have to start thinking earnestly about it. But ultimately sex is simply a major theme in the history of civilization, and is one of the most important characteristics that distinguishes humans from other animals, so it's natural for it to be a theme in art. Not that it's 100 percent necessary, but I think it's far stranger still to avoid sex altogether, and I will continue dealing with it in my work.
Makoto Aida's work was on view in the exhibition "Monument for Nothing" at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, from November 17, 2012, to March 31, 2013.
Makoto Aida: All Too Human
Simon Fujiwara
The Legacy of Objects
By Andrew Maerkle
Installation view of Welcome to the Hotel Munber (2010) at the 3rd Singapore Biennale, 2011, mixed media, dimensions variable. All images: Unless otherwise noted, courtesy Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt, and TARO NASU, Tokyo.
Interview:
ART iT: Many of your works subtly combine mechanisms of both eroticism and archaeology in an investigation of how objects talk. The installation and performance you have in the Singapore Biennale, Welcome to the Hotel Munber (2008- ), goes even further in its premise that the central figure of the work is an amateur erotic writer. To begin with, could you discuss your approach to erotics?
SF: Erotic art is rarely taken seriously. I thought it would be comical to try making erotic art that goes into deep psychological and social issues the way that the works of the Surrealists or Bataille did in the past.
My use of eroticism is also in a sense about dealing with gay identity, and the lack of choices that gay men have to talk about their sexuality. For example, I wanted to understand whether it's possible to fuse the discourse of gay identity with the idea of family, in contrast to the prevailing theme of gay erotica that tends to celebrate the creation of a new, all-male family in exclusion to preexisting familial relationships. And of course the idea of reproduction is central to the performance: What is the legacy of a homosexual child? If he's not going to have children, can he still carry the family forward?
On the other hand, my work is not really about eroticism at all. Eroticism is a foil for holding the attention of the audience and keeping people interested in the rest of the material. If I have eroticism as an overriding lead-in, I'm free to talk about anything, such as a specific moment in Spanish history that has been largely forgotten by the broader international public - almost nobody has a personal relationship to it any more. So it's a way to help the audience get into that material.
Finally, there's also the idea of conflict, which is very much drawn from Bataille: the idea that eroticism is something that will always be in conflict. Bataille talks about it in terms of a primitive man's gesture of creation, which will never be resolved with civilized society. This idea of conflict drives the whole story.
Top: Detail of Welcome to the Hotel Munber (2010) as installed at the 3rd Singapore Biennale, 2011. Bottom: Installation view and detail of Desk Job (2009) in the Nordic Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo Anders Suneberg,
ART iT: Is Bataille's Story of the Eye one of the texts that you draw from? One could find parallels, for example, between the use of the ostrich egg as a prop in your performance and the connection between eyes, eggs and sexuality in Bataille's story.
SF: Yes, Story of the Eye is one of the texts by Bataille that has influenced me, as well as some of his more academic essays. It's difficult to determine what erotic writing should be, because the quality's not always there. That's why with this performance I chose to start with the subtext that it was written for these cheesy gay magazines, in order to keep the pitch on a low level from the beginning. That way the audience doesn't have any expectations of high literature, or even erotic literature for that matter.
ART iT: Setting aside the idea of erotic content, do you approach the installation component of the work through a consideration of the erotics of space? In the way that you conceive of the erotic narrative content as a "lead-in" to other material, do you think about the relations between objects as a mechanism for getting people to engage with the work?
SF: Absolutely. This was a major concern with my installation for the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009, Desk Job, which I developed at the same time as the performance for Hotel Munber and is in some ways an offshoot of the performance, dealing again with the figure of the erotic writer who writes about his life. Because I couldn't be there in Venice to perform for the entire six months of the exhibition, I had to find a way to translate into a sculptural situation the sense that the audience of Hotel Munber experiences of constantly trying to piece together what is true and what not, and trying to piece together the story and understand what it really is. All the material is unverifiable - the whole lot - so you're really left to your own devices, which emerges from a classical theatrical idea of allowing the audience to ultimately decide what actually happened.
With things like Desk Job and the installation component of Hotel Munber - which is a different part of the same work - my question was, how can people get something out of looking at the installation? It's enough for me that they can go in and say, "OK, Franco, Spain in the 1970s - I know something about that." If you don't have those basic references, that then there's no beginning, so you have to have a certain level of knowledge. But if you have those references, then you can sort of understand that it's about my parents, you see my father in the bar with the young child, and then there's a few things that are obviously erotic, or pornographic, really. What was interesting after the first time I showed it was that people started to think that everything in the installation was erotic - the castanets, the baskets, the dripping candles - and they started to understand that they are implicit in the reception of the work because it's all coming from within their own heads. I've just given them a few tasters, and the rest is in their imagination.
I like to put the emphasis back on the audience's own psychology, because of course with work like this you could easily tell someone the story, you could guide them through it by the hand, but that wouldn't leave them space to add their own experiences to the interpretation or reconsider their own families or what their own histories are in relation to their parents' histories. So the responses varied widely from interest in approaches to reconstructing history to identifying with this idea in the performance that one can maintain a relationship even with an estranged parent. The responses varied widely from the personal to the political.
ART iT: The work also seems to sensitively touch upon the sexual tensions that occur between parent and child, both in terms of how the child affects the parent's sexuality as well as how the parent models the child's sexuality.
SF: Yes. It's interesting that despite how homoerotic it is, few people define it as a gay work. They completely understand it as a work about sexuality in general, and that this is just one instance of the battle between homosexuals and Franco, which could equally unfold in a heterosexual context or in any other kind of social institution.
ART iT: Do you have any concerns that it could be labeled as a gay work?
SF: I'd like the work to be as universally appreciated as possible. I hope people could enter it without thinking that it's part of a closed society. The main character, my father, is a straight guy who's been turned into a gay guy, so you could choose to identify with him, or you could identify with my mother, who's silently in the background of the whole thing, and imagine what it's like for her to have a son who's talking about this situation. There are a number of options.
In the process of making a work like this with so many different references, it was important to play the shock factor of those readings against the more analytical, literal descriptions that come afterwards. I certainly think it's important to be vocal about homosexuality, especially in places like Singapore and other parts of the world where it's not as freely spoken, and which are not that different to Franco's Spain in that sense.
There's a definite political undertone, but it's always worked out through fiction and a shared metaphorical space rather than an unequivocal documentary-type situation.
Top: Installation view of Phallusies (An Arabian Mystery) (2010) at Manifesta 8, Murcia, 2010, mixed media, dimensions variable. Bottom: Installation view of Frozen (2010), commissioned by the Frieze Art Fair Cartier Award, 2010, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo David Grandorge.
ART iT: In tandem with the erotic elements in your works are the archaeological situations you create, whereby the discrete components seem to communicate a broader narrative, but simultaneously retain the right to refuse communication - they are, after all, just objects. What led you to begin working in that way?
SF: Having studied architecture before entering art school, I never believed in the essentialized image of the artist - an image that still persists in many ways. When I was making sculptures in art school, I was always more excited about talking about them and the connections between them and things that weren't visible, and trying to convince people that there is a connection, and finding that space between object and the spoken work or text I was quoting. I always enjoy seeing that shift that occurs in a person's mind when they imagine a certain book that was written in 1850 and then look at a broken egg and make a connection between the two. I thought this could be a beautiful, potent form for me to use.
Also, I'd been trained in architecture school to talk about my ideas through constantly having to do presentations of models and sketches and having to convince juries that I could make this building that's going to change the world and be sustainable and bring people together and tick all the boxes of "zero carbon emissions," and so on. Yet actually what you're talking about is a lump of cardboard. I found it philosophically comical that so much work happens in rhetoric and dialogue and that objects themselves don't really matter, and of course this extends to advertising as well: no matter the product, they all receive this massive storytelling treatment.
There's a kind of lack of respect on the one hand for objects in themselves, but on the other hand through the texts one can understand the power of objects or sculptures. So my sculptural installations are almost like theatre sets, and I work similarly to a film or production designer who is constantly asking, "Does the Coca-Cola in the frame tell a story or not?" That's exactly how I think. I think about it in psychological terms that are almost didactic, because all the components are telling a story, and because that story is so complex, if I didn't give those immediate signals the audience wouldn't be able to get further with it.
ART iT: But in art coding and exclusion can also be productive. Not everything has to communicate equally to everybody, in contrast to the advertising or architecture approach.
SF: Certainly. There are always things I add to the installations or performances that are tangential or make no sense, or there's wasted imagery, such as a few slides that come up during the Hotel Munber performance that briefly take the audience somewhere else or make an association with something that I said before or will say later but is not explained. I like throwing in a wild card here and there.
Also, the emotional element has been a point of discussion in particular with this performance. I'm aware it's a very brain stimulating performance. If you like to read or like literature and fantasy, then you'll like this performance because you get this very clear fiction-analysis-fiction-analysis, poetic-analytic structure the whole way through. Then at the end when things break down and I start to become emotional, you aren't sure how deeply affected I am, and whether I'm now becoming my father, and whether my father's crying because he realizes he's becoming Franco. This is a moment that you can't define in any emotional category. You're left with this shocking end that is unplaceable and upsets the things that have gone before.
It was important not to preach to the audience. People were really angry that I added this cheesy, emotional thing at the end, but that's exactly why I did it, because it needed something that could throw viewers into doubt as well, such that everybody has to respond differently and in their own personal way. That's why I describe myself as a closet expressionist. Expression is a bit of a dirty word, just as eroticism has been a dirty word. Why is that? Why have we lost that? Perhaps it's because we tend to want to preserve and institutionalize everything - and where do you put emotion in a museum?
View of stage for the performance version of Welcome to the Hotel Munber at the Singapore Biennale, 2011. Photo ART iT.
ART iT: As an artist do you feel tension, then, between making performances and installations? Do you feel an emotional tension between acting something out versus leaving it in a space?
SF: I use tension as a technical device, pairing things that will spark off other things. With a performance, the tension between analysis and fiction is simply a device to ensure that it's dynamic and that it doesn't become one long talk. The fiction is necessary because it puts people in a metaphorical state. It takes it away from me, such that suddenly we all access a shared sphere where we're all imagining the narrative and none of us are physically part of it, and it keeps the narrative from looking like a kind of therapeutic self-analysis session. When you're dealing with autobiographical material, or supposedly autobiographical material, or the form of autobiography, then of course you're always skirting these traps of being pinned down into certain positions, but I use it to break open identity and enable associations to form the audience response. People always want to psychologize an artwork and add their own emotional rationale to it, and that's the power that I'm harnessing. I'm trying to slip between the tag on the wall explaining where I was born and what the work is in order to find that subconscious place where you can manipulate the audience to think what you want to tell them.
A special solo presentation of work by Simon Fujiwara is on view Feb 25-26 in the stand of Taro Nasu at G-Tokyo 2012. He is also the subject of a solo exhibition at Tate St Ives, on view through May 7.
Simon Fujiwara: The Legacy of Objects
By Andrew Maerkle
Installation view of Welcome to the Hotel Munber (2010) at the 3rd Singapore Biennale, 2011, mixed media, dimensions variable. All images: Unless otherwise noted, courtesy Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt, and TARO NASU, Tokyo.
Interview:
ART iT: Many of your works subtly combine mechanisms of both eroticism and archaeology in an investigation of how objects talk. The installation and performance you have in the Singapore Biennale, Welcome to the Hotel Munber (2008- ), goes even further in its premise that the central figure of the work is an amateur erotic writer. To begin with, could you discuss your approach to erotics?
SF: Erotic art is rarely taken seriously. I thought it would be comical to try making erotic art that goes into deep psychological and social issues the way that the works of the Surrealists or Bataille did in the past.
My use of eroticism is also in a sense about dealing with gay identity, and the lack of choices that gay men have to talk about their sexuality. For example, I wanted to understand whether it's possible to fuse the discourse of gay identity with the idea of family, in contrast to the prevailing theme of gay erotica that tends to celebrate the creation of a new, all-male family in exclusion to preexisting familial relationships. And of course the idea of reproduction is central to the performance: What is the legacy of a homosexual child? If he's not going to have children, can he still carry the family forward?
On the other hand, my work is not really about eroticism at all. Eroticism is a foil for holding the attention of the audience and keeping people interested in the rest of the material. If I have eroticism as an overriding lead-in, I'm free to talk about anything, such as a specific moment in Spanish history that has been largely forgotten by the broader international public - almost nobody has a personal relationship to it any more. So it's a way to help the audience get into that material.
Finally, there's also the idea of conflict, which is very much drawn from Bataille: the idea that eroticism is something that will always be in conflict. Bataille talks about it in terms of a primitive man's gesture of creation, which will never be resolved with civilized society. This idea of conflict drives the whole story.
Top: Detail of Welcome to the Hotel Munber (2010) as installed at the 3rd Singapore Biennale, 2011. Bottom: Installation view and detail of Desk Job (2009) in the Nordic Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo Anders Suneberg,
ART iT: Is Bataille's Story of the Eye one of the texts that you draw from? One could find parallels, for example, between the use of the ostrich egg as a prop in your performance and the connection between eyes, eggs and sexuality in Bataille's story.
SF: Yes, Story of the Eye is one of the texts by Bataille that has influenced me, as well as some of his more academic essays. It's difficult to determine what erotic writing should be, because the quality's not always there. That's why with this performance I chose to start with the subtext that it was written for these cheesy gay magazines, in order to keep the pitch on a low level from the beginning. That way the audience doesn't have any expectations of high literature, or even erotic literature for that matter.
ART iT: Setting aside the idea of erotic content, do you approach the installation component of the work through a consideration of the erotics of space? In the way that you conceive of the erotic narrative content as a "lead-in" to other material, do you think about the relations between objects as a mechanism for getting people to engage with the work?
SF: Absolutely. This was a major concern with my installation for the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009, Desk Job, which I developed at the same time as the performance for Hotel Munber and is in some ways an offshoot of the performance, dealing again with the figure of the erotic writer who writes about his life. Because I couldn't be there in Venice to perform for the entire six months of the exhibition, I had to find a way to translate into a sculptural situation the sense that the audience of Hotel Munber experiences of constantly trying to piece together what is true and what not, and trying to piece together the story and understand what it really is. All the material is unverifiable - the whole lot - so you're really left to your own devices, which emerges from a classical theatrical idea of allowing the audience to ultimately decide what actually happened.
With things like Desk Job and the installation component of Hotel Munber - which is a different part of the same work - my question was, how can people get something out of looking at the installation? It's enough for me that they can go in and say, "OK, Franco, Spain in the 1970s - I know something about that." If you don't have those basic references, that then there's no beginning, so you have to have a certain level of knowledge. But if you have those references, then you can sort of understand that it's about my parents, you see my father in the bar with the young child, and then there's a few things that are obviously erotic, or pornographic, really. What was interesting after the first time I showed it was that people started to think that everything in the installation was erotic - the castanets, the baskets, the dripping candles - and they started to understand that they are implicit in the reception of the work because it's all coming from within their own heads. I've just given them a few tasters, and the rest is in their imagination.
I like to put the emphasis back on the audience's own psychology, because of course with work like this you could easily tell someone the story, you could guide them through it by the hand, but that wouldn't leave them space to add their own experiences to the interpretation or reconsider their own families or what their own histories are in relation to their parents' histories. So the responses varied widely from interest in approaches to reconstructing history to identifying with this idea in the performance that one can maintain a relationship even with an estranged parent. The responses varied widely from the personal to the political.
ART iT: The work also seems to sensitively touch upon the sexual tensions that occur between parent and child, both in terms of how the child affects the parent's sexuality as well as how the parent models the child's sexuality.
SF: Yes. It's interesting that despite how homoerotic it is, few people define it as a gay work. They completely understand it as a work about sexuality in general, and that this is just one instance of the battle between homosexuals and Franco, which could equally unfold in a heterosexual context or in any other kind of social institution.
ART iT: Do you have any concerns that it could be labeled as a gay work?
SF: I'd like the work to be as universally appreciated as possible. I hope people could enter it without thinking that it's part of a closed society. The main character, my father, is a straight guy who's been turned into a gay guy, so you could choose to identify with him, or you could identify with my mother, who's silently in the background of the whole thing, and imagine what it's like for her to have a son who's talking about this situation. There are a number of options.
In the process of making a work like this with so many different references, it was important to play the shock factor of those readings against the more analytical, literal descriptions that come afterwards. I certainly think it's important to be vocal about homosexuality, especially in places like Singapore and other parts of the world where it's not as freely spoken, and which are not that different to Franco's Spain in that sense.
There's a definite political undertone, but it's always worked out through fiction and a shared metaphorical space rather than an unequivocal documentary-type situation.
Top: Installation view of Phallusies (An Arabian Mystery) (2010) at Manifesta 8, Murcia, 2010, mixed media, dimensions variable. Bottom: Installation view of Frozen (2010), commissioned by the Frieze Art Fair Cartier Award, 2010, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo David Grandorge.
ART iT: In tandem with the erotic elements in your works are the archaeological situations you create, whereby the discrete components seem to communicate a broader narrative, but simultaneously retain the right to refuse communication - they are, after all, just objects. What led you to begin working in that way?
SF: Having studied architecture before entering art school, I never believed in the essentialized image of the artist - an image that still persists in many ways. When I was making sculptures in art school, I was always more excited about talking about them and the connections between them and things that weren't visible, and trying to convince people that there is a connection, and finding that space between object and the spoken work or text I was quoting. I always enjoy seeing that shift that occurs in a person's mind when they imagine a certain book that was written in 1850 and then look at a broken egg and make a connection between the two. I thought this could be a beautiful, potent form for me to use.
Also, I'd been trained in architecture school to talk about my ideas through constantly having to do presentations of models and sketches and having to convince juries that I could make this building that's going to change the world and be sustainable and bring people together and tick all the boxes of "zero carbon emissions," and so on. Yet actually what you're talking about is a lump of cardboard. I found it philosophically comical that so much work happens in rhetoric and dialogue and that objects themselves don't really matter, and of course this extends to advertising as well: no matter the product, they all receive this massive storytelling treatment.
There's a kind of lack of respect on the one hand for objects in themselves, but on the other hand through the texts one can understand the power of objects or sculptures. So my sculptural installations are almost like theatre sets, and I work similarly to a film or production designer who is constantly asking, "Does the Coca-Cola in the frame tell a story or not?" That's exactly how I think. I think about it in psychological terms that are almost didactic, because all the components are telling a story, and because that story is so complex, if I didn't give those immediate signals the audience wouldn't be able to get further with it.
ART iT: But in art coding and exclusion can also be productive. Not everything has to communicate equally to everybody, in contrast to the advertising or architecture approach.
SF: Certainly. There are always things I add to the installations or performances that are tangential or make no sense, or there's wasted imagery, such as a few slides that come up during the Hotel Munber performance that briefly take the audience somewhere else or make an association with something that I said before or will say later but is not explained. I like throwing in a wild card here and there.
Also, the emotional element has been a point of discussion in particular with this performance. I'm aware it's a very brain stimulating performance. If you like to read or like literature and fantasy, then you'll like this performance because you get this very clear fiction-analysis-fiction-analysis, poetic-analytic structure the whole way through. Then at the end when things break down and I start to become emotional, you aren't sure how deeply affected I am, and whether I'm now becoming my father, and whether my father's crying because he realizes he's becoming Franco. This is a moment that you can't define in any emotional category. You're left with this shocking end that is unplaceable and upsets the things that have gone before.
It was important not to preach to the audience. People were really angry that I added this cheesy, emotional thing at the end, but that's exactly why I did it, because it needed something that could throw viewers into doubt as well, such that everybody has to respond differently and in their own personal way. That's why I describe myself as a closet expressionist. Expression is a bit of a dirty word, just as eroticism has been a dirty word. Why is that? Why have we lost that? Perhaps it's because we tend to want to preserve and institutionalize everything - and where do you put emotion in a museum?
View of stage for the performance version of Welcome to the Hotel Munber at the Singapore Biennale, 2011. Photo ART iT.
ART iT: As an artist do you feel tension, then, between making performances and installations? Do you feel an emotional tension between acting something out versus leaving it in a space?
SF: I use tension as a technical device, pairing things that will spark off other things. With a performance, the tension between analysis and fiction is simply a device to ensure that it's dynamic and that it doesn't become one long talk. The fiction is necessary because it puts people in a metaphorical state. It takes it away from me, such that suddenly we all access a shared sphere where we're all imagining the narrative and none of us are physically part of it, and it keeps the narrative from looking like a kind of therapeutic self-analysis session. When you're dealing with autobiographical material, or supposedly autobiographical material, or the form of autobiography, then of course you're always skirting these traps of being pinned down into certain positions, but I use it to break open identity and enable associations to form the audience response. People always want to psychologize an artwork and add their own emotional rationale to it, and that's the power that I'm harnessing. I'm trying to slip between the tag on the wall explaining where I was born and what the work is in order to find that subconscious place where you can manipulate the audience to think what you want to tell them.
A special solo presentation of work by Simon Fujiwara is on view Feb 25-26 in the stand of Taro Nasu at G-Tokyo 2012. He is also the subject of a solo exhibition at Tate St Ives, on view through May 7.
Simon Fujiwara: The Legacy of Objects
Pak Sheung Chuen
Coincidence Measured by Body
By Andrew Maerkle
From A Zebra for 5 Persons, 2006-12-28, 12:30-13:00, Cheung Sha Wan, Hong Kong. All images: Courtesy Pak Sheung Chuen/pakpark.blogspot.com.
Based in Hong Kong, Pak Sheung Chuen is known for works involving subtle interventions into the everyday urban environment. His practice developed from a multi-year project contributing a weekly art column to the local Ming Pao newspaper, which he used as a platform for registering his encounters in the city, ranging from discovering a surrendipitous love letter in the rows of titles on a receipt from a bookstore to attempting to bottle the horizon along Victoria Harbor. In such works, Pak combines the grand scales of government, economy or environment with his own bodily scale to identify the myriad points where individual lives and broader society intersect.
ART iT met with Pak in May 2010 to discuss his practice in greater detail.
Interview:
ART iT: One thing that strikes me about your work is the idea, called yuanfen in Chinese, of fateful coincidence or convergence, which seems to be particularly evident in pieces such as Waiting for a Friend (without appointment) (2006), for which you stood outside a train station for four hours waiting to encounter someone you know. Is this a concept that you consciously explore or apply in your practice?
PSC: Through my works I want to make daily life more meaningful, and because yuanfen is related to encountering unexpected potential, I think it is a good word to reflect this attitude. Yuanfen is a very Buddhist concept. You believe something good will happen in the future, and that everything will turn out in a good way. Sometimes I produce something good for myself, or sometimes I produce something good for the future. It's like when you plant the seeds of a flower, one day you suddenly have flowers. I like that feeling.
Top: Waiting for a Friend (without appointment), 2006-12-29, 12:47-16:38. Bottom: Familiar Numbers, Unknown Telephone, 2005-5-16, 13:15-13:18.
ART iT: But if we usually think of it as something beyond our control, in your works the yuanfen of encountering a friend at the train station is part of a constructed situation. Are you interested in the idea of playing with elements of both control and chance, and with how different bodies relate in time and space, as in a cosmology?
PSC: Actually, I think something must happen if I create this kind of situation, it just depends on how long it takes - maybe 10 hours, maybe one day, maybe two days.
I am a practicing Christian but I read many books on Buddhist thought, and one Buddhist teaching is that a flower is not just a flower; it is sunlight, it is water, it is soil, and it is you: everything around a flower is part of that flower. I have the same thinking: I am a person, but I am also the people around me.
For four years from around 2003 to 2007, I worked for a local newspaper, the Ming Pao, making weekly art projects for the Sunday edition. During this period I spent a lot of time simply hanging out and walking around the streets. I would walk until I found something that spoke to me, and then an idea would emerge. For example, one day I saw this traffic sign in the street with the figures of a man and a child holding hands, and I wondered where the mother could be. I started looking around the city and began to find different combinations of adults and children on the signage, imagining that they all come from a single family. [This piece became Ethic of the Single Parents: Father and Son / Mother and Son / Mother and Daughter / Father and Daughter (2003).]
With another piece, Familiar Numbers, Unknown Telephone (2005), I found a bus stop served by four bus routes, 91, 91M, 92, and 96R, and thought this combination of numbers is very similar to a mobile phone number. I dialed those numbers, someone picked up, and I told him I saw his telephone number on the bus stop. He couldn't believe it. He asked, "Is it part of an advertisement?" I said, "No, it's like a silkscreen print on the bus stop." He asked, "Is it a new-style bus stop or old-style bus-stop?" We continued this kind of silly dialogue for a few minutes, and I recorded everything.
Afterward, I wrote about it as one of my newspaper projects. I learned that some people actually tried dialing the number themselves, so I called the man back to apologize. Then later when I happened to revisit the area near the bus stop, the numbers had been stolen. This was a strong reminder that presenting work in a newspaper is completely different from other art media. But I like it because you can interact with people who are completely unknown to you and connect with them. This is a major characteristic of my work. I always make myself interact with people I don't know, and create relationships with them.
ART iT: Were you already working like this before working for the newspaper?
PSC: It started with Ming Pao. I suggested that they provide a page for artists to do projects, and it's still running today, although I am no longer involved on a regular basis. At first it was completely new to me, because I had always been a painter. But I have a good sensitivity to the things around me so I started to think about how to make a piece for the newspaper. At that time, in 2003, Hong Kong was struck by the SARS epidemic, which was terrible, and I couldn't find a job. So I concentrated on walking in the streets. Then when I was walking, a miracle happened. It was almost as if somebody or something spoke to me, and showed me what to do. So gradually I found a way to use the newspaper to develop my ideas and artworks.
ART iT: Is this the reason why your recent artworks generally involve an action, a documentation and then a story?
PSC: Yes. While doing the newspaper I felt very uncomfortable with the idea of returning to a gallery environment. It took me a long time to go back. I still do the newspaper sometimes but I feel that if I'm not constantly in Hong Kong the artwork won't be powerful, because it won't be able to relate to the readers in the same way. I stopped doing regular projects when I left in 2007 for a yearlong residency in New York.
ART iT: Then do you think of your art as being specifically located in the community in Hong Kong? You're not thinking about reaching an international audience?
PSC: The first period I was making art for the readers of the newspaper. I did it for around four years, and it helped me to develop my art practice. Of course even some projects from that period can appeal to international audiences, but mainly I enjoy when I'm making artwork as part of my everyday life, just like cooking, going shopping, and other activities. I don't need to think too much.
Also I find the process of making works from ideas I encounter on the streets is similar to therapy. I find that the environment and people around me become friendlier, and I can have a more positive way of thinking about my city. This is what I was trying to communicate to readers, and hope they enjoyed.
But after I left Hong Kong for the residency the way I make art changed, or the target changed.
Top: Installation view of Inexistent Time (2008) at the 3rd Yokohama Triennale, 2008. Bottom: Installation view of A Travel Without Visual Experience (2009) at Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.
ART iT: What about the work that you made for the 3rd Yokohama Triennale in 2008, Inexistent Time and Existent Time? Did it have a target?
PSC: I was responding to the theme of the exhibition, "Time Crevasse." I tried to think about time in my life, what it means to me, and came out with several ideas. One is the idea of the lifeline. Every person has their own lifeline, but when you put two lifelines together, what is the meaning of the parts that don't line up? I approached it almost like a sculpture, in the sense that when you're making a sculpture you have to think about both the positive and the negative space.
But overall I think of my artworks as being destined for books - it's just that maybe now the readers have become more professional.
ART iT: What happens when you do exhibit in a gallery situation?
PSC: At the very beginning I felt it was difficult because my training came from doing the newspaper, which was just about putting an idea on paper: everything's flat, and I only have to manage one specific area. But in an exhibition you need to think of the gallery as a space, you need to consider the feelings of the people who enter that space; it's not about a pure idea - otherwise they could just look at the book, no need to go to the gallery. So recently I have started to approach exhibitions more in the way of a painter, or rather I prepare two exhibitions for the same space at the same time. The first is about the conceptual idea of my artwork, and the second is about creating a composition in space through the different elements of my works, allowing people inside to feel like they are looking at a three-dimensional abstract painting and making it easier for them to enter the idea. And in the case of A Travel Without Visual Experience (2009), which was an installation of photos I took while blindfolded on a tour of Malaysia, I tried to achieve that effect on an even deeper level in having the audience directly experience the idea behind the work by darkening the space so it was impossible to see the photos unless they used their camera flashes.
Detail from installation view of Valleys Trip (2007), map of Tokyo's 23 wards, 1:10000 scale, 2006 edition.
ART iT: Earlier we were talking about yuanfen and cosmologies. I brought it up because you also have several works based on maps, like Mountains Trip and Valleys Trip (both 2007), where you used the creases in a paper foldout map and the gutter of an atlas, respectively, to determine itineraries through Tokyo. Why are you so interested in maps?
PSC: I don't know exactly why, but I think maps basically give me a way to know where I am. The perspective of a map is like the perspective of god looking down on the world: we humans become very small. Maybe it's this feeling that I like.
The pieces I made in Tokyo developed the same way as my Hong Kong pieces, through hanging out in the streets. Valleys Trip happened because one day I went to a bookstore and found a map of all 23 districts in Tokyo. It was really thick, but small. Each map went across two pages, but even if you pressed the book flat, you could never see the part of the map that was in the gutter. Then when I pressed it, the idea came out: what if I could travel in that gap? What would that mean? It was an interesting and abstract idea. Then as I traveled the gap I decided to take photos of myself. I knew that one day this project would be published in a book, so I placed myself in the middle of the frame. That way the photo would be there in the gap of the book.
I think everyday life is like that. There are so many things around us, it's just that you need to pay attention, calm yourself down, and then the idea will come out. Actually it's very religious. When you're doing spiritual practice, some idea will come out and fill your whole body. This kind of thing supports my life.
ART iT: Many of your pieces develop from your own body - its dimensions and how it exists in space. Sometimes these are kind of absurd, but they also can be quite powerful, like A Zebra for Five Persons (2006), for which you and four other people lined up together to block off a zebra crossing.
PSC: I made that piece when I was on a residency and came back to Hong Kong for one month. While in Hong Kong, I put a calendar inside a map and then every day of the month used the numbers of the days to determine a new place to visit and see whether something could happen. Every place I went, I made something in response to the inspiration I received there, so this is a kind of yuanfen also. One day I found this incredibly narrow zebra crossing, and it really stimulated me. It was very noisy in that area because the crossing lights make a loud, fast noise when it's ok to cross, and I thought about why we like that in Hong Kong: because the government wants people to move faster, they narrow the crossing space and make an agitating sound so people will move fast. I wanted to stop the people from moving so fast, and make the street slower. I asked my friends to come together to do this art piece walking across the zebra for a half hour, and then we documented it and put it on YouTube so people could get to know the idea.
All: From A Present to the Central Government (2005). Top: Part 1, 2005-7-1, 15:00-17:00, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. Middle: Part 2, 2005-7-17, 10:00-17:35, around the periphery of Tiananmen Square, Beijing. Bottom: Documentation of route for Part 2 action.
ART iT: Is this connected to your works that relate to Hong Kong politics, like A Present to the Central Government (2005), for which you used a yellow cloth spread on the street to collect the footprints of marchers during the annual July 1 civil rights march?
PSC: Yes. When I was working in the newspaper, I felt I had the responsibility to express the feeling of the Hong Kong people through my column, and this period coincided with a critical point in Hong Kong politics. I was speaking out as an individual and an artist, not as an activist. Most of my friends are activists, and the way they think is totally different from me. They think the government is shit, and that they need to fight with them. But for me we need all kinds of people to fight this dragon government, only one way is not enough. Someone has to shake hands with them, someone has to fight with them, someone has to give ideas to them to produce gradual change.
But even if my artwork is small-scale and private, this actually gives it much more impact. People could see my artwork in the newspaper and realize they are the same as me, just like with the man who stood before the tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Why was that image so powerful? Because even though he's the same as anybody, that man was able to stop the tanks on his own. You can measure your body against him. I think this is very important for my artwork. I try not to make my art so big because I need the audience to feel my artwork by themselves, directly. Most of my works express my personal feelings. I use my own power to oppose the system, to oppose the thinking behind the current political situation. But at the same time it's not about only expressing anger. I hope people can calm down and have their own thoughts on the situation so that it can lead to positive thinking. We need both.
Pak Sheung Chuen: Coincidence Measured by Body
By Andrew Maerkle
From A Zebra for 5 Persons, 2006-12-28, 12:30-13:00, Cheung Sha Wan, Hong Kong. All images: Courtesy Pak Sheung Chuen/pakpark.blogspot.com.
Based in Hong Kong, Pak Sheung Chuen is known for works involving subtle interventions into the everyday urban environment. His practice developed from a multi-year project contributing a weekly art column to the local Ming Pao newspaper, which he used as a platform for registering his encounters in the city, ranging from discovering a surrendipitous love letter in the rows of titles on a receipt from a bookstore to attempting to bottle the horizon along Victoria Harbor. In such works, Pak combines the grand scales of government, economy or environment with his own bodily scale to identify the myriad points where individual lives and broader society intersect.
ART iT met with Pak in May 2010 to discuss his practice in greater detail.
Interview:
ART iT: One thing that strikes me about your work is the idea, called yuanfen in Chinese, of fateful coincidence or convergence, which seems to be particularly evident in pieces such as Waiting for a Friend (without appointment) (2006), for which you stood outside a train station for four hours waiting to encounter someone you know. Is this a concept that you consciously explore or apply in your practice?
PSC: Through my works I want to make daily life more meaningful, and because yuanfen is related to encountering unexpected potential, I think it is a good word to reflect this attitude. Yuanfen is a very Buddhist concept. You believe something good will happen in the future, and that everything will turn out in a good way. Sometimes I produce something good for myself, or sometimes I produce something good for the future. It's like when you plant the seeds of a flower, one day you suddenly have flowers. I like that feeling.
Top: Waiting for a Friend (without appointment), 2006-12-29, 12:47-16:38. Bottom: Familiar Numbers, Unknown Telephone, 2005-5-16, 13:15-13:18.
ART iT: But if we usually think of it as something beyond our control, in your works the yuanfen of encountering a friend at the train station is part of a constructed situation. Are you interested in the idea of playing with elements of both control and chance, and with how different bodies relate in time and space, as in a cosmology?
PSC: Actually, I think something must happen if I create this kind of situation, it just depends on how long it takes - maybe 10 hours, maybe one day, maybe two days.
I am a practicing Christian but I read many books on Buddhist thought, and one Buddhist teaching is that a flower is not just a flower; it is sunlight, it is water, it is soil, and it is you: everything around a flower is part of that flower. I have the same thinking: I am a person, but I am also the people around me.
For four years from around 2003 to 2007, I worked for a local newspaper, the Ming Pao, making weekly art projects for the Sunday edition. During this period I spent a lot of time simply hanging out and walking around the streets. I would walk until I found something that spoke to me, and then an idea would emerge. For example, one day I saw this traffic sign in the street with the figures of a man and a child holding hands, and I wondered where the mother could be. I started looking around the city and began to find different combinations of adults and children on the signage, imagining that they all come from a single family. [This piece became Ethic of the Single Parents: Father and Son / Mother and Son / Mother and Daughter / Father and Daughter (2003).]
With another piece, Familiar Numbers, Unknown Telephone (2005), I found a bus stop served by four bus routes, 91, 91M, 92, and 96R, and thought this combination of numbers is very similar to a mobile phone number. I dialed those numbers, someone picked up, and I told him I saw his telephone number on the bus stop. He couldn't believe it. He asked, "Is it part of an advertisement?" I said, "No, it's like a silkscreen print on the bus stop." He asked, "Is it a new-style bus stop or old-style bus-stop?" We continued this kind of silly dialogue for a few minutes, and I recorded everything.
Afterward, I wrote about it as one of my newspaper projects. I learned that some people actually tried dialing the number themselves, so I called the man back to apologize. Then later when I happened to revisit the area near the bus stop, the numbers had been stolen. This was a strong reminder that presenting work in a newspaper is completely different from other art media. But I like it because you can interact with people who are completely unknown to you and connect with them. This is a major characteristic of my work. I always make myself interact with people I don't know, and create relationships with them.
ART iT: Were you already working like this before working for the newspaper?
PSC: It started with Ming Pao. I suggested that they provide a page for artists to do projects, and it's still running today, although I am no longer involved on a regular basis. At first it was completely new to me, because I had always been a painter. But I have a good sensitivity to the things around me so I started to think about how to make a piece for the newspaper. At that time, in 2003, Hong Kong was struck by the SARS epidemic, which was terrible, and I couldn't find a job. So I concentrated on walking in the streets. Then when I was walking, a miracle happened. It was almost as if somebody or something spoke to me, and showed me what to do. So gradually I found a way to use the newspaper to develop my ideas and artworks.
ART iT: Is this the reason why your recent artworks generally involve an action, a documentation and then a story?
PSC: Yes. While doing the newspaper I felt very uncomfortable with the idea of returning to a gallery environment. It took me a long time to go back. I still do the newspaper sometimes but I feel that if I'm not constantly in Hong Kong the artwork won't be powerful, because it won't be able to relate to the readers in the same way. I stopped doing regular projects when I left in 2007 for a yearlong residency in New York.
ART iT: Then do you think of your art as being specifically located in the community in Hong Kong? You're not thinking about reaching an international audience?
PSC: The first period I was making art for the readers of the newspaper. I did it for around four years, and it helped me to develop my art practice. Of course even some projects from that period can appeal to international audiences, but mainly I enjoy when I'm making artwork as part of my everyday life, just like cooking, going shopping, and other activities. I don't need to think too much.
Also I find the process of making works from ideas I encounter on the streets is similar to therapy. I find that the environment and people around me become friendlier, and I can have a more positive way of thinking about my city. This is what I was trying to communicate to readers, and hope they enjoyed.
But after I left Hong Kong for the residency the way I make art changed, or the target changed.
Top: Installation view of Inexistent Time (2008) at the 3rd Yokohama Triennale, 2008. Bottom: Installation view of A Travel Without Visual Experience (2009) at Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou.
ART iT: What about the work that you made for the 3rd Yokohama Triennale in 2008, Inexistent Time and Existent Time? Did it have a target?
PSC: I was responding to the theme of the exhibition, "Time Crevasse." I tried to think about time in my life, what it means to me, and came out with several ideas. One is the idea of the lifeline. Every person has their own lifeline, but when you put two lifelines together, what is the meaning of the parts that don't line up? I approached it almost like a sculpture, in the sense that when you're making a sculpture you have to think about both the positive and the negative space.
But overall I think of my artworks as being destined for books - it's just that maybe now the readers have become more professional.
ART iT: What happens when you do exhibit in a gallery situation?
PSC: At the very beginning I felt it was difficult because my training came from doing the newspaper, which was just about putting an idea on paper: everything's flat, and I only have to manage one specific area. But in an exhibition you need to think of the gallery as a space, you need to consider the feelings of the people who enter that space; it's not about a pure idea - otherwise they could just look at the book, no need to go to the gallery. So recently I have started to approach exhibitions more in the way of a painter, or rather I prepare two exhibitions for the same space at the same time. The first is about the conceptual idea of my artwork, and the second is about creating a composition in space through the different elements of my works, allowing people inside to feel like they are looking at a three-dimensional abstract painting and making it easier for them to enter the idea. And in the case of A Travel Without Visual Experience (2009), which was an installation of photos I took while blindfolded on a tour of Malaysia, I tried to achieve that effect on an even deeper level in having the audience directly experience the idea behind the work by darkening the space so it was impossible to see the photos unless they used their camera flashes.
Detail from installation view of Valleys Trip (2007), map of Tokyo's 23 wards, 1:10000 scale, 2006 edition.
ART iT: Earlier we were talking about yuanfen and cosmologies. I brought it up because you also have several works based on maps, like Mountains Trip and Valleys Trip (both 2007), where you used the creases in a paper foldout map and the gutter of an atlas, respectively, to determine itineraries through Tokyo. Why are you so interested in maps?
PSC: I don't know exactly why, but I think maps basically give me a way to know where I am. The perspective of a map is like the perspective of god looking down on the world: we humans become very small. Maybe it's this feeling that I like.
The pieces I made in Tokyo developed the same way as my Hong Kong pieces, through hanging out in the streets. Valleys Trip happened because one day I went to a bookstore and found a map of all 23 districts in Tokyo. It was really thick, but small. Each map went across two pages, but even if you pressed the book flat, you could never see the part of the map that was in the gutter. Then when I pressed it, the idea came out: what if I could travel in that gap? What would that mean? It was an interesting and abstract idea. Then as I traveled the gap I decided to take photos of myself. I knew that one day this project would be published in a book, so I placed myself in the middle of the frame. That way the photo would be there in the gap of the book.
I think everyday life is like that. There are so many things around us, it's just that you need to pay attention, calm yourself down, and then the idea will come out. Actually it's very religious. When you're doing spiritual practice, some idea will come out and fill your whole body. This kind of thing supports my life.
ART iT: Many of your pieces develop from your own body - its dimensions and how it exists in space. Sometimes these are kind of absurd, but they also can be quite powerful, like A Zebra for Five Persons (2006), for which you and four other people lined up together to block off a zebra crossing.
PSC: I made that piece when I was on a residency and came back to Hong Kong for one month. While in Hong Kong, I put a calendar inside a map and then every day of the month used the numbers of the days to determine a new place to visit and see whether something could happen. Every place I went, I made something in response to the inspiration I received there, so this is a kind of yuanfen also. One day I found this incredibly narrow zebra crossing, and it really stimulated me. It was very noisy in that area because the crossing lights make a loud, fast noise when it's ok to cross, and I thought about why we like that in Hong Kong: because the government wants people to move faster, they narrow the crossing space and make an agitating sound so people will move fast. I wanted to stop the people from moving so fast, and make the street slower. I asked my friends to come together to do this art piece walking across the zebra for a half hour, and then we documented it and put it on YouTube so people could get to know the idea.
All: From A Present to the Central Government (2005). Top: Part 1, 2005-7-1, 15:00-17:00, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. Middle: Part 2, 2005-7-17, 10:00-17:35, around the periphery of Tiananmen Square, Beijing. Bottom: Documentation of route for Part 2 action.
ART iT: Is this connected to your works that relate to Hong Kong politics, like A Present to the Central Government (2005), for which you used a yellow cloth spread on the street to collect the footprints of marchers during the annual July 1 civil rights march?
PSC: Yes. When I was working in the newspaper, I felt I had the responsibility to express the feeling of the Hong Kong people through my column, and this period coincided with a critical point in Hong Kong politics. I was speaking out as an individual and an artist, not as an activist. Most of my friends are activists, and the way they think is totally different from me. They think the government is shit, and that they need to fight with them. But for me we need all kinds of people to fight this dragon government, only one way is not enough. Someone has to shake hands with them, someone has to fight with them, someone has to give ideas to them to produce gradual change.
But even if my artwork is small-scale and private, this actually gives it much more impact. People could see my artwork in the newspaper and realize they are the same as me, just like with the man who stood before the tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Why was that image so powerful? Because even though he's the same as anybody, that man was able to stop the tanks on his own. You can measure your body against him. I think this is very important for my artwork. I try not to make my art so big because I need the audience to feel my artwork by themselves, directly. Most of my works express my personal feelings. I use my own power to oppose the system, to oppose the thinking behind the current political situation. But at the same time it's not about only expressing anger. I hope people can calm down and have their own thoughts on the situation so that it can lead to positive thinking. We need both.
Pak Sheung Chuen: Coincidence Measured by Body
Mickalene Thomas
Models of Agency
By Andrew Maerkle
Mama Bush: One of a Kind Two (2009), acrylic, rhinestone and enamel on wood panel, approx 274 x 366 cm. All images: Unless otherwise noted, courtesy Mickalene Thomas Studio.
Interview:
ART iT: Your work engages with images of black women in settings that evoke both the aesthetic of 1970s Blaxploitation cinema and the composition of historical European paintings. In this day and age, does working with images of blackness necessarily mean that you are dealing with black identity?
MT: When I'm making the work, I don't necessarily think of it as being representative of a specific cultural or ethnic identity. That may be one of the inspirations, but it's really more an extension of who I am. For African-American artists, any time you make work that in any way deals with your identity there's a tendency for people to want to think of it only within that framework. But I personally think there are universal elements to the work. I would like to think it speaks to the human spirit and there's a relationship that anyone can find familiar. To me, that comes back to thinking about painting and art history more than contemporary concepts of cultural identity.
I approach the work primarily through the formal aspects of making a painting, and the end product is about painting. But I want to use the black body because the idea of placing it in a context where it is not usually seen or spoken about enables comparisons to the Western ideology of beauty. From my experience, in Western art history when you see images of black women they're generally depicted in positions of servitude or looked at through an anthropological perspective. They are not seen in Western art history in the archetypal explorations of notions of beauty. I was always interested in those images that are considered beautiful and related to the self. I was interested in whether I could change those perspectives with the art that I made, if I could play with how people might look, not only on a stereotypical level but also maybe erase that and challenge viewers in their own perceptions of images. I think that's why I always go back to using formulas from Western art as a mechanism for making the paintings. That way, when I insert the black body, it has a relationship with something that was already there and exists.
ART iT: Are you familiar with the work of the Japanese media artist Yasumasa Morimura, whose "Daughter of Art History" series of photographs also reworked the Western art canon? I think there are some overlaps between what the two of you do, although clearly different results.
MT: I'm familiar with the work, although I've never looked at it in depth. I know that Manet was influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, evident in his use of color, the play with pictorial space and the way he constructed landscapes. I'm very conscientious of that. When I look at people I don't only stop there but also look at their references.
The similarities with Morimura are not something I've particularly thought about, though, when I look at his work. I think it's an interesting comparison and it makes me want to look at it more. But just as Matisse looked at Manet, you have all these artists that come out of one another and use each other as a way of finding out how to make something new.
Both: Oh Mickey (2008), DVD and framed monitor, rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel, diptych, approx 81 x 127 x 14 cm (framed monitor) and 122 x 91 x 5 cm (painting).
ART iT: For me the interesting thing about yourself and Morimura is that it's not just this idea of inserting a foreign body into the Western art canon but also the process of making elaborate sets, photographing them and then working from the photograph, where each image becomes a performance or a documentation of a performance.
MT: I see his work as being more performative than my own. Certainly, there is an element of performance in my work because I want to create my own space, see it directly, and be a part of that space. I become a kind of art director when I'm working with the models, and I also work with a stylist, a makeup artist and a lighting designer. It's a collaborative production, and the models themselves bring something that I can't necessarily bring to the work, which is really exciting.
I'm interested in performance in the sense that I can expand on the idea of the space and how I work with the models. I think there's something there that I can pursue further. That's why I started the "Ain't I a Woman" series of videos recording the models as I photographed them. I felt there was something lost in the photo stills and in the paintings that could be captured on video. For me the performative element develops from wanting viewers to see all sides of what happens.
ART iT: The videos capture those shifts between confidence and vulnerability that the models experience during the shoot, whereas the photo captures only one moment.
MT: Yes, there are moments when the models find within themselves a decisiveness of action, and that can be generated by both the vulnerability and the confidence of knowing which is the right angle they want to portray. Those subtleties are the moments that you want to capture with photography but can't always capture.
I actually used to do more performance when I was in graduate school at Yale, where I would dress up as this alter ego that I named "Quanikah." Growing up in New Jersey in the late 1970s there was always this need - perhaps inspired by the Black Panther movement and even Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement - to reclaim yourself by having an "African" name. My cousins and family members all changed their names to "African" names that we made up for ourselves, choosing things that sounded different and rooted in Afrocentric thought. When I go home, some of my cousins still call me Quanikah.
But who is Quanikah? She grew up in South Jersey in Camden and is now attending Yale - I made her into this true person. Thinking about how she might look, was she a local from the New Haven community? There was a divide between the town and the university; most of the African-Americans at Yale worked there, so those of us who were students were always asked to show our IDs or otherwise prove we belonged.
I decided to do this project with Quanikah going to Yale, dressed as a local, for a performance. I was stopped much more frequently than I had been up to that point, and many of my peers in the art school didn't recognize me because I was made up in a sort of costume, wearing a wig and earrings and fake nails. It was quite an experience. I was considering Cindy Sherman at the time and those moments of transformation when you are perceived as someone else, how people respond to you based on what you look like or what you're wearing, as opposed to who you are, and the story that can be woven around that experience. That story took the form of a series of photographs that I produced while at Yale.
Left: Negress (2001/05), C-print, approx 122 x 109 cm. Right: Negress 4 (2001/05), C-print, dimensions not available.
ART iT: I read that you started out making abstract works at university. Why did you feel that abstraction wasn't working for you at that time, or why did you feel it was necessary to push further into figuration and portraiture?
MT: When I was doing my undergraduate degree at Pratt I always felt that I wasn't good with the figure, and I always avoided figure painting courses. I responded more to painters like Bryce Marden, Terry Winters and Agnes Martin. But once I got to Yale I was challenged about why I was doing abstract work and what it really meant to me. I didn't know how to justify it except through talking about my works as paintings. I started experimenting with text paintings, removing anything that had to do with color, form or representation. I thought maybe I could work with text and still work abstractly.
Eventually, I felt it was necessary to work with the figure. So while I was at Yale there were two bodies of work I was making in my studio, some were representational and some were abstract, and I was looking for a way to bring the two together. It's slowly getting there. I still think there's a divide even though there are abstract elements in the current work if you remove the figure. That's what keeps me making the work. For me, there's so much more room and conceptual play with abstraction. I like contending with that understanding of what's abstract, what's expressionism, what's conceptual theory?
I started responding to how people use the figure in different ways. I remember seeing Gary Hume and being impressed by how he uses the figure abstractly whereby it's really about forms and color, or how Kara Walker uses the figure. Her drawing is impeccable, and I think that's why she's able to do these cutout silhouettes with perspectival space, because she understands drawing. She's a conceptual draftsman more than anything else. For me abstraction is that thing: I know how to use abstraction; I'm rooted in it and understand it.
The figures came more from the critical discussion around my work during graduate school: Why are you, as a young black woman, dealing with these ideas? How are you going to bring them together? It's not that they expected me to work with black issues, it's more that they were curious as to why I, personally, was so invested in the language of abstraction. That's why I'm interested in bringing these two languages together.
Top: Black Cock, Black Bitch (2000). Bottom left: Untitled (2000). Bottom right: Untitled (2000).
ART iT: Was the Quanikah experiment what shifted you into figuration?
MT: Yes, that and photographing myself and my mother. I had started using symbols and signifiers in my paintings related to black male masculinity and black female sexuality, pairing graphic images together. For example, I made a glitter painting of a rooster and a female pit-bull, which I put together as the "black cock" and "black bitch" in a play with visual semantics. I was working with images and slang and wordplay, and that became a conceptual way of using abstraction and words. I was looking at Mel Bochner a lot then, and Glenn Ligon was a big influence as well in trying to understand how to make these images without being heavy-handed or forcing the ideas. And then it took new shape and specificity when I brought photography into it.
ART iT: You mention your interest in the history of abstraction. I hadn't realized how big your recent works are until I saw them in person. How do you end up working at such a big scale, is it necessarily a response to the idea of the macho painter or is it more driven by the demands of the material?
MT: I think it's a little of both. There's definitely the bravado of knowing you can pull off a big painting. And it is a boy thing. I like wrestling with those male notions of, "They've done it, why can’t I do it too? How will I do it?"
Initially, I worked on a small scale but I found it limiting in terms of composition. I started thinking about pictorial space and how to change the flat, graphic space of my work into a more complicated three-dimensional space - how to play with flat planes and perspective. There's always this desire to make the painter's painting, to have this Clement Greenberg notion of the painted surface and its relationship with the viewer. I feel the scale is important because it determines how the paintings are viewed and what they mean. I enjoy the challenge of working large because I have to contend with the relationships, there's a struggle of trying to understand all the components and make them work in a painting.
Usually, when I work on a small scale I get it so quickly that it doesn't allow time for exploring. After a while, working at a certain size you know what's going to happen before you do it, and I felt I knew my system too well and had to reinvent it. I think the challenge was for my self. There are certainly some works that are better on a small-scale, like the multi-panel portraits, and I think those work well because they are graphic images that are contained in their space and the point is there.
But I love struggling with the painting when I'm in the studio and I can't get it and have to leave it and come back to it four or five times. I've learned just by looking at, say, Jasper Johns and certain images that resonate with me, that whatever that feeling is when you're in front of those paintings is what I want people to feel in front of my own paintings.
Installation view of "Mickalene Thomas - One of a Kind Two" at the Hara
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2011. Photo Keizo Kioku, courtesy
the artist and Hara Museum of Contemporary Art.
Work by Mickalene Thomas will be on display in a solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, from September 15 to October 29, and is currently included in the group shows "EAT ME," at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town through September 4, and "Africolor," at Danziger Projects in New York through September 10. Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Thomas' Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Nois is currently on view at the Modern Restaurant.
By Andrew Maerkle
Mama Bush: One of a Kind Two (2009), acrylic, rhinestone and enamel on wood panel, approx 274 x 366 cm. All images: Unless otherwise noted, courtesy Mickalene Thomas Studio.
Interview:
ART iT: Your work engages with images of black women in settings that evoke both the aesthetic of 1970s Blaxploitation cinema and the composition of historical European paintings. In this day and age, does working with images of blackness necessarily mean that you are dealing with black identity?
MT: When I'm making the work, I don't necessarily think of it as being representative of a specific cultural or ethnic identity. That may be one of the inspirations, but it's really more an extension of who I am. For African-American artists, any time you make work that in any way deals with your identity there's a tendency for people to want to think of it only within that framework. But I personally think there are universal elements to the work. I would like to think it speaks to the human spirit and there's a relationship that anyone can find familiar. To me, that comes back to thinking about painting and art history more than contemporary concepts of cultural identity.
I approach the work primarily through the formal aspects of making a painting, and the end product is about painting. But I want to use the black body because the idea of placing it in a context where it is not usually seen or spoken about enables comparisons to the Western ideology of beauty. From my experience, in Western art history when you see images of black women they're generally depicted in positions of servitude or looked at through an anthropological perspective. They are not seen in Western art history in the archetypal explorations of notions of beauty. I was always interested in those images that are considered beautiful and related to the self. I was interested in whether I could change those perspectives with the art that I made, if I could play with how people might look, not only on a stereotypical level but also maybe erase that and challenge viewers in their own perceptions of images. I think that's why I always go back to using formulas from Western art as a mechanism for making the paintings. That way, when I insert the black body, it has a relationship with something that was already there and exists.
ART iT: Are you familiar with the work of the Japanese media artist Yasumasa Morimura, whose "Daughter of Art History" series of photographs also reworked the Western art canon? I think there are some overlaps between what the two of you do, although clearly different results.
MT: I'm familiar with the work, although I've never looked at it in depth. I know that Manet was influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, evident in his use of color, the play with pictorial space and the way he constructed landscapes. I'm very conscientious of that. When I look at people I don't only stop there but also look at their references.
The similarities with Morimura are not something I've particularly thought about, though, when I look at his work. I think it's an interesting comparison and it makes me want to look at it more. But just as Matisse looked at Manet, you have all these artists that come out of one another and use each other as a way of finding out how to make something new.
Both: Oh Mickey (2008), DVD and framed monitor, rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel, diptych, approx 81 x 127 x 14 cm (framed monitor) and 122 x 91 x 5 cm (painting).
ART iT: For me the interesting thing about yourself and Morimura is that it's not just this idea of inserting a foreign body into the Western art canon but also the process of making elaborate sets, photographing them and then working from the photograph, where each image becomes a performance or a documentation of a performance.
MT: I see his work as being more performative than my own. Certainly, there is an element of performance in my work because I want to create my own space, see it directly, and be a part of that space. I become a kind of art director when I'm working with the models, and I also work with a stylist, a makeup artist and a lighting designer. It's a collaborative production, and the models themselves bring something that I can't necessarily bring to the work, which is really exciting.
I'm interested in performance in the sense that I can expand on the idea of the space and how I work with the models. I think there's something there that I can pursue further. That's why I started the "Ain't I a Woman" series of videos recording the models as I photographed them. I felt there was something lost in the photo stills and in the paintings that could be captured on video. For me the performative element develops from wanting viewers to see all sides of what happens.
ART iT: The videos capture those shifts between confidence and vulnerability that the models experience during the shoot, whereas the photo captures only one moment.
MT: Yes, there are moments when the models find within themselves a decisiveness of action, and that can be generated by both the vulnerability and the confidence of knowing which is the right angle they want to portray. Those subtleties are the moments that you want to capture with photography but can't always capture.
I actually used to do more performance when I was in graduate school at Yale, where I would dress up as this alter ego that I named "Quanikah." Growing up in New Jersey in the late 1970s there was always this need - perhaps inspired by the Black Panther movement and even Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement - to reclaim yourself by having an "African" name. My cousins and family members all changed their names to "African" names that we made up for ourselves, choosing things that sounded different and rooted in Afrocentric thought. When I go home, some of my cousins still call me Quanikah.
But who is Quanikah? She grew up in South Jersey in Camden and is now attending Yale - I made her into this true person. Thinking about how she might look, was she a local from the New Haven community? There was a divide between the town and the university; most of the African-Americans at Yale worked there, so those of us who were students were always asked to show our IDs or otherwise prove we belonged.
I decided to do this project with Quanikah going to Yale, dressed as a local, for a performance. I was stopped much more frequently than I had been up to that point, and many of my peers in the art school didn't recognize me because I was made up in a sort of costume, wearing a wig and earrings and fake nails. It was quite an experience. I was considering Cindy Sherman at the time and those moments of transformation when you are perceived as someone else, how people respond to you based on what you look like or what you're wearing, as opposed to who you are, and the story that can be woven around that experience. That story took the form of a series of photographs that I produced while at Yale.
Left: Negress (2001/05), C-print, approx 122 x 109 cm. Right: Negress 4 (2001/05), C-print, dimensions not available.
ART iT: I read that you started out making abstract works at university. Why did you feel that abstraction wasn't working for you at that time, or why did you feel it was necessary to push further into figuration and portraiture?
MT: When I was doing my undergraduate degree at Pratt I always felt that I wasn't good with the figure, and I always avoided figure painting courses. I responded more to painters like Bryce Marden, Terry Winters and Agnes Martin. But once I got to Yale I was challenged about why I was doing abstract work and what it really meant to me. I didn't know how to justify it except through talking about my works as paintings. I started experimenting with text paintings, removing anything that had to do with color, form or representation. I thought maybe I could work with text and still work abstractly.
Eventually, I felt it was necessary to work with the figure. So while I was at Yale there were two bodies of work I was making in my studio, some were representational and some were abstract, and I was looking for a way to bring the two together. It's slowly getting there. I still think there's a divide even though there are abstract elements in the current work if you remove the figure. That's what keeps me making the work. For me, there's so much more room and conceptual play with abstraction. I like contending with that understanding of what's abstract, what's expressionism, what's conceptual theory?
I started responding to how people use the figure in different ways. I remember seeing Gary Hume and being impressed by how he uses the figure abstractly whereby it's really about forms and color, or how Kara Walker uses the figure. Her drawing is impeccable, and I think that's why she's able to do these cutout silhouettes with perspectival space, because she understands drawing. She's a conceptual draftsman more than anything else. For me abstraction is that thing: I know how to use abstraction; I'm rooted in it and understand it.
The figures came more from the critical discussion around my work during graduate school: Why are you, as a young black woman, dealing with these ideas? How are you going to bring them together? It's not that they expected me to work with black issues, it's more that they were curious as to why I, personally, was so invested in the language of abstraction. That's why I'm interested in bringing these two languages together.
Top: Black Cock, Black Bitch (2000). Bottom left: Untitled (2000). Bottom right: Untitled (2000).
ART iT: Was the Quanikah experiment what shifted you into figuration?
MT: Yes, that and photographing myself and my mother. I had started using symbols and signifiers in my paintings related to black male masculinity and black female sexuality, pairing graphic images together. For example, I made a glitter painting of a rooster and a female pit-bull, which I put together as the "black cock" and "black bitch" in a play with visual semantics. I was working with images and slang and wordplay, and that became a conceptual way of using abstraction and words. I was looking at Mel Bochner a lot then, and Glenn Ligon was a big influence as well in trying to understand how to make these images without being heavy-handed or forcing the ideas. And then it took new shape and specificity when I brought photography into it.
ART iT: You mention your interest in the history of abstraction. I hadn't realized how big your recent works are until I saw them in person. How do you end up working at such a big scale, is it necessarily a response to the idea of the macho painter or is it more driven by the demands of the material?
MT: I think it's a little of both. There's definitely the bravado of knowing you can pull off a big painting. And it is a boy thing. I like wrestling with those male notions of, "They've done it, why can’t I do it too? How will I do it?"
Initially, I worked on a small scale but I found it limiting in terms of composition. I started thinking about pictorial space and how to change the flat, graphic space of my work into a more complicated three-dimensional space - how to play with flat planes and perspective. There's always this desire to make the painter's painting, to have this Clement Greenberg notion of the painted surface and its relationship with the viewer. I feel the scale is important because it determines how the paintings are viewed and what they mean. I enjoy the challenge of working large because I have to contend with the relationships, there's a struggle of trying to understand all the components and make them work in a painting.
Usually, when I work on a small scale I get it so quickly that it doesn't allow time for exploring. After a while, working at a certain size you know what's going to happen before you do it, and I felt I knew my system too well and had to reinvent it. I think the challenge was for my self. There are certainly some works that are better on a small-scale, like the multi-panel portraits, and I think those work well because they are graphic images that are contained in their space and the point is there.
But I love struggling with the painting when I'm in the studio and I can't get it and have to leave it and come back to it four or five times. I've learned just by looking at, say, Jasper Johns and certain images that resonate with me, that whatever that feeling is when you're in front of those paintings is what I want people to feel in front of my own paintings.
Installation view of "Mickalene Thomas - One of a Kind Two" at the Hara
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2011. Photo Keizo Kioku, courtesy
the artist and Hara Museum of Contemporary Art.
Work by Mickalene Thomas will be on display in a solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, from September 15 to October 29, and is currently included in the group shows "EAT ME," at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town through September 4, and "Africolor," at Danziger Projects in New York through September 10. Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Thomas' Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Nois is currently on view at the Modern Restaurant.
Hong-Kai Wang
By Leslie J Ureña
Music While We Work (2011), audio and video installation recorded on location in Huwei, Yunlin, Taiwan. Photo You-Wei Chen, courtesy Hong-Kai Wang.
Born in 1971, the Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang works with sound as a conceptual means to investigate social relations and examine the construction of new social spaces. Wang is one of the participating artists in the Taiwan Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, "The Heard and the Unheard – Soundscape Taiwan," where she is exhibiting a new project, Music While We Work. Made in collaboration with Taisugar's Huwei sugar plant in central Taiwan - one of only two such facilities remaining in Taiwan - this multichannel sound and video installation was produced with a group of retired workers and their spouses who returned to the factory to record a soundscape of the current employees at work. ART iT met with Wang to discuss her work in greater detail.
Interview
ART iT: For this year's Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the subject is sound, variably defined. How do you define your contribution to this examination of "sound"?
HKW: My aim with this project was to set up a platform where the sound can speak for itself. The composer Edgard Varèse once reflected that people usually don't know how long it takes for sound to speak for itself. In my practice, I often ask the audience to make the effort and to take time to engage in the act of listening, because to do so is political and because it instantly changes the power relationship between the listener and what was unheard and what is to be heard. In Music While We Work, I tried to push this examination further and perhaps make it more accessible by creating a platform where listening can be seen as a potential political agent in contrast to the visual referents of the social spaces that exist therein. What can be at stake when you are listening and after you've listened? This project is really about questioning and discussion while allowing oneself to be immersed in a particular architectural music-space.
Music While We Work (2011), audio and video installation recorded on location in Huwei, Yunlin, Taiwan. Photo You-Wei Chen, courtesy Hong-Kai Wang.
ART iT: What are the potential reactions that you think could emerge from Music While We Work?
HKW: This is a very big question. What this project will potentially instigate is a question to be asked maybe 10 years from now. Making artwork that is relevant is like calling for social change, and so is life itself, because they all consist of many small moves. One move is only meaningful if the next moves follow.
To respond further, what could be at stake needs to be asked not just by you or me, but also by many people who share similar concerns: for instance, the people who work in the sugar factory community or the people who share their work and experiences, or Bo-Wei, the political activist/composer who moderated the recording workshops for this project. What should we do in order to not simply react like one of Pavlov's dogs, that is, to not react reflexively as conditioned by society's attributes or even by the position we believe we have chosen?
ART iT: Did you have a chance to observe the viewers of the work in Venice? What were some of their responses?
HKW: It was a pity that I didn't have much of a chance to observe the viewers of the work in Venice. But on my last day there, a woman of perhaps South Asian origin approached me and said that she really loved the piece. I didn't know her at all, so that is probably the best kind of feedback I could have, because such a local situation based in my hometown somehow came across to someone from a very different cultural background.
ART iT: You don't see the work as specifically political, but do you see it as political in terms of how it is produced? Did you consider the ways how political movements try to accomplish change?
HKW: What interests me is what could happen once one has an interaction with a project that insinuates something that does not occur in one's daily life. The way I look at it is that this project brought an unusual situation to the people whose lives and work have revolved around the factory, and invited all of them to explore how to make/define a unique language through sound. When you read poetry, you don’t necessarily think about contributing to society. However, when you are making poetry, you are looking/listening for things you don't see and don't hear easily, and then whether you find them or not is a political process.
ART iT: You have a biographical connection to Huwei. Did you ever hesitate when deciding to make a work related to your birthplace? How did you separate your past from the work, if at all?
HKW: I'm always concerned that it could become too personal. Personal nostalgia is never interesting to me. To quote my mentor, Chris Mann, "Personal nostalgia is a mental illness." To deal with this, I always try to seek out others who share similar life experiences or views.
You can never entirely detach yourself, however. In one way or another you always have an emotional and personal investment in it all. But if it can resonate with the audience, I don't have a problem with that. For instance, when you listen to a love song, and it's only about the singer's loss of love, you can still relate to that, because you might share a similar experience.
I'm not afraid of my reference being specific, since I think that when it is specific, it also has the potential to be general.
Music While We Work (2011), audio and video installation recorded on location in Huwei, Yunlin, Taiwan. Photo You-Wei Chen, courtesy Hong-Kai Wang.
ART iT: How about the collaborators at the factory? How were they selected?
HKW: There was no selection from my end - I left my hometown when I was 15. I went to my father, and he was able to put me in touch with his former colleague, Mr Huang, who in turn enthusiastically put me in touch with all of these couples. He was extremely helpful and he did a lot of early coordination for me, in terms of the recording workshop. I then met with the couples last December, and of course Mr Huang was very charming and persuasive on my behalf. Because of my connection to the community, it was not very difficult to get them on board, and they all know my father, which also helped.
ART iT: How did you explain the project to them?
HKW: I told them it would be in Venice, though they had never heard about the Biennale. I think that they wanted to help because it would put the sugar factory in an international arena and, also, because what this project set out to do was very unusual to them. It's not a TV interview, a movie, or a documentary. They just had to show up and learn to use the audio recorder.
ART iT: Were they increasingly curious as the production went on?
HKW: They were hands off. We were pretty much unsupervised. We went wherever, and had free reign of the factory and the fields. The whole factory was informed of the project by the management, so everyone was aware of our presence. From time to time people asked why we were still there, and why we were there at night. We would just tell them we didn't have enough material, and that we were doing something different. The people at the factory are definitely curious about seeing the final product.
ART iT: Will you do a mini-recreation of Venice for them? How will you present it to them?
HKW: It depends on the type of spaces to which I have access. They have surely seen the newspaper reports, since the factory is likely keeping track of things. I think it's important to get their feedback.
ART iT: You and your collaborators knew the exhibition would be held at the Palazzo delle Prigioni. Did that influence how you decided to organize the project? How did the project change from proposal to conclusion?
HKW: The building has very striking architectural characteristics. I didn't think it would be necessary to cover the building, since the more you try to cover the Palazzo delle Prigioni, the more obvious this effort would seem. I thought that in this project it would not work. From a very early stage I decided the projection would be on the wall of the Palazzo. Fortuitously, the texture of the factory worked very well with the texture of the Pavilion. It was not a painful decision for me.
Installation view of Music While We Work in the Taiwan Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice, 2011. Courtesy Hong-Kai Wang.
ART iT: You've mentioned how the Palazzo's rugged walls added texture to the piece. How about the space of the white cube? How would the exhibition of Music While We Work be affected by such a space?
HKW: Wherever this piece is shown, it has to deal with the space's specific architectural form and its inherent spatial problems and properties.
I would be happy to see how it could be translated in the white cube, and how the pristine walls might affect it. We would need to consider how the audience would react to the projection, and the audio runs the risk of automatically becoming the soundtrack. I want to make sure that the audience pays attention to the sound, and that the projection is not privileged.
Since this project has to do with the community, I think in one way or another it has to go back to where it came from. The project has to be examined over time and across different places, so as to look into how this provisional intervention could still be relevant.
Hong-Kai Wang's work remains on view in the Taiwan Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale through November 27.
Music While We Work (2011), audio and video installation recorded on location in Huwei, Yunlin, Taiwan. Photo You-Wei Chen, courtesy Hong-Kai Wang.
Born in 1971, the Taiwanese artist Hong-Kai Wang works with sound as a conceptual means to investigate social relations and examine the construction of new social spaces. Wang is one of the participating artists in the Taiwan Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, "The Heard and the Unheard – Soundscape Taiwan," where she is exhibiting a new project, Music While We Work. Made in collaboration with Taisugar's Huwei sugar plant in central Taiwan - one of only two such facilities remaining in Taiwan - this multichannel sound and video installation was produced with a group of retired workers and their spouses who returned to the factory to record a soundscape of the current employees at work. ART iT met with Wang to discuss her work in greater detail.
Interview
ART iT: For this year's Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the subject is sound, variably defined. How do you define your contribution to this examination of "sound"?
HKW: My aim with this project was to set up a platform where the sound can speak for itself. The composer Edgard Varèse once reflected that people usually don't know how long it takes for sound to speak for itself. In my practice, I often ask the audience to make the effort and to take time to engage in the act of listening, because to do so is political and because it instantly changes the power relationship between the listener and what was unheard and what is to be heard. In Music While We Work, I tried to push this examination further and perhaps make it more accessible by creating a platform where listening can be seen as a potential political agent in contrast to the visual referents of the social spaces that exist therein. What can be at stake when you are listening and after you've listened? This project is really about questioning and discussion while allowing oneself to be immersed in a particular architectural music-space.
Music While We Work (2011), audio and video installation recorded on location in Huwei, Yunlin, Taiwan. Photo You-Wei Chen, courtesy Hong-Kai Wang.
ART iT: What are the potential reactions that you think could emerge from Music While We Work?
HKW: This is a very big question. What this project will potentially instigate is a question to be asked maybe 10 years from now. Making artwork that is relevant is like calling for social change, and so is life itself, because they all consist of many small moves. One move is only meaningful if the next moves follow.
To respond further, what could be at stake needs to be asked not just by you or me, but also by many people who share similar concerns: for instance, the people who work in the sugar factory community or the people who share their work and experiences, or Bo-Wei, the political activist/composer who moderated the recording workshops for this project. What should we do in order to not simply react like one of Pavlov's dogs, that is, to not react reflexively as conditioned by society's attributes or even by the position we believe we have chosen?
ART iT: Did you have a chance to observe the viewers of the work in Venice? What were some of their responses?
HKW: It was a pity that I didn't have much of a chance to observe the viewers of the work in Venice. But on my last day there, a woman of perhaps South Asian origin approached me and said that she really loved the piece. I didn't know her at all, so that is probably the best kind of feedback I could have, because such a local situation based in my hometown somehow came across to someone from a very different cultural background.
ART iT: You don't see the work as specifically political, but do you see it as political in terms of how it is produced? Did you consider the ways how political movements try to accomplish change?
HKW: What interests me is what could happen once one has an interaction with a project that insinuates something that does not occur in one's daily life. The way I look at it is that this project brought an unusual situation to the people whose lives and work have revolved around the factory, and invited all of them to explore how to make/define a unique language through sound. When you read poetry, you don’t necessarily think about contributing to society. However, when you are making poetry, you are looking/listening for things you don't see and don't hear easily, and then whether you find them or not is a political process.
ART iT: You have a biographical connection to Huwei. Did you ever hesitate when deciding to make a work related to your birthplace? How did you separate your past from the work, if at all?
HKW: I'm always concerned that it could become too personal. Personal nostalgia is never interesting to me. To quote my mentor, Chris Mann, "Personal nostalgia is a mental illness." To deal with this, I always try to seek out others who share similar life experiences or views.
You can never entirely detach yourself, however. In one way or another you always have an emotional and personal investment in it all. But if it can resonate with the audience, I don't have a problem with that. For instance, when you listen to a love song, and it's only about the singer's loss of love, you can still relate to that, because you might share a similar experience.
I'm not afraid of my reference being specific, since I think that when it is specific, it also has the potential to be general.
Music While We Work (2011), audio and video installation recorded on location in Huwei, Yunlin, Taiwan. Photo You-Wei Chen, courtesy Hong-Kai Wang.
ART iT: How about the collaborators at the factory? How were they selected?
HKW: There was no selection from my end - I left my hometown when I was 15. I went to my father, and he was able to put me in touch with his former colleague, Mr Huang, who in turn enthusiastically put me in touch with all of these couples. He was extremely helpful and he did a lot of early coordination for me, in terms of the recording workshop. I then met with the couples last December, and of course Mr Huang was very charming and persuasive on my behalf. Because of my connection to the community, it was not very difficult to get them on board, and they all know my father, which also helped.
ART iT: How did you explain the project to them?
HKW: I told them it would be in Venice, though they had never heard about the Biennale. I think that they wanted to help because it would put the sugar factory in an international arena and, also, because what this project set out to do was very unusual to them. It's not a TV interview, a movie, or a documentary. They just had to show up and learn to use the audio recorder.
ART iT: Were they increasingly curious as the production went on?
HKW: They were hands off. We were pretty much unsupervised. We went wherever, and had free reign of the factory and the fields. The whole factory was informed of the project by the management, so everyone was aware of our presence. From time to time people asked why we were still there, and why we were there at night. We would just tell them we didn't have enough material, and that we were doing something different. The people at the factory are definitely curious about seeing the final product.
ART iT: Will you do a mini-recreation of Venice for them? How will you present it to them?
HKW: It depends on the type of spaces to which I have access. They have surely seen the newspaper reports, since the factory is likely keeping track of things. I think it's important to get their feedback.
ART iT: You and your collaborators knew the exhibition would be held at the Palazzo delle Prigioni. Did that influence how you decided to organize the project? How did the project change from proposal to conclusion?
HKW: The building has very striking architectural characteristics. I didn't think it would be necessary to cover the building, since the more you try to cover the Palazzo delle Prigioni, the more obvious this effort would seem. I thought that in this project it would not work. From a very early stage I decided the projection would be on the wall of the Palazzo. Fortuitously, the texture of the factory worked very well with the texture of the Pavilion. It was not a painful decision for me.
Installation view of Music While We Work in the Taiwan Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice, 2011. Courtesy Hong-Kai Wang.
ART iT: You've mentioned how the Palazzo's rugged walls added texture to the piece. How about the space of the white cube? How would the exhibition of Music While We Work be affected by such a space?
HKW: Wherever this piece is shown, it has to deal with the space's specific architectural form and its inherent spatial problems and properties.
I would be happy to see how it could be translated in the white cube, and how the pristine walls might affect it. We would need to consider how the audience would react to the projection, and the audio runs the risk of automatically becoming the soundtrack. I want to make sure that the audience pays attention to the sound, and that the projection is not privileged.
Since this project has to do with the community, I think in one way or another it has to go back to where it came from. The project has to be examined over time and across different places, so as to look into how this provisional intervention could still be relevant.
Hong-Kai Wang's work remains on view in the Taiwan Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale through November 27.
Jompet Kuswidananto
We Are the System
By Andrew Maerkle
A Space between You and Me (2011), installation of wooden chairs and wood, speakers, iron electrical box. Courtesy Ark Galerie, Jakarta.
Part of an energetic, community-driven art scene in Yogyakarta, Jompet Kuswidananto makes multimedia installations that often combine video, sound and mechanized elements. His installation Java's Machine: Phantasmagoria (2008), for example, presents a ghostly phalanx of bodiless figures delineated only by empty pairs of shoes and fragments of ceremonial military dress, as well as objects such as drum kits that periodically crack out a sharp, hollow percussion. Dealing with the elusive representation of Indonesian national identity, this installation develops from a broader, communal project of self-intiated historical research by Jompet and his peers that has also fed into an ambitious commission for Hong Kong's Para/Site Art Space in late 2010, "Third Realm," and a solo exhibition at Bandung's Selasar Sunaryo Art Space that opened March 26 of this year, "Java's Machine: Family Chronicle." ART iT met with Jompet in mid-2010 to discuss the research-based aspects of his practice.
Interview:
ART iT: You mentioned that you started out not in art but in music, and that you are essentially self-taught as an artist. Can you talk about how you came to work in the visual arts field?
JK: The first art for me was music. When I was at university I supported myself through participating in bands and making scores for theatrical performances and videos. Over time I gravitated to making more experimental sound performances, and then one day a curator invited me to participate in an exhibition, and I found myself in the middle of this new art scene in Yogyakarta. Although I didn't study art at school, in Indonesia the educational infrastructure is not really developed to begin with, and since the society in our country is quite communal, the community takes over the role of the large-scale institutions, providing members a kind of informal education. On top of that I became an assistant to established artists like Arahmaiani and Nindityo Adipurnomo, who also runs the art space Cemeti Art House with his partner Mela Jaarsma. That proved to be the most effective and efficient way to learn art. They accepted me. The system is there and it's really open.
ART iT: Do many other artists learn this way as opposed to through academic training?
JK: I think many artists do go through art school, but they don't really expect the education to determine their careers. The community is the system, so even if you don't go to school, if you're active in the community it can be enough. Everybody shares ideas and discusses art with each other. It's a valuable resource because the government is so poor - or at least corrupted - and doesn't support art.
Top: Installation view of Java's Machine: Phantasmagoria (2008) at Singapore Art Museum, 2011. Photo ART iT. Bottom: Anno Domini (2011), wooden pillars, sound installation, text, soldier figures and video components. Courtesy Ark Galerie, Jakarta.
ART iT: When did you start making the mechanized "ghost figures" with the military parade uniforms? I remember seeing your installation Java's Machine: Phantasmagoria at the Yokohama Triennale in 2008.
JK: I exhibited the first version of this work in 2008, several months before it was included in the Yokohama Triennale. Prior to that I was making more interactive pieces, although the incorporation of video and mechanical things and sound has always been a part of what I do.
I started the project when I was researching the history of Indonesia, specifically, the history of Java. The history is incredibly complex, with many transitions, from Hindu religion to Islam, from colonial to post-colonial, traditional to modern, dictatorship to democracy. In my research I found that Indonesia has been in a constant state of transition, and the cultural identity constantly changing and unstable, with many layers. Usually we think about transition in terms of binaries, but in my view the reality goes beyond binary terms; it's what I call the "third reality." The idea for the hollow figures came from this imagining of the body as always developing or changing, and this need to constantly develop new realities as a strategy for negotiating the competing binary tensions that affect Indonesia.
ART iT: Are you still involved in the kind of performance activities that you were doing at university?
JK: I am. One important community I belong to is a theatre group that I joined in university. The group, Teater Garasi, has now developed into one of the most significant independent groups in Indonesian contemporary theater. The organizational structure incorporates several directors, each with their own styles, working with an executive director who has a more abstract or non-narrative language, and we produce dance-theater-performances that draw from all kinds of references. Currently I focus on my performance activities in the context of Teater Garasi and then pursue personal projects on my own, but there is a strong overlap between the two. We research the same ideas and issues, even if we express them in different ways.
ART iT: Do you ever contribute to the actual staging of the Teater Garasi performances, or only the conceptualization?
JK: None of us have academic backgrounds, so we have no boundaries. I can offer my opinions about anything from the acting to the music, and everybody can contribute many different ideas. In the discussions there is no sense of strict discipline - it's all fluid.
ART iT: Where does the hunger come from to invent these new approaches to art, dance, performance?
JK: Well, art for me has both a social role and is also about self-discovery. My research into the history of Indonesia started because at the time I felt my generation had become distanced from our traditional history. I felt I had lost my roots but couldn't explain why. In my family, my grandmother was a traditional animist, my father is a Catholic and I am a second-generation Catholic. So much of the knowledge that belonged to my grandmother could not be transferred to my father because of their different views, and this is something that has happened to many other families in Indonesia as well. At the same time the history education in school concerns only the history of power and military events, the ruling agenda. The real history of our society or culture is not being told, so I started to research this by myself and with the Teater Garasi group. We have recovered a lot of valuable information, and then that research takes on a social role when we present it through an artwork, because it is an alternative history to what is taught in school.
Both: Installation view of Third Realm (2010) at Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong; multi-media installation and performance work in collaboration with Yudi Ahmad Tajudin, founder and theatre director, Teater Garasi, Yogyakarta. Courtesy Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong.
ART iT: Where do you go to research the history?
JK: We travel. There are artifacts, there are living people, there are local museums - we travel across the country seeking them out. The works that have come out of this have been important for everybody involved - some 15 or 20 of us - so it's a significant project that I think will continue for a long time. We found that actually what we are looking for is a way to negotiate the changes of time, which is all the more difficult because the problems change across different places and different times. One of our major concerns is to understand how people negotiate the acceleration of changes in time.
ART iT: What do you ask when you interview local people? Do you discuss specific topics like the post-war Independence era?
JK: We ask many questions, but the questions themselves are not that important, because we do not position ourselves as being somehow outside the problem. We are a part of the society and we want to work with other people to try to find an answer. We don't discuss political epochs so much as the practical ways we deal with the overlapping tensions generated by the multiple transitions that Indonesia has experienced over the course of its history. It's really difficult to identify Indonesia now. It's like a collage, and the past is not really the past.
ART iT: And now following the ages of the Sultanates and the Dutch colonization, and then the regimes of Sukarno and Suharto, you have the potential of a new layer of transition with the rise of a fundamentalist Islamic democracy.
JK: Yes. Part of my research is about the idea of the homogenization now emerging in Indonesia since the full embrace of democracy. Democracy actually paved the way for increased homogenization. At the same time, the political power of the fundamentalist parties is not really that strong, and you have to remember that Indonesian culture is really complicated so it's unlikely their ideas will ever be completely accepted.
This relates to another important avenue of research I have been conducting, on the social group called Abangan. Translated literally, "abangan" means "red," but culturally it corresponds with the English use of "gray." The Abangan are a layer of society that began to emerge during the first modern era in Indonesia around the end of the 19th century. They live in tension between conservative Islam and a mix of local beliefs. So in Indonesia if you say "I'm a gray Muslim," then it means you're a Muslim because of your heritage but not a strict believer. I find this idea can be applied not only to religion but also to many different aspects of Indonesian society now, and it's become a very complicated and sophisticated system for navigating identity. I would say that Indonesia itself - the nation - has been constructed through the idea of being a "gray nation." We are not Communist, we are not liberal, we are not West, we are not East. We can say our country is based on the belief in one god, although in practice we have many different religions and traditions - so it's not true, but that's OK. I think the recent concerns about growing religious fundamentalism are more tied to the media, which exploits the sensationalism of the extremists.
Whispering Kala (2011), wooden pillars, speakers, microphone, video documentary performance. Courtesy Ark Galerie, Jakarta.
ART iT: So the idea of the ghost figures is tied to very real issues of "grayness"?
JK: Yes, exactly. The first ghost figures wore the uniforms of the Javanese Royal Army. These uniforms were purely ceremonial, and created after the end of the Java War in 1830 as a kind of negotiation between the Dutch and the Javanese kingdom. Following the war, the Dutch modernization campaign spread extensively throughout Java. The Dutch built factories, roads, bridges: all kinds of infrastructure. But I found that the appearance of the army uniforms with their mix of Western and local elements represented a new kind of war, a war of symbols, and the battlefield for this war was the body. This battle to manage the symbols on one's own body started 200 years ago and continues today. The idea of negotiating the transformations of time and culture has not ended, it just continues in a different way. It's very significant to me that this idea stems from the military - a defensive mechanism. The ceremonial army became a new way for the Javanese to defend themselves, or negotiate the modern era, by managing the symbols in their lives.
ART iT: How do you see the project developing from here?
JK: Now I am looking more into the history of this idea of the Royal Army. In my recent pieces I have tried to find a new approach to the presence problem. The figures take the appearance of the carnival or parade. In Indonesia this is a common symbol. We are always celebrating the invention of the community, and the changes of time.
Jompet's work is currently on view in the solo exhibition "Java's Machine: Family Chronicle" at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, through April 17.
By Andrew Maerkle
A Space between You and Me (2011), installation of wooden chairs and wood, speakers, iron electrical box. Courtesy Ark Galerie, Jakarta.
Part of an energetic, community-driven art scene in Yogyakarta, Jompet Kuswidananto makes multimedia installations that often combine video, sound and mechanized elements. His installation Java's Machine: Phantasmagoria (2008), for example, presents a ghostly phalanx of bodiless figures delineated only by empty pairs of shoes and fragments of ceremonial military dress, as well as objects such as drum kits that periodically crack out a sharp, hollow percussion. Dealing with the elusive representation of Indonesian national identity, this installation develops from a broader, communal project of self-intiated historical research by Jompet and his peers that has also fed into an ambitious commission for Hong Kong's Para/Site Art Space in late 2010, "Third Realm," and a solo exhibition at Bandung's Selasar Sunaryo Art Space that opened March 26 of this year, "Java's Machine: Family Chronicle." ART iT met with Jompet in mid-2010 to discuss the research-based aspects of his practice.
Interview:
ART iT: You mentioned that you started out not in art but in music, and that you are essentially self-taught as an artist. Can you talk about how you came to work in the visual arts field?
JK: The first art for me was music. When I was at university I supported myself through participating in bands and making scores for theatrical performances and videos. Over time I gravitated to making more experimental sound performances, and then one day a curator invited me to participate in an exhibition, and I found myself in the middle of this new art scene in Yogyakarta. Although I didn't study art at school, in Indonesia the educational infrastructure is not really developed to begin with, and since the society in our country is quite communal, the community takes over the role of the large-scale institutions, providing members a kind of informal education. On top of that I became an assistant to established artists like Arahmaiani and Nindityo Adipurnomo, who also runs the art space Cemeti Art House with his partner Mela Jaarsma. That proved to be the most effective and efficient way to learn art. They accepted me. The system is there and it's really open.
ART iT: Do many other artists learn this way as opposed to through academic training?
JK: I think many artists do go through art school, but they don't really expect the education to determine their careers. The community is the system, so even if you don't go to school, if you're active in the community it can be enough. Everybody shares ideas and discusses art with each other. It's a valuable resource because the government is so poor - or at least corrupted - and doesn't support art.
Top: Installation view of Java's Machine: Phantasmagoria (2008) at Singapore Art Museum, 2011. Photo ART iT. Bottom: Anno Domini (2011), wooden pillars, sound installation, text, soldier figures and video components. Courtesy Ark Galerie, Jakarta.
ART iT: When did you start making the mechanized "ghost figures" with the military parade uniforms? I remember seeing your installation Java's Machine: Phantasmagoria at the Yokohama Triennale in 2008.
JK: I exhibited the first version of this work in 2008, several months before it was included in the Yokohama Triennale. Prior to that I was making more interactive pieces, although the incorporation of video and mechanical things and sound has always been a part of what I do.
I started the project when I was researching the history of Indonesia, specifically, the history of Java. The history is incredibly complex, with many transitions, from Hindu religion to Islam, from colonial to post-colonial, traditional to modern, dictatorship to democracy. In my research I found that Indonesia has been in a constant state of transition, and the cultural identity constantly changing and unstable, with many layers. Usually we think about transition in terms of binaries, but in my view the reality goes beyond binary terms; it's what I call the "third reality." The idea for the hollow figures came from this imagining of the body as always developing or changing, and this need to constantly develop new realities as a strategy for negotiating the competing binary tensions that affect Indonesia.
ART iT: Are you still involved in the kind of performance activities that you were doing at university?
JK: I am. One important community I belong to is a theatre group that I joined in university. The group, Teater Garasi, has now developed into one of the most significant independent groups in Indonesian contemporary theater. The organizational structure incorporates several directors, each with their own styles, working with an executive director who has a more abstract or non-narrative language, and we produce dance-theater-performances that draw from all kinds of references. Currently I focus on my performance activities in the context of Teater Garasi and then pursue personal projects on my own, but there is a strong overlap between the two. We research the same ideas and issues, even if we express them in different ways.
ART iT: Do you ever contribute to the actual staging of the Teater Garasi performances, or only the conceptualization?
JK: None of us have academic backgrounds, so we have no boundaries. I can offer my opinions about anything from the acting to the music, and everybody can contribute many different ideas. In the discussions there is no sense of strict discipline - it's all fluid.
ART iT: Where does the hunger come from to invent these new approaches to art, dance, performance?
JK: Well, art for me has both a social role and is also about self-discovery. My research into the history of Indonesia started because at the time I felt my generation had become distanced from our traditional history. I felt I had lost my roots but couldn't explain why. In my family, my grandmother was a traditional animist, my father is a Catholic and I am a second-generation Catholic. So much of the knowledge that belonged to my grandmother could not be transferred to my father because of their different views, and this is something that has happened to many other families in Indonesia as well. At the same time the history education in school concerns only the history of power and military events, the ruling agenda. The real history of our society or culture is not being told, so I started to research this by myself and with the Teater Garasi group. We have recovered a lot of valuable information, and then that research takes on a social role when we present it through an artwork, because it is an alternative history to what is taught in school.
Both: Installation view of Third Realm (2010) at Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong; multi-media installation and performance work in collaboration with Yudi Ahmad Tajudin, founder and theatre director, Teater Garasi, Yogyakarta. Courtesy Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong.
ART iT: Where do you go to research the history?
JK: We travel. There are artifacts, there are living people, there are local museums - we travel across the country seeking them out. The works that have come out of this have been important for everybody involved - some 15 or 20 of us - so it's a significant project that I think will continue for a long time. We found that actually what we are looking for is a way to negotiate the changes of time, which is all the more difficult because the problems change across different places and different times. One of our major concerns is to understand how people negotiate the acceleration of changes in time.
ART iT: What do you ask when you interview local people? Do you discuss specific topics like the post-war Independence era?
JK: We ask many questions, but the questions themselves are not that important, because we do not position ourselves as being somehow outside the problem. We are a part of the society and we want to work with other people to try to find an answer. We don't discuss political epochs so much as the practical ways we deal with the overlapping tensions generated by the multiple transitions that Indonesia has experienced over the course of its history. It's really difficult to identify Indonesia now. It's like a collage, and the past is not really the past.
ART iT: And now following the ages of the Sultanates and the Dutch colonization, and then the regimes of Sukarno and Suharto, you have the potential of a new layer of transition with the rise of a fundamentalist Islamic democracy.
JK: Yes. Part of my research is about the idea of the homogenization now emerging in Indonesia since the full embrace of democracy. Democracy actually paved the way for increased homogenization. At the same time, the political power of the fundamentalist parties is not really that strong, and you have to remember that Indonesian culture is really complicated so it's unlikely their ideas will ever be completely accepted.
This relates to another important avenue of research I have been conducting, on the social group called Abangan. Translated literally, "abangan" means "red," but culturally it corresponds with the English use of "gray." The Abangan are a layer of society that began to emerge during the first modern era in Indonesia around the end of the 19th century. They live in tension between conservative Islam and a mix of local beliefs. So in Indonesia if you say "I'm a gray Muslim," then it means you're a Muslim because of your heritage but not a strict believer. I find this idea can be applied not only to religion but also to many different aspects of Indonesian society now, and it's become a very complicated and sophisticated system for navigating identity. I would say that Indonesia itself - the nation - has been constructed through the idea of being a "gray nation." We are not Communist, we are not liberal, we are not West, we are not East. We can say our country is based on the belief in one god, although in practice we have many different religions and traditions - so it's not true, but that's OK. I think the recent concerns about growing religious fundamentalism are more tied to the media, which exploits the sensationalism of the extremists.
Whispering Kala (2011), wooden pillars, speakers, microphone, video documentary performance. Courtesy Ark Galerie, Jakarta.
ART iT: So the idea of the ghost figures is tied to very real issues of "grayness"?
JK: Yes, exactly. The first ghost figures wore the uniforms of the Javanese Royal Army. These uniforms were purely ceremonial, and created after the end of the Java War in 1830 as a kind of negotiation between the Dutch and the Javanese kingdom. Following the war, the Dutch modernization campaign spread extensively throughout Java. The Dutch built factories, roads, bridges: all kinds of infrastructure. But I found that the appearance of the army uniforms with their mix of Western and local elements represented a new kind of war, a war of symbols, and the battlefield for this war was the body. This battle to manage the symbols on one's own body started 200 years ago and continues today. The idea of negotiating the transformations of time and culture has not ended, it just continues in a different way. It's very significant to me that this idea stems from the military - a defensive mechanism. The ceremonial army became a new way for the Javanese to defend themselves, or negotiate the modern era, by managing the symbols in their lives.
ART iT: How do you see the project developing from here?
JK: Now I am looking more into the history of this idea of the Royal Army. In my recent pieces I have tried to find a new approach to the presence problem. The figures take the appearance of the carnival or parade. In Indonesia this is a common symbol. We are always celebrating the invention of the community, and the changes of time.
Jompet's work is currently on view in the solo exhibition "Java's Machine: Family Chronicle" at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung, through April 17.
Tadasu Takamine
From the Mouth or in the Mouth but not of the Mouth - Words and Objects
By Andrew Maerkle
Installation view of Too Far to See (2011) at the Yokohama Museum of Art; ceramic, computers, projectors, speakers, mirrors; sound programming by Yuichi Matsumoto; video by Kotaro Konishi. All images: Unless otherwise noted photo ART iT.
Starting his career with the seminal performance group Dumb Type, Tadasu Takamine is known not so much for a particular style or practice but rather for the diversity of the approaches and media that he uses from work to work. This makes him difficult to characterize as an artist, although one recurring theme is Takamine's investigation into the relations between body and mediation, expression and self-awareness. In essence, many of his works reflexively interrogate what it means to make art. His current solo exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art, "Too Far to See," loosely focuses on Takamine's activities of the past decade, providing an opportunity to evaluate the correspondences and divergences apparent in his recent output. ART iT met with Takamine in Yokohama to further discuss the exhibition and his works.
Interview
ART iT: In 2004 your video Kimura-san (1998) - which includes footage of you masturbating the physically disabled titular figure - was preemptively removed from the exhibition "Non-Sect Radical: Contemporary Photography" at the Yokohama Museum of Art, presumably in compliance with Japanese laws censoring the depiction of genitalia. The current museum director Eriko Osaka makes reference to this incident in her introductory message to your exhibition, while at the exit of the exhibition there is a hand-written wall text in which you discuss fellatio in terms of revenge. Is it possible to think of this exhibition as a kind of revenge with regard to the Kimura-san incident?
TT: No. The wall text that I wrote here, and its reference to "revenge," comes from a work that I contributed to the group exhibition held in Amsterdam in 2009, "The Demon of Comparisons." I was unable to show Kimura-san in 2004, and even given a solo exhibition that situation hasn't changed; the work still cannot be shown. But I have tried to approach that context with a positive outlook. To begin with, the problem of censorship does not apply only to this museum, nor does it apply exclusively to museums in Japan. The simple fact that Yokohama was even interested in showing Kimura-san - and made an attempt to do so - is significant to me. I don't blame the museum for the removal of the work. I think it's more to do with problems with society in general. I previously exhibited Kimura-san at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England - thanks largely to the efforts of the director, Jonathan Watkins - but that doesn't mean the work can be shown anywhere in England. More than categorically dividing everything into places where the work can or cannot be screened, I think it's situational, which is something I anticipated when I made the work.
ART iT: Can you clarify how you understand the connection between revenge and fellatio?
TT: The origins of the text and thinking about the relations between fellatio and revenge begin with the work I made for Art Tower Mito in 2004, A Big Blow-job. When I was young I thought of fellatio as this unilaterally violent action carried out by the recipient upon the giver, although of course I came to understand that was not the case. But I wanted to further explore this dynamic between active and passive, giver and receiver, which I myself had experienced in caring for Kimura-san. As I worked on A Big Blow-job this image gradually took hold of me of a relatively small sex organ - not necessarily a penis - that is connected through the roots of the earth to the entire universe, and is melted down in the mouth of the giver. This I saw as a kind of cosmic revenge.
ART iT: I had thought that perhaps the exhibition as a whole was designed as an institutional critique. For example, the opening gallery features "paintings" made using found blankets that were stretched like canvases and arranged in the classical museum-style installation. At first glance it's confusing whether you actually made these blankets, or simply found blankets that you stretched over painting stretchers, and this uncertainty is compounded by the "informational" wall texts, which delicately balance between seriousness and irony.
TT: Probably the critique of the museum is secondary to a critique of the audience. That gallery is basically a leftover from the Degas exhibition that preceded my own. The Degas exhibition was a huge success, attracting some 350- or 400-thousand visitors. When I went for my site visit there were an incredible number of people packed into the galleries, and although they could barely see the paintings, they all seemed satisfied once they had read the wall texts. I admit there's something juvenile about such a critique, but frankly it could have been any Impressionist painter on display and people would have flocked to the museum. They like to see things that already have fixed values, and then talk about how great they are. The fact is that nobody really knows whether it's great or not. They just read these authoritative wall texts and come away impressed. I wanted to take the piss out of this situation, so I asked the museum to leave that one gallery from the Degas exhibition for me to use, and then I inserted my own "paintings" and wall texts into the preexisting exhibition design. I chose to work with blankets because I see them as these daily essentials that are often treated without any consideration at all - almost the complete opposite of masterpiece paintings.
Both: Installation view of the exhibition "Too Far to See" at Yokohama Museum of Art, 2011.
ART iT: Also on display is your installation Sympathetic Trade (2005/11), comprising a video monitor flanked by two touristic photo-op-style figures clad in kimono robes with cutout faces, through which a synchronized audio track seems to poke fun at the action depicted in the video. Is this work also intended to parody the institutional mechanisms of art?
TT: The idea of incorporating figures alongside the video was part of the work when I first realized it in 2005 at the National Museum of Ethnography, Osaka, in the group show "More Happy Every Day," only in that case I used African wooden figurines taken from the museum collection. Everything else remains the same, with the two voices commenting on the video as in a comic routine. The idea was to use objects from the museum collection that might become more interesting if they could speak.
I'm not sure what they were used for, but the kimono figures in the current version were simply what I found in the storage here. Rather than critiquing the museum outright, I tried to bring the museum and its staff into the making of the work as accomplices.
ART iT: What was your intent behind the soundtrack poking fun at the video?
TT: I suppose it's a way of poking fun at myself. I shot the video sometime around March 1993 when I was in New York and had all these vague impressions of America that I thought could be turned into an artwork. I had a lot of footage from New York that I planned on editing, but because it was too challenging it all sat around until I was invited to the exhibition in Osaka. I decided to show this one excerpt of the footage as an example of my failed vision for the project.
ART iT: I thought the video alone was beautiful - at the time you had this willowy, elegant figure that suited both masculine and feminine clothing, such that the more outlandish your outfits became, the more they suited you; the voices that poke fun at the video seemed almost excessive. In that sense many of your works employ similar ironic mechanisms, as with the framing wall text that accompanies the video installation Do what you want if you want as you want (2001/11), in which you question whether you have created a work about friendship or a work about the situation in Palestine.
TT: Actually Do what you want is another failure. I first showed the work in 2001 at Kodama Gallery in Osaka. The previous year I had done a pair of three-month residencies in Israel for a total of six months over the course of a year. On my first visit to Israel I was introduced to a girl of mixed Saudi-German parentage who was raised in Germany but based in Ramallah in the West Bank. I was keen to visit Gaza so when I heard that she had relatives there I asked her to take me, and we became friends.
Half a year passed before my second visit. I contacted the girl to let her know I was coming, but all the Israeli people warned me that it was too dangerous to meet her. I disregarded these warnings, but in fact in the time since we had last met she had transformed into a radical activist. She could talk only about the situation in Palestine, telling me about people she knew who had been killed and other atrocities. She spoke English very quickly and it was difficult for me to follow, so most of the time I was in a complete stupor. As we had been filming our conversation, she then asked me to take the video with me outside of Israel and publicize its contents. I felt I had been entrusted with a task that should be carried out by a journalist, and as an artist I had no idea how to respond journalistically to the material she had entrusted to me.
I was mortified about the situation. When I had the opportunity to do the exhibition in Osaka, I thought I should go ahead and use the video, and ended up presenting it as a mosaic-style three-channel installation with each channel presenting a fragmentary viewpoint cutout from the original video. But of course the relations between the contents of what the activist says in the video and the act of appropriating that material for an art exhibition in Osaka were so skewed that soon after installing the work I felt it was a failure, and introduced the framing text panel as a complementary part to the video.
Top: Installation view of the work Sympathetic Trade (2005/11) at the Yokohama Museum of Art; figures, monitor, speakers; figures: "Representation of a foreign man in Japanese dress" and "Representation of a foreign woman in Japanese dress" (working titles), from the collection of the Yokohama Museum of Art, not dated. Bottom: Installation view of Do what you want if you want as you want (2001/11) at the Yokohama Museum of Art; monitors, DVD, video filmed on location in Jerusalem, 2001. Photo Tomoki Imai, courtesy Yokohama Museum of Art.
ART iT: Do you have any guiding rationale or methodology for incorporating text into your works? For example, since many of your works originate from deeply personal experiences, do you conscientiously turn to text to provide a measure of reflexive distance from those experiences?
TT: It's not the case with every work, but I do give consideration to how clearly language can explain my intents, or to what extent it can deflect possible misunderstandings. In particular the installation about my wedding, Baby Insa-dong (2004), was really addressed to my wife's father, but I don't think it would have communicated anything through only images and video. The text is what makes it an artwork. And again because Kimura-san has such strong imagery, when I thought about how to present it to the public I decided to integrate it into a performance, and then edit the video of the performance and overlay that with words. There was a process that flowed from image to performance to editing. Particularly in the case of such works in which I expose very specific, personal elements of myself, then I find language to be a useful tool for responding to potential misunderstandings - although it's far from the only tool.
ART iT: Yet you also have multimedia installations like A Big Blow-job and Kagoshima Esperanto (2005) in which you explore the impossibility of communication by purposefully obscuring the text elements of the works.
TT: In the case of A Big Blow-job, the moving lights gradually reveal the characters that I have carved from the earth, drawing out the special texture of the text. Rather than having them listen to a narration or be fed the text through a video projection, I thought viewers would find it more interesting if they felt that they were discovering the text on their own. This in a way relates to Do what you want. I really can't justify this comment, but I feel that what the activist was telling me was similar to anything you might hear on the news. At the same time the reality of the situation was different from any previous frame of reference I had in that I was witnessing a testimony, in a sense, from someone who was right beside me, a friend. What viewers of the work hear in the audio is real - not scripted - and exactly as it was related to me. What stressed me out was the idea of how to respond to or interpret this "reality," to the extent that I was almost paralyzed. I think viewers of the work might experience a similar feeling. Eliciting that paralysis response is a major part of the work.
ART iT: The multimedia installation that concludes this exhibition and features video of silhouetted male and female figures fellating an assortment of phallic objects, Too Far to See (2011), was developed from a seminar in which a group of people exchanged their ideas on fellatio. Was there a difference for you in making this work as opposed to personal projects like Do what you want and Baby Insa-dong?
TT: The material in Baby Insa-dong is related to the social history of Japan but perversely I felt employing a personal viewpoint would be more effective in addressing such a topic. A discussion on the conditions of the Korean diaspora here is not something you can just leap into with a broad audience. It's something you have to work through on your own, and I thought I could turn that process into a work. In contrast, had I executed it by myself the viewpoint expressed in Too Far to See could have been understood as an attempt to turn a personal obsession into a bigger discussion than merited. Carrying out the discussion in a group seemed to have more possibilities for interesting results, and I created an open structure with no fixed objective, allowing the work to reflect a variety of opinions.
Detail from the multimedia installation Lesson (Reconstruction) (2008), on view at the Yokohama Museum of Art, 2011.
ART iT: This returns us to the final wall text on "revenge" and fellatio. Do you see that wall text as now being part of Too Far to See, or is it autonomous?
TT: The text - poem rather - is separate, although it forms the basis for the work. I distributed the poem to all the participants at the start of the seminar. The Too Far to See project should properly be considered an extension of the poem. The poem itself is vague. It discusses a utopia that is still far away. As such it considers how one might search for a way to approach that distant goal, not only through thinking on one's own but also through the help of others - or even perhaps through assembling people together - and living through that process together.
Tadasu Takamine's work remains on view at the Yokohama Museum of Art in the solo exhibition "Too Far to See" through March 20. The exhibition then tours April 23 to July 10 at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and May 4 to July 17 at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.
Related:
Reviews: Tadasu Takamine, "Too Far to See"
By Andrew Maerkle
Installation view of Too Far to See (2011) at the Yokohama Museum of Art; ceramic, computers, projectors, speakers, mirrors; sound programming by Yuichi Matsumoto; video by Kotaro Konishi. All images: Unless otherwise noted photo ART iT.
Starting his career with the seminal performance group Dumb Type, Tadasu Takamine is known not so much for a particular style or practice but rather for the diversity of the approaches and media that he uses from work to work. This makes him difficult to characterize as an artist, although one recurring theme is Takamine's investigation into the relations between body and mediation, expression and self-awareness. In essence, many of his works reflexively interrogate what it means to make art. His current solo exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art, "Too Far to See," loosely focuses on Takamine's activities of the past decade, providing an opportunity to evaluate the correspondences and divergences apparent in his recent output. ART iT met with Takamine in Yokohama to further discuss the exhibition and his works.
Interview
ART iT: In 2004 your video Kimura-san (1998) - which includes footage of you masturbating the physically disabled titular figure - was preemptively removed from the exhibition "Non-Sect Radical: Contemporary Photography" at the Yokohama Museum of Art, presumably in compliance with Japanese laws censoring the depiction of genitalia. The current museum director Eriko Osaka makes reference to this incident in her introductory message to your exhibition, while at the exit of the exhibition there is a hand-written wall text in which you discuss fellatio in terms of revenge. Is it possible to think of this exhibition as a kind of revenge with regard to the Kimura-san incident?
TT: No. The wall text that I wrote here, and its reference to "revenge," comes from a work that I contributed to the group exhibition held in Amsterdam in 2009, "The Demon of Comparisons." I was unable to show Kimura-san in 2004, and even given a solo exhibition that situation hasn't changed; the work still cannot be shown. But I have tried to approach that context with a positive outlook. To begin with, the problem of censorship does not apply only to this museum, nor does it apply exclusively to museums in Japan. The simple fact that Yokohama was even interested in showing Kimura-san - and made an attempt to do so - is significant to me. I don't blame the museum for the removal of the work. I think it's more to do with problems with society in general. I previously exhibited Kimura-san at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England - thanks largely to the efforts of the director, Jonathan Watkins - but that doesn't mean the work can be shown anywhere in England. More than categorically dividing everything into places where the work can or cannot be screened, I think it's situational, which is something I anticipated when I made the work.
ART iT: Can you clarify how you understand the connection between revenge and fellatio?
TT: The origins of the text and thinking about the relations between fellatio and revenge begin with the work I made for Art Tower Mito in 2004, A Big Blow-job. When I was young I thought of fellatio as this unilaterally violent action carried out by the recipient upon the giver, although of course I came to understand that was not the case. But I wanted to further explore this dynamic between active and passive, giver and receiver, which I myself had experienced in caring for Kimura-san. As I worked on A Big Blow-job this image gradually took hold of me of a relatively small sex organ - not necessarily a penis - that is connected through the roots of the earth to the entire universe, and is melted down in the mouth of the giver. This I saw as a kind of cosmic revenge.
ART iT: I had thought that perhaps the exhibition as a whole was designed as an institutional critique. For example, the opening gallery features "paintings" made using found blankets that were stretched like canvases and arranged in the classical museum-style installation. At first glance it's confusing whether you actually made these blankets, or simply found blankets that you stretched over painting stretchers, and this uncertainty is compounded by the "informational" wall texts, which delicately balance between seriousness and irony.
TT: Probably the critique of the museum is secondary to a critique of the audience. That gallery is basically a leftover from the Degas exhibition that preceded my own. The Degas exhibition was a huge success, attracting some 350- or 400-thousand visitors. When I went for my site visit there were an incredible number of people packed into the galleries, and although they could barely see the paintings, they all seemed satisfied once they had read the wall texts. I admit there's something juvenile about such a critique, but frankly it could have been any Impressionist painter on display and people would have flocked to the museum. They like to see things that already have fixed values, and then talk about how great they are. The fact is that nobody really knows whether it's great or not. They just read these authoritative wall texts and come away impressed. I wanted to take the piss out of this situation, so I asked the museum to leave that one gallery from the Degas exhibition for me to use, and then I inserted my own "paintings" and wall texts into the preexisting exhibition design. I chose to work with blankets because I see them as these daily essentials that are often treated without any consideration at all - almost the complete opposite of masterpiece paintings.
Both: Installation view of the exhibition "Too Far to See" at Yokohama Museum of Art, 2011.
ART iT: Also on display is your installation Sympathetic Trade (2005/11), comprising a video monitor flanked by two touristic photo-op-style figures clad in kimono robes with cutout faces, through which a synchronized audio track seems to poke fun at the action depicted in the video. Is this work also intended to parody the institutional mechanisms of art?
TT: The idea of incorporating figures alongside the video was part of the work when I first realized it in 2005 at the National Museum of Ethnography, Osaka, in the group show "More Happy Every Day," only in that case I used African wooden figurines taken from the museum collection. Everything else remains the same, with the two voices commenting on the video as in a comic routine. The idea was to use objects from the museum collection that might become more interesting if they could speak.
I'm not sure what they were used for, but the kimono figures in the current version were simply what I found in the storage here. Rather than critiquing the museum outright, I tried to bring the museum and its staff into the making of the work as accomplices.
ART iT: What was your intent behind the soundtrack poking fun at the video?
TT: I suppose it's a way of poking fun at myself. I shot the video sometime around March 1993 when I was in New York and had all these vague impressions of America that I thought could be turned into an artwork. I had a lot of footage from New York that I planned on editing, but because it was too challenging it all sat around until I was invited to the exhibition in Osaka. I decided to show this one excerpt of the footage as an example of my failed vision for the project.
ART iT: I thought the video alone was beautiful - at the time you had this willowy, elegant figure that suited both masculine and feminine clothing, such that the more outlandish your outfits became, the more they suited you; the voices that poke fun at the video seemed almost excessive. In that sense many of your works employ similar ironic mechanisms, as with the framing wall text that accompanies the video installation Do what you want if you want as you want (2001/11), in which you question whether you have created a work about friendship or a work about the situation in Palestine.
TT: Actually Do what you want is another failure. I first showed the work in 2001 at Kodama Gallery in Osaka. The previous year I had done a pair of three-month residencies in Israel for a total of six months over the course of a year. On my first visit to Israel I was introduced to a girl of mixed Saudi-German parentage who was raised in Germany but based in Ramallah in the West Bank. I was keen to visit Gaza so when I heard that she had relatives there I asked her to take me, and we became friends.
Half a year passed before my second visit. I contacted the girl to let her know I was coming, but all the Israeli people warned me that it was too dangerous to meet her. I disregarded these warnings, but in fact in the time since we had last met she had transformed into a radical activist. She could talk only about the situation in Palestine, telling me about people she knew who had been killed and other atrocities. She spoke English very quickly and it was difficult for me to follow, so most of the time I was in a complete stupor. As we had been filming our conversation, she then asked me to take the video with me outside of Israel and publicize its contents. I felt I had been entrusted with a task that should be carried out by a journalist, and as an artist I had no idea how to respond journalistically to the material she had entrusted to me.
I was mortified about the situation. When I had the opportunity to do the exhibition in Osaka, I thought I should go ahead and use the video, and ended up presenting it as a mosaic-style three-channel installation with each channel presenting a fragmentary viewpoint cutout from the original video. But of course the relations between the contents of what the activist says in the video and the act of appropriating that material for an art exhibition in Osaka were so skewed that soon after installing the work I felt it was a failure, and introduced the framing text panel as a complementary part to the video.
Top: Installation view of the work Sympathetic Trade (2005/11) at the Yokohama Museum of Art; figures, monitor, speakers; figures: "Representation of a foreign man in Japanese dress" and "Representation of a foreign woman in Japanese dress" (working titles), from the collection of the Yokohama Museum of Art, not dated. Bottom: Installation view of Do what you want if you want as you want (2001/11) at the Yokohama Museum of Art; monitors, DVD, video filmed on location in Jerusalem, 2001. Photo Tomoki Imai, courtesy Yokohama Museum of Art.
ART iT: Do you have any guiding rationale or methodology for incorporating text into your works? For example, since many of your works originate from deeply personal experiences, do you conscientiously turn to text to provide a measure of reflexive distance from those experiences?
TT: It's not the case with every work, but I do give consideration to how clearly language can explain my intents, or to what extent it can deflect possible misunderstandings. In particular the installation about my wedding, Baby Insa-dong (2004), was really addressed to my wife's father, but I don't think it would have communicated anything through only images and video. The text is what makes it an artwork. And again because Kimura-san has such strong imagery, when I thought about how to present it to the public I decided to integrate it into a performance, and then edit the video of the performance and overlay that with words. There was a process that flowed from image to performance to editing. Particularly in the case of such works in which I expose very specific, personal elements of myself, then I find language to be a useful tool for responding to potential misunderstandings - although it's far from the only tool.
ART iT: Yet you also have multimedia installations like A Big Blow-job and Kagoshima Esperanto (2005) in which you explore the impossibility of communication by purposefully obscuring the text elements of the works.
TT: In the case of A Big Blow-job, the moving lights gradually reveal the characters that I have carved from the earth, drawing out the special texture of the text. Rather than having them listen to a narration or be fed the text through a video projection, I thought viewers would find it more interesting if they felt that they were discovering the text on their own. This in a way relates to Do what you want. I really can't justify this comment, but I feel that what the activist was telling me was similar to anything you might hear on the news. At the same time the reality of the situation was different from any previous frame of reference I had in that I was witnessing a testimony, in a sense, from someone who was right beside me, a friend. What viewers of the work hear in the audio is real - not scripted - and exactly as it was related to me. What stressed me out was the idea of how to respond to or interpret this "reality," to the extent that I was almost paralyzed. I think viewers of the work might experience a similar feeling. Eliciting that paralysis response is a major part of the work.
ART iT: The multimedia installation that concludes this exhibition and features video of silhouetted male and female figures fellating an assortment of phallic objects, Too Far to See (2011), was developed from a seminar in which a group of people exchanged their ideas on fellatio. Was there a difference for you in making this work as opposed to personal projects like Do what you want and Baby Insa-dong?
TT: The material in Baby Insa-dong is related to the social history of Japan but perversely I felt employing a personal viewpoint would be more effective in addressing such a topic. A discussion on the conditions of the Korean diaspora here is not something you can just leap into with a broad audience. It's something you have to work through on your own, and I thought I could turn that process into a work. In contrast, had I executed it by myself the viewpoint expressed in Too Far to See could have been understood as an attempt to turn a personal obsession into a bigger discussion than merited. Carrying out the discussion in a group seemed to have more possibilities for interesting results, and I created an open structure with no fixed objective, allowing the work to reflect a variety of opinions.
Detail from the multimedia installation Lesson (Reconstruction) (2008), on view at the Yokohama Museum of Art, 2011.
ART iT: This returns us to the final wall text on "revenge" and fellatio. Do you see that wall text as now being part of Too Far to See, or is it autonomous?
TT: The text - poem rather - is separate, although it forms the basis for the work. I distributed the poem to all the participants at the start of the seminar. The Too Far to See project should properly be considered an extension of the poem. The poem itself is vague. It discusses a utopia that is still far away. As such it considers how one might search for a way to approach that distant goal, not only through thinking on one's own but also through the help of others - or even perhaps through assembling people together - and living through that process together.
Tadasu Takamine's work remains on view at the Yokohama Museum of Art in the solo exhibition "Too Far to See" through March 20. The exhibition then tours April 23 to July 10 at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and May 4 to July 17 at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.
Related:
Reviews: Tadasu Takamine, "Too Far to See"
Miranda July
You Are Doing Good My Dear
By Andrew Maerkle
Concept sketch for Eleven Heavy Things (2009/10). All images: Unless otherwise noted, courtesy Miranda July.
Documentation of an email correspondence with Miranda July, January 1-20, 2011, compiled into interview format:
ART iT: This issue of ART iT addresses the theme "Text," looking not only at artists who use text in their works but also artists who look at how the world communicates with us, and how we decode the world. Thinking about the idea of text - coding and decoding - what is communication to you?
MJ: Communication is really my main comfort in life. In one way or another I'm always trying to describe feelings in new and better ways. I will do this regardless of the outcome, even alone in a dark room. But the best - the creamy center - of life is when someone re-describes a feeling back to me in a way that I never would have imagined, but is more ecstatically accurate than what I could have come up with. This can happen in a book, a conversation, a performance - in any medium, by any person of any age.
ART iT: You frequently use text in your works but as a filmmaker you are also an image maker, and even with your piece for the 2009 Venice Biennale, Eleven Heavy Things, the idea was that people would take photographs with the sculptures. What is the relationship - or what are the differences - between text making and image making for you?
MJ: Yes, it's a little bit of conundrum, actually - given what I said above - that I'm keenly aware that images (movies, performance, sculpture, etc) can communicate lightning quick, democratically and effortlessly. Writing is the tonic form, the undiluted, maximum strength me. All the other forms are a tiny bit more diluted - they're less easy to control, more subject to the weather of collaborations, interpretations. The world comes in more. Which isn't a bad thing, and is in fact what draws me to them.
I often vacillate for a while about what medium a new idea should be - last night I was thinking about a story that has a very odd sexual relationship in it and I wondered if people really needed to SEE that, or if I would be freer just writing about it. I imagined casting an actress with just the right kind of skin versus having to describe that skin in words.
Top: Installation view of The Hallway (2008) at the 3rd Yokohama Triennale, 2008. Photo Yoshinaga Yasuaki, courtesy of the Organizing Committee for the Yokohama Triennale.Bottom row: Eleven Heavy Things (2009) as installed at Union Square, New York, 2010. Photo Brian Paul Lamotte.
ART iT: You have published fiction writing, but text (notes, signs, impromptu intertitles, online chats) also appears in your art, film and online projects as a kind of disembodied voice. The "writer" is distanced from what is being expressed, giving the text a life of its own in the mind of the reader, as in your installation for the Yokohama Triennale in 2008, The Hallway. Is this aspect of the disembodied voice something you consciously explore with your use of text? If so, where does this interest come from?
MJ: In my most recent movie, The Future (which hasn't been released yet), there is a very prominent disembodied voice - that of the moon. Only after I'd completely finished the movie did I think of this book that I wrote when I was six or seven called "Lost Child." In this book a girl is led by a voice calling to her from the sky, "a voice buzzing in her head" - I actually drew a picture of the voice coming down from the sky with the words "You are doing good my dear." The voice ultimately turns out to be the voice of a star - I remember feeling that this was kind of a cheap ending, but I couldn't figure out any other logical answer.
I also can't think of a great answer to your question, other than yes, I do seem to do that, and it's resonant in a way I can't explain. The Hallway and the sculptures for Venice were similar in my mind to when I've asked audience members to read aloud texts that end up sounding very confessional, as if the readers themselves had written them. Only with this new work, they read in their heads, so they are the audience of what's happening with the voices in their heads.
ART iT: It's interesting what you write about communication. I guess I should have thought to ask, would you say that many of your works are about different aspects of communication? And is sexuality a big part of communication for you? It seems from reading your short stories that many of your characters are sexually isolated, and this is also a reflection of how they function or don't function in society. I like the idea that our minds communicate one thing and our bodies communicate something else entirely, which stayed with me in particular after reading your stories "The Sister" and "Ten True Things."
MJ: I wouldn't say my work is about communication, but connecting or not connecting with another person is often crucial to the lives of my characters, which I think is pretty human and realistic. I maybe focus more on the lead up to communication, the longing, the misguided impulses, such that these communications are very heavily weighted when they happen. For some reason I would never associate sex with communication. Maybe that is the woman in me that values talking SO much, and feels sex would be a very inarticulate way to communicate most things.
Above: Audience members perform backstage during Things We Don't Understand and Definitely Are Not Going To Talk About, March 1, 2007, The Kitchen, New York. Below: Miranda July performing in Things We Don't Understand and Definitely Are Not Going To Talk About, March 1, 2007, The Kitchen, New York.
ART iT: It also seems that you frequently cite the language of therapy. Does therapy relate to the disembodied voice at all? Are you necessarily satirizing the language of therapy, and the conditions that popularize that language in society, or is your interest more of an ambivalent nature?
MJ: I wouldn't say that it's exactly a satire, because I see a therapist and have benefitted from that. But therapy is also funny to me. It's a funny kind of intimacy because it's both so honest and complex, and so formal and ritualized. In fact, just thinking about it right now makes me want to write scenes. All these scenes would be drawn right out of my real life.
ART iT: You mention the idea that in The Hallway and Eleven Heavy Things viewers/readers are "the audience of what's happening with the voices in their heads." Do you see this dynamic, then, as a performative situation that is different from reading a book? Or is it a way of democratizing/imaging the process that already takes place when we read books?
MJ: I think it's the same as when you read, but I tried to find ways to physically make the participant take on the "I" or the "you" in the texts. If it's written that the "you" looks up and sees the word "JOY" and you can actually look up and see the word JOY on a post-it note attached to the ceiling, then maybe, in a very clumsy way, that encourages you to believe that the "you" is really YOU, your most intimate self. I also try write thoughts that are familiar, that maybe everyone has internally but doesn't verbalize.
ART iT: In your first feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), computers play a significant role in the story, as the means through which the young boy Robby has the online relationship with the older curator, and of course the emoticon for "poop back and forth, forever" has taken a life of its own since the movie. What was the attraction of online communication for you in constructing the story?
MJ: For Me and You I think I just liked the structure of strangers writing and then meeting - it did not have to be online, what mattered was that it was an intimate, even slightly sexual (but innocent) relationship between two people who absolutely could not have that relationship in our world.
In the new movie computers are also important because everything changes when a couple turns off the Internet. As someone who manages to not be addicted to drugs or alcohol, it confounds me that something new that was invented in my lifetime could be so very addictive. It fills in all the cracks, all the frighteningly vague or boring or empty spaces where new ideas come from, which is why it is soooo delicious.
ART iT: Can you explain further what it means to "quit the Internet," at least in terms of the The Future? In general, what is the context for the plot, about a couple who become unhinged from time and space when faced with the responsibility of looking after a terminally ill cat? Have you changed your approach from Me and You at all?
MJ: Well, these are questions that will be answered when you get to see the movie. I think it will be obvious that I haven't changed my approach, in as much as the budget is about the same, and the cast again has no stars. But I hope this movie goes a little deeper into its characters - and most notably, it isn't a comedy. There are funny parts, but ultimately it's a very sad tale.
This couple quits the Internet the way any of us might, to stop the distraction. But it creates a space that perhaps allows things to devolve to the extreme in a way that might only happen over many years if you didn't have to face the void within.
Still from the film The Future (2011). Courtesy Todd Cole, © 2011 THE FUTURE.
ART iT: Is the decision not to use stars in your films due to budget constraints, or a creative choice?
MJ: The first time I very consciously did not want stars; it seemed like they would be inappropriate for the story. This time I made a big show of being open to stars, met with lots of them, but ultimately felt like the relatively unknown actors Hamish Linklater and David Warshofsky were truly the best ones for the job. I'll admit that it might be a little bit about control. I really want to have as much control as I can over the world I'm making and how it's perceived. Of course, I love movie stars in other people's movies, and will see a movie just because a certain actor is in it. I just haven't made the connection to myself yet. Maybe next time.
ART iT: Do you think that film has in any way superseded your work in performance - do the two fields coexist for you or does film swallow up performance (and maybe everything else as well)?
MJ: Certainly many, many more people have seen the first movie than have ever seen me perform, or will ever. Nonetheless, I've been surprised that people still refer to me as a performing artist, even though it's safe to say that none of these people have much of an idea of what my performances are like. I think maybe it is almost a way to say something about my movies, or even my books - if "performance artist" weren't thrown in there then the words "author" and "filmmaker" would be misleading, too normal.
Maybe it's not true, but I really believe that I'm pulling this off, that all the worlds are successfully co-existing. I do feel some (self-imposed) pressure to rotate mediums, to not do two movies or two books in a row for fear of getting stuck in one of those worlds. Freedom above all.
ART iT: Having worked across so many different creative fields, do you have any figures that you look to for inspiration? For example, when you first began experimenting with performance and video, did you have any model to follow or was that something that developed organically out of your circumstances at the time? Now that you are making feature films, do you have any particular filmmakers who you find have influenced you?
MJ: It is more as you suggest, that each thing developed out of the circumstances of the time. That is what happens when you don't go to art school and are not surrounded by people doing the same thing (as I might have been had I, say, wanted to be in a band).
For a long time I felt embarrassed that I had so few references outside myself, but now that I am married to someone [the graphic designer and film/video director Mike Mills] who really sucks energy and inspiration from the many, many, books and movies he devours, I see that it's just a different process.
That said, when I was 23 and someone gave me a cassette tape bootleg of an early Patti Smith performance, I felt electrified - and by the performances of Kathleen Hanna at the time, in her band Bikini Kill. They didn't do what I did, but they were gutsy, which was the main thing I needed to see. I could figure out the rest.
Some of my favorite movies are: The Truman Show, Random Harvest, Groundhog Day and Somewhere in Time - all movies in which someone's perception of reality shifts in an almost science-fictional way - that's my favorite kind of movie. I wish I were more influenced in terms of craft, but I really forget about all that when I'm watching movies. I watch like a fan, with my mouth slightly open.
Screen capture of MirandaJuly.com, illustration ART iT.
ART iT: Final question. Visitors to your website are asked to enter a secret password before they can continue to the main content. I enjoy this because of course I already know, or assume, that any word I pick will allow me to proceed, but I still stop to think about a suitable word to enter. For me, your website serves as a reminder of the absurdity of how so many of our interactions on the Internet are controlled by arbitrary passwords. I also noticed, though, that your site seems to archive every password that is entered into the intro page. What happens to all these words?
MJ: Wait, how could you tell that the words are archived? They are, and the list is amazing. At first I was confused about how a word like HUBERT could have been entered 178 times, but then I realized that people stick with the same word, maybe because they think they've guessed the right word?(!) So far no plans for them, but one day I'll publish them all. The most oft-typed word is LIGHT, at 19,126 times. Others include: LANGOROUS (154), PUSSY (173), TWAT (29), HOLE (27), FEMINISM (23) and JEFF (23).
Miranda July's The Future was screened as part of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, held January 20-30 at multiple venues in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah.
By Andrew Maerkle
Concept sketch for Eleven Heavy Things (2009/10). All images: Unless otherwise noted, courtesy Miranda July.
Documentation of an email correspondence with Miranda July, January 1-20, 2011, compiled into interview format:
ART iT: This issue of ART iT addresses the theme "Text," looking not only at artists who use text in their works but also artists who look at how the world communicates with us, and how we decode the world. Thinking about the idea of text - coding and decoding - what is communication to you?
MJ: Communication is really my main comfort in life. In one way or another I'm always trying to describe feelings in new and better ways. I will do this regardless of the outcome, even alone in a dark room. But the best - the creamy center - of life is when someone re-describes a feeling back to me in a way that I never would have imagined, but is more ecstatically accurate than what I could have come up with. This can happen in a book, a conversation, a performance - in any medium, by any person of any age.
ART iT: You frequently use text in your works but as a filmmaker you are also an image maker, and even with your piece for the 2009 Venice Biennale, Eleven Heavy Things, the idea was that people would take photographs with the sculptures. What is the relationship - or what are the differences - between text making and image making for you?
MJ: Yes, it's a little bit of conundrum, actually - given what I said above - that I'm keenly aware that images (movies, performance, sculpture, etc) can communicate lightning quick, democratically and effortlessly. Writing is the tonic form, the undiluted, maximum strength me. All the other forms are a tiny bit more diluted - they're less easy to control, more subject to the weather of collaborations, interpretations. The world comes in more. Which isn't a bad thing, and is in fact what draws me to them.
I often vacillate for a while about what medium a new idea should be - last night I was thinking about a story that has a very odd sexual relationship in it and I wondered if people really needed to SEE that, or if I would be freer just writing about it. I imagined casting an actress with just the right kind of skin versus having to describe that skin in words.
Top: Installation view of The Hallway (2008) at the 3rd Yokohama Triennale, 2008. Photo Yoshinaga Yasuaki, courtesy of the Organizing Committee for the Yokohama Triennale.Bottom row: Eleven Heavy Things (2009) as installed at Union Square, New York, 2010. Photo Brian Paul Lamotte.
ART iT: You have published fiction writing, but text (notes, signs, impromptu intertitles, online chats) also appears in your art, film and online projects as a kind of disembodied voice. The "writer" is distanced from what is being expressed, giving the text a life of its own in the mind of the reader, as in your installation for the Yokohama Triennale in 2008, The Hallway. Is this aspect of the disembodied voice something you consciously explore with your use of text? If so, where does this interest come from?
MJ: In my most recent movie, The Future (which hasn't been released yet), there is a very prominent disembodied voice - that of the moon. Only after I'd completely finished the movie did I think of this book that I wrote when I was six or seven called "Lost Child." In this book a girl is led by a voice calling to her from the sky, "a voice buzzing in her head" - I actually drew a picture of the voice coming down from the sky with the words "You are doing good my dear." The voice ultimately turns out to be the voice of a star - I remember feeling that this was kind of a cheap ending, but I couldn't figure out any other logical answer.
I also can't think of a great answer to your question, other than yes, I do seem to do that, and it's resonant in a way I can't explain. The Hallway and the sculptures for Venice were similar in my mind to when I've asked audience members to read aloud texts that end up sounding very confessional, as if the readers themselves had written them. Only with this new work, they read in their heads, so they are the audience of what's happening with the voices in their heads.
ART iT: It's interesting what you write about communication. I guess I should have thought to ask, would you say that many of your works are about different aspects of communication? And is sexuality a big part of communication for you? It seems from reading your short stories that many of your characters are sexually isolated, and this is also a reflection of how they function or don't function in society. I like the idea that our minds communicate one thing and our bodies communicate something else entirely, which stayed with me in particular after reading your stories "The Sister" and "Ten True Things."
MJ: I wouldn't say my work is about communication, but connecting or not connecting with another person is often crucial to the lives of my characters, which I think is pretty human and realistic. I maybe focus more on the lead up to communication, the longing, the misguided impulses, such that these communications are very heavily weighted when they happen. For some reason I would never associate sex with communication. Maybe that is the woman in me that values talking SO much, and feels sex would be a very inarticulate way to communicate most things.
Above: Audience members perform backstage during Things We Don't Understand and Definitely Are Not Going To Talk About, March 1, 2007, The Kitchen, New York. Below: Miranda July performing in Things We Don't Understand and Definitely Are Not Going To Talk About, March 1, 2007, The Kitchen, New York.
ART iT: It also seems that you frequently cite the language of therapy. Does therapy relate to the disembodied voice at all? Are you necessarily satirizing the language of therapy, and the conditions that popularize that language in society, or is your interest more of an ambivalent nature?
MJ: I wouldn't say that it's exactly a satire, because I see a therapist and have benefitted from that. But therapy is also funny to me. It's a funny kind of intimacy because it's both so honest and complex, and so formal and ritualized. In fact, just thinking about it right now makes me want to write scenes. All these scenes would be drawn right out of my real life.
ART iT: You mention the idea that in The Hallway and Eleven Heavy Things viewers/readers are "the audience of what's happening with the voices in their heads." Do you see this dynamic, then, as a performative situation that is different from reading a book? Or is it a way of democratizing/imaging the process that already takes place when we read books?
MJ: I think it's the same as when you read, but I tried to find ways to physically make the participant take on the "I" or the "you" in the texts. If it's written that the "you" looks up and sees the word "JOY" and you can actually look up and see the word JOY on a post-it note attached to the ceiling, then maybe, in a very clumsy way, that encourages you to believe that the "you" is really YOU, your most intimate self. I also try write thoughts that are familiar, that maybe everyone has internally but doesn't verbalize.
ART iT: In your first feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), computers play a significant role in the story, as the means through which the young boy Robby has the online relationship with the older curator, and of course the emoticon for "poop back and forth, forever" has taken a life of its own since the movie. What was the attraction of online communication for you in constructing the story?
MJ: For Me and You I think I just liked the structure of strangers writing and then meeting - it did not have to be online, what mattered was that it was an intimate, even slightly sexual (but innocent) relationship between two people who absolutely could not have that relationship in our world.
In the new movie computers are also important because everything changes when a couple turns off the Internet. As someone who manages to not be addicted to drugs or alcohol, it confounds me that something new that was invented in my lifetime could be so very addictive. It fills in all the cracks, all the frighteningly vague or boring or empty spaces where new ideas come from, which is why it is soooo delicious.
ART iT: Can you explain further what it means to "quit the Internet," at least in terms of the The Future? In general, what is the context for the plot, about a couple who become unhinged from time and space when faced with the responsibility of looking after a terminally ill cat? Have you changed your approach from Me and You at all?
MJ: Well, these are questions that will be answered when you get to see the movie. I think it will be obvious that I haven't changed my approach, in as much as the budget is about the same, and the cast again has no stars. But I hope this movie goes a little deeper into its characters - and most notably, it isn't a comedy. There are funny parts, but ultimately it's a very sad tale.
This couple quits the Internet the way any of us might, to stop the distraction. But it creates a space that perhaps allows things to devolve to the extreme in a way that might only happen over many years if you didn't have to face the void within.
Still from the film The Future (2011). Courtesy Todd Cole, © 2011 THE FUTURE.
ART iT: Is the decision not to use stars in your films due to budget constraints, or a creative choice?
MJ: The first time I very consciously did not want stars; it seemed like they would be inappropriate for the story. This time I made a big show of being open to stars, met with lots of them, but ultimately felt like the relatively unknown actors Hamish Linklater and David Warshofsky were truly the best ones for the job. I'll admit that it might be a little bit about control. I really want to have as much control as I can over the world I'm making and how it's perceived. Of course, I love movie stars in other people's movies, and will see a movie just because a certain actor is in it. I just haven't made the connection to myself yet. Maybe next time.
ART iT: Do you think that film has in any way superseded your work in performance - do the two fields coexist for you or does film swallow up performance (and maybe everything else as well)?
MJ: Certainly many, many more people have seen the first movie than have ever seen me perform, or will ever. Nonetheless, I've been surprised that people still refer to me as a performing artist, even though it's safe to say that none of these people have much of an idea of what my performances are like. I think maybe it is almost a way to say something about my movies, or even my books - if "performance artist" weren't thrown in there then the words "author" and "filmmaker" would be misleading, too normal.
Maybe it's not true, but I really believe that I'm pulling this off, that all the worlds are successfully co-existing. I do feel some (self-imposed) pressure to rotate mediums, to not do two movies or two books in a row for fear of getting stuck in one of those worlds. Freedom above all.
ART iT: Having worked across so many different creative fields, do you have any figures that you look to for inspiration? For example, when you first began experimenting with performance and video, did you have any model to follow or was that something that developed organically out of your circumstances at the time? Now that you are making feature films, do you have any particular filmmakers who you find have influenced you?
MJ: It is more as you suggest, that each thing developed out of the circumstances of the time. That is what happens when you don't go to art school and are not surrounded by people doing the same thing (as I might have been had I, say, wanted to be in a band).
For a long time I felt embarrassed that I had so few references outside myself, but now that I am married to someone [the graphic designer and film/video director Mike Mills] who really sucks energy and inspiration from the many, many, books and movies he devours, I see that it's just a different process.
That said, when I was 23 and someone gave me a cassette tape bootleg of an early Patti Smith performance, I felt electrified - and by the performances of Kathleen Hanna at the time, in her band Bikini Kill. They didn't do what I did, but they were gutsy, which was the main thing I needed to see. I could figure out the rest.
Some of my favorite movies are: The Truman Show, Random Harvest, Groundhog Day and Somewhere in Time - all movies in which someone's perception of reality shifts in an almost science-fictional way - that's my favorite kind of movie. I wish I were more influenced in terms of craft, but I really forget about all that when I'm watching movies. I watch like a fan, with my mouth slightly open.
Screen capture of MirandaJuly.com, illustration ART iT.
ART iT: Final question. Visitors to your website are asked to enter a secret password before they can continue to the main content. I enjoy this because of course I already know, or assume, that any word I pick will allow me to proceed, but I still stop to think about a suitable word to enter. For me, your website serves as a reminder of the absurdity of how so many of our interactions on the Internet are controlled by arbitrary passwords. I also noticed, though, that your site seems to archive every password that is entered into the intro page. What happens to all these words?
MJ: Wait, how could you tell that the words are archived? They are, and the list is amazing. At first I was confused about how a word like HUBERT could have been entered 178 times, but then I realized that people stick with the same word, maybe because they think they've guessed the right word?(!) So far no plans for them, but one day I'll publish them all. The most oft-typed word is LIGHT, at 19,126 times. Others include: LANGOROUS (154), PUSSY (173), TWAT (29), HOLE (27), FEMINISM (23) and JEFF (23).
Miranda July's The Future was screened as part of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, held January 20-30 at multiple venues in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah.
Yeondoo Jung: Part II
II. Retrograde Parlor Tricks
Yeondoo Jung on the illusory limitations of digital effects.
Location #5 (2006), C-print, 116.8 x 240 cm. All images: Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul.
ART iT: We were just talking about your two video-performance pieces Documentary Nostalgia and Cinemagician, and how they comment on technology by, in a sense, misusing it. Have you made other works that directly comment on the medium you're using? How about your photographs, for example?
YJ: The "Wonderland" (2005) series of photographs recreating children's drawings has a lot to do with the replication of reality. At first glance a photograph looks like real life, but as a representation, say, of a street scene, then there are many other unavoidable elements and contexts that enter into it. It's not just a street, it's a suburb of Seoul; it's not just a person, it's always someone. But a child's drawing always has a remove from reality. Children don't understand the relations between scale, composition, color, the laws of physics and other elements that inform our representations of reality, whereas in photography all of that is automatically accounted for. You could almost say that the medium of photography and children's drawings are diametrically opposed. One is a very realistic mode of representation and the other is the most unrealistic possible. I thought there was a lot to play with in combining these two extremes.
Then with my "Locations" (2007) series I thought about the 17th-century Dutch painters. They painted these landscapes that were influenced by images of Spain, with mountains, hills and rivers, but if you go to Holland everything is flat. So they created their landscapes in the studio, out of their imaginations. Yet, a landscape photograph always relates to the limitations of the medium. You have to bring a camera to some kind of extraordinary or specific location, and then which moment you press the shutter at which angle determines the resulting image.
Now that everybody has a camera, if something amazing happens on the street somewhere, it's far more likely that everybody on hand will take out their cameras and photograph it than it is that anybody might take out a notebook and sketch it. Even in the 17th century when painting was at its peak, I don't think the average person would have sketched a noteworthy event. Photography is a representational medium that is shared by an extraordinary number of people, and the specific beauty of the place or the particular moment you press the shutter is no longer as definitive as it once was. And photography is such a realistic medium that once people understand an image in terms of where it was taken and how, they lose interest in it. My response was to bring the studio lighting system and props to the landscape, creating confusion between the real natural setting and an artificially constructed backdrop.
As with Documentary Nostalgia, my way of dealing with a realistic medium was the opposite of how people normally deal with it, and the most inefficient way I could possibly think of.
Above: Location #11 (2006), C-print, 122 x 155 cm. Below: Location #1 (2006), C-print, 122 x 153.5 cm.
ART iT: But when we talk about everybody having cameras, we can also think of writing as another important technology that was for a long time the domain of only an elite few, and is now widely shared - and of course in Asia the official literacy percentages in China, Japan and both North and South Korea are all above 90 percent. Maybe that's where photography is headed, where it's no longer about being impressed by the image itself and people begin to appreciate a kind of "deep literacy" of reading what is behind the text or behind the image.
YJ: There are certainly still many things in both literature and photography to explore. That's why I keep making artworks.
Another thing I find important is that technology is always one step ahead of the artist. It takes time to humanize technology. It takes even longer to find a way to express lasting values through new technology.
In fact I actually do use cutting-edge technology in my works, but on a completely superficial level. It's almost like a 1970s guy who has been inserted into the present. Where you could easily solve a creative problem by simply pressing a button, I end up doing everything myself. In any case I shot the entire 85 minutes of Documentary Nostalgia using a digital recording device, because film doesn't have the capacity for recording something that long in one take. I connected a computer hard drive to the camera, so the camera was not recording to tape or any other medium, it was recording directly to the hard drive, and in turn the hard drive was copying the file into the computer directly. This was only possible with the development of faster connecting cables and faster camera capturing speeds and faster computer chip processing speeds, and everything was in high definition. None of this technology had been available to anyone before. Even in 2007 I was barely able to handle this media. But otherwise everything about the production of the work was very manual and physical.
I think artists should not be overwhelmed by technology. For instance, I am a big fan of Harry Potter. I actually memorized all the spells, I read the books many times and had a cassette tape to repeatedly listen to the audio versions in my car. In the first book, Harry is living as an orphan with his relatives in a closet under their staircase, and he feels completely worthless. Then the invitation from the Hogwarts school arrives and he finds a new dignity and reason to live. This feeling was conveyed beautifully through the writing and does so much to build the fantasy of the story. But when the movie came out and the computer imagery made this fantasy possible for the screen, and we could see the castle and the train and people flying through the air playing quidditch, none of these roller-coaster effects zooming in and out could actually convey the sense that this little orphan Harry had discovered his own specialness.
This isn't necessarily about distinctions between literature and movies, but technology is not always the solution to expressing these complex human experiences.
Bewitched #2 (2001), C-print, 120 x 150 cm.
ART iT: Advances in CGI technology have led to a new boom in Hollywood of recycled fantasy classics like Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings and Alice in Wonderland, as though every generation has to reinvent these stories for its own technology. But one thing that these movies all seem to over-emphasize - and I think this is related to the special effects - is the notion that the characters cannot grow without killing something. This is always justified as resulting from a battle between supreme good and supreme evil, but it's really surprising how deeply fascist the Hollywood fantasy genre is, whereas perhaps the original books at least had more complexity.
YJ: When I was a child there was a puppet program on TV that had a witch puppet flying on a broom, and there were always shreds of paper waving back and forth to evoke clouds, and a fan in front of the stage to blow the witch's hair everywhere, and since the puppets couldn't move their legs, when they walked they simply bounced up and down as the puppeteers move them back and forth. I think this kind of puppet story is in a way more sophisticated than CGI, even though it has less detail and people know it's not real because they see everything holding the fantasy together. Computer effects may be believable, but in contrast to the puppets, few people have any idea how the effects actually work. This difference between knowing or not knowing the roots of the process is very significant to the emotional attachment viewers invest in a work. If you don't understand the illusion you can be swept away by the effects but also alienated at the same time.
Another example is my photo series "Bewitched" (2001), in which I helped people to realize their fantasies. Each work in the series comprises two photographs, one taken from the subject's everyday life and the other of the subject living out a personal fantasy, with the subject in the exact same pose in both images. The "Bewitched" series was inspired by the American TV series of the same name, which I watched when I was a child. In the TV show, when the witch Samantha twinkles her nose, something magical happens. But even as a child when I saw these scenes I understood that the producers had simply stopped the camera and changed the set, then moved everyone back into the same position. You can recognize it immediately, but the effect was amazing.
Both and following image: CineMagician (2010), dual-channel HD video, 55 min.
ART iT: Did you ever see Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark (2002), which was shot in a single 96-minute sequence shot at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg? The difference between this film and Documentary Nostalgia is that the camera is moving through space, and the characters are moving with the camera, so it's not a stationary composition.
YJ: I haven't seen it, although it sounds interesting. But this actually reminds me of a point I wanted to make about CineMagician. The title refers to George Méliès, one of the first explorers of filmmaking in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Before cinematography was discovered, people like the Lumière brothers shot these documentations of real life, with people walking around the streets or workers coming out of the factories. I think Hollywood movies were built around this documentary approach, and of course dramas tend to resemble everyday life and experiences. Méliès, however, started out as a professional magician, and he wanted to use film to create a fantasy world, even building a glass studio with white linen curtains to control the sunlight. He made hundreds of films, including Trip to the Moon (1902). All of them were amazing, but what I find really interesting are the special effects that he made through double exposure techniques. He would take his neck out and hang it somewhere, or transform into a woman and then back into a man, or grow large and then small again. All these effects are so primitive. If you see the films today you can recognize that he's walking close to the camera to grow large and then standing away from it to grow small. It's an illusion but so much of the mechanism remains visible.
I worked with a professional magician on CineMagician, and we agreed to switch roles for the work. I put myself on the stage, acting as the magician, and he played the role of the artist. As my alter-ego, he had to build these sets recreating beautiful scenes that I remember from my 20s when I was in a mountaineering club. But the way he went about doing this was not logical. In fact, it resembled the way artists work. He used some of his magic props such as the levitating table. Usually in a magic act he might have a beautiful lady lying on the table to complete the illusion, but in this case when he needed to use the table leg for something else, he just took it out from under the table and started working on other things. The result is that many people who saw the work didn't recognize which part was magic and which part was not. Everything was illogical because it was all going against the laws of gravity, but people didn't recognize it as magic or something out of the ordinary. So CineMagician plays with these visual tricks that are both amazing and yet widely known, but the interesting thing is that people actually were enchanted because they didn't recognize what they were seeing as "magic."
The work of Yeondoo Jung is currently on view in the 8th Shanghai Biennale, "Rehearsal," at the Shanghai Art Museum through February 28, 2011, and in the exhibition "Made in Popland," at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, through February 20, 2011.
Part I. Advancing Beyond Efficiency
Yeondoo Jung on how the misuse of technology leads to art.
Yeondoo Jung on the illusory limitations of digital effects.
Location #5 (2006), C-print, 116.8 x 240 cm. All images: Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul.
ART iT: We were just talking about your two video-performance pieces Documentary Nostalgia and Cinemagician, and how they comment on technology by, in a sense, misusing it. Have you made other works that directly comment on the medium you're using? How about your photographs, for example?
YJ: The "Wonderland" (2005) series of photographs recreating children's drawings has a lot to do with the replication of reality. At first glance a photograph looks like real life, but as a representation, say, of a street scene, then there are many other unavoidable elements and contexts that enter into it. It's not just a street, it's a suburb of Seoul; it's not just a person, it's always someone. But a child's drawing always has a remove from reality. Children don't understand the relations between scale, composition, color, the laws of physics and other elements that inform our representations of reality, whereas in photography all of that is automatically accounted for. You could almost say that the medium of photography and children's drawings are diametrically opposed. One is a very realistic mode of representation and the other is the most unrealistic possible. I thought there was a lot to play with in combining these two extremes.
Then with my "Locations" (2007) series I thought about the 17th-century Dutch painters. They painted these landscapes that were influenced by images of Spain, with mountains, hills and rivers, but if you go to Holland everything is flat. So they created their landscapes in the studio, out of their imaginations. Yet, a landscape photograph always relates to the limitations of the medium. You have to bring a camera to some kind of extraordinary or specific location, and then which moment you press the shutter at which angle determines the resulting image.
Now that everybody has a camera, if something amazing happens on the street somewhere, it's far more likely that everybody on hand will take out their cameras and photograph it than it is that anybody might take out a notebook and sketch it. Even in the 17th century when painting was at its peak, I don't think the average person would have sketched a noteworthy event. Photography is a representational medium that is shared by an extraordinary number of people, and the specific beauty of the place or the particular moment you press the shutter is no longer as definitive as it once was. And photography is such a realistic medium that once people understand an image in terms of where it was taken and how, they lose interest in it. My response was to bring the studio lighting system and props to the landscape, creating confusion between the real natural setting and an artificially constructed backdrop.
As with Documentary Nostalgia, my way of dealing with a realistic medium was the opposite of how people normally deal with it, and the most inefficient way I could possibly think of.
Above: Location #11 (2006), C-print, 122 x 155 cm. Below: Location #1 (2006), C-print, 122 x 153.5 cm.
ART iT: But when we talk about everybody having cameras, we can also think of writing as another important technology that was for a long time the domain of only an elite few, and is now widely shared - and of course in Asia the official literacy percentages in China, Japan and both North and South Korea are all above 90 percent. Maybe that's where photography is headed, where it's no longer about being impressed by the image itself and people begin to appreciate a kind of "deep literacy" of reading what is behind the text or behind the image.
YJ: There are certainly still many things in both literature and photography to explore. That's why I keep making artworks.
Another thing I find important is that technology is always one step ahead of the artist. It takes time to humanize technology. It takes even longer to find a way to express lasting values through new technology.
In fact I actually do use cutting-edge technology in my works, but on a completely superficial level. It's almost like a 1970s guy who has been inserted into the present. Where you could easily solve a creative problem by simply pressing a button, I end up doing everything myself. In any case I shot the entire 85 minutes of Documentary Nostalgia using a digital recording device, because film doesn't have the capacity for recording something that long in one take. I connected a computer hard drive to the camera, so the camera was not recording to tape or any other medium, it was recording directly to the hard drive, and in turn the hard drive was copying the file into the computer directly. This was only possible with the development of faster connecting cables and faster camera capturing speeds and faster computer chip processing speeds, and everything was in high definition. None of this technology had been available to anyone before. Even in 2007 I was barely able to handle this media. But otherwise everything about the production of the work was very manual and physical.
I think artists should not be overwhelmed by technology. For instance, I am a big fan of Harry Potter. I actually memorized all the spells, I read the books many times and had a cassette tape to repeatedly listen to the audio versions in my car. In the first book, Harry is living as an orphan with his relatives in a closet under their staircase, and he feels completely worthless. Then the invitation from the Hogwarts school arrives and he finds a new dignity and reason to live. This feeling was conveyed beautifully through the writing and does so much to build the fantasy of the story. But when the movie came out and the computer imagery made this fantasy possible for the screen, and we could see the castle and the train and people flying through the air playing quidditch, none of these roller-coaster effects zooming in and out could actually convey the sense that this little orphan Harry had discovered his own specialness.
This isn't necessarily about distinctions between literature and movies, but technology is not always the solution to expressing these complex human experiences.
Bewitched #2 (2001), C-print, 120 x 150 cm.
ART iT: Advances in CGI technology have led to a new boom in Hollywood of recycled fantasy classics like Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings and Alice in Wonderland, as though every generation has to reinvent these stories for its own technology. But one thing that these movies all seem to over-emphasize - and I think this is related to the special effects - is the notion that the characters cannot grow without killing something. This is always justified as resulting from a battle between supreme good and supreme evil, but it's really surprising how deeply fascist the Hollywood fantasy genre is, whereas perhaps the original books at least had more complexity.
YJ: When I was a child there was a puppet program on TV that had a witch puppet flying on a broom, and there were always shreds of paper waving back and forth to evoke clouds, and a fan in front of the stage to blow the witch's hair everywhere, and since the puppets couldn't move their legs, when they walked they simply bounced up and down as the puppeteers move them back and forth. I think this kind of puppet story is in a way more sophisticated than CGI, even though it has less detail and people know it's not real because they see everything holding the fantasy together. Computer effects may be believable, but in contrast to the puppets, few people have any idea how the effects actually work. This difference between knowing or not knowing the roots of the process is very significant to the emotional attachment viewers invest in a work. If you don't understand the illusion you can be swept away by the effects but also alienated at the same time.
Another example is my photo series "Bewitched" (2001), in which I helped people to realize their fantasies. Each work in the series comprises two photographs, one taken from the subject's everyday life and the other of the subject living out a personal fantasy, with the subject in the exact same pose in both images. The "Bewitched" series was inspired by the American TV series of the same name, which I watched when I was a child. In the TV show, when the witch Samantha twinkles her nose, something magical happens. But even as a child when I saw these scenes I understood that the producers had simply stopped the camera and changed the set, then moved everyone back into the same position. You can recognize it immediately, but the effect was amazing.
Both and following image: CineMagician (2010), dual-channel HD video, 55 min.
ART iT: Did you ever see Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark (2002), which was shot in a single 96-minute sequence shot at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg? The difference between this film and Documentary Nostalgia is that the camera is moving through space, and the characters are moving with the camera, so it's not a stationary composition.
YJ: I haven't seen it, although it sounds interesting. But this actually reminds me of a point I wanted to make about CineMagician. The title refers to George Méliès, one of the first explorers of filmmaking in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Before cinematography was discovered, people like the Lumière brothers shot these documentations of real life, with people walking around the streets or workers coming out of the factories. I think Hollywood movies were built around this documentary approach, and of course dramas tend to resemble everyday life and experiences. Méliès, however, started out as a professional magician, and he wanted to use film to create a fantasy world, even building a glass studio with white linen curtains to control the sunlight. He made hundreds of films, including Trip to the Moon (1902). All of them were amazing, but what I find really interesting are the special effects that he made through double exposure techniques. He would take his neck out and hang it somewhere, or transform into a woman and then back into a man, or grow large and then small again. All these effects are so primitive. If you see the films today you can recognize that he's walking close to the camera to grow large and then standing away from it to grow small. It's an illusion but so much of the mechanism remains visible.
I worked with a professional magician on CineMagician, and we agreed to switch roles for the work. I put myself on the stage, acting as the magician, and he played the role of the artist. As my alter-ego, he had to build these sets recreating beautiful scenes that I remember from my 20s when I was in a mountaineering club. But the way he went about doing this was not logical. In fact, it resembled the way artists work. He used some of his magic props such as the levitating table. Usually in a magic act he might have a beautiful lady lying on the table to complete the illusion, but in this case when he needed to use the table leg for something else, he just took it out from under the table and started working on other things. The result is that many people who saw the work didn't recognize which part was magic and which part was not. Everything was illogical because it was all going against the laws of gravity, but people didn't recognize it as magic or something out of the ordinary. So CineMagician plays with these visual tricks that are both amazing and yet widely known, but the interesting thing is that people actually were enchanted because they didn't recognize what they were seeing as "magic."
The work of Yeondoo Jung is currently on view in the 8th Shanghai Biennale, "Rehearsal," at the Shanghai Art Museum through February 28, 2011, and in the exhibition "Made in Popland," at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, through February 20, 2011.
Part I. Advancing Beyond Efficiency
Yeondoo Jung on how the misuse of technology leads to art.
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