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Brochure of the Spencer Museum of Art's exhibition curated by Kris Ecrums
Citation preview
Extra/Ordinary:Video_Art_
from_Asia
Exhibition Curator: Kris Imants Ercums
Brochure Design: Tristan Telander
Exhibition Design: Richard Klocke
Editor: Bill Woodard
cont
ents
____
the_Intro______________________________00:00:02
the_work______________________________00:00:08
the_artists___________________________00:00:21
Extra/Ordinary:_________Transmutations_of_the_Everyday__
Y
The exhibition Extra/Ordinary: Video Art from Asia investigates new ways of transforming familiar experiences and daily routines into moments of expanded meaning, contemplation, and humorous reflection. By repositioning our constructed notions of the “everyday” as cinematic recreations or comical interventions, this exhibition explores the imaginative potential embedded in the ordinary stuff of life.
In one of its original medieval iterations, “ordinary” referred to the unchanging rituals of the Roman Catholic mass known as Ordo Missae—thus its association with daily routine in contemporary usage. However, when the daily rituals of life are repositioned through the eyes of artists, the shallow waters of the banal suddenly deepen into a reservoir of endless possibilities. The artists in Extra/Ordinary share a common interest in the meaning of our ordinary lives, especially within the context of Asia, where an immense reevaluation of historical consciousness and cultural practices is occurring under the guise of “development.” Together, these artists uncover the potential of daily experience and explore the material stuff of the world as mutable and laden with potential. In the process, ordinary moments are uprooted, transformed into wondrous encounters and, through the “poetics of noticing,” restored as artifacts of memory and meaning.
03
The everyday has received considerable attention in recent contemporary art, with longstanding political connotations: Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) grounded the everyday as fundamental to the reordering of society; the Situationist International critiqued capitalist society through the everyday; and most recently, contemporary scholars have rooted their discursive practice in the everyday. However, generally speaking, in the last few years the exploration of everydayness in recent art, while connected to the political awareness of twentieth-century avant-garde practice, has begun to implicate itself in new ways. While striving to make daily encounters relevant, artistic engagement with common experiences is a strategy for infusing new meaning into what is typically ignored—“tracing silent contours” that make the prosaic something worth looking at.1
As the sum of our days and the foundation of the life we will come to call our own, everydayness is an essential building block of life, an existential protein if you will.2 Through his writings, the American thinker John Dewey (1859–1952) explored the relationship
1 Nikos Papastergiadis, “ ‘Everything That Surrounds’: Art, Politics and
Theories of the Everyday” in Every Day, 11th Biennale of Sydney (Sydney:
Biennale of Sydney, 1998).
2 Michael Sheringham goes on to observe “…while many things are
commonly identified with the quotidien—eating, phoning, shopping,
objects and gadgets—everydayness is not a property or aggregate of
these things; it inheres rather in the way they are part of manifold lived
experience.” In Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism
to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pg. 386.
between art and everyday life, struggling to “recover the continuity between the types of refined and intensified experience, like in a work of art, and the everyday events, doings and sufferings that are universally recognized as the elements of experience.”3 By remaking the mundane stuff of life into moments of significance, artists offer us a way to understand how our daily routines, or the unsuspecting memories of days gone by, or just waiting around for something to “happen” can transform our passive, ordinary lives into an active resistance against boredom. Through the process, we discover that meaning can be found everywhere, in everyone, and everything.
Boredom remains one of the fundamental adversaries of contemporary consumer society, which is assaulted with an ever-widening array of technology: instant messaging, Facebook updates, Twitter, Nintendo Wii, and a plethora of portable gadgetry. Boredom is also a distinct historical phenomenon, related to contrasting phenomenon like “interest” or “excitement,” which some scholars suggest are requisite parts of modern consciousness.4 German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) saw the modern development of urban life and the advances of technology as the root causes of boredom, arguing that overstimulation
3 In Katya Mandoki, Everyday Aesthetics: Prosaics, the Play of Culture and
Social Identities (Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), pg. 89.
4 Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani, eds. Essays on Boredom
and Modernity (Amsterdam; New York, NY: Rodopi, 2009).05
prevents us from making value distinction and creating a fulfilling life.5 However, there is something in our recent turn to the everyday—the origins of boredom—and its reevaluation that is meant to struggle against this idea and reassert the legitimacy of contemporary life, the ordinariness of existence, and the value of common people. When approached like this, boredom is merely a state of mind, not necessarily something to be avoided or cured, but a condition in life that depends on a choice, an action.
One way in which people are taking creative action is through the widespread application of new, cheaper forms of digital video and online formats like YouTube, an immensely important venue for the art of the everyday. This exhibition took shape using online video clips, emails, and file sharing. Yet despite the thin copies of DVDs transported via global couriers, the use of equipment like flat screens and projectors manufactured from petroleum and rare metals—not to mention the carbon footprint incurred through trans-oceanic shipping—makes one reconsider the wonders of the traditional object-based exhibition. Martha Rosler, an innovator in video art, reminds that “video itself is not ‘innocent.’ It too is a form of cultural commodity that often stands for a celebration of the self and its powers of invention.”6 The timeliness of video is part of
5 Ralph M. Leck, Georg Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology:
The Birth of Modernity, 1880–1920 (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2000).
6 Marth Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001.
(Cambridge, MS: MIT Press, 2004), pg. 367.
the backbone of Extra/Ordinary, which explores ways of transmuting the ordinary into something extraordinary. It is from this kernel found in the simple life that the artwork in this exhibition began to emerge, a slowly attenuated static shape dancing across a pixilated screen. The use of moving images in this exhibition to capture the passing of moments now long gone, or to restore a lost memory, or to remake life through cinematic effect, further reflects the fleeting qualities that make the everyday so extraordinary.
_______Kris_Imants_Ercums/ _________________Curator_of_Asian_Art
07
After spending immense sums to construct signature
venues like the “Bird’s Nest” stadium and the “Water
Cube” natatorium, the XXIX Summer Olympiad opened
in Beijing with a massive spectacle on August 8, 2008.
That same day, three artists—Chen Shaoxiong from China,
Gimhongsok from South Korea and Tsuyoshi Okazawa
from Japan—with considerably less ostentation, held the
opening ceremony for the Xijing Olympic Competitions.
Situated in the art district of Caochangdi on the outskirts
of Beijing, Xijing was conceived as an imaginary “western
capital” meant to compliment three other directional
capitals of East Asia—Beijing “the northern capital,”
Nanjing “the southern capital,” and Tokyo “the eastern
Good_Sports_________________Xijing_Men’s_Collective_____________________
capital.” For the opening ceremony, the emblematic
Olympic torch ceremony is staged as a “smoking relay.”
Passing the sacred flame from cigarette tip to cigarette
tip in a consecutive relay, the final embers are tossed into
a waiting barbeque grill to emblazon the inaugural flame
of the twenty-day competition. In Xijing, signature Olympic
competitions are reconstituted from moments of common
experience: the steel blades in fencing are transformed
into soft, scratching sticks; a leg of the triathlon involves
releasing fish purchased at a local market into a Beijing
canal; watermelons are substituted for soccer balls; and,
in perhaps the most meaningful reversal, the marathon
becomes an endurance sleep-off. The performance of
an alternate vision of the geopolitical athletic spectacle
of the Olympics within the realm of an intimately
collectivized artistic body not only resituates the “play”
of competitive sports away from the realm of nationalized
competition to a more personal dimension, it also avows
the fundamental element of amusement seemingly
absent in professional sports.
Courtesy of Boers-Li Gallery and the artists
09
The “forests of gestures” was for Certaeu an unfixable,
metamorphosis of space created by individuals in urban
environments.7 Through his “action videos” Tsui Kuang-Yu
creates his own forest of gestures that trace, transform,
and reposition the way movement in urban space is
used to create meaning in our everyday life. The Invisible
Cities series reveals the oftentimes hidden pedestrian
perspective of cities through interruptions of comical—
even slightly absurdist—extremes that ultimately manage
to soften, or even dismiss the brutality of cities. In Sealevel
Leaker the seemingly innocuous movement of walking
becomes an active determinant. Spewing water in all
directions, Tsui not only manages to augment his bodily
A_Forest_of_Gestures___Tsui_Kuang-Yu____________________________________
7 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pg.102.
presence, he also leaves a fleeting trace of his walk,
mapping the unencumbered individual onto the rigid
grid of the city. Pedestrian action becomes something
transgressive that arouses reactions of smiling amusement,
mild annoyance, and slight surprise. Liverpool Top 9!! (not
the Top 10, mind you) has the veneer of a well-executed
mockumentary in the vein of This is Spinal Tap. Yet, this
imaginative, satirical investigation into the idiosyncratic
aspects of urban design in Liverpool excavates the
way that city dwellers across the globe reassign the
geography of urban space to usages more fitted to the
realities of everyday engagement. As Michel de Certaeu
observes, “the moving about that the city multiplies and
concentrates makes the city itself an immense social
experience of lacking a place—an experience that is,
to be sure broken up into countless tiny deportations
(displacements and walks)...”8 Thus, when Tsui reimagines
how crossing the street can become an act of community
involvement, or the electronic bleeps of a pedestrian
signal can inspire a celebratory dance, or even when
decorative rocks become a moment for a relaxing foot
massages a la the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Park in Taipei,
he pulls at the urban fabric of the city and shows how we
slowly reweave meaning in our daily actions.
8 ibid, pg. 103.
Courtesy of Eslite Gallery, Taipei and the artist
11
Izumi uses a combination of his body, technology, and
space to playfully create videos that strive to transmute
the banal into a superlative encounter, much like
alchemists of old sought to transmute base metals into
noble elements like gold. As the “everyday alchemist,”
Izumi takes an unconventional approach to his magical
reordering of the quotidian. Using mundane objects, he
concocts performances that distort the body, expand the
perceptions, and rediscover the joys of good, cheap fun.
Izumi enjoys setting up game-like moments of distraction.
In Door (2006) he tries to insert a key drawn on his finger
into a lock, and in 19 Days 19 Works (2006) he spends
just under three weeks in an endurance test of the
everyday_alchemy________izumi_taro__________________________________________
imagination. In his most recent work, Izumi casts himself
as the protagonist who inadvertently falls victim to the most
unlikely, somewhat cartoonish incidents. In Lime at the
Bottom of the Lake (2008) a black “hand” materializes on
high, seemingly from a surveillance camera. The ominous
appendage slaps a monitor and pulverizes Izumi flat as
a pancake. In Finland (2008) we find the artist strolling
along, minding his own business when, suddenly, he swims
through a pitcher of water propped just in front of the TV.
His body contorts and twists in the liquid atmosphere like
a genie made of taffy. And then magically, he walks out
the other side. Izumi observes, “Like light and shadow, it is
well known that images are pliable. But because my body
is not flexible I need a device to enter into the picture.”9 His
use of cheap, daily objects—a water pitcher or tube TVs
for example—and his low-tech, video-guerrilla approach
to art glows with a kind of cool-otaku-hipster-proletarianism,
a pulse of everyday experimental fun in the de-centered
art scene of Tokyo. Like the prophetic alchemy of old,
which declared the properties of certain metals and
medicines as indispensible for weathering the end times,
Izumi’s brand of everyday alchemy is a preventative
against the drudgery and madness of our own making.
9 from Gabriel Ritter, Tokyo Nonsense, 2008.
Courtesy of hiromiyoshii
13
Since antiquity, Afghanistan has been at the nexus of
world events. Within recent times, the everyday context
for the people of this mountainous, land-locked region
of Central Asia has been defined by geopolitical violence.
During the nineteenth century, the “Great Game” between
Russia and Great Britain was played out in three horrific
Anglo-Afghan Wars that concluded in 1919 with the
founding of the Kingdom of Afghanistan. In the 1970s,
with the “cold war” Soviet Invasion (1979–1989) and
ensuing civil war, Afghanistan was once again a pawn in
global politics. Taking advantage of a nation destabilized
by nearly two decades of civil conflict, the Taliban
seized control in 1996. And, following the September 11,
white_noise__________________lida_abdul__________________________________________
2001, World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the
beleaguered Afghani people were in the crossfire of an
escalating “war on terror.” This year alone, an estimated
1,500 Afghani civilians have died in the conflict and the
vast majority of the country lies in ruins.
A product of this upheaval, artist Lida Abdul left
Afghanistan as a child refugee. She has spent her life
trying to comprehend “the disaster that has ravaged
my country for nearly two decades.” When she was
finally able to return in 2005, she began her own curative
engagement with Afghanistan by enacting a series of
ritualized performances in the devastated architectural
15
spaces that dominate the environs of Kabul. A ruined
presidential complex, with remnants of columns like an
ancient Greek temple, is the wrecked site of White House
(2005). In a meditative reordering of chaos, Abdul slowly,
with method and intent, brushes white paint on each
wall, each inconsequential fragment of rubble. As a
cathartic act, Abdul sublimates the manifestations of war
and reclaims the ruined space as both a mnemonic site
of the past and a hopeful monument for a future as yet
unrealized. She is never far from the subject of her work,
as she observes:
There is always the fear that the work of the
dissident artist, or one too close to an unfolding
“politics” compromises its aesthetic intentions; the
fear that forms might become subordinate to
content. As well-intentioned as this critique might
appear to be, one has to ask: Whose politics? In
my work, I try to juxtapose the space of politics with
the space of reverie, almost absurdity, the space
of shelter with that of the desert; in all of this I try to
perform the “blank spaces” that are formed when
everything is taken away from people.10
Near the end of the video, a young man appears in
this “blank space.” Abdul camouflages him in white. He
both blends into the wreckage and is restored. The video
concludes with a herd of goats climbing through Abdul’s
silent monument.
10 http://www.lidaabdul.com/statement.htm
Museum purchase: Peter T. Bohan Art Acquisition Fund, 2006.0032
For Koreans, the twentieth century will always be
remembered as a time of national turmoil, marked by
the end of the long-lived Joseon dynasty (1392–1910),
the nation’s annexation as a colony by the Empire of
Japan (1910–1945), and the division of the country into
two nation-states by a violent civil war (1950–1953). The
subterfuge of this history runs deep in the stories that Jung
restages in Handmade Memories. For this series, Jung
collected six anonymous memories from elderly Koreans
that he approached and interviewed in parks around
Seoul. Each telling began with the same question: “What
was the most memorable event in your life?” As each
memory unfolds, juxtaposed on the adjacent screen
behind_the_curtain______jung_yeondoo____________________________________
a crew wearing orange
jumpsuits—a seemingly divine
corporate entity—reconstructs
the setting in a soundstage:
a mountain hut in Legends
and Poverty; a flower-filled
memorial in TV Star; a resort
locale in Jeju Island Camel;
a traditional hanok (courtyard
house) in 6x6 Manor; a
golden path in Barley Field;
and a railroad track in On
the Dividing Line between
Body and Soul. Through his
own brand of cinematic
magic Jung revives the
past, repairing the disparate
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19
shards of remembrance into an imagined singularity that
is animated again for a final fleeting moment before our
eyes. Through much of his work Jung explores memory as
it exists on the permeable boundary between imagination
and the oblivion of dreams. Handmade Memories
builds on the 85-minute film Documentary Nostalgia
(2007) in which Jung recreates key moments from his
own life in one continuous take. However, mythology
often warns us against looking back—think of Lot’s wife
turned to salt. And great writers like Marcel Proust recall
how disappointing memory can be, as it never truly
restores the past. Scientists like Edmund Bolles and Daniel
Schacter, who work on memory, also call into question
the pure form of remembrance we often times idealize.11
Rather, current research suggests that we only recall
ourselves in a fragmented, discontinuous ways. Our
minds don’t archive memories whole. Instead, memory is
selective and constantly changing. It moves forward and
reacts to the present just as we do. This subjectivity, the
imaginative potential embedded in memory, is at the
core of Handmade Memories, which is far from a Proustian
attempt to grasp at the past, but rather is an elegiac
journey through the workings of the imagination.
11 Edmund Bolles, Remembering and Forgetting: An Inquiry into the Nature of Memory (New York: Walker and Company, 1988); and Daniel L. Schacter, Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains and Societies Reconstruct the Past (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995).
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Courtesy of Tina Kim Gallery, New York City,
and Kukje Gallery, Seoul
Lida Abdul was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in
1973. She lived in Germany and India as a refugee
before moving to the United States. In 2000 she received
her MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Her work
crosses formalist boundaries and merges traditions—
Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, pagan, and nomadic—that
collectively have influenced Afghan art and culture.
Her performative videos explore the conditions of life
in contemporary Afghanistan. In 2006 she was named
a Prince Claus Award laureate. Her recent exhibitions
include Afghanistan Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2005),
Thermocline of Art—New Asian Waves, Karlsruhe,
Germany (2007), and the mid-career retrospective
Lida Abdul at Centre A, Vancouver (2008). For the past
few years, Abdul has been working in different parts
of Afghanistan on projects exploring the relationship
between architecture and identity. For more, check
out her website http://www.lidaabdul.com
_____the_artists_________
Chen Shaoxiong 陈劭雄 was born in
Shantou, Guangdong province, China, in 1965. He
graduated from the Print Department at the Guangzhou
Fine Art Academy in 1984. In 1990, together with Lin
Yilin and Liang Juhui, he formed the “urban guerilla”
collective known as Big Tail Elephant. A provocateur
of the Chinese art world, Chen employs video and
installation to investigate the shifting societal landscape
of contemporary China. His international exhibitions
include: Venice Biennale (2003), Between Past and
Future: New Photography and Video from China (2004),
the Hong Kong and Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale (2008)
and, most recently, Orient Without Borders, Espace Louis
Vuitton, Paris (2008). For more information check out his
website http://www.chenshaoxiong.com
Gimhongsok 김홍석 was born in 1964
in Seoul, Korea, where he continues to teach at
Sangmyung University. He received his BFA in 1987
from Seoul National University and went onto study
at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig,
and at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1996. Using video
and installation, Gimhongsok’s art blurs perceptions of
belief and subjectivity. He has exhibited internationally
at the 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007), 6th Gwangju Biennale
(2006), and at the Korean Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2005)
with his most recent group exhibition Your Bright Future:
12 Contemporary Artists from Korea, LACMA and Houston
MFA (2009).
23
Izumi Taro 泉太郎 was born in Nara, Japan,
in 1976. He received his BFA in painting in 2000 and
his MFA in 2002, both from Tama Art University. Using a
combination of technology and performance to make
short videos and installations, Izumi creates an everyday
aesthetic through his work. Some of his recent exhibitions
include After the Reality, Deitch Projects, New York (2006),
Out of the Ordinary: New Video from Japan, LA MoCA
(2007), Waiting for Video: Works from 1960 to Today,
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2009), and
a solo show, Magicians Bread, Solar Eclipse, hiromiyoshii,
Tokyo (2008).
Jung Yeondoo 정연두 was born in Jinju,
Korea, in 1969. In 1994 he graduated with a BFA from
Seoul National University. He then earned a diploma
in sculpture from the London Institute in 1995 and an MFA
from University of London in 1997. In 2006 he participated
in the International Studio and Curatorial Program Artist
Residency, New York. In 2007 he was named “Artist of
the Year” by the National Museum of Contemporary Art,
Seoul, at which he time he produced the epic 85-minute
autobiographical film Documentary Nostalgia (2007).
In 2008 the Korean Ministry of Culture named him
“Today’s Young Artist.” His films and photography
have been featured in scores of exhibitions around
the world. For more information check out his website
http://yeondoojung.com
Ozawa Tsuyoshi 小沢剛 was born in
Tokyo, Japan, in 1965. After graduating from Tokyo
National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1989, he
completed his postgraduate studies in mural painting
at the same university in 1991. Basing his work on
dialogue, interaction, and communication rather than an
isolated studio practice, Ozawa draws on the dynamics
of everyday life and human interactions in his art. Large-
scale projects have included the Museum of Soy Sauce
Art (1999–2000), a humorous take on Japanese art history.
Ozawa’s numerous international exhibitions include the
solo show Answer With Yes and No! Mori Art Museum
(2004), Asia Pacific Triennial Brisbane, Australia (2006),
and Another Landscape, Mori Art Museum (2008).
Tsui Kuang-Yu 崔廣宇 was born in Taipei,
Taiwan, in 1974. He graduated from the Taipei National
University of the Arts in 1997. His action videos use
elements of humor to explore the meaning of urban
space. After completing residences at Gasworks Studio,
London (2004), and Rijksakademie van beeldende
kunsten Stichting Trustfonds, Amsterdam (2006), Tsui
returned to Taipei. His exhibitions include the Taiwan
Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2005), the solo show You
So Crazy, Chelsea Art Museum, New York (2005), and
the Taipei Biennial (2008). Currently Tsui is preparing
for a trip to the Artic Circle.
25
Spencermuseum of ar t
The University of Kansas
www.spencerart.ku.edu