trivialities

some thoughts on keeping a journal:

I have kept a journal ever since I was seven. With very few exceptions, I have written in it everyday, even if it is just one sentence. I go through a ton of pens and paper; half of my closet is densely packed with remnants of these daily scribbles. In the past, when I finished a notebook, I would sometimes hesitate before adding it to my colossal collection—Do I really want to add another book of trivialities to take up even more space?—then remember how fond I am of my colorfully illustrated volumes from my childhood and my newest one would be spared.

Once every year or so, I wipe the dust from their covers and look through them. The older, the better: writings grounded too close to my present are not as interesting as the testimonies of an existence that I have lost long ago. I find patterns, an aspect of the whole that I could not see in the moment. From seven until nine, they were mostly sticky images pressed onto paper with cray-pas that would still cling to my twenty-five-year-old fingers; the text was mostly an explanatory accompaniment. From ten to fourteen, words slowly start to take over most of the page and the images come as an afterthought at the end of each entry. Age twelve also marks a shift from writing entirely in Korean to entirely in English. By age fifteen, images disappear altogether, but there still must have been some interest in the journal as something visual, as I would often use ink in various colors (or maybe it was just trendy to use brightly colored ink at the time). From age sixteen to seventeen, images reappear briefly, but as “ideas” supplementing my angry manifestos. From eighteen on, only black ink, all text, mostly legible and neat handwriting, coherent and full sentences. There is also a shift back to writing in Korean, with occasional English words or phrases.

I always wonder what the trajectory would have been like if I had not moved to States. Would I have so readily and viciously cast out images from my daily meditations? Regardless of the fact that it was infinitely uncomfortable to convey my thoughts in English, once I came here, I insisted upon writing all my entries in that broken grammar and consistently incorrect spellings. My obsession with mastering those cruel and foreign words deemed all else as secondary. In the beginning, the image afterthoughts were a treat after a grueling one-hour of writing three sentences—drawing felt free without the constraints of grammatical and syntactical rules—but I eventually seemed to have found these treats a luxury I could no longer afford; a sense of dire urgency took over when kids continually teased me at school and I could still not speak back.

Voluntary silence can be empowering, but an involuntary one scars for life. I imagine it must feel something like a singer suddenly losing her voice from an accident. The developed consciousness is there but speech is no where up to that level. Thus my journal became both the training and battle grounds with language. Rather than that of negotiation, the relationship has long been my attempts to conquer it, subordinate it, thrust it in the position at my mercy. This is one reason why anger so permeates my language; it has given me power, but only after so much pain and sacrifice.

Now I call my journal writing “meditations.” Though it always has been both, to some degree, it is no longer a tense site of struggle but a calm place of refuge from all outside noises. It is a place where I can finally hear and feel myself. Call it a present inwardness, to modify Marilynne Robinson’s term. When my main battle was with language, I did not notice a significant disparity between the life as I lived it daily and the times of reflection while writing, as life was the writing, the language. But as I grew older, I found my journal a necessity, a means by which I could confirm my own existence. Otherwise, I still feel, I would become swallowed up by the world, both by those of the physical and cyber spaces.

Navigating the physical space of New York City, to say the least, can be overwhelming. Every sound, sight, smell, feeling competes for my attention: too much to hear, see, smell, feel at once, but I try. I try to take it all in patiently, one at a time, but most times, it requires an incredible proficiency at multitasking.

Hence all the ears plugged into a device. Music isolates a person into a single sensory experience, or, at least, foregrounds all the others. Music is the bubble, the refuge from the aggressive excess of what happens outside. When we turn up the music, we choose what assaults our ears. I bitterly laugh when I think about the popular media reports in the early 2000s of studies on the dangers of loud music on headsets and psychological consequences of creating this bubble. Because mp3 players were only the smallest fraction of a much larger phenomenon that has, over the years, grown monstrously out of control at an alarmingly accelerated rate.

When this single-channel sensory refuge expands into a double or even triple—that is, when the device provides not only music but visual and other information—the space shifts from acting as the cozy, dark corner of a closet to a fully outfitted bomb shelter. Smartphones indicate this expansion of alternative space: not only can we shut off the sensory surplus around us through music, but browse through pictures, read news articles, play games, communicate via social media networks, and so on. Mobile access to the internet is the ultimate expansion of this previously bounded refuge into infinity. We can never exhaust the possibilities of activity in cyber space: there always exists another universe, another galaxy that we have left untouched but we know exists.

It is so easy to get lost in the virtual world, especially by leaving the body behind. I associate presentness with my body; I need to see, hear, smell, touch, taste, to know I am still here. I sometimes get the impression that words on the internet are like floating, disembodied ideas. When I see my hand moving over my journal, I know my words come from me. It is my voice, with my handwriting, which, otherwise, a digital device would convert to “Arial” or “Times New Roman.” This daily writing is my way of fetching my words back to myself as a physical being; no one else but I, in this time and space, could have produced them. I need this solitude, the brief moment of present inwardness. Only then do I feel safe from external sensory assault while I reclaim my receding body from cyber space, and can remind myself how much I love and hate the language that now confirms my existence.  

ivory tower

a heavily academic paper which i thought i messed up but for which i received fairly decent feedback.

Sublime Tactics and Political Domination:

the Radicalism of Schiller’s Education as Emancipation

It is impossible to speak of the sublime without a discussion of politics: that is, the power relations between the perceiver and perceived. Immanuel Kant describes the sublime as the feeling invoked within us when we look upon something that is “large beyond all comparison” and that gives our eyes the illusion of perceiving the idea of infinity (Kant 103). By likening this feeling to one felt by the Christian god, Edmund Burke describes its effect in similar terms: “whilst we contemplate so vast an object […] and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him” (Burke 68). The object of the sublime is awe-inspiring and terrible precisely because our sense cannot possibly grasp it all at once; before it we also strongly apprehend the inadequacy of our sensibilities and imagination. In other words, we feel that we are at the mercy of the object that overwhelms us with its vastness.

Longinus, in possibly the first extensive exposition on the topic, devotes his work to the analysis and application of these mechanisms in practical speech—specifically, in political oration. The author’s primary interest in the sublime is its potential to exert power over the listener. Among the various other stylistic techniques that the author considers, what he calls phantasia, or visualization, is an especially potent weapon. This is because this particular technique specifically targets is the imagination; “when combined with factual arguments,” Longinus writes, “it not only convinces the audience, it positively masters them” (Longinus 223). Misleading them and concealing all these devices is key to this mastery: the author punctuates his discussion of the different tools and methodologies with frequent reminders to prevent the audience from becoming aware of their use, as knowledge would disperse the illusion (Longinus 231). Indeed, Kant condemns oratory precisely because of its basis on deceitful manipulation. He calls it “the art of using people’s weaknesses for one’s own aims” and that it “is unworthy of any respect whatsoever” (Kant 198).

For Burke, obscurity plays a significant role in the feeling of sublime. He likens the source of fear and terror to that of darkness and tales of ghosts and goblins. We fear uncertainty, what we cannot apprehend in its completeness while also “[i]t is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions” (Burke 61). It is from this double effect of fear and respect that the sublime derives much of its power to dominate us.

In this equation, then, the other side of fearful ignorance is omniscience. If the object of the sublime is not a natural phenomenon but a person, the situation becomes a dominant-subservient relationship that often results in a systematized political economy. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punishment, 1975, argues that Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon functions on this political relationship between knowing and unknowing. The architectural design of this prison structure places a single surveillance tower surrounded by a circle of individual cells. The person in this tower—protected from gaze by Venetian blinds and angular wall—receives an unobstructed view into the activities of every inmate, while the inmates, on the other hand, are denied any view into the interior of the tower, let alone each other’s cells. Foucault writes that “Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable” (Foucault). The only knowledge that the prisoners have is the fact of their being watched; they know nothing about the identity of the watcher or whether the watcher is even inside the tower. The inmate “is seen, but does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject of communication” (Foucault). This partial knowledge is the ingenious aspect of Bentham’s creation: only a glimpse and denial serves to maintain control on a psychological level.

In natural occurrences of the sublime, there is a second part to the initial feeling of subservience: the feeling of the imagination’s inadequacy is quickly succeeded by an affirmation of our power of reason. Kant describes the two-step process as a kind of sacrifice in the name of morality, the object of humanity’s perpetual ambition toward a higher purpose. Thus, the sublime is a negative pleasure: only after we feel that “the imagination […] is depriving itself of its freedom” do we receive the affirmation of our “supersensible power” which surpasses that of anything in nature (Kant 129, 131). The experience is more rewarding because of the deprivation, as it is “one that serves our inner freedom” by revealing our moral potential (Kant 131).

When this second part—the reward that “expands the soul”—is removed, only deprivation remains, and the sublime becomes exploitative power (Kant 135). In his analytical, Kant inserts a brief critique of the government and religion for doing precisely this:

That is also why governments have gladly permitted religion to be amply furnished with such accessories: they were trying to relieve every subject of the trouble, yet also of the ability, to expand his soul’s forces beyond the barriers that one can choose to set for him so as to reduce him to mere passivity and so make him more pliable (Kant 135).

This gesture disciplines the masses to make them more manageable. In a sense, it is the containment of a multitude into finitude, the opposite of an untamable sublime. Friedrich Schiller, too, criticizes this reductive strategy of state control: “Compelled to disburden itself of the diversity of its citizens by means of classification, and to receive humanity only at second hand, by representation, the governing section finally loses sight of it completely” (Schiller 41). Like so many inmates in Bentham’s Panopticon (number 42, number 43, number 44...), the demystified and generalized citizens become interchangeable parts under a few that hold the knowledge and power of the sublime’s full spectrum.

The key to reclaiming power and freedom, then, lies in a reinsertion of mystery, chaos, and complexity. Since its beginnings, modern science as well as philosophy seem to have acted from a vengeance, a vehement mission to strip all things of their obscurity to lay them bare under the glaring light of rationality. Condemned and openly scorned are ideas of the sacred, spiritual, and subjectivity. Certainly, demystification soothes anxieties resulting from uncertainty, but it is questionable whether we are happier human beings in our comfort of supposed knowledge, as the pinnacle of this hierarchy—that is, reason over sense—seem only to be a privilege of a small minority.

Schiller, in On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795, argues that happiness comes with freedom, and these in turn are not frivolities, but absolute necessities for the betterment of society. He blames the hierarchy of reason over sensibility—often championed in the name of progress—as the source of the degenerate and selfish state that he sees in his contemporary world. Forcefully imposing order onto citizens only has a limited influence. Instead of a hierarchy, he calls for a balance of these two apparent dichotomies, that is the only way that could produce a perfect and complete being.

An aesthetic education—in contrast to a rational-centric education dominant during his time of writing as well as for us today—cultivates both aspects of a human being and thus emancipates both. The suppression of either, that is, “[p]artiality in the exercise of powers […] inevitably leads the individual into error, but the race to truth” (Schiller 44). Though generally regarded as two conflicting poles, their penchant for either extreme make Christianity and philosophy guilty of the same crime: “The old principles will remain, but their will wear the dress of the century, and philosophy will lend its name to an oppression which was formerly authorized by the Church” (Schiller 47). Choosing either or will always keep people in chains, merely bearing different names. The problem, then, must be addressed on the fundamental level, that is, education.

Freedom from the oppression of either can only be achieved through beauty and art. Thus through this solution, the figure of the artist—or genius, according to Kant—and the very process of artistic creation emerge as emancipators. To Kant, the creative process empowers the maker through its freedom:

the imagination ([in its role] as a productive cognitive power) is very mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it. […] We may even restructure experience […]. In this process we feel our freedom from the law of association […]; for although it is under that law that nature lends us material, yet we can process that material into something quite different, namely, into something that surpasses nature (Kant 182).

In other words, the process not only allows us to feel our own freedom in the moment, but also opens up possibilities of freedom in the future by restructuring experience into something new, untethered by the constraints of our given structure of reality. Here, Kant forms the modern conception of the mysteriously gifted artist, with originality—creation of the new—as “the foremost property” that cannot be learned, nor passed directly onto others because “he himself does not know” (Kant 175, 177). The artist/genius, veiled in mystery, assumes a god-like power, that can only wield its fullest potential through proper training and education. Schiller essentially calls for an education that will shape every human being into an artist, who can take full advantage of his/her potentials to free themselves and the whole of society: “Beyond question Man carries the potentiality for divinity within himself; the path to divinity, if we may call a path what never reaches its goal, is open to him in his senses” (Schiller 63).

Of course, this power, too, has potential to abuse and manipulate. However, what is so pertinent about Schiller’s educational proposition is that such a balanced education will breed noble human beings. To successful results of this education, abuse of power to dominate others would not be desirable; in fact, it would be repulsive to do so. Since a noble disposition cannot be taught or imposed, a person must wish him/herself to reach this state. Hence, the aesthetic education would drive each to voluntarily seek a moral life because he/she recognizes it as his/her higher purpose to attain.

Schiller’s proposal has not only the attainment of truth and the freedoms of individual citizens at stake; it is, most importantly, a way to maintain order in society. According to him, happy and harmonious individuals lead to a happy and harmonious society, which essentially must be an egalitarian society. “[S]ince the way to the head must lie through the heart,” only when freedom is granted will an individual wish to act nobly, not merely act out of obligation (Schiller 50). “A noble spirit is not satisfied with being itself free; it must set free everything around it,” and the result becomes a cooperative and productive society (Schiller 111). Freed from constraints and passivity, the individual wills him/herself to activity and order emerges naturally (Schiller 124). In a language that strangely resembles the optimism of early Communist writings in our modern history, Schiller declares that in an aesthetic State, knowledge becomes not just for the few, but the “common property of the whole of human society” (Schiller 139). The power of the sublime, then, returns to Kant’s two-fold definition: from shrinking in fear, we rise again in defiance to meet that power and to surpass it.

Works cited:

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. ed. James T. Boulton. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1968. Print.

Foucault, Michel. "Panopticism." Discipline & Punishment, 1975. Foucault.info. Web. 04 Nov. 2012. <http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism.html>.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub., 1987. Print.

Longinus. On the Sublime. trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe and D. A. Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.

Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. trans. Reginald Snell. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004. Print.

ruins of yesterday/tomorrow

Leonardo Drew at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Sept 6 - Oct. 12, 2012

Here is a man who loves making things. So much so that he created an entire world out of them. And this must be what people mean when they say art has the potential to envision an alternate reality: Leonardo Drew, at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., has paved a window into a strange civilization that bears an uncanny resemblance to our own.

I use the word civilization because his massive constructions (both standing or wall-mounted) manifest undeniable traces of human industry and skill. A quick glance might suggest an impression of an arbitrary assemblage of found material (especially the charred and painted barricade), but a second look definitively rejects this initial impression to one’s embarrassment: his work is the result of such careful and painstaking labor that it appears almost neurotically obsessive. One can imagine Drew’s eyes burning up in pain as he sits in his studio for weeks, months, years, diligently cutting plywood into hundreds of perfectly two-by-two squares or one-inch-long splinters, then placing each piece, anointed with a dash of glue, into their own spot part of one giant, densely packed sculpture. I think of Yayoi Kusama hypnotically carving out circles on her canvases for days, or your grandma sewing away at another one of her quilts.

The installations also exude a kind of ghostly grandeur of ancient ruins. The striking element is the work’s pastness: this extinct community no longer exists, but there is no doubt that they did. One can perceive their mark not only through the pure scale of the remnants (the space of the gallery barely provides adequate room to contemplate the entirety of a given work from a distance), but also through the confident assertion of their power: imposing barricades tower over the viewer, phallic forms raise their manes and roar at the passerby, the intricacy of the work indicate discipline and pride of the maker’s own craft. The viewer navigates the space of the gallery with the fascination of exploring The Natural History Museum and their display of artifacts, perhaps from our own lineage. The wall sculptures’ intrusions into our space excite us like an encounter with the (fake) giant whale or a shark’s head: their presence is awe-inspiring but we constantly affirm that the immobile structures pose no actual threat. We can still regard them from the safety of our own positions.

But it is our imagination that causes the most tension: who were these people and what happened to them? They had a magnificent respect for the natural world—barely altered tree trunks and roots twist and turn out of their fixed spots, the man-made splinter pieces assume pulsating organic forms—yet it was a time after plywood’s invention and the sure signs of industry, such as the bolted pieces constructed from exact measurements (Number 159, 2012 is starkly aluminum). Some wall pieces, made mostly of flat rectangular or square cuts of plywood, read like blueprints of a city to be built or reconstructions of existed sites. In Number 162, 2012, for example, pieces of thick, hand-made paper provide a base for a gridded city bordered by a monstrous black forest; outside of the human habitation lie suggestions of water (smeared blue paint) and hills, along with neat groupings of rusted cotton and solidified mud. The city grid is a tactic employed to maximize space for a large population; yet these people leave untouched the gnarling forest—clawing its way into the viewer’s space—that seems capable of swallowing up the city itself.

Drew’s work is full of such strange juxtapositions: the dichotomies of our contemporary world—nature vs. industry—exist side by side, a condition that is increasingly difficult for us to imagine. In purely formal elements, too: from a distance, his large splinter pieces give the illusion of being plush and even inviting (starfish/flower-like Number 160, 2012), but an examination of the actual materials proves otherwise, not to mention the violently perpendicular eruptions of longer pieces from the wall. We live in an age of the modern globalized city, where nature is clearly marked off (parks, gardens, potted plants) from central human activity. Dichotomies exist almost like a necessity.

But there is another layer of strangeness. This civilization seems to have been built using remnants of a people that have existed prior to it; the materials could have been the discarded or destroyed materials of another begone age. For example, a substantial portion of Number 161, 2012 utilizes visibly broken wood that have not been cut into perfect measurements like many of his other works. Yet this site, too, is what remains as an evidence of its own past, abandoned in middle of construction. At the end of its trajectory into the inner gallery space, the structure seeks the support of a wall while the large beams that might have provided that role lean against another. The result is a double removal of time: we see both a corpse and the ghost that haunted it. But that ghost—could it have been from somewhere in our time? The attempt to assign Drew’s people to a specific point in our known history consistently fails us; ultimately, we only end up in exhaustion after fruitlessly spinning around and around, chasing our own tails.

But there is a way to accept this world: by rejecting a linear history. Drew allows us to escape the rigid structure of cause and effect—where we know all that’s been said and done—into a floating concept of time, where anything could be said and done, and perhaps has been already.

ontology

Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield

at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY

on permanent display

Home is not a physical fact but a feeling. It can have strong ties to an actual location—where one retreats after a day of work or one’s childhood hometown, for example—but not necessarily. Because home has to do with feeling welcome, protected, comfortable. It is a point of origin where we feel we belong; it is a reference point for all that lies outside of it. That’s why we always “return” home: it is where we all started.

Some leave home and never go back. But denial does not erase an existence, not even in one’s consciousness. That is why an unexpected brush with home is more powerful—even violent—than a premeditated meeting: home unarms us.

Speaking of Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield, 2009 as manifestation of an “Asian aesthetic” may sound reductive, essentialist, and exclusive, none of which I endorse. However, I find it important to do so as a starting point because I could not (still cannot) fend off images of the Korean countryside upon my first encounter with Lin’s work.

I spent most of my childhood in Seoul, Korea, a small country inconspicuously wedged between the massive mainland China and the floating islands of Japan. It is a modest-sized country with oversized ambitions: its people suffer from an overflow of American capitalist consumerism, trying to compensate for thousands of years built upon Confucius values of balance, respect, and acceptance of what is given them. Living immersed in that culture, it’s easy to believe the in the unity of those ambitions and their realizations. But when I beheld an American mountain for the first time in my life, I realized how small Korean mountains were. Indeed the sublime is everywhere to be found in the United States; the Korean landscape in my memory shrinks into humility in comparison.

As a child, I had few occasions to travel outside the city, so the home in Lin’s piece is not so much my identification with the greens (my childhood is full of concrete grays), but with a disposition. Korean aesthetic in particular must be an inevitable result of a history of oppression (colonization) and limited resources. The way in which Confucianism was able to take hold of the culture was because, in a sense, reality would otherwise be unbearable. Just as Nietzsche speaks of concepts of morality (piety, mercy, forgiveness) as names given to societal gestures that had wholly different origins, Confucius’ teachings of respect (for elders, for nature) became a Korean way of life, not for its own sake, but as a way to tame the infinitely expanding ambitions of any human being that might otherwise roam freely (as in the United States or China). Hence Korean landscape architects build around what already exists at a site (a tree, a boulder) and rarely remove anything entirely. Their artificial modifications call for a minimalist approach; they even seem to have the same respect for the sky, as even palaces are more horizontal than vertical. Like living in a rented house, one may alter the space as long as one retains respect for the overall structure: the artist is nature’s tenant.

Of course, art manifesting a respect for nature is not particular to Korean culture alone. Lin has cited as an influence the Native American burial mounds she grew up seeing in Ohio. Like Korean burial mounds, they too are swellings of the earth, both protective and monumental. Human hands sculpt them to mark a past existence but the earth appears to have done the swelling to welcome the body back to its birthplace. Our place during the dormant state before birth and after death is in the womb.

Lin’s Wavefield, however, are not tombs, but fluctuating waves; if they house the dead, the dead are free to wander under each wave. The swellings are a universality rather than particularities; human identities give way to a natural ontology that no longer distinguishes between human, animal, or landscape but unites them as a single being called spirit, both living and dead.

The site exudes a generosity and warmth of an old sage who also happens to be your own grandfather. I approach the Wavefield with respect but without fear. It does not judge me but I am careful with how I take my first step; I get the sense that the place has seen it all and I want to do it the right way. There perpetually lingers in me an awareness that it knows what I do not know. It is wise—like the old master himself, not like Confucianism as coping mechanism—it rises up as if to match the American sublime darkly looming in the distance but is indifferent to it. It is gentle, yet confident: it does not shrink back with embarrassment like the Korean mountains in my memory. It beckons me to meet it while I hesitate in caution: I don’t want to disturb you..., I say, but it keeps telling me with a smile, no, no you are not disturbing me, come and sit.

The Wavefield invites us to communicate with it but the mode is not entirely human (verbal language) or even animal (body language): performatives are not compatible. But this method of exchange does resemble the moment when two animals meet for the first time: they sniff each other out. And the sniffing is not just a physical act; it’s a feeling out before making a judgment about the other (hostile or friendly?). A feeling out for vibes: in this state, one must suspend all judgments or presumptions in order to conduct a proper assessment. An encounter with the Wavefield is not a one-sided affair (bestower/receiver) but a mutual investigation, which is only possible when we return to a point of origin. But the work is all the more generous because it unconditionally welcomes us. It takes the first step to bring us home, somewhere before birth and after death, where we have all been. We begin, then, by feeling the waves breathe and accepting its invitation.

the it in the photo

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective
Guggenheim Museum
June 29 - October 8, 2012

My first encounter with this artist’s work: I fell in love, it moved me to tears.

Here I must inform the reader of how unusual this reaction is, that I am one of the most negative, scathing, hateful of skeptics (never really with bad intentions), especially regarding photographic portraiture. I have seen too many pity-evoking photojournalistic propaganda—“Oh, look at this poor girl bloodied and crying over her dead mother’s corpse, isn’t this a horrible war, what terrible things are happening on the other side of the world”—that so many people equate with artistic insight and thereby talent. But Dijkstra does something different: she strips her photographs down to their barest; she rejects the popular props for superficial empathy (or just props in general to add layers of “symbolism”) and focuses on her job as a portrait photographer. It is she and her subject, not much else—and the result that we get to see is simply beautiful. It is beyond words because what makes them beautiful is that indescribable thing that we can’t attribute to a single visual element in the photograph.

I know what I feel as a result of seeing that thing—love, pain, awe...—though not a single one of these adjectives can fully describe the powerful emotion that sweeps through my entire body upon recognizing it. Maybe that thing—You know, it! It!—can never really have a name, but only be conveyed by an abstract game of charades with no right-answer card. Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, tries to put a name to something like this in a single “true,” “just” photo of his mother: the photo possesses her “air,” as he calls it. That’s not quite it with Dijkstra’s work; I don’t personally know the people she has photographed, let alone for an entire lifetime. But it is kind of similar; it’s a combination of what is inside the viewer (history? recognition? memory?) and what is inside the photograph—when you can’t separate the two to describe the it. It’s a miracle of two gears—each found in unexpected places, maybe at the opposite ends of the world—clicking together to make an entire machine come to life.

It, that thing, is there in the photograph. The thing that moved me to tears. And can it be—really?—just the artist’s love for her subjects that I felt through the portraits? Because I don’t know these people, I can’t judge how true or just these portraits are to them, how well Dijkstra captured their air. All I can feel is the artist’s will, her aching desire to do so, to capture something of these people’s essence in a single frame.

We catch a bit of that heart-wrenching investment fueling her artistic process in the five-channel film installation, The Krazyhouse, 2009. Each person dances in front of a white background for the entirety of a song (house/dance music, which tends to be a bit longer than other genres) and their movements—no matter how much they try to vary it for the camera in the beginning—become fairly repetitive. It’s easy to get bored. But eventually, after much patient voyeurism, the particular mannerisms of each person peek through. I say “peek,” because they’re all through very small gestures—Nicky reaching down slightly to pull down her dress without breaking her rhythm, or Philip softening the hardness of his eyes for a split second when he wipes the sweat from his brow—that we probably wouldn’t recognize as their particularities when we watch them for short amount of time in a club, or if Dijkstra had edited out any awkward moments. But once you catch them, you know this is theirs. It is the aha! moment for the artist, and through the installation, we, for ourselves, are privileged to witness that moment of recognition, when the artist sees who her subjects might be in their essence.

And beyond the artist’s devotion, it is probably her generosity to us, the viewers, that moved me. I cannot separate the raw insides of the person behind the camera from the resulting photograph in front—Dijkstra is necessarily present and exposed in her work. It is the combination of her love, respect for her subjects and in turn their trust for her (it’s easy to feel like a mere test tube bacteria for an artistic experiment, as opposed to an actual human being with thoughts and feelings), their willingness to let their guard down even for the smallest fraction of a second so she could capture it on camera. They, too, seem to feel her love and see that she may have this ability, at least an immense and genuine desire to recognize their essence. This is because Dijkstra doesn’t hide behind her camera; she uses it as a magical device that somehow captures that mutual trust and respect.

And I am the third component of her art: I am a witness as well as a grateful participant. I am the more grateful because the artist doesn’t try to take advantage of me either. I am moved not because of her manipulation of me and her subjects but because of her good grace. Dijkstra is an honest photographer, a truly rare specimen in the art world today.

haters will hate

 

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Nets

Whitney Museum
July 12 - September 30, 2012

To reduce Kusama’s work as a symptom of her mental illness is another extension of the long familiar, bitter response to modern art, “my two year old can do that.” The dismissive commentary essentially contests the very notion of authorship of a particular form that does not appear to result from extensive “artistic” training. The urge is a powerful one, especially when the motif is so common and the artist herself has admitted that she has had hallucinations of dots and flowers ever since she was a child. Other people have testified that they, too, see dots. But the difference: while one hallucinating 15-year-old is screaming for her mother in terror because the “dots are going to get her,” Kusama uses her dots to communicate more than her own fears and obsessions.

The dismissal ultimately has in part to do with the source of her dots; but to focus only on the source is to deny the significance of any kind of art, which is how the artist uses her sources. Kusama’s use of her dots indicate the artist’s awareness of how they have functioned for her and their potential for others: as an “obliterating net.” The complexity in the these dots arises from their role as a screen that simultaneously protects and provides a view of the other side. Even if hallucinating infinite dots is a defense to all that is fearsome in the world outside the sick patient, manipulating the visual phenomenon so that it is no longer clear what is being protected from what (inside/outside ambiguity: Kusama’s nets sometimes seem to catch the world, not withhold her from it) while simultaneously giving a view of this world (a cat is still recognizable as a cat even if Kusama has covered it with dots) is clearly an artistic gesture that reaches beyond the psychological erasure of trauma. Kusama does not erase; she marks in order to see and confront. And this she generously shares with the rest of the world.

Her dangerously decorative paintings from 2009 to 2010 and recent collaboration with Louis Vuitton that brands her dots make our job more difficult. But the critic must always be generous and see, first and foremost, what is in front, then weigh the relevance of information that lies outside of the object.

 

fyi

i don't update my blog that often and not many people read it anyway, but i figure at least some explanation of future going-downs might help for those who care:

i am taking some time off from the real world (or maybe virtual world) for a while, i'm not sure how long. could be just a few weeks, or few months, but i will be gone and probably have very little opportunity to update my blog or even communicate via phone, email, etc. during this time.

now don't miss me or my writing too much.
i will be back at least by the fall.

FOIL

 

The Ungovernables, 2012 New Museum Triennial at 235 Bowery
Feb 15 - April 22, 2012
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If the crowded and stiff (and overrated?) biennial at the Whitney uptown somehow adheres to a tame and sophisticated art-world sensibility, The Ungovernables, New Museum’s 2012 triennial resists it: much of the work in the exhibition—by a total of 34 artists, groups, and collectives—are political in nature in one form or another. All floors of an entire museum dedicated mostly to political art can prove a risky endeavor; political art, by definition, suggests taking a specific stance on a topic in debate, with which every viewer may or may not agree. However, the range of subjects and forms that the curator, Eungie Joo, and her assistant, Ryan Inouye, have chosen provide an excitingly new perspective on a variety of political views that demonstrate a powerful dynamic between each assembled under the same roof.

Of course, such a large number of works cannot agree to everyone’s taste, including mine, and some I found to be absurdly unappealing. For example, a corner on the second floor was densely occupied by a series of objects and diagrams/drawings that were part of the Times Exchange series by José Antonio Vega Macotela. The Mexican-born artist’s working method essentially consists of exchanging favors with the inmates of a prison in Santa Martha Acatitla. Since the artist is able to move freely around the outside world, the prisoners ask the artist to teach a daughter how to read, beg a father for forgiveness, etc., while they do what Macotela asks, such as record their movements within the prison throughout the day, let the artist take a fingernail sample from each, etc. The results on display are mundane keepsakes: densely collaged cigarette butts, clothes preserved in wax, and so on. Macotela’s project, sure, is noble; but from an artistic point of view, the work strikes me more like a scrapbook from a Peace Corps expedition than art that can stand firmly on its own. The only element that adds any interest to this series is his philanthropic gesture; unfortunately, the actual objects themselves show nothing of this elaborate back story.

Some works did stand out, one of which is Dark Day, 2012, by New York-based artist, Abigail DeVille, a piece that is installed halfway down the John S. Wotowicz Stairs, which connect the third and fourth floors of the museum. Almost as soon as I set foot on the first step, the persistent murmur of the visitors’ chatter ceased, replaced by what sounded like construction noise heard through a closed apartment window that acted like a prelude to what I was about to see. I could still hear these sounds as I walked down the isolated staircase then paused in front of an old, zip-locked copy of The Stargazer Handbook that had been stuffed into a rectangular hollow of the same size in the wall as if to stop a leak. I laughed as I recalled the prints from Lutz Bacher’s The Celestial Handbook scattered throughout each floor of the Whitney that were neatly framed. This recollection proved to become a large influence in my experience of the main installation, located a few steps lower, that looked like Beetle Juice’s demolished and abandoned closet in the projects at some ghetto-ized borough of New York City.

An opening had been carved out of the wall opposite the window side and the space inside was a complete dump, where most of the surfaces were painted in crisscrossing as well as parallel black and white lines. A torn piece of a wall leaned against one side, behind which was a collection of about 35 empty vodka bottles, a heap of a wooden fence-like structure leaned across a corner, parts of what remained of a spring bed mattress with other pieces of destroyed furniture hung helplessly from a broken ceiling, and a ray of uncannily warm domestic light shone down from what would be the floor above. This sight (site), familiar to those who pass by any run-down neighborhoods, still exists on the periphery, just like the way in which urban housing issues are pushed to the side by city councils in favor of more “pressing” ones; after all, the work doesn’t even get an actual floor for display, but the artist had to dig out and create a space for it. However, through its contextualization within an art exhibition as well as the painted lines that force the viewer’s attention to an otherwise common trash hole, DeVille’s installation demands serious inquiry into why and how such sights/sites exist. Then a pristinely intact painting of a woman holding a small rabbit also positions the work within an art-historical context: art is always a product of its societal conditions.

Once I made it to Brazilian artist, Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machato’s, O Seculo (The Century), 2011, I realized that the noise I heard in the staircase was not from DeVille’s work. The 9:37-minute video begins with a view of a run-down but still empty section of a street. The camera remains fixed there, while for about five minutes, various objects—ceramic bowls, florescent lights, chairs—are thrown furiously into the frame and smashed to pieces by invisible hands from the right. Later, smoke appears from the same side, while the fixed frame still does not allow the viewer to see its source. The loop ends when its blank canvas becomes filled with chaos.

Another: London artist, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s 2011 portrait series is something of a rare specimen in the midst of new-media-installation art that fills most of the triennial. The initial impression of its out-of-placeness immediately gives way to the beauty of each painting; hiding in a fairly monochrome palette of brown, black, and other dark tones, the faces peer out at us, each eye reflecting that striking glimmer of titanium white. As if only the presence of whiteness can mark the existence of otherwise dark bodies, her larger canvases also leave small areas of the blank canvas exposed.

Overall, The Ungovernables offers a solid and diverse selection of works, without leaning heavily toward any singular political position. There is something for everyone, that is, unless you still believe in the concept of a pure and autonomous art. That said, The New Museum’s triennial is not for the naïve art-lover: be prepared to come face to face with difficult questions.