Becoming Strangers: Travel, Trust, and the Everyday

1
Becoming Strangers Travel, Trust, and the
Everyday

• Day 18 The Subject, Erased

2
Beginning Again Back to Hegel

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)s ideas
  about art have proved central to Western
  discussions of aesthetics for 200 years.
• Art -- when allowed to become something separate
  from religion and decoration -- provides the
  occasion to reflect on what it means to be human.
• When artists are aware of art history, they can
  build on it.

3
Can One Have Inhuman Art?

• If art permits reflection on the meaning of being
  human, how can it suddenly reject the human in
  favor of the in- or posthuman?
• Since World War II, artists and philosophers have
  discovered that, to understand what human
  means, they cant take the meaning of the word
  for granted.
• This has led to skepticism about virtues values
  people in Western societies often take for
  granted. For example why do people defend the
  right to self-expression and personal freedom
  tooth nail? Do people really have news to
  share or does Hallmark say it all?

4
Putting You in Context

• The humanities (and the arts) have begun
  exploring Bigger Pictures than the scale of the
  individual first-person point of view.
• This can seem inhuman but it has also proved
  a powerful change of focus scale.
• One can study systems in which the
  individuality and identity of people matter
  much less than aggregate behavior, or
  experiences in which who you are isnt that
  important.

5
What kind of systems are we talking about?

• Social networks communication networks
  genetics human-machine interactions education
  music literature many more!
• Isnt this social science??? No humanists (and
  artists) approach these issues in their own,
  distinctive way.
• Koyaanisqatsi and Baraka are films that
  concentrate on the behavior of systems traffic,
  the assembly line, flocks of birds, etc.

6
Here Come the Posthumanists

• JOHN CAGE.
• Turns away from Western emphasis on
  self-expression. Seeks a music that will jolt
  people out of themselves make them contemplate
  the things of the world their complex
  interactions.

MICHEL FOUCAULT. Ceases to revere the
author and the individual as
mysterious quasi-divine entities. Insists
that our reverence for them is a consequence
of a historical process (humanism).
7
Kimsooja A Twenty-First Century Artist

• Kim Soo-ja was born in Taegu, Korea, in 1957.
• Beings exhibiting art in Korea in the early
  1980s.
• Studies in Paris in mid-80s and begins to exhibit
  internationally.
• In 1998 she moves to NYC.
• In 2003, while working on the site
  http//www.kimsooja.com, she renames herself
  Kimsooja.

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Kimsooja Sculptor and Installation Artist
BOTTARI bundles wrapped in a large cloth, often
a bedcover. Used like a box or a backpack for
purposes of transport. Kimsooja makes bottari
using discarded bedcovers.
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Kimsooja Performance Artist

• Cities on the Move 2727 kilometers Bottari
  Truck (1997)
• Eleven day performance piece.
• Kimsooja filled a truck with bottari, and
  traveled all over South Korea.

10
Kimsooja Video Artist

• In the late 1990s Kimsooja began to explore how
  sewing could serve as a way of understanding
  how the self relates to the world.
• She began to create silent videos in which she
  casts herself as the needle that sews
  together a location, passers-by, and any events
  that occur.
• She remains absolutely still during the whole of
  the performance.

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The Needle Woman Series
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Recent (South) Korean History

• 1950-1953 Korean Civil War
• 1948-1961 Syngman Rhee elected president four
  times
• 1961-1987 military rule
• 1980 Kwangju Uprising
• 1987 Great Labor Uprisings and a peaceful
  transition to democratic governance

13
Korean Monochromism
Dominant style of the 1970s. White and neutral
colors associated with medieval Korean
porcelain. Suggests the Taoist ambition to lose
the self in natures vastness. All relevant
painters were male.
14
Minjung Art

• Dominant style of the 1980s. Emphasized social
  protest on behalf of the oppressed.
• Combined socialist realism with a revival of
  interest in Korean folk art.
• For first time, women artists taken seriouslybut
  only as the voice of oppressed laborers.

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Kimsooja in a Korean Context

• Uses colorful, traditional fabrics that employ
  the minhwa folk style of painting popular with
  Minjung artists.
• BUT she uses a feminine art sewingand she
  emphasizes the domestic.
• Exhibits in high-end galleries and is an
  avant-gardist.
• BUT she rejects the monochrome
• palette of indigenous (post)modernist art in
  favor of video installationmedia without a
  nationalist tinge.

16
Kimsooja Internationally

• In early to mid-1990s, she was exhibited as an
  exemplar of Korean art.
• In the later 1990s, especially after she moves to
  New York in the wake of the 1997 East Asian
  economic collapse, she began to be exhibited as
  an exemplar of a nomadic tradition.
• Either way, she represents The East to The
  West. For example shes called Buddhist,
  despite the fact that she was raised Christian.
  (She learned Zen from John Cage!)

17
Kimsoojas Lesson

• Her art never tells us about her interior life.
• She makes us think about the relationship between
  culture, gender, domesticity, art,
  authoritythings important to herby showing how
  they cluster around her.
• She faces away from us. She faces toward the
  world. She, as an artist, brings us along with
  her. We contemplate travel, and the
  bringing-together that is a persons life.
• This is not an art of self-expression. It is a
  performance showing how to live, and how to think
  about living.