Visual Arts

The curatorial office Latitudes — guest editor of the new issue of the art magazine UOVO, which includes Walker curator Doryun Chong’s interview with artist Haegue Yang — has also made available a wonderful conversation between Walker curator Peter Eleey and artist Michael Rakowitz [pdf]. In his project Return, Rakowitz re-opened the import-export business run by his Iraqi-Jewish grandparents in New York, with the plan — which Rakowitz saw as “bad business” that made for “great art” — of importing Iraqi dates. Read the store’s blog.

When Brave New Worlds opens October 4, it’ll include the piece Blind Room by Korean artist Haegue Yang. Each time she installs the piece, a multisensory installation that with lights, smell and sound, she buys all the components of the piece, including blinds, locally.

For the new issue of the Turin-based magazine UOVO, Yang discussed her recent work with Brave New Worlds‘ co-curator Doryun Chong. The issue was guest-edited by former Walker curatorial fellow Max Andrews with Mariana Canepa-Luna, known for their work on the intersections of art and ecology. Their curatorial practice, Latitudes, has made the full interview available as a pdf.

An excerpt from Chong and Yang’s conversation:

Doryun Chong: We can start playing a bit of word game. I said, ecology’, and you said, what about eco-il-logy’ or eco-illogical’. Can you say more?

Haegue Yang: The word is derived from the Greek οικος (oikos, household’) and λόγος (logos, study’), and I’d like to draw our attention to a somewhat contradictory notion to logos’: pathos. I would like to propose a new term for our contemporary language, ‘eco-motional’, which would encompass pathos, and this new supplementary term, in my mind, allows the complexity of ecological matters to be redefined and extended. We would not only need to mobilise our consciousness and rationality but also our emotional involvement around issues of ecology, because ecology requires somewhat abstract and long-term thinking.

When we briefly exchanged our initial thoughts about ecology recently, I talked about my experience of suddenly coming upon dozens of windmills while travelling on a train through northern Germany. The landscape in that area is not particularly spectacular, but some die-hard nature lovers would appreciate its unique, lonesome and melancholic features, I’d imagine. The presence of these windmills, however, very much ‘damaged’ the landscape. At that moment, a sudden sense of loss came over me. I felt as if the presence of the windmills almost took away the possibility of one being fully, yet naturally absorbed into the landscape and nature. Images and perceptions are part of our ecology, and they clearly contribute to our engagement as organisms in our environment, not only addressing our physical habitats but also our mental and intellectual territories.

DC: Your answer, then, confirms my feeling about your recent video trilogy – Unfolding Places (2004), Restrained Courage (2004), Squandering Negative Spaces (2006). Each one, almost twenty-minutes long, is a sequence of images of mostly ‘insignificant’ moments; the kinds of images that perhaps occupy the majority of our physical space and perceptual grid in actuality, but that one’s visual and mental focus is usually not directed on. In the meantime, the narratives, which are written by you but read by a different voice in each one, ruminate on different notions, manifestations, and experiences of – I’d guess the best word would be – the pathos of living and going about in this world.

I know that you are inspired by the cinematic methodology of, especially, Chris Marker, and the whole point is to have no clear relationship between images and narratives. But is it too much of an assumption if I were to suggest that a kind of narrative seems to emerge when you put the three titles together? Could we interpret this from an ecological point of view?

HY: In the entire video essay, the voice-over repeatedly speaks about various forms of deprivation in human relations. The absences of connections often cause melancholia, the state in which one feels like s/he is in a chasm. The feeling of being thrown out of a community and the sentiment of lonely dislocation dominate the narrative structures as well as the scenarios in the video essay. The confessional tones and the various images of reflection – such as puddles, rain drops, different kinds of light sources – constitute an allegorical rhetoric. I chose to bring a certain self-reflection to issues in real life without fragmenting them. Ecology is normally defined as an individual’s relation with other beings and his/her environment, but for me, it is nothing but a lack of commonness’ that inevitably brings us into an existential struggle to be connected.

In Unfolding Places, most of the attention focuses on unfolding a negative of real space, in order to be able to navigate oneself and known one’s own position within an environment – instead of being absolutely flexible and floating around as our contemporary society often demands. The second video, Restrained Courage, is a painful and shameful confession of one’s failure to relate oneself to others, and aspires for radical action that goes beyond typical neo-liberal negotiations of social relations and thus avoids the deceitful, unreliable stipulation of a happy ending.

Doryun Chong, assistant curator of Visual Arts and co-curator of the exhibition Brave New Worlds wrote this reflection for the September/October issue of WALKER magazine. Brave New Worlds opens October 4.

Curatorial research trips can be grueling. When traveling, we curators tend to city-hop, going from one artist’s studio to another, with meetings often extending through dinners and into the wee hours. I’m certainly not complaining — to be able to meet new artists and learn their ways of thinking and seeing the world is not only a job but a privilege. But I often wish there was more time to learn the larger context in which these artists work.

Last September, my Walker colleague Yasmil Raymond and I got that rare chance. We found ourselves in the city of Cluj-Napoca in Romania as part of a two-week, four-country, five-city research trip for the exhibition Brave New Worlds, which opens on October 4. Located in north-central Transylvania, bordering Hungary, Cluj-Napoca is the third largest city in the country but wasn’t even part of it until the end of World War I. During World War II, the region was repatriated to Hungary, only to be restored again to Romania in 1947. The long history of tussles between the neighbors is still visible in the city, where nearly 20 percent of its population identify as Hungarian.

We first got interested in the city through the remarkable journal IDEA: arts + society and we wondered how this city, far off the beaten path of the contemporary art scene, could produce such a rigorous, well-informed publication. I realized that this is a rather Western-centric view, and the purpose of such travels is to challenge preconceived notions about what constitutes and who contributes to contemporary art.

After several days visiting art venues and studios, we decided to take a day off. It was Sunday, and we met up with Mircea Cantor, a Brave New Worlds artist who

lives and works nearby part of the time. We headed to an open-air market to buy fresh produce to make brunch. Mircea guided us through rows of vendors, joking and bargaining with women who hawked everything from juicy grapes to bags of brilliantly scarlet paprika, while Roma women in elaborately patterned pleated skirts wove through the crowd. We bought cheese from a young shepherd and his father, who both wore small conical top hats, typical apparel for Transylvanian goatherds, I was told.

After a huge meal, our guide took us to the Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania on the edge of the city. Founded in 1922, the museum is an outdoor park dotted with transplanted and reconstituted buildings — shingle-topped houses, thatched roofed barns, and mills (sometimes all of those in one structure!), and churches with incredibly steep steeples. While rustic, theseb uildings were complex and surprisingly ingenious. The wood carvings adorning them, both rough-hewn and delicate, were exotic to my eyes and also had universal resonances. After all, isn’t Romania the land of Constantin Brancusi, that peasant turned arch-modernist sculptor, and Mircea Eliade, the religious scholar who interpreted diverse world traditions through the shared cultural experience of “sacred and profane”?

It’s easy to romanticize a context one doesn’t fully comprehend, and that’s a risk inherent in such short excursions into the unknown. Miscomprehension, in a sense, is an inevitable condition we always work within, but it could generate illuminating conversations, as long as one approached it with a willingness to understand other cultural heritages, historical experiences, and political spheres. Mircea may very well be sick of hearing foreign curators like me asking him about Brancusi and deposed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. But he patiently responded to our questions, and we came away with a renewed understanding, if only partial, of where he comes from.

Should you meet Mircea when he’s in Minneapolis in October, there’s one question you won’t need answered: Vlad the Impaler — the historical basis for Bram Stoker’s Dracula — is not from Transylvania, but Wallachia, a neighboring region to the south.

Photos (top to bottom):

1. Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond at the Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Photo: Mircea Cantor

2. Mircea Cantor explaining the totem pole made by Hungarian peasants in Transylvania. Photo: Yasmil Raymond

3. Doryun, artist Adrian Ghenie, and Mircea Cantor. Photo: Yasmil Raymond

4. Doryun and Yasmil enjoying the fresh air and meadows in the museum ground. Photo: Mircea Cantor