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News from the Expanse By Jean-Christophe Baily
Manic Miniature
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This would be the first point. The second is that in front (in a manner of speaking because in fact one is never in front, but next to, between, with, among) of what Koo Jeong-a does, and which is so little installed, so far from any base, there is no desire to produce a linear, finished text, a "preface" - but something made of little islands of meaning dotted around and without more weight than the dancers' paper planes. Something also that wouldn't be a memory of a previous block but which would come straight away like that, posed, just posed, proposed, not linked, not linked up. Is it possible? I don't know, the text runs, runs toward what it wants to grasp, which, of course, runs away. It's always like that, but this time it's even more obvious, there's a risk of ruining everything. Posing, moving, removing, throwing, withdrawing, drawing closer, juxtaposing, moving away, piling up, forgetting, and so on. These verbs describe actions we perform daily on objects. But in daily life, these actions, even when they designate an aesthetic (decorative) aim, are always functional, within a system of brief, often almost automatic, hinged sequences between intention and result. To approach Koo Jeong-a's work, one has to imagine a liberation of these actions, their deployment in a space in which they are freed from their usual purpose and become autonomous and very important. The raison d'être of the archipelago of objects she associates in space escapes any recognizable function or organization. The archipelago of objects or these patches of things are present and they manage to escape; they even escape the system of "presence". But attempting to relate them to a known, catalogued end brings the feeling of not getting it, of betraying. Thus, for example, if they are associated with ritual. Yes, it's true that something in what she does is in that line, probably, but there is also something that eludes it, that moves away from it. We see a heap of white powder on the floor or on a table. We see a lamp, a plastic receptacle, a bunch of stone chips, wrinkled papers, a spool of thread, rubble, boxes of medicine, boards, a tube of glue... these things are there together, where Koo Jeong-a put them and this could be anywhere: outside or inside, in an empty garage, a gallery, a museum room, on the comer of a table, on the floor, on a mantelpiece... These things are often less than things - debris, powder, waste, dust. But there is nothing that would classify them in a particular category of objects as if they were collections. Even if what is infinitesimal is recurrent, there is nothing exclusive about it. So what we find ourselves faced with has no scale, no register, no limits. In her terms, it's even limitless, without edges: the installation stops where its container, the room, stops, but in itself it doesn't really have an outline, and if the network that it forms weren’t so precise, so dense, it could be said that there is something about it that looks spilled: island hopping of objects carried off by rising waters and gently deposited. It's almost as if we found ourselves faced with nothing, nothing substantial in any case, or nothing that utters, nothing that asserts itself with that doggedness that belongs to art. We are in the presence of a discreet, secret, scattered, fragmentary system. I was going to add, because it seemed obvious, "unfinished", but that would be wrong; the mystery is that in this system there is an accomplishment, a finish, a balance that is borne out and reinforced. Someone came, who placed these things and these-less-than things here and there, who didn't really put them together, put them back together, it's more as if someone brought them and left them, left them there, or as if these things came and formed these sequences, these islands, these archipelagos of points and sequences without a plan or an order. And this doesn't move away, doesn't make noise either. It's just there and that's all. It's a "thus" or a "there is", a piece of world but one that doesn't make any noise, that goes away under the world without saying or recounting anything, without saying anything else but what the appearance of beings has that is both abrupt and spread out, there where it is bare and can barely be distinguished from the nothingness from which it looms. For many, in truth, it wouldn’t be anything, anything in any case that can be linked to art, to the corpus of intentions of art. But yet this determination is present, and I would even say that brought to its simplest expression (that is, just short of expression), it is entirely there. And thus comes this idea that art could also be this, very little; the infinitely delicate art of moving things, the art of taking apart their network so one can see them, see them again, so one can come near them carefully, in the silence of their intervals. And the thread of this idea holds; it resonates in the history of art, where it touches everything that has woven and questioned the status of the object: a long time ago with the still life, less long ago, with the ready-made. And names light up: Chardin, Morandi, Duchamp. You follow the thread, you see, and the traffic goes in both directions, toward the past or from the past to us. The old can light up the new just as the new can light up the old. These are not "influences" but beams of meaning that sweep the field and with which you can go back in time or go forward. Let's go back: this is not of course to say that Koo Jeong-a's installations are or could be today's "still lifes", or even groups of objects that perhaps went through the wall of representation to come and be placed as themselves in front of us, spreading out in space. No, saying that would be thwarting things again, as earlier, with ritual, but what one can do is to point to a link that might be a remote descendent, an echo descended into things: this same echo that you hear in the words "still life" or in German, Stilleben, which evokes something like silent or speechless life, something that is in any case on the same wave length with the silence that can be heard and seen in Koo Jeong-a's installations. That is a real silence, simple and sustained, a purely spatial and tactile silence, and not a silence guaranteed by presence, that makes a racket, as everyone knows. A silence that is not, either, that spectacular and empty one of nothing, but that is the "almost nothing" one - and everything is in this "almost", in the barely sustained tone of something that, not being nothing, is already something. This "barely" of appearance could be called the sensitive, not this thick layer of snow that the philosophers love to walk on when they're tired, but this infra thin layer that illuminates when. it falls, where it falls, where it is touched, barely. In other words, pure beginnings or pure ends, births or disappearances, and what is between them: a little or completely like these sounds of Chinese music that go back to silence, that draw their beauty from being close to silence which is their native land. (1) What is at stake here is tact, a way of being in art without insisting. Just as the Chinese sound is analyzed in that it disappears, Koo Jeong-a's installations have to be broached in that they happen, in that they touch down and then go away: not only because they're fleeting, but also because their way of being is diametrically opposed to the noisy finality of expression, diametrically opposed to an attempt to make a statement, to last, to push in wedges in the world. It is just the opposite. It is in edges of the world that it is installed, and yet that's saying a lot, because it's not installed, not at all. lt's there, in an intimate breath, infinitesimal and beginning where every thing is recognized and left, left in peace. And this movement towards things that is made by moving then by placing them in networks, it's not empathy, it's not something that attempts to elicit the milk of human tenderness in the direction of the small or humble or abandoned, it's a wider and more desperate feeling, it's what holds that the appearing is everywhere, that the appearance of things has no royal road and is without base or frame, that it comes, that it only comes, that it is only the poured coming from which one draws, from which one can draw: which is just what Koo Jeong-a does, with a little spoon or ladle, pouring little piles of what she has drawn from the water of time here and there. Incidentally, I found an ancestor of hers, Lichtenberg, who wrote: "He couldn't see a tiny bread crumb on the ground without picking it up and putting it on. a stone, all alone." (2). Little piles, then, that are sometimes real "piles" (I'm thinking in particular of these tumuluses of powdered aspirin giving rise to a whole material metaphor of soothing.) What are they doing and how did they get there? What are they like? At first sight, one might think of leftovers, remains, and thus an aesthetic or an economy of vestiges or saving. There is that, undoubtedly, but it seems to me just as right to think that what is in front of our eyes with these floors and tables strewn about is not a memory. It's the whole question of the fragment: whether it comes from the explosion of a previous block or on the contrary if it is native. Why should each fragment come from a piece taken from a nondecomposed ancestor and each multiple a son of One? Why should the world be a complete puzzle, the finite sum of an infinity of scattered pieces? What Koo Jeong-a's art connects to, it seems to me, is the idea of a puzzle in. itself unfinished, the idea that the fragments are not leftovers so much as beginnings, and that they can and should be played with, networks and paths should be made with them, places should be formed, just because they are like this, free of use, in a manner of saying, predisposed to a changing arrangement, to being sent. One thinks of course of the roll of the dice (paper airplanes again, they sail, they land) and so the question of chance, order and disorder. Because what is so striking in Koo Jeong-a's installations, whatever the objects or the materials she uses, is the feeling of a fragile but solid order, that doesn't do away with chance but which contains it, rejects it. Dispersed, the objects are nevertheless organized. It's as if these arrangements went beyond the opposition between order and disorder, as if they respected their simultaneity and folded them together in the same issue. There are sometimes series, groupings, and sometimes, on the contrary, it is scattering that dominates. Strange gardening, with clumps and plants standing alone. In Olga Sedakova's beautiful book on poetry, I read this: "like writing music, writing poetry reorganizes time by offering an alternative to the flow of things that oust each other out: the figure of their co-presence, of the mutually heightened existence of each one." (3). Almost each of these terms can apply to the phrases of objects that Koo Jeong-a writes. Except that if it's now a question of a poem, it would be a radical and not a lyrical one: no echoes of things, things that awaken echoes, beneath the presence. More than a game of dice, i.e. a construction-destruction of figures, there. is the game of pick-up sticks, where you have to pull out the slender sticks one by one without upsetting the pile (in the Stockholm exhibit there was a heap of fine wooden sticks that brought it to mind). In the box the sticks are orderly. But are they upset when the box is spilled? No, of course not. There is another order, and the point of the game is to respect this deal even though it looks like disorder. More than order and disorder, perhaps sleep and awakedness should be used: the sticks awakened by the fall; the objects awakened by their arrangement. An idea emerges from all this about forms. In this discreet, fleeting, portable art, made of touches, "form" doesn't come, there is no pathos of formation, or if it comes, it is pure relation of spaces and intervals. There is no closing, no "circumscriptibility" of the figure, as the Byzantines would have said. The figure is formless, or rather free, evaporated, without outline. The figure is just a place, a place inhabited by points, a state of things set down and spread out, a field of immanence, a rendez-vous, a punctuation of intensities. These intensities - the areas of echoes shaped by setting down objects - look like vestiges: powders, used and discarded things, tools as if thrown away. Vestiges: in themselves and also as traces of an activity, but like any vestige, they are also like presages: they are both. They exist between the two, between vestige and presage, between ruin and work-in progress. This interstice that is theirs and that strains them (as they were strained between order and disorder) is the present, it's their release time that is suspended, there is nothing else: ephemeral, they give consistency to a pure present, which is their finish. The coming of the time from which they were drawn, now they are stagnating in it, and we who see them, we enter this time, which is turned-over silence. It's a little like the - temporary - end of a trip, like a station: a state of things, a punctuation of real in the real, a move towards the irreality that derives from it, a garden. But during the trip, art has opened, and that is a very simple word: open, as for a door, a flower, a possibility. It's as if between it and us, between us and what we see, there is no more cognitive estuary: what is intelligible is right on the floor, without any division between field and out of field, uncircumscribed, posed, proposed. A pure presentation, an all over of objects without getting carried away, from which the figure of the author, of the artist, is withdrawn. She or he has only just happened by, but what is this happening, what is happening here? It can only be imagined, it would be like a novel. The heroine went out of the house, she picks up and moves, she puts down, she goes away. You could say it like this, with her: So I have eyes, arms, hands, a heart, a thought. This doesn't constitute a subject, it's not hard and closed like a subject, these are filaments, like those of lamps, they light up, they go out. And outside, where things are, it doesn't constitute a world, not right away, not yet, these are things put down in the world, between order and disorder, between vestige and presage, in the coming, in the present, in this strange lasting suspension. But for the moment, everything is out. And it only lights up here and there, when I touch it: between what can't close completely like subject and what can open a little like world, there is only that, touches, contacts, points of impact, of pacts. The "objects" are traces of these meetings. In mystery novels the clues add up leading to a source: imagine clues without source and without the intrigue that carries them, imagine them joined and spread, placed next to each other, imagine the hike that could be done with them. In one sense, Koo Jeong-a's installations are like photos. Not just because of the "release time" but because there is at work in them the same system of withdrawal.,...And besides, she does photos: not only those necessary for the memory and stocking of her installations, but also snapshots, here or there, touches: dogs in a courtyard, the moon in the sky, the light on the roofs.,...Again, it's nothing, almost nothing.,...Again, all the intensity is squeezed into this almost. Directions, notes. Finally, photos, installations and also texts - recounting a dream, for example - make a kind of log: a log of touches, happenings, someone came, saw that. But rather than its coming and landing like a calm artistic determination, it's very worried, discreet. One would think more of these marks that animals use to stake out their territory: invisible frontiers, slipped fields, touching points, brought-back objects. Not to note the memory of the path like the little Poucet, pioneer of land art, not to make a nest, like birds, but to take a path, form an opus incertum, a sensitive and penetrable territory made of withdrawals and notches. Last question: these fleeting "territories" but that also look absolutely finished and whose secret prescription is so strong - do they have anything to do with the rhetoric of places as imagined and developed in Antiquity and beyond (4), and within which each moment of the discourse corresponded to a place or an image (in truth a place-image) able to set its contents, so that if one passed by where these place-images had been stored, one could rewind the whole speech that was stored? The first answer that comes is obvious: no, we are with Koo Jeong-a far from all this, in another world altogether, and far, in particular, from any idea of storage, delegation, copy. It would be absurd to try to go beyond her installations and assume there are things hidden behind those she shows, we are, on the contrary, with her beyond any symbolism. But if one recalls that this projection of discourse in space was metamorphosed in the Middle Ages into a writing of space itself, this space being thus immediately conceived as a succession of place-images whose very arrangement was primordial, things get more complicated and tighter. In the theory of these places, a theory of linkages, the relation between the parts is not thought out statically, but on the contrary, it is based on the movement that links them. This movement is the ductus, in other words the flow of the composition. T o go back to the vocabulary of the time, the ductus is an aspect of the dispositio, it is its soul and vector. (5) In this thinking, the cloister and beyond the monastery as a whole are the paradigms of the places, and their plan, before being a transfer, is, as Mary Carruthers explains, a "meditating machine". Although it's clear that in relation to that, the "places" of Koo Jeong-a are first kinds of anti-cloisters, the "meditating machine" function can still be applied to them, and the organization of the archipelagos of objects that form them also presupposes something like a ductus. Sometimes we envisage the space and the act of installation as a whole and sometimes we focus on one of its points, and some other times we go from one point to another, going from an effect of order to an effect of heap, from an intelligible organization (pile or series) to something that looks as if it were forgotten: in the impossible cloister without edges or outlines, we nevertheless take paths, fragments of paths. And the ductus that goes through and forms this patch of things there, in front of us, it is really something like a thought. Koo Jeong-a's withdrawals are the material and the trace of her thought, a thought that doesn't recite anything, that doesn't reproduce or picture speech that would have to be remembered, but that would remember before us what it is and that extends not as a memory but as a present gone within things. "Nothing will have taken place but the place", yes, because the thought that shows itself here is wandering, living, without mediation, suspended in the present that it suspends - a pure puzzle. Casually, with such an overspilling of thought in the expanse, with such technical simplicity (the installations don't rely on any handiwork; they're purely mental), an extremity has been reached: it's the movement by which modern art has freed itself of the copy that reaches a kind of ultimate point. Remote or close imitation, the ready-made, the assemblage, everything is behind now, there is no longer any mediation, no more separation between what comes and the coming, between what is posed and what it poses. The ritual, the still life, the Chinese music, the puzzle, the poem, the pickup sticks, the garden, the photo, the log, the animal territories, the art of memory and the ductus - each of these stations is in fact like a fitting: the objective was above all not to settle down Koo Jeong-a's art or to put it into a category or a type of activity but to try to understand it while striking matches and watching the landscape of comparison until the match, each time, goes out. Beyond that, there are only beginnings of intelligibility, only Koo Jeong-a's so ample way of sowing them directly on the infra thin layer of the sensitive, without surrounding or hurting it, just like that, while happening by. (1) See Franqois Jullien, Éloge de la fadeur, Paris, 1991. MANIC
MINIATURE: KOO JEONG-A AT PRASTGARDEN Koo Jeong-a, exh. cat., ed. Olivier Belot, (Yvon Lambert, Paris, 2001) p. 129-132 A room has been cut off, the windows have been sealed with plastic. To be sure, light passes through this membrane, but there is a strong feeling of suffocation. An interior has been created which is radically isolated from the outside world, a zone of claustrophobic calm where small details emerge with a new kind of clarity. This is no longer a room in the world, but its own world with its own rules. We look around with an intense attentiveness. On a table lie piles of pencil leads. A desire for order fights the constant threat of chaos. Here and there the piles have fallen apart; some of the lead sticks have rolled away. Someone will again have to see to these small architectural models. What are these delicately styled exercises about? What powers have been at work in this isolated room? I am reminded of a classic 500 year-old example of isolation and tranquil meditation: the writer Montaigne in his isolated tower. Is Koo Jeong-a a melancholic? Her small interventions in the environment are sometimes almost invisible: various objects are arranged in ways that could hardly be called aggressive. Pads of paper, writing instruments, glue, office materials all of the most non-dramatic sort. Wrapping, cartons, "junk". An inattentive person could easily walk by the room without noticing these small sculptural interventions. But the person who does stop and follows the clues becomes more and more drawn into this miniature landscape. In the end, every detail in the room seems to evoke a claim or question. On the upper floor at Prostgarden (the old Vicarage) stands an unmade bed where the artist slept during the installation of the exhibition. It was not a period of absolute isolation, but certainly a period of intensive, solitary work. An occupation with those things closest at hand while in seclusion: thoroughly, feverishly, manic? This is where the comparison with the solitary melancholic seems possible, the lonely brooding person who turns his passivity into manic activity. There are many literary examples. Two extreme cases: Samuel Beckett and Tomas Bernhard. A transformation from melancholy to feverish activity are to be found in their work, a shift from pain turned inwards to manic use of language. This is how the manic machine sounds in Beckett's case. The cogs turn around a hard, empty place, devoid of meaning - one's own self: "I'm something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty space, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, born and then dead, born In a cage, and then dead in a cage, in a word like beast..." Here, the machinery of language becomes a way to write oneself out of the inner, painful space which Beckett experiences as a kind of jail. The linguistic liberation which can maybe never come to an end but must constantly continue has been described as a shift from melancholy to mania. The sealed room at Prastgarden and the tables with painstakingly ordered and disintegrating piles bring to my mind this theme of melancholy, this movement between isolation and manic activity. But in Koo Jeong-a's work it is never a question of Beckett's or Bernhard's furious and often aggressive sort of energies; rather, it is about a precision of details taken to impossible extremes. Why pile pencil lead in perfect formations, why cut apart and then glue together cartons made of cheap cardboard, why carve up a toilet paper roll while in isolation? In any case it is not a question of a slacker attitude, ie an elegant nonchalance. One could easily misinterpret Koo Jeong-a's room as untidy, even chaotic. Nothing could be further from the truth: this is a concentrated universe where very little has been left to chance The more you narrow in on the details, the more evident it becomes that the artist has already been there. The notion of mania and melancholy as intimately linked, as two sides of the same coin in fact, has been investigated by Michel Foucault. His cites a medical source from the 1600s: "if one can say that in the melancholic person, the brain and the animal spirits are obscured by smoke and a kind of thick fog, then one can also say that the mania seems to ignite a kind of fire which has up to that point been smothered by the fog and the smoke." This view of melancholy, as a condition that can be overcome, is found in a refined, literary form in the work of Montaigne. His Essays are a meticulous exploration of his own subjectivity's every nook and cranny. Pulling yourself back into your inner space is, according to Montaigne, the basis for all contemplation: "We must reserve an inner space for ourselves which is ours alone, completely free, where we uphold our true freedom, our most important refuge and solitude." More thoroughly than anywhere else, Montaigne looks at the relationship between solitude, melancholy and creativity. Here, he describes the ties that constitute the basis for artistic creation: "It was a melancholic mood, in other words a mood completely opposite to my usual disposition brought forth by that bleak solitude that I threw myself into a few years ago which inspired in me the mad idea to write. And when I then found that I was completely empty and scraped bare of other topics I took up myself as the subject and object for myself." In this way, melancholy arises from self-imposed isolation, from the decision to turn your back to the world in order to have access to your own soul. But from this melancholy is born the need to write: the imagination goes running wild and creates spectacular monsters and complete breakdown threatens. But the self manages to stay sane and transform this into an artistic practice: writing. This is the cycle of creativity for Montaigne: away from the world, plunging into the darkness of the soul, and then out again, back into the workings of the world. What does this somewhat high-flown story of creativity have to do with a contemporary artists like Koo Jeong-a? On one level, probably very little. But on the other hand, the writing that Montaigne practices in order to cure his melancholy comes from common subjects close at hand. To a large degree, all kinds of everyday themes appear in this labyrinthine text: food, sleep, works, care of one's body, objects and tools. Instead of huge philosophical concepts, very concrete things are consistently emphasized. Things that are so everyday that we have a tendency to overlook them, things that are very simple. Two complications: Koo Jeong-a is not a man, and not European. How well does this model of melancholy, which tends to dominate the European view of creativity, from the Renaissance onward fit an Asian woman artist's work at the end of the 20th century? Maybe this idea of a contemplative subject who goes into herself and then frees herself from melancholy through the act of artistic creation is a completely masculine concept. When Beckett and Bernhard free themselves from heavy melancholy, it happens through a kind of frenzy. The mania in Koo Jeong-a's work has a completely different lightness to it. It has an incredible intensity, but it is also fragile. Perhaps the concept of the self as both melancholy and creative is also something completely European: perhaps the framework for Koo Jeong-a's work is completely different, even though her work is for the most part shown in Europe? Is the thought of a subjective inner self which is manifested externally itself something which is inapplicable to her work? Sometimes it seems to me as if her activities play themselves out in a zone which is neither tied to the outer nor the inner: a space which evades the somewhat broad aesthetic categories which the European world view confidently forces upon things. But what kind of space is this? It is easily to mystify the Asian by depicting him/her as something so foreign and different as to be incomprehensible from a European perspective at all. Or perhaps Gilles Deleuze is right in his book about Foucault when he speaks about Asian subjectivity, or absence of the subject, as an "attempt to inhale emptiness." When the subject appears unstable and as something elusive then it also applies to the "work", the objects in which the subjective powers are manifest. One does not need to reference Asian sources or histories in order to locate the thread of the dissolution of the subject in contemporary art. And one can without a doubt trace a similar displacement of the work itself. One artist who perhaps more clearly than anyone else worked with the ephemeral, elements that are not constant or unique, is the Cuban Felix Gonzales-Torres, whose work consists of open series. The duplication of an artwork already puts into question the notion of the unique, and a series puts it on even shakier ground. Gonzales-Torres's unfinished editions push the whole issue to the furthest extreme. I sense that Koo Jeong-a works somewhere in the extension of this desire to break down the unique, auratic work of art. Her objects expose vulnerability and she charges the most everyday things with feelings in a way which call to my mind this Cuban predecessor. The "editions" are no longer produced, but are instead to be found again in the everyday world: pads of paper, toy packaging, paper clips and other small things which one might find In the drawer of a writing desk. The white pads of paper have been cut into pieces but then rejoined into a rectangle, other pads lie intact in piles. The everyday and the undramatic are shown here in a way that would suggest they hide a secret dimension. And those who look carefully enough will find traces of activities difficult to explain: corners that have been cut off, small pieces pasted together in new constellations. These small things are not simply shown as ready-mades, but also manipulated according to an obtuse logic. A kind of landscape has grown in this room, like architectural models or a city in miniature. Koo Jeong-a's work addresses the inaccessible, the sometimes nearly invisible. She intervenes in already existing spaces and adjusts the world of mass-produced objects with an extremely delicate touch. It is perhaps not so much about the things themselves, but about the awareness that arises through contact with them. The small adjustments upset our stale, mechanical expectations, and suddenly these everyday objects are seen in a new light. Sometimes this is literally the case, as in the example of the altered lighting that Koo Jeong-a placed in the gallery as well as In the public space. In a temporary gallery space in a garage she focused light in corners which would otherwise be dark: the dust is suddenly given a "body" and appears as a landscape. In another piece she works with a different manipulation of light, this time in a public space: a rose-colored filter placed over the street lamp creates a completely different mood. In this way, other memories are evoked, and other expectations are created. Her work utilizes materials which can seem endlessly fleeting and of low aesthetic value: white powder made out of crushed aspirin tablets, blue medicine capsules which have been stuffed into the holes of a wall, moth parts of dead insects found in an attic. Where does this work play itself out? In these simple materials or in our inner worlds? I am inclined to answer: in our inconsistent and unwieldy attention. The strength in her work (strength is a word which seems foreign to her vocabulary) seems to me to be in her ability to show us our weak points. The "strength" in this work is the ability to show extreme fragility. Despite the materials' qualities, industrial and rarely valuable, Koo Jeong-a's work stirs an intense feeling of fragility. The nearly invisible is that which makes those things that are overly visible bearable. It is easy to finally block some things out or make them disappear from our field of vision. The small piles of pencil leads in the isolated room at Prostgarden are effective. The viewer who stops and truly sees them finds more than merely a bunch of lead; something you are very familiar with. So much that the experience has perhaps already sunk below the thresh-hold of what is visible.
Sculpture Degree Zero: Koo
Jeong-a The Hugo Boss Prize 2002 Francis Alÿs, Olafur Eliasson, Hachiya Kazuhiko, Pierre Huyghe, Koo Jeong-a, Anri Sala (New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2002) p. 79-83 As a thing the way is 1 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus, (New York: Doubleday, 1926), p. xii.
Handwritten essay on Koo Jeong-a Cedric Price, Koo Jeong-a (exh. Cat.)
Secession (November 12, 2002- February 2, 2003) p. 1 –3
Koo Jeong-a, exh. cat., " 3355 ", [Secession, Vereinigung bildender Künstler, Wiener Secession,Vienne, 2002] Dreams
have relevance to the future For
dreams to be transferred to others at different time is a key to treasure. Recognition requires reference to the memory of Looking - and involves time in such a process The
Enjoyment of observed size is enriched when comparison can be made at
WILL and WHIM. -
TIME is the dimension of the delight of RE-BEING - A THEORY OF COMPLEXITY is therefore unfolding, IN REAL TIME - CLARITY and DOUBT: MYSTERY and MISUNDERSTANDING can be reveled in by the viewer into transmogrifies into the cognoscente. - ORDER & DISORDER became part of the same, as tidy and mass can never be. - KOO presents both package and the unpackaged, requiring equal recognition of themselves and the viewer. Poetry
in motion requires both the eye and the memory. THIS HARVEST OF THE SILENT EYE - uses TIME to ripen - but oh! What a meal.
Cedric Price
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