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Colaboran en este número / Contributors in this Issue: Vicente Carretón Cano, Berta Sichel, Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes, Agnaldo Farias, Pedro Medina, Menene Gras Balaguer, Alicia Murría, Brian Curtin, Santiago B. Olmo, Rubén Bonet, Eva Grinstein, Stephen Maine, Alanna Lockward, Filipa Oliveira, Isabel Tejeda, Juan Vicente Aliaga, Mónica Núñez Luis, Suset Sánchez, Mireia Antón, Chema González, Luis Francisco Pérez. Especial agradecimiento / Special thanks: Horacio Lefèvre
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PRIMERA PÁGINA / PAGE ONE:
SUMARIO CONTENTS
Cultura democrática y museos Democratic culture and museums ALICIA MURRÍA
DOSSIER: ARTE Y VÍDEO: LOS ORÍGENES ART & VIDEO: ORIGINS
7
Sendas de la imaginación magnética Paths of Magnetic Imagination VICENTE CARRETÓN CANO
20
Género e imagen. Feminismo en los orígenes del videoarte Gender and Image. Feminism in the Origins of Video-Art BERTA SICHEL
28
Cultura, documento visual, identidad e imperialismo. La obra de Fiona Tan Culture, Visual Document, Identity and Imperialism. Fiona Tan’s Work JUAN ANTONIO ÁLVAREZ REYES
41
Cildo Meireles: Babel Cildo Meireles: Babel AGNALDO FARIAS
52
Desde Corea. Entrevista con Hong-hee Kim From Korea. Interview with Hong-hee Kim MENENE GRAS BALAGUER
60
La irresistible seducción de las bienales The Irresistible Seduction of Biennials ALICIA MURRÍA
66
Conversación con Francisco Jarauta Conversation with Francisco Jarauta PEDRO MEDINA
74
Cibercontexto
78
Info
94
Críticas de exposiciones / Reviews
Portada / Cover: VALIE EXPORT Syntagma, 1984. Colección MNCARS.
PAGE ONE Democratic culture and museums Around the middle of last year I pointed out, also on this page, that, for the first time in Spain, the different art sectors had managed to express ourselves through representative associations, and I wrote about how this new situation could, in the near future, result in our playing a role in coordinating and, possibly, taking part in the planning of the cultural policies we require, as well as in those issues which affect us directly. It is neither easy nor fast to develop this process, particularly if we take into account the almost complete lack of channels of intervention available to civil society in our relatively young democracy. However, over the last few months there has been some progress, and we are currently about to sign a document, with the Ministry for Culture, establishing good practices for museums, which in the first instance will have to be carried out by the Ministry itself, but which will also gradually become the responsibility of the Autonomous Communities and the local councils. What are the issues examined in the document? It essentially establishes the need for transparency in appointments, public contracts and competitions for specific projects with set deadlines, and effective expert committees, as well as the elimination of political interference, and incompatibilities which make the concentration of power difficult or impossible. It is not a perfect document, and it will need to be revised, but it can be a highly useful tool if the different public administrations make some advances towards applying it. During the last phase of negotiations we were surprised to hear our Minister for Culture refer to the “need to bring some order to our museums”, as well as her comments that the number of visitors is relevant because it is linked to votes. It should not be forgotten that the need for this document was an idea which emerged from art associations, particularly the IAC, which must be credited for carrying out the work, and that it was written not as a result of internal “disorder” in Spanish state museums, but in response to a lack of cultural policies and their subsequent developments; this is precisely what causes “disordered” political decisions, and even direct, and sometimes very blatant, interference in some Autonomous Communities, as we have seen lately. Along the same lines, her references to the necessary financial control could suggest that public funds are being squandered, when in many cases the harsh reality is that museums see their annual budgets frozen or reduced with no justification at all. We are aware of the fact that we live in a country where a good number of museums and art centres have been built, but it is also true that, once these expensive and splendid buildings are completed, their necessary funding is often forgotten. Are we going to start correcting our mistakes?
ALICIA MURRÍA
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Gender and Image Feminism in the Origins of Video-Art
By Berta Sichel*
No attempt has been made to write a history of the kind of videographic narrative developed by women artists. Since the emergence of the first commercial video camera, in 1956, a part of this history relates video technology to a more personal and specific use on the part of these female creators. Nevertheless, the proper moment to begin this history in particular, and the development of video in general terms, is the late 60s and early 70s, when this media contributed to change and expand the definition of art. Another aspect can be found more recently, when the discipline of gender studies began to investigate the form in which the social construction of gender established a differentiation between “feminine” and “masculine” spaces. Both during the aforementioned decades and the present, video was conceived as a media that permitted women to create their own space of representation, one in which they could typify the dichotomy between the private and the public –even if they were also discussing topics related to the body, domestic life or the sociability of the public sphere. After all, this dichotomy is the essence of the feminist movement itself, at least in its earliest stage. On the other hand, terms related to gender were also mixed with topics such as the race, social class and sexual orientation of artists. The emergence of video in the market is coincidental with that of feminist theory and practices. As a result of its effort to question feminine subjectivity, revaluing personal history and transforming the position of women in society, the feminist movement had a deep impact in the work of artists, especially in the 70s. In view of the fact that they were excluded from traditional artistic spaces, women artists were forced to create their own collective organizations of production and exhibition such as galleries, festivals, publications and
Artists from the late 60s and early 70s were confronting both a long history of objectification of feminine nude figure and the misogynist expressionism of modernism. workshops. Even though they made use of all artistic media, video-art and performance were more attractive for them, perhaps because new media had not a previous history of female exclusion. Based on the avant-garde movements from the 50s and 60s, initially as an artistic form, the use women artists made of video was something different from the masculine uses of the same media. This difference is especially evident in their interest in contents and their preference for subjectivity, attitudes that would influence later practices that used video as a fundamental media. Women went beyond the notion of “form as content” so as to instil their works with personal histories and a social-cultural critic. They rejected some
HANNAH WILKE Philly, 1977.
aspects of the kind of conceptual art represented by minimalism and preferred to use their artistic work as a means to talk about identity, oppression, gender discrimination or motherhood. Their works, so profoundly different from videos made by men, became more and more introspective in order to eventually incorporate fantasies. Feminist artists struggled to get rid of masculine perspective and to represent their own, developing a feminine vision. Videographic feminist works challenge the prevailing –albeit decadent– modern, formalist and self-referential discourse, so typical in the 70s, as well as psychoanalytic theory and the construction of the subject. On the contrary, video works here as a tool for examining personal life and experiences lived by friends and families. It also serves to question the historical role of women and the relation to their own history. While exploring the histories of women in society and arts, it especially pays attention to reflection and speculation about the existence of an
MNCARS Collection.
essential feminine aesthetic and about the position of women as objects of a masculine gaze. The 70s were also influenced by the publication of History of Art, by H.W. Janson (1962), in the U.S. This textbook, which used to be the bible for students of history of art for decades, doesn’t even mention the name or the work of a women artist. However, Janson was not an aberration. He only took part in a world of art that venerated the geniality of men-artists. By the time, American artistic scene had already assimilated and completely interiorized Greenbergean aesthetic of high modernism. As Griselda Pollock comments about this period, “if “painting” was privileged by modernist discourse as the most ambitious and significant one among the arts, it is because its combination of gesture and trace ensure the presence of the artist through a metonymic effect. They inscribe a subjectivity whose value, by visual inference and cultural acknowledgement, is masculinity”1. DOSSIER · ARTECONTEXTO · 25
Women, then, had their own very specific aesthetic concerns. Artists from the late 60s and early 70s were confronting both a long history of objectification of feminine nude figure and the misogynist expressionism of modernism. As a result, they decided to situate their work as opposed to all these pictorial traditions and transformed their studios of painting, sculpture, etching, drawing and ceramics into artistic discourses that were completely innovating, using what was then known as “alternative artistic forms and media”. In order to transmit their messages women made a frequent use of resources such as performance, art-books, video, and so on. Challenging conventional forms in the practice and critic of art, feminist works were emphasized on the personal connection with materials and the immediacy of the context beyond formalist abstraction. For many women, home constituted a natural subject of artistic production, as it was a place profoundly charged with contradictory meanings. As Lucy Lippard has observed, “[women
When it was incorporated as an element of a live performance, video would alter the experience of stage space as it interrupted the spatial continuity by adding a layer of presence and reception that resulted from the technological mediation. artists] worked with [domestic] iconography because it’s right there, because it’s what they know best, because they cannot avoid it”. They explored domestic topics such as maternity, sexuality, death, family relations, control of physical space and food preparation and consumption. The trilogy by Carolee Schneemann Fuses, Scroll and Meat Joy (1964-1975), as well as Semiotic of the Kitchen (1975), by Martha Rosler, provide two well-known examples nowadays regarded as key pieces of that period. During that moment of artistic exploration and political agitation, women artists produced a large, powerful, poignant, unique joint of artworks. Their videos are a link between modernism and postmodernism whose aesthetic traits were strongly determined by the technical limitations of early video technologies (long shots, scarce or totally absent edition and camera movements and a direct confrontation with the spectator). All these common traits worked as formal elements that situate video-art in opposition to TV and defined it as an artistic form focused in notions such as duration, perception and process. The earliest examples are more indebted to minimalism and conceptual art than to Madison Avenue or Hollywood. Compared to the works that are developed today with digital technologies, the experience of watching these tapes can be arduous. They are too slow, too personal, and the spectator’s expectations and 26 · ARTECONTEXTO · DOSSIER
concentration are deeply challenged. They are radically opposed to what David Antin has called TV’s “money-metric”, that is, the rigid division of TV time into fragments of 15, 30 and 60 seconds. In spite of the technologic obstacles, artists such as Hanna Wilke, Ana Mendieta, Joan Jonas, Ulrike Rosembach or Valie Export did bravely affirm their body, transferring it through dynamic actions, in many cases exposing their nakedness. This is manifested in their aim to display, stretch and expand the body, surpassing material or physical limitations through movement. There are significant differences regarding the gesture, position, movement and bodily behaviour each artist assumes in her work. In general, women are inclined to movement and space. In their imagination, space seems to be around them. In her essay Mass Culture and Woman, Andreas Huyssen claims: “observing contemporary art’s panorama, one might wonder if performance and body art would still be prevailing in the 70s were it not for the vitality of feminism in arts and for the manner in which women articulated their experiences of body and performance related to gender”2. Performance was also significant for women artist at that time, in view of the fact that it was a manner to challenge formalism. It constituted a new strategy for denying the division between art and life, exploring the dynamics of the relation between the artist and her audience, and conceiving art as something social and experiential. This had a special meaning for women artists, whose role in the history of art had been historically reduced to that of a simple model and muse –never a creator or a master. Re-conceptualizing their artistic role, partly exerting a control of their bodies on the stage, feminine body art had a “particular potential for destabilizing the structure of conventional art’s critic and history”. Video increased the impact of performance by permitting that an eventual, unknown audience could see a piece that had only been represented once. Through video, performance could become something considerably present, always representing the action by the first time. Video cameras also changed the nature of performance, since it created a sense of intimacy that permitted artists to do things they wouldn’t have done in front of a live audience. When it was incorporated as an element of a live performance, video would alter the experience of stage space as it interrupted the spatial continuity by adding a layer of presence and reception that resulted from the technological mediation. Joan Jonas used this distance/intimacy for exploring a range of psychosocial and psychosexual. Nevertheless, gender images and narratives are not exclusive from the 60s and 70s. In a post-feminist era, the scope of representation has a larger basis –undoubtedly influenced by globalization– and it is not strictly focused on the public-private dichotomy. Many artists that became adults in the 80s, as well as other younger ones, are working within the framework of social discourse concerning minorities, sexual identity, race, colonialism… In the mid 80s, while theories on multiculturalism and subjectivity were flourishing in universities and
the art world, video and cinema directors with diverse backgrounds began to find new forms to corporally transmit both their experiences and the language of the previous generation. Hybridization of cinema and video dissolved the strict limits between genres: avant-garde, documentary and narrative forms were questioned and recombined. The works by Swiss artist Ursula Biemann, or those by American Sadie Benning (which portraits adolescence as an important stage of productive tension and emphasizes individuality and freedom as factors that determine personal sexual identity), Elahe Massumi’s pieces (born in Iran) or Shu-Lea Cheang’s (born in Korea) are only a few examples. In Writing Desire (2000), Biemann discusses the new internet screen and the role of the international traffic of women from the Third World. This video deals with the topic of sexual trading or, according to the artist, with the traffic of women from Asia to Western Europe. Writing Desire evinces that economic globalization turns women into merchandise; moreover, it does so by easily manipulating them through the internet. In this work, the spectator becomes a sort of new voyeur of sexual consumerism on the internet. Massumi works using the concept of the documentary –but it denies its structure and goes beyond the mere document–. It uses the body as a place of representation and increases the possibilities and forms to see the “colonized body”, which can be clearly appreciated in works such as Obliteration (1994), Hijras (2000) or A Kiss is not a Kiss (2002), in which, ignoring external factors, she explores the impossibility to represent certain bodily parts –those that are kept hidden, despite they constitute the center of life. On its part, Cheang’s work draws all its strength and allurement from unusual forms through which she questions social stratifications of personal experiences. She deals with subjects such as the power of media, ethnic stereotypes and
interactive relations by subverting the rules and the use of the truth in documentary. In a similar way to Biemann, Massumi and Cheang, Latin American women artists have transcended their stigmas and national limitations so as to become global artists with global interests. Apparently, women have surpassed their interest in feminine gender, even though they have never forgotten their feminine condition. As a result, their topics are often related to universal human concerns: freedom, hope, violence and the origins of humankind, among others. These examples are just the top of the iceberg in a much wider subject that has been already analyzed in many texts under the label “gender studies”. Nevertheless, discussing medial works by women (or writings, or art made by women) only makes sense if there is a relation to the whole joint of artworks by both men and women and to those elements typically coded as “feminine” or “masculine” in these works3. But in spite of the general nature of this text, without going deeper into the subject, we could conclude that images influenced by gender undoubtedly exist and construct the subjectivity of the aforementioned artists and many other women artists. * Berta Sichel is Director of the Audiovisual Media department at the MNCARS. 1.- Pollock, Griselda. “Painting, Feminism, History”, Destabilizing Theory Contemporary Feminist Debates. Edited by Michele Barret and Anne Phillips. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. 2.- Andreas Huyssen. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism. (Indiana University Press,Bloomington and Indianopolis, l986), 61 3.- Sara Mills. “Knowledge, Gender and Empire,” in Writing Women and Space. In Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, eds. (The Guildford Press: Nueva York, Londres, l994), p. 36.
DARA BIRNBAUM Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79. MNCARS Collection.
DOSSIER · ARTECONTEXTO · 27
From Korea Interview with Hong-Hee Kim: From the Local to the Global and How a Symbiosis between East and West was achieved By Menene Gras Balaguer*
Hong-Hee Kim has curated both the last edition of Gwangiu Biennial and, more recently, the exhibition Nam June Paik and Corea: From the Fantastic to the Hyper-real hosted by Fundación Telefónica. Undoubtedly, these events, as well as the curator’s professional background deserve our attention. Her academic career as a professor and her activity as an art historian, critic and curator are equally remarkable. Former director of the SSamzie Space, curator of the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 2003, and currently at the head of Gyeonggido Museum of Art, Hong-Hee Kim is deeply acquainted with Korean contemporary art scene, which she always assumes included in the international context in which artistic production is developed. The project she proposed for the most recent edition of Gwangiu Biennial was focused in the transformation of the city into a global site, in which the local and the global could meet, representing a postmodern cultural function in which emigration policies and fluidity result in “de-territorialization” and the elimination of frontiers. In the catalogue of Gwangiu Biennial is clearly stated that “Asia must recover and reshape its identity, in the direction of an open nationalism, an open regionalism and a cultural symbiosis”. The need to review the past, being aware of the urgent task of recovering the history while identifying the present are some of the premises that lead Hong-Hee Kim to produce the “Febrile Variations”, a term that was also the title of the biennial, and which served as a recognition of “abundance” and the continent’s dynamism in all the areas of cultural and economic activity, specially in Southeastern Asia. The Biennial proposed “seeing modern and contemporary art through the eyes of Asia”, and the recommended method for visualizing this proposal consisted of conceiving two exhibitions that were complementary both in time and space. First 56 · ARTECONTEXTO
Chapter, devoted to present Asian stories using diverse resources such as narrative techniques and subjective or objective approaches, included a historical exhibition that tackled the issue of contemporary art in the context of the history of ideas, focusing on Asian identity. And Last Chapter, focused on “mapping” or re-creating the different global cities on a map, in an exhibition that visualizes Asia under a constant construction and emigration, its global role, involved in a continual interrelation with other metropolises. The term “root” is a key concept in the aesthetical and critical discourse that provides support to the project’s argumentation, whereas the individuality of the local is always reminiscent, although indicating that the latter is not necessarily opposed to the utopia of a global society. “Local identity can only be articulated after dismantling the global/local dichotomy, and this could only be possible after reconfiguring local traditions and historicity”. The flourishing of countries such as Korea and China in the global economy has distorted the whole global order, and the unstoppable growth of a region such as Southeastern Asia permits us to foresee that it will be impossible to re-establish the precedent situation, just the way it was before the 90s. “Asia is transforming itself”. From the West, contemplating this quick development, we haven’t been able to react following the rhythm imposed by the simultaneity of the era of global communication. Will we eventually react in the proper time and way when we see how Asia expands and breaks the limits of its own geography? Asia “is moving”, it travels unceasingly, it travels, it changes, it returns and resists. 2006 has been the year of Asian biennials: Singapur, Shanghai, Gwangiu, Busan, Taiwan, Sydney and Brisbane. All these events have summoned up international contemporary art and have served not only to probe the current state of art affairs and the artistic
SONG DONG Waste Not, 2005-06.
Co-grand prize work of 2006 Gwangju Biennale.
production in general terms, but also the commitment of art with reality and historical present. In every project that was materialized according to the different proposed frameworks, international artistic community has played an specific role as regards to the prevailing aesthetic discourse, based on an integration spirit that doesn’t intend to eliminate differences. Nam June Paik’s exhibition at Fundación Telefónica (From March 13- Until May 20 2007), is not only the first anthological exhibition of this artist after his death in January 2006, but it is also the first Paik’s exhibition that includes pieces owned by Korean private and public collectors. During the presentation of the exhibition, HongHee Kim, curator of the show and author of several books about Paik, made a crucial question: who was Paik and what role did he play as an artist who can be identified with the transcendental model of the postmodern artist of the Diaspora?. She sees in Paik the reaffirmation of apparently irresolvable dualities: art / anti-art,
art/technology, classic art/popular art, art/entertainment. According to Kim, the aesthetic experiences Paik was trying to communicate is the result of the integration of cultures he assumed during his lifetime, from Korea to China, Japan, Germany and the U.S. Western cultural heritage, historical avant-gardes, dada, new technologies, “Oriental philosophies such as the Taoism, Zen, YingYang, and Chamanism”, all these elements are combined in Paik’s work, which can be confirmed in works such as Zen for T.V., the series Television Buda, or The Moon is The Most Ancient T.V. The exhibition Nam June Paik and Korea: From the Fantastic to the Hyper-real comprises 70 pieces that were selected according to their relevance with regard to the ambivalences of the nomad he always thought he was, his precedence, the world he abandoned and the one he chose to live in from the early 60s until his death. Hong-Hee Kim is the author of this project that undoubtedly will have an international impact, since it somehow closes the series of ARTECONTEXTO · 57
tributes that were celebrated during 2006 in an attempt to acknowledge his extraordinary contribution to the arts, video and all the new forms of creation he encouraged by means of the most advanced information and communication technologies, all of which has eventually confirmed his prophecies about the utopia of global society.
How do you see the Korean art scene concerning the new generations? Which have been the changes for the past two decades? Amidst the vortex of readily visible present change that is the definition of contemporaneity in Korea, the emergence of the “new generation,” or sinsaedae artists emerged in the late 1990s, is striking. The expanded role of the curator, appearance of alternative spaces, increase in arts funding and staging of international and overseas exhibitions have served as a backdrop for the growth of today’s young artists in their late twenties to late thirties. These sinsaedae artists absorbed the multilateral and anti(non)ideological aspect of predecessors, the former new generation artists who have been active since the first half of the 1990s. Nevertheless, they began to develop their own languages through their own perceptions and values, developing an artistic practice that was marked by its increasing engagement with globalization. This was perhaps due to their background. They were primarily educated overseas, and returned to Korea in a more explicit way as they moved toward internationalizing themselves, thereby attempting to participate into the hierarchy of privilege and the star system. These artists concentrated on self-commoditization and privileges of stardom through deliberate strategizing. In the symptomatic context of the diversification of the center, nomadism, and globalization, these artists suggest an international vision that transcends Korean and Asian identity, and their works are emerging as a global model of hybridism. The dynamism of hybridization and cultural nomadism are the esprit de corps of the new generation artists of the late 90s.
You were the curator for the Korean pavilion in the 2003 biennale. Could you speak about the selection of works and artists? How was the experience? I think that it was an opportunity to show and present Korean art to the world given the people that meet in Venice in this kind of event. The Korean Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2003 presented the works of Whang Inkie, Bahc Yiso and Chung Seoyoung under the theme of Landscape of Differences. In conceiving the theme and developing a curatorial premise, what came to mind is the necessity of introducing a new direction whereto Korean contemporary art was heading should be suggested in an international level. I attempted to reject some sort of exoticized forms of Otherness or Asia-ness by locating the Korean Pavilion on a site-specific frame of “here and now.” The 58 · ARTECONTEXTO
theme Landscape of Differences not only pertains to the identity of Korean Pavilion, but also a key notion that expresses the presenttense of Korean-ness. Said otherwise, the identity of Korean exhibition is not found in regional traditions or ‘Othered Orientalism,’ but in a state of the contemporary that is always produced to make “here and now” visible. Through this, an aspect of contemporary Korean art that is traditional yet modern, Korean yet international can be revealed. I hoped that a different and new approach to contemporary Korean art would be generated through this occasion. The works of these 3 artists did not display any sense of typical, stereotyped Korean-ness both in terms of subject and style nor material spectacles or works overly dependent on visual effects. Instead, the works are more concerned with the act of preserving criticality and reflexivity. The viewers are required to exert some effort in reading these works, which eventually forms a sort of interactivity between the exhibition and themselves.
The Gwangiu Biennale was again an international project that you curated too. i think that the presence of Korean artists was good balanced among the choice of the other curators. Could you say something about your proposal? Total 25 Korean artists participated in the 6th Gwangju Biennale 2006 –11 artists in The First Chapter exhibition and 14 (4 collectives and 4 individuals) in The Last Chapter exhibition. While The First Chapter featured both established and emerging artists focusing on the exhibition theme of ‘tracing the root of Asian art,” most of the artists invited in The Last Chapter are younger generation mainly emerged from the alternative space background. I guess the works from these artists of different generations could show diverse dimensions of Korean contemporary art.
If you think about the Korean scene of contemporary practices in the art world, where would you put as an art historian the beginning of modern or contemporary art, in a way that it would be possible to go through from there until now? The Korean contemporary art of the latter 20th century has gone through dramatic phases of development with 3 turning points throughout its process. The first one was the Informel movement of the late 1950’s which had extended itself into Monochrome abstract painting, the mainstream modernist trend of the 1970’s. The second was the Minjoong art movement which shook up the 80’s with political and social agendas and anti-modernist stances, and the last one was the spreading of postmodernism during the 90’s. These 3 phases can be interpreted as the procedure from modernism via antimodernism to postmodernism, which was the main impetus to form a history of Korean contemporary art. Korean post-modern art appeared with the new generation artists, or sinsaedae artists of the early 1990’s who practiced new paradigm of art and later flourished into culmination with the activities of the next sinsaedae artists
afterwards. However, it was Nam June Paik’s sudden advent in Korean art scene in the 1984 with his 1st satellite project Good Morning Mr. Orwell which gave a new experience of postmodernism to Korean audience for the first time.
cases, his international success and reputation was not welcome seen as a threatening intervention to the existent Korean art scene. However, Korea’s national mourning on this death last year proved how his mother country Korea sincerely loved and was proud of him.
You are participating in the Korea project for Arco in two exhibitions: one at the Space in Alcalá 31, with the young artists that were in Gwangiu, and the Nam June Paik exhibition. You wrote two essays about Paik and an interview, what has been your relationship to Paik as an artist and Paik’s work?
* Menene Gras Balaguer is the director of the culture and exhibitions section in Casa Asia.
First of all, I am glad to show some of the artists from The First Chapter exhibition of Gwangju Biennale 2006 through ARCO. I think this will be a good opportunity to introduce Gwangju Biennale to the world. As the Artistic Director of the 6th Gwangju Biennale 2006, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Organizing Committee of ARCO Korea 2007. Also, I feel very much honored to curate Nam June Paik exhibition for the occasion. Paik has put on a great influence on my career as art historian, curator and art critic both on personal and professional levels; he is a great teacher who showed me a new vision and also a senior who taught me the virtue of multi-tasking to meet the double demand of practice and theory/ the practical and the academic in the field of contemporary art. As John Cage was a fateful being for Paik to change his life, Paik for me also was a critical person in life. Also, In commemoration of Paik’s death, this exhibition will show his works owned by Korean collectors. These works, which would manifest Paik’s attitude towards Koreaness and Koreans, will reflect Paik’s ambivalent vision of his homeland Korea. I hope this exhibition will provide another viewpoint to read Paik’s works.
How did you manage to get an exhibition from Korea about Paik? Is it the first time that the pieces chosen travel altogether to be shown specifically coming from Korea? In fact, it is not an easy thing to borrow works from collectors, especially fragile productions like video art. Many institutions and personal collectors contributed to this exhibition with their heartfelt respect and affection to Name June Paik. I would say this exhibition is the result of collaborative spirits between exhibition organizers and collectors. Although many of the exhibit works were already shown elsewhere, it is the first time to gather and show these works together in a single exhibition.
How important do you consider Paik for Korea and the world? is ti recently that he has been considered as he deserved? It is true that Name June Paik’s reputation was better known abroad rather than inside Korea. While the international art world evaluated Paik as a historical figure in Art History, many of Korean viewers perceived his success as sensationalism or myth rather than trying to understand ideas and reasons in his artistic practice. In some
NAM JUNE PAIK & KIM HONG-HEE at the artist's Green St. Studio, 2005. Courtesy: SSamzie Space, Korea
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Audiovisuals on the Web By Carmen Torres Because it’s a discipline that’s so ambiguous and, at the same time, so interdisciplinary, it would be useful to remember the circumstances that helped bring about what is known today as videoart. Emerging when the first home cameras became available to the public in the ’60s, video was principally constituted as a tool of opposition against the established culture and the entertainment industry. If television can indeed be considered its technological predecessor, the aesthetic of video has a closer kinship to cinematography. In fact, many of cinematography’s concepts, like its types of shots and editing, are applied to video art, even though their discursive charge doesn’t carry all the way over. From its beginnings, then, we can see that video emerged in a hybrid manner that’s difficult to define.
These traits made it very attractive for restless artists coming from music and plastic art, like Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell, who would go on to become audiovisual icons. Paik, Vostell and the artists who followed them found a highly efficient way of opposing the models of the era, while always remaining independent and critical of the system. The medium then diversified into very wide currents, from socalled guerrilla TV, video-performances and travel diaries to videos-dance, video-installations, etc., thus multiplying the variants and categorical complexity. The concept of videoart has fallen largely out of use, as it is generally considered to be too limited to include so many subgenres, giving way to the contemporary notion of New Media.
Electronic Arts Intermix http://www.eai.org/eai/ An American organization based in New York, in charge of the distribution and preservation of both historical and contemporary works of technological art. It also periodically organizes expositions in different parts of the world, and it possesses a collection of about 3000 works of video and interactive art. In its large database, we find biographies of major artists, along with lists of their major works. The database boasts both foundational artists like Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Bill Viola, Vito Acconci, etc., and current carriers of the audiovisual narrative torch like Pipilotti Rist and Dan Graham. Among its activities, it’s worth noting the preservation work EAI has been performing since the beginning of the 70s, creating the biggest archive of experimental electronic works for future generations. EAI is a good starting point for finding basic information about a great number of disparate artists.
Jim Campbell www.jimcampbell.tv Artist born in Chicago in 1956. Campbell is one of the most important contemporary figures in the field of interactive installations. Making use of his scientific training in physics and engineering, he creates works that viewers must put together for themselves, using their own personalities, which differentiates Campbell’s work from the stance usually taken by computer art. The intimacy and warmth, as well as the poetic charge that Campbell achieves are truly rare, considering that he uses highly technological materials such as LED screens and plexiglass sheets. His recurring themes are the minimum range of information necessary to make a moving image intelligible, the relations between analog and digital, and various works linked to the concept of pixel. His homepage has detailed descriptions of his works, divided into categories like Public Art, Installations and Ambiguous Icons (pieces using LED’s), as well as critical texts and video footage of his exhibits.
Netherlands Media Arts Institute: Montevideo / Time Based Arts http://www.montevideo.nl/en/index.html This organization, whose name, Montevideo, is actually an umbrella for three different institutions, was founded in Amsterdam in 1978 and represents a historic landmark for both Dutch and international video. Its founder, René Coelho, began to make his house, equipment and documentation available for electronic artists to use and likewise show their works. A large part of the era’s Dutch video artists passed through the center, as did figures of the stature of Gary Hill and Bill Viola, who in turn donated works that the institute rented out to gather funds. From that moment, and thanks to subsequent support from the government, Montevideo has grown constantly in infrastructure and importance, little by little becoming a program for the conservation of electronic works that still continues today. Currently, the organization offers short residencies of three months, as well as exhibits, symposiums and workshops. On its web page, we can find links to all the aforementioned areas, along with an online catalog of the collection, including information and streaming excerpts of videos and a very effective search engine.
Videobrasil http://www.videobrasil.org.br/ Videobrasil, International Festival of Electronic Art, occurs every two years in São Paulo. It focuses on outskirt countries that generally receive little distribution of works of this type. We can thus find artists from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, along with extensive panoramas of Latin American video, as well the regular exhibition of internationally renowned figures such as Bill Viola, Robert Cahen and Eder Santos, among others. The Videobrasil festival is put on by the Videobrasil Cultural Association, which also puts out Cuaderno Brasil, a publication dedicated to contemporary art, Videobrasil colección de autores, a documentary series on artists and Videobrasil On-line, a database of Latin American electronic art. The association also shows exhibits in cities around Brazil.
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