Extra/Ordinary: Video Art from Asia by Spencer Museum of Art

Extra/ Ordinary: Video_Art_ from_Asia

Exhibition Curator: Kris Imants Ercums Brochure Design: Tristan Telander Exhibition Design: Richard Klocke Editor: Bill Woodard

_ ___ en ts co nt the_Intro______________________________00:00:02 the_work______________________________00:00:08 the_artists___________________________00:00:21

Extra/Ordinary:_________

Transmutations_of_the_Everyday__

The exhibition Extra/Ordinary: Video Art from Asia investigates new ways of transforming familiar experiences and daily routines into moments of expanded meaning, contemplation, and humorous reflection. By repositioning our constructed notions of the “everyday” as cinematic recreations or comical interventions, this exhibition explores the imaginative potential embedded in the ordinary stuff of life. In one of its original medieval iterations, “ordinary” referred to the unchanging rituals of the Roman Catholic mass known as Ordo Missae—thus its association with daily routine in contemporary usage. However, when the daily rituals of life are repositioned through the eyes of artists, the shallow waters of the banal suddenly deepen into a reservoir of endless possibilities. The artists in Extra/Ordinary share a common interest in the meaning of our ordinary lives, especially within the context of Asia, where an immense reevaluation of historical consciousness and cultural practices is occurring under the guise of “development.” Together, these artists uncover the potential of daily experience and explore the material stuff of the world as mutable and laden with potential. In the process, ordinary moments are uprooted, transformed into wondrous encounters and, through the “poetics of noticing,” restored as artifacts of memory and meaning.

The everyday has received considerable attention in recent contemporary art, with longstanding political connotations: Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) grounded the everyday as fundamental to the reordering of society; the Situationist International critiqued capitalist society through the everyday; and most recently, contemporary scholars have rooted their discursive practice in the everyday. However, generally speaking, in the last few years the exploration of everydayness in recent art, while connected to the political awareness of twentieth-century avant-garde practice, has begun to implicate itself in new ways. While striving to make daily encounters relevant, artistic engagement with common experiences is a strategy for infusing new meaning into what is typically ignored—“tracing silent contours” that make the prosaic something worth looking at.1 As the sum of our days and the foundation of the life we will come to call our own, everydayness is an essential building block of life, an existential protein if you will.2 Through his writings, the American thinker John Dewey (1859–1952) explored the relationship

Nikos Papastergiadis, “ ‘Everything That Surrounds’: Art, Politics and

Theories of the Everyday” in Every Day, 11th Biennale of Sydney (Sydney: Biennale of Sydney, 1998). 2

Michael Sheringham goes on to observe “…while many things are

commonly identified with the quotidien—eating, phoning, shopping, objects and gadgets—everydayness is not a property or aggregate of these things; it inheres rather in the way they are part of manifold lived experience.” In Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pg. 386.

between art and everyday life, struggling to “recover the continuity between the types of refined and intensified experience, like in a work of art, and the everyday events, doings and sufferings that are universally recognized as the elements of experience.”3 By remaking the mundane stuff of life into moments of significance, artists offer us a way to understand how our daily routines, or the unsuspecting memories of days gone by, or just waiting around for something to “happen” can transform our passive, ordinary lives into an active resistance against boredom. Through the process, we discover that meaning can be found everywhere, in everyone, and everything. Boredom remains one of the fundamental adversaries of contemporary consumer society, which is assaulted with an ever-widening array of technology: instant messaging, Facebook updates, Twitter, Nintendo Wii, and a plethora of portable gadgetry. Boredom is also a distinct historical phenomenon, related to contrasting phenomenon like “interest” or “excitement,” which some scholars suggest are requisite parts of modern consciousness.4 German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) saw the modern development of urban life and the advances of technology as the root causes of boredom, arguing that overstimulation

In Katya Mandoki, Everyday Aesthetics: Prosaics, the Play of Culture and

Social Identities (Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), pg. 89. 4

Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani, eds. Essays on Boredom

and Modernity (Amsterdam; New York, NY: Rodopi, 2009).

prevents us from making value distinction and creating a fulfilling life.5 However, there is something in our recent turn to the everyday—the origins of boredom— and its reevaluation that is meant to struggle against this idea and reassert the legitimacy of contemporary life, the ordinariness of existence, and the value of common people. When approached like this, boredom is merely a state of mind, not necessarily something to be avoided or cured, but a condition in life that depends on a choice, an action. One way in which people are taking creative action is through the widespread application of new, cheaper forms of digital video and online formats like YouTube, an immensely important venue for the art of the everyday. This exhibition took shape using online video clips, emails, and file sharing. Yet despite the thin copies of DVDs transported via global couriers, the use of equipment like flat screens and projectors manufactured from petroleum and rare metals—not to mention the carbon footprint incurred through transoceanic shipping—makes one reconsider the wonders of the traditional object-based exhibition. Martha Rosler, an innovator in video art, reminds that “video itself is not ‘innocent.’ It too is a form of cultural commodity that often stands for a celebration of the self and its powers of invention.”6 The timeliness of video is part of

Ralph M. Leck, Georg Simmel and Avant-Garde Sociology:

The Birth of Modernity, 1880–1920 (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2000). 6

Marth Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001.

(Cambridge, MS: MIT Press, 2004), pg. 367.

the backbone of Extra/Ordinary, which explores ways of transmuting the ordinary into something extraordinary. It is from this kernel found in the simple life that the artwork in this exhibition began to emerge, a slowly attenuated static shape dancing across a pixilated screen. The use of moving images in this exhibition to capture the passing of moments now long gone, or to restore a lost memory, or to remake life through cinematic effect, further reflects the fleeting qualities that make the everyday so extraordinary.

_______Kris_Imants_Ercums/ _________________Curator_of_Asian_Art

Good_Sports_________________ Xijing_Men’s_Collective_____________________ After spending immense sums to construct signature venues like the “Bird’s Nest” stadium and the “Water Cube” natatorium, the XXIX Summer Olympiad opened in Beijing with a massive spectacle on August 8, 2008. That same day, three artists—Chen Shaoxiong from China, Gimhongsok from South Korea and Tsuyoshi Okazawa from Japan—with considerably less ostentation, held the opening ceremony for the Xijing Olympic Competitions. Situated in the art district of Caochangdi on the outskirts of Beijing, Xijing was conceived as an imaginary “western capital” meant to compliment three other directional capitals of East Asia—Beijing “the northern capital,” Nanjing “the southern capital,” and Tokyo “the eastern

capital.” For the opening ceremony, the emblematic Olympic torch ceremony is staged as a “smoking relay.” Passing the sacred flame from cigarette tip to cigarette tip in a consecutive relay, the final embers are tossed into a waiting barbeque grill to emblazon the inaugural flame of the twenty-day competition. In Xijing, signature Olympic competitions are reconstituted from moments of common experience: the steel blades in fencing are transformed into soft, scratching sticks; a leg of the triathlon involves releasing fish purchased at a local market into a Beijing canal; watermelons are substituted for soccer balls; and, in perhaps the most meaningful reversal, the marathon becomes an endurance sleep- off. The performance of an alternate vision of the geopolitical athletic spectacle of the Olympics within the realm of an intimately collectivized artistic body not only resituates the “play” of competitive sports away from the realm of nationalized competition to a more personal dimension, it also avows the fundamental element of amusement seemingly absent in professional sports.

Courtesy of Boers-Li Gallery and the artists

A_Forest_of_Gestures___ Tsui_Kuang-Yu____________________________________ The “forests of gestures” was for Certaeu an unfixable, metamorphosis of space created by individuals in urban environments.7 Through his “action videos” Tsui Kuang-Yu creates his own forest of gestures that trace, transform, and reposition the way movement in urban space is used to create meaning in our everyday life. The Invisible Cities series reveals the oftentimes hidden pedestrian perspective of cities through interruptions of comical— even slightly absurdist—extremes that ultimately manage to soften, or even dismiss the brutality of cities. In Sealevel Leaker the seemingly innocuous movement of walking becomes an active determinant. Spewing water in all directions, Tsui not only manages to augment his bodily

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pg.102.

presence, he also leaves a fleeting trace of his walk, mapping the unencumbered individual onto the rigid grid of the city. Pedestrian action becomes something transgressive that arouses reactions of smiling amusement, mild annoyance, and slight surprise. Liverpool Top 9!! (not the Top 10, mind you) has the veneer of a well-executed mockumentary in the vein of This is Spinal Tap. Yet, this imaginative, satirical investigation into the idiosyncratic aspects of urban design in Liverpool excavates the way that city dwellers across the globe reassign the geography of urban space to usages more fitted to the realities of everyday engagement. As Michel de Certaeu observes, â&#x20AC;&#x153;the moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a placeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an experience that is, to be sure broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks)...â&#x20AC;?8 Thus, when Tsui reimagines how crossing the street can become an act of community involvement, or the electronic bleeps of a pedestrian signal can inspire a celebratory dance, or even when decorative rocks become a moment for a relaxing foot massages a la the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Park in Taipei, he pulls at the urban fabric of the city and shows how we slowly reweave meaning in our daily actions.

Courtesy of Eslite Gallery, Taipei and the artist

ibid, pg. 103.

everyday_alchemy________ izumi_taro__________________________________________ Izumi uses a combination of his body, technology, and space to playfully create videos that strive to transmute the banal into a superlative encounter, much like alchemists of old sought to transmute base metals into noble elements like gold. As the â&#x20AC;&#x153;everyday alchemist,â&#x20AC;? Izumi takes an unconventional approach to his magical reordering of the quotidian. Using mundane objects, he concocts performances that distort the body, expand the perceptions, and rediscover the joys of good, cheap fun. Izumi enjoys setting up game-like moments of distraction. In Door (2006) he tries to insert a key drawn on his finger into a lock, and in 19 Days 19 Works (2006) he spends just under three weeks in an endurance test of the

imagination. In his most recent work, Izumi casts himself as the protagonist who inadvertently falls victim to the most unlikely, somewhat cartoonish incidents. In Lime at the Bottom of the Lake (2008) a black “hand” materializes on high, seemingly from a surveillance camera. The ominous appendage slaps a monitor and pulverizes Izumi flat as a pancake. In Finland (2008) we find the artist strolling along, minding his own business when, suddenly, he swims through a pitcher of water propped just in front of the TV. His body contorts and twists in the liquid atmosphere like a genie made of taffy. And then magically, he walks out the other side. Izumi observes, “Like light and shadow, it is well known that images are pliable. But because my body is not flexible I need a device to enter into the picture.”9 His use of cheap, daily objects—a water pitcher or tube TVs for example—and his low-tech, video-guerrilla approach to art glows with a kind of cool-otaku-hipster-proletarianism, a pulse of everyday experimental fun in the de-centered art scene of Tokyo. Like the prophetic alchemy of old, which declared the properties of certain metals and medicines as indispensible for weathering the end times, Izumi’s brand of everyday alchemy is a preventative against the drudgery and madness of our own making.

Courtesy of hiromiyoshii

from Gabriel Ritter, Tokyo Nonsense, 2008.

white_noise__________________ lida_abdul__________________________________________ Since antiquity, Afghanistan has been at the nexus of world events. Within recent times, the everyday context for the people of this mountainous, land-locked region of Central Asia has been defined by geopolitical violence. During the nineteenth century, the “Great Game” between Russia and Great Britain was played out in three horrific Anglo-Afghan Wars that concluded in 1919 with the founding of the Kingdom of Afghanistan. In the 1970s, with the “cold war” Soviet Invasion (1979–1989) and ensuing civil war, Afghanistan was once again a pawn in global politics. Taking advantage of a nation destabilized by nearly two decades of civil conflict, the Taliban seized control in 1996. And, following the September 11,

2001, World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the beleaguered Afghani people were in the crossfire of an escalating “war on terror.” This year alone, an estimated 1,500 Afghani civilians have died in the conflict and the vast majority of the country lies in ruins. A product of this upheaval, artist Lida Abdul left Afghanistan as a child refugee. She has spent her life trying to comprehend “the disaster that has ravaged my country for nearly two decades.” When she was finally able to return in 2005, she began her own curative engagement with Afghanistan by enacting a series of ritualized performances in the devastated architectural

spaces that dominate the environs of Kabul. A ruined presidential complex, with remnants of columns like an ancient Greek temple, is the wrecked site of White House (2005). In a meditative reordering of chaos, Abdul slowly, with method and intent, brushes white paint on each wall, each inconsequential fragment of rubble. As a cathartic act, Abdul sublimates the manifestations of war and reclaims the ruined space as both a mnemonic site of the past and a hopeful monument for a future as yet unrealized. She is never far from the subject of her work, as she observes: There is always the fear that the work of the dissident artist, or one too close to an unfolding “politics” compromises its aesthetic intentions; the fear that forms might become subordinate to content. As well-intentioned as this critique might appear to be, one has to ask: Whose politics? In my work, I try to juxtapose the space of politics with the space of reverie, almost absurdity, the space of shelter with that of the desert; in all of this I try to perform the “blank spaces” that are formed when everything is taken away from people.10 Near the end of the video, a young man appears in this “blank space.” Abdul camouflages him in white. He both blends into the wreckage and is restored. The video concludes with a herd of goats climbing through Abdul’s silent monument.

http://www.lidaabdul.com/statement.htm

Museum purchase: Peter T. Bohan Art Acquisition Fund, 2006.0032

behind_the_curtain______ jung_yeondoo____________________________________ For Koreans, the twentieth century will always be remembered as a time of national turmoil, marked by the end of the long-lived Joseon dynasty (1392–1910), the nation’s annexation as a colony by the Empire of Japan (1910–1945), and the division of the country into two nation-states by a violent civil war (1950–1953). The subterfuge of this history runs deep in the stories that Jung restages in Handmade Memories. For this series, Jung collected six anonymous memories from elderly Koreans that he approached and interviewed in parks around Seoul. Each telling began with the same question: “What was the most memorable event in your life?” As each memory unfolds, juxtaposed on the adjacent screen