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Yeondoo Jung Makes a Movie
I interviewed Yeondoo Jung the other day and he was wearing a cashmere shirt in a deep maroon. His pants were a slightly faded version of the same color. I always like it when people wear all one color. I think it represents a high level of commitment.
Jung’s father threw an ashtray at him when he said he wanted to be an artist. It was a heavy crystal ashtray. I’m pretty sure from the context of the story he told that the ashtray was clean. Regardless, it seems it was really a symbolic gesture because the object didn’t actually hit Jung and probably was never intended to.
Jung Senior was a pharmacist in Korea until he retired because of the changes to medical licensing in the country a few years ago. Although he was trained in Western pharmaceuticals and went to medical school, Yeondoo’s father used his extensive knowledge of Chinese herbs to combine his own medicines to treat the overall cause of an individual’s affliction, rather than just the symptoms. Western medicine tends to ignore the fact that human beings are fully integrated entities. Korea Westernized its healthcare industry five years ago, separating diagnoses and treatment as well as pharmaceutical and herbal medications. There is no longer a legal place for sophisticated, creative approaches to healing that cross these imposed delineations.
Yeondoo Jung might not have followed his father’s wishes that he go to medical school, but his work is inspired by his father’s attitude that it is one’s approach and the way one looks at things that matter, not a loyalty to pure form that is important. This attitude is shared by a lot of artists who work across mediums, but Yeondoo Jung also happens to be quite technically accomplished (in sculpture, video, photography and performance installation). His work, topically, deals with the fantasy and disbelief in film and photography; he is especially inspired by old Hollywood studio musicals with their painted backdrops and obviously constructed sets.
Before I talked to Yeondoo, I heard from a mutual friend that he was really “into” Elvis. I didn’t really know what that meant. Was it some hipster affectation?
Nope. Actually, Jung is quite sincere about his love for Elvis Pressley, having started his extensive record collection at 15. His ultimate fantasy is to get a big red Cadillac and drive down to what he referred to as “Graceland Palace.” When I suggested that he film the journey and make a piece about it, he looked at me a little funny. Art is very important to him of course, but we’re talking about his personal Elvis fantasy here, and it isn’t an issue he seems interested in exploring the non-realities of. In fact, in general Jung has no interest in cold, hard truth. His work is made up of a sparkle-eyed attitude of pure admiration. He looks lovingly at a bygone era before green screen technology and computer animation, where the best fantasies still have their seams showing.
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Pasta Sauna, by Proef (Marije Vogelzang)
Performa Hub: Visited Nov 5th at noon
My mother is Italian. When I tell her I had a bad day she tells me to eat pasta and go to sleep. I’m worried this process will make me fat. I have a lot of bad days.
Marinetti said pasta makes you fat. And slow. And dull. And lazy.
The Pasta Sauna at the Performa Hub slows me down. I’m rushing between appointments. I have to check my email. Instead, I stand in a steamy room and watch Shelley, who is dressed in a white jump suit, take a ball of dough and work it through a pasta maker that is at the top of a 12-foot ladder. It unrolls slowly into a pot of lightly boiling water waiting below. We try not to talk about Performa logistics. I tell her it’s nice to see her in this atmosphere.
An NYU student with short black hair and bright pink lipstick takes photos with a little red camera. People write on the steamed up glass walls of the sauna as if they were dirty cars parked on the street, only they don’t write “wash me.” That I would have noticed. I don’t notice what they write.
Lillie asks me how to pronounce two words in the Manifesto she is reading outside the Sauna doors, inside the Performa Hub. She reads well. I grate cheese onto the pasta (“fat,” I think), and drizzle olive oil (“more fat,” I think), sprinkle salt and pepper, squeeze lemon, add a little rosemary. I sit with Lyra. We talk a little about the website. We talk a little about how good the fresh pasta is. I watch people walk in off the street and go through the lulling, satisfying process of obtaining fresh, free lunch.
Marije Vogelzang is back in the Netherlands by the time I’m sitting here enjoying her “eating design,” but a journalism student from Columbia interviews people on her team. I think about how this girl looks exactly like I imagine a proper journalism student should look: brown hair, glasses, a young face with a serious expression. She even has one of those little notebooks with the spiral binding at the top of the page.
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Meg Stuart: Auf Den Tisch! / At The Table
Barishnakov Arts Center
First response written Saturday Nov. 7, 7:40pm; Location of response M14 Bus; location on bus back left section; Entered bus Ave A between 2nd St. and Houston; Got off bus Ninth Ave; Destination The Kitchen; Mood anxious; Songs played on ipod include Flushed Chest, Joan as Police Woman; Russian Hill, Jellyfish; After the Flood, Talk Talk; Think, Do Make Say Think.
I’d be lying if I said I knew how they got from here to there. All I really know for sure is that I didn’t want to leave when the performance was as over as it was going to be.
“Is improvisation alive and well?” Roselee Goldberg asked.
Yes (in more words) was the answer.
Exposing the physical and psychological makes these performers human, and then very near super human. (I wouldn’t want to watch just anyone in formlessness.) It’s all out here. They’re laying it out: the ugly, the sex, the politics, and blatantly tortured souls. What I know I saw was that they did this because they had to do this.
Suicide attempts called out. Dollar bills torn, and why couldn’t I tear one?
Apple in the mouth; (fake) blood spilling down cheeks. Desperate steps. Eating, kissing, consuming each other.
Second response written Monday Nov. 9, 9:00am; Location of response an apartment in Williamsburg; Mood empty; No music playing.
Yesterday Tan Lin was talking a bit about his Twitter and chalk performance piece. This was in the context of a Writing Live workshop, a deprogramming event that, at best, resists definition. He said he was surprised when so many people stopped to read a long, personal story as it was being written with chalk on the sidewalk. Rebecca Armstrong said this wasn’t surprising, that the personal was the only thing that anyone would stop for in this city. I’m paraphrasing her from memory: the depersonalization of the experience of living and being in New York City (any city?) creates hunger for intimate personal moments. I read this once in a magazine: the spa industry exists to package and sell touch and intimacy to New Yorkers (any city dwellers?) in a non-threatening, consumable way. I’m drawing the obvious conclusion: Meg Stuart’s Auf Den Tisch! is a question, not a filling station.
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William Kentridge
Mon Nov 8th, 8pm at Cedar Lake Ballet
1. Regarding Ideas:
About halfway through his lecture performance with video, William Kentridge tells a story that involves himself, the early morning/late night minutes lying between four and five a.m., a garden, a studio, an alarm system, his wife, a bed, and a video camera. In the story he wakes up with thoughts of an impending (now happening) performance project running through his head. He has an idea on many levels. First, he realizes that he’s awake because the ideas are coming to him now and he must record them somehow; second, he realizes that this process of having the idea is really a part of the idea itself; third, he decides to document the idea via an external visual of the idea process, which is really the same thing as the idea in this case.
He said it: “My job is to make drawings, not to make sense.”
He gets out of bed and walks through his garden. Just the word garden alone, when it comes out of his mouth, evokes a kind of manicured loveliness: something magical and precise and softly colorful in the pre-dawn glow. There must be dew and roses present. He walks across the garden and reaches his studio. Again, though he refers to it as just “my studio,” the image is clearly illuminated. It must have many windows; it must be wood, painted white, perhaps with a wall clinging vine along one or more of the outer walls. He turns off the alarm and walks in the door. The alarm is less visible: is it a little keypad to the right of the door? Does it beep when he punches in the code? Let’s say yes to both, only the beeps must be somewhat faint, more elegant than beeps should be allowed to be.
He gets the video camera from the studio and walks back to his bedroom. He sets up his video camera at the foot of the bed where he and his wife sleep. He tells his wife the camera is not for domestic pornography. And then suddenly, or rather, a few minutes after he’s moved on from the initial story description and into another segment, we get to see footage of the bed, the wife, and the idea process via the artist sitting up sleepless in bed between four and five a.m. Then all sorts of questions, or rather, one specific question arises. Are we watching real-time footage of a man having an idea about having an idea or are watching a writer/actor who planned this pre-recorded performance ingredient (which is really just one idea) precisely because of its charmingly accidental, diary-like quality?
2. Regarding movement:
Roberta Smith said of Kentridge in the New York Times in 2007: “Perhaps because he began as an actor, writer and set designer, he doesn’t exhibit great feeling for the immediacy of the art object. As a result his work is almost always best when presented at a remove, in translation or in motion.”
Claudia La Rocco said of Tere O’Connor in the New York Times in 2009: “At a time when many choreographers are distancing themselves from dance as the central focus of their work and instead placing themselves in a broader context of conceptually driven art and multimedia projects, Mr. O’Connor’s work remains rigorously movement focused.”
Seen in the context of a larger arts-world of colliding pure forms, movement ceases to become something outside the “art object.” Adding elements of motion and choreographed live action does not take Kentridge’s work away from itself or create distance and remove that adds value to some higher level tangible object-based aspect of itself. It is not some way of presenting itself, but rather, just is itself.
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