Jeremy Wade and Pete Drungle / Brooklyn Rail

“I know New Yorkers hate audience interaction,” Jeremy Wade said half apologetically to his small audience before instructing us to get up out of our chairs and engage in a bit of partner-focused aura cleansing. This New Yorker, for one, sure did hate it—all that forced touching and obligatory interaction with strangers. I appreciate, however, how it set the scene for the rest of the performance by emphasizing the communal experience. Wade and musician Pete Drungle, accompanied by percussionist Mike Skinner, used movement, text, sound, music, and a spinning disco ball to whirl the audience with them into a psychedelic vortex of energy and memory.

Although the performers’ respective strengths showed most clearly through music and movement, in this work-in-progress called The Whirling Visitation there ends up being very little distinction between spoken word and gesture. Wade’s jerky gesticulations—as if each movement were halted before completion—seem to originate from all points in his body at once. From Wade’s tongue to his eyebrows and fingertips, his body becomes a container for the same kind of human energy we cleansed in our partners at the beginning of the show. Physicality, in this case, extends to voice as well: singing and spoken word are seamlessly integrated as actions also originating from energy held in the body. Despite this successful continuity, the show would benefit from slimming down the volume of spoken text, which was appropriated in collaboration with Marcos Rosales. A newer investigation for Wade, the text isn’t yet as masterfully integrated as Drungle’s strange and beautiful electronic auditory elements.

Most of the time it looks as if there is something pulsing through Wade and trying to get out—that’s where the text-based drug references make their most complimentary impact. He holds a lighter in between his teeth as he reads from the classic teenage addiction memoir Go Ask Alice or reworked sections from J.T. Leroy’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. While reading, he steps gently from one foot to the other and shakes his fingers to indicate them as the outermost physical limits of his contained internal electricity. Wade and Drungle use guided visualizations and the concepts of alien visitations and psychedelic oblivion in this piece, not only as aesthetic references, but also to try and draw elements of the ecstatic experience into the realm of performance.

The rave culture that Wade is associated with (and to some degree all club dancing) engages movement in its primitive, experiential form: here, the ecstatic trance is visually interpreted. The performers obviously aim beyond metaphor and toward the sublime experience. However, despite audience participation and Wade’s substantial charisma, the work never quite inhabits the space between art and ecstasy. A satisfying interdisciplinary dance piece, it steps right up to the edge of something more.

Link to article HERE

Si Yeon Kim: Barricade / Brooklyn Rail

Si Yeon Kim, Barricade (2008). Digital print, 3.6 × 2.6 ft

As seen through a Western lens, the “problem” with contemporary Korean art is its lack of an easily defined national aesthetic. It doesn’t exhibit visual shorthand comparable to Chinese art, which has a common foundation in the Cultural Revolution, or Japanese art, which is famous for manga and anime. In part, this is because internationally-based Korean artists don’t want to be pigeonholed into a narrow framework based on national identity. Particularly when looking at a younger generation born mostly in the 70s, however, it is both impossible and undesirable to divorce the work from its cultural context: that of globalization intersecting with a very particular domestic traditionalism.

Seoul-based artist Si Yeon Kim places everyday objects into symbolic arrangements so that they become personally poignant melodramas with heavy cultural connotations. In her current exhibition at Gallery Satori, one black and white print from the “Barricade” series (2008) pictures an eggshell, paperclip, burnt match, and bobby pin standing upright on a windowsill. Photographed from the inside, these objects look as if they are both playfully and ominously guarding access to a bright exterior. In another image from that series, a razor blade, broken eggshell, air-filled paper bag, and one of the artist’s signature white spikes are lined up under a bed. Kim clearly spells out the unspeakable in a traditional Korean home: abortion, self-mutilation and, more generally, suffocation and the impulse toward escape.

As a whole, the photographs quite clearly communicate a desire to, well, communicate. Because of the underlying, culturally specific sense conveyed—silence within the home and maintenance of strictly structured outward appearances—the artist’s all too clichéd still lifes are forgivable. The onion on the cutting board and the spilled salt mean tears and bad luck—sure, we get it, and we’re supposed to. The comments aren’t cryptic because they’re intended to be straightforward replacements for verbal communication. They express a specific anger born of living with the expectations of traditional domestic roles. Yet they’re photographed with an overwhelmingly clean, pretty, almost calming aesthetic: the images are mostly white, with soft shadows and an absence of chaos. Every object looks to be in its correct place; Korean culture’s rigidity in terms of outward presentation is embraced in the look of the pieces if not the content.

It’s quite understandable for artists to want to evade national stereotyping. Lee Bul, for instance, one of the most internationally recognized contemporary Korean artists, chose not to be included in the Korean art survey exhibition, Your Bright Future, at LACMA earlier this year. It was the first major attempt to define themes in contemporary Korean art, but his work continues to resist easy categorization by nationality. Looking at Korean identity as it relates to a recently globalized world, however, provides a wider and more productive view. It’s that tension itself that Kim responds to the most: a home only looks like a jail when the one trapped inside can see the world beyond the bars.

Original article HERE