6pm, 8 December 2011, Ellery Queen: The Finishing Stroke at Space O’NewWall
November 30th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Elllery Queen: The Finishing Stroke
November 19th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
8 December 2011 – 8 January 2012
Space O’NewWall
51-2 Seongbuk-dong, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul
South Korea
http://www.onewwall.com
Opening: 6pm, 8 December 2011
Cover Image of Ellery Queen’s The Finishing Stroke, published by Pocket Books in 1959 in USA
Curated by Hyunjoo Byeon
Suppoerted by Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Arts Council Korea, Space O’NewWall
Space O’NewWall is pleased to present Ellery Queen: The Finishing Stroke, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Seoul. Ellery Queen is one of the most renowned contemporary artists and has attracted considerable attention in the international art world throughout his career over 20 years.
Ellery Queen investigates the transformation and circulation of ideas, situating his interest in transferring his real life experience into the context of art. Encompassing a variety of forms such as installation, painting, photograph and publication, Queen’s work examines the way in which art is rendered visible through the mechanism of institution and his interventions and gestures that refer art histories expose and scrutinize the art world.
Born in 1963, UK, Ellery Queen’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows around the world, including Cohen Gallery, New York (1991); ICA, London (1994); Camden Arts Centre, London (1995); Wrightsville! New Art From London, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis (1995); Sensations, Royal Academy of Art, London (1996); Galeria d’Arte Moderne, Bologna, Italy (1997); The Player on the Other Side, P.S.I, New York (1998); Museum of Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2000); New Blood, Saatchi Gallery, London (2004); Yokohama Triennale (2001/2006); Haunch of Venison, London (2008); Gwangju Biennale (2008); Venice Biennale (2003/2009); and BFI Southbank, London (2010).
While preparing for the exhibition since last year, an unexpected event occurred, leading to the absence of the artist in this exhibition. In spite of his disappearance, this exhibition continues the artist’s wish to present his work to the Korean audience, thus appreciates two artists, Roisin Byrne and Bona Park, who share common interests in artistic practices with Queen, contributed to complete his exhibition. Their participation in this exhibition also represents Queen’s idiosyncrasy and flexible attitude towards circulating and sharing ideas. Ellery Queen: The Finishing Stroke, where the traces of the artist is left evident, explores the trajectory of art through the artist’s interventions in the institutional context of art and questions the meaning and the limits of the artist’s gestural presence.
엘러리 퀸의 서울에서의 첫 개인전 《Ellery Queen: The Finishing Stroke》이 스페이스 오뉴월(대표: 서준호)에서 열린다. 엘러리 퀸은 현대미술의 대표적 작가 중 하나로, 30여 년 작품 활동을 해오며 미술계에서 많은 관심과 주목을 받아왔다.
엘러리 퀸은 삶의 경험을 예술의 맥락으로 전환시키는데 관심을 두고, 개념의 변화와 순환을 탐구한다. 작가는 설치, 회화, 사진, 출판물 등과 같은 다양한 매체를 활용해 미술제도 안에서 예술이 만들어지고, 의미를 획득하는 과정을 구체화하는 작업을 해왔고, 미술사를 참조하는 작가의 개입과 제스처를 통해 미술계의 세부를 면밀히 조사하고 드러내왔다.
1963년 영국 출생인 엘러리 퀸은 1989년 런던 골드스미스 대학을 졸업하였고, 네덜란드의 라익스아카데미에서 수학하였다. 영국의 젊은 작가 그룹인 yBa의 일원으로 화려하게 작품 활동을 시작하였고, 동시대 미술의 대표적 작가로 활발한 활동을 하고 있다. 엘러리 퀸은 뉴욕 코헨 갤러리 (1991), 런던 ICA (1994), 런던 캠든 아트 센터 (1995), 워커 아트 센터 (1995), 런던 로얄 아카데미 (1996), 이태리 볼로냐 현대미술관 (1997), 뉴욕 P.S.I (1998), 폴란드 바르샤바 현대미술관 (2000), 런던 사치 갤러리 (2004), 요코하마 트리에날레 (2001/2006), 광주 비엔날레 (2008), 베니스 비엔날레 (2003/2009), 런던 BFI 사우스뱅크 (2010) 등 다수의 국제적 전시에 참여한 바 있다.
지난 해부터 기획을 시작한 본 전시를 준비하는 동안, 예기치 못한 사건이 발생하여 엘러리 퀸은 실종되었다. 하지만 본 전시는 한국의 관객에게 작품을 소개하고 싶어한 엘러리 퀸의 뜻을 이어, 엘러리 퀸의 작품 세계에 영향을 받고, 퀸과 공통의 관심사를 가진 로이신 바이런과 박보나 두 작가의 공헌으로 완성되었다. 두 작가의 전시 참여는 엘러리 퀸이 지닌 개념의 순환과 공유에 대한 독특할 정도로 열린 태도를 나타내는 하나의 방식으로도 작동한다. 작가의 부재에도 불구하고 엘러리 퀸의 자취를 극명하게 선보이는 《Ellery Queen: The Finishing Stroke》전은 작가의 미술제도에 대한 개입을 통해 미술의 궤도를 탐색하고, 미술제도와 전시의 맥락에서 예술가의 역할, 의미를 여러 각도에서 조명하여 예술 인식에 대한 지평을 넓히고자 한다.
About
May 20th, 2011 Comments Off
Hyunjoo Byeon is a curator based in Seoul. Her curated projects include Tourist’s Dream, Project Space 2 at Iniva, London, 2010; Flexible Aura, Brain Factory, Seoul, 2009; Jason Underhill’s Sing Your Heart Out, part of Event Horizon of GSK Contemporary, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2008-09; Here Once Again, SNU Museum of Art/Alternative Space Loop, Seoul, 2008. These projects draw on her concern as a curator with curatorial position on exhibition aesthetics and its rhetoric and reconfigurating impact on the relation with the audience. Byeon has achieved her MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2008 and BAs in Art History and Business Administration from Ewha Womans University, Seoul. She was selected as a participating curator for the Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course in 2009; has contributed several texts on contemporary art to publications including Dual Mirage Part 1 and Part 2 and is a contributor to the Moving Index (http://artoffice.org). Besides Byeon has participated in the exhibition Cooperation, not Corporation, ITS-Z1, Belgrade, 2010 and the symposium Institution as Medium, Kunstahalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2010, as an invited panel. She is working as a lecturer at Kaywon School of Art and Design, South Korea and Curating Subjects which she has translated into Korean will be published by SAMUSO and Hyunsil Moonhwa Yeongoo in 2012.
변현주는 서울을 중심으로 활동 중인 큐레이터이다. <Here Once Again – 예술과 영화가 소통하는 접점>, <Jason Underhill’s Sing Your Heart Out>, <Flexible Aura>, <Tourist’s Dream> 등 대안공간 루프/서울대 미술관, 런던 로얄 아카데미, 브레인 팩토리, 런던 이니바 외 다수의 장소에서 개최된 전시를 기획했다. 이외에도 세르비아 ITS-Z1에서 열린 전시 <Cooperation, not Corporation>, 독일 쿤스트할레 프리데리치아눔에서 개최된 심포지엄 <Institution as Medium> 등 국제적 전시와 학회에 초대되어 참가한 바 있다. 런던 골드스미스에서 MFA 큐레이팅 학위, 이화여자대학교에서 경영학과 미술사 학사를 취득했으며, 2009년 광주 비엔날레 국제 큐레이터 코스 참여 큐레이터로 선정되어 참여한 바 있다. 동시대 미술에 관한 비평과 글을 서적 <Dual Mirage> part 1과 part 2 등에 기고했으며, The Moving Index (http://artoffice.org)의 필진이다. 계원예술대학에 출강하고 있고, 한글판으로 번역한 큐레이팅에 관련된 선집 <Curating Subjects>이 2012년 현실문화연구와 사무소에서 출판될 예정이다.
Cooperation, not Corporation
May 7th, 2011 Comments Off
Cooperation, not Corporation
ITS-Z1, Belgrade, Serbia
- Invited as participating curator for the exhibition Cooperation, not Corporation which was curated by Maja Ciric and David Goldenberg
- Contributed a text for artist Bona Park’s work Not A But B
Bona Park, Not A But B, 2010
Hyunjoo Byeon
A bitter joke. It is a common feature that we are presented when encountering Bona Park’s work. Her work in various mediums such as video, photograph, installation and performance subtly fabricates situations that can be found in daily life and lets the spectator interface within the awkward state of affairs. The artist does not attempt to deceive the viewer by trapping them between fiction and reality, yet rather she exposes the absurdity of which is beyond notice through her witty yet pungent play.
In Not A But B (2010) Park presents another joke resisting formal orthodoxies. The artist constitutes her critical parameter for the perception of a work of art, exploring how the contextual integration of an artwork’s authority is emerged.
The work is a novel project that appropriates varied ideas from different people. Commissioned by Korean curator Dae-bum Lee for his project Novel 01: In Search of Jun-ho Lee, a collection of artists’ writings including an imagined character named Jun-ho Lee, Bona Park has taken as its starting point from the unrealised writing by Mikolaj Lozinski. Lozinski renounced his plan to write a novel about a person who has the same name with a famous person. Park found Lozinski’s discarded scheme in Italian curator Cecilia Cuida’s archival project Forgotten Ideas, which collects abandoned ideas from diverse artists, curators, writers and other creators, and wrote about Jun-ho Lee. Jun-ho in Park’s novel named after a famous Korean activist who was against for the Japanese colonisation, but she has a tedious and unsatisfying life, teaching English at the small institution while being pressured to compare her life with the activist.
Not A But B is the collective ideas, which resembles Lee’s and Cuida’s associated projects; borrows its motive from Lozinski’s idea; and collates the narrative story created by Park. Additionally, the process of conceiving various ideas extends as it involves a number of participants in its project-in-progress. Originally written in Korean, it will be translated into multiple languages when the work is presented in different countries, including the translators as participants.
Encompassing certain related ideas and blurring the boundaries of the authority of an artwork, Park’s Not A But B is an indication of a transformation in the state of appropriation. However, as Park’s humorous approach in her practice takes a gesture of withdrawal, the use of appropriation in her work differs from appropriation high-lighted in the mid 1990s, which aimed to subvert the dominant system in a more peremptory way. Appropriated ideas in Not A But B address not the death of the author, but a possible format which both an individual and collective ideas coexist; it does not question to whom the work belongs; it rather seeks for a new subjectivity by mapping of where it stands in relation to the surrounding notions. The work is a continuation of the journey in a search for a certainty in the uncertain flow of ideas.
It might be early to say if the journey to search for its new subjectivism would succeed or not. Instead, I would rather say that Bona Park’s playful gesture seems to suggest new terms of approach to intervene in the pretentious rhetoric that echoes in the dominance of Western ideas and the market power in art. Her bitter joke, which seems at once to veer away from the positive engagement of the status of the current circumstance, paradoxically discloses the hidden overwrought grandiosity, thus the withdrawal gesture located in her work very self-consciously becomes a gentle shout which urges the awakening. With this intriguing joke, setting up a stage for interaction with the viewer, the relationship between ideas and socio-cultural paradigms is re-contextualised. And it would be a step to find post autonomy in contemporary art.
The Rise of Tangled Desires in the City
May 7th, 2011 Comments Off
The following text is contributed to the publication Dual Mirage Part 1: Does a mirage actually exist? If so where is it and what is it? published by Rock-Paper-Scissors in 2010.
The plan for Britain’s biggest piece of public art has recently been unveiled. Designed by Turner Prize-winning artist Anish Kapoor and structural engineer Cecil Balmond, the 115 metre-tall red spiral steel tower ArcelorMittal Orbit will be built for the 2012 Olympic Park in Stratford, East London. This gigantic sculpture will be taller than Big Ben and the Statue of Liberty in New York and is expected to offer views of 250 acres of the Olympic Park, as well as London’s skyline, for 700 people an hour from a viewing platform. Visitors will be able to take a trip up and down by using either a huge lift or a looping stairway. It will cost £19.1 million to produce and £16 million will be funded by Lakshmi Mittal, the steel magnate, as the tower is named after his company’s name.
It is claimed that this spectacular piece will be the artist’s “commission of a lifetime”. The Mumbai-born British artist Anish Kapoor is well known for his abstract sculptures that excavate an inner landscape of psychology by exploring the interaction between the opposites. He investigates the void which is filled with a nothingness which ironically draws on presence. With his enigmatic yet poetic artworks, Kapoor is one of the most distinguished artists of our time and his retrospective show at the Royal Academy in 2009 was the most successful exhibition by a living artist held at the RA, attracting about 280,000 visitors. In his artistic practice, scale is an important tool of sculpture and it invites the viewer to confound spatial perception. In fact, the ArcelorMittal Orbit is not his first large-scale sculpture. Kapoor created the fleshy and gigantic site-specific installation Marsyas[1] that intervened between the indoor and outdoor space of the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in 2002. His Cloud Gate (2006), a 110-tonne polished steel sculpture for the Millennium Park in Chicago, also falls into this category. He explains that every idea has its scale and through the scale the artist creates a sense of the sublime, which he considers his central artistic goal, by encouraging the spectator to physically experience a piece of art which is often only partially visible from one perspective. Hence it seems the ArcelorMittal Orbit would be Kapoor’s artwork of a lifetime.
Being concerned with his artistic practice and his motif of the sublime which the ArcelorMittal Orbit will present with its breathtaking scale, I should be excited to encounter this moment of wonder that will be created by Kapoor, however, I was rather frightened when I saw the news. Perhaps, the sculpture seems to represent the rise of tangled desires reaching up to the sky instead of “something to arouse curiosity and wonder” as London’s mayor Boris Johnson said. There are too many entwined desires underlying the piece to call it simply a work of art.
Ever since the success of the Angel of the North in Gateshead in England, the much loved public art piece by the artist Anthony Gormley, the nation seems too eager to produce a landmark or icon of the region and this probably has driven Boris Johnson’s desire to build his political monument for the 2012 London Olympic. As he said, Johnson aims to “have a stunning spectacle in East London that will be recognised around the world”. It is hoped it will create a permanent visitor attraction for generations to come after the Olympic. Nevertheless, in the history of big symbolic London visitor attractions, some of them were not successful such as the Brunel’s Victorian Thames Tunnel which is now used by tube trains and the Festival of Britain Skylon by Winston Churchill. Johnson adds that the ArcelorMittal Orbit will make London the world capital of arts and culture and become the perfect iconic cultural legacy. Yet it is also considered that it is motivated by the comparison of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Whereas the ArcelorMittal Orbit will be built under the name of art, the Eiffel tower was constructed as an entrance for the Exposition Universelle in 1889, not as a public art piece but as a piece of engineering, and yet it became a work of art in the eye of the public as time passed. It seems the Orbit is instrumentalised as a commodity of this political propaganda by borrowing the name of art. The questions regarding his policy are also as follows: if he considers London as the capital of arts and culture, why does this city need to rival other cities’ landmarks? Why doesn’t he invest and fund emerging artists, art institutions and art schools to promote this city’s artistic and cultural legacy instead of raising the gigantic structure?
The name of the tower also seems to illustrate the glory of a fortune in our time rather than the name of an artwork. The piece takes its name from Europe’s richest man Lakshmi Mittal, the owner of ArcelorMittal. The company will fund most of the estimated budget and it will be a sponsor of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012. Regardless of the fact that ArcelorMittal is claimed to have resisted the EU emissions trading scheme and has been questioned on other matters of morality in its industry, Mittal’s desire to glorify his name seems to be achieved through his fortune.
In the ArcelorMittal Orbit, Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond refer to the Tower of Babel as an influence: “there is a kind of medieval sense to it of reaching up to the sky, building the impossible.” It sounds amusing that Kapoor and Balmond cited the failed tower since it attempted to dedicate its glory to a man, to “make a name” for the sponsors. It might be too early to say how this piece will be conceived and appreciated by the public even though this gigantic sculpture seems more an eruption of tangled desires than a work of art. It may be quite successful if the artist intentionally aims to represent the reality of our epoch where it is impossible to reach up to the sky without manifesting political, economic and social entangled desires; to expose the hidden mechanism of a society with its bizarre form as an autonomous power of the resistance of art and with its paradoxical character in art. Boris Groys said that the artistic appropriation of iconoclasm that produces the paradox-objects could be called modern works of art. And such art does not reduce itself to the representation of power – it participates in the struggle for power that it interprets as the only way in which the true balance of power could reveal itself [2]. As Groys argues, it can be enough if the hideous piece discloses the complicated desires in it as well as the relation between art and power. Otherwise, the steel tower can always be recycled.
