Focus on the Viewer: The Fifth Gwangju Biennial
By Thalia Vrachopoulos
This Biennial’s theme "A Grain of Dust a Drop of Water," with its agricultural allusions, contains an element of earthiness akin to the peasantry so close to the heart of Korean culture. Oftentimes, a grain of dust and a drop of water are all a farmer has had, but out of these humble materials he has wrought the miracle of creation. To examine this metaphor as an operant factor in art artistic director Yongwoo Lee transformed the structure of the Biennial, integrating feedback from the viewer by appointing viewer-participants. Lee, who earned his Ph.D from Oxford, is a definitive source on Biennials and has written widely on this topic, and participated in countless international shows as panelist, speaker and curator. Lee’s extensive familiarity with the historic plight and struggle of Koreans to overcome political oppression makes him especially suited for the task of heading this endeavor in its innovative approach: to break with past models by using democratic methods of selection. When a member of the press asked Lee how he arrived at his methodology and the artist-participant concept, he explained that in past years lay audiences perceived the Biennial as a rarefied event slated for specialists. Consequently, he wanted to overcome this shortcoming by involving the viewer as much as possible both within the viewer process, as well as, with the actual selection of artworks.
Lee and his artistic director Kerry Brougher, currently the Director of Art Programs and Chief Curator of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, organized a task force to study the patterns of three groups of audiences from forty-two countries; the general public, the professional art producers (sans artists,) and cultural activists. Since it was decided that the focus of this Biennial would be on the viewer, the artist selection was done after the panel convened and 60 artists were chosen to collaborate with 60 viewer participants, one pair from the same geographic area. For the most part the collaborations were amicable but as with any large-scale project there were some problems when the pair did not agree on the methods or product. The viewer-participant’s trepidation is articulated in a statement by Jahman Oladejo Anikulapo a journalist who wrote about his experience with the Nigerian photographer Muyiwa Osifuye when at the inception of their collaboration he mused "I h[ave] to be careful not to offend this God" and then "I was ever so reluctant to kick-start our contact" and finally "at the end of the third session, I discovered that: The Artist is no God;" However, all in all the show’s intent was reflected in the exhibited art which included music, dance, new media and film, and we anticipate eagerly the further development of this theme in future projects.
Since the late seventies university pedagogy has been broadening its scope and expanding into inter-disciplinary, multi-cultural approaches, in fact to be politically correct today means to be inclusive. So why not apply this method to Biennials? Yet, up to now, and though there have been some marginalized artists included in these shows, art has been defined in a relatively narrow sense and the audience has remained virtually passive. The most evident exception to this is new media art that contains interactive components that involve audience participation but that is not traditionally considered fine art per se. And, even though art specialists have attempted to broaden the categories, it was necessary to attain the blessing of the Biennial conduit to strike the final blow to art officialdom’s elitist practices. The Gwangju Biennial’s producers, professionals and lay audiences, have afforded us the chance to see an event that in its inclusive scope addresses the hot issue and question "who is the audience?"
As explained by the exhibition designers Yoongyo Jang and Changhoon Shin the show in the main Biennial Hall is organized by sub-themes; the first is entitled A Grain of Dust: A Map of the Cell; the second theme is A Drop of Water: Map of Flow; and the third, Dust+Water=Synthesis. Finally, on the ground floor is The Club Contour: Theatrical Topography where performances and symposia take place incorporated with installations. These two designers created spaces that for the most part successfully highlight the artworks, but at certain points their design infrastructure overwhelms the art as seen in the cubicles of the third level and the elevated ramps that led to nowhere special.
During the opening week of September 8th The Club Contour was the site of a symposium with the theme "The Audience: Who are they? Six international critic participants discussed the topic while offering their suggestions for future possibilities. Charlotte Bydler from the University of Uupsala at Stockholm spoke brilliantly on her view that the Biennial despite some of its shortcomings, in its performative aspects and viewer-active focus, is serving to democratize the arts. Eleanor Heartney a New York-based critic, sees Biennials as announcers of positive world change, and she asserted that these venues can serve as forums for reconciling cultural differences by addressing some relevant questions such as: who is the exhibition for?; what is its purpose?; who are its viewers?; is there a conflict?; can it be reconciled?; how far should one go in breaking down the borders and how can it be accomplished? Kwok-kian Chow, Director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Singapore, pointed out the value of this Biennial in its consideration of the local audience within the larger context. He feels that the collaboration between the local citizenry with the international community is fruitful in fostering understanding and at the very least promotes artistic endeavor. As to its real success, Chow thinks that we must await the responses of local audiences from whom we can learn for the future.
The Club area is also the site of many performances one of which was by Sincha Hong, Korea’s premier performance artist who executed a sound piece by John Cage. Cage wrote music for keyboards throughout his life mostly to accompany modern dance performances using electronic extensions, chance and performer collaboration. Among Hong’s many Cage performances was one with composer Joshua Pierce at the Seoul NYMAX Festival and the Anthology Film Archive’s Courthouse Theater in New York City in 1994. The present performance was marked by the absence of dance movement yet it was an emotionally charged and dynamic one composed of atonal sounds and true to Cage, incorporated the element of chance. It is significant to note that this seminal artist-figure to Korea’s history never looses luster but rather Hong attains breadth, scope and complexity taking on ever-newer challenging projects.
New York based media artist Larry Litt performed a stand-up comedy piece entitled the Blame Show, about cultural censorship and media democracy. In this wacky yet spontaneously funny show Litt repeated the reasons that numerous interviewed figures offered as causes for the world’s problems. Litt’s charming fun-filled irony and punning wit along with the lively audience responses resulted many times over in fits of laughter while he simultaneously landed a broadside into the ranks of complacent audiences. The Club area is also the site of installations organized by the dynamic Tanja Weingartner, assistant curator of the club show presenting a young section of upcoming international talents like Kolkoz (video-games/France), Markus Wetzel (Gwangju Metro Station/ Switzerland) and Monika Goetz (light/ room installation/Germany.) Wetzel for example, created a Metro Station installation in front of the main hall of the Gwangju Biennial out of his interest in representing islands both as real places and as projections of his imagination. Wetzel who is a Swiss New York-based artist works both with installation and virtual media to express alternate realities as catalysts for achieving inner states inspired by exterior stimuli. His work contains a strong social dimension that is evident in the public projects he undertakes such as the ‘metro’ as well as in their focus that deals with the idea of escaping from the city to some island. Wetzel appropriates or takes off from the works of Martin Kippenberger who created metro stations in parts of Europe as a way of both exchange and connection between disparate places. Wetzel made his Gwangju project as a metro stop but one that is graffittoed which is something not usually encountered in Korean culture. Wetzel likes to think of his metro project as a way of enacting both an exit from reality and entry into utopia.
Some of the most significant examples are situated in the gallery Grain of Dust but which are also about the most nihilistic and depressing subjects including terrorist attacks, military interventions, and burnt cadavers. The team from Cameroon of Che Didian Anye a human rights activist, and Malam an artist collective, created such a work. As they explain their goal, it was to "show what people never saw in New York or in the media" about events like September 11th, 2001. There are charred bodies still at their computers, the victims roasted beyond recognition in blackened shreds yet as the team intends us to take from their effort a lesson of peace, it is understandable that they would use this shocking subject with which to affect a change. Yet, another artwork that strikes terror in the hearts of its viewers is by Richard Rose and Jim Sanborn entitled The Critical Assembly and is exhibited in close proximity to the former. While Sanborn is an installation artist, Rose is the Pulitzer Prize author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and a vast series of literature on related topics. Theirs is an installation about the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico where the atomic bomb was developed between 1943-1955. The horrific sounds of apocalyptic music repelling in its Stockhausen-like cautionary tone are emitted from an enclosed corner gallery. Once you enter the darkened room you are faced with an appalling array of unfamiliar machinery that appears to be in the midst of some evil process of production. This installation was put together out of a variety of vintage equipment from the original site in New Mexico. According to its authors, their work is meant to evoke "the brilliance of the collective human mind and the devastating power of knowledge," and "is about the allure of pure science and the ethical dilemmas scientific researchers have faced for decades." This was one of the most successful works in the show that not only shocked audiences out of their stupor, but that was also aesthetically a very beautiful work in the sublimity of its gleaming surfaces and mercurial darkness. Other consequential examples on this level include the River of Time, 2004, a collaboration between Yasuo Kobayashi a professor who served as the viewer participant and the artist Tatsuo Miyajima. Their installation consists of a darkened room whose floor is composed of lights that symbolize the isles of the immortals in the primordial river of life, according to Asian legend. When first entering the elicited response is disjunctive but after the eyes adjust to the dark, the resulting feeling is of such awe reminiscent of a universal sigh akin to that felt when viewing the last part of the film 2001 Space Odyssey.
The second theme artworks offer a great contrast and some of the most beautiful pieces are to be seen in this level A Drop of Water: Map of Flow. The team of Barbara Edelstein as artist and Jianjun Zhang as viewer participant collaborated on a project called The Garden of Wishing Trees. Their mutual interest in the combination of man, nature, and culture brought them together to draw inspiration from global ethnic myths of wishing trees resulting in their endeavor of the garden. While somewhat alluding to these myths their garden is not literal but imaginative and simultaneously evocative. These composite trees are made of resin that appear like ice sculptures set within Plexiglas boxes full of clear water. Because the material from which they are constructed appears like crystal and the container in which they are set seems like it’s full of water, the resulting exchange between solid and void is paradoxical. It appears as if the tree is made of ice and is melting into the Plexiglas container, yet in reality they are both made of solid material. Each tree is made of two different wish-inscribed leaves from dissimilar plants that appear on the same limb thereby alluding to connection. They can also be read in terms of the Apocalypse, in which St. John the Apostle in Chapter 22, speaks of the leaves on the Tree of Life as "the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations." Edelstein and Zhang’s installation promotes peace and brotherhood in its collaborative aspects but this is not to say it is neutralized. The viewer is encouraged to take home a leaf fashioned by Edelstein, inscribe it with a wish, photograph it, and mail it back to the duo that would consequently re-use it in a future artwork.
The next level up incorporates both the dust and water and its aim is synthesis between the dualisms of death/life, yin/yang, material/spiritual. It is divided into Dust +Water-Up and Dust + Water- Down. The Greek team Amalia Frangouli a viewer participant, whose real life occupation is as an office worker, and Nayia Frangouli a Yale graduate in communication design cooperated on a project called Structures that are built for transparent reasons, 2004. They created a transparent replica of the Korean parliament building as a responsive to the local community and to show their concerns about the environment and democracy. By creating an environment through projected images they feel that their work would "succeed as a symbolic notion of the public being outside and inside" simultaneously. The team of Annie Ratti an Italian installation artist and Jeonyong Lee a former North Korean who now lives in Gwangju, created a map of the Korean peninsula entitled Homage to Korea, 2004 in a symbolic and artistic gesture that depicts the two Koreas. Split in the middle by a transparent wall the mound of earth dotted with disparate cultural ephemera (toys, clothing, furnishings, food cans, money, souvenirs and photos of Korean politicians) is indeed a powerful work that drives home the issue in everyone’s mind: the re-unification of Korea. By highlighting the separation yet proximate relationship between the two sectors Ratti and Lee seek to awaken audience response in the effort to affect a positive change.
The biggest problem encountered by the teams was in their initial encounters perceiving future problems in communication between viewer-participant and artist. This concern is seen in the statement of viewer-participant Jungeun Lee a young local student who collaborated with the SAA art collective on a hair salon project. Lee says "I worried about not being able to communicate with the artists at first" but, she continues "on the contrary, it worked out better because we came from different angles" that show " the difference in our methods of expression." The SAA artists had already done a hair salon project in Gwangju, and were thinking about a future project along the same lines when they met their viewer participant and discovered that coincidentally her mother runs a beauty shop. Lee offered many practical suggestions to the team such as creating separate booths to give clients additional privacy and to allow them to experiment with cosmetics without professional assistance. Male and female viewers could go in and have a haircut or manicure by one of the many stylists behind the pump-up chairs in the individual booths. The astounding success of this installation was evident when, at the opening, long lines of eager crowds waited to experience this work in progress at first hand.
While it is a fact that the obvious questions raised by the Gwangju Biennial are concerned with issues of audience participation, cultural exchange, and ethnic cooperation but there exist also those questions that are not immediately apparent such as: What is the role of art? What are its goals? Should it reflect social issues? If so to what extent? Another aspect of this show is its substantial body of political art, which in itself instigates questions. Political art may reflect the burning issues of its time but this genre also begs the question, when does art stop being art to become reportage? It is believed that if an artwork drives the point home to the viewer shaking him out of his complacency then it is successful. Well, many believe that an illustrated journal article with pictures can do the same. So, why art? Art is a very powerful communication tool and if it accomplishes the intended goals of the artist then its purpose will have been served. Two years ago political art was shown infrequently, now it is a welcoming change to see that the spirit of protest is still alive.
