Good Sleep, Bad Sleep, and Bizaare Sleep
Beck, Jee-sook | Art Critic, Director of Atelier Hermès,
Seoul, 2012
The dramatic rescue of 33 miners trapped 700 meters underground for 69
days; I watched the scene live on the internet in Amherst, a small town in Eastern U.S. I expected a breathtaking drama. To an “audience” like me who was used to sleek equipments in science fiction movies,
the rescue capsule in Chile looked rather quite shabby. The whole atmosphere at
the scene seemed kind of awkward without the sound of noisy news anchors of
Korean TV and usual excitements and ceremonies common in Korean TV. I couldn’t stay
up until the end. The repeated journey of the rescue capsule named Phoenix “throwing up” miners one by one at one hour
each was just too long. I was not a tourist, nor an international student, nor
an immigrant in America.
I was in an ill-defined state living an isolated rural life. My desire to
participate in an emotional conclusion of a disaster as a world citizen faded
away. - The End.
When I noticed Chilean Capsule among the list of artworks for Rho
Jae Oon’s solo exhibition Mulian Mulian, I was reminded of the actual
rescue one year ago. It had already been buried deep in the back of my memory
bank. Is the new start always possible as long as there is someone who
remembers it, even though the event is over? I was curious how the artist would
represent the event. Chilean Capsule was standing abreast to the high
pillar in the middle of the exhibition hall. The colors of its Chilean flag
were removed by white paint and the capsule was reduced from the actual size so
it’s too small to fit a person in. Standing there slightly tilted without the
real rescue function, Chilean Capsule seemed to reconstruct my
impression in a way. For instance, it looked to be a humble, simple, yet
serious and careful symbol of salvation out of an audience’s expectation who remembers
living in the time of hyper-marketing of augmented reality beyond the
spectacles of a society.
On the other hand, the structure looked like a small monument encompassing
all the subjects of the exhibition due to its color, shape and the location.
This is a research process about the artistic methods trying to considerably
offer the thinking about the ethical meaning that comes with the act of
watching or displaying someone else’s disaster. It stands there wondering as
the result of an “artistic experiment or an adventure of Rho’s style reasoning the
globally spread disease, famine, and the hell.”[i] As a matter of fact,
an artist cannot stay indifferent to the pain of others. Still, the artist
should not abuse his artistic right by habitually using a disaster happened to
someone else (even though unintentional) as a subject matter or enjoy it as a
bad taste. He cannot be too apathetic or overdo it. The representation of a
disaster must not be either too realistic or too abstract. Facing the series of
questions such as where do you draw the line for the dignified artistic
representation of a disaster or is it really necessary to have the audience’s
empathy and affinity in the process[ii], the monument
bounces them off instead of answering right away.
Strictly speaking the monument is more closely related to the ‘post-event’
rather than the event itself. Of course all the monuments conform to the
representation of the post-event. However, in this case, it means the total sum
of all the consequences caused by the disaster, including a will to settle and
overcome the disaster and providing preparation for a disaster as well as
reshuffling of unexpected encounters. In a sense, a disaster and post-disaster
are indistinguishable, but the experiences of post-disaster go beyond the area
of the threshold of the consciousness. For instance, the “capsule” might represent the miracle of all the survivors’ return and yet
the miracle preoccupies the traces of trauma surfacing in-between various
events of daily lives the survivors had to endure after the rescue. The
disaster is officially recognized but the post-disaster is just an individual
existence; struggling in the sea of questions without finding any answer. Such
situation is what Chilean Capsule wants to remember, as long as it can.
It is not important here to determine whether the adventure of Rho trying to heal the
collective post-traumatic memory loss is appropriating the Baron Münchausen’s exaggeration or his
artistic restoration experiment is citing Bertolt Brecht’s estrangement
effect. Also, even if his work method seems to resemble the penance of Pillar
Simeon of the 4th century who stayed up on top of the column for 37
years or the “journey” of Howard Hughes who stayed in a
penthouse of a hotel watching multiple monitors in his later years, it does not
seem necessary to emphasize that here; although the artist rallies all these
quite often and Howard Hughes’ method seems to be preferred. In this
exhibition, Rho’s “remedy”
rather reveals its detailed existence through Framesize that is played
in variation at different locations in the exhibition.
Paul Virilio said in electronic-information science, displaying the
information on monitoring screen is more important than storing it.[iii] Meanwhile, Rho considers the
monitoring screen itself, meaning the frame, as the more important information.
In the environment where various displays have become the core media and a
ubiquitous interface in our time, Framesize establishes a kind of a
frame-scape by modifying the frame’s color, shape, size, and material.
Initially the idea came from the fact that a movie or the concept of virtual
reality is commonly used all too voluntarily and conventionally. Then, it was
devised to make a momentary lapse of reason or to place a temporary limit. The “framesizes”
scattered over the exhibition hall through the gap of
momentary pause create infinitively expandable visual rhythm through the sum,
distribution and reiteration of the simplest geometric figure. When this frame
is written in musical notes in a melody and sung I realize the point that the intrinsic
rate arises from the traditional role of the frame through reflection (simply
through a mirror) and passing (for example, the window of a running train). Now
what’s more important in Framesize is to make a link to information, or
even hacking information rather than uploading information.
In regard to disaster, Framesize originally does not even bother
trying to reproduce its conditions and details or over-produce information.
Instead the images reflected on the surface of the frame make audience to link
other works in the exhibition. In the process, it is inviting the audience to
put on their own conventions while fulfill the different layers of different
habitus built in the art works. Or they can imagine passing through a hollow
frame in a split second while moving through Framesize filled with
diffused reflection of material. The void of meaning makes people to look at
the disaster from the opposite perspective of how it is usually portrayed in
disaster movies and asks them to look at special broadcast on disasters
sideways. While refusing the result and purpose the typical screening monitors
offer, people willingly slide into the frame and are agitated in the landscape
of a disaster. For instance, we may be able to hack into the existence of the
people remaining at the scene of a disaster through the path of Framesize.
The people affected by a disaster cannot view or show the scene of disaster in
a strict sense. There is no way of knowing how they view the world in front of
an indistinguishable and crushed mass in the landscape, or the elimination of
familiarity, or the addition of an anamorphosis. Henri-Pierre Jeudy says that
the people’s view is closer to that of an artist when it slides away from our
view. The look in artist’s eyes[iv] here means the
request for using the principles of interlocking and reciprocity of different
views in order to activate the connivance within various, unknown, and
different intimacies in representing the landscape of a disaster.
The collapse of the Chilean mine suggests the most extreme landscape of a
disaster where habitus of the perspective is suddenly collapsed and flattened.
In the scenario of the collapse, the fact that there is no casualty but
survivors removes the feeling of distance at once by pulling us violently up
close to the scene. Being buried alive is a terrible-enough nightmare just
thinking about it. Even feeling claustrophobia seems natural. Since the state
of panic in normal life is caused by inputting wrong information from body or
sub-consciousness, it can be overcome by inputting correct information. The
healing method which helps one to overcome the fear of death by repeatedly
reminding the fact that one can never die from a panic disorder is a good
example. However, the fear of being buried alive escalates because of the fact
of being alive at the moment. The Chilean miners are said to have endured the
time in the blacked out underground mine shaft by watching movies and making
video calls. The scenes they watched are exactly the same as the dreams and
what would be displayed on the screen of their dreams during the RAM state of
sleeping. Perhaps the frame of this screen would be quite bigger in aspect
ratio than The Highest, The Lowest because the “depth” would be at least 700 meters underground. The fact that the deep
sleep like death is one of the symptoms for posttraumatic stress can even be
very logical.
In his book, Kriegsfibel (War Primer), Brecht displays a picture of
soldiers napping in broad daylight. Be it inside a trench or just on the
ground, wherever they lie seem to be the tombs. These young soldiers are taking
a nap within the white line drawn up by the engineering battalion after
removing landmines to create safe passages.[v] In other words, they
are sleeping within the white frame set up for safety. We see Jataka Mirrors
(Mirrors of Previous Birth) in their sleep. Rather, Jataka Mirrors is
the dream we, together or alone, imagine encountering a disaster. Jakata is the
painting about Buddha’s whole life. The artist combines this painting with the
idea of a Karma Mirror, reflecting the sins one committed in his life, to
create a new structure. The result is a kind of a mirror room constructed of
red acrylic mirrors and aluminum poles. Acrylic mirrors are the frames in
various aspect ratios shown throughout the 100 years of film history. Audience
can see themselves reflected on these frames and the reflections are reflected
yet again on other frames located left, right, and below them while they are
moving around dispersedly. Due to the incidental distortions of images created
by acrylic mirrors on this mirror room, and the red tone, audience may feel
dizzy from self-image, images of image, and infinite images of whirls.
Virilio explains that children usually repeat the same play over and over
in order to resist the adult’s logical time of disciplining them to fill the
mental state of void. Whirlwind, circle dance, and unbalanced play appearing
commonly in children’s play, which vaguely equalize the play with disobedience,
are said to be repeated as they increase the sense of vertigo and confusion;
and joy and pleasure are acquired through them. Unlike playing with a ball
where you need to keep your eyes on the ball constantly, such a children’s play
as ‘what time is it, Mr. Wolf?’ a typical image play where a brief moment of
Mr. Wolf twisting his body between things seen and unseen are imagined.[vi] To see your past
life and karma, Jataka Mirrors makes you to immerse in a familiar
imagination play in a child’s body. The forgotten past and future enter into
the black hole of a play.
Virilio extracts the concept of the picnolepsie from the momentary symptom
of epilepsy such as children not being able to explain the event they had seen
during the day, or quite a normal grown-up dropping a cup in the blink of an
eye.[vii] Just like the RAM
sleeping state, where you are sleeping but you are dreaming, and you do not
remember your dream; this is related to the blind spot, the unseen areas of a
moment sandwiched in-between seeing. Virilio wants to ensure the normality of
the picnolepsie in contrast to modernity which is trying to wake this “entre-deux” up forcibly, the unseen and lost moments, into the state of
awareness. “Picno” is a prefix
originated from Greek, meaning frequent or perpetual. “Lepsis,” meaning seizure, paralysis, or convulsion of nerve is added to it,
and picnolepsie can be interpreted as a frequent occurrence of temporary loss
of memory. It has become to mean the opposite of the rapid awakening of the
level of awareness from some time ago. In Jataka Mirrors, people are
reflected off the acrylic mirror surface of various aspect ratios and move
around, and then pass through the empty space in-between. In this process,
people witness the simple and pure pause, disintegration and reappearance of
existence, and the phenomenon of time separation; and finally through all these
people restore the capability of picnolepsie which had been suppressed by the
speed of modern society’s image. From this perspective, these artworks can be
said to prefer the montages of Georges Malis’ early movies where the
nonexistence was shown just as is, while rejecting the cinematic special
effects which try to embrace the nonexistence in a film. Consequently, at the
moment when impossible, paranormal, and miraculous forms break down in between
frames, Jataka Mirrors elucidates the “East-Asian” state of picnolepsie that the movie is the Jataka painting of our
era and the screen is the clear Karma mirror standing in front of hell of the
present time.
When we are training the skill of the picnolepsie exposing the “in-between
time” by reversing the current that is trying to fill
the void of memory with the probability of sequence led by the rationality, we
can finally be full of our own time by putting the unstable structure of
mediating time into common use. Like Jataka Mirrors, this technique can
be applied to other individual works[viii] or working methods.
But when the artist’s works are scattered in a public place like an exhibition
hall, now the picnolepsie is substituted as one method of viewing. Compared to Rho’s previous
exhibitions where various images of collected scenes from internet, films,
videos, and TV are displayed on monitors, this method of viewing becomes
especially apparent for Mulian, Mulian which is composed of objets d’art,
flat surfaces, installations, and paintings. This is due to the possibility of
the absent space appearing between objects by broadening the view to be the
perception as the points of view instead of using more common viewing method of
tuning one-on-one with monitors. Also all the art works with quite different
levels of sensation, different degrees of representation, and different methods
of installation all melt the boundaries between truth and illusion, reality and
appearance, and live sound and auditory hallucination by securing the
fundamental of the time of the moment where it is possible to enter the
different world of logic within the exhibition hall. The Goryeojang, Burying
the Starved Alive of 2011 is a kind of double print where a scene from the
movie with the same title, directed by Kim Ki-Young (1922~1998) in 1963, is
processed and printed. It is also a dissolving view overlapping the moment of
the execution. From this, it becomes a foundation for another layer of a
meaning to stick out. There I can see a protrusion of a satellite picture
depicting the tombs of the victims of starvation in North Korea. To sum it up; “if the hell
exists within the heart of human beings regardless of the density of the
representation,” the method of viewing the analogous
picnolepsie opens up the exhibition hall towards the gap and something
different beyond the universality of the hell. Into the gap opened up by
disturbance and disharmony, the kairos, which Mario Perniola called “opportunity” meaning the epieikés[ix] requiring a
distinguished definition for a special moment, interferes.
In Confucianism, the discourse on disaster is treated as a more
comprehensive theory of natural catastrophe, or Jae-i-ron [재이론 in Korean, 災異論 in Chinese]. The word Jae-i
is a compound word meaning a disaster [Jae-nan] and a modification or
variation [Byeon-i] where disaster is a direct casualty to human such as
famine, flood, or disease; a modification is a strange development of a natural
occurrence surrounding human. A disaster is the realization of a torment while
a modification is an appearance of an abnormal phenomenon predicting the state
of agony. The reason human beings fear the modification is due to the horror
uncertain and incomprehensible occurrence brings.[x] The Mountainring
Braindead-scape depicting the big rings hanging on the top of the mountains
seems to be a natural occurrence predicting some kind of forthcoming calamities
just like a tombstone in a Korean folktale which is said to sweat right before
the coming of a crisis. In fact, the artist says he did not paint these
landscapes from his own imagination, but rather he used the “punctured
scenes” he discovered in nature for collage. The
painting, which is supposedly done in a short time using traditional Korean
landscape painting technique for the rings on the mountains, could be a serious
joke or an accurate foresight. In his series of Braindead-scape, which
the artist said he drew with a technique close to automatism, this Mountainring
Braindead-scape was inspired by his realization that the rings on the
summit reminded him of the holes in human brain caused by Alzheimer’s disease
or a mad cow disease. Rather, maybe he said the dying brain gave a cue to him
of the mountain rings.
Anyhow, the “young voyant” Rho going through the
picnolepsie appropriates the form of painting instead of photography or film,
in order to prevent and defeat the natural catastrophe. Perhaps it is because
the painting can make us expect the moment of a disaster only by the analogical
method within the process of representation, or with the aid of abstraction
whereas photography or film can do it by fixating the moment of a disaster.[xi] Also, another reason
would be that while photography or film deals with a disaster that is already
happened or at least there is an agreement it has happened; painting can
reproduce the prediction of a modification which has not happened yet. In this
sense, the automatism drawing of the artist can be seen as a ritual performance
to prevent or defeat a disaster. Comparing the Mountainring Braindead-scape
to the traditional Sea God Festival, a kind of a rain calling ceremony, Rho’s ritual for crisis
is closer to Chimhodoo than Hwaryongje. The former is a
ritual where a head or bones of a tiger are thrown into the water in order to
awaken the sleeping dragon underwater. It is believed that the rain would come
down when a dragon arises to the sky. On the other hand, Hwaryongje is
also a rain calling ceremony, but it just uses a drawing of a dragon. Though
Mountainring Braindead-scape depicts the forms of mountains, it is intended
to draw out some kind of effect through invisible impact from the rings
manifested in the painting instead of copying.
In contrast to Sea God Festival such as Hwaryongje, the figure of a
dragon is not present at Chimhodoo as it stays underwater all the time.
Since it is historically said that the more the shape of a dragon is shown and
materialized the more miserable and distressed the God-like status of a dragon
becomes, emerging from underwater and revealing its figure would be unhelpful
to the dragon’s sacred status.[xii] Suddenly the dragon
underwater reminds me of a spy in Hitchcock style movies who often falls into
the picnolepsie. He would be hibernating until receiving an order for a mission
impossible, and then one day all of sudden he would be in disguise of a perfect
and yet fictional character achieving a common visibility. Usually a spy is the
coolest when he is an invisible being, just like the pick pocketing looks
magical only till the trick is revealed. I am quite curious to find out how our
spy, Rho the hyper pickpocket secretly dispatched to 21st century
world of hell, would distinguish himself in his next “film.” – The End.
[ii] Lee, Sang Gil, “Beyond the Memory of Faded Disasters – Five Thoughts,” Humanities and Arts
Magazine F1: Disaster, Seoul: Moonji Cultural Institute SAII, 2011, p.
16
[iii] Virilio, Paul, translated by Kim
Kyeong On, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 2004, p. 94.
[iv] Jeudy, Henri-Pierre, translated
by Lee Sang-Gil, “Propos sur les paysages de catastrophe: Tchernobyl,” Humanities and Arts Magazine F1: Disaster, Seoul: Moonji
Cultural Institute SAII, 2011, p. 31
[vii] Hereinafter all the mentions
related to picnolepsie are from Paul Virilio’s same book, pp. 28-83.
[viii] In his text messages to me, Rho
Jae Oon indicated that this concept is related to the concept of Casta Diva
in his Aegibong Project (2006-2007).
[x] Lee, Wook, Disasters and
National Rituals of Chosun Dynasty, Seoul:
Changbi Publishers, 2009, p. 77.