“Inverting the Scale of the Complex, and Moving Forward by Tracing” - Forward for the “Something Traceable: 더듬어 볼 수 있을 법한 것들”
Written by Jaemin Hwang
Translated by Gichan Lee
1.
There is a sense of grief we find in pairs who are separated against their wishes and intentions. Architecture and art belong to such a pair. The two have had multiple instances where they mutually informed and shaped each other’s paths. In one instance, the pictorial tactics of painting were incorporated into the organizational scheme of architectural plans. In another, their disparate historical trajectories were integrated to push toward Gesamtkunstwerk. However, the collapse of the “plane” following the overall decline of modernism, and the dissolution of the once-shared aspiration toward a total work of art have rendered the possibility of their coming together as unlikely as ever. During the decades following these events, architecture has grown into a gigantic proportion reflecting the era in which geographical distance lost its meaning, characterized by deluded globalization. Art on the other hand has come to serve as an apparatus that helps justify such an expansion. Conversations around the collaboration between the two evoke only the unresolved problems of its past critiques, while any further endeavor to intersect the two appears destined for a disingenuous outcome. The unresolved feeling of grief lingers on, and some refer to this state as a “complex.”
Art critic and historian Hal Foster characterizes the collaborations of art and architecture as “art-architecture complex,” invoking not only the word’s meaning of neurosis but also its ominous consumerist implications. Among the several intersections of architecture and art pointed out by Foster, the current discussion will focus on his examinations of the problem of pictoriality. One of the most striking of his arguments in the book is his reevaluation of Donald Judd. Foster reconsiders Judd’s historical (op)posing of his (Minimalist) art as “specific object” that is neither painting nor sculpture by the way of literalism and reducibility free from illusionism and arbitrariness. He then concludes that the “specific object” of Minimalism, having fallen short of a complete renewal of late-modernist art, was in fact a continuation of pictoriality and illusionism it set out to break away from. The Minimalist undertaking of the problems of late-modernism failed to fully address these problems, and their remnants are revealed in the wary triumph of illusionism of Judd’s works and are unequivocally pronounced in the site-erosive works of Dan Flavin whose bright light dematerialized the space in its illusionistic effect. Based on these hidden illusionistic phenomena in the practices of Judd and Flavin, Foster continues to illustrate the problematic redirection of Minimalism shown in the works of later artists like Olafur Eliasson whose work Foster describes as operating in an erosive illusionism befitting the oversized halls of contemporary art museums. As an aspect of the “art-architecture complex,” pictoriality serves as a covert agent of imagistic spectacle. The residues of illusionism that survived its eradication within the realm of painting now constitute the spectacular images of the overgrown architecture (the phallic imagistic symptom in the guise of American virtues), while the site-erosive exploitative spectacles of art-architecture complex abate the Minimalist criticism that sought to eradicate the rampant reign of the spectacle. As such, the “art-architecture complex” reveals itself to be a problematic catastrophe, or “down-turning,” that warrants a revision.
It is worthwhile, however, to try to approach the crisis at hand in a simpler term. Perhaps the issue here lies in the scale. The problem is born when the capital-fed architecture expands its structures to the point where they dematerialize into images, which in turn renders the structures, which ought to be essential, ornamental. What would happen, then, if the problem of the scale became inverted? What would happen if, instead of an artwork ballooning into the architectural scale, an art museum folds along the perimeters of the artwork it houses? And what if this artwork is of a particular medium, perhaps painting, whose nature prevents itself from expanding into the architectural scale? Will pictoriality continue to exert its illusionistic effect on the architecture, and thus lead to yet another deceitful end result?
2.
The solo exhibit Something Traceable: 더듬어 볼 수 있을 법한 것들 (2021) showcases the works of the artist Lee Yoo Kyung who has explored the topics of “place” and “space” over the years in her paintings. In her past private works, Lee has sought to connect painting and “place” by capturing the familiar placeness found in the walls of neighborhood side streets or surveying places of her personal significance through non-narrative, image-based tactics using maps and floor plans. Lee’s 2019 series Tracing Beyond Senses, also included in the current exhibit, can be seen as a direct expression of such interest.
Lee explains that the Tracing Beyond Senses series juxtaposes the images that illustrate the desires of modern Korean society around housing. Through juxtaposition, she explains, her works materialize the forgotten time and space of early-modern Korean society and thereby search for their significance in contemporary Korean society. It is worthwhile to discuss Lee’s motives behind choosing juxtaposition as her artistic strategy. One of the reasons lies in Lee’s continued exploration of time and space specifically within painting. Working with and searching for space within painting has always held a central role in her practice, especially because it has long become impossible to treat the space according to the conventions of linear perspective. Through her continued practice as a painter, Lee has developed profound curiosity and questions regarding the topic of space within painting, and grafted them onto her long-held interest in the topic of placeness, begetting her first “tracing.”
Lee’s “tracing” gradually develops into the realm of architecture--the most overt and salient imagistic emblem of modern desires, as well as the ever-evolving chronicle with deep ties both to space and place. In the Tracing and Sensing series, Lee appropriates architecture as pictorial symbols and inserts them into her paintings. The piece makes use of various images surrounding postwar Korean architecture and urban development including: 1950s National Housing, the statue of John B. Coulter (the first head of the UN Korean Reconstruction Agency) and its sculptor, aerial view of Anam-dong Cultural Residence (Munhwa Residence), plan of UNKRA housing and newspaper cartoon satirizing the greedy landlords of the time. By searching for and appropriating ready-made images in her allusions to architecture, its placeness and its social history, Lee effectively pares down the architectural scale itself.
Here, painting encroaches on and eliminates the breadth of architectural scale, the unforeseen byproduct of which is its criticism. Lee’s interest in placeness is now examined through its relationship with modern image and desire whose clues Lee has searched for in “locality.” This tactic reflects Lee’s attempt at conducting a tight-woven investigation of the intersection of modernity and locality that goes beyond the simple treatment of the formal relations among architecture, modernity and modernism. In other words, by folding architecture onto itself to fit within the scale of a painting, Lee localizes architecture and transfigures it into its specific state.
A mere reduction of architecture into image, however, would only yield further problems. In order to avoid this, Lee has chosen to leave architecture and painting apart at a precarious distance, rather than settling for a hypothetical half measure or an inept middle ground between the two. This fickle disequilibrium was further expanded in a piece that was exhibited along the Tracing and Sensing series. Titled, A Collection of Gestures: The Props, (2019) the installation consisted of several “gestures” (a term Lee uses to denote her gestural works) that were laid out in a specific constellation to prevent them from converging into a painting. Their layout, instead, pushed the paintings through their planes and extruded them into real space, where they interacted with other objects and continued to expand further--an effect brought on by manipulation, or gesture. By placing a stretched canvas and an architectural scale model of a human figure together, the piece also experimented in interchanging the painting’s perspective and the architectural perspective through the medium of scale. This juxtaposition transports the viewers to the viewpoint of the human figure from whose point of view the painting appears undoubtedly architectural, thereby firmly establishing an interactive exchange between painting and architecture that forms an unbreakable dynamic. In other words, the piece has, on a miniature scale, created its own “complex.” The resulting miniature complex, however, evokes less of the ominous complex system of the military-industrial complex, as it does a neurotic outburst. Lee’s works demonstrate a symptom-like sense of uneasiness toward the superficialization of architecture and the symbolification of painting one hand, and the inevitability of grafting the two together on the other.
Lee’s new work, the Painting Samples series (2021), which features paintings of tiles positioned on top of a support mimicking a tile catalogue, appropriates the commodity status of the common building material. A quintessential example of serialized industrial production, a tile, on its own, is seldom viewed as a finished product. Rather, it is most often considered as a finishing to architectural surfaces. The painted tiles of the Painting Samples series, however, lack the modern aesthetic of serialized production. They are ornate, and even gaudy. The particular way the pieces are exhibited reflects an important aspect to Lee’s investigation of today’s built environment on a local scale from which she identified the contemporary Korean desire from the tiles on the walls and floors. After coming across ornate and “painting-like” designs of trendy tiles, Lee detected a new marketing message that responded to a new kind of contemporary Korean desire; a desire that warranted a shift away from the impersonal “modern” designs to those that resembled little “paintings.” The Painting Samples series can be seen as part of the process through which Lee analyzes this new desire embodied in “interior” design that gave birth to the monstrous crossbreed. During the same time in which contemporary paintings have struggled to circumvent commodification, objects of industrial production--the ideal Minimalist objects--have aspired to painting in its most vulgar iteration. In understanding this irony, Lee’s methodology in which architecture and painting clashes against one another through the medium of local placeness proves yet again to be useful.
The chimeric monstrosity of the tile-painting, however, is not something a painter is disposed to accepting indiscriminately. As a work-around, Lee has chosen to approach Painting Samples as a designer, comparable to the way Minimalist artists would consider themselves workers. This choice also provides the necessary ground for another peculiar aspect of the show, which encourages the audience to pick up and touch the tile-paintings as if they were actual product catalogues. Painting Samples recognizes both the descent of painting’s status into mere ornaments as well as the public’s desire toward them as commodities, and appropriates the medium’s curious position as objects. The effect of such a critical act can be diminished due to the inherent preciousness and gravity of painting. Lee has overcome this by placing them off the gallery walls and in the hands of viewers where their preciousness as art objects become temporarily obfuscated.
Deployed as a device, the sensorial element of touch also speaks to yet another context of Lee’s continued exploration of architecture and painting: digitization. As the internet continues to swallow more and more aspects of human life, we are increasingly deprived of sensory interaction, especially that of touch. This deprivation has brought about an unexpected development in painting; Painting has come to serve as a medium of touch through which we reconnect with our tactile perception. Thus, painting often approaches “the digital” in a poetic context. Meanwhile, in architecture, the development was hardly unexpected but rather seamless; the digital environment served naturally as a part of the architectural production. The Painting Samples series overlays the two contexts, and invites the audience to experience first-hand this supposed materiality of painting. Then it asks, “So, what do you think this materiality is?” The answer may not lie in the tile-paintings, but rather in Preview (2021), the taxidermized 3D images that accompany the tile-paintings.
3.
First solo exhibits tend to leave you with a lot of questions than answers. Something Traceable does exactly that. Why were the forbidding images of early-modern Korea painted in such vivid colors? Does the reconfigured, painting-scale architecture expand yet again? What would that entail? What kind of network would emerge from searching for the seemingly impossible scenario in which art and architecture come together in a way that does not marginalize localized modernism? Can such a network replace, or, at least, diffuse the art-architecture complex? It is with these questions and more that are to come that I would like to close the discussion at present.