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PenumbraBermondsey Project Space46 Willow WalkLondon SE1 5SF18 - 27 October 2012Layering spacesby Euyoung Hong In the exhibition Penumbra, the exhibition space is allocated to each of eight artists to work their projects for one day each. Rather than gathering eight different complete works into one exhibition space by dividing that space into eight fragmented spaces, over the course of the eight days, each artist enters the space that is occupied by another work, produced in the previous day. The principle of the exhibition is to allow the works of art to intrude upon each other conceptually and physically. This intervention of work occurs sequentially. Accordingly, the exhibition works gradually accumulate in the same place until the end of the project. The method of collaboration with artists in this exhibition is, therefore, different from usual. For example, in other exhibitions, there is often a preliminary process of negotiation that necessarily condenses different ideas and elements into a certain single form of consent before the event. Apart from the agreement of each artwork interfering with, and being interfered by, the other seven, there are no detailed plans for the exhibition. This implies that the artists themselves will, of course, find it difficult to know what would happen on their own project day; and it is impossible to have a complete idea or plan before the show. The exhibition, therefore, is composed of the processes of creating works of art, rather than complete pieces of work. This blurs the boundary between the artist’s exhibition space and artist’s production space. The last day of the project is open publicly. Viewers will, at first, encounter the final layer of space that is completed by eight artists. At this level, it will be difficult for viewers to distinguish an artist’s work from another, as they are completely intermingled. Merging an exhibition space with an artist’s studio need not to be total chaos; rather it can be a means of visualizing a work of art, particularly one that experiments with and materializes the possibility of contingency. The practice of art acts as a new connection between objects, people and ideas and can transfer everyday space or objects into an aesthetic relationality. This final layer of space cannot be identified merely as a pictorial image; rather, different elements constantly interact with each other in and through the gap between different layers of time, ideas and relations.The exhibition space is a complex kind of space, and intermingles the various functions of space, not only for exhibiting a work of art, but also for other purposes such as holding a workshop or seminar. Because of this multi-functional aspect of the space, an artist can find unexpected objects in the space already; such items as a ladder, office chairs, or tables, which cannot easily be found in other exhibition spaces. For the first of the eight artists participating in the exhibition, the unoccupied exhibition space itself becomes a given condition for creating a work of art. Considering the particular condition of the space, I decided to present a temporary foldable space - called Waiting Room (2012) - which is composed of two sets of foldable steel frames and vinyl sidewalls and ceilings. This temporary spatial construction is frequently used in South Korea for various purposes, such as street shops, temporary outdoor offices and waiting rooms outside restaurants. Such foldable spaces are much more economical than constructing actual buildings. The foldable space can also be easily moved and removed. In the project, I use this temporary spatial construction as a waiting room, in which different chairs are placed, facing each other along opposite walls. Some of the chairs are collected from the exhibition space. The others come from different places outside. In real life, when we enter a waiting room, one can see people who are waiting for the event that they expect to occur. The space is often divided by people, because people tend to make a group or groups for chatting or simply waiting together in the space. This spatial division, formed by people, definitely relates to the arrangement of objects, such as chairs, tables and partitions. A particular spatial arrangement generates a new rule, whereby people occupy the space in a certain pattern and behaviour. This temporary space territorializes itself through its complex spatial operations. On the one hand, it operates as a generative site that not only encounters different things and ideas, but also allows a new event to occur. On the other hand, it becomes a space that suspends people’s further actions. In my work, space is crucial, not because a work of art necessarily occupies a particular place, but because a work of art is produced in an interrelationship with the space. Space becomes a fundamental factor that determines the territory of a work of art. From a spatial perspective, Waiting Room is political, because it presents a ‘suspended space’ that allows flows of people in the space and at the same time experiences a delay of an event or decision that the people expect to occur. Layering as a constant process of de-territorialization can be an essential method for activating this suspended space, in the sense that it does not accumulate different spaces and elements in a historical order, but is an act of blurring existing boundaries and borders, through which different forces and powers can encounter and produce something new. It deals with a place of complexity, which is in constant movement from one form to another, rather than the idealist account of a permanent settlement or protection. This construction occupies a position that layers differences, such as a presentness with a delayed future, the private with the public and the valid with the invalid. This is a shared yet closed space.
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by Eva Diaz (Assistant Professor, History of Art and Design at Pratt Institute)2007Picture the interior of a corporate office, say IBM in its heyday in the 1950s or 1960s. As an extreme example of bureaucracized space, you probably can visualize it even if you haven’t actually seen it. Picture a vast area populated by endless rows of uniform desks, a seemingly limitless expanse made brightly sterile by fluorescent fixtures ensconced in the depressingly regular grid of a drop ceiling. Next, envision a domestic interior, a living room for example, primed for a Met Home spread, every object tidy, ordered, pleasantly asymmetric, every chair standing to attention, each vase, lamp, and tchotchke intentionally placed with a compulsive eye for display. These are environments in which presentation has calcified into predictable pattern. With these sites in mind, imagine them detonated, unearthing a new order in disturbance?picture fragments of chairs held magically aloft, pieces of desks and armoires clinging to walls, phones forcefully jammed inside drawers, dangling their tangled cords like so much unkempt hair. Picture the corporate-designed and the interior decorated intermingled and exploded, caught hovering in mid-blast with a stroboscopic camera, frozen in the midst of catastrophe. This fragmented place could be as Alice found it in her fall down the rabbit hole, with cupboards and bookshelves mischievously adhered to walls in an awry parallax of the world as previously experienced. Such a rearrangement possesses the menace of other, recent and cruel alterations of space, however?the attacks upon the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001 come to mind. As embodiments of corporate office culture and capitalist efficiency, their violently destroyed interiors (though shielded by the hulking modernist towers) perhaps experienced a comparable instant of dislodgment before pulverization. Or, this new off-kilter space may bring to mind the aftermath of Katrina, in which the domestic was ferociously reordered and inverted, whole homes floating off their foundations as their bobbing contents drifted away into limelight of publicity.In Euyoung Hong’s recent sculptures a similarly aggressive rethinking of objects and interior space occurs. Hong scatters and suspends precisely sliced wedges of furniture throughout the gallery space, creating moments of unexpected repetition, say, when corners of a desk have gathered together in an improbable wall-bound sequence of jutting triangular promontories, or when an end table is sutured to another and suspended mid-room in an odd upended hybrid. Chairs, like hyper-magnetized objects having finally surrendered their independent resolve, are ripped asunder and charge toward a single point in a jumbled cluster of legs protruding chaotically from the wall. Eerily, each object is blanched to match the stark walls, as if coated in the dust cloud of a massive explosion or exposed in the ionic flare of a white hot nuclear blast. * * *In the early part of the 20th century, composer Eric Satie called for new musical forms “which will be part,” according to his great advocate John Cage, “of the noises of the environment.” Given the length of some Satie’s pieces, such as the more than 24-hour composition Vexations, his music was intended as background for other events; Satie’s plan was to create “furniture music… designed to satisfy ‘utility’ requirements.” If it was barely recognizable as music, if it blended in with the innocuous furniture, only then would his compositions possess the “power to irritate” and to “despise art.” Reflecting upon the career of filmmaker Luis Bunuel, literary theorist Michael Wood noted that attempts by avant-gardists to conceive of a rigid order, of straight-laced furniture as a foil for a revolution in music, in fact serve to set firm points of opposition and fixed codes to transgress. In this manner, transgression misrecognizes the intractable problem of the symbolic order: that it’s always changing, and sometimes with a perverted rationality. The tendency to dissolve the category of art into functionality, “life” defined by its utility, in turn creates a life gone sterile with its reduction to pure use value. To Satie the furniture is a constant, a backdrop to mimic in its overlooked ubiquity. But what if the furniture rears up and wants to transgress too, if it tires of playing the straw man of conformity to the rebellion of actions around it? What if objects and background aren’t fixed tableaus upon which to act out change, what if they are recognized as part of a process of revolutionizing outmoded forms, and indeed bring attention to the ubiquity of form in our surroundings, bringing “background” to prominence in a move that was the promise and technique of modernist design? Hong’s disorienting spaces may at first appear as imagined, as a visual enactment of the condensed and displaced logic of dreams. Yet in the detritus thrown up by Hong’s catastrophes a demand for redress is made by the recently outmoded objects that are the kibble of landfills. The quaint and obsolete cord-bound phones now supplanted by wireless networks, the mock Chippendale clawed chairs or pseudo Federal-style bedside tables that are the fixtures of thrift stores and cheap motels, the “functional” desk whose emulation of modernist design stopped at the point of uninspired austerity; this junk has been given the dignity of weirdness, has been chopped and rearranged so that its uselessness and ugly bad design acts like a beacon, a warning from the virtually disposable objects of our culture that they are still replete meaning and strangeness. This stuff, the normally unattended to backdrop, insists on being seen as charged with intention, as created and ordered with certain interests and certain quick profits in mind. The way we create objects and organize spaces is a corollary to the way we arrange our society?never neutral, always constructed. For Hong slicing open these disregarded objects unlocks insights into the way our habitual use of space can be estranged toward a close attention to the appearance and organization of form, so that new forms can be created that represent our ever-changing symbolic order. Here the music doesn’t become like the furniture so much as the furniture creates a punk cacophony of its own.*Eva Diaz is an art historian and writer. Her Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton University, titled “Chance and Design: Experimentation at Black Mountain College,” was advised by Hal Foster. Diaz was on the faculty of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program from 1999-2008, and she was recently the curator at Art in General, a non-profit contemporary arts space in New York. She has taught art history at Sarah Lawrence College and Parsons The New School of Design. In fall 2009 she joins the faculty of Pratt Institute in New York as an assistant professor of contemporary art.