Installation view of 《Double Negative: From White Cube to Netflix》 © ARKO Art Center

The Arts Council Korea (ARKO) presents 《Double Negative: From White Cube to Netflix》 (hereafter DNWN), selected for the 2018 Visual Arts Creation Support Exhibition Program, from December 19, 2018 to February 3, 2019.

《DNWN》 investigates how the “sites” of art—produced and consumed across contemporary open platforms, networks, and online services—can be re-examined within the white cube.

The exhibition title draws from Double Negative, a monumental land art work completed by Michael Heizer (b. 1944) in the Nevada desert in 1969, and from the situation surrounding Bong Joon-ho’s film Okja, which chose Netflix as its release platform in January 2017. The massive opposing canyons of Double Negative have been remembered largely through circulated photographs. Imagining these two worlds is not about constructing a binary, but about affirming the viewer’s position—one that is “decentered.”

If there is no single “proper place” to which art wholly belongs, must pilgrims visit catalogs through which works circulate, or the network links mass-produced for dissemination? How is it possible to share experiences in ways that are less public? Ultimately, this question mirrors concerns about how “exhibition” itself can sustain its own form.

Installation view of 《Double Negative: From White Cube to Netflix》 © ARKO Art Center

The 《DNWN》 website, double-negative.xyz—introduced as the exhibition’s third site—is also an exhibited work by participating artist Jinwhan Hong. The web program old bridge v1.02 collects and categorizes concepts surrounding the exhibition from the web, generating loose links. These precariously connected links link to and distort one another, sometimes disrupting themselves. double-negative.xyz functions not as a temporary archival repository for a museum exhibition, but as an alternative commons.

At ARKO Art Center, 《DNWN》 reconsiders several premises of exhibition-making by bypassing certain conventions of the white cube. By not designing physical partition walls for circulation or dark rooms for video works, the exhibition sought to create an environment akin to a liberated interface, and the gallery lighting—blinking at regular intervals—was intended as a non-conventional device that challenges fixed and immutable conditions.

Today, artists have no predetermined place. It is an unstable space in which crisis and calm arrive simultaneously, constantly casting doubt on its own fixed identity. At its core, this discussion may rest upon the critical discourse surrounding the sites of all art—perhaps art that has always existed outside from the very beginning.

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