Dahoon Nam studied Art History at the University of Toronto. He currently lives and works in Seoul.
Protect Me From What I Want
Museology
This exhibition willingly
embraces two flashpoints: myth and museology. Ours is, indeed,
an era of fully realized myths—mythologized capital, mythologized consumption.
This is not a warning siren against the “technovirus-like spread of financial
capitalism,” though it is not entirely unrelated. The exhibition instead
focuses on art that has become addicted to acceleration while riding the roller
coaster of hyper-capitalism. It also addresses museology in the sense that art
afflicted by such addiction requires a separate manual for handling.
This is a lonely museology—one
that insists on confronting the process by which museums degenerate into
institutions that cultivate illusions of paradise, and that refuses to allow
museum exhibitions to function, or be encouraged to function, as catalogs of
monthly hit products.
Myth
Notes on contemporary art
history. Representative cases that appear almost evolutionist in
nature: Pop Art, a fruit borne of the American species called “active
marketing.” YBAs, a British variant that adds the sweetener of modern
humanities—cruelty, let us recall the severed cow’s head and flies—to American
Pop Art, producing a more academic impression. Damien Hirst, in particular, was
astonishing, in that he embodied precisely the figure so desperately desired by
neoliberal knowledge economies: the strategist, advertising master, and
creative entrepreneur rolled into one living type.
In the neoliberal
knowledge–culture economy, the apex predator is not philosophy or aesthetics,
but advertising. Advertising as the alchemy of myth. Knowledge and culture tilt
heavily toward the rhetoric of marketing and the spirituality of advertising, within
a withdrawal from a world saturated by incessant shock events.
To truly manufacture The
Great Gatsby as a great figure—moral corruption, vulgarity,
self-contradiction, and emptiness, the reflective discourse of F. Scott
Fitzgerald, are strict taboos in this world. Let us beware the foolishness of
driving ourselves into cultural bankruptcy through such outdated 1970s
approaches (^^). At the same time, as French artist Jean-Pierre Raynaud once
remarked, to survive as an artist in the Paris art world, one must pretend to
be a pessimist. Successfully navigating between these two poles is the key to myth-making.
Protect Me From What I
Want (1983–85) is a work by electronic billboard artist Jenny
Holzer, a warning bell ringing for contemporary individuals swept away by
torrents of excessive information. Yet a decade later, in 1990, she became the
first American woman to receive the Golden Lion at the 44th Venice Biennale.
Critical art feeding the very world it critiques—while even absorbing ethical
legitimacy—this is the banal continuation of the history that turned Marcel
Duchamp’s ready-made urinal into an immortal myth.
This narrative, whose expiration
date is nearly past, continues tenuously with the next candidate: Felix
Gonzalez-Torres. His Untitled (1991), a photograph
of the bed he shared with his deceased partner displayed on massive outdoor
billboards across New York City, barely garners attention due to its
appropriation of commercial advertising space and its displacement of the
battleground from the museum to the bed. But the true nature of this event lies
in the fact that art’s battlefield was reduced to a bed. Such a struggle, while
less extreme than Hirst’s, represents a model form of conformity favored by the
system.
Prayer
A disguised paradise, brightness
without a light source, auditory hallucinations whispering happiness—all are
part of a cave phenomenon born from disconnection from the world. This time,
the words belong to British artist Antony Micallef. The world, he says, is
little different from “a sweet Disney movie slowly transforming into violence
and pornography.”
In this world, a young girl
prays: “God, please let all the wars in the world end. And please make my nose a
little higher and my breasts bigger.” (The order doesn’t matter.)
Shim Sang-yong : Director, Seoul National University Museum of Art
