Okay, so here’s what’s going on with the project. From the start it was always slightly unclear exactly what it was we were going to do here. For example, the first I ever heard of there being an actual exhibition came a couple of weeks before we left when someone suddenly mentioned the need to create invitation cards for the opening. "Opening? I thought it was a workshop..." Then followed the information that there were local artists already involved, and that some of them wanted to work with the local context of the area of the gallery. Fair enough, but I thought we would just be researching artists here, for possible inclusion in the documentation of our workshop, the details of which would be developed on the flight from Frankfurt. As we touched down in Yeonhee-dong we began talking about how everyone should work together, and from the beginning the idea from Jan was to have a very flat structure, where everyone involved could give something of theirs and take something from somebody else, so that everyone would make something as a kind of a collaborative exhibition where it didn't matter if your an artist, a curator, an assistent or the friend of a friend who can hook us up with cheap nights at the Marriot. Then everyone would be credited equally, with mention of what their role had actually been. This appealed strongly to my already rapidly growing sense of radical socialdemocracy. Or something.
Power, however, I immediately sensed was always a bit skeptical of this idea. Both, I guess, because of believing strongly in the rights of artists to retain all rights to their own work so as to be in control of their own integrity. But also, and more importantly, because of a belief in the impossibility of actually truly achieving a flat structure. By coming here and inviting people to take part in our lovely flat structure, we are of course already involved in the establishment of a hierarchy. So the power is already distributed in an uneven way. Jan, however, would say that it was important to try to let go of this power, and anyway that artists need to be controlled and forced into perhaps not thinking about their work as "their" work. During a conversation we developed the idea that what we're aiming for is a situation where people approach creating their individiaul works with the mindset of it being collaborative work. I have a lot of sympathy for this idea and it was also seems to relate to a sort of ideal of mine of striving for a condition of total heterogeneity. Impossible of course, but interesting.
Nevertheless, the first few days had a feeling slightly similar to the first episode of Lost. Everybody is sort of just waiting around trying to discern who will take charge and become the leader, who will be Jack and who will be Sawyer. I guess Jan has been kind of a Jack by default. But who will be the junkie hobbit? Yesterday we all had different stuff to do. Jan and Bjørn started a wall painting, while Power, Jooyoung and I were out visiting galleries. At the moment Jan is with his girlfriend Lina who arrived from Berlin (via Tokyo!) last night. (This kind of puts us in that week of season 3 of Lost when Jack is trapped by the Others.) Bjørn is outside doing something or other, Power is doing her other work (I believe there will soon by a text on Münster at kunstkritikk.no) and I'm in research mode with the catalogue for the 4th Seoul International Media Art Biennale which took place last year, i.e. new one next year. Organized by Seoul Museum of Art, whose assistant curator Yoo-Jun Lee we met yesterday. Lars Morell just e-mailed us PDFs from the latest issue of Billedkunst; my review of the Norwegian MA-shows as well as an article in which Jan is interviewed about something. In a way it feels like a kind of calm has set upon the space, for the first time so far really. It is also unusually cool outside, only 23 degrees and quite breezy.
