So. I'm back in Norway. At the moment actually at my parents place in Våler, a small, small place outside a small, small city called Moss, not so far from the relatively small city of Oslo. It's raining. It's 15 degrees outside. Tonight I'm going out with a bunch of old non-artworld friends. Hey, this blog suddenly got real blogg-y, huh?
It's weird to be here, we've been discussing it on e-mail, that we all feel like it's just a little break and that we will all soon be back at the gallery at Jeeonheedong, surfing the web, going to the bathroom on the roof, talking to the security camera guy, ordering food, smiling at locals walking by, eating Pringles, drinking, skyping each other and others, talking about art, talking about comfort, talking about each other. Bjørn will be thinking up t-shirt slogans, Jan will be answering e-mails about future exhibitions, Power will be writing texts and letting us in on all the juicy gossip she is somehow privy to, Jooyoung will be talking on the phone saying "neeee" a lot.
I'm listening to Paul Simon's "Graceland", this weird and wonderful album where the ex-Garfunkel compadre teamed with a bunch of "world musicians" (i.e. Africans) and I'm sure he had an idea that the recording process would be some kind of flat structure, I'm sure the Africans were confused, I'm sure Paul Simon was too. How the hell did anyone come up with the idea of putting those 80s sounding trumpet sounds on the same track as that African-inspired rhythm-section? It's a thing of beauty, maybe it's the best album of the 80s, even more, I'd say one of the finest documents of late 20th Century Western culture I know. It sounds super-dated and totally timeless at the same time. That's such a piece of art criticism hyperbole bullshit. Yet it's completely true. It's impossible not to fall in love to it, with it, from it. With everyone involved, everyone who is sucked into your world while you're in its world. In every paradox there is a grain of selv-evidence. Chevy Chase (my favourite actor, he's soooo due for some kind of Bill Murray-style cred-comeback, yet it would be completely right if this never happens) in the video for "You Can Call Me Al" is like an American Jon Skolmen, the great Norwegian actor whose face graces one of Bjørn's Håkki-shirts.
Various elements of the concept, problems and ideals:
- The art product as excuse for setting up social relationships.
- Intensified discrepancies between the curatorial concept and the artist’s feeling of what it is they actually do.
- Vagueness as a way to remove the potential for antagonism.
- Uncertainty as to the general level of consensus within the group.
- Uncertainty as giving the appearance of consensus.
- Decision-making as creative boost.
- Decisions made by authorities or when reporting to authorities.
- Lack of authorities leading to lack of decisions.
- Lack of decisions to be made resulting in lack of creativity.
- Lack of research as a way of achieving flat structure.
- Flat structure as attempt at breaking down the centre – periphery dichotomy that everyone used to be so interested in, but which is now (apparently) unhip again.
- Idea: Make a barometer that measures the distance of the “centre – periphery question” from any given centre or periphery.
Favourite old school attempts at dealing with centre- periphery:
1) Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. What was Guildenstern doing when Polonius was giving his monologue on Hamlet's aflictions? He was annoying Rosencrantz with a collection of impressive animal sounds. A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself.
2) “The Zeppo”, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 3 episode 13. Xander starts off the episode by almost getting killed by some kind of demon. He is told to stay out of the way of battle and while the other Scoobies spend the rest of the episode fighting off one of the (apparently) most serious threats to Sunnydale ever, Xander tries to find his “thing”, gets into lots of trouble with a penis-metaphor driving zombie, and most importantly, gets laid for the first time. While Buffy is fighting back a huge demon in the library Xander is facing one of his own. “You up for it?” Faith asks seductively. Then comes a top-shelf highlight from the genius book of Xander one-liners: “Oh, I’m up….I'm suddenly very up....It’s just I’ve never been up with people before.” In all, though, the message is simple: the centre is wherever you decide to put your focus, and everyone has their own focus, so there is no centre. There is no need for one, and we don't need consensus. Consensus isn’t necessarily bad or to be avoided. We just need to agree on when we need it and when we can do without it. With art, we can do without it most of the time.
3) The Ballad of Nikki and Paolo. The long-awaited episode on Nikki and Paolo. In the middle of a slow beginning to season three, Lost fans everywhere were mostly interested in one aspect of the show: why the hell had the writers introduced these two useless characters? Everyone knew. They were set up to be horribly killed so as to satisfy the bloodthirst of an audience who couldn’t tolerate the shift of focus onto someone with whom we had not yet emotionally invested in on a sufficient level. But it’s really a joke on the audience by the producers. Because even though we all hate Nikki and Paolo and want their horrible death scene (and we get it, albeit in a suspended way, which makes it even better/ worse), what really happens is something else. By the end of the episode their deaths are loaded with more meaning, more pathos and more downright sadness than most any other death on the show. (Remember Shannon, okay wasn’t so bad, but Boon or that Latin girl? Who really cared? Also, the emotional weight of Nikki and Paolo’s deaths may well be seen as previewing the one truly heartbreaking death so far on the show, namely that of the hobbit. (Who it must be said, has usually been far more annoying than N & P ever were.) So what have we learned from this; that no matter how we perceive the centre-periphery to begin with, shifting the focus can also give us the chance to experience something which is a lot more interesting than is to be expected.
The Yeeonhee-Dong 195 Residency Project was about temporarily shifting the focus. Nobody believes that what we did there will gain any significant amount of attention, nor should we want it to or feel that this would be necessary to somehow make the project valid. Attention does not equal worth. Worth does not automatically merit attention. Attention can detract from worth. This is the story of how we begin to remember.
