From : Caspar Stracke
Sent : Tuesday, September 4, 2007 3:41 PM
To : Jooyoung lee
CC : Erlend Hammer
Subject : Re: show
Attachment : inside.the.office.rtf (<>
good to hear from you. thanks.
if you could even write short -version
It took a few days, cant keep up with your blogging speed!
But, I went BACK and did a little thing in your exhibition space ;-)
Can't log onto yr blog as guest! But heres text and 2 related images.
I also but up a short version, with link you Yeonheedong 195 on my own blog
See you soon,
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caspar
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I am waiting for somebody at the exhibition space (Seoul for Museum of Art.)
A friend who wants to see the show we're in.
It is quiet pleasing to have an "office" inside this show. Not that I have to wait in a cafeteria or walk endless rounds this space whose art pieces I know quiet well since I was installing (with everybody else). I rather can sit down at an office table take my laptop. I have absolutely no problem to plug in the power for my laptop - I feel so comfortable doing this because the environment suggests: I am at home, or, at least among friends. There is this -slightly deceiving- feeling of total relaxedness, being in an intimate sphere which is a bubble within an anonymous public (art) space. It reminded me of Rirkrit Tiravanija's 1:1 replica of his East village Apt at Gavin Brown Gallery a few years back.
So I open my laptop and start writing this, while waiting.
My friend arrived and I left this text window in my laptop open. Later when I returned to pack up, several visitors were curiously reading the first three sentences and I have been reminded that this is not an office and that any action and object in this space becomes part of the art piece.
I usually have a lot of problems with "info art" - improvised reading stations and other in-gallery compromises attempting to displaying conceptual or otherwise text-heavy art projects. Most of them are so unsexy, aesthetically unsatisfying. Unless these reading stations have another layer in which they are able to create a life on their own. I think this is the case with Yooyoung Lee, Erlend Hammer (and Jan Christensen's) documentation of the last residency project and Yeonhee-Dong 195.
It took me a while to understand (and I keep forgetting) that this situation was actually the outcome of this three week residency project (which I had not seen) But what I've seen happened on the tables in this room: So fascinating how this project constantly accumulates information that is then turns "inside out." Pamphlets of upcoming events, catalogs from past shows, text, speech, video.
Like a chameleon it becomes an exhibition - within the exhibition, a museum-within-the-museum, able to hold a mirror in the face of the exhibition, recoding and displaying even its own installation and activities beyond. On may occasions they would do sound and/or image recordings - the prospect of constant recording gives this project another conceptual dimension which distinguishes "the office" (as I still like to call it) from other similar situations. It is a rhizomatically spreading organism, full of life and makes us neighbors (the surrounding art pieces in the show) look pretty "dead".
