Unexpected gift
Young Chul Lee
Contemporary art in Korea has seen an immense expansion in terms of art institutions as well as in the art population, but it has remained a terrain difficult for the general public to reach and the discussions at the Gwangju Biennial, the Pusan Biennial and Media City Seoul always revolved around the same old topics. This problem results in dual attitudes. Civil servants and the public working in industry and commerce think that culture should above all contribute to the vitalization of the local economy. On the other hand, artists claim the construction of obstacles to the speed and flow of capital defends the local against the trend towards cultural uniformity occurring at the global level. Although we admire and respect the spirit of some of its proponents, this “localist” position is both false and damaging. For it is based upon a false dichotomy between the global and the local, which assumes that the global represents homogenization and undifferentiated identity whereas the local preserves heterogeneity and difference. This argument contains the implicit assumption that the differences of the local are in some sense natural, or at least that their origin remains beyond question. So local differences pre-date the present scene and must be defended or protected from the intrusion of globalization.
I think that globalization should be seen as a combination of two different systems of homogenization and heterogenization rather than simply as a cultural, political and economic homogenization. A better framework with which to divide the global and the local is represented by diverse networks with flows and obstacles. In such networks local moments and perspectives prioritize a barrier or boundary that “re-territorializes” while the global privileges the mobility of the flow that “de-territorializes.” In any case, to assume that an identity that lies outside the global flows of capital and empire should be protected against them is wrong. Simply speaking, locality, tradition and the past are like foreigners. They are the matter of transgressing boundary rather than a matter of geographical place or temporal distance. Following on from Antonio Negri’s remark, today’s “Empire” manages hybrid identity, flexible hierarchy and multiple exchange by playing on the network of command. In the post-modern movement on a global level, the creation of wealth, art and culture tends toward what we call the production of bio-politics, i.e., the production of life itself. In this production, the economic, the political, the cultural and the artistic intersect and permeate one another. In spite of Europe being a geographic channel through which the concept and practice of Empire vitalizes itself, the attempts at resisting it and effectively figuring out an alternative and the global scenario is not limited to any geographic region.
To draw out this scenario, ceramics can be adopted as a very useful language, a kind of Esperanto of artistic expression. Clay, a multiple crystal with an irregular atomic structure, is the richest resources on earth and easy to shape. It is a “breathing form” containing rich mineral components and living compounds. In order to vitalize the breathing form inside life, ceramics should break away from the genre of art that has developed as a professional area since the early modern period and should be revived as a source of new ideas and practices to change life. Ceramics have featured traditional craft techniques for hundreds of years, but the medium is preparing for a new dawn as a multi-cultural aspect of contemporary art. Interestingly, ceramic is used for advanced technology on a molecular or atomic level in the area of material chemistry rather than in art. Although everyone is talking about the change brought about by the Internet revolution, electronic ceramic represents the avant-garde of material science. Ceramic as a structural material has no viscosity and is vulnerable to thermal shock such as rapid heating or cooling, but electro-ceramic overcomes such weaknesses and has emerged as the third most significant material following metal and plastic. This material is used in diverse applications such as resistors, circuit boards and magnets. Although we are not using this new ceramic material for making art works, its functional significance could be associated with a new dimension of the artistic production for life. Ceramics is not a material to which the audience adds its own echo that the reified work does not pronounce, but will be a means to produce historical memory and induce a critical reflection on the current mode of life. Art is the only aspect of contemporary society in which the fact that living, creative labour cannot be individualized and measured is demonstrated most clearly. This is also the reason why art becomes a great, heroic monument. The artist’s activity in itself already assumes meaning as insubordination and revolt regardless of whether it presents a political subject matter or not. The primary condition of labour in the transition to the post-modern is that there are no hierarchies among intellectual, mental, physical and non-physical labour and it cannot be measured in terms of time. That a craftsman abolishes the discrimination of labour through a horizontal relationship with artists, conversation and real rather than virtual contact, is to weaken the distinction between professionals and non-professionals that became established in the process of modernity and to further promote the value of social cooperation and autonomous production inherent in artistic production. Complex experiences such as an intimate encounter between individuals, the changes occurring in each part of it, trial and error in the process of making and the joy of discovery, guarantees an invisible place of production that is temporal but very concrete and complete in itself. In such a place the dichotomy between the local and the global disappears and a new place is constructed in which information exchange by way of the Internet and global electronic networks is established.
It is instructive that Roberto Costantino, who launched the project of the Biennale of Ceramics in Contemporary Art, has used the metaphor of the art of Lilliput in the Gulliver’s Travels to invoke the vision of dwarfs capturing Gulliver alive. Indeed, today’s Biennale not only expresses but also organizes the globalization of art. It does so by multiplying and structuring the interrelationship through networks. Therefore the Biennale channels the meaning and direction of the imaginary that cuts through these communicatory connections. In that it grants the viewer with mass sociability, new uniformity in action and thinking, the Biennale is an apparent example of the spectacle mentioned by Guy Debord. To resist event capitalism, the spectacle produced by the Empire is not just a matter of scale, but of the production of the art that produces life, if proposed in a more modest manner, a kind of potlatch in tradition of North American Indians. Today, people have forgotten the practice of giving a gift. At best one sells what one wants to sell to the user. In lip service philanthropy expressed in the motto “for the public, with the public,” the public strategy of the Biennale resembles administrative charity that tries to suture the “visible wound” of society. The true bliss of giving lies in the unexpected gift at a moment along with the “imagining” of the happiness the receiver. However, in today’s exhibitions, “the collapse of gift” occurs occasionally with the recipients screened for their qualifications. In the global expansion of event capitalism and the instrumental mode of the digital, we witness the deterioration of the mental analogue mode. The Albisola project presents a rare case of the cooperation of artists from around the world with local ceramicists founded upon the unconditional of sharing gifts. When social and artistic cooperation is a precondition, when our naked lives appear as virtual wealth, the spectacle of event capitalism will end. We expect an exhibition in which labour, play, discovery, surprise and joy will come together with the multitude.
Excerpt from the Proceedings of the “Local ceramic traditions and globalisation of contemporary art” conference, 19/20 October 2002, Fortezza del Priamàr, Savona.
Conference proceedings Local ceramic traditions and the globalisation of contemporary art
