We often come to Art at a museum holding “famous” works of Art with the same affable expectations we have for other tourist attractions or the beach: please delight me. The beach is easiest, for our participation takes the least thinking. We don’t have to do anything but go to sleep in the sun. Tourist attractions—statues, buildings, waterfalls—expect a little more attention paid, but we can still drift through taking snapshots, then check the places off your list of Things to See (why we have to see them is never asked). Art overlaps with tourist attractions, in that contained in a particular museum are famous works by artists whose names we know, so we pay money to see them so we can say we saw them. This approach requires the least effort: come to the work, take a minute or less discerning what it is, read the title and artist, nod in recognition. That works up through the Impressionists, maybe a Picasso when his figures were recognizable. Woe to anyone stumbling through the thicket of 20th century postwar contemporary Art. When representation fell away—or was hacked, shoved, or dreamed away—so did the attention span of the average museum tourist. Free audio guides have helped, surely, but when we hear curators airily suggesting that the artist is “questioning the traditional line between life and art” or “commenting on the meaning of movement and space in our post-industrial age” we tend to reel, letting the conceptual language whirl around like confetti, then move on to the next crazy installment involving melting ice and video of the artist consuming string.
The end of representation marked the end of the Old World, and that world was all we knew. Modern Art in the 20th century began questioning everything—the role of the artist, the tools used, the placement of the artistic work, the space it inhabits, the medium through which it communicates, whether it needs to communicate anything at all, whether it can communicate anything, the historical, social, political, psychological, and economic forces involved in the work and the creative process and where the work ends up, the role of the observer, the space between the observer and the work observed, whether that “space” is meaningful in any way, and if so, who decides? I could go on. In the same way we can’t know how a bridge is built by just looking at it, to appreciate Art we need to put the effort in: what is the artist trying to do, or say? What is s/he reacting against, breaking away from, reviving, honoring? What is the socio-political and/or historical context we can place the work, and does that have any bearing on our understanding? What has come before, what came after? Methods, colors, figures, space, light, shadow, movement, brushstroke. The first step in approaching Art is simply to shift the emphasis of this question: “How is this Art?” to “How is this Art?” and trusting not that what we are beholding in this side alley gallery a “great” work of Art, but simply an expression of the artist. Yes, all Art is quite useless, as Oscar Wilde famously quipped.
At the Guggenheim, an exhibition of the works from the 1960s to the present of South Korean born Lee Ufan snailed upwards in Gehry’s building, called "Marking Infinity". From the Guggenheim's website: charting his creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical terrain that has radically expanded the possibilities for painting and sculpture since the 1960s. Lee is acclaimed for an innovative body of work that revolves around the notion of encounter—seeing the bare existence of what is actually before us and focusing on "the world as it is."
Ufan’s works were initially unfamiliar to me; moreover, as instillations using common, working-industrial materials simply arranged in space didn’t appear as having the artist’s creative intentions upon them. One instillation from 1968 had stainless steel thin narrow strips strewn across one another but interwoven to make a soft grid like a magnified section of a wicker chair. Eleven strips by ten make up the threading design. Just beyond each side of this square weave on the floor lay piles of more stainless steel strips, unadorned, still, as though awaiting their chance to join the weaving. The piece seems both unfinished and fresh, inviting the viewer weaving. In this, Ufan achieves an “encounter” between work and audience looking upon the work. The stainless steel strips are manufactured for their sharp, strong, pliable, industrial usefulness. Here they give way to be threaded into a softer, woven texture that in itself could be useful, as woven textures like wicker chairs are. The Art is the invitation between unfinished design and the strips alongside awaiting their participation—as we stand alongside acknowledging the invitation to “finish” the work began. Relatum, which names many of the works in his exhibit, is a philosophical term denoting things or events between which a relation exists. So artwork is not “an” object as such but a network of relationships, shifting aesthetic experience to the art of encounter. Rather than objects representing and so standing apart, Art for Ufan is a process of mediation between self – other, nature – industry, being – nothing, presence – infinity.
Relatum – a Response from 2008 is a “pure distillation of materials,” an oval stone two feet high by two wide leaning toward at a distance of a few feet a large thick dark square slab of steel: an encounter of organic nature and processed industry. The two remain at a distance, but incline to one another, which is the invitation by the artist through his Art to contemplate their relationship, Their distance in space, framed as it is in contemplative proximity, symbolizes distance in time and in shared natures. Organic stone becomes over time (and place) processed or created into steel. Looking on from our distance as viewer, the oval stone appears ordinary, even dull beige in color; indeed it shares in its dull sheen the color of the steel slab, the latter only darker and richer in power. The steel slab lies in its finished but unused industrial state—yet it also is unfinished as it awaits industrial use: what good is a flat slab of steel? If we turn to the stone, we see its potential for the arts of sculpture, and to the artist’s eye it awaits its representational form. But slicing through our initial judgment, examining the stone qua stone, we can more readily appreciate the time compressed it contains, its mysterious ancient composite structure. What powers forged this heavy weighted thing? Beige soon gives way to intricate patterns and sparkling facets, pores and stains and moss dried to a burned green paste. An earth hovers there in space, minerals and spices packed within like planets and stars within a galaxy. If Art is intentional, Ufan arranged the rising angled oval stone to face toward the flat steel slab lying before it, but its slender end coming to meet the stone bends upward gently like a wave heralding the stony prow of a ship. One side of steel slab facing the stone is gouged slightly along its edge, trimmed half an inch in precise shaping to the presence and force of the stone, as though by inundation over time and proximity the stone has worn away the edge. This encounter, a gradual wearing away of the seemingly solid and timeless and enduring steel, is ironic in that the stone’s own minerals were worn and broken down and transferred across time and distance to form the steel slab itself.
Dialogue Series – Dialogue 2008: A large canvas is laid down flat. The artist bends over a pristine creamy white canvas, then makes a limited number of discreet strokes with a broad flat brush loaded with gray paint, a color vague and ephemeral. Gestures are minimal, his mind focused, and the resulting image is sort of a solid gray flat cup-shape, basically square but tapering slightly at the bottom. Through the process, the shape depicted is at once minimal and perfectly executed, yet because the image is not centered on the canvas; all the more does its painted shape call to its own presence. Although gray, there is a darkening on one side of the shape, grayness expressing its own depth and hollowness. The image is simple and precisely conveyed, as though the artist executed with absolute concentration a lithe gesture this moment in time and presence in space.
Relatum – Silence, 2008: a tall steel structure rises from the floor yet leans for support on the wall behind it. Steel, flat rectangle twelve feet high. Away from it stands a rock two feet high, found and placed there from nature, yet seeming at its head to incline toward the height of its blank, industrial formed distant brother. The wall holds the steel’s shadow, dark and solid at its host but only a nightly wisp of material in itself. The light, however, upon the rock casts a number of soft, inter- and overlapping shadows of its own. Shadows both cast by the light and the soft intermingling, as though ripples easing toward the steel. The steel’s industrial use intends its geometric, stable, forceful rectangle shape, yet removed from its industrial context, lending instead its presence to this aesthetic, “useless” encounter with its organic original self—again, the rock quarried to give the steel slab its mineral body and blood, indeed its very existence.
Funny story: the artist, who was then shuttling between Japan and France, was doing an exhibition in Paris. For some installments, he went searching for a particular kind of rocks he had in mind. Walked the city parks, and couldn’t find any. He became discouraged, then came upon piles of just these needed rocks. He used a wheelbarrow to haul rocks to the exhibition space. That afternoon he discovered outside the police, who wanted to speak to him. He needed to return the rocks immediately, as they were part of a Japanese garden. Ufan pleaded, and, as they were French, the police agreed that he could return them after the show. Ironic that he found in Paris the rocks he needed, in a garden whose cultural design he was ignorant of, but so close to his home.
