The Delightfully Disturbing Conceptual Art of Michael Joo | Brilliant Ideas Ep. 3

brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor the contemporary art world is vibrant and booming as never before it's a 21st century phenomenon a global industry in its own right brilliant ideas looks at the artists at the heart of this they have a unique power to inspire astonish provoke and shock to push boundaries ask new questions and see the world of fresh artists like Michael Joo you I guess Michael jr. is an artist who delights and disturbs in equal measure with the best of art some of the boundaries between I and we and you dissolve his works range from sculpture performance and video art to arresting large-scale installations he's a conceptual artist you wouldn't be able to classify him as one thing over another and in his personal exploration of a wide range of themes from identity nature and politics Michael Jew has become one of America's most enigmatic artists his work was able to transform his identity into something more Universal and that's what a good contemporary artist can do is that Michael Jews were it's about material it's about new ways of looking it's about deconstructing things it allows you to spend time with it and you know discover different things within it over time Michael Jew was never destined to be an artist born to scientists he was in art terms a late bloomer only joining art school in his early 20s I was born in upstate New York and grew up there outside of Ithaca in the 60s my parents came over from Korea in the late 50s early 60s and ended up doing postgraduate work there so I grew up in a very active academic environment but I never had known of art as a career I was never told that it could be an artist it wasn't until I took work in Vienna Austria doing very low-level science work research work that I spent some time with scientists who would rather talk about art and culture and I felt a lot of urgency at that time I immediately started cold-calling art schools and eventually got in I had come to New York to be in Manhattan and its energy is very particular and very special so what I like about Red Hook is that it's cut off so close to Manhattan but you can blow things up here and you can do that and happen we're in Red Hook Brooklyn and this is my studio and welcome my work is about possibility and potential in a way if the studio is a place full of possibility almost a laboratory for experimentation Michaels work it's an individual exploration he just has a lot of tools in the paint box when he's putting them together and interesting in creative ways a lot of times some in the studio have a group of objects laid out what are kind of almost study tables for form and these forms will keep changing as I go back to them but almost like many studios in and of themselves this table happens to be an examination of crystal forms in many ways it could be seen as a model for for my process sometimes these forms grow into something fruitful and sometimes they don't grow at all and they're very static so by living with some of these forms and having them go through some of the other projects I think they all influence each other in some ways even though my folks were both scientists our household was fairly diverse there was quite a bit of contradiction in terms of science religion philosophy and my father was a was a an excellent draftsman and he would take us on trips to the forest and I remember him drawing from nature growing up in such a rural environment as upstate New York and then almost free suburban Minnesota I was exposed to a lot of nature and time alone I think my natural curiosity in those situations was piqued yeah this is a from a series of works called improved racks in nature when one of these animals drops a horn it could go for miles before it drops the other horn so to me the act of bringing them together again to one hole seemed kind of poignant that in nature nothing's truly perfectly balanced perfectly symmetrical and so by cutting these antlers in two parts and rebalancing them by the milliner fields I'm kind of imposing my will or the artists will of nature here and trying to rebalance and improve upon something that's already you know most perfect in a way or something we think it was perfect the work of Michael there's enough mystery in it there's nothing air ative to it it's sort of a very balanced work of being poetic and and super intelligent at the same time I think people respond in a weird way this early to it because it is trying to articulate sort of a being rather than a complete narrative for me the process of realizing an artwork is a bit of a path that goes in multiple directions I'll often subject a work to some kind of extreme process whether it's chemical or whether it's physical whether it's something born out of a laboratory or born out of a social experiment I guess allow it to be shaped by being subjected to those things and I think in many ways my art is about that type of potential and possibility and perhaps the result is is really not the anticipated outcome these is when Michael Joo burst onto the art scene in the early 90s the American markets had very little exposure to the Asian art world though born and bred in upstate New York he was viewed as not quite American not quite Korean and not quite a combination of the two Michael joy is an artist that I met for the first time in the Venice Biennale in 1993 and he presented his huge section of a plane from Korea war with his self-portrait as a woman on top of the side of the plane and that moment Michael Joo was a complete novelty because it was the first artist that was able to combine these two different culture the Western American and the Korean Michael has also found success in South Korea in 2001 he represented the country at the Venice Biennale once more deconstructing and reconstructing nature in his familiar style but while he easily traverses between these two realms he also declines cultural categorization being labeled as a Korean artist troubles me and as much this the fact that any labeling is is a bit troubling it kind of resists the label of Korean American and in many ways Korean it strikes me as kind of funny because I its rather inaccurate and it really depends on where you're speaking from and in some ways I see myself as fairly as absolutely international and primarily American I think Michael Joo is different because I don't think that he's so wedded to say I'm a Korean or I'm a Korean American I'm he was born in the States he was educated here so he was in a way not transplanted he was almost homegrown if you will and I think that has a more positive impact on the work that he has made because it's less about saying I'm Korean a Korean man and I'm an RS exploring different forms of identity in different forms of the practice of making art what might be perceived as an interest in personal identity is really for me an interest in how we get to where we've arrived you know it's more about an interest in human consciousness and I think that is in my line of interest or thinking of elliptical thinking on the way I see any kind of relationship of identity to my work one of the things that on process-wise that is very interested in lately is the creation of an perception of image in a way here the riot shields are in a wall or a barrier but ultimately what we're looking at is a reflection of ourselves and the implication is it forms a portable architecture that forms a portable borderline that almost moves and undulates you know at the will of the individuals behind it but I think when we look at them or it were they you know I'm interested in how we're looking at a distorted version of ourselves at the same time and makes you more aware of everything else around you one of the things that is happening in Michael's work is that he is now talking about the audience and talking about the viewer how we see ourselves and most of all how we relate to one another in works before of his that you could look at and watch the investigation of what he was talking about the investigation of identity and power and things like that now he invites you in with the use of mirrors to not only see what he is to say about it but how you looking at what he's saying respond to it so you become part of the piece and I think that this is a big issue for a lot of contemporary artists the use of mirrors because we're returning to this idea of spirit and alchemy and trying to figure out who and why we're here and how to cope with it in March last year Michael embarked on his most ambitious mirrored project a site specific installation in the Middle East for the 2015 charger biennial I wanted to make a space that reflected both the viewer and the place in which it was situated so over the course of the year spending I think about six site visits found myself moving across the desert following the irrigation channels and archaeological sites I felt a great intimacy with the earth and so it struck me that the experience of you know the present could be so connected to the past so deeply in this work in Sharjah these pathways all lead to a large reflected image of the city behind you and as you walk towards yourself along these carve channels in the earth that are blueprinted from existing and archaeological irrigation channels that can you not only walk towards yourself but you walk away from the place that you dim it like the idea that you're in the present thinking about the past and walking towards yourself but also away from what you've left behind IDs I guess in 1993 at 26 years old Michael Jew exhibited salt transfer cycle a video installation that still today remains one of his seminal works the artwork I'm probably best known for his performance work called salt transfer cycle it's a work that's part of an ongoing series of performative actions or gestures salt transfer cycle was the first Michael placed himself was the subject of the film traveling across the world in an attempt to articulate our relationship with nature with salt as the common link central to this film was the idea of energy a recurring theme that has come to define his 20-year career salt transfer cycle basically dealt with a character myself traveling from east to west and that I wanted to set up an idea of energy dream almost but a dream of energy in the form of salt played out at first with artifice by swimming through 2,000 pounds of MSG to going to an environment of extreme real salt the salt desert in Utah to finally ending up in the mountains of South Korea waiting for a wild elk to lick salt off my body and kind of return that idea I guess of this white powder and have it enter the blood streams of these animals and get shot back out into nature and therefore continue some kind of cycle the narrative is abstract in his work but there is always a narrative there's always something that stands for it's almost like a key to a puzzle or a map there is just something in that particular piece that you don't respond to with your mind you respond to because you just respond to it people identify with it no matter where they're from some of the themes of the work that I'm most interested in our energy and transformation and geez such a big word in many ways but I think this goes hand-in-hand with the idea of transformation I like the idea that energy itself exists and is a malleable almost kind of substance and it's almost for me parallel to the idea of sculpture a characteristic of Michel Jews work is the fact that that he works in all mediums there's a conceptual artist and whatever is appropriate to articulate that idea whether it be a sculpture found objects or something he paint it's always in service to this idea that he had this is a example from a relatively new very new series of work actually a new group of work involving and calories of human energy this case we've been calculating the number of calories of various actions this happens to be point zero three one five calories per millisecond and this is the number of calories that it takes to fall Michael Jewell works is very both mysterious and interesting and captivating since 1993 did the work of Michael do develop immensely I mean it became much more elaborate and sophisticated is more philosophical and the impact is always direct but you cannot be infinite down the most important for me and currently exploring the idea calories human nature in order to determine calories you burn something up measure the energy lost in order to expend energy decimator work your body and I think that those parallels are interesting silkscreen print is lurking underneath get a hint of one here and as the next layers are applied it brings back the text which has been buried now under a layer of kind of excess silver it's upside down hmm interesting huh this is the calories to get up or to rise per millisecond when I first came to art I was really interested in possibility for things in the present tense things that could potentially be launched as an experiment and yield a result that would had an immediate visceral kind of quality I mean early pieces I was doing poorly in art school were driving people crazy they were electrifying fresh chunks of muscle tissue so that they would move and make drawings or interacting in nature getting animals to do their own actions michael has made his career from presenting his ideas in extreme and unexpected ways but sometimes his unusual approach has also left people feeling alienated there have been works that are controversial either because it was the work or it was a hostile audience my exhibition I did in 2009 wasn't very well-received there was a confused reception because I showed a lot of different mediums alongside each other when really it was simply about the process of making but it definitely had garnered some of the harshest many years the messages are not always easy to decipher in his work he's very interested in materials and in presenting them in new ways and some of the information that he's trying to communicate is more subtle it takes more effort to get into it it requires you to participate and I think that's a really important aspect of any artist if you're just there sitting back and understand all I get it that's what it looks like I don't necessarily see that that is successful work but if you're engaged and you're forced to give some thought to it that in my personal opinion makes it a much more successful work of art all the work is always for me in the process of becoming or being whether it's more direct or obvious as synthetic human sweat evaporating to leave salt crystals and amino acid and skin tissue residue to calculating the number of calories it takes to pull the trigger of a loaded Smith & Wesson police handgun to waiting for wild elk to lick salt off my body for 10 days to the idea of making a cast of something in the natural world and then going through a number of processes to arrest that cast of the mold some of the results become a little closer to fixed and discreet art object but I think I see no difference with the work like that - walking 400 miles against the flow of the Alaskan pipeline just to measure the human energy it takes per step as opposed to another millions of years of fossil fuel that are flowing the other direction so experience and experience all parts of the work whether they are experienced by me is the protagonist or whether they're subjected to it by me as the protagonist in the artworks the desert doesn't really change I think my intention for the work isn't about a specific type of communication I think the embedding of meaning and intention that I have within the work is in many ways the motivation to make and the reason the work takes the particulars a pit does I hope that the viewers experience or my work in the space is generous enough physically and visually to engage the viewer long enough for it to have any kind of impact or take some sort of hold I think art is one of the last arenas and last areas that defy a certain kind of specialization the process of making art is an examination or a view into ourselves or where we're where we are at a particular moment I mean I think that in many ways with the best of art some of the boundaries between I and we and you dissolve into a place where intentionality process author and viewer disappear and I think that in that place there's important questions that can be asked that don't get asked in certain other disciplines or practices brilliant ideas powered by hyundai motor

Channel: Bloomberg Originals

Views: 134,274

Keywords: Bloomberg, Artist (Project Role), Michael Joo, Sculpture, Performance art, Brilliant Ideas

Id: FqbW56PnLx8

Length: 24min 12sec (1452 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2015