Studio

And this is an update on a work in progress. A painting that I have been applying myself to daily, in amongst all else I do. There are many things I could mention pertaining a certain exhibition in a certain dealer gallery in Christchurch…. But, I have the superior product! When completed it will have very erudite association to a sentence in a novel by the Korean author Yi Yunmol – concerning dust.

work in progress

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Prior to making the earlier work – Protection against Success – I made two other protection works, of which I’m also quite fond.

Protection against Control

Protection against Religion

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… so i arrived back at the studio feeling quite invigorated after a very enjoyable time out and made this work. I’m rather fond of it. I have always been interested in the relationship of failure to success, as Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM has been quoted, “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple really. Double your rate of failure.”

Protection against Success

After finishing this I went downstairs to the gallery and dismanteled the work I made for the group show here at the studio - Warfare Thesis: Pomo’s Bulldog. I left it laying on the floor for a while and started to recognise some very appealing attributes to its form, almost as though at rest it had finally discovered it’s quiet beauty.

resting art

But eventually I had to bring all my stuff back up to my studio and so like the other weavings before it was stuffed into a bag and lent itself to an ongoing study.

bagged and tagged

confessions of a bibliophile

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I made this work in anticipation of a visit from Cho Sung Mook. Unfortunately he didn’t turn up, though I have been told that his health is not particularly good so, I really understand that he will have priorities other than mine. I will make sure that Rho Unyoung can send this to him as a gift if it works out that I won’t get to see him before I leave.

Cho Sung Mook

detail

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Viggo and me

I made this we collage and stuck it on my door, because I got tired of seeing it lying on the floor. Unfortunately most people are under the mis-apprehension that it’s a photo of me. That I some how stole out one evening and got a professional Hollywood make-up job, to look like a homeless guy dragging a shopping trolley through an as-yet-to-be-realised post-appocalyptic narrative. It’s a screen shot of Viggo Mortensen, for the film adaptation of the Cormack McCarthy novel The Road. It’s a great read if you want to lie awake at night wishing you never had children, or hoping you never do.

door

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Warfare Thesis: Pomo’s Bulldog

I arrived here at Goyang on a Sunday afternoon, having spent the evening in the city in a hotel. It was late on Saturday night when I reached Seoul and as I was to soon find out probably next to extreemly unlikely I would have made it out to Goyang if I had of tried. Two days after arriving Mr Sim, The Studio’s Program Manager, knocks on my door to inform that the following Monday there will be a group exhibiton in the Gallery and if I want to put in any work I bought with me from NZ, then that will be just super.

Oh, but I don’t have any work, Mr Sim - I like to travel light … how about I make you something then. That is what I have travelled all this way to do, to make more stuff (this is Art in mong-speak and mong-speak is what I excell in when considerably jet-lagged).

And why not plunge right into the deep-end, with the feeling of having numerous bricks tied around my waist, lead shoes and a tin-foil hat. My normal approach to exhibitions is take you’re time, lots of time, in fact take time for a really long ride into the country and let it walk home. Thus, the immersion into a methodolgy of making that is the opposite of my normal practice has been stimulating. It is something that I do regularly in the studio at home, though often the pieces get looked at, moved into a corner, cannabilised for something else and then fall into the pit of forgetting – from which ideas sometimes crawl from to grasp great lungfuls of fresh air. A kind of playtime that has fruitful endresults at times, though I’m always finding myself silghtly embarrassed by it’s cloying need for friendship. I just stand there in the studio tapping my foot, looking at a watch thinking – shit, time should be back from the country by now.

My only option then, with five days to complete a work, was pull the tarp back off of the pit and see what crawled out.

The day after the exhibition opens I was asked to give a presentation to explain the work. Of course I had presentation confused with informal chat, and proceeded to launch into a raving rant about the importance of freedom of expression and the sustenance gained from the pursuit of ellusive excellence in cognition. That only once artists have embraced failure can we sustain success … …

Maybe half-an-hour into my very circuitous meditation on just about anything but the work in question, the director of The National Museum of Contemporary Art (who I didn’t know was going to be attending), politely coughs and asks – ahem, are you by any chance related to Barry Flanagan?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis

Warfare Thesis: Pomo's Bulldog

detail

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Intro

Well, I suppose this is going to be obvious. Studio and the stuff I’m making in there.

The studio complex itself is quite large. A two-storied structure made from reinforced cast-concrete. As a visitor I had, Hi Ash, commented – “It’s a fortress!” Yup, I concur. It houses 24 individual studios, a gallery, a kitchen, a workshop, toilets and showers, offices for administration, a storage room, and a room for security guards (?).

The studios are all mostly the same dimensions – though I think the sculptors get a little bit more space. And of course all the sculptors are down stairs on the ground-floor, which is just common sense. Nobody wants to break their back lugging hefty objects up-and-down stairs.

The working space in my studio is almost exactly the same size as my studio back in Christchurch. I walked in the first day and thought – this is strangely familiar. Though of course it is nowhere near as messy as the one in Christchurch. But I’m working on this, naturally. I have every intention to never clean this studio. One finds comfort where one can.

Oh, and 48, 100W florescent lights is something to behold in so small a space. It’s bright than daylight. I have my venetian blinds permanently closed as there is no way to tell the difference between night and day inside the studio with the lights on. I’m sure there’s a small uranium fuel cell buried somewhere close just to keep all the lights working.

So the studio complex is situated just outside Goyang city, the northern most reaches of Seoul. Ha!, my bus-stop is named Gogol – I now feel like a slightly mad diarist. To get to the city, I take a bus for twenty minutes and the subway for between 20-40 minutes, depending on where I’m going. To give some perspective, the DMZ is closer to the studio than the city center. Perversely, I find some comfort with this, being situated so close to the last remaining cold-war relic on this planet. There is, everyday, some sort of military activity – helicopter gun-ships, tanks, soldiers, jeeps, pill-boxes on the side of the roads, so it makes sense they build a fortress.

Anyway, I could carry on chatting inanely for hours, and I’m sure you just want to look at some pictures, so, here goes….