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REVIEWS
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Marcus Verhagen on possibly
the best show this year
Haegue Yang: Storage Piece
Lawrence O'Hana Gallery
28 April – 9 May 2004
Haegue Yang’s Storage Piece, which showed
at Lawrence O’Hana Gallery in late April and early May, was
a brilliant tease, a work of art made out of other works that were
wrapped up and stacked together on palettes. It cast the viewer
as an interloper whose aesthetic instincts were not just frustrated
but gently mocked, while offering a thoughtful meditation on the
nomadism of the contemporary artist.
At first sight, the pile of boxes, crates and
bubble-wrapped oddments came across as a slightly fussy, neo-minimalist
piece, hovering cleverly on the border between sculpture and installation.
After all, it sat on a pedestal of sorts – the palettes –
and had an imposing physical presence. But the impression quickly
unravelled. As soon as you realised that the work consisted of earlier
pieces by the same artist, the minimalist reading became problematic
and the show took on a more provocative character. The artist had
left a clipboard lying on top of a box, and the clipboard, it turned
out, held an inventory of all the works that were piled up in the
gallery, together with telegraphic descriptions (‘UN matchbox’,
‘Knitting material’, etc.). The list was a bureaucratically-framed
taunt, holding out tantalising scraps of information on pieces that
would remain under wraps for the duration of the show.
At the opening, two actors appeared and read
out a rambling script in which the artist disserted on our attachment
to things and on her experience of making and showing some of the
mothballed pieces. (The reading was recorded and then replayed throughout
the show.) One of the hidden objects, apparently, was a rack that
she had wanted for her home but had instead exhibited – having
bought it with the help of a sponsor, she could hardly use it for
private ends. Another invisible piece consisted of Korean objects
that had been assembled for a show in Amsterdam on contemporary
Korean culture; Yang, who was already living in Europe, had to hire
a ‘personal shopper’ to collect the objects for her in
Korea. By this point in the performance it was clear that Yang had
a taste for the absurd and that much of her earlier work hinged
on telling incongruities – on mismatched ambitions and deflected
purposes. But the end of the reading held a masterstroke. Still
speaking through the actors, Yang explained that the offer of a
show at Lawrence O’Hana Gallery had come just as she was trying
to find a storage facility for earlier pieces, some of which were
on the point of arriving from exhibitions which had recently closed.
A little disingenuously, she suggested that the show wasn’t
a carefully executed artistic project as much as a convenient solution
to a practical problem.
It was an eye-opening joke, one that transformed
the show into a tug of war between the assemblage and the space.
Could the pile of wrapped objects turn the room into a warehouse
or would the gallery turn the crates and packages into an artwork?
And of course the gallery won, but it won at the cost of the piece’s
cogency as a purely aesthetic proposition. The collection of boxes
did, yes, read as a work of art, but not as the kind you first took
it for. Rather, it read as a witty commentary on the quasi-sacral
aura of the traditional art object and on the role of the gallery
in maintaining that aura. It took the viewer’s initial response
and exposed it as a conditioned reflex – and one that eased
the process of commoditisation but didn’t necessarily do justice
to the work itself. And the piece hinted, just hinted, that if the
artist had instead pandered to the viewer’s expectations, she
might have had a home or studio large enough to accommodate her
earlier work.
The piece also read as a diary-cum-travelogue,
as the account of one artist’s experience in a rapidly globalising
art world. The packages came from far-flung places, from Seoul,
Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin, and their movements presumably mirrored
those of the artist herself. But in the piece travel was pictured
in terms of residues. In between the witticisms and sharp observations,
the work told of deracination and unrelatedness. After all, the
pieces-within-the-piece were in a sense homeless.
The show nimbly managed a number of conceptual
tricks. It used concealment in the service of demystification. The
artist spoke but not in her own voice and her work, like her person,
was both present and not. But the show was more than just a clever
display of conceptual prowess. It held up a mirror to the art world,
wrong-footing it and uncovering deep-seated automatisms. And it
was also a bemused but deeply compelling meditation on globalisation
and on the opportunities, lapses and redundancies that come in its
wake.
Marcus Verhagen is a freelance lecturer and critic.
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