Presentation by Claudia Pestana

[Slide 1 | Time code 00:40]
Hello Everyone, I am Claudia Pestana and it is a pleasure to take part in these conversations.
I would like to thank Park Gahee, Seo Naim, Kwak No-One, Lee Bo-bae, and Shin Se-jung for the invitation and for all the meetings, exchange, hard work, and patience that made these presentations possible.
Won-seok, thank you for the introduction to today’s session.
My presentation is titled Not a Service, not an authority, not graspable.
It builds on a workshop I was invited to conduct with SeMA peers at the North Branch of the Seoul Museum of Art in October 2020. The title was slightly shorter then, it was simply: Not a service, not an authority.

[Slide 2 | Time code 01:15]
Not a service, not an authority was an opportunity to share my experiences as a museum educator, art mediator/facilitator and also as a curator. It allowed me to elaborate on why I insist on learning not being seen as a service―not being the act of merely offering interpretations to the public, especially authoritative ones, just because that may be what the public expects and requests. It also became a chance to look over a series of projects where groups of people could gather together in exhibitions and, as active participants, experience their premises and the works being shown. It was also the first time to explore what before had been merely a quip that I would make, ‘learning is not a service,’ whenever I was confronted with suggestions that audiences can only properly understand the worth of works of art and shows when they are given a multiplicity of programs. By adding ‘not graspable’ to the title of this presentation, I will look through a series of apparently unrelated projects to reflect on ways that artworks, exhibitions, and learning can operate in relation to one another.

[Slide 3 | Time code 02:33]
To start, I’d like to revisit the type of situation established by Tammy Kim’s 5 Interloc(k)utors when it was presented in the Conjunctures within Breach section of the 2010 Random Access exhibition at Nam June Paik Art Center.

‘Random Access,’ as many of you may know, is the title of a work by Nam June Paik consisting of strips of audio tape that a visitor can playback randomly―the NJP Art Center director at the time used this as the premise for a show that consisted of exhibitions by all members of the curatorial team as long as they explored a Nam June Paik work or text and any ideas associated to it. For Conjunctures within Breach, my section, I opted to show Paik’s Hand and Face. This silent b/w film showing Nam June Paik moving his hands over his face became the pretext to explore notions of reciprocity and reversibility―particularly in relation to the body as a whole and how it integrates its different members.

The exhibition was very sparse―at least when it opened―Paik’s film was projected on a wall, with only three monitors on plinths, and Tammy Kim’s large sculpture was in the centre with a large wall text drawn from her writing on the wall behind it.

The monitors played Helena Almeida’s Ouve-me, another b/w silent video of a woman behind a veil with the words ‘hear me’/’listen to me’ covering her mouth and on the other monitor was Bruce Nauman’s Walk with Contraposto where the artist walks down a corridor swaying his hips, while the third monitor showed a short video that was made by Nam June Paik and found in the video archives.

Most prominent was Tammy Kim’s large-scale white sculpture. Although made for the show, it was based on an earlier piece the artist had made while she was still a sculpture student. At her school, professors would regularly critique students’ works in their studio spaces. The artist decided to reverse the power dynamics in order to address the unease that she felt having her work constantly scrutinized by older established white male artists, so she created a sculpture that could be used during the discussion of the work itself: a tilted round-topped table that stood at the corner of her studio and was built to her scale. This piece, turned the tables on her professors’ authority and stature by giving her a vantage point over them: she would take the uppermost neck opening among the slots on the tabletop using a set of stairs, and the professors occupied the lower neck openings. Given their size, their movements were often restricted because the slots for their heads and shoulders were too tight. The professors became locked into looking up at the artist and she in turn was in the position to look down on them.

For the exhibition at NJP Art Center, the reversal of hierarchies operated in a slightly different way: here the iconic works by the more established artists were scattered around Tammy Kim’s sculpture while her piece took over the space not just in terms of scale but because it invited the audience to interact with it.

In the end, it was the invitation to be inhabited, extended by the work, that overturned the most hierarchies and even shifted many of the premises of the exhibition.

[Slide 4 | Time code 06:53]
Thanks to leftover budget and the help of colleagues to complete the paperwork needed to be able to use it, I was able to invite several artists to respond to the work’s invitation to be inhabited. Each of the three interventions that took place altered the landscape of the exhibition.

So, there were three interventions in total: A noise performance When I Look At The Clouds I See Clouds by Pedro Lagoa with Park Daham and Cho Younghoon, included a live projection of excerpts from the films that the sound for the performance had been taken from, and which was later incorporated into the exhibition along with a smaller sculptural object.

[Slide 5 | Time code 07:16]
The second intervention was a Okin Manifesto: 5 minute revolution by Okin Collective, and it consisted of a workshop discussing manifestos and drafting items for a personal manifesto to add to a print that could be rolled up into a megaphone that was used by the audience to shout out their manifestos throughout the museum. Leftover ‘megaphone prints,’ photo documentation and items from the performance were also later placed in the show.

[Slide 6 | Time code 07:45]
The final intervention was devised with Dirk Fleischmann and consisted of artists from Hansung University spending a day in the exhibition, proposing alterations that they would like to make to the exhibition. They were then invited back for another day to directly modify the space and the experience of the works in accordance with their suggestions. Unfortunately I don’t currently have any photos of this. In addition to the obvious energy of the chaos and disruption visible in the images, these three interventions also highlighted how exhibitions could change as those gathering within them actively participated in what the exhibition or the works propose: in this particular case this occurred by following the lead of the work, but resulting in something that had not been imagined in advance.

[Slide 6-7 | Time code 08:36]
In hindsight, I can probably trace my affinity for this type of experience to when I was part of the 2007 Document 12 ‘education team’ as one of the Goethe Institute sponsored international curators. That edition placed an emphasis on education as an active engagement, and the program ranged from a mediation approach to guided tours, daily lunch lectures, magazine and community projects, to works that also operated as spaces for learning. The entrance to the Fridericianum is a particularly memorable recollection for me since it offers an image of some of the ideas behind that edition of the Documenta: the foyer space was transformed into a mirrored corridor containing mirrored rectangular sculptures by John McCracken. Upon entering, a person was surrounded by infinite layers of their reflections and those of others around them. When a tour of the exhibition began here, regardless of who might be speaking, one would also always be confronted by one’s own position and presence in the whole situation. But one would also be somewhat estranged from the familiarity associated with recognizing one’s own reflection because these were intermingled with the reflections of all the others that were also present in the space. In this environment, the idea of being a visible participant that contributes to the construction of the learning experience becomes almost impossible to escape. However, that was in 2007, and this idea of being estranged from something familiar as an instigator of curiosity and transformation has over the years extended beyond gathering in person as a group. In the past decade, it has come to increasingly include being able to almost be in continuous contact with numerous realities and experiences through social media and other digital platforms. More recently, social distancing measures have brought added nuances to our understanding of gathering and staying in touch through digital and social media platforms. What happens when things become out of reach and gathering is no longer a possibility?

[Slide 8 | Time code 10:57]
Even before the pandemic, one of the ideas subjacent to the 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale’s One Escape at a Time (2021) exhibition was to ask what can be learned from the new ways people come into contact with things given shifts in how popular media is experienced, now that access to it mostly occurs through streaming, as well as short clips on Instagram or YouTube. This idea was present in Echoes, the public program for One Escape at a Time, and although it included programs like performances, talks, workshops, and guided tours, some of which had to be adapted to remote online versions, the Network brought fragments of the Biennale to numerous establishments in Seoul. Although mostly only representations of works in the forms of posters or short excerpts of videos, these items were a means of making the exhibition present within spaces people may routinely visit and where they are accustomed to engaging with both the unfamiliar and the routine ―something that could be as simple as trying a new flavor of cake in a bakery or browsing through new books at a bookshop. In addition to this wider public, there was something that I like to think of as an intermediary public which included the people who owned or managed the establishments willing to take part and all the members of the biennale team who became the frontline of communication with the establishments to invite them to participate. As an intermediary public, team and establishment owners became advocates, caretakers, and hosts of these fragments and representations, witnessing not just the items themselves but also a multitude of people interacting with them―whether in the intimacy of a small shop or out in the open in a public square.

[Slide 9 | Time code 12:48]
The idea of these fragments dispersed throughout the city is reminiscent to me of Ernesto de Sousa’s text reflecting on the Graphic Arts as ‘vehicles of intimacy’ (1965) and on how, as they became increasingly easy to produce, artists could harness their potential and engage with wider audiences in previously inaccessible yet public spaces—today there are even more media that can be experimented with in this way and audiences are even more ready to interact with them on terms beyond the purely commercial ones. Several projects in the biennale could be looked at to gain insight into some of these issues, but for this presentation, I would like to focus on the collaboration between Tastehouse and WORKS, one of three projects the Biennale developed with Seoul art spaces.

[Slide 10 | Time code 13:41]
Proposed by art space Tastehouse and design duo WORKS, OoH is a project in the public realm that intervenes within the massive publicity infrastructure present throughout the city. The work itself is an immense image conceived for the media facade in K-pop Square. This image is presented in 1:1 scale on the project website out-of-home.kr that could be accessed from the biennale website. On the website a person can scroll over the entire image, sometimes coming across large expanses of color, or with different shapes and at times with characters and letters. Grasping the ‘bigger picture’ would however be highly unlikely, although reading the description in the Information section of the website offers a clear description of the main ideas.

[Slide 11 | Time code 14:50]
The acronym OoH stands for Out of Home, the marketing term for all advertising that takes place out of home on items such as billboards, media facades, etc. Increasingly, this is where we encounter information or messages and it is rapidly becoming more omnipresent and fluid, from static billboards visible as we drive by in our cars, to attention-grabbing moving images on large media canvases on building façades, or monitors and posters on the metro and buses. Here is the immense image, created for OoH and screened on the K-Pop Square media canvas as a motion graphic. This was where the image as a whole could be glimpsed―and yet, even this does not fully capture what the work does.

[Slide 12 | Time code 15:48]
Especially given that to explore the vastness of the image and the notion of distribution inherent to the dissemination of content on publicity platforms, Tastehouse and WORKS took 1:1 ‘excerpts’ to use on a diversity of items. For example, on T-shirts, as can be seen here and on the large banner on the facade of SeMA or interspersed among the Biennale street lamp banners.

[Slide 13 | Time code 16:15]
So, what can we learn from access to only fragments, quotes, or excerpts of a whole, that because it might not be a static object, may still evade graspability in its entirety? Might these suggest a form of gathering that is not just about people coming together in person nor being connected through digital platforms? Might gathering also be about how we bring things together and pass them on to one another? To reflect on this, I would like to mention a work and a performance—both of which are works by Heman Chong; and to consider the potential of gathering as something that enables reconfiguration and places things in suspension.

[Slide 14 | Time code 16:58]
Chong’s Everything (Wikipedia) is a durational performance where a performer reads the article of the day on the home page of Wikipedia from start to finish. They then select any of the available hyperlinks to read. This action can be repeated for as long as was predefined with the performer. This action brings to the fore aspects of how we take for granted the crowd-sourced information made readily available at our fingertips as well as the uses we make of it, while also highlighting its structure. As the performance continues, the connections and jumps between articles can become looser and less clear, creating the sense of things becoming increasingly absurd, despite the performer having followed instructions precisely.

[Slide 15 | Time code 17:57]
When this happens, and most connections to the initial article are lost, the reading becomes a “futile attempt to vocalize the entirety of human knowledge”. In addition to what this work proposes conceptually, experiencing the performance becomes an act of participation as something similar to floating attention. For example, in this image, the performer is performing in the corner and the visitors were reading the handout to contextualize themselves with what he was doing. Everything (Wikipedia) as a performance can suggest how a gesture or action is able to reframe things.

[Slide 16 | Time code 18:30]
Another piece by Heman Chong’s also presented in this group exhibition in Lisbon last year is also an action. This time it took on the task of reframing the pretext for the entire exhibition while also highlighting its original premises: Cut Down The Middle, these four words are a title that refers to both a work and an exhibition. Chong suggested that choosing the title of the exhibition could be one of his works included in the show I curated in dialogue with the artist, João Vasco Paiva. The pretext for the show was to present Paiva’s work alongside works by artists that he had exhibited, collaborated, or shared ideas or space with over the years. Anchored on Paiva’s practice, the works by other artists included in the exhibition were initially selected based on affinities with notions of urban space and the traces of the structures that determine those spaces that are also present in Paiva’s work. This idea of certain experiences, having predetermined rules and codes subjacent to them, is something that often also applies to exhibitions and exhibition spaces. These pretexts, although relevant and legitimate, also projected a very specific perspective on all the works, and despite having been at the origin of the exhibition, were also somewhat restrictive.

[Slide 17 | Time code 19:57]
By mentioning that when he proposed the four words Cut Down The Middle as the title of the exhibition, he had taken them from a sentence in one of Clarice Lispector’s novels, Heman Chong reconfigured the priorities of the premises that gave rise to the exhibition, especially by adding that the title of the novel the sentence came from was itself suggested to Lispector by a friend and fellow writer who had taken it from a sentence from a novel by James Joyce. With this action, Heman added a layer of randomness to how a title for an exhibition works, liberating it from its original premises and opening it up to new readings. This idea of reading, sharing, exchanging, and negotiating understandings can be seen as an act of placing things in suspension—or into a temporary arrangement, rather than crystallizing them into certainties. It is generous since it is not a need to grasp and control, but rather alludes to appreciating the possibilities offered by the ungraspability or evasiveness of things. Yet, with the additional narrative that Chong provides for his choice of title, there is also a hint of how, regardless of whether in person or not, engaging with works and ideas is a joint activity of confronting, reconfiguring, and sharing perspectives—importantly, in this case, it can be done with close friends and also with distant peers from other times.

[Slide 18 | Time code 21:25]
Although, the negations in the title of this presentation, and a certain evasiveness in my approach, are intended to highlight how art as a potentially indeterminate, and at times even negotiated, experience can be a way to look at things as if in suspension, they are also an attempt to suggest that non-explanatory approaches can free the experience of art from merely being an instituted value to be appreciated and recognized authoritatively. As suggested by the proposed reading of Cut Down The Middle just presented, perhaps it can also be recognized as a form of learning with, from, and through, others, be they peers, colleagues, members of the public, or friends. In this spirit, I would like to conclude by drawing on the curatorial essay of my colleague Jiwon Lee in the One Escape at a Time catalog. She says:

When we present a work as the sum of the artist’s biography, a synopsis of the work’s content and underlying contexts, and a rundown of its visual characteristics, materials, dimensions, and technical specifications, perhaps we risk foreclosing the chance for an escape that is already manifested by the work. That is, explaining a work with articulated concepts may offer us something concrete, but it can also obscure everything that lies in between. …

For me, the exhibition was a physical proposal to see beyond our own principles, appreciate collisions between different perspectives, and engage each other in complex relationships. … Though we may be sitting side by side, the distance between us is an unfathomable one, containing incomparable differences and multiple worlds. …¹

Bibliography
De Sousa, Ernesto. “Graphic Arts, Vehicle of Intimacy.” In Your Body Is My Body, catalog edited by Isabel Alves, 23-42. Lisbon: Museu Coleção Berardo, 2016.
Diawara, Manthia. “Édouard Gilssant’s Poetics of Trembling.” Paper circulated on the occasion of the author’s seminar, “De-opacification and the Right to Opacity,”at Maumaus, Lisbon, November 8, 2019.
Miranda Justo, José. “A Meditative Flow on Ernesto de Sousa’s Conception of Modernity (and Two Appendixes on Related Matters).” OEI, nos. 80-81 (2018): 85-94.
ALVES, Isabel, JUSTO, José Miranda, eds., Ser Moderno… em Portugal. Lisbon: Assirio and Alvim, 1998.
LEE, Jiwon “(No) Escape” in One Escape at a Time, catalog for the 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Seoul: Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), 2021.

This revised transcription/note is based on Claudia Pestana’s presentation titled ‘Not a Service, Not an Authority, and Not Graspable,’ held on Day 2 of Public Meetings―Shift in Learning (January 16, 2022) as a part of SeMA Learning Station: Shift at Seoul Museum of Art.

Korean translation of the text: “서비스도 권위도 아닌, 그리고 가늠할 수도 없는”을 위한 노트/기록―클라우디아 페스타나의 발제