Hub Notes: 6/15/08
Hub Notes: 6/15/08
At 3:00 on a recent afternoon, I was waiting for a group to get off the elevator so that I could do one of my first official tours, or “conversations.” When a group of three teenagers emerged, I asked them if they were interested in a brief introduction to the Hub space, and they agreed. I was about to begin talking about Dongducheon when one of the boys jumped in to ask, pointing at Sangdon Kim’s Hold your breath for four minutes—The Cemetery, “Is that some kind of surveillance thing?” It was a moment in the piece showing not the gravestones, or the running stream, but the construction site, followed by a brief pan over rows of buildings, perhaps the neighborhood immediately surrounding the cemetery. Entering the space with no knowledge of the context, or “mission” of the exhibition, this boy offered an instinctive, if mistaken, impression of what he saw.
Trying to respond to this misreading without discouraging his curiosity, I explained that these artists were making videos not in an effort to survey upon the people of Dongducheon, but rather the opposite: as part of a multi-faceted, two-year process of engaging directly with residents of the neighborhood, and creating projects to reflect and record their (often silenced) experiences and viewpoints. What I considered here was the range of possible difference between a person’s immediate visual response and the actual narrative of the piece; my efforts to “correct” people sensitively without alienating them; and the implications of such “visual misreading” in general. While art viewers conventionally presume that all responses to a work are valid (there is no “wrong answer” in art), the Hub space seems to demand a different approach—despite the formal abstraction within some of them, works are intended to tell a specific story, and it is my role to assist in conveying and substantiating that story. Still, it is notable that all works retain traces of other stories, different narratives: perhaps Sangdon Kim’s video does echo the surveillance and regulation by U.S. Forces, even if his camera is not the culprit.
—Becky Brown