Venue: Art Space Pool (Seoul)

Artists : Halil Altindere, Igor Grubic, Joachim Koester, Julian Röder, Seo Pyeung-Joo, An Jung-ju, Okin Collective
Curator : Seon-Ryeong Cho

Illusion, Indecision, and Transformation of Movement: Visual Media and Body Gestures

Seon-Ryeong Cho (curator)

How can human gestures attain freedom? We see and perform many gestures in our daily lives. Many of these gestures are not just personal but have a social and political context. Dancers explores what happens when visual artists are able to relocate human gestures with social and political contexts into the milieu of an exhibition gallery. These gestures include political gestures such as demonstrations (Julian Röder), riots and suppressions (Igor Grubic), and refugee escapes (Halil Altindere), programed gestures such as military exercises, chi training, and election campaigns (Seo Pyeung-Joo, Okin Collective, and An Jung-Ju), pathological gestures such as hysterical seizures (Joachim Koester), and so on. We usually focus only on the contextual meaning of these situations, but these artists find another level of meaning by paying attention to the external aspects of these gestures.

Paying attention to the external aspects of gestures does not mean disregarding their contextual meanings; it means revealing the hidden meanings of the gesture itself. Artists reveal the aesthetic and political possibilities of gestures by parenthesizing the gesture's original purpose. However, these possibilities are not found by simply repeating or criticizing the gestures of society. Gestures captured by artists through video and photographic media have a very complex hierarchy. Gestures are both habitual and coincidental. They are both clichéd and surprising. The artists of Dancers transform their gestures, but this transformation is not instantaneous or complete. Various behaviors such as indecision, fragmentation, separation and delay exist in an ambiguous spectrum. There are fundamentally vague and fluctuating effects in which many layers overlap, divide, and combine. Dancers seeks to explore these layers and intervals.

Dancers subtextually discusses the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's concept of gesture. Agamben says that gesture is a third kind of action that is distinguished from production (action with purpose) and enacting (action without purpose). In the case of production, the means are governed by purpose. In the case of enacting, the means are irrelevant to the purpose. However, in the case of gesture, means themselves are without purpose. Using gesture as a means is not only irrelevant to its purpose but by parenthesizing the purpose, it also purifies the means themselves. According to Agamben, the "pure means" visualized by gestures are "common things" that anyone can use. In this respect, Agamben transforms the problem of "the goal of the means" (a spectacle that reduces everything to pure visibility) that occurs in contemporary capitalist society into a positive. The methods used by the artists of Dancers are similar. The artists seek to reveal the potential of gestures by parenthesizing the purpose of political, social, and pathological gestures and showing their pure external aspects.

In this process, photography and video images play a very large role. Dancers explores the history of visual media's capturing of human gestures. Since the 19th century, when Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey invented chronophotography and the Lumiére brothers invented film, one of the main goals of visual media (photographs and their logical descendants motion pictures) was to attempt to capture movements visually. In particular, the movement of the human body was an important target. However, due to its technical limitations, visual media cannot capture movement as it is (unlike auditory signals, optical signals can only be recorded intermittently). For this reason, human movement captured by visual media has a somewhat bizarre and fantastic character. Visual media cannot help but show the illusion of movement rather than movement itself. The visualization of gestures as pure means, which this exhibition intends to show, is also connected to this problem. These awkward, funny, and odd gestures echo the parenthesizing of purpose in another way. In other words, at the moment when the artists choose the photographs and video images, the basis for the pure means of parenthesizing of purpose is revealed. Visual media by its very nature separates movement from its purpose by mechanically deconstructing and reconstructing movement.

 

+http://www.altpool.org/