The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

What constitutes an ideal work of public art? This has preoccupied Gimhongsok since 2006. In some cases, his responses have been ideal in the literal sense: unrealisable plans delivered in the form of mock lectures, or proposals so absurd that they can only be relayed by actors trained to recall them from memory. With his ‘Public Nature’ sculptures, the monuments the artist proposes are visually humble, cobbled together from plastic bags, cardboard boxes and other consumer detritus. In a perverse twist, however, his life-sized maquettes are produced in high-cost materials like bronze and resin. Such perversity is not an unusual trait of a Gimhongsok work, given the artist’s longstanding interest in the shortcomings of communication and address. He has a particular fascination with the dynamics of translation between languages and cultures, the unpredictability with which meaning is conveyed, miscommunicated and produced anew. Art, for Gimhongsok, is already fraught with ethical dilemmas; his genius lies in exacerbating these, filtering them through the foibles of translation, its missteps and eccentricities. And, is there anything more prone to misstep and eccentricity than public art? Here, Gimhongsok duly stumbles through the prickly questions of consensus — consensus on which community values any given monument should embody and, through its presence, reinforce; consensus on which collective tastes an ideal work of public art should appeal to; consensus on the necessity of public art — and, even the very possibility of consensus. Finely attuned to the prevailing conceits of his time, Gimhongsok recognises the currency that participation holds in terms of a general antipathy directed toward cultural elitism and artistic egoism. For inspiration, he seeks out the great secular, collective labour in which humanity is currently engaged as a model for the ideal public sculpture. And he finds it in garbage. Gimhongsok states: ‘The objects found on the streets that are formed by plastic bags or cardboard boxes can be seen as a kind of collaborative public work’. 1 A pile of plastic bags awaiting collection, for instance, is an everyday sculpture open to alteration by others, the shape of a bag changing when an empty bottle is shoved into it by a passer-by, or the whole stack being knocked over by the flow of human traffic. The artist declares: ‘Because there are no set guidelines for the use of plastic bags, this dynamic social narrative is a totally spontaneous manifestation and can be seen as a true social agreement’. 2 Accordingly, A Fire 2011 approximates a bonfire by placing a full garbage bag on a stack of wooden beams. In Canine Construction 2009, nine garbage bags are arranged in the shape of a giant dog. Haphazard binding compresses the rearmost bag into a tail, while an easy-carry tie atop the sculpture’s ‘head’ furnishes it with a quirky pair of ears. A study on slanted and hyperbolic constitution – LOVE 2012 is as unwieldy as its title, a rangy totem of precariously perched boxes and bed-rolls stacked into the letters ‘L’, ‘O’, ‘V’ and ‘E’. But why does Gimhongsok go a step further? Why does he monumentalise the un- monumental by casting his objects into editions of bronze and resin? Appropriately, the answer lies in ‘LOVE’. It’s quite an obvious subject, for who could deny the candidacy of love as the most widely acceptable cultural value? But, here, there is an art world in-joke at play, for those four letters also constitute the most iconic work (dated 1967) of American pop artist Robert Indiana, countlessly repeated in various media — particularly public sculpture — as well as quoted and parodied widely. For its part, Canine Construction riffs on the sleek, colourful balloon dog sculptures of Jeff Koons. Here, however, the peppy stance, aerodynamic curves and anodised hues are replaced with doughy and lumpy, slumping, black garbage bags, with their indelicate mass and flat, uninspiring matt black surface. The clumsiness is endearing, making it arguably more dog-like than Koons’s austere and colourful creations. For all their charm, Gimhongsok’s expensive materials and labour- intensive processes suggest that questions of artistic originality have been subsumed into the broader category of value, of what provides any given art work its venerated status. Like a translation, a resin cast of a garbage bag remains a copy, an inauthentic approximation of the real thing. But, at the same time, it works — it works as a work of art. Just like a translation, it produces new inflections. Gimhongsok’s proposals set out to represent collective values by mimicking the process of collective creation. But, in doing so, they demonstrate the insufficiency of assumptions about originality, value and what it means to represent and reinforce a community through art. Like translations, what his works purport to do and what they actually do are never the same. Perhaps the ideal work of public art should always leave room for such a gap. Reuben Keehan 1 Gimhongsok, artist statement, reproduced in Gimhongsok: Public Blank [exhibition brochure], Kukje Gallery, Seoul, 2010, p.23. 2 Gimhongsok, p.23. GIMHONGSOK Irreconcilable differences 118