Marie de Brugerolle: Cody Hyun Choi: Canons/Cannons, 2015
First meeting, first steps (mid-nineteen-nineties)
I met Cody Choi in 1995 in his studio on Greenwich Street in New York, having been invited there by Dennis Elliot who was the director of ISP program in New York. After Hors Limites: l'art et la vie, for which I was adjunct curator opened in November 1994 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, an exhibition addressing the origins of happenings, “events” or performance art, I went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York to work on a Bruce Nauman retrospective. It seemed to me that there were connections between Choi and Nauman, notably in their shared interests in constrained bodies, the use of language as a tool, and the redeployment of objects and materials from American consumer society—sublimated by philosophical inquiry.
A number of important pieces were installed in Cody’s studio. They were significant not only in terms of the artist’s own work and development, but also in relation to their historical context. It was here that I discovered the Bad Drawing series (1992–93) and the wooden boxes of Cody’s Legend vs. Freud’s Shit Box (1994–95) as well as those that made up Ego Shop (1994). Cody was also finishing a series of Edge Paintings (1995) and three pieces in particular caught my attention: The Last Gasp (Sitting Coffin/Energy Container) (1994); the “David” from Cody’s Legend vs. Freud’s Shit Box; and High Heel Neurosis (study of a female energy balance against gravity) (1994–95).
A post-appropriation digest
The Last Gasp (Sitting Coffin/Energy Container) (1994) is a sound sculpture that functions as both a reappropriation and a unique investigation—with nod to René Magritte and Mike Kelley. It might be termed a “digested appropriation,” a gesture that no longer refuses to make something new from something old, offering a shameless ricochet of an artistic form that is constitutive of modernity itself. For the “life-sized” wooden coffin of The Last Gasp is indebted to a series of paintings by Magritte in which the Belgian Surrealist offered a new perspective on several key images associated with the origins of modern art in France, including three paintings by Magritte that feature a coffin: Perspective II, Manet’s Balcony (1950), Perspective I: Madame Récamier by David (1951), and the related Perspective: Madame Récamier by David (1951). Magritte also created a bronze sculpture based on the latter, Madame Récamier by David (1967), that is almost the same size as a real piece of furniture, and a little larger than the original painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1800. The decision to reproduce Magritte, who himself remade—or hijacked—works by his predecessors, is anything but haphazard. For each of the three French painters from whom Magritte “borrowed” salient forms—François Gérard (1770–1837), David (1748–1825), and Édouard Manet (1832–83)—are associated with the rupture that marks the passage from the ancien régime or a “classical” order to the onset of the modern. Choi was attuned to both the irreverent “pastiche” of dominant models of Western visual culture and to metahistorical and metaphysical considerations related to his “applied” philosophy.
I remember our conversations about the writings of Gilles Deleuze and especially Jacques Lacan when I returned to New York in 1997, shortly before Cody himself decided to go back to Korea. He told me that he felt he had “absorbed everything” that modern Western philosophy could teach him. Once, when we were walking in the gardens of the Nogushi Museum in Queens after an afternoon spent with friends, Cody told me about his new research. He was studying traditional Chinese philosophy with a “master,” and at the same time starting to hang out time with a group of young “hackers” who were teaching—and debating with—him about digital culture. I can picture him commenting on the calm beauty of the museum’s rock gardens, recalling how Mike Kelley had told him how much he admired Isamu Noguchi, while at the same time beginning to walk with a heavy, applied step. At that moment I noticed the beauty of his shoes, made from the best materials by one of the trendiest Korean designers. To my mind, until that time Cody wore old shoes that clashed with his American biker’s jacket. In response to my questions Cody answered that his philosophical work was beginning to have an impact on his body, on his way of walking and that he was beginning a period of transition.
It was then that I remembered Magritte’s shoes (The Red Model, 1934) and the High Heel Neurosis piece that Cody had been working on when we first met. On Cody’s feet, as it were, Magritte’s shoes had literally become plastic forms—a pastiche of the Belgian painter who knew how to ridicule his own work, especially in his so-called Période vache in the later nineteen-forties. Magritte’s self-parody targeted the hegemony of the Parisian artistic scene, and is not insignificant that all this transpired in 1948, during the Cold War, when the world was split into two on either side of the Iron Curtain.
The impact of a dominant aesthetic canon refers to restrictions (of the body, of taste, of making) mandated by convention. The very title High Heel Neurosis (study of a female energy balance against gravity) (1994-95) could be sounded out as “High Hell,” alluding to the fact that in both Western and Asian traditions, women’s feet were often subjected to aesthetically-occasioned “torture.” We are familiar with the foot binding originating in the courtly etiquette of tenth century imperial China and not eradicated until the early nineteen hundreds that prevented women from walking and inflicted lifelong damage. Accompanied by an explanatory diagram that seems to account for why “office girl’s legs are beautiful,” Choi’s wooden sculpture has something in it of another Chinese ritual, “Death by a thousand cuts”—a photograph of which came into Bataille’s possession in the mid-nineteen-twenties. Cody explained to me how lifting the sole of the foot unsettles the posture and also blocks the correct irrigation of the brain, due to anchoring and circulation of corporeal energies. We can see how archaic and modern myths combine endlessly to recreate “canons” that are little more than “straightjackets.”
In everyday French parlance, canon is used to designate a beautiful girl or a handsome boy, as well as a weapon of war (“cannon” in English) that propels balls, or the barrel of a gun. Like the English “canon” it also denotes a code of laws (as in the canon law of the Catholic church), a more general established principle, or a group of exemplary literary or other works—rule-governed, often dogmatic, systems established by convention. Choi’s work is anchored in a unique metahistorical reading of the processes according to which art was canonized at the turn of the twentieth century. As we will see, the question of rules and of the canonization of contemporary practices corresponds to the criticism of a type of colonization. It is in dialogue with artists belonging to moments of rupture such as Michelangelo, and refers to an ability to constantly reactivate the question of modernity as an unfinished project. It is about an aesthetic that goes beyond the will to imitate, reminding us of the ultimate value of art.
This raises the question of artists who work outside the studio, such as Robert Smithson, for whom the university became a “studio” when he decided to take up teaching. Smithson wrote explicitly about the “fall” of the studio since the time of Michelangelo. This reconfiguration achieved a kind of critical mass a few years later when John Baldessari commenced his “post-studio” course at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California, making his class into a place of translation and transmission. Today, Baldessari often receives small groups of artists in his studio to continue the discussion.
I remember our visit to Louise Bourgeois, at her Chelsea home, one spring Sunday. Louise welcomed us as usual, having asked the usual question: “Do you have a cold? And your friend, is he ill?” Her fear of germs didn’t limit her curiosity about young artists, and “living room” conversations quickly became fraught with staged irony. The pink color of the Pepto-Bismol used by Choi fascinated her. So Louise began to imagine badly stitched figures in fabric, puffy figures that sometimes turned pink.
Choi’s “David” disturbs canonical rules in two respects: in relation to neoclassical values and in relation to kitsch. It is anti-canonical by virtue of its challenge to classicism as much as for its annexation of mass-produced materials. Its “form” is not simply the opposite of that posited by convention, it is “beyond recovery” and unclassifiable. For starters, it is not called “David” but Cody’s Legend vs. Freud’s Shit Box (1994-95). It is an iconic statue in the antique sense of the term—that is to say, a portrait of an individual—whereas Michelangelo’s sculpture is not a “proper” portrait, but rather the representation of an idealized figure. It is also a heroic nude, following a tradition dating back to antiquity that was accentuated under Augustus, the first Roman Emperor (27 BC to 14 AD). It is also the product of an aesthetic, mystic, and political program: Apollonism. If Michelangelo’s David (1501–04) symbolizes the Florentine Republic, unseating Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes (1455–60), one measure of its audacity is attested by the moment chosen for his figure’s pose: an almost lascivious contrapposto, the calm before the battle. David represents the oppressed minority that wins thanks to its courage and wit, faced with a giant who is, by all appearances, stronger and better armed. Choi transfers the message of this allegory to postwar relations between Korea and the United States—and to postcolonial experience itself. To attack this monument is literally to appropriate both an academic model and a universalist project by means of a work the scope of which is political because it is aesthetic.
This is where the exemplary force of Choi’s work is located: a strong aesthetic in the service of philosophically-inclined political thinking, yet deeply vested in corporeal materiality. Molding his own body in the pose of Michelangelo’s figure, the artist is in dialogue with both the Florentine “original” but also with Auguste Rodin who was criticized for having “molded from nature” by way of a life cast. To make a wax mold, instead of carving directly into a block of marble, poses questions about the history of sculpture in a “post-medium” era. The idea of “post-medium” was first suggested by Rosalind Krauss, who stressed the insufficiency of Clement Greenberg’s notions of modernist purity and its replacement with practices defined by heterogeneity, interdependence, indeterminacy, and, ultimately, obsolescence. To paraphrase the artist Morgan Fisher (who was, in turn, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin): “It is when something is obsolete that it can become revolutionary.” Krauss’s point of view is the opposite of what is implied by the postmodern condition, or by conceptual art, installation-based practices and relational aesthetics: moving on from the white cube is not inevitable, perhaps not even possible. In effect, the technical extension of media restores the autonomous and specific nature of the work of art, so that the “white cube”—in its role as an ideal space—becomes, like Michelangelo’s block of marble, the immanent gangue from which the work is to be released.
So, how does Choi’s work question post-medium specificities?
To answer this question we need to understand that the very interaction between ancient and modern practices leads quite directly, in concept and fact, to the persistence of the medium. When Choi named his sculpture and thus created a “portrait,” he was no longer working in the heroic mode. For his nudity is fashioned after nature and is not subject to the canon. We see a man of wax with one foot in a basin of Pepto-Bismol—literally, “a giant with feet of clay,” who displays his flaws, pain and weakness. Here, the contrapposto is a way of maintaining a precarious balance, one that connects it in a different manner to the sculptural work of Bourgeois, who also speaks of this sensitive, fragile tension in her work.
The rhetoric of the “exemplary” cedes its place to a hybridization of ways of making—and being—and in this Choi uses the “ruse of the metis” about which Michel de Certeau writes—the apparent appropriation of the rites and traditions of an invader so as to be able to ensure the survival of one’s own traditions. One could speak here, of syncretism, or even of anthropophagy in a symbolic sense, methods for thinking a world in transformation. In Choi’s work, the plinth is replaced by a pierced box, the evacuated form of which corresponds precisely to the hips of the seated artist. It is the measure of a single individual, and any use of the work must adhere to this scale. We are reminded of the first “corridors” of Bruce Nauman, which were also presented with the constraint of adapting themselves to the unique nature of the artist. Choi built his “legend” from these two disparities: an antique model derived from biblical history and a box of excrement. The artist “performed” the two parts of his sculpture by first molding his body and then shaping its outlines in the negative excavation. This emphasis is reinforced by the photographs that accompany various steps in the production process. The gap becomes a trace, marking an absence, the reverse side of the mold, the hole of the cut. Similarly, the constitution of a volume in wax is one stage in the technique of lost wax casting (to create bronze sculptures, for example). But Choi makes the maquette into the final form, and the shipping crate or “waste” into a plinth. In this way he inverts the founding principles of the rules of art, calling into question the established borders between the techniques that frame disciplines. It is by these means that the work opens-up new articulations between codes: the artist becomes the vector for such new perspectives, and momentarily incarnates the stakes.
Golden Boy Poster (Heidegger in Bagesvaerd Church) (1986–91) is based on a similar move. I remember seeing the poster that informs this piece with Cody for the first time in a small gallery in New York, and hearing his comment on “pseudo-heroes.” In Golden Boy Poster, Choi brandishes a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, the popular stomach medicine, probably first used in art by Ed Ruscha in screen prints such as Pepto-Caviar Hollywood (Cirrus Editions, Los Angeles, 1970). Text and image are fused in Ruscha’s work as they are in Cody’s, and there is a line of force that underpins the work. The repurposing of consumer products—taken up by other artists in the LA scene, notably Paul McCarthy (ketchup, syrup, and sundry foodstuffs) and Mike Kelley (deodorizers)—offers a social critique directed by what John C. Welchman terms “digestive” philosophy, but also a masquerade or disguise. McCarthy, for example, explains that ketchup designates the fake blood used in films, the abundant and outrageous gore that makes the artificial obvious. Printer’s ink, and traditional screen print inks, are replaced by foodstuffs, perverting the artisanal process.
Reversing the dichotomies between rough notes / work of art, hero / clown, and crate / plinth, Choi uncovers a dimension that is already at work—though not always discussed—in Michelangelo: an intermittently macabre humor, and a penchant for the grotesque. As Smithson noted:
If one considers Michelangelo’s grotesque sense of humor “pictorial illusion” then one sees art in terms of realistic and natural content. Modernist criticism recoils at the sight or thought of Michelangelo, because the organic is threatened by what Wolfgang Kayser calls “the annihilating idea of humor.” Realistic and naturalistic criticism fears the cosmic laughter inherent in the grotesque (grotto-cave)—the abyss.
It is the fall of the studio that modernism fears.
Withdrawn body = hole of spirit (or dead end?)
Like Nauman and Kelley among others, Choi takes on the figure of the “trickster,” or Divine Rogue. By hijacking conventions he marshals an economy of negativity to produce twisted meaning. The holes in the wooden crates give birth to new figures—outlines of a phallus, an arm, a head, create a new, fragmented body, established by a founding absence. It could represent something that is missing, or a space for play, or for breathing, as with a musical instrument, to allow air to circulate and sound to pass.
The Last Gasp becomes, then, The Last Gaps, the mark of a separation between East and West, between different systems for the representation and understanding of the world, between language and the inarticulate. With sardonic corporeal humor, Choi creates a musical coffin the sonorities of which generate an atmosphere made up of all of the “body’s airs”: belches, flatulence, hiccups, even a “musical vagina.” The circle is thus complete—from Madame Récamier to the renovated “perspectives” according to which she is perceived, from David to Magritte by way of Choi, the seat of the Muses has taken on a real form and become a sound sculpture. The performative nature of the piece brings to mind Kelley’s Performance Related Objects (1977–79), “instruments” that were themselves in dialogue with Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noise (1913) and its argument for a future music constituted by everyday noises.
The message is the alphabet
Cody Choi is adept at making witty remarks and puns, both written and spoken. He is aware that the alphabetical script of the Korean language, famously invented in the fifteenth century, became a means of resistance under the Japanese occupation in the first half of the twentieth century. Remembering, also, the symbolic nature of illuminated writing (especially in the work of Nauman), Choi’s use of these signs to write texts in neon offers to renew the struggle by releasing another round of resistant meanings. Down Side is Heavy (2010-11) and When you say no, you know something. When you know something, communication is impossible. (2009-11) use modernist codes to circulate proverbs invented by the artist that announce the renewal of Eastern philosophy—as it might be applied to a Western system. Fortified by a custom variant of the linguistic “wit” about which Freud wrote in his essay on “Jokes” (1905), Choi uses the dominant language to illustrate its own loss of momentum . . . and the gift is returned to the sender.
I believe in Roman Jakobson’s claim that language is a dominant “cultural form.” The neon works arose from my first experiences after returning to Seoul from the United States in 2004. There are so many billboards in Korea—in a mix of languages, English, Chinese, and Korean. Some of them are in English but use the Korean alphabet, some of them are Chinese with the Korean alphabet, some are the reverse and some of them are all mixed up. What kind of culture is that? Recently, the English language has become one of the most important issues in Korea. Some rich parents force their children to have tongue surgery so that their English pronunciation will be more natural. They want to be like Americans in speech, while their manner must be humble, in line with Chinese Confucian precepts. This gives rise to a new race of Koreans. I was angry at this development, so I translated a paragraph of Chinese philosophy into English and transferred it to the Korean alphabet on a neon billboard. What results is not a binary opposition, but a multiple overlapping.
Recent paintings such as No Ego No Suffer (2001–13), mounted on an ancient fabric used for mourning garments, testify to a form of melancholic nostalgia for the historical Korea—epitomized by the Choson dynasty, an era noted for a renaissance in the arts that underwrote Korean cultural identity and which Choi wants to help reinvent. The impertinent humor Choi shares with Baldessari recurs in the “Double Bill” series (2012)—also in dialogue with the history of art—and in his recent Episteme-Sabotage series (2014). Here, Choi remakes some of the key paintings of modernity: Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) in Episteme Sabotage-Shit, (2014); Manet’s Olympia (1863) in Episteme Sabotage-Flower from East (2014); and—fast-forward a century—Ruscha’s Hollywood Boulevard (1973) which is transformed into Episteme Sabotage-Stone (2014). Under each reproduced painting, a piece of white fabric, piece of artist’s underwear or T-shirt, is marked with a painted message.
The cuts and amputations Choi inflicts on these (and other) pieces relates to aspects of colonial and postcolonial history that are often ignored in the sanctioned narratives of modern and contemporary Korean art. The Episteme Sabotage works, like Made in USA (1986–2002), Bonder Bounder, m&m (2011–12) and Gift Exchange 2 (2009), are all boomerangs originating in some sense from a potlatch. We know that when certain gifts are received they confer a debt; I want to suggest that these works can be understood through the principle of “counter-gifting” or giving back. The small, fetish-like totem of Bonder Bounder, m&m, (2011-12) a sort of plastic phallus, for example, invokes the monumental stones symbolizing fertility that can be found all over Korea. The life-sized plastic weapons suspended on either side of it in this mobile are a nod to the phallocentrism propagated by Hollywood films and Western cultural marketing. The debt-laden counter-gift becomes a treacherous, even poisoned, gift. On the tiny plinth of Gift Exchange 2 (2009) fake pink and green plastic “Nikes” are wrapped in rubber. This strange “wrapped gift” also contains a knife blade pointing upwards: it is a contemporary totem that, through the metonymic effects of its parts simultaneously standing-in for—and contending against—a global commodity system, represents a backlash, a kind of postcolonial effect. Choi told me about the American army blankets he used for his paintings, Pepto-Bismol Hit and Overlay, Rambo (both 1989-90), but also recalled the smooth tires sent from the US to Korea with which he and other Korean kids would play. These old, retreaded tires, donated scraps that doubled as an efficient mode of Western dumping, were repurposed in Korea to produce fake Nikes—part of a whole ghost product line of commodity objects simulated after brand-name “originals” sold in West. A fair backlash?
Looking beyond their real life and real world locations, Choi’s use of these scraps and fragments relates to a conceptual counter-aesthetic that brings his work alongside that of certain feminist artists such as Mary Kelly. The base materiality informing Post Partum Document (1973–79), for example, is evoked in Choi’s Night Soiler, No. 90–2 (1990–92), a painting made with stained layers of his daughter’s excreta that he had first buried and then dug up. For the artist it was a case of delivering an offset to a monocentric, enunciative apparatus, opening it up to new perspectives, suffusing it with humor, and bearing witness to history by pointing outside of its margins. Here, beauty is revealed as a weapon.
((Notes))
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[1] The earliest version of Perspective II: Manet’s Balcony appears to be a red chalk drawing made ca. 1948–49.
[1] Lingchi or “Death by a thousand cuts” is a Chinese torture that consists of cutting away the flesh of a living person piece-by-piece, opium being administered to prolong the suffering. Georges Bataille writes of the practice in Les Larmes d’Eros (The Tears of Eros, 1959), noting that the photo he reprinted was published for the first time in George Dumas’s Le Traité de Psychologie (Treatise on psychology, 1923–24) and that Adrien Borel, one of the founders of the Société psychanalytique de Paris, gave it to him in 1925.
[1] On this subject, see the exhibition catalogue, Robert Smithson: Une rétrospective, le paysage entropique 1960–1973, ed. Maggie Gilchrist and James Lingwood (Marseille: Musées de la ville de Marseille, 1994). In the first head text for his essay “What Really Spoils Michelangelo’s Sculpture” (1966–67), Smithson cites Clement Greenberg’s discussion of Michelangelo’s relation to pictorial illusion (see page 167): “However, what really spoils Michelangelo’s sculpture is not so much its naturalism as, on the contrary, its unnaturalistic exaggerations and distortions which place themselves more in the context of pictorial illusion than in that of sculptural self-evidence.” Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Sculpture, Its Pictorial Past” (1952), reprinted in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 161.
[1] In 1995, while assisting Robert Storr with the Bruce Nauman retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, I also worked for Louise Bourgeois. Her series of sculptures in stitched pink fabric represented figures of often exaggerated size, such as Three Horizontals (1998).
[1] When first exhibited at the French Salon in 1877, critics accused Rodin of having cast L’Âge d’airain (The Age of Bronze) from a living model. Even if Rodin proved his intentions, a certain level of doubt persists.
[1] See, Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999) and Under the Blue Cup (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
[1] See, Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, 1 arts de faire, (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 63–64. De Certeau notes that, “various theoretical comparisons will allow us to better characterize the tactics, or the polemology, of the ‘weak.’ The ‘figures’ and ‘turns’ analyzed by rhetoric are particularly illuminating in this regard. Freud already noticed this fact and used them in his study on wit and on the forms taken by the return of the repressed within the field of an order: verbal economy and condensation, double meanings and misinterpretations, displacements and alliterations, multiple uses of the same material, etc.” Michel de de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 39. De Certeau distinguishes between the ruse and the “bricolage” of Lévi Strauss, which is both a tactic and a strategy.
[1] See, for example, Bruce Nauman, Performance Corridor (1969). Here the dimensions of the corridor are based on the proportions of the artist’s own body. Two wooden panels are installed twenty inches apart, one extremity being open and the other closed-off by the wall on which they lean. Lacking instructions, the spectator may enter the corridor but does know what is at the end of it. This first corridor arrived just after Nauman’s film exercises, notably Walking with Contrapposto (1968), in which Nauman’s body is posed in a contrapposto stance.
[1] Robert Smithson, “What Really Spoils Michelangelo’s Sculpture” in Unearthed: Drawings, Collages, Writings, ed. Eugenie Tsai (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 73.
[1] Present in all civilizations, the figure of the buffoon or the clown upsets the rules of societies. On the myth of the “trickster” see Carl Gustav Jung, Le Fripon Divin: un mythe indien (Paris: Georg, 1997). See also, Jung, On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure, ed. Herbert Read (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968).
[1] See, Luigi Russolo et al, The Art of Noise: Destruction of Music by Futurist Machines, trans. Robert Filliou (Sun Vision Press, 2012). ((Unable to find publisher info, does the author have this?—I added this note and also could not find publisher location))
[1] From the sixth to the fifteenth centuries, the Korean language was based on a system of ideograms, close to Chinese kanji, comprising over ten thousand signs. In the fifteenth century, Sejong the Great imposed the Hangul, an alphabetical system, in order to spread literacy as widely as possible. Scorned at first by the educated classes, in the twentieth century this vernacular writing became a form of resistance under the Japanese occupation.
[1] Cody Choi, conversation with the author, winter 2015.
[1] Potlach is the act of giving, and receiving in return, during ceremonies in which objects are exchanged but no money changes hands. Practized widely in the Pacific region and by American Indians, the main purpose of potlatch was to avoid war. However, gifts create a debt that must be honored, with the consequence that villages might be utterly destroyed in cases where the exchange is based on a superior counter gift. See, Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Gunnison (London: Cohen & West, 1966); originally published as “Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques” in L’Année Sociologique in 1925; and Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
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Marie de Brugerolle: CODY CHOI : POST PERFORMANCE PAINTINGS, 2017
Cody Choi's work is anchored in a profound thinking that emerges from his experiments transformed by matter. The aesthetic of transgression that has been implemented since his first performances has produced sculptures and paintings that address art conventions and push them to their limits.
The body at work is first and foremost his own, brought into confrontation with the canons of western culture sublimed by classical sculpture, being itself turned towards its Greek and Roman roots. But wasn't there already an idea of pastiche or at least challenge in Michel-Angelo's David whose proportions go beyond the norms of nature?
If Michael Angelo included the “non-finito” in certain artworks, like Slaves (1513-1515), and Moses (1513-15) before that, Cody Choi's David questions the similarities between the formal canon and the subconscious roots that innervate it. The title Cody’s Legend Freud’s Shit Box (1994-1995) indues a connection with the question of sublimation, dear to S.Freud. The work of art would be the culmination of a process of transformation of the sexual urge. Cody Choi's David has its foot in a pink basin, filled with Pepto Bismol. It stands on a plinth that is simply composed of boxes that were used in previous performances, with the artist inserting his body into the holes that correspond to the measurements of different parts of his body, in this case his posterior while he is crouching (Untitled, 1994).
The artworks of Cody Choi question the limits of what we consider as sculpture or painting, which is in itself the question of modernity, but more particularly he gives form to emotions that are the result of an experience of frustration. This emerges from the gap between the imagined projection and reality, and it is this that is confronted, challenged and overtaken by the forms produced.
Right from the first paintings and performances, the body of the artist is at work, not as a completed portrait but as vector of an energy that is common to all. This energy is that of frustration, he explains. We could say that it is this gap between what is desired and the real, between what we project and what stands firm that must be transformed by the artistic act. Cody Choi chooses not to fill this gap but rather to use it as a vibration, on the scale of his body, cast but not sculpted in marble, is a decision to halt the process at a point before bronze casting, in an unstable fragility. This is accentuated by the basin filled with a liquid palliative that becomes a visible prothesis for a suffering body.
Playing between gravity and colorful perception, the pictorial pieces of Cody Choi are consequences of his initial performative works. The use of Pepto Bismol is of the domain of the pharmakon, both poison and remedy, an artificial color that reminds us of flesh and the internal functions of digestion and transformation of matter. The “non-finito” is here valued as a form that acts, in the same way that we speak of “imagenes agentes”, that is to say having a certain efficiency, an impact, on the viewer.
It is the effect of the real that produces this, and not sublimation. Gravity, that is to say the relationship with the ground, with matter, with the low, is one of the reversals of modernity and more particularly of “camp” culture to which this manner of emphasizing the artifice belongs, through the use of objects for their intended purpose.
This use of objects, this functionality maintained in the final artwork, creates a double tension. A tension and space between what would be art and what would be non-art, a tension and space between the desire to see and the desire to know. Cody Choi appropriates more than objects of use, he experiments with them in a form that reactivates the tension. His pieces proceed then from a spacialization that provides a place for the viewer, a place from where to watch and physically feel the transgression.
It is in this that Vacant Strip (2016-17) is both a nod to Minimalist and Baroque sculpture. We are aware of the criticism that was made by Michael Fried in his Art and Objecthood (Artforum, March 1967) article, towards the art that he calls “literalist”, that would be one end of art, because Minimalist sculpture, offering a place to the spectator, deviates from the strict definition of the medium. Vacant Strip leaves a free space, a breath between the vertical object and the position of the viewer. This space is outlined by the rim of a disc, the flat base of a pole dancing bar, flat on the ground, from which the sculpture borrows its proportions. This reflecting disc functions both as a plinth, a stabilizing base and as a mirror. We know these bars that propose small mirrors to clients so that they can look under the skirts of the waitresses who aren't wearing any underwear. One's view is thus skewed in comparison to the frontal nature of the vertical mirrors that surround the usual podiums in strip clubs. Could it be a dialectical confrontation of Western customs (bars with mirrored walls represented in modern painting, such as Manet's Bar au Folies Bergères 1881) and the bars with horizontal mirrors referred to above that are widespread in Japan and perhaps also in Korea?
Or even a dialogue between Minimalist sculpture that opens the space up to the viewer, and includes the latter, "American" art and the Baroque, born in Italy, which also opens out the space of the painting as an extension of the land? Indeed, the body of the spectator is summoned by the painting of Caravaggio, for example, and the plane of the painting seems to be an extension of secular space. Here, the spiral movement that would form a torsal column is to be imagined by the viewer. The base has given way to a platform, whose shimmering gloss also evokes the slipping of gold from the frame of the painting onto the ground. The column has given way to the exercise bar, the absent body of the goddess is that of the striptease dancer, who only shows herself for money, as we are reminded by the artist. Beyond a somewhat simplistic criticism of the commodification of the bodies, one could see in it a statement validating the force of the "pay to see", in other words, the effort to be provided by the viewer so as to obtain the object of their desire.
The boy's desire to see under the skirts of girls is simply the curiosity to know where we come from and where we go. It makes the girls, who are not fooled, laugh, and it makes the world turn in an economy that keeps on going. Cody Choi articulates this essential question with humor and wisdom and goes beyond the postmodern cause of the pastiche of an art of facade to place the minimal aesthetic and the baroque whirlwind back to back. The decor that multiplies the points of view, via this supporting axis, defies the symmetrical rule of conceptual art and modernist expectations. A body will be there, this is what holds the piece together.
A post-performative painting, this implies an awareness of performance as a practice of re-presentation. A conscious re-presentation of itself but not a self-centered one. Centripetal.
Color Haze could be a nod to Kandors (2011) by Mike Kelley, or even to the Dream Machine (1958) by Bryon Gysin or to the Modulator Espace Lumière by Lazlo Moholy Nagy.
It is interesting that the two men, years apart, were struck by a perceptual experience of projection in the city of Marseille, where Cody Choi exhibited his David for the first time in 1994 and where he had a major exhibition in 2015. The Color Haze is a luminous machine that produces colorful effects in motion. We think of holograms, those of Bruce Nauman and those dreamed of by Marcel Duchamp, we think of the consequences of gravity on the colorful organ that is the rainbow of the light spectrum. Cody Choi is a painter and knows it. He knows the rules, the conventions and the way that things are done, all the better to transgress them.
Transgression is a serious matter, it concerns the Law, that of the father, the fathers, but also the Gods. Transgression occurs at the risk of loss. That of recognition, that of being a prophet in his own country, icon in a world of art converted to the fetishism of the commodity.
How does this transgression take place? Through frustration, lack, the hole, or the false hole, in other words, the space that makes the colors vibrate. The colors are then like the vowels of an alphabet whose consonants, more masculine, are erased, cast, slipped, so that one can read the name of the colors "all over".
Cheesekhwa (Color Painting) (2017) is a grating word game with regard to a movement in Korean painting from the early 1970s, Dansaekhwa (Monochrome). At the same time as being the antithesis of the monochrome, as the paintings are literally both polychrome and not abstract, it is also a pun on the popular American pejorative expression: "cheesy", which designates a thing of bad taste, "kitsch” in a way. Cody Choi evokes the contradiction of an image impossible to decipher in a scholarly way, to be read, but only viewable in a sensitive manner. Moving from sensation to emotion, being the Cézanien project that opened up modernity, this would make its return within the project? In any case, this Cheesekwa series of paintings could not exist without a historicist dimension, that is to say, critical of contemporary history.
One of the actors of the Dansaekhwa movement, Lee U-Fan, made a trip to Japan in the mid-1950s and spent time with the Gutaï group. Gu means instrument and Tai, the body. The Dansaekhwa paintings are certainly monochromatic but also make use of gestures that imply slippage, sometimes to the point of tearing the surface. Here the ambiguity is kept in suspension. What is transgressed? The modernist tradition of "all over" and Jasper Johns? The abstract expressionism of a Pollock, reader of the magazine Gutaï and precursor of Allan Kaprow? Or indeed contemporary acculturation that has flattened history into a continuous present?
