Gregory Maass & Nayoungim
6 pm. 27th Aug. 2014
AUT University WG 403
Talk will follow the opening from 4:30-6 pm of DeSporting
a UFO Kim Kim Gallery Project at St Paul Street Gallery Three
produced by the artists and AUT Visual Arts students.
Good evening everybody.
My name is Gregory Maass and this is my wife and partner in crime Nayoungim. We are invited artists by Paul Cullen in the fine arts department, right now and developing a show with the post-graduate students for the St. Paul Street Gallery which will open on the… .
I would like you to show some of our work. The order of the works you will see is only roughly chronological. Our presentation here is special because normally we do not show works we did before we started working together but as we are at a University it makes sense to show student works. I hope we will make a good first impression, because we only have one shot at that. I gathered some examples of our artwork under the perspective of “material” or how to make a “a good choice of material” for an artwork.
Images
1. This is a work of mine which I made as an art student in my parents garage in Germany in 1995. Obviously a house made of carrots. It was summer and the carrots curved quickly after making the incisions. The work has a short expiration date and I had to work quickly. Are carrots a good material?: they are cheap most of the time, easy to find, easily shapeable and everybody knows the material through personal experience of eating. The connotation of eating implies the desire of becoming what one eats. Before I worked with carrots and before I started studying art I worked for a while with peanuts and made painting of peanuts with peanut butter. My first solo-show was a show exclusively with work made of peanuts. I tried to get an image of these works compositions but did not succeed.
2. Choosing the carrot above all other vegetables was due to it´s longish characteristics, it´s like a materialized line.
3. This is a circle made of Zucchini called John le Cercle in tribute to the author of spy novels John Le Carré. I am interested in methods of production, not only in the choice of material. Generally one has the choice of or joining or separating something. But surprisingly so blending, overlapping, and even entanglement, is these opening up new methods of production.
4. This is a photographic still-life of an arrangement toilet paper rolls. Art historically speaking still lifes represent some sort of richness through food laden tables, or memento mori through lack of it or personal riches as well as scientific cutting edge material and knowledge. Toilet paper relates to food and also to cutting edge material, it has to be firm and soft in the hand and dissolve quickly when submerged in water.
5. Nayoungim developed this Dog House as art student. She was at that time interested in Industrial Design. You have here a maximum of different material from wood, Plexiglas, aluminum, Nylon. Many different procedures where needed to assemble this Doghouse. It includes a food and water dispenser and a tent and it´s partially foldable. Here you have a set of construction ideas which decided the choice of material. Interestingly you may consider the useful-and uselessness of the object as well as the blurred line between art and design.
6. This is a still shot from a movie written and directed by Nayoungim in 2004. It´s called “Mind the Gap”. Please pay attention to the brown background of the set. The set was partially build with painted aluminum sandwich panels, which we adapted to a different task.
7. This is a duo-show of Nayoungim and me we made in 2005. The title was “Today is Boring”. We adapted the brown panel of the film set for this show. Until now we readapt material and works to the varying needs of an installation. Actually here is the first time where we used a single color as a material. Brown. A few pictures later you will see an installation work interely dedicated to the color brown.
8. Here we have an installation work realized by Nayoungim. It was called “double happiness ping-pong” from 2005. Here we find a mirriad of different materials: adhesive tape, pingo-pong ball dispensers, towels, ladders, aluminum ladders, etc., these material were interconnected and indispensable to each other.
9. Here you see a set-up for a show of the year 2012 in a commercial gallery of a range of work we call “relationships do not exist”. The title derives from the famous saying of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan claiming that “Sexual relationships do not exist”. Thank you Jacques.
10. Here we use ideally personality as a material. We used our collection of play figures, which include object from the 1950s until today as a base material supply.
11. ---here two astronauts. The support underneath the figures is made from the bottom of sport trophies we collected. The object where then cannibalized and later Frankensteined back together, repainted, and put in relation to each other. We also used personality as a material in a different topic. The realm of show-biz. We used two not so different personalities as materials David Hasselhof and Spongebob Squarepants. Both were highly inspiring subjects. Here the invitation card to from 2008 in Switzerland.
12. 2 million years of art
13. Here the set-up of the installation where Spongebob is returned to Bikini Bottom while riding on the leg of the swimming David Hasselhoff. You may notice a very liberal or let´s say deliberate usage of materials, blue putty for DH´s foot, a papier-maché island with a yellow putty summit, tube isolation as a leg of DH and golden leg hair, is not really visible here as well a prepacked sponge for car washing plus two adhesive eyes to represent Spongebob. Another part of the installation was the installation of Höfe, which means cottages or farms in German.
14. We tried to build the name “Hasselhoff” through the tautological use of cottage models, video-rental furniture and use of film slogans --
15. --realized in kitchen foils and green felt. We are still working sometimes on David Hasselhof. Lately we did ceramic works on his subject, which consisted of a heap of noodles indicating personal characteristics of David Hasselhoff. Which I do not show here. And the idea of using persons as material is quite tempting and fruitful. Other materials I am interested in are L. Ron Hubbard or Philip K. Dick. But as these are people we should rather call these materials subjects especially if they are still alive.
16. Here the material Brown as a theme for an installation in 2011 : We were not allowed to change the interior of the show, as it was historic heritage. The old railway station of Seoul. There was already a lot of Brown in the hall when we arrived. The title was “that´s right, Brown”. Which was also the central piece of our installation.
17. Here a detail, an object consisting of a vintage Snoopy on a skate board (original from a surprise meal from McDonalds) on top of a sculpture made of a foam block for flower arrangements by an inmate of psychiatric Clinique in France, making it a work of ART-BRUT. We put it together covered it with resin and brown which gave it this chocolate aspect we were looking for. Now a very different material in many aspects from this it is more like a return to the carrot. Tofu.
18. Tofu is a material interestingly bland, clear, healthy, quite perfect in many aspect and overwhelmingly neutral. The show was called “the handsome tofu”. Here a central installation in the Department for Philosophy and Art in the Netherlands. Depicting a so-to-say typical Tofu dish. It is a accumulation of the most different materials, maybe due to the neutrality of the TOFU. Plexi-glass Guitar with a neck made of Baguette, fake autumn leaves, ceramic houses, a mad-hatter, wood disks and staffs covered with Chinese lacquer, felts hats, Formica a.s.o.. ----Now we will present something quite different it´s a thing we started in 2008 in Scotland and through which we produced some nice work. It´s called KIM KIM GALLERY. We see KKG as an artwork and the material composing of this artwork are of economic, organizational, and conceptual nature.
19. Kim Kim Gallery is an institution which not solely function in a gallery context, but through self-awareness evaluation and adaptation of KKG´s structure to varying spatial, financial, and esthetic circumstances. It is a peripatetic enterprise, which infiltrates the structure of contemporary art through unconventional marketing and seeks formats in which art works can function efficiently and independently from the mainstream. Here an image of our first ever KKG show.
20. This is the installation we did inside the Market Gallery in Glasgow in 2008. The sculpture is made of wood, plywood, and wallpaper, there is also a layer of kitchen foil on the back of the hall. The following image is a show organized in 2 derelict model apartments from the early 90s in the basement of the Hyundai Head quaters in Seoul City in 2011.
21. The material constituting the show where often the objects found in the apartments turned into artwork or were in other aspect deriving from the structure, meaning often commonly found in many apartments, carpet, mirrors, furniture, concrete a.s.o..
22. These model apartments were renovated by us and turned into showrooms and installation of works of artist Chung Seoyoung. I have to mention it, the show was voted one of the best shows of 2011. – The following work by KKG is quite different it´s a theater piece we developed in collaboration with scientists around a very special “material” in 2012: Instant noodles, and in this case known under the term RAMEN. The name of the theater piece/scientific research/essay was called Ramen Ensemble.
23. Here you can see one of the scientist during a representation of the Ramen Ensemble. Right now I see the noodle as a connection between East and West, going back to the time of Marco Polo. Connotations are crucially important in art, as it is the association created by representation and with what the artwork is associated with, or one of the vectors constituting the art. The work undertook to give a most complete image of the material “Instant noodles”, scientifically and emotionally.
24. Here you see the first work of KKG as a exhibition designer for a photography biennale. We used the a text on photography as the material around which to build the show. The names of the artists were blacked out and the whole printed on banners. ---Now we come to a couple of outdoor sculptures.
25. This is a snowman Nayoungim and me developed for the city of Pusan a city where it rarely snows. It´s made of stainless steel. We wanted to provoke a caustic reflection through the snowman, like a landmark.
26. This is Mona Lisa Overdrive, a sculpture build of old foam matrasses, diverse toys, everyday objects, wood etc. As the whole of the construction was so diverse in solidity we decided to solidify the whole agglomeration of materials with expansion PU Foam. The whole was then painted with façade paint. Here and image of the sculpture before hardening it.
27. This is also unusual to show in a presentation the unfinished work: Mona Lisa Overdrive preparation before PU Foam hardening.
28. And here the same finished.
29. VIP is a work we made in France at the foot of the Mount St. Victoire, which very often depicted by Paul Cézanne, who definitely is a very import person. It was build of skids, blanket and pre-owned stuffed animal toys and some paint. This panorama was washed away in a flash-flood, a couple of days after this image was taken.
30. Here a detail.
31. This is a sockdryer, we made this in Canada in 2005, where sock drying is a real issue. The construction relates to traditional Korean Roof construction and the material dealt with is evidently “socks”.
32. This is a work about extreme-neutrality from 2011. You may see a seemingly wild mix of different objects: Vintage tape recorder, milk crate, batteries, Belgium light stand, pre-owned pants, and so on. The whole builds a vehicle we used as a performative object of everyday object, like an assembly of ready mades, sans the writing: which indicates: “extremely neutral” in Korean. Here the question of material is replaced by the question of what object/component serves to do what. There is also a working light source installed in the liquid container, which leads over to another important material often neglected. Light.
33. Here we see our outdoor sculpture “Hot mill” inspired by the Moulin Rouge (which means red mill in French) made famous by the drawings of Toulouse Lautrec on top of one of the smallest galleries in Seoul in 2011. Here we build a mill out of a very common Sauna sign. The lamps we used are coming lighting devices in any Korean Sauna. An electro motor is turning the Sauna.
34. HOT MILL by night.
35. This sculpture was built out of fluorescent lights. It was displayed inside a courtyard of the Plateau Samsung Museum in 2013. What I did not know that the gas in the tubes react to the outside temperature, so we had a few problems keeping this thing running in the winter, we had to rewire it and we did not find ladders high enough to reach the top and so on. Finally in a later version we exchanged the fluo-tubes with LED light based tubes. The title is “acceptance”. Materiality was a real issue.
36. This show was called “There is no beer in Hawaii” and we followed a theme which is in between UTOPIA and DYSTOPIA, which we call FUCKTOPIA . (or BLEEPTOPIA if you will for the faint at heart/sensitive/squeamish amongst you .)
37. Here is a detail of the show, a FUCKTOPICAL painting in the background and a VENUS OF WILLENDORF in the foreground. The head is an electrified candle, the body is made of rivets and leather and the base is made from a re-purposed Go-table. We were interested in the theme of a Venus of Willendorf as it seems to be one of the oldest and very nice sculptures around, roughly 30 000 years old.
38. SURVIVAL OF THE SHITEST was a show we developed inside a very special residency in the South of France. We lived and worked inside a psychiatric Clinique. Some of the inmates and retired people from the city helped us developed some of the art. Why do I show this, the hand is of perculiar interest . It is made of wood bits and peaces, cage wire and paper. The next work is partially a found object, a tunnel, built by one of the patients and partially retro-fitted with a souvenir Eiffel Tower.
39. Eiffel tower with Tunnel.
40. Success was the theme for this show called “The early worm”. Here we have the gaping mouth of the worm, adorned with Swarowski cristals.
41. Here the crystals as a detailed view.
42. Here a lamp-like object made from post-office boxes and several Belgium wooden lamps. The next image will display a ready-made palm tree, a found object.
43. Palm Tree: --- Here again the question of the material is solved or not even appearing due to the use of components and ready-made objects. Even though these consist of course of proper material and have to be consider in that way. Now I would like you to introduce to our latest object of interest. We return here to the subject of personality as a material, or even the artist as material. It is a festival developed by Kim Kim Gallery.
44. Douglasism Festival Poster by Rano, the satanic nerd designer from Chile. Please bear with me just a little longer. In the year 2005 an event called “Douglasisms”, which commemorated the 33rd birthday of Douglas Park, was initiated by the London-based collective Decima with artworks about and with DP, featuring a signboard depicting DP by the late Piers Wardle a.k.a Lewis Draper at the Gallery Upstairs in Clerkenwell Green, London. Kim Kim Gallery adopted this title and considers Douglasism as a multi-layered approach to the quasi-totality of the creative output of Douglas Park encompassing a vast array of sources. The oeuvres displayed are often results of collaborations with other artists. The Douglasism Festival 2013 in Seoul became a coherent picture of DP´s work and individuality which verges on the eccentric. Kim Kim Gallery provided insight into the methods, attitude and pattern of thought of Douglas Park and included the works of a myriad of artists with whom DP works as a phenomenon of art-catalysis up to the present. But who is Douglas Park? In his own words: „born in 1972, UK visual artist, writer (of literary prose and critical essays, both mostly art connected), exhibition curator and multiple practices and roles combined.“ DP ́s ever growing biobibliography fills 38+ pages and we wisely forwent to present it here.
45. Before I show some views on the 16 different venues of the Douglasism Festival I would like to start with a presentation of the oral art and quite exentric voice of Douglas Park through himself reading his text “undercover vacation/top-secret showcase” which is included in a Audio CD Kim Kim Gallery co-produced, Douglas Park´s greatest hits. AUDIO
46. The first view is on Douglas Park himself. The biggest challenge and the biggest asset of the show is that Douglas Park´s works consist largely out of collaboration with other artists. We showed collaborations with more than 50 different artists.
47. This is the ground floor of the central venue called “Itemized Miasma”. Where we put some photographic work on the floor and also branded a new kind of beer, called Bottled Park. Douglas insisted on an indication of an infinite content of alcohol on the label.
48. On the upper floor we showed all the catalogues, books and flyers containing his work as well as many images depicting Douglas Park. The third floor contained video projections of a choice of movies he played in.
49. This is Douglas Park during Douglasism Festival in 2013. It´s one of the rare performances of “By accident”, it is an art -historical research about mostly quiet unknown or overlooked but nevertheless important accident influenced artworks. In his own word: This cultural area being fate striking work at any stage of production, exposure or whenever, only for drastically affected outcome to be kept by the authors, deliberately addressed and appearing as part of their output –as well as actually generating other work.
50. This is another venue made by the Austrian artist Kurt Ryslavy a true wine dealer, collector and artist. The work is called Douglas Six-Parks. On the floor a cut out park of Seoul and a display cooler on one side with 6 wine Austrian wine bottles and a photomontage of Douglas´ head on a torso with a six-pack. Hence the title.
And here the last image of a video lecture entitled “Speech is matter” by Clemens Krümmel a German Art theorist, critique and translator, about Douglas Park´s work. Clemens Krümmel speaks about the seeming immaterial work of Douglas Park and states that everything that matters needs at least temporarily a material support. In a second part he reads the essay on “thinking like a stone” by Robert Morris with pebbles in his mouth. Referring to a saga about the greek orator Demosthenes, who was born a stutterer, wanted to become the greatest orator of his time, and thus tried to raise his voice against the crushing noise of the waves on the beach near his village to exercise his abilities.
You are invited to join us for the opening of our solo-exhibition “no-ego ego trip” new works at Split Fountain on the 30st of August. It will be all brand new never before shown works.
Thank you very much.
Aug. 2014
Aukeland
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