S: You have lived and worked in Hagen, Seoul,
Paris, Maastricht, and a number of other cities and artists'
residencies. Do you think that makes you global artists?
Is the term meaningful?
G: Nayoungim and me feel a mixture between
excecutive delegated managers of an international corporation
yetting around the globe mixed with chinese travelling working in his bunk.
S: Do you think of contemporary art as another
mass medium, neighbor to TV, internet, cinema, radio?
If you could choose your own neighbors from
these media, who would you pick?
Is mimesis, or imitation, an important concept
for you? (Imitation, as
in: "art imitates nature", the
classical idea that imitation is crucial
for artmaking.) If it is, what are your
models?
(My own idea here being, that mimesis and
anti-mimesis somehow shape our
experience, combined in a field of tangible
and abstract models -
naturalistic and formalistic zones, combined
like the black and white on
a chessboard; or like the dark and the lighted
windows in a huge
high-rise appartment building. I know this
formulation is still very
intuitive, I will have to work on it to
express it in a more meaningful
way.)
Do you hope that your work somehow relates the
celebration of life as it
is to a sense of queasiness, or unease? (To
coin a slogan: is it about
"The gloriousness of mayonnaise"?)
Do you have a favourite material?
Which things do you avoid in your art?
How do you decide when a work is finished?
G: Metabolism of the human being, living cell, Abfallprodukte.
The human being has a metabolism with is
producing shit.
Let´s try to imagine a living thing without a
metabolism the human being would possibly not be creative at all.
Working in art is like shitting so to say,
there are these pieces coming out and it stops steered by peristaltic.
S: Do you feel that your work has a central theme
to which you return time and again?
Entertainment, No, Tautology, Sex, Success,
Beauty.
Please discard any questions you find dull,
flat, overworked, and so on.
You are also welcome to treat any passage from
my "Warped Flow Gadget"
text as a question to be commented upon...
G: So let´s talk about how I feel like
a brain surgeon trapped in the body of an artist.
Even though it is absolutely desolate down
here except for the occasional shrimp or anemone who´s strayed from his
hydrothermal vent, I am really enjoying tooling around in the submersible. I
know you are not crazy about me taking you to the Mariana Trench, some 320 kilometers
southeast of Guam. But it is the only way I thought I´d be able to get enough
peace and quiet and enough distance from the whole art scene to be able to
complete the next shows I´m under contract for. The place is pretty swanky
considering that it has to withstand about 16,000 pounds per square inch.
....
Absolute entertainment:
It is, of course, much less difficult to arouse
genuine anger, indignation, and outrage in people than it is to induce joy,
satisfaction, fellow feeling, &c. The latter are fragile and complex, and
what excites them varies a great deal from person to person, whereas anger et
al. are more primal, universal, and easy to stimulate (as implied by
expressions like "He really pushed my buttons"). Filmed Autopsies and
cholesterol-concious cooking shows on finally arrived HDTV are so violently
unpleasing to look at that the viewer doesn´t bother to expend the thumb muscle
energy to required to zap or surf away from anything on the screen. ...
S: You stepped down from studying
philosophy at the Sorbonne IV in Paris after only 2 years and then stepped down from your elaborate computer simulation of
machines build with frozen DNA cubes only after eight months.
Do you think that
it exhibits an immature restlessness and inability to honor long-term
commitments or do you think that it exhibits a wonderful kind of boundless,
nomadic intelligence and creativity that can´t and shouldn´t be constrained by
a single vocation?
G:"The latter."
THE HOUSE OF KIMCHI
S: Are you interested in Metaphysics? and do
you believe in Near-death accounts?
G: I recently had this incredible experience
of floating above the bed in an IC unit in a hospital in Daytona Beach,
Florida, I was about to be declared legally deceased, and I have this
incredible experience of floating above the bed and being imersed in what I
describe as a "sitz bath of radiant white light," and then I felt
myself being thrown into the trunk of a car with diplomatic plates, but the
trunk is suffused with this warm effulgence that makes me feel more at peace than
I have ever felt before, and soon I was at this whitewashed ivy-draped villa
where I was given a polygraph test ...- and then I hear this seraphic voice
which says: "Go to the House of Kimchi," so I go to the House of
Kimchi, which is this very opulent edifice, sort of like Versailles except that
it´s completely constructed out of kimchi, those very pungent Korean pickles,
and when I arrive there´s tremendous commotion going on and I see this woman
sprawled out on the lawn in her bra and jeans. So I rush back into the House of
Kimchi and begin to inhale air freshener, which is like this beautiful aerosol
iridescence, and I describe it as "inhaling the sparkling light until
there is no distinction between the radiance of the air freshener and myself -
we were one."
Isn´t that incredible?
S: Indeed!
