A critical review of Youngmi Chuns piece; ‘2nd Floor’ shown at the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition as part of the Liverpool Biennial 2006.
Second Floor fills the room with
its dirty presence. The installation by Youngmi Chun is a concrete floor which
viewers are invited to walk over. It consists of a room in the gallery space
being carpeted with an overlay of carpet ending about 10cms up the wall at the
edges of the room. This carpet has then been covered with a soft grey coloured
concrete and sand mixture. We are presented with a room that now contains a
second floor, which completely seals off the original gallery floor.
The wide opening to the room and lack of ‘keep off’ sign invites
us to walk over the piece, as we do so we feel and hear it quietly crunching
and crumbling beneath our feet. Unfortunately it seems, someone has sprayed
some purple graffiti on the outside of one of the windows, this doesn’t
appear to be part of the piece but it certainly crosses your mind that it could
be. Other than this slight distraction the room is bare from other work and
the new floor is the only thing placed in the room. The floor is crudely flat
and not perfect.
I’m writing about this piece because of its daring simplicity and successful
intrusion into the relationship that occurs between artwork, gallery space and
viewer. It is minimalist, yet there is a sense of narrative in this piece. Its
literary title and the fact that the purple graffiti, as it turns out is indeed
part of the piece suggest so.
When researching Chuns work I found an image of the piece installed in another
country and the graffiti no longer looked like a tag or a couple of foreign
characters; in this instance it read ‘NONSENSE’. This comment is
meant to be unreadable by the majority of its audience. Most people who saw
2nd floor would probably not have realised it had been labelled as ‘nonsense’,
as most would not have spoken Korean. Chun studied Fine Art in Korea and obtained
her MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art. She seems to speak broken yet
competent English on her website so I assume she is near bi-lingual. The graffiti
appears to be in a language foreign to the majority of viewers dependent upon
where it is exhibited; Korean in England and English in Korea.
I get the feeling that she is pulling our leg. The narrative of this piece suggests
an outsider has labelled the contents of the gallery as nonsense. Contemporary
Art as a whole? or just her work? I think it likely that she wants to poke fun
at us as we take on the role of viewers. Her vehicle for doing this is her artwork.
Does she want to see us look and analyse and attempt to understand why an artist
would cover a floor in concrete? Is that why she has done something fairly anonymous
so that she can quite privately be entertained by or examine this behaviour.
I do not doubt the possibility that this piece is for her rather than us.
I doubted further her respect for the viewer by the fact that she responded
to my email, which enquired about the piece saying she would attempt an explanation
if I said why I was writing about it and what I liked about it. I did so, and
have not received any further replies. Did she ever intend to reply? Or has
she used me to gain a better understanding of how her work is interpreted? It
is most likely that she simply has not managed to reply yet or forgotten, but
part of me suspects that she won’t and has taken advantage of my interest
and my enthusiasm for what I think her work is about.
I don’t like the piece if it is simply a means for her to examine us as
viewers of art. It is quite unoriginal to trick the viewer and to treat them
as a laboratory-test-mouse. I see little personal benefit in her treating the
viewer like this. I am undecided about what I think she has tried to achieve
with 2nd floor.
Originally I saw it as a brilliantly simple intervention of gallery convention.
The construction of a sculpture, which doesn’t sit on the floor, but replaces
it and then inviting viewers to walk upon it was wonderfully refreshing. Carl
Andre’s floor tile sculptures spring to mind; Steel Zinc Plain 1969 here
however we find ourselves damaging the work as we walk upon it, not to mention
its disregard for aesthetics. Delicate works often become damaged by viewers,
but to have endorsed this idea and engage the audience with the process of changing
the piece allowed intimacy in quite a different way.
I originally felt that Chun was addressing conventions of how artwork exists
and is displayed or received in galleries. It is very strongly engrained in
us that paintings go on the wall, sculptures on the floor (or a pedestal; which
is simply raised floor). These conventions have boundaries, which Chun has also
crossed. Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel 1913, was one of the first pieces
that invited viewers to touch the artwork and physically interact with it, yet
Chun has gone one stage further and made it so that we damage her piece. She
also addresses the convention that we walk on the floor of the gallery around
a piece of work experiencing it from many sides. By making the piece devour
and cover the floor she stops us walking upon it and elevates us to look down
upon the work whilst standing on the work itself. 2nd floor interrupts conventional
flow of art gallery behaviour and forces viewers into something slightly different,
but definitely new.
Upon the discovery of the graffiti being part of the piece and not unfortunate
vandalism, we see that she has again been unconventional by having some of her
work exist outside of the gallery where she has displayed it. I’m very
interested in the interaction an artwork has with the viewer in terms of how
it changes the space it inhabits. In particular what our expectations of a gallery
space should be like and how we receive the gallery space being dependent on
the work placed within it. I would like to completely cover a room with something
irrelevant so that you could enter the room from within the belly of a large
sculpture yet know nothing of what the room looked like and not come into contact
with wall or floor at any point; a concealment of the gallery, which is supposed
to be plain and unnoticed.
Bibliography
http://www.youngmichun.com/index.htm
E-Mail from the Artist. Address found on her website.
http://www.newcontemporaries.org.uk/artist_single.php?aid=1444&PHPSESSID=d67d0788a81b2db9bb08610c4bcf772b
www.tate.org.uk
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/mediaartnet/
Copyright Tom Duggan. 2006.