A conversation with Michael Joo.
By Simon Sheikh and Joachim Koester.
SS: A lot of your work involves the circular and the linear, do you see that as a straight-forward representation, be that ironic or iconic, of eastern and western thought?
MJ: One aspect of my work is, perhaps, that it takes certain stereotypes out of context, which are usually personally derived. The mere fact of my asian heritage is really something that is culled form a personal array of material, so to speak. And so resulting from this kind of stereotypicalcontent on the text-level, I think it was natural with my interest in structure to take certain kinds of iconic structures and read them the other way round. It is perhaps most interesting to me that maybe I was always interested in it, but my work, and my own reading thereof, and other people's reading of it begins to affect my srereotyping.
JK: It«s telling that it is very materialistic, and it also plays with stereotypes of east and west, a certain person was quite suspicious of your video from Korea, thinking it looked like Colorado!
MJ: Exactly! What do you except from your authority, you know. An authoritative position is something you usually simply state, and in a work of art people usually take things for granted, I mean, how do I know that those De Koonings were really in oil paint? Maebe they are in piss and shit, I only believe it because the information has been passed on from another, as another level of life.
SS: Obviously your work is rooted in your own personal history and experience, in the way that you have worked with these themes as a process of knowledge. How does your work relate to the current debate on the construction of identity as including or excluding difference. Your work certainly can be, and has been, read in that context.
MJ: I would love to say that it's accidental, but at the same time, it is not truely strategic, in the sense that we all evolve strategies for survival, for continuance of artmaking. There survival would read as adaption, adaptability, the ability to continue, certainly, personally, in terms of the psyche transformed to the artmaking process, culling these elements from my own personal history, are all that, on one level, I am qualified to take and re-codify. That's a qualification, because it is my material. Other people will have that material, that's something that will allow me to sit outside of it, and see it develop, maybe in hindsight, but it's something I also get an immense reading from myself.
JK: That would be a nice idea, to be able to sit outside and watch it develop. What I also like is your idea of creating a structure that leaves room for accidents, in a way making the structure come closer to real life, that can take on a life of it«s own.
MJ: By creating a structure, on one level you can surprise yourself by setting up the conditions by which the work can exist on its own. The idea of a work that can survive on its own is first of all a total myth, it's all in how it's recieved, and as a producer, initiator, of the piece, you can often only gage whether it is surviving for yourself, since you can rarely get an honest or adequate critique from someone else, and to base it on your commercial success is a whole different ballgame anyway, so what have you got for yourself as artproducing entity? I think as a conceptual base for how to make art, for myself, part of the goal of some of the work is to create an elaborate enough structure, that in some sense, despite all its rationale, and reasons for making, and reasons for coming into existence reading as in structure and material choices and text choices, everything combined into one, to form some kind of distraction, so to speak. That you put so much rationale into, try to get past that into some other territory, that you could hope to intent, so to speak.
SS: s quite interesting, cause in a way Joachim is also working inhis pieces with setting up a structure that touches another level altogether.
MJ: Yeah, I see something of that in your work as well, Joachim, in connection with your usage of video, in regards to the establishment of the video-language as a structure, creating some sort of authority, or universal "type".
JK: It would in a way create a structure that would force the viewers to consider their positions towards this structure, whether I'm working with video or architecture, as the case may be. And to define themselves, to define their positions towards their space, and towards the artspace. It's a social thing, I think the social part of it very important in the artworld itself, and in the way you produce works of art. I guess that the whole idea of art being a social thing might be underestimated.
MJ: Underestimated, certainly, or overly critized, perhaps. As much as it is an inadequate model for society, it does have its own structure, and that structure does have to have its own sort of society. In a way even an artists relation to that structure, if they maintain one foot in that plane and one in another, which is always desirable I think, and particularly pertinent in these times, is the idea of maintaining a certain amount of not clinical, but usable schizophrenia. It's a social system, as the other one is, it's perhaps the most reflective part of the artworld, that reflects the outer social system.
SS: Yeah, it certainly has no illusion of democracy! It's interesting, since a great deal of current art seems to be turning inwards to its own institutions on one hand, and to be more dependent on social relations on the other. Let's say that those social relations are in the artworld, but they could also be relations outside, and it seems that the space between them is where everybody tries to situate their work.
MJ: That is one of the only ways you can identify yourself as well, I mean it's very hard to identify yourself with, say, technology. You really only begin to figure out where you fit in by either rejecting or socializing. In any event it becomes an ontological question. About your immediate surroundings, about your social skills, so to speak. It's being a "homeboy".