By Cathy Rose A. Garcia
Staff Reporter
Most contemporary art exhibitions tend to have complicated themes, so it is refreshing when a gallery comes out saying that there's no overall theme.
``The Infinite Starburst of Your Cold Dark Eyes,'' the first collaboration between PKM Gallery and Bartleby Bickle & Meursault, is one such exhibition.
``This exhibition has no curatorial agenda worth expounding (besides, we are allergic to the sort of rote, quasi-theoretical patter that has become endemic in presentations of contemporary art). Our choices have been guided only by our affinities ― emotional, intellectual, sensual ― elicited by the works. Taste and sensibility, in short. This is not to say that these works are without ideas, but their appeal and significance resonate beyond whatever relevance they have to any critically approved concepts,'' the gallery said, on its Web site.
Works by nine artists Bae Young-whan, Baik Hyun-jhin, Jonas Dahlberg, Michael Joo, Kim Sang-gil, Lee Bul, Noori Lee, Richard Prince and Thomas Struth are displayed in PKM Gallery in Hwa-dong, Jongno and the Bartleby Bickle & Meursault viewing room in Anguk-dong, Jongno, Seoul.
At the Bartleby Bickle & Meursault viewing room, the artworks are placed alongside vintage furniture, personal artifacts, books, music and film clips.
``There are associative strands, tangents, and convergences, an organic aesthetic logic that emerges from this seemingly disparate grouping. Struth's photo of prelapsarian wilderness, for instance, finds a counterpoint in Joo's sculpture, uncanny in its verisimilitude, of elk antlers cast in polyurethane. And Noori Lee's delicate watercolors of politically freighted images (the reflecting pool at the 9/11 Memorial, an array of surveillance cameras in a German town), rendered unfamiliar and enigmatic by the displacement from their source in news archives, induce a suitable state of mind for Dahlberg's silent video ― essentially one extended tracking shot in conscious homage to Antonioni's `The Passenger' of an intricate scale-model recreation of New York's Gramercy Park as it once existed in a long-vanished era of genteel bohemianism,'' the gallery said.
There's also Richard Prince's painting printed with a joke. In Bae's newly commissioned piece, he used some lines from author Nathanael West's dark novel ``Miss Lonelyhearts'': ``They had believed in literature, had believed in beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything. Money and fame meant nothing to them. They were not worldly men.''
If there is something these works have in common, it would be perhaps their elegiac tone. Many, if not all, the works were made in the new millennium, but the gallery noted the mood is ``fin-de-siecle, very, very late 20th century, of ruins and fragments, spectral traces of histories concluded and memories evanescent.''
``Leaving behind a decade all too appropriately dubbed the `naughts,' the years of excess and narcissistic gratification that imploded with bankruptcies both financial and moral, we embark on an endeavor to imbue our little patch of the art world with poetry and ardor, with intellectual fascination and sensuous wonder,'' the gallery added.
The exhibition runs through Feb. 26. Visit www.pkmgallery.com (02-734-9467) or www.bbmeursault.com (02-722-1757).