[강덕봉]Movement of Speed

Movement of Speed

Oh Yun-jeong (Art critic)

• Accelerando in progress

The speed of our lives, in which the rate of progress and change has become increasingly rapid, encourages us to race stealthily yet passionately towards the enlightened path. This sophisticated speed leads us to yearn for that which is perceived as being ‘further’ beyond the horizon, and to never cease in our race towards the promise of a future with ‘the higher’ efficiency and ‘the faster’ speed. Within the agogics of the speed —when the closer you get, the further things seem to be away from you—‘we don’t have time to contemplate what might drop in anytime as being consumed in things urgent and possible in a daily basis’, as stated in Sein und Zeit (1972) by Martin Heidegger. “Ceasing means a death” to the souls that are violently passionate about the frenzied speed. This statement by Paul Virilio about the attraction and fear of speed has fallen into place as a general law in this world. If a moment takes a slower pace, only the fastest can be guaranteed of their safety due to the fear that you might be shattered, as if by the frontal force of bullets. The rapidly accelerating speed, and the intention to achieve a stable level of safety, leads us to endure more to an increasing rapidity, and subsequently to this obsessive desire for higher speeds. The speed that once set us free from the limited world, now causes us to admit that our lives are endlessly restless, and therefore we demand other measures and rules as we hunger for stability.

A question is posed: ‘What experiences were brought to our lives by speed?’ Another question is what viewpoint does contemporary art take toward this? With the dynamic narrative of the Futurists, art in the Twentieth century had once promoted the value of speed through a visual language revering the era of machine as their ideal aesthetics. Their speed, however, overly focused on ‘placing the fixity of life onto movement’. This fiery manifesto towards the beauty of speed by Filippo T. Marinetti is now read with the tone of sublime comfort and serves as a type of anesthetic for the senses, which ‘fixates life to movement’. A ‘simultaneous epiphany’ within the sensory shock creates an immersive fantasy and extends into a tyrannical perspective surpassing every representation. The real material that composes the everyday world is distorted in our perspectives thanks to fantasy, which is endlessly reduced and absorbed by huge objects, thereby blurring our views of perceptive experiences. As Theodor W. Adorno said, ‘the curse of incessant progress is endless regress.’ The accelerated speed of progress brings forth increasing advancements in our lives, and yet our vision becomes more and more skewed. With blurred vision and half-closed or blinking eyes we manage to focus on 00:00:00:00Ⅰ, and still the afterimages of the work begin to overlap and create more confusion, fleeting with an arrow-like speed despite our efforts to look more intensely. Nevertheless, even with the help of distortions, we seem to have stronger desire to see things ‘inserted’ clearly between continuous movement, or in other words, to see familiar forms and the things blurred out of the background.

• Simultaneous clusters of moments

Having captured momentary movements within the everyday routines of modern day life since 2007, Kang Duck-bong began to tie the ‘hidden or unseen’ movements together with clusters of pipes in the 2010 exhibition HIDE. Relying on the moments when speed becomes full-blown in its acceleration, in 2013’s Movement of Speed Kang sought to generate clusters of simultaneous movements which are then shattered into fleeting moments. Or to put it another way, the earlier works assembled ‘standstill‘ forms with the weight and mass of pipes, while the current work divides the ‘static’ forms into fleeting pieces, occasionally drawing them back together again.. At present, the artist, as if taking snapshots of each moment of dynamic movement, constructs his encapsulated visual sequences into pipe clusters. Kang’s superhuman attempt to visually capture the contradictions that come out of the experiences of these moments, gives us a glimpse into the refined consciousness of the integrated state of the Futurist. For instance, the works are similar to Futurist images of figures drawn with numerous overlapping limbs in continuous or radial forms, conveying dynamism and momentary rays of light. However when Futurism is brought up in Kang’s work ‘in the current art scene’, its significance would lie in his role as a ‘mediator’ measuring modern society as it races with spectacular speed, and evoke contradictory symptoms out of this reckless pace.

The three-dimensional forms, which seem to have been produced by mixing continuously shot images of a quickly developing scene, are definitely movement clusters occurring within a fleeting moment. In other words, as the material that is constructing these forms, the pipes also create a cluster that alludes to the data of a certain similar situation occurring simultaneously and instantly. Kang adds gradated effects to the dynamic constructions, made by stacking up thin pipes one by one and turning the sculptural mass into fragmental afterimages shattered by speed’s light. These prism-like representations of color double as optical illusion that leave us seeing hazy silhouettes due to phosphorescence on the horizon, as if something has passed through like an arrow. For instance, in 00:00:00:00Ⅰ the reduced human figures, racing away from us on a base seemingly connected with the (exhibition hall) floor, are in actuality, immobile objects. These are, however, the substantial objects of the rapidly disappearing continuum, the moment they rise up above the ground level and run forward. They emit phosphorescence to the observer, making him or her feel dazzled and overwhelmed by the scene racing by. Such awe-inspiring scenes are also featured in 99:59:59:99—in which human forms with a head and three bodies seemingly circle around Chronos’ system of time—as well as in 00:00:00:00Ⅱ in which the motion of a human form can be traced racing along the trajectory of time. The work is flattened like a linear drawing through the use of Kang’s thin straight pipes. The forms, which are fragmented due to their acceleration, are left with blurry silhouettes as they become thicker or thinner in a gradated effect within the intoxicating speed. These solid masses, despite their usual strength, disappear into the cold, and melt a little into the viewer’s physical and psychological spaces.

In Vitesse et Politique: Essai de Dromologie (1977) Virilio suggests that entering the world of speed means we are introduced to the ‘political economy of speed’. He argues that, in previous eras, speed brought comfort to us by increasing our survival rate, while the speed of modern times serves as a risk to our own existence, not just as a threat to our being. In other words, Virilio sees the current accelerated sense of speed as bringing us to a point where we are immersed within a psychological conformity and no longer able to judge. In addition, such a world as this comes to a halt at an extreme level of speed, reaching an ‘extreme inertia’ in which a person doesn’t need to move from one point to another to make something happen. As the movement of ‘extreme inertia’ governs, the immobility of objects (or humans) appears gradually or abruptly, and this phenomenon stealthily implodes within our being, creating bodies devoid of willingness. Kang realizes the type of movement that helps us to avoid ‘extreme inertia’ by focusing on the motion of legs within an otherwise immobile situation. However the motion of legs creates a series of collisions and shocks due to the ‘extreme inertia’ that is prevalent and yet it still comes to a halt by getting stuck within the conforming sensory experiences, gravitating only towards the temporal system of speed. An empty transparent pipe on the legs implicitly breaks down the invisible dictatorial movement because of the way that it implies a connection to the viewer’s bodies ‘within’ the actual (exhibition) space. The immobile legs and the viewer’s bodies become integrated within this covertly invading and attacking speed. The speed never ceases to create uneasiness, suppressing possible coincidences and determining how objects (or humans) function.

• con moto movement

Nevertheless, the living body is still alive, maintaining such uneasiness and setting up different issues every minute. In other words, to live is to endlessly change. Therefore the life that relies on speed neither simply exists within speed, nor is it fixed onto it. The artist marked the titles with a time stamp, perhaps in an intention to measure, in his own rough way, the sleek world dominated by a speed that is marked by numbers. Perhaps rather than being passively moved from here to there, the artist transforms the overwhelming speed to his own, by recording a variety of up/down and right/left movements visually, based on his experiences of speed. In addition, this underlines the point that, externally, his constructs stay immobile, although far from being in standstill, instead serving as clusters of moments gathered within this endless motion. For instance, even the empty space it is not a void but full of fine particles like immeasurable bits of dust. If anything invades such a space, whether it be a human or an object, the particles immediately begin subtle movements. The delicate motion expands from the point that the empty inner space serves as a pipe, bringing hardly perceptible motion, in contrast to the dynamic movement portrayed with the pipe sculptures. In other words, his pipes act as a cluster that minute particles pass through, as they escape from the moments between the gaps that are hidden and invisible in our limited views. Within this situation, the viewer, depending on their state of movement, slowly brings forth fission to inertia, by encountering one’s own temporal senses, becoming interminably slow, or fast.

Now we continue the flow between the gaps found in the accelerated movement, and should respond to the things overlooked and lost in each moment of reality, rather than yearning for that which is ‘further’, beyond the horizon. This refers to leading a life with one’s own temporal measurement and a variety of movements (con moto), resistant to the racing in the accelerated speed of progress. ‘Art in our times’ should raise objections, develop the rhythm and score of a new visual language, and command a variety of ensemble. As well as this, artists in our times also ought to maintain a persistent contemplation of one’s own, as well as experiments of resistance in regards to the overlooked absences of reality, caused by the accelerated pace. If each artist’s aesthetic experiment spreads out as a ‘movement of speed’, there might be a resistant stream against speed which may deprive one of abilities to contemplate and conceptualize. Therefore Kang, having placed the concept of ‘speed’ at the center of his aesthetic thinking, may raise a flow of ‘movement of speed’ and turn his suggestion of one’s own temporal record into a small artistic cluster which can be extended. In addition, it seems vital that he keep working hard to convert a ‘life fixated with speed’ into life ‘free-flowing within a variety of speeds’, in order to encompass the movement of speed within his work.

작가 홈페이지 : http://www.duckbong.com/