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2022
In thinking about the art of Kimsooja, with whom I have had a long friendship, I would like to talk about friendship and the way a symbiosis intrinsic to being friends, to being as friends, to friends as a central way of being is a congruence, as that word echoes its original Latin meaning—con: with, together; and gruere: to fall or rush, to rush in. Friendship is this falling together, this rush toward another, with another. Friendship is a congruence of recognitions, acknowledgments, sympathies. We can say that friendship finds its congruence in testing the experience of experiencing together, of mutually picturing the world, attentive to the notion of the immanence of existential Being into which consciousness is woven and from which experience emerges so that being-together is possible. Each human being is an instance of Being, an emanation of Being as an animate sign in the world, and to think of friendship in this light as the congruence of being-together is an ideal formation in which every face that faces another is a text of the world that is read by the other and that Otherness opens, rushing in.
To speak of congruence and this sense of immanence, of a fundamental energetic presence inside and around all things, is to speak of contiguity and connectedness as an essential concern with space understood as an infinitely elastic material in which relations are embedded, giving rise to what, among every kind of thing, relations are and can be between humans, between self and others, and between beings and Being. Falling together in being-together considers space especially in terms of proximity, of removing distance to attain closeness, of coming forward toward the condition (physical, psychological, social, spiritual) of touch. If space in our contemporary thinking and experience is a matter of the habitual placement of things and practical navigation or the psychological continuum from alienation to intimacy or of technical storage and distribution, it is still not entirely desanctified. What could be called the supra-mundane condition of existence, of that immanence I have already noted, remains an aspect of the surround, of the ambience in which we persist as living, cognizant things.
It is this consideration of spatiality and materiality that undergirds all of Kimsooja’s art. And it is in this sense that such aspects as congruence, being-together, friendship, and their ramifications in terms of social and political relations take hold. The spatial and material are presented in her work, for example, in the particular form of cloth, of fabrics into which, as I’ve just suggested, our consciousness of self and world are woven and wrapped. Kimsooja has always used cloth as material and metaphor combined, and always in a condition of mobility, of beings and Being on the move, hinting at that energetic essence of Being and making legible what it means to be with others and, therefore, to be attentive to a general relational sense of the recognition of others that we call Otherness. At the base of this, I think we can say that this attentiveness to others and Otherness, particularly in an attitude toward the condition of being-with-others in the specific sense of being-together as friends, is to understand the direction of this attention and attitude toward care—care for others located in place and care for others suggested through movement as more than a local condition, as a broader sense of the shared presence of being-together.
These qualities of attention to continuity with others, of the contiguity and congruence of being-together, of cloth as material and metaphor of daily being and a deeper connection with Being, is present in many of Kimsooja’s works over the years. So it is with her installations of bottaris—traditional Korean fabric bundles of people’s clothes from different places that stand in as metaphorical surrogates for the transitory nature of the body and the mobility of society, of movement and tumult, of what is changed and what remains. Bottaris, in the way I’m framing Kimsooja’s work, are containers of remnant beings that mark presence as memorial, bundles set down for moments in time, yet implicitly mobile, ready to be taken and placed anew, collected and distributed. She captures the transitory still more literally in her video Cities on the Move (1997), in which the artist makes her way over eleven days on the back of a truck loaded with bottaris, traveling through her native South Korea. And then this sense of the fabric into which our being is woven and wrapped is expanded metaphorically in the six videos she collectively titles A Needle Woman (1999-2009), of which I’ll speak more in a moment. I will just say briefly here that the streams of pedestrians walking by her in the videos are signs of the artist perceived objectively, with consciousness suggested in two ways: the consciousness of others witnessed as an “outside” and the consciousness of the artist witnessed as an “inside,” mirrored reflections of self and objecthood, of the artist who is the needle in the act of sewing social space at once with others and alone.
Still more abstractly, Kimsooja diffuses and etherealizes the metaphor of cloth and the contiguity of being-together in the numerous works she has made titled To Breathe. These works, too, have been sited in many places around the world, a distributed movement of a work in which visitors are beings gathered in space, unique yet similar bodies joined in the act of dilation, breathing in and out as they listen to the recorded and amplified sound of Kimsooja’s own breathing. She and they are wrapped in this materiality and metaphor of the body as the tissue of reciprocal social being and the emanation of Being rising and falling, dipping in and out of the experience of being-with-others, to attend to Otherness, and perhaps being-together in that congruence of what it is to care for one another in friendship. Each of these works pictures the world in this way, deploying space, movement, geography, place, time, and people to propose this picturing as the canvas of Being on which these various expressions of being-with-others and the potential of being-together are made manifest.
Here at Wanås Konst, another work is added to the long thread of this thinking, the site-specific piece Sowing into Painting (2020) that is at the center of the larger exhibition of her work under the same title. There is a double entendre in the title, knowing of her “needle woman,” such that sowing rhymes with sewing, cultivation with creation, and, by extension, artist and viewers woven into the surround of site and sight, being with Being. For the work, Kimsooja has had a field plowed and planted with flax seed—flax for linen canvas on which paintings are made and for linseed oil that binds paint’s colored pigments. The earth is the site of picturing just as a canvas is. The technical word “support,” signifying the wood frame on which a canvas is stretched for painting, has the particular evocation of care, of the ground not only for caring for the earth but also for what is pictured. This is the social and political spaciousness of world-picturing in which Kimsooja has shown the complexities and promise of being-with-others, and here in Sowing into Painting, she traces the site and sight of cultivating care itself. The generative earth, the earth of production, is the unfolding of the picture of a world that is both topos, a place of belonging, and utopos, an aspirational not-yet-place of imagining.
As both central metaphor and site, the work speaks to the recurrent theme at Wanås and in previous installations and exhibitions by Kimsooja of communing with the communal and of the work of hands as compensatory and liberating, weaving the social fabric that dresses Being in our being-together in acts of gathering, production, distribution, and dispersal. Elsewhere, I have written about her work in terms of the philosophical notion of Being-in—what Peter Sloterdijk defines simply as “being something with something in something.” I have written about A Needle Woman, in which I propose that the artist standing still in the midst of rivers of mobile bodies takes on the function of a gnomon, the vertical apparatus of a sundial that casts the sun’s shadow and reiterates time’s continual enunciation of Being. Time is melded entirely with spatiality here. Kimsooja’s body is a measuring device of passage, such that time itself is a contiguous material, a fabric of Being into which bodies are sewn. The measured and recorded beings we see in these videos live in time past, though symbolically they suggest continuity as they stream by the artist’s immobile figure, continuing into the present as the sociality of crowds hardly changes, and promising what is also to come. We see the artist only with her back to us as all the faces passing by her read her and are read—some curious, some clearly hostile, some indifferent—foregrounding how challenging and fraught the relations among beings are, how the people in these videos made in Patan, Havana, N’Djamena, Rio de Janeiro, Sana’a, and Jerusalem reflect the difficulty of sewing together, this togetherness of social being in which Kimsooja is the foreigner, the one at the doorstep of others, with her Otherness reflecting theirs.
To be something with something in something is the condition of social relations in which friendship occurs and is always underwritten by the particular space of hospitality, of crossing a threshold, though hospitality is always itself in a condition of friction, a condition in which, as Jacques Derrida has written, the host is also the hostage, brought into an inextricable relation that makes demands on the host to fulfill expectations of reception, propriety, generosity, of proximate yet deferential attention to space, and that there is in this attention a degree of connection that in some way attempts to find the glint of sameness between host and stranger. In Kimsooja’s work, there is always that sense of the mirrored and mirroring self, of internal meditation whose volte-face is a mediation of communal sociality, a labor of producing sociality, of coming to know the Other in the sowing of being-together. Friendship can be said to invite that sowing as a form of picture-making on the earth, as a sign not of scarcity, not of winnowing isolation, but in keeping with the proposition that “to friend” is an active verb tuned to its plural form in which the fructive generosity of being-together is the imagined harvest of the plenitude of difference, of Otherness with others as the basis for what it means to sew together a social fabric that at least buffers and mitigates harm.
Let me turn, in this regard, to another video series that concerns itself with being-together, Thread Routes (2010-2016), which Kimsooja has also brought to Wanås. In keeping with other works she has made, the series offers a distributed geography of handwork, a mobile mapping of an intricate labor of collaboration bound up in techniques and histories of specific locations, of landscapes in which these localities of working hands also reach outward toward the larger map of the communal understood as a topos, as common belonging and being-in-Being. Thread Routes never denies the fact of commodity production and its personal and social hardships. Yet the working of work is toward a binding sense of interaction that spells the communing of the communal, of intimate groups dipping in and out of time and labor and landscapes that become, in their repetitions, an assertion of the intricacy of what it is to be with others in the possibility and nearness of friendship and the plural state of consensual virtue with others.
Inevitably, there are dangers here as the needle of the self and selves that moves in and out of the social fabric is still a pointed implement that pierces, that can rend as well as sew. So it should be underlined that commune, communal, and communitarian are words that are not simply signifiers of an expanded state of negotiated care and intimacy but also of being-together as a political condition. What “to friend” means in this light is to seek and enter into relationships of affinity and affiliation, which can also be understood as another volte-face of conflicting principles of collective and colonized interactions. I have written elsewhere about what can be called, in relation to friendship and affiliation, the tyranny of sameness. Leelah Gandhi writes in her book Affective Communities that “even the most radical communities of difference, founded upon solidarities of class, gender, race, or ethnicity, lapse into a politics of similitude—privileging separation over relationality, demanding uniformity as the price for belonging.” She quotes Kwame Anthony Appiah, who states: “Between the politics of recognition and the politics of compulsion, there is no bright line.” Yet if there is no clear line between them, there is a line around them, which is to say that the politics of sameness bases itself on territorial exclusivity, on its restrictive sense of ownership that is always boundaried by the blinkered intensity of compulsion.
This is the challenge that underlies “to friend,” and even if it is unstated here at Wanås Konst that the sowing of seeds in Sowing into Painting is toward a harvesting of social good, there is the subterranean tremor, the subterranean question of who is it who friends another in the politics of recognition and what deep complicity lies between them? To recognize another is to grip both comfort and agonistic defense in the mutual desire of likeness-only-to-myself and its willful sense of compliance, even to extremes of juridical enforcement and tribal violence. The bright line of community as a form of compulsion and the territory of likeness paradoxically traces the outlines of a self-affirming fortress that excludes as much as it includes, and reigns by marking unsameness as much as sameness, twisting the path of friendship and community along a gauntlet of marginalization and oppression.
Yet wandering with others among Wanås Konst’s woods in the commune of nature, of planting and bringing to harvest, suggests something, despite undercurrents, that is altogether different, something more like what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “compearance.” He writes: “the between as such: you and I (between us)... What is exposed in compearance is the following, and we must learn to read it in all its possible combinations: ‘you (are/and/is) (entirely other than) I’ [‘toi (e(s)t) (tout autre que) moi’]. Or again, more simply: you shares me [‘toi partage moi’].” Belonging as an exclusivity, as boundaried territory only for some, and this sense of compearance as an essential sharing between I and Other present different registers of accessibility. The melded conjugation of Nancy’s “you shares me” that inhabit his “between as such” offers an environment of openness that is always a visiting-with, so to speak; that does not claim an exclusivity, a single way of being, but widens the access of each of us to our differences in a ramified network of connectedness, just as we move here in Wanås among the trees that are themselves a model of being-together, of rootworks ramifying in a network of shared sustenance that signals precisely the mutuality of sowed alliances in which tout autre que moi is also toi partage moi. His “and” infers the openness that Kimsooja unveils; what Sloterdijk in a similar thinking calls “existential spaciousness,” where we are always beside and with others not necessarily in unison or harmony, but in a proposed space of Being that, in its profound breadth, exceeds likeness-only-to-myself.
In this existential spaciousness, the works here at Wanås Konst—Sowing into Painting, Meta-Painting (2020), A Laundry Field (2020), To Breathe (2020), and Thread Routes—share what Derrida has noted as an essential quality of friendship, which “breathes in a shared language (past or to come) and in the being-together that all allocution supposes.” This aspiration made visible in Kimsooja’s work to accomplish a mutuality of being-in-Being, of the melding of my I with another I, revives what friendship has been understood to be most fundamentally for more than two millennia. Aristotle first spoke of friendship as a form of consent—a word in its two parts that means “to be with” and “to sense,” to taste, touch, hear, smell, and see, to be with Being and to be with others. These are the tools by which being-in-Being is brought into consciousness and can be shared with other consciousnesses in order to weave the basis of sociality, whether in conflict or otherwise, which is to say Other-wise in the breadth of accommodation. If we are to plant together, to breathe together, to follow the handwork of communities producing together, we are in an active, performative practice of sensing and feeling with others. That practice takes the form of repetition and variation in Kimsooja’s works. Within the works, actions are often repeated, even suggesting labor as a form of ritual, while the works themselves are repeated and varied from venue to venue, as if the topos of belonging and the utopos of deracinated openness are joined: a commons of being in a state of mobile and mobilized closeness.
There is, in this sense of repetition and ritual, of handwork and comepearance, a relation, for example, between Sowing as Painting and another work Kimsooja has made various times, Archive of Mind, in which small balls of clay are laid out on a table to be rolled over and over in one’s hands—a table as tableau that supports an act of being-with-others, sowing shapeliness from earth’s material. Both works imply ritualized labor as maintenance, a word whose etymology signifies hands and care, so that we enter into a practice of care-fullness, of hands at work in the cultivation of what can be called consenting space, sensing together toward a shared form, a multiple form of generative making, an amplitude of care-fullness in a space for being-with-others. For what friendship does in creating a plural us is bring into the visibility of experience the consensuality of understanding that I am not the same I as I was before the friendship nor is the friend, and that we are each both I and Other, each of us a second mutated self—and still a third, because together we form a hybrid third self together. In this intertwining and multiplication of myself with the one who is beside me in friendship, our plural form is, therefore, also a microcosm of community, in which the ritual sharing of labor takes place, of pleasure, of devotion, and of the finitude of each of our lives.
Of course, there are frictions in friendships and communities, yet the mobility in and of Kimsooja’s works proposes that being-with-others can have this forward trajectory, this active movement toward being-together. What shifts these works this way is a difference in temporality that distinguishes the symbolic from daily reality. What I imagine as the curved space-time of being-together bent by the gravitational pull (the rushing in) of friendship runs counter to the linearity of similitude in the troubled political life presented by Leelah Ghandi. For the time of the tyranny of sameness is dependent on long durations of governmental rule that produce juridical practices, laws of identity and entrenched prejudices enforced punitively. Instead, Kimsooja’s works depend on a more momentary sense of time and a symbolic framework rather than a juridical one—the time of the chance encounter while viewing artworks; the sweet trace of brief and transitory experiences that may possibly be revelatory, may possibly be touched by the haptic proximity of communal being, but are neither entrenched nor punitive, and, at the very least, are tutelary as an ethics, as friendship’s paradigm.
The episodic time of Kimsooja’s works encourages a loose weaving of the cloth of sociality that accommodates difference within sameness—a meditative easefulness that permits what the punitively juridical cannot: to socially and spatially accommodate the variation of Otherness, to be proximate yet parallel, which is to say allowing unsameness alongside sameness, increments of distance that still afford the pleasures of doing-together. This is what we see in Thread Routes, with its multiple geographies and its hallucinatory repetition of people working alongside one another, their labor a form of public affiliation, the possibility of compearance in consenting space a prospect hanging in the bright air.
Sunlight falls across these landscapes and figures, luminousness a motif that floods Kimsooja’s works as the sign of generative activation, of time in movement and the eventfulness of being-together. So it is that Sowing as Painting depends on the sun as the nurturing illumination that makes legible what seed and blossom bring at the site of work, collaboration, and comepearance. From that flax seed, in Meta-Painting, linens hang in rows that catch the shine of unstained possibility, and do so in proximity to equally unmarked bottaris placed underneath them, made from the same cloth, as if to imply a form of companionship in the mobility of pure potential, the dilation of sheer thingness, human and nonhuman, on the path to the openness of becoming. So it is, as well, with the white, waving sheets against the green sweep of trees in A Laundry Field that invite the idea of unblemished freshness; and the mirrored rooms in all the variations of To Breathe, in which every reflected body is a body twice illuminated; and the faces in the crowds of A Needle Woman, where, as I have said, the artist herself is tied to the sun as a gnomon marking the light in the passage of days, of continuity and what is to come.
All of these works share the existential spaciousness, the fundamental and permeating presentness of presence in which the ambience of being-together gathers Otherness in the brilliance and difficulties of affiliation. The aesthetic task and the ethical task, the task of Nancy’s toi partage moi, move through Kimsooja’s works before Wanås, in Wanås, and beyond. They picture her active, mobile sense of sowing and sewing as handwork for social wholeness, of being-in-Being so that the self and selves together unfold the worlding of the world. This is what Derrida proposes as a horizon, a wellspring for the communal, writing: “The relation of oneself in the other—there we have the true infinite.” These chance meetings, these works in a life of work, propose this infinitude of same with unsame and what it means and can mean “to friend.”
– 2022.