Workshops as Anti-Form in Art : The Things Summoned by Resembling Assembling (Check-up of Ruins)[1]
April 8–September 30, 2024

Ee Yeoro

Hello, Ms. Lee. I quite enjoyed the workshop that took place on the residency’s courtyard that early summer morning, ringed by the Han River and park. I view recalling my enjoyment yesterday not simply as a way of opening this letter but as part of the process of understanding art. Understanding is quite conditional, just as the will to understand arises from a competition among attractive forces.[2] If art as an institution is an assemblage of those conditions, a workshop is a setting that individually presents and establishes them with all of us gathered there together. In that sense, a workshop is not simply a secondary artistic event or a program associated with some larger event; it is an occasion for resummoning critical ways of knowing that explore the premises of art, along with the different things that art has externalized thus far.

Viewing and speaking about the artwork/mass in the Resembling Assembling workshop took place along similar lines to a comparison of similar images. This type of “seeing” was pre-artistic in the sense of the basic cognitive functions that identified similarities among forms, and it is also something that art has disregarded as “anti-artistic” for the sake of its establishment as a modern genre. For instance, viewing a work of art at a museum and saying it “looks like a thumb”[3] is regarded as a conventional statement that seems somehow uneducated and uncultured—a childish remark that fails to notice what is truly important. Some might criticize the “looks like” part as sounding like a non-subjective way of speaking.

But Resembling presented a setting for just this type of viewing. Indeed, the four participants were given the instruction to “match the mass with the part of the human body.” Yet, Resembling Assembling also considers the reasons for representation being so negatively defined in contemporary art. If the creation of sensory-based systems of judgment is the radical foundation of aesthetics,[4] our survival in society demands that perceptions and judgments be made so quickly that they more or less overlap. The world we live in today is not so different from the one “three million years ago,”[5] when our very life depended on the judgment of whether that rustling in the forest was just the wind or a predator’s misstep. Indeed, accustomed as we are to perceptions based on judgments, the sensory differences that allow us to examine our judgments may end up omitted. One reason that contemporary art has focused on abstract elements such as blots, marks, and noises is to perceive the minority elements situated beyond forms that can be represented in a visual culture synchronized to social judgments. Representation has thus been eschewed in favor of different approaches to seeing, and contemporary art as a whole could be described as a framework for the linguistic/philosophical question of “how to create objects without referents.”[6]

Resembling Assembling comes across as a case of creating “objects where the referent is different every time.” In this sense, “it looks like a thumb” is a legitimate constituent of viewing. But who is doing the “work”? The four participants, the four masses, artist Leeeunji, critic Ee Yeoro, and the Seoul Museum of Art— “workshop” was something we needed as a new catch-all term to name a state that could not be attributed to any one party. As a workshop, Resembling operates by separating perceptions of forms from judgments about “what they are” while using instructions to newly situate them within the participants’ actions. An example of this is Park Sohyun’s remark that “these four curves reminded me of this (pointing at knuckles)” (00:34): each participant’s natural interests in the act of seeing are accepted but not fixed as judgments. Much like the oddly shaped rocks that the paper masses imitate, the representational traces are not complete. The visual constraints are such that parts are not specified as wholes, and rather than connecting congruently with different parts to form robust closed circuits of logic, they trigger questions in turn, as seen when someone else remarks, “For me, this resembled a person’s silhouette in profile.” Rheem Daul observes that the image “seems to vary a lot according to the angle” (00:43). As this indicates, each person’s situated knowledge[7] is opened up naturally to others in different positions, and Park Sohyun’s footsteps take her closer to Rheem (00:45). It is the looks and steps of the participants that render the mass a three-dimensional artwork in space.

Conventionally, a workshop is regarded as an ancillary program to provide an experience for the non-expert public and aid their understanding. A separation remains between artists, producers, and experts on one side and viewers, consumers, and the public on the other. But in Resembling, the remark that one shape “looks like a thumb” comes from Cho Heesoo, who is herself an artist and filmmaker. When an artist follows a non-artistic instruction to “find similar bodies,” the division is bridged, and the elements begin to be repositioned. (Indeed, position happens to be the next instruction.) Within Resembling’s constraint (suggestion) of speaking a common language, the participants show their powers of attention rather than their expertise. The subtle differences they observe become an exploration of the internal and external components of art, including the environment,[8] perspectives,[9] scale,[10] emotions,[11] shading,[12] and projection.[13] Their expertise is developed through attention and discipline, but there is no separation in identity between experts and laypeople. The sharing of viewer-ness is the foundation of the workshop,[14] and because there is no qualitative separation of the subjects and agents of viewing as different actors, the viewing shares the same performativity. The fact that the second workshop occurs due to their viewing is what makes Resembling truly workshop-like.

The name applied to this workshop is “Check-up of Ruins” (Cho Heesoo, 09:50). In contrast with the medical connotations of the word checkup, the word ruins conjures an “act that is effectively diametrically opposed to a checkup” as an “action or act of viewing rooted in faith or mythology” (Cho, 49:06 [script version][15]). While the participants are never informed as such, Resembling identifies issues relating to belief, which has long been a subject of the artist’s explorations. At the same time, a new dimension is introduced to belief by the fact that the participants regard their action as a checkup. A checkup would appear to be a one-sided act, performed by a doctor on a patient, an agent on an object, or an expert on a non-expert. In Resembling, the checkup is not a process of determining appropriateness based on standards that transcend experience, but one of “forming independent standards of appropriateness”[16] through openness of communication.

This originates in the perceptions that the masses “are so individually forceful that they make you want to respect their power” (Cho Heesoo, 06:03), and the openness is sustained in a state where “we’re all thinking that [the things named] are not all there is” (Rheem Daul, 09:49). In this way, “it looks like a thumb” is a belief, a comparison, an argument, a suspicion, a foundation, a relativization, and a justification. In Resembling, a given sentence is not categorized by itself in terms of normative, technical, or factual language; it disperses into linguistic clouds. Is it by coincidence that the image of a paper mass modeled on a rock should conjure associations with clouds? (As it happens, the artist mentioned to me in an email a few days before that the “literal meaning of clūd, the etymological origin of the word cloud, is rock.”) Each person’s cloud contains their own linguistic conglomerations, and it is at the intersection of these that the utterance takes on its own character. The structure of Resembling Assembling is one in which actions are categorized as actions by everyone who approaches them, without being attributed to any models of before/after, subject/object, or cause/effect, and the focus of the participants’ “checkup” is on themselves. As Rheem notes (09:51), “I feel like this one has become a kind of mystery and is saying something about what we have done.” The workshop character of Resembling is one that consistently reflects itself to the end.

The term workshop has been in use since the mid-16th century.[17] It was used typically to refer to the workplaces of artisans in Western Europe, as seen with the frequent use of the phrase “workshop of”[18] when indicating the work of creators during the Renaissance. Under apprenticeship systems consisting of craftspeople, assistants, and trainees, workshops were places for training apprentices, settings for experienced assistants to use equipment prior to setting up their own workshops, and forums for these individuals to discuss different ideas.[19] After the Industrial Revolution, these workshops survived as smaller-scale institutions that contrasted with large-scale factories.[20] When the term was adopted during the 20th century in the fields of academics, education, and art, it is believed to have been meant to underscore the sense of shared training and self-study rather than one-sided instruction by educators. When the British theater director Joan Littlewood (1914–2002) established the Theatre Workshop in 1945,[21] her methodology emphasized joint training without divisions of roles, as well as collective creation based on research by all members—bringing together different artistic experiments in Europe while aspiring to popular theater and rejecting the bourgeois-based theater orthodoxy.[22]

Having originated in workplaces from a modern era when art was not fully separated as a social genre, the workshop was reintroduced to contemporary art following a separation in terms of production culture and industry. Today, it examines and renews the obvious presuppositions that have sustained work. Through our interactions and my observations of Resembling Assembling between April and September of this year, I learned about how the workshop has operated as an anti-art form that has never been either fully absorbed into art or eschewed within it. When I asked why the idea of a Critique Workshop had been proposed to me, a complete stranger, this was the reply: “I’ve had a lot of experiences where I’ve received exhibition texts in which my language is summarized along expert lines from a larger-level perspective. I thought perhaps my residency critique should be a bit more process-centered, doing something different from before where it draws upon the smaller-scale aspects, while remaining interesting.” Has my contribution lived up to that? In writing this text, I have drawn confidence from the workshop-like moments I have experienced.

-
[1] Since this text refers to the experience of the workshop Resembling Assembling (May 29, 2024, 9 am, SeMA Nanji front courtyard), which was based on Leeeunji’s work Resembling Assembling (Check-up of Ruins) (10:37min., workshop documentation—HD single-channel video, sound, 2024), I use the title of the actual workshop in this text

[2] For a reference on the issue of attractive forces, see Lee Heewoo, “The Things Criticisms Has Long Taught but Never Learned,” Sseum vol. 17, no. 2 (2023).

[3] Taken from Cho Heesoo’s remarks during Resembling Assembling (Check-up of Ruins) at 02:33. The video may be viewed on the Seoul Museum of Art YouTube channel. The time stamps indicated in this text refer to that video: Seoul Museum of Art | 13. Leeeunji, 2024 NANJI Access: Premiere, YouTube, Seoul Museum of Art channel, accessed August 13, 2024 and September 29, 2024, https://youtu.be/Al1f6tDZYvo?si=yOpQ1dbJoIz_96Ym.

[4] For a reference, see Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetics, trans. Kim Dong-hun (Seoul: Mati, 2019).

[5] Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain, trans. Kim Sohee (Seoul: Jisik Gallery, 2012), 89.

[6] This was first presented in the paper Gottlob Frege, “Über Begriff und Gegenstand (On Sense and Reference)” (1892). As an example of the framework being used and introduced in a contemporary art context, see Yun Jaeyeong, “‘Hirstism’? Revealing Damien Hirst’s Belief” (master’s thesis, Kookmin University, 2022), 66.

[7] A major concept in feminist epistemology, situated knowledge is also translated into Korean as situational knowledge and conceptual knowledge. The original source was the paper Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599. I first encountered the concept in the text Kwon-Kim Hyeonyeong, “Secondary Victimization in Sexual Violence and the Issue of Victim-Centeredness,” in Feminism of Victimization and Aggression (Seoul: Gyoyangin, 2018).

[8] “This [half-shaded] part may explain why I feel a bit sleepy.” (Rheem Daul, 01:34)

[9] “At first, I thought it was a hand, but now I see a person’s face, so do you have to look at it from above?” (Rheem Daul, 00:51)

[10] “But normally, when we think of a part of the body, we imagine a unit something like this. Is this actually a scope that’s been enormously enlarged?” (Cho Heesoo, 09:13 [script]) “Oh, that’s true. This shape. Here, it’s like a quarter of a face.” (Cho Sumin, 20:49 [script])

[11] “There are kind of sad eyes, a nose, and a sad-looking mouth…” (Cho Sumin, 03:03)

[12] “But now that I look, this part is intentional. I’m not sure if it’s the light, but it looks a bit yellow. Did you add the shading here on purpose?” (Cho Heesoo, 03:11 [script])

[13] “It feels like it wasn’t always shaped like this, like it got a bit damaged. They all live ordinarily with injured body parts. All living things.” (Rheem Daul, 29:35 [script])

[14] The Korean translation gongdongsuryeon (literally joint training) was selected as a pure Korean translation for workshop at a second regular session of the city of Seoul’s Correct Korean Writing committee in 2014 and has been frequently used by Korean state institutions’ ever since. For a related discussion, see Guide to Workshops by the visual artist Lim Gayoung. For relevant literature, see Ee Yeoro and Lim Gayoung, Accounts of Art: A Manual for Viewing and Speaking about Exhibitions, design. Nam Seonmi (Seoul: White River, 2024).

[15] This is part of an undisclosed record of the workshop, including parts not featured in the video.

[16] Yoon Hyungchul, “Appropriation of Critical Realism as an Antidote to Post-truth?: Revisiting Wentzel van Huyssteen’s Postfoundational Rationality,” Studies in Systematic Theology, vol. 42 (2022): 24.

[17] “Workshop,” Oxford English Dictionary, OED (2014), accessed September 29, 2024, https://www.oed.com/ dictionary/workshop_n?tl=true&tab=factsheet.

[18] An example is “Workshop of Jacopo Tintoretto.”

[19] Mark Cartwright, “Life in a Renaissance Artist’s Workshop,” World History Encyclopedia, September 24, 2020, accessed September 29, 2024, https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1611/life-in-a-renaissance-artists- workshop/.

[20] The following paper provides information about the context behind the use of the workshop in industry during the early to mid-20^th century: M. Rimmer & P. Sutcliffe, “The Origins of Australian Workshop Organisation, 1918 to 1950,” Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 23, no. 2 (1981): 216–239.

[21] Theater critic Irving Wardle wrote, “The very term workshop, now used to dignify every kind of group activity, was [Littlewood’s] invention,” quoted in Hur Soonja, “Joan Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop’s Theatre Practice,” Journal of Korean Theatre Studies Association, vol. 1, no. 64 (Seoul: Korean Theatre Studies Association, 2017): 129., and originally in Irving Wardle, “All the World’s a Workshop: Joan Littlewood Revolutionised the Stage. Irving Wardle Reviews Her Autobiography, and Her Life,” The Independent (April 2, 1994).

[22] Hur Soonja, “Joan Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop’s Theatre Practice,” Journal of Korean Theatre Studies Association, vol. 1, no. 64 (Seoul: Korean Theatre Studies Association, 2017): 127–168.