My Life Flashing Before My Eyes

In the end, I didn’t catch the Magritte show. I was very disappointed but I'm over it now. I'll live. A sad substitution, I know, but I read Howard N. Fox’s (LACMA curator of contemporary art) interview of John Baldessari in the museum newsletter. (I am compelled to tell you here that I used Cliff Notes just ONCE in my life -- for Moby Dick -- and felt that in the end I only cheated myself ... Ok, I made that last part up.) Anyway, a couple of things that Baldessari said got me thinking. For one, he said that there are "all kinds of narratives, and the ruling narratives are the ones that most people believe in." Kind of obvious, maybe, but I appreciate this idea. I think it's very true. I would add that it's super important to understand the ruling narratives really well in order to subvert or dissect them which hopefully instigates thought and discourse. Meaning, one can't completely disengage from what is understood as the status quo. To disengage is to leave reality, in some sense, and even then it's limited because eventually you come back to the world around you and then you go eat lunch at McDonald's or watch TV or whatever.

Another idea that Baldessari brings up in his take on Magritte: "imagery is more overwhelming than words. If you open up a book and there's text on one side and an image on the other, we're going to look at the image first … it is a little treacherous because we might get seduced too easily." Fox's response to this statement, but in regards to Baldessari's work: "Your own work seduces the viewer but never lets that very seductive moment be consummated because you're always confounding the viewer." Cristina and I talked about something similar to this last night, the idea of presenting a work without context or without answers and how this can be an exclusive or elitist act. I guess this practice supports the pre-existing idea that art is unintelligible by and irrelevant to society at large. I’m sure there must be a way to confound and mystify while respecting the viewer, while still engaging in a mutual dialogue … Of course, one also has to deal with particular misunderstandings and misgivings toward art that have been in place for a long time in popular culture.

ANYWAY, to address the title above. I am taking this course called "Get Your Sh*t Together" (asterisk theirs, not mine) through Side Street Projects. In many ways, I'm learning what it means to be an artist and how to be a professional one. Our first assignment was to write our obituaries, the idea being to figure out what we ultimately want to accomplish and what we want to leave behind. I'm not dead-set (ha ha) on accomplishing everything I wrote but it was a helpful exercise in figuring out what my direction should be. I would imagine my obit would change by the end of this course but it felt strangely therapeutic to flash my imagined life before my eyes, through the power of MS Word.

So here it is. Don't judge me. And if you must, I don't want to hear about it.

The artist and philanthropic entrepreneur Helen H. Kim died on Thursday, her 78th birthday. The cause of death is as of yet unknown. Kim grew up in Los Angeles after emigrating from Korea at the age of seven. She received her BFA from the UCLA School of Art and Architecture in 1996 and began to show work in various disjoined group and solo shows for the next 10 years. Never feeling completely at ease in the paradigms of the established gallery and museum circuits, Kim ambiguously straddled the line between, in her own words, “the role of the civilian and the cultural, anthropological mediator” during this period. It was in 2008 that Kim began a newly focused, life-long commitment to the arts, having in the previous year come to personal resolutions about the role and functionality of art in both the private and public realms. This established a personal manifesto about art and strategies for cultural, spiritual and political awareness that informed her career for the remainder of her life.

Kim sought to “bring art to the streets,” creating unconventional venues through which the public experienced ideas of religion, spirituality, culture, displacement and alienation. Her site-specific works repeatedly drew the attention of local media, though generally as whimsical spectacles or odd occurrences due to the novel modes of presentation. Often, the works were presented anonymously so that the experience for the viewer was completely visceral and without the categorization of art. Kim felt this particular moniker disallowed the true art experience for a public generally unfamiliar and disconnected to the art world. Kim’s work, unlike that of many street or public artists of her time, flew under the radar because of the lack of branding or marketability in her practice. Despite this level of anonymity and lack of conventional categorization, Kim found and developed a small and dedicated following.

In addition to what she dubbed her “street-level” art practice (which also included the web), Kim carved her place in the art world through small but established galleries and museums throughout North America, Europe and Asia. She used this cache to progress her idea of bringing art to the streets by creating work in public spaces in conjunction with various art institutions. This eventually lead to projects funded by organizations as varied as Amnesty International, the Korean American Foundation of the Arts and several Christian organizations referred to en masse as the Emerging Church. Throughout, the intention behind Kim’s body of work continued to be to blur the lines between spiritual and intellectual, high and low cultures, the mainstream and the marginalized. It was specifically “the sphere of otherness” in which Kim was interested. She, having experienced the sense of otherness first as an immigrant then as a woman, came to believe that the sense of otherness was a part of every human experience. She sought to create a space for dialogue based on this commonality. After working with numerous groups on such projects, Kim founded her own organization, Group Effort, which promoted global dialogue and awareness about and on behalf of disenfranchised peoples primarily, though not exclusively, through the arts. Group Effort is now under the leadership of Kim’s daughter and fellow collaborator of many years.

In the end, Kim stated that her purpose in life was to “live authentically and truthfully. Otherwise it would be a life wasted, and what would I have to say for myself when God Himself asks me what I was up to in my 70 to 80 years on earth?” We can only wonder what conversations Kim is having with God as this goes to print. Kim is survived by her husband, daughter and Group Effort.