“The movie that machine cries for is the minimum courtesy of the empire and capital.
The mountain with disappeared path is dark.
How empty is the street light in village all night long.”
- Kim, Yong Taek, from Zombies

The question of what art can do today can perhaps be replaced with what life can do. This question is about humans’ will and its necessity. Let’s ask again what we live for and who our lives are for. As the reality that we face is, reality of art is dark like the ‘mountain with disappeared path.’ It’s not because we can’t see the future, but it’s because of the brutality of planning age that predicts and establishes future ruthlessly.

Such transparent future of art is like a mirage. As if hiding an obvious fact that the reality is unstable, authority claims over and over that the value called sustainability is possible in the one-time age. But rather than the mirage clearing up, there are more people that try to be content in the fantasy world that the giant capital created.

The end of art came close at hand, not since art started resembling reality, but since the cultural system started measuring according to the logic of economy in neo-liberalism. In terms of Deleuze’s way, art was like the will to deviate from all systems and conventionality. It was more like the challenge for a new creation rather than an escape.

If so, in today’s reality where people live with wounded body for glory, what can art to? Should art change the unstable reality? Or should it repeatedly portray such reality? Regarding this age of uncertainty, Nicholas Bourriaud states about the distinction of art, in the era where everything about humans and all products is recorded from the birth : “Artists activate symbols.”

According to Bourriaud, anyone in the same era records the object that they want to own through photographs, but whereas most people’s memories are fixed through record, artists seek a new possibility through image. This isn’t insisting that the art in same era can go beyond the instability of reality.

It means, in the era where all values are changing from moment to moment, the conventional claim that art has unchanging value is not persuasive anymore. The art today begins from the relationship with reality- whether it penetrates into reality and artistic attitude intervenes with reality, or escapes to the virtual world that resembles reality.

Today’s art, passed through modernism and post-modernism, doesn’t create a problem no matter how it utilizes reality: whether it creates magical realism or interprets socialistic realism anew. In fact, the 21st century art summons the past and appropriates it to create various layers of reason, rather than creating new things.

Moojin Brothers’s work begins from the ordinary life in particular. Their videos that were produced based on experiences and materials from reality generally wanders somewhere between reality and fiction, and compares this era, which is gradually derealizing, through the bodies of alive and dead. These bodies tend to appear as something between humans and non-humans, where the nonhumans may be a metaphor of monsters or mechanized human aspect.

Moojin Brothers’s works is a record of behaviors that penetrate fiction, which existential view of the world, from the reality where the mind and matters all became poor, and the process that constructs the body the neoliberalistic era of capital and technology bore. Like this, they cross between reality and art, performance and experience and existence and imagination.

Dream of Sleeplessness

“It is the sleeplessness that only suits the night, and the dream of sleeplessness, the problem of exhaustion.”

‘M’, appearing in The Last Sentence (2015), is a janitor of a narrow tunnel. S/he exists because of filthy things. Meanwhile, history of civilization is a record of processes that eliminate or annihilate excretion, pollutants, dust, etc. Maintaining sterile condition with no stain becomes the symbol of so-called success. ‘M’ is only allowed of the body, and has no personality.

S/he is a fictional character that Moojin Brothers created, but paradoxically seems close to a zombie that represents the present well. Zombies can be interpreted as the Western capitalism being compared to the man-eating cannibalism. In other words, zombies satirize the reality of market capitalism, leading to consumption for consumption.

Meanwhile, as opposed to comparing the birth of zombies to greedy capitalists, it can be interpreted as a cultural attempt to criticize the older generation and overset it. George Romero, the father of zombie movies, explains that it is “criticism of the civilization that modern capitalistic society caused, in other words, media, religion and even institutionalized family system or narrow-minded attitude of people that doesn’t accept others’ opinions.”

So, ‘M’ is closer to the latter. The character in The Last Sentence resembles the youth that circles the outskirt of city and can’t expand the world anymore. ‘M’ cleaning the narrow tunnel records unchanging past and present in the tunnel that shows merely no difference before and after cleaning. Then suddenly, it changes to the space of reality from the dark. The place s/he arrived at is the place that actual building janitors stay.

In the place where there is no warmth of life, there are objects that don’t go well with the placed. A bouquet of dried flowers, silver foam sheet, calender, animal-shaped metal sculptures are discrepant symbols. These objects that can’t be named don’t order anything. Symbols helplessly glide out of the screen. ‘M’ heads back to the tunnel. The actor/performer ‘M’ doesn’t express any kind of emotions.

S/he only moves and acts according to the given flow. S/he doesn’t feel uncomfortable about dirty things, doesn’t panic after seeing objects that resemble organs, records according to the manual and slowly moves forward. S/he is stuck in a dead end. The only action permitted is moving forward, making a detour and coming back.

The generation that is allowed of wandering, it emphasizes the life that can’t stay, but doesn’t signify freedom. However, The Last Sentence can’t be interpreted simply as the analogy for reality. The Last Sentence portrays the youth that experience the symptom of the era where the flickers of life disappeared, but doesn’t just blindly reenact pessimistic future.

Rather, Moojin Brothers use up all the remaining hope to seek the exit. As the women divers rise above the water after using up all the oxygen, they are using up every possible things that still remain to seek the possibility in the future.

Deleuze stated that Kafka and Beckett’s art both had dreams while awake. Kafka exaggerated what is impossible in reality as much as possible to create a fiction that seems real, and Beckett completely eliminated what is possible in the dream.

Odradek (2012) is the video that produced the mysterious existence/nonexistence, Odradek, in Kafka’s short story “The Cares of a Family Man,” and recorded passing through the middle of the night, dragging this object/life. The story describes two different opinions on whether the origin of the word Odradek is Slavic or German that was affected by Slavic. Slavoj Zizek cites Lacan and explains that Odradek is libido that is virtually an organ.

An “undying” organ without the body. Which means, according to Lacan’s interpretation, Odradek is the figure of father’s agony, rather than the father himself. Similar to the idea of zombies, Odradek doesn’t die and wanders around. It isn’t clear whether his agony is realistic or metaphysical. I would speculate that it would be close to Kafka’s existential question.

Odradek’s wandering seems to ask if we are going to free ourselves as humans and own our lives, or live only with the instinct, without the body. This also is the question asked throughout Kafka’s stories, including The Metamorphosis. Moojin Brothers throw in an uncertain impersonal being, as if throwing a dice into an irrational reality.

Piercing the reality

If literature is the will to go beyond language within the limits of language, visual art explores the possibilities outside language. Fiction describes reality yet can’t enter the actual reality, but modern art has continuously formed relationships with reality. Moojin Brothers combine literary imagination to various art media to find the contact point between reality and unreality, visual and linguistic texture, and body and labor.

Their works are completed as they combine a series of processes including writing, drawing, crafting, recording and editing. Reality is the source of all inspirations, but reality is dramatized and turned into monster. Here, the no-name being changes into a monster against its will, but doesn’t lose consciousness.

Meanwhile, the authority that creates monsters changes into the monster itself. They eat others’ miserable scraps and gain weight. A sadist called authority can’t exist alone. Like this, irrationality symbolizes reality. The Scriptures of the Wind (2016) connects Odradek and The Last Sentence loosely, yet emotionally.

These works exchange questions and answers and construct the whole as the part for the whole. In the world in The Scriptures of the Wind, children who are stuck in the lost world appear. Children move around constantly to preserve the truth of the world that their father’s father’s father created. Sadly, children’s father must’ve lived a similar life.

The only means of communication for children in the lost world is the messages delivered from over the wall. Even that is one-sided. The Scriptures of the Wind recalls the sad story that all of us know. The story heads toward the past one after another, and the anxiety about the future that is to arrive grows together- just like the beetle in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis can’t change its daily life and witness the situation that it’s faced with.

Who would have the power to cut the ring of fate? Do we need to wait for another savior, when Godot hasn’t even arrived yet. It is true that the action of creating new sentences, rearranging the previous grammar, gathering abandoned words, recovering broken meanings and reconstructing vanished stories seems irrelevant to the reality.

However, it is this action that pierces the reality of predetermined fate. Reality can’t shatter the past completely like modernism, but we can’t spectate the world as bystanders either. Like this, Moojin Brothers had to look for some possibility in the ruins.

The Heap (2015) couldn’t stop the redevelopment, but the irrational behavior to rearrange the remaining ruins in the scene that is already finished seemed like the will to exhaust what’s left to the end. Because it would be a ‘poetic announcement’ that tells that the game isn’t over yet, not to restore the game itself.

References

• [비평] 가능한 것 너머에는
  [Critique] Beyond the Possible