The Repetitive Movement of Starving and Stuffing Oneself

If we imagine what it meant to make a living long ago, before the emergence of the concept of the modern nation-state, or even further back, in agricultural or prehistoric times, it seems that life may not have been so complicated. Of course, making a living was difficult, but perhaps it was not as structurally complex and intricately entangled as it is today, nor was it such an utterly “exhausting” task (as quoted from an interview with Minja Gu).

“Eating,” even at first glance, is a fundamental condition and prerequisite for survival, as well as a primary act of reproduction. There is no need for it to be complicated. Yet today, the various forms of consumption and enjoyment associated with “eating” have extended far beyond matters directly related to survival.

Moreover, the winner of the stakes involved in “eating” is never the person who eats to survive, but invariably the system that controls the industry. For instance, “eating” is one of the most essential tourism products. Consequently, as cities around the world, particularly in Asia, are transformed into tourist destinations, the food industry has become a major national industry.

“Eating” has also become an essential condition for “well-being,” depending on the types of food consumed and the methods of preparation. What and how one eats have become crucial concerns of everyday life in the pursuit of a slender body and a healthy lifestyle. Accordingly, the wellness industry has established itself as a thriving sector of contemporary business.

Of course, eating can also reflect distinctive personal tastes. Some people take great pride in their courage to risk their lives tasting dangerous foods. At times, eating becomes intertwined with other aspects of human desire, serving to intensify those desires. After all, tasting or experiencing unique and exotic things in the global marketplace is considered a virtue of global citizenship.

Yet throughout this process, despite being a fundamental act of survival, “eating” is gradually losing its function as a necessary and sufficient condition for sustaining life. People no longer live simply to eat. Nevertheless, making a living remains far from easy.

Suppose someone were to place a wager on “eating” (starving, stuffing oneself, eating well, eating carelessly, and so on). This would not merely be a contest over who can eat the most or who has the courage to consume something unusual. Nor would it simply be a question of whether food tastes good or bad, whether it is healthy or unhealthy, whether it contributes to the development of the local economy, or even whether it produces carbon monoxide that contributes to global warming.

Ultimately, it would be a “life-or-death” wager, with survival itself at stake. In other words, for such a wager to be genuine, the stakes involved in “eating” must be nothing less than one's life. For example, the opposing demonstrations of “starving” and “stuffing oneself” taking place in front of Gwanghwamun should be taken with the utmost seriousness if both those who starve and those who gorge themselves are equally placing their own lives at stake.

Of course, it is ironic to speak of “eating” at the level of merely struggling to survive in an age of “tourism,” an activity that is both romantic and thoroughly driven by the consumption of desire, and in an era defined by “well-being” and “taste.” Yet we have little choice, for we now live in a time when we must ask ourselves how to breathe inside a bubble. We are still imperfect humans who have not yet been replaced by cyborgs.

In fact, our lives today have strayed far beyond the bounds of what might be considered normal. In other words, the system of late capitalism, together with neoliberal exchange, has transformed our lives into a state of exception, producing a bizarre condition of error that repeats itself perversely. As a result, contemporary art becomes astonishingly “artistic” simply by reproducing this reality.

Reality itself is, quite literally, artistic, and therefore there is no longer any need for a separate realm of art as a mechanism of sublimation, whether elevated or abject. Under these conditions, subjects have reached a point where they either die in a brutally exposed and devastated state (through suicide or murder), or directly embody and manifest the question of life and death through their own bodies.

Here, the acts of starving or stuffing oneself must truly be matters of life and death. For someone whose very livelihood constitutes both the purpose and reality of existence, starvation manifests a complete suspension of their life at an utterly devastating level. It is a state of living death. Merely imitating the act of “starving” does not mean that the fatal dimension of an individual living being's existence can be shared.

Only the “suspension” of the concrete reality to which that person has devoted their entire body and life can correspond to the dimension of “starving.” At this point, the mouth can no longer speak of beauty or ugliness. Instead, it can only engage in the repetitive movement between the refusal to eat and excessive consumption.

Impotent Artistic Acts and Their Repetition

If we consider the role of art throughout history, or at least as it might be discussed in a somewhat progressive aesthetics lecture, art has served to reflect life through analogies that are both beautiful and “utterly ugly,” whether on the level of the real or in its most extreme manifestations. This leads us to make the absurd claim that artistic practice is a distorted symptom of our society, and that its distorted reflection may, more fatally than anything else, constitute a dimension of the real in contemporary life.

Furthermore, it is precisely for this reason that we speak of the necessity of a community mediated by artistic practice. We expect the field of art to overcome the limitations of the political sphere, which is mediated by the monotonous repetition of everyday life, by cultivating more imaginative dimensions and possibilities for the future within the immediacy of reality itself. But is this expectation actually valid?

Let us define contemporary artists as those who cross boundaries and arbitrarily declare just about anything to be an artistic act. To put it more plausibly, contemporary artists might be described as those who perform peculiar forms of labor at the points of dislocation within the symbolic order of contemporary society, or even within its twisted and distorted manifestations. In this sense, such arbitrary acts of “doing whatever one pleases” sometimes take place at the boundary between artistic practice (the dimension of performance) and life (the dimension of actual reality). Well, at least that is how we might describe it conceptually.

At least here, I am not referring to every artist who has graduated from art school and continues to practice. Today's art market is a market in which artists, as producers, create artworks as commodities, expecting them to function as symbolic signifiers in one way or another, whether through ownership or communication, and in which artists should be recognized as legitimate workers.

Now, let us consider viewers as investors in this market. I would like to offer them the following advice: If you wish to invest in art, invest in the future. Invest in institutions or systems of artistic production that ensure education, a healthy environment, the cultivation of abundant human resources, and a transparent art system.

Likewise, artists who labor to improve the environment, reproduce abundant human resources, and establish and improve transparent art systems should be recognized as legitimate workers. Yet at this point, we can see that art has become no different from other social systems or corporations. But is that all there is to it?

Should we apply the same ethical virtues demanded of other social and production systems and corporations to artists, establish the labor conditions necessary for their livelihoods, and continuously evaluate and quantify whether their artistic labor conforms to those virtues? Anyone would easily find themselves caught in a dilemma. Art has never functioned in such a normal manner.

On the contrary, it has resisted and negated precisely these systems. Whether it has been a bubble or an illusion, the abnormal role of artistic practice, its function as a distorted image of society, may still remain valid. Of course, making a living is important in the first place. Therefore, artistic practice can now only be understood as a singular moment that emerges temporarily in the form of an event or phenomenon.

The various negative forms of action undertaken by contemporary art and artists are naked, pornographic reproductions and repetitions of reality, devoid of analogy—impotent and useless acts. These erroneous acts are invariably awkward, absurdly nonsensical, inappropriate, and unsatisfactory. Must they continue to be repeated? The problem is that this repetition is not a matter of choice.

The repetition of these impotent, erroneous acts has become a condition of life itself. Yet this is by no means a problem confined to the realm of art. In fact, our society is filled with activities that tirelessly continue to produce forms of worthlessness resembling these useless artistic acts. Subjects who enthusiastically carry out utterly worthless activities, without ever establishing a coherent symbolic order, are empty signifiers that continually slip away.

Yet there is something that makes such subjects believe they are the masters of their own lives: the extraordinary authority granted to them to “consume” endlessly and eternally. We must now consider how to transform these quasi-artistic acts—the useless performances through which our society continuously produces worthlessness—into acts that generate value, or whether we should instead seriously reconsider the very category of uselessness itself.

In other words, should we replace contemporary subjects as empty signifiers with actual substitutes such as cyborgs, or should we recognize their eternal right to consume as something substantive? The latter may seem easier, but the former is more realistic. What is impossible is to restore the alienated subject, as an empty signifier, to the position of an actual master.

The masterless actions of our bodies, their automatic, automatistic performances, have already entered the dimension of the real. Illusions, fantasies, desires, and virtuality are no longer unreal; they are reality. The wager on “life” that is bound up with “eating” is no longer one made between human beings within the human realm, but between humans and nonhumans (or prosthetic humans and cyborgs).

Therefore, if the artistic practices that enthusiastically produce worthlessness today are ever to acquire value, this will only be possible in a future inhabited by some form of nonhuman existence. Moreover, the form of that value will have undergone an intensely consumptive process. What is required is a transition into a different dimension beyond the modernist mechanism of production–consumption–alienation (capitalism).

In an era that, in practical terms, consists solely of consumption and enjoyment, the problems of a system centered on production have become apparent to everyone. The accumulation of wealth has already reached its limits, while the capacity to desire something new has long been trapped in a state of impotence and incapacity.

For today's subjects of empty desire, perhaps the only possible breakthrough lies in continuing to consume, and in pursuing consumption to its extremes. This is because such worthless and useless activity constitutes profoundly substantive, real, and actual labor for the contemporary subject. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of the world's population consists of those who do nothing but consume and enjoy.

For this vast majority, the acts of consumption and enjoyment have now effectively replaced the urgent existential struggle to make a living. As long as they do not all perish, the eventual winners of the wager on useless activity will be this overwhelming majority of consumers and pleasure-seekers.


Erroneous Act One—Eating as an Act of Neoliberal Consumption in the Globalized City

“When I think about eating... exhaustion. Along with the skepticism and fatigue that have recently come to permeate every aspect of society, exhaustion is the first word that comes to mind when I think about food, food products, and eating. These days, eating is closely connected to the food industry, cultural enjoyment, notions of healthy living, and the various lifestyles, promotional strategies, overwhelming amounts of information, food listings, and trends that encompass them all. For example,

- Advertisements emphasizing visual images, particularly television commercials, which are among the things we encounter most readily through the internet and other media.

- Various articles introducing topics such as ‘Ten Vegetables Essential for Your Skin in Summer.’

- Investigative programs exposing the conditions and production processes of food products, such as Food X-Files, as well as warnings and recommendations from news broadcasts and other lifestyle information programs.

- Programs introducing popular restaurants, such as Gourmet Road, which encourage gluttony, emphasize the experience of eating, and foster pride in the experience of consumption and enjoyment—as seen in blogs.

- Much of what appears in magazines and elsewhere consists of attempts to create a particular atmosphere by invoking one style or another. Accordingly, neighborhoods such as Garosu-gil and Seochon have become lined with stylish cafés and restaurants elaborately decorated according to particular aesthetic styles, attracting crowds of people seeking to enjoy something, alongside an ever-growing number of establishments.

- Promotional events at supermarkets, including discounts, product demonstrations, and food-tasting stations.

All of this seems to stem from the fact that we have become able to ‘purchase, consume, and enjoy food and culture with money.’ It seems to encompass every aspect of the processes of purchasing, consuming, and enjoying, extending to every ingredient, dish, utensil, and place involved. And then there is the exhaustion of having to choose among countless suggestions, the fatigue brought on by an overwhelming amount of information.

Of course, there are people who ignore all of this and live according to their own principles. But for someone who cannot do so, there is the fatigue that comes from confronting the dilemmas in which one inevitably becomes entangled.”

— Minja Gu's Thoughts on Eating

In effect, we are all tourists. But this does not simply mean that we go sightseeing or travel to places that are unfamiliar yet strangely familiar. Rather, it means that even while living in the places we call home, we find ourselves living like tourists. This may sound romantic, but it is, in fact, a condition of contemporary life, and perhaps this is precisely why making a living has become so utterly “exhausting.” We consume culture; we eat culture.

Of course, acts of “consumption” also provide someone with a salary and help sustain their livelihood. This is why projects such as cultural exchange and the development of cultural cities have become major priorities for governments across contemporary Asia. Yet the consumption of culture cannot be understood solely in terms of developing tourism resources and expanding markets.

What is particularly significant is that, in this process, cities, their inhabitants, and even our own desires become objects of consumption. As desires themselves are consumed, people become bearers of empty desires. Increasingly consuming information and culture, these desires become enslaved to the very act of consumption. More precisely, everything involved in eating, seeing, and living becomes an object of exchange.

Neoliberal exchange does not merely refer to transactions between labor and corporations. It has led us to voluntarily display even the most personal and intimate aspects of our lives, including those we might otherwise keep secret, within the commodity market (we must not overlook the fact that even social networking services such as Facebook and KakaoTalk constitute potential marketplaces).

In fact, under policies promoting the establishment of cultural tourism cities and economic revitalization, entire cities are transformed into tourist destinations and crowded with visitors. Meanwhile, actual residents are either displaced or become tourists themselves, while tourists, too, grow weary of the endless repetition of commodities put on display.

Through this exhausting repetition, we have already entered a state of total alienation, whether on a material, psychological, or libidinal level. Even for residents, the experience is no longer one of having a stable place to call home, but rather of inhabiting a place while simultaneously touring it.

Now, no matter how remote a place we visit anywhere in the world, we cannot escape the overwhelming amount of information available about it. Perhaps there is no longer any such thing as a “remote place” in the world. In the globalized city, every place becomes a tourist destination, experienced directly or indirectly through the internet.

It is as though the entire world has become a colony of Google and Wikipedia. Every city has become a universalized city, and the world seems to have grown more convenient in countless ways. The irony, of course, is that this is precisely what we once desired. Yet amid the convenience and universality we sought, life has become a form of isolation within abundance, complexity, and distraction.

“These days, there are things that give us a vague sense of satisfaction, as though we have experienced, come to know, or enjoyed another culture without actually having to go anywhere. For example, an authentic Mexican taco restaurant, its interior design and table settings, Norwegian furniture, Scandinavian-style interiors, kitchens, and table arrangements, and so on. Looking at the magazine Kinfolk recently, I have noticed how these kinds of atmospheres have become something of a trend in themselves.

Similarly, as we discussed in relation to the cooking class I attended in Yogyakarta, we constantly encounter vague notions of what is supposedly ‘authentically something’—ideas whose origins and means of dissemination are themselves unclear. These, too, resemble tourism, or perhaps tourism without actually traveling. Seeking out delicious food operates in a similar context. In a way, it is regarded as a special activity within everyday life and thus becomes a form of tourism.

This relates to what you described as ‘living somewhere while simultaneously being a tourist.’ The attitudes of residents whose neighborhoods are becoming tourist destinations also reflect this phenomenon. Of course, their perspectives differ depending on whether they own their buildings or homes or are merely temporary residents. Nevertheless, they may feel uncomfortable with the situation while simultaneously enjoying it, or appear to dislike it while displaying a certain sense of superiority about living in such a place. It is as though those tourist ‘resources’ belonged to them.”

— Minja Gu, from an interview on cities and tourism

The quintessential portrait of the consuming and pleasure-seeking subject is that of the tourist. Contemporary artists, meanwhile, strangely reproduce this portrait of the tourist. Wherever artists' bodies are situated, a sense of awkwardness emerges. The presence manifested by artists' bodies, which cannot be reduced to either tourists or residents, brings to the surface the awkwardness and discomfort inherent in today's culture of consumption and enjoyment.

As part of the loosely ongoing project Moment Untimely Encounter, which has continued for several years, a number of young Korean artists visited problematic tourist destinations in Indonesia and Malaysia. Their bodies made profoundly awkward appearances in these places, revealing a certain impoverished ethical condition confronting contemporary artists and, more broadly, today's empty subjects. As one aspect of this discussion, I would like to examine the 'Minja Gu Project'.


An Example of an Erroneous Act: The Cooking Class in the Minja Gu Project

Minja Gu's artistic practice, in which she continuously transforms various activities into projects at the boundary between artistic practice and life, can also be understood within this context (I will not explain Gu's works here. Instead, please refer directly to her website and artworks).

What caught my attention were the story of Minja Gu as a marathon runner who completed a marathon over two days (42.195, 2006); her experience of searching for employment in Taiwan and helping an elderly woman (The World of Job, 2008); her experience of making kimchi with ingredients she received in exchange for helping several households in Seongam Village while residing at the Gyeonggi Creation Center, and sharing it with others (Winter-ing, 2010); her more recent experience of taking a cooking class in Yogyakarta, Indonesia (summer 2014); and several other cooking-related projects she has recently undertaken.

In her projects, the artist herself or the participants always make an awkward appearance. It is difficult to determine whether there is something genuinely real about these appearances or whether they are simply performances, but in any case, their awkwardness is undeniable. They are not exactly “acting,” yet neither do they embody the tedious realities of everyday life. Nor can they be described as inappropriate, or readily classified as capitalist labor that produces something tangible.

Perhaps it would be better to call these acts, which resist easy symbolization and continually slip away from definition, a kind of “erroneous act.” In a recent 'Minja Gu Project' in which I became inadvertently involved, Gu found herself “unexpectedly” taking a tourist-oriented, commodified cooking class in Yogyakarta, a city that has become a tourist destination while remaining subject to development restrictions and relatively underdeveloped. Of course, this was an actual experience. She obtained ingredients from a local market, cooked alongside a skilled chef, and enjoyed the resulting meal.

“The cooking class began with a visit to a nearby market to purchase ingredients. The market looked remarkably similar to the traditional markets I remember from my childhood. These days, traditional markets in Korea seem to have changed considerably due to redevelopment, improved accessibility, revitalization policies, collaborations between markets and art, and their transformation into tourist attractions.

One thing that particularly struck me was that they were still using balance scales with weights to measure goods. In fact, when I visited Croatia earlier this year, I saw the same method being used at a local market there. I wondered whether such scales were still being manufactured today and continued to be used in this way, but I really don't know. The way meat and fish were sold, including chicken and pork, was also similar to traditional markets in Korea. Whole chickens were laid out on market stalls, then prepared, weighed, and sold.

What I found most embarrassing, however, was my own behavior. For example, when choosing a menu for the cooking class, I asked which dish was the most representative, the most distinctly Indonesian. I had already assumed that Indonesia, being such a large country, would encompass an enormous diversity of cultures and peoples, and yet I still found myself asking that question. What is truly unique to ‘Java’? That sort of question. (Of course, this conventional question has become almost like a greeting, something everyone has probably asked at least once, but it still feels incredibly awkward to ask.)

It is similar to how, when meeting people from other countries, before getting to know them well enough to learn about their personal lives, we tend to treat them less as individuals and more as representatives of a particular country or culture. Questions framed in this way often become the main topics of conversation.

Another reason I wanted to take a cooking class was perhaps the very same reason I felt embarrassed by my own behavior. I wondered whether there might be something uniquely ‘their own’—something that could be discovered in cooking methods, the ways ingredients are used, and so on.

The place where I took the cooking class, called “via via”, and the food served there were also quite... Well, apparently “via via” has been operating for nearly twenty years as a place encompassing a restaurant, guesthouse, guided tours, and various other services. I imagine it must be quite well known among foreign visitors and featured in travel guidebooks.

For that reason, I suspect that both its visual presentation and its food have been refined and adapted to certain expectations. Almost everyone in the restaurant was a foreigner, probably because it caters primarily to travelers, or perhaps because its prices differ from those of local restaurants. The cooking instructor had also apparently studied something like hotel culinary arts, or so I assumed.”

— Minja Gu, after attending a cooking class in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, summer 2014

In this process, a certain sense of “awkwardness” remains, something that Minja Gu herself experiences despite having actively participated and carried out the cooking. It is a bewildering, unsettling feeling. What makes it even stranger is when someone asks, “But what exactly is so strange about that?”

In other words, this awkwardness emerges precisely when we ask what could possibly be wrong with the simple act of obtaining ingredients, cooking, and eating. It was not an act performed according to a predetermined script, but rather an incidental situation in which the ordinary activity of making and eating food was actually “performed.” Yet, strangely enough, it ended on an awkward note.

To my mind, these acts, which seem neither theatrical nor entirely real, reveal the predicament from which contemporary individuals find it so difficult to escape. What is quietly left unmentioned here is the system and mechanism within which these acts take place, along with their history. This is because the very structure of that system is incomplete, its components failing to fit together properly.

It is irrational, unequal, and sometimes even founded upon exploitation. Furthermore, it is precisely this system that has produced empty subjects for whom nothing remains but the act of performance itself.

Yogyakarta is located on the island of Java in Indonesia. Following decolonization and the relocation of Indonesia's capital to Jakarta, Yogyakarta developed into a kind of cultural city. As a relatively underdeveloped region, the city has maintained restrictions on urban development imposed by its local government.

Consequently, there are still few high-rise buildings, while hotels catering to tourists and a handful of shopping malls symbolize the city's opening to neoliberal economic forces. Its low cost of living, cultural openness, and strong sense of community, characteristic of Javanese culture, have attracted young people and cultural practitioners from across the country.

Their presence has contributed to the creation of an environment in which artists can sustain themselves as full-time practitioners, one of Yogyakarta's defining characteristics today. Moreover, an art school established through the independent efforts of young artists in the 1950s is located in the city center, suggesting that the influx of cultural practitioners will continue.

Local identity, education, and self-organized initiatives have thus intersected to sustain Yogyakarta's distinctive character. Of course, this does not mean that the realities of an underdeveloped city, including widespread “poverty” and “disease,” have been overcome. Many residents continue to struggle with poverty. Indeed, as Indonesia increasingly becomes a nation shaped by neoliberal exchange, the possibility that global capital may exploit and intensify the city's impoverished conditions makes its situation appear somewhat precarious.

Nevertheless, among artistic practitioners, poverty is not necessarily regarded as something that must be overcome, but rather as a foundation for their activities and a source of cultural enjoyment. In this respect, their practices directly challenge the ideology of modernity promoted by developmentalist states and, combined with their strong sense of community, suggest alternative possibilities.

In the present global context, Yogyakarta may constitute a community existing in a kind of exceptional state. Admittedly, this somewhat risky and romantic interpretation is possible only because, compared with other globalized metropolitan cities, Yogyakarta has thus far retained a distinctive sense of locality.

Of course, the absence of extensive redevelopment does not mean that Yogyakarta has escaped the global tourism boom or neoliberal exchange. One inevitably encounters streets and products that have been commodified for tourism. Food culture also plays a significant role in this process. Yogyakarta, too, has somewhat inadvertently become a tourist city, and cooking classes have similarly been transformed into tourist commodities.

The act performed by Minja Gu in this setting took place at the intersection of several dimensions that do not quite coincide: it was neither simply tourism, nor genuine participation, nor everyday life itself, yet it could not be dismissed as inauthentic either, since she actually cooked real food and ate it as a meal.

“Not informing people that the project is not a performance. This is something I consider very important and have been thinking about a great deal. There are aspects of it that I myself find unsatisfactory. Not telling them. Perhaps I believe that this approach might be effective. In addition, I often find myself hoping that it will not be art at all.” (Minja Gu, responding to a question about whether she shares with participants in her projects whether or not their activities constitute performances.)

The 'Minja Gu Project' is a project that intersects in a remarkably precise way with the errors of our reality and the irrational wagers imposed upon life. What these errors ultimately point toward are unresolved questions on an ethical level. Moreover, insofar as they can be discussed in the public sphere as erroneous performances, the continued awkward existence of the 'Minja Gu Project' may reveal a moment in which contemporary artistic practice acquires a peculiar universality that distinguishes it from other forms of quasi-artistic performance.

As an artist, Gu always begins something at the dead ends of our society's problems, at points where issues remain unresolved and answers cannot be found. In this sense, the erroneous act is already anticipated from the outset, and, as always, she is unable to arrive at an answer. For now, all that can be said is that her body, her very existence, serves as the medium through which these conditions are made visible. Yet there is something curious about all this.

Her activities are, to the extent that we might call them the 'Minja Gu Project', rather amusing. This strange sense of delight within a labyrinth is indeed a thoroughly inappropriate combination. Perhaps for this very reason, I even find myself thinking that, although artists may be impotent, they are far from apathetic; rather, they seem busier and more energetic than ever before. 

References

• [비평] ‘먹기’와 예술행위의 부적절한 만남
  [Critique] An Inappropriate Encounter Between 'Eating' and Artistic Practice