'Language now represents the medium in which objects encounter and come into relation with one another. No longer directly, as they once did in the mind of the augur or priest, but in their essences.'
Walter Benjamin
NINTEEN THIRTY FIVE SAW German cultural critic Walter Benjamin complete his celebrated essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in which he describes a new philosophy for the arts, a theory that was to affect the notion of culture up to the present day. Throughout the work, the author argues that art’s metamorphosis from singular hand made objects to the machine made and mass produced, demands a corresponding alteration of mankind’s appreciation of art; from a mode of perception with foundation in epic poetry to an overall aesthetic based upon allegorical montages. In the absence of traditional and ritualistic values, Benjamin declares that art must inherently originate in man’s developments within cultural and political systems. Alternatively, society will witness the ruin of truly unique and creative skills.
In 1999, Young-Hae Chang, a Korean artist with a Ph.D. in Aesthetics from the University of Paris, and Marc Voge, an American poet based in Seoul, participated in a Net Art workshop in Brisbane. Their focus was flash, a computer programme, predominantly used to generate complex animations. However, the duo was particularly intrigued by two of the programme’s rather more elementary qualities: how to create words on screen and how to combine text with music. In a genuine comparison with 1965 and Nam June Paik’s discovery of video and his subsequent adoption of the medium as his instrument of work, Chang and Voge had arrived at their chosen vehicle of artistic expression.
They formed Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, a designation consisting of Chang’s full name and Heavy Industries symbolising Voge and synchroneously highlighting the Korean love for conglomorates. Merely a year after Chang and Voge’s first collaboration, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recognised Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries for their contribution to online art. Since then, they have created approximately 40 works, all in roughly the same, simple format. The typography is consequently standard Monaco font, typically in black and on rare occasions, in colour. The script dances onto the screen synched to the rhythm of basic electro-pop-jazz. Even though flash can be a highly proficient tool, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries scarcely employ any of its functions, ‘choice does not equal fantasy. Or rather, you could argue that a lack of choice equals fantasy’.
The monotone text portrays Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ satirical novellas. Each piece begins with a perpetual numeric countdown but the subject matters are as diverse, as the presentation is uniform. Spanning an archaic hero searching for divinity in an existence lived anywhere but where it seemingly counts; a man who dies and is reincarnated as a stick; a Korean cleaning lady who in reality is a Latin philosopher; an illegal immigrant in a prison below the French Palace of Justice; a woman sexually welcoming a corporate monopoly; a mysterious night with Sam Beckett in a smoky bordello; a cry for help from a beauty queen; a cheerful gathering followed by a poisonous execution.
One of the group’s most striking virtual events was produced in 2006 for Tate Online, to coincide with the opening of London’s Frieze Art Fair. The work is called The Art of Sleep and is inspired by George Luis Borges’ story about a boy incapable of forgetting. It pictures a half-sleeping net-artist’s stream of (un)consciousness where the central character is awoken at dawn by a barking dog. The wakening becomes a catalyst for a spiritual revelation, helping him realise the farcicality of all matters but particularly the curious illogicality of art, ‘art is futile and beautiful like the whining of a dog’. The insomniac’s reasoning continues to expand until everything in existence, including cheese cake, falling pianos and fancy galleries, all equate to art. Finally, sleep regains hold of the exhausted artist and leaves another theory of art to disappear into the ether.
Simultaneously Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries constitute an alternative model of art. As per Tate Online’s custom, an artists’ interview accompanies an exhibition but Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries declined to be interviewed in person and instead set about maximising the net’s possibility for being both a physically absent yet present figure. Chang and Voge therefore organised a virtual conversation with Jemima Rellie (the journalist representing the Tate) and the artists subsequently transformed the recordings into an animated interview called The Art of Silence. Throughout this supplementary work, Chang and Voge speak with computer manipulated voices experiencing a heated discussion, after which Jemima Rellie bursts into a cartoon sounding opera. This so-called interview is, apart from being hugely entertaining, as sagacious as the actual art-piece, The Art Of Sleep, in that it confronts the idea of reality and allows a virtual contact to open up a properly, specific form of virtual reality. Exhibited together, the interview and the work manifests the artists’ continuous thinking about art’s position in society.
Creating child like non-academic monologues, but highlighting serious and thought provoking themes constitutes an ideal match with an aesthetic style that however humble it might appear is engaging and displays a consequent sense of perfection. Whereas most new media art is relational and response from the audience a necessity to complete the art-piece, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries refuse to let the viewer interact in the traditional new media sense. Contrarily, they present their art in the manner of a conventional gallery, where the spectator can only view the finished artwork. However, the experience is hardly a passive one. The rudimentary looking but complex-in-content text flashes onto the screen with a velocity just within the cognitive ability, thereby compelling us to actively focus our mind on the story. Translating each piece into several languages, the linguistic flexibility inevitably forces one to contemplate the monopoly of language and it’s fragility as a means of communication, ‘to write, read, and chat in English on the internet is to implicitly justify a certain history. Certain governments do not ban or burn books anymore, they prevent access to the web, meaning they justify a different history than the one we do by using English. So our choice of language is probably the biggest historical influence on our work.’ Opposing the complexity of the narrative, the artists’ website is stripped bare of any tortuousness. It is but a single page with a series of links whose sole function is to direct the onlooker to the various works. The design echoes an infallible non-presence and as a writer you are left with a vexatious feeling of incapacity when trying to correspond with the art group. This sensation is particularly emphasised upon reaching the bottom of the list, with the link Urgent Request. Enthusiastically you click it, but instead of seeing the group’s contact details, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ regular introduction begins and once again a mischievous story unfolds. Contemporaneously, you cannot but smile about the refreshing union of decisiveness and geniality with which the two artists corporate, ‘We can’t and won’t help readers to locate us. Distance, homelessness, anonymity, and insignificance are all part of the Internet literary voice, and we welcome them.’
Indeed, the duo’s occupation with separate and abstract levels of interpretation may be a valid reason why their creative employment is valued more in the high art world than among new media devotees. A further suggestion being that their work reflects upon older visual art forms, such as experimental cinema in terms of placing the viewer in a more committed relationship with the film than is the case with mainstream pictures. In addition, a renowned point of reference for Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is Stéphane Mallarmé and specifically his interplay between style and content combined with the concept of coincidental cross-links. In accordance with Mallarmé’s anticipation of the fusions between poetry and the other arts that were to develop in the dadaist, futurist and surrealist schools, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries are forerunners in the conjunction of a pertinent literature and a fecund use of the web, thereby making a significant contribution to the internet as a convincing media for contemporary art.
Whether or not Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries have contemplated Benjamin they are postmodern storytellers who challenge his innermost fear, that humanity could lose its vital ability to fully process art with the overwhelming amount of information currently available. In their work, the traditional methods of story narrative have mutated in form and fundamentally integrated into today’s frequently utilised method of communication, the internet. Born in a century where ‘reality shows’ and ‘virtual reality’ have become common codices of reference and a historic period which saw the philosophical downfall of the union between reality and ideality, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ demonstrates that the age of mass culture can make substantial virtue of the juxtaposition of reality and the virtual, in the formation of a new ideality.
If you would like to see these complete works, please go to the following links
http://www.tate.org.uk/netart/artofsleep/theartofsleep.htm
http://www.tate.org.uk/netart/artofsleep/theartofsilence.htm
http://www.yhchang.com/URGENT_REQUEST.html
http://www.yhchang.com/SO_SO_SOULFUL.html
Links to artists’ homepage and gallery: www.yhchang.com and www.galleryhyundai.com