Ken Lum
Photo-mirrors: Presenting new reflections
In a television interview the South African author John Coetsee made a wonderful attempt to give a definition of beauty. 'There is a kind of beauty' he started, 'that is human. You may find it in a relationship with a woman. Then there is another kind of beauty, a concept that became current during the 19th century. It is an abstract, large kind of beauty in the literature about aesthetics referred to as the sublime.'
By SASKIA MONSHOUWER
Although Coetsee wrote his answer down, I cannot quote him literally television images simply flash by but I hope that I grasped the point. It is the difference between the human, fragile kind of beauty and this abstract overwhelming form that steers the core of contemporary art. The latter is probably the same urge that spurred artists and art historians on to think about how to escape the power of institutions and political systems, and consequently forced them to a critique of the modernist concept of beauty. The ambivalence present in Coetsee's answer, structured only by the carefully chosen words, is also to be found in the works of Ken Lum, especially in the development in his oeuvre over de last couple of years.At the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1998, Ken Lum presented his Photo-mirrors. These pieces of art diverge greatly from his earlier works. They consist of large, hard-edged mirrors that are strategically hung in the gallery space. Snapshots which record holidays, weddings, important friends, and places are tucked into the edges of the frame. The rectangular frames and the hard flat surface form a composition that seems to be a reference to minimalist sculpture. With his Photo-mirrors Ken Lum combines three current themes of the contemporary visual arts: they are about the visitor (subject), about the work of art (object), and about the gallery space.
On the face of it the Photo-mirrors seem to have made a break with his earlier works, but are in essence a continuation of the concept. At the beginning of the nineties, Ken Lum had an international breakthrough with his large photographs combined with simple texts. Both the photograph and the texts seemed to have been drawn from reality, although they were in fact carefully constructed. Referring to the composition of these works, it could be said that they are also not unrelated to Minimalist Art. Especially if the graphical effects of the total image, the photograph in combination with the colour field next to it, are taken into account. The way this design is handled has been called ironical, and can be seen as critique of the sterile severity of the minimalists. The photographs form a contrast, they bring a human touch as it were.
'I'm interested in moments and what is real resistances, drives, desires, urges, wishes and so on. Without those things you wouldn't have some sort of animation or drama. I'm not interested in just some abstract moment because there are a million moments in a day' says Ken Lum in an interview with Marnie Flemming.1
Ken Lum's quotation can be seen as a link between his earlier and his present work, and is equally relevant to both. The concept of the Photo-mirrors is a continuation of Barthesian-inspired thoughts about photography. Ken Lum starts from a (theoretical) kinship between a mirror and a camera. 'The camera is nothing more than a mechanical process by which an image is mirrored onto the black plane of a surface that has that has photochemicals on it.', he states in an other interview.2 '(...) it isn't just about the apparatus, it's also about the images that it potentially contains. This potential is theoretically limitless. 'The idea of a limitless potential has consequences for the experience of time and the role of the viewer, the subject. On the one hand a snapshot is an arbitrary, instantaneous moment in time. It is banal. On the other hand, the moment is confirmed and particularized by the presence of the subject. '(...) I do try to retain that and I try to reveal something of the relationship that people have to cameras, images and forms, as well as their relationship to others, by sticking those pictures in.'
Through his works Ken Lum creates a synthesis between classical modernist thoughts about space, form and object, and the knowledge that the meaning of a work will be determined by the context. These insights are the achievement of conceptual art. The dichotomies banal commodity / high art, public / private which were ascribed to his works earlier, are still valid. Ken Lum emphasizes the experience of the subject as a viewer, and in doing so he is pushing these visions in a new direction.
'I'm interested in what constitutes the subject, not only the subject in the work, but the subject standing in front of the mirror. And that constitution has been a recurrent theme in all my work. Is always in between, Hybrid, always in the process of transformation.'
It is this emphasis on the subject that may provide a link to the human kind of beauty to which John Coetsee refers. The paradoxical effect in terms of contemporary art is that he points back to the classical modernist view on art, but in doing so raises objections. He is not simply returning to the aesthetics of the sublime, but he stresses in a way the right and the potential of the viewer to create a personal, private relationship with an object. Aesthetics are necessary to this, because they lift the banal picture/moment out of the sea of indifference and make it special.
'I realize more and more that excising all the social references in the gallery space is not simply to enhance the contemplative relationship that people have with a work of art, but also enhance the privacy of the viewer. So a gallery space despite of being 'public', is actually extremely private. And that privacy is analogous to the privacy of the collector's or whomever's' home.'
It is fascinating to see how ideas are shifting and it is good to know that reflection is still an important part of contemporary art. I shall take the liberty of recognizing a metaphor of this process in the mirrors by Ken Lum. *
Notes
1. From an interview with Marnie Flemming, in Catalogue, published by Oakville Galleries, 1994
2. All the other quotes are from an interview with Lisa Gabriella Mark, in: Catalogue by the Sao Paulo Bienal, 1998
Saskia Monshouwer, publicist, has been working at Kunstbeeld, a Dutch Art Magazine, since 1989