Michael Joo: October 3

October 3, 2007
6:30pm at The New School
Tishman Auditorium
66 West 12th Street

Michael Joo's provocative sculptures and videos explore how science, religion, history and media inform the ways we interpret our surroundings. More interested in how we perceive than what we are looking at, Joo tests the limits of viewers' beliefs and plays on preconceived notions with artworks like Yellow, Yellower, Yellowest (1991), a sculpture consisting of three beakers filled with yellow liquid, accompanied by labels mischievously identifying their contents as the urine, respectively, of Genghis Khan, Benedict Arnold and the artist himself. Deeply interested in the cyclical nature of energy, Joo has also presented Salt Transfer Cycle (1993-95), a video in three segments. In one, the artist swims through a vast mound of MSG, the stereotypical flavor enhancer in Asian cuisine; another finds Joo walking, crawling and running on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, a stark bit of mineral-rich terrain in the country the artist was born and raised. In the third, Joo sits on a mountainside in his parents' native South Korea with his body encrusted in salt, allowing an elk to lick him. With great awareness of the connection between the physiological and the psychological, Joo has also presented perhaps his most widely known sculpture, Visible (1999-2000). A transparent plastic Buddha with visible human innards, it perhaps reminds viewers not only of essential hidden organs but also their cloaked potential as enlightened beings. Joo is presently at work on a project in Alaska, where he recently walked 400 miles along the route of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and placed a taxidermied caribou in the wild, recording its interaction with nature. He now plans to enlist native craftsmen and artists to create artworks fashioned from whale skeletons.

http://www.publicartfund.org/pafweb/talks/talks_current.htm