Page 61 - artview21 ebook Art Magazine 2023.5 issue1

Manhattan Blues & Archaeology of Memory

As viewers entered Julie Hwang's funny, elegant, and and simplified forms. Like all her imagery, the shapes
sobering exhibition, they came upon a characteristic painted on these wooden bowls, hoes, and rakes
bit of humor on the artist's part-an antique Brownie stem from the figure, but in their simplicity the forms
camera, whose bull reflector had been printed over with communicate a primarily graphic energy. Here Hwang is
an image of a four-pan-eled window. Through which a showing her affection for a visual language that might
single eye looks out of a gray sky. At once a wonderfully be read by all cultures.
idiosyncratic object and a sly commentary on looking- As the title suggests, the farmer's tools are literally
who is watching who?-in contemporary art, Hwang's meant to dig down, into a place where memory is
camera evidences her enduring interest in the all-so- uncovered, to ensure that culture can continue to
human attempt to create meaning. exist and be appreciated. hwang wants to characterize
Hwang's quiet sense of humor prevailed in this show, relations between old and new paths, and so she paints
along with her wish to document and record the her slightly personal hieroglyphs onto a series of forms,
variousness of human activity very late in the millennium. which, as beautiful as they look are meant to be used. In
Living in Seoul and New York, she is interested in that sense, Hwang's art suggest and inordinate yearning
presenting us with the complexity of urban life. Her to be of service, to be of material help.
installation Manhattan Blues(1995-1996) gives us a ‘Manhattan Blues'(1995) is also the title of a very large
vision of New York as an endlessly active, endlessly canvas, a triptych in which each panel is 71 by 86 1/2
interesting parade of people and experience. Consisting inches. In contrast to the other work, this painting lacks
of scores of wooden clocks, on which hwang has color, consisting only of black, white, and gray. Within
painted her distinctive motifs of generalized figures, each panel are subdivisions st up in a grid, so that the
featureless faces, broadly sketche representations different compartments look like windows, each with a
of technology. ‘Manhattan Blues' not only looks but different view onto New York life.
sounds intensely busy, for the working clocks produce a In the middle panel, Hwang recorded the wonderful
constant, unsynchronized ticking. anomalies of city life. In the upper-left corner two fish-
The installation under scores Hwang's pleasure in the flounder?-are being watched on a scale; on the bottom
randomness of city life, and the fact that imagery has right, a telephone is superimposed over a bisected face,
been painted on clocks demonstrates a literal rendering, its upper half white and its lowr part black. Other images
as well as metaphorical suggestion, of the passage of include a buxom nude with a light fixture and a lug for
time. Hwang's paintings have always depicted the figure a head, a suitedfigure with a go game for a head, and a
as a simplified, even schematic form, enabling her to person before a camera, whose features are hidden by
allegorize the human condition. In some ways, she can an umbrella.
be. likened to a visionary journalist, whose stories both Despite all the activity, there is a curiously dispassionate
describe and point toward the best in ourselves. Despite tone to the work' Hwang is determined to report
the seemingly boundaried, impersonal experience objectively on the human condition. But despite its
of what the clocks portray, they work as a unified distant quality, ‘Manhattan Blues' communicates an
composition because they portray something non- affection for our lives through the warmth of art. The
material and abstract - namely, the relentlessly detached painting also suggests sadness, perhaps an inevitable
quality of time. quality given the gestures made in life and their slow
'Archaelolgy of Memory'(1995-1996) consists of old fade into memory.
Korean farmer's tools and household items, onto which
hwang has painted her customary vocabulary of figures Jonathan Goodman, art critic