OPEN SPACE

……………………………………………………………"That bottle keeps its blink on its side red from horizon." Clark Coolidge………………………………..

Despite recently receiving my masters in Visual and Critical Studies I have always had a love/hate relationship with critical theory.  Within my graduate program there is a running joke that critical theory is “like a stain you can’t get out.” My biggest frustration is the disconnect I feel between what is discussed and generated within the sterile walls of the academy and the communities that exist beyond those walls who are often the subjects of the theories produced and studied.  Over the past two years, as I was buried in theory and thesis writing, I found myself often questioning the relevance of philosophical texts for those who exist within activist circles, public services, and that which is often described as “on the ground.”

My frustration with the inaccessibility of critical theory hit home after reading a portion of the text, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex by philosopher, Judith Butler in a course entitled Critical Race Art History. Butler is infamous for her incredibly dense and often incomprehensible language that consists of the kind of sentences that most people have to read over and over to gain even the slightest understanding.  In Bodies that Matter Butler discusses the materiality of the body and the repetitive performativity of gender, pushing for the destabilization of normative gender binaries—or at least, this is what I’ve gathered from my second and third reading. This theory speaks directly to our intimate understandings of bodies, desire, and expressions of gender.  It is immensely relevant for many people and therefore can be considered a potentially liberating text and yet is written in a language that is inaccessible to so many people beyond and even within the academic institution. This is the contradiction of critical theory that drives me a little bit mad. When expressing this discontent in class, my professor, art historian Jacqueline Francis, gently intervened asking where it is that one has the experiences that inspired Butler’s text: the gay bar or the academy? (more…)

Imin Yeh is a printmaker and recent graduate of the MFA Department at the California College of the Arts.  Her practice deflates cultural stereotypes and addresses issues of labor and consumerism through a critical and humorous lens.  Yeh’s piece “Everybody Loves a Skinny, White Boyfriend” was included in the exhibition For Lovers and Fighters that I curated at The Spare Room Project in February 2009. We sat down at a coffee-shop together last Friday and talked about her recent projects, her relationship to local art institutions, and the politics and negotiation inherent in making work that is deeply rooted in one’s own experience and identity. Yeh was a recipient of the 2009 Barclay Simpson award.  Her piece “Good Imports” is featured in the Chinese Cultural Center’s Present Tense Biennial 2009 and in a satellite installation in nearby storefront at 710 Kearny Street until August 23rd.  Her work will also be included in Intersection for the Arts Benefit Auction on June 13th.

Adrienne Skye Roberts: I thought we could start by talking about your two recent projects in the MFA exhibition at the California College of the Arts (CCA) and the Present Tense Biennale at the Chinese Cultural Center.

Imin Yeh: I graduated with two succinct but related bodies of work: one is lovingly titled “Good Imports” and is a part of the Chinese Cultural Center’s Present Tense Biennale and the other project is “The Legend of the Power Animals” and was my MFA exhibition at CCA. Both projects have to do with the things we buy being the focal point of what we know about other cultures. Every object we have has a dual story of who made it and who ultimately consumes it.

ASR: Can you describe the installation “Good Imports”?

IY: There are a few pieces in the gallery at the Chinese Cultural Center and I was also given a storefront in Chinatown to do whatever I wanted—which is a perfect place for “Good Imports.” The installation consists of objects—laptops, televisions, children’s toys—that were all made in China and either found or donated to me.  They are installed in an excessive pile and each object is individually covered in hand-printed fabric. The pattern of the fabric is taken from the boxes that souvenirs from China are shipped in. I work at the museum store at the Asian Art Museum and our back storeroom is filled with these boxes. I always loved these boxes growing up and when I would go back and forth to Taiwan or China as a child I would keep these boxes much longer than whatever came inside them. At the museum gift shop, whenever someone buys a $20 tea pot or whatever and I bring out the box to put it in and they are always so excited because they feel like they are buying an authentic object.  The pattern of the boxes becomes a superficial identification of something Asian or something that is Chinese.

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Daddy always said that if one just stayed put in San Francisco, eventually everyone who mattered would show up here, and then he himself came as if to prove himself correct. I remember him tottering off the plane as though an earthquake was actually happening. And then he came back two other times, never entirely relaxing, but affable enough, like a mint julep. I thought of him tonight when John Giorno came to San Francisco and gave a jubilant reading for the Poetry Center at San Francisco State.

Even if you know nothing about poetry you will remember Giorno as the actor in one of Andy Warhol’s most notorious films, Sleep–Warhol’s first film, made when the artist was 35 years old and looking to try something new. Giorno was 27 and, it is said, Warhol’s boyfriend at the time. The film consists, as many know, of Giorno sound asleep for nearly five and a half hours-there’s a version in which some of the shot footage is repeated to make it last eight hours-an elaborate joke on contemporary health advice which urged Americans to sleep eight hours a day, nearly an impossibility for the always alert Warhol. Tonight John Giorno looks wiry, energetic himself, though I imagine he sleeps just as deeply now.

Maybe this is an illusion brought on by his heavy-lidded bedroom eyes, the left one of which rarely opens all the way up. All in all he is a performer of exquisite looks, a cap of soft white hair exquisitely combed in furrows up and over his ears towards the back of his head. High-tipped eyebrows of an imposing jet black contrast with this white, soft hair, like Mia Farrow with the eyebrows of Penelope Cruz. So yes, he always looks surprised, and yet his eyes have seen so much trouble and pain in the world that only a practice of Buddhism could have spared him.
I met him once before, in New York, in the 1970s, outside the building on the Bowery where, he tells me, he still lives. “Were you looking for me or were you looking for William?” he teases, I guess he knew he had spotted a Burroughs fan! I was an undergraduate with a sort of boyfriend who lived way way downtown next to John Giorno. “Who?” I mumbled, but soon this guy had filled me in on everything Giorno had done.

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