Abstrakte Erkennung Substanz Volumen Stimmung Filter Reduktion Abstraction Recognition Material Volume Mood Filter Reduction (EN)
Editorial: Bomas Dueler (BCGM chief dealer and guardian angel of boma)
Translated by boma pak English translation by Sophie
Editor's note — Ágrafa Society
boma pak posits, as the author of this text, Bomas Deuler — guardian angel of the artist boma pak, presumed German. This textual construction, crossing a virtual figure with the authorial actual, communicates with boma pak's world of image work, which discloses the fissuring of convention, the splitting of the symbolic. The transmission of feeling sometimes makes the fake, or the virtual, real. Swept up in the illusion, confusion, obscurity, and ambiguity this text spins between the real and the imagined, between letter and image, viewer and reader come to find a certain woman(ly thing) residing at the point where interpretation becomes impossible.
The first and last pages of the German original, "Abstrakte Erkennung Substanz Volumen Stimmung Filter Reduktion", written by Bomas Deuler (BCGM chief dealer and guardian angel of boma).
Bomas Deuler (BCGM), promotional copy for the exhibition Abstract Defeat Bulbs
In 2018 boma pak launched 'WTM decoration & boma'1, which mediates between handwork and work at the scale of decoration, and stated in the artist's bio that work made through this identity handles the material desires 'pushed out' of the relatively non-material media (web, digital image, performance, installation) she works in through fldjf studio2. boma pak has operated the concept of material in the contexts of the 'touchable', the 'long-durational', the 'acknowledged', the 'deemed valuable', the 'having a place of its own'.
We are far apart, but we have corresponded through this email for a long time now. In one of the recent letters s/he3 told me that lately, as the boma of WTM decoration & boma, s/he had been drawing — 'ah, suddenly, just, fallen right into it'. S/he said the last stretch of social distancing had been distressing, all that staying home, but that s/he was having a good time. I felt the desire to keep her safe, and so I became Bomas Deuler and organized this BCGM online presentation, Abstract Defeat Bulbs (BCGM, https://www.wtm-boma.com/bcgm, 2021).
The abstract forms first appeared in the installation work and painting of two exhibitions in succession in 2017: Pre-Open Emerald Glass, The False Sacrifice of White(Archive Bomm, 2017) and Shame on You (Doosan Gallery New York, 2017). In the works shown in each — fldjf material suite: perforated glass emeralds on display4 and Silverly Decoration Sale ₩1,900 (material suite 17-2)5 — silhouettes of unspecified mass are filled in with a single colour. An emerald in a glass mood, a silver in a Silver feel. The working notes point to the following language.
The 'abstract' or 'formless' form departs from the 'abstract screen'. Covering over the centre of the image of the digital image that becomes an object of desire — landscape, interior, object. Erasing it. The sensation of the screen, smooth and without clear edges, is no different from the sensation of abstraction, and from this non-human material world. Only as itself, having become a mirror, throwing a false image up in front of me. Some way of proving that the material world is empty. Once you thought the sky was something you could capture or hold through any media, but it turns out you cannot. When you come close to the things that say "Hey, it's here. Full." you find it emptied out. "It's full in here, so look" : masculinity. 'Atmosphere' and 'feeling' are light, so they sell easily and are discarded easily and are even denied. The subject of copying and of enjoyment becomes scarcity value. But you say hole, and turn to look, and they have been filled in.
Around that time s/he sent me an email with this written in it.
'I never asked for it, but the world copied the sky, feeling, material, time… for me, and replaced them just as fast. I received it all without a thought and I'm fooled into believing they were given to me, but soon enough I realize it's footage I have no control over. Then I forget again. My art practice departed from this feeling of betrayal, and from shame.'
boma, preliminary sketch for White Men Vases, 2017.
According to boma, who is in charge of 'holding the pencil' in this exhibition, the results unfolded as Abstract Defeat Bulbs are set off by a drawing made during a brief stay in a First World country after that year's run of exhibitions, White Men Vases. S/he drew anonymous white vases — plausible, high-end, seen somewhere, the kind s/he would have felt like owning. S/he drew them one by one, enjoying the feeling of having become a collector. And then suddenly s/he felt the form being drawn as a white man. More precisely, it was like putting a white man inside the silhouette of the vase and sealing him in. The title puts a full stop on 'vases'. To represent an object one wants to own is an old human and artistic act. And humans have poured merciless time and effort into making the illusion of ownership solid. The illusion grows more and more solid, and has now landed in a time in which the world is one more simulation. Like the empty quantum universe, the world seems not to be human. Jean Baudrillard wrote why the world has not yet disappeared6 and disappeared. A certain art person — captivated by a beautiful landscape and moment and feeling the desire to keep that time, or the desire to enjoy a vase displayed on the far side of a glass wall — fails, inside these microscopic and perpetual events of desire, to realize the human limit7, and as a defence mechanism against the fact that the object of desire and its representation can never coincide, has been grasping (pretending to grasp) what cannot be held. fldjf studio has been exhibiting that reflex act, and the white vase drawings s/he attempted are caught mid-course: drawing a form and at the same time smudging, melting, running as they please, with no limit of time or space.
S/he went on to present the series fldjf TVS figures (Hobby Hall, Chwimiga, Seoul, 2017). One day s/he sat in the studio and improvised, drawing lumped-together forms. S/he numbered each one and archived the figures, drew them onto gold and silver adhesive sheeting, cut them out, made them into cards and accessories. The perforated sheeting left over — like the border left behind once all the stickers have been used up — was fixed onto clear acrylic panels and made into objects; in every hole where the clear acrylic showed through s/he wrote 'men 00 (number)' and wound a thin ribbon around it as if wrapping a gift. Unlike the forms in the paintings shown in the earlier exhibitions, the fldjf TVS figures are forms derived somewhat 'irresponsibly', with no source material. As though scooping out a mass of gas that turns into infinitely different shapes at every instant, s/he sealed them into a single form. Approach the object through sensation and you get a hint of the state called 沒我, rapture. S/he was intoxicated by the feeling of handling 'abstraction' by following feeling and sensation. Loading a brush with paint and laying down colour, working paper clay, coloured pencil, oil pastel, pencil, digital drawing… with any medium at all, in the instant it settles into the hand and coincides with sensation, s/he feels a joy and an immersion hard to put into words, and that instant dandles the soul of a being. But 'the soul, Psyche'8 is so light that it gives up its gaseous property and has been used and used, so s/he denied the value of the rapture s/he knows and at the same time censored whether this dares to be abstraction, and felt shame. S/he keeps a distance from that full place, a distance measured out by however much immersion time has passed. And she buries it, stands up a sign reading 'the feeling (rapture) (that you know) is not here', and defers the signature.
Every abstract attempt inside the institution — excluding the non-linguistic artistic screen that infant children command with all sorts of mediums, or private non-linguistic instants like it, just as they are — is an embarrassing game. Until it is recognized, abstraction is not abstraction; the moment abstraction is enshrined inside the institution it acquires the status of something praiseworthy and comprehensible. Abstraction is 'the abstract state', and it is helplessly plausible (authentic) language: refined petroleum, a vigorous handshake, the diamond that is reason, the dick of my pure feeling. Not in art alone — the modern attempts at meta-abstraction are inscribed in history as eventful attempts and fleeing the oleaginousness, the cringe, of masculinity (which I would like to call solipsism.) But by the logic of power, awe always runs in one direction, and that history is language subsumed into a field of well-fed dicks. For that reason, at the moment the contemporary institution manifests itself, its value is no different from the coolness of a drunk man pissing at the roadside. Well, nothing to be done. S/he too was captivated by essential language and by the world of sustainable abstraction, and wanted to exist as the power that corresponds to it and as its return gift. But for whatever reason, the inquiry into that desire and the practice are a grammar of copying and anonymity, and as art-world material they have always failed. Failure reflects the actual state of things. S/he needed something else. The necessary condition of abstraction is its outside, and s/he is (appears to be) in the place of the outside. For a trace of rapture or a representation to be possible at all, a structured time-space is needed, and one is indebted to the material abundance of the medium. In order to speak as the outside, s/he becomes a fake that imitates the essential thing by which s/he was captivated.
'WTM decoration & boma (2018–)', launched in order to handle material desire, began with touching paper clay and plaster clay and confirming their secret density and texture. S/he decided to open up and look at the feeling that said, 'no need to even look, this is a video that will fail as material'. Enjoying the material abundance of the object called clay, given as a small lump in the hand, and enjoying it, s/he made fragile rings and pendants of a single form. The secret density and texture s/he confirmed followed the form of the ornament. The project circulated by making collections and selling and gifting them.
Abstract Defeat Bulbs — holes that have become silhouettes, masses of gas with a sense of volume put into them — hang in clusters, fake and shimmering. S/he describes volume onto the once-flat forms with light and shade. Representational technique (art) serves that purpose alone. In order to swell into 'that language you know', only as much as it pretends to be abstraction, slightly plump, like foam wallpaper. S/he is slightly plump, and is revealed when plump. Something smudged and coming apart is revealed in silhouette form at the moment of detaching the soul-feeling — which, never congealing into language, is like a filter sold cheap. They pretend to be three-dimensional and stick to something somewhere, plausibly there. And no one can tell whether they are real or fake. Much like the reproduction and the survival methods of the things s/he has observed closely. S/he puts a comma on the briefly enjoyed time of abundance and moves on. The consciousness has been eking out a living stuck to the surface of an abstraction packaged as soul. What has not begun, the foetal state, no longer producing, just being there like that. As a zone where there is nothing but mirroring. Remaining only in a flat state that wants the authority of the three-dimensional. What on earth is the reason the real is necessarily impossible inside institution or form? Is that a secret? S/he swells what s/he felt in the way you want it, and prepares, forever and in secret, a space of consolation and of leaping, for no one else. S/he does not produce.
fldjf studio, begun in 2014, is a work designed as 'the task of "having light" fails easily and, slipping off matter, a fictional company, the studio format and the web-page presentation method gather'. They reflected failed (hallow) abstraction. For them, 'light' is sometimes stuck sparsely to windows high up on tall buildings, sometimes seems spread far off across the sky, and is embedded in the ground too. They cover the light and make it impossible to tell whether there is light or not. And they go on negating, saying this is that light-cover. Professing concepts such as 'Vicious Semi Virtual Suite & Service/AD', 'Natural Cover Making Semi-Virtual Studio', 'Natural and Original mood & Gesture making studio', fldjf studio has made some ten thousand flat digital object images (light-covers) wrapped in fldjf studio's walls, frames and ribbons. As a process of catching 'reflected light' by leaning on the matter that reflects it and then covering it again, a boring monochrome screen loops somewhere. If atmosphere is a shell, is it not perpetual? The work they attempted and failed at just before starting the studio, window ornament's time (b painting, Gallery 175, Seoul 2014), is a window ornament series about the impossibility of expressing light with colour. Borrowing the web page of this contribution and the glass screens of each monitor and handheld device, it guides that flattened, dried-out time toward this light of that time. These thin lights will each become one more world, according to the law of entropy.
(from the top) boma pak, window decoration 1, window decoration 7, window decoration 4, window decoration 2, window decoration 1: the sky blue at the front, 2014. Wood panel, oil on paper, dimensions variable.
S/he feels that in the world there exists no grammar in which the material desire s/he handles can safely subsist, apart from exchange value. S/he observes myself being reduced, through the medium, to 'an unimportant, trivial thing'.9 Since s/he does not cling, I become the dealer and the guardian angel who protects her ego.
July 2021. Bomas Deuler
Notes
1. WTM decoration & boma (2018–) produces and sells jewellery, sculpture, objects, scent, illustration, and so on, focusing on the concepts of handwork and handcraft, following fldjf studio's de-material working method and the material imagery shed from the medium.
2. fldjf studio (2014–), fldjf studio or real studio. Devised to champion and record light, the moment, and femininity, this semi-transparent studio advertises a fictional company. boma pak, who devised fldjf studio, plays the part of a fictional character belonging to it — a 'reflector' and a 'dancer qhak'. The studio takes the surfaces of forms found in the world and virtualizes them, aiming to crack the exchange value between what has been acknowledged as real and what has not, and at the same time works through its practice on how to renew, and present to the viewer, the 'androcentric' implications carried in the verbs 'to exhibit' and 'to see'.
3. S/he, broken and pressed flat.
4. fldjf studio, fldjf material suite: perforated glass emeralds on display, 2017. Oil on paper, gloss medium, eyelet punching, ribbon, brass, resin frame shelf, nails, dimensions variable. Title and caption revised in 2020.
5. boma, Silverly Decoration Sale ₩1,900 (material suite 17-2), 2017. Silver powder on paper, polysol, marker, pencil, paraffin sculpture frame, ribbon, nails, dimensions variable.
6. The original title of Jean Baudrillard's last published book, Pourquoi tout n'a-t-il pas déjà disparu? (2007), is 'Why hasn't everything already disappeared?'
7. Written the human limit and read 'thinking oneself human and feeling the human limit'.
8. Easy if it can't be seen. Images are easy. Jesus is awfully good-looking (?) | 靈魂 Spirit and Soul: 1. The spirit of a person who has died. 2. The immaterial substance thought to dwell in the body, to take charge of the workings of the mind and to confer life. | Psyche: 1. [Greek and Roman myth] Psyche (the beautiful girl loved by Cupid; the incarnation of the soul). 2. [p~; the ~, one's ~] soul, spirit (as opposed to the body) (cf. CORPUS). 3. An insect, a kind of moth.
9. Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, trans. Yi Seongmin, Seoul: b-books, p. 244.
*이 글은 시각 예술 저널 웹진 세미나의 여덟번 째 이슈에 기고되었습니다.
