Kimsooja

A woman standing immobile, with the back to the camera. Perfectly motionless. You cannot see anything from her but the silhouette. She's contemplating the continuous motion of the river. Water moving slowly, detritus floating, sometimes metallic junk, of various shapes and sizes, something white comes and goes, now and then, ice, or maybe chemical debris, birds flying over the water. Flow of the river, fabric of life.

For Kimsooja, artist's practices are similar to that of Buddhist monks in the sense that they both try to liberate and go beyond themselves.

Because the woman standing still on the screen, perfectly anonymous, her back to us, is actually she, Kimsooja, the author of this movie.

A movie that does not belong to Performing Arts. It is not a Performing piece: it is a Performance artwork. The difference is subtle: she did not perform in order to create the movie; on the contrary, she created the movie in order to perform in front of us each time.

She is staying there, motionless, contemplating the river, till she feels that the river becomes immobile and she is moving.

For us, to understand the flow of the river, a referential is needed. She, the motionless woman, anonymous, rear to us, she is the referential. As we are watching, we realize more and more that she is there as anyone of us. That's why she has to remain anonymous, she is only a reference point for us; and we enter the trance, her trance, till we are starting to feel that the river becomes immobile and we are moving.

In that moment the temporal has disappeared; it remains the eternal: no past, no future, only a continuous flow, flow of the Cosmos, fabric of Cosmos, and we become part of it.

I am thinking now at the movies of Satyajit Ray: his Apu Trilogy, perhaps the greatest cinematic artwork ever: the conflict between cosmos and history, between eternity and temporal.

A Laundry Woman, Yamuna River, Delhi, the 10 minutes movie of Kimsooja: there is no beginning, no end, no good, no bad, no past, no future, only a continuous moment, flowing unaware of us, till we become part of it, till we flow and it remains motionless, stillness and motion no more distinct.

So, she is - as Buddhist monks should be - a mediator, to make us realize where the temporal becomes senseless.

The approach isn't new: art critics have noted the similarity with the Rückenfigur from the paintings of the Romanticist Caspar David Friedrich. Well, Friedrich used as referentials not only humans - sometimes a solitary tree, sometimes the ruines of a church - but the approach is the same (look at the presentation attached at the end of this post). And the similarity is striking if we look at his most famous canvas, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog).

And we can go further back in the art history, to the Sprecher character from Medieval paintings: only here, in the movie of Kimsooja, the Sprecher is silent.




(Hirshhorn Museum)

(Contemporary Art)

(Filmofilia)

(Caspar David Friedrich)