UNEDITED essay by DaveDyment for Germaine Koh: Stall catalogue (Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong, 2004)
Stand Up and Be Counted: The Quotidian Work of Germaine Koh
Grandmother:
What are you doing, Smut?
Smut:
I’m counting the hairs on the dog.
Grandmother:
Whatever for?
Smut:
(incredulously) To see how many there are.
Drowning by Numbers – Peter Greenaway.
Conceptual Art
loves to count and codify. Artists as varied as Vito Acconci, Mel Bochner,
Jonathan Borofsky, Stanley Brouwn, Hanne Darboven, Hamish Fulton, Jonas Mekas,
and Lorna Simpson have all utilized counting in their work. On Kawara filled
volumes by counting back a million years from 1969 (One Million Years [Past]) and ahead a million years (One Millions Years [Forward]). An audio
installation at Documenta XI presented volunteers reading from the books, into
a tape recorder.
For his Fluxus
performance Counting Song, Emmett
Williams simply counted the audience and left the stage. Martin Creed titles his work numerically and, with his band
Owada, released a CD of pop songs where almost every lyric consists solely of
Creed’s rhythmic counting. Roman Opalka started counting in 1965 and hasn't
stopped, committing each successive number to canvas. Even Ed Ruscha’s classic
artist’s books might be deemed mere volumes of photography were it not for his
tidy titles, such as Twenty-Six Gasoline
Stations and Thirty-Four Parking Lots.
A recent web
project by Claude Closky, Top Ten
Favorite Numbers, invites visitors to vote on their favorite digit, thus
altering the numerical sequence based on popularity.1 Toronto’s
Micah Lexier (now living in New York City) takes a similar approach to numbers
– resizing them to democratize their surface area. He also counts his own age
in coins, ink prints and other media, constantly attuned to his own mortality.2
Counting
figures largely in the work of a number of other Toronto artists; Daniel Olson3
has published all the prime numbers and the value of Pi up to a million
digits as attractive leather bound books for handy reference. Kelly Mark does
her counting with the One, Two, Three, Four, Stroke of prison walls. The work
is published as a wallpaper and her own years are tallied as a tattoo on her
arm – updated yearly on her birthday.
She also punches in and out, daily, using a time-clock to tabulate hours spent
on artwork.
Germaine Koh’s
Counter from 2002 is a simple
numerical counter embedded in the gallery wall, with a push button below it.
Unlike the tired, ‘interactive’ art of the late eighties and early nineties, all
the gallery visitor must do to take part is press the clicking button and
register his or her presence.4 The numbers cannot be rolled back but
there is nothing to prevent someone from incessantly pressing the button, in
order to somehow have more impact on the data than his predecessor. So the
Counter accommodates exaggeration and registers idle boredom. In this way, the
skewed figures are significant, rather than flawed data.
Most
substantial counting is done for eventual wider reporting. We answer statistical
information because we know it will be entered into large, potentially useful
data banks; we vote to have our opinion counted and influence change; we attend
protest marches in the hopes that the following day the press will report the
large number of people who agree with our social or political position.
Corporations take counts for market research, to better their ability to sell
their product or service. Amazon.com has yet to post a profit. As a retail
venture it is unsuccessful yet as a data bank of personal consumer information,
it is unrivalled. This data will eventually be used to determine, not only how
to market a book, but whether or not it will be published. The data is
meticulously scrutinized and of course, sold to other companies.5
Counter
reports its data only to the visitors that follow you. The information is
neither gathered, analyzed nor published. No conclusions are drawn, but the
data is somehow not inconsequential - it exists
as a record of seldom-noted gestures and impulses; it serves to lend importance
to the smallest of actions.
One of Koh’s
best works is Poll, from 1999 – a
two-meter high metal post that tracks the choices of pedestrians. Placed in the
centre of a high-traffic footpath, the pole forces those who encounter it to
make a decision to veer to the left, or to the right of the obstruction. Many
will make this decision unconsciously, most without any knowledge of
participation in Koh’s project. The survey, then, is not taken numerically, but
by the path itself. The side most worn represents the favoured route.
The
crossroads, the road less traveled, diverging paths, the chosen path. These are
ubiquitous metaphors in literature, blues music and other narrative arts. They
suggest themes of fate and destiny and the notion that a simple choice has
profound implications. Koh gently pokes fun at these grand ideas by disrupting
the path only slightly, making the ‘alternate route’ no more than a few simple
steps.
Teams, from 1997, consisted of a mass of
blank publicity buttons, available for the taking, in two different colours. By
selecting a colour, visitors placed themselves in one of two groups. Once worn
outside the gallery the participants became representatives of their particular
“team”.6 The 2003 work, Focus
Group, further distills the notion – all the buttons are identical and so
the visitor must only decide whether or not to partake. Like Poll, the title pun serves as an entry
point – the buttons two-tone, high-contrast graphic is one used to assist
optical focusing.
Survey Field, a 2003
project for Artengine (www.surveyfield.net),
is a web work that collects opinions from online communities and presents the
data in the form of a grid of coloured points. The answers to a series of
questions are presented based on the participant’s geographical location. The
red for no, green for yes or blue for maybe colour scheme blurs into other
colour patterns to simultaneously present the bigger picture and distort the findings.
Like Closky’s
survey, Poll, Teams, Focus Group and Survey Field all provide a vehicle for charting popular opinion, but as an
end rather than as a means. With constantly increasing data processing
abilities, statistics have become incredibly specific. During the Bill Clinton
scandal it was reported that 84 per cent of the public who wanted him impeached
ate Campbell's Soup, while Burger King customers were predominantly pro-Clinton.7 Conversely,
Koh’s imprecise evidence eschews correlations in favour of gestalt.
For Prayers, 1999, Koh hooked up a device to
the administrative computer in the gallery office that translated the
keystrokes into Morse-encoded smoke signals, which were then broadcast from the
gallery window as long and short puffs of smoke. This foregrounding of the
behind-the-scenes tasks that gallery staff perform dignifies8 the
actions but also makes them beautifully meaningless. The number of people able
to decipher Morse Code is, I suspect, small. In many ways the piece reduces the
deskwork to clouds, to weather.9
PoS
and Relay, both from 2004, continue
the practice of converting communicative data into shared experience, however
ephemerally. PoS utilizes an outdated
commercial Point-of-Sale receipt printer to translate information gathered
online, the staccato rhythms of the printer sounding like Morse code or
incoherent speech. Relay concretizes
the currents of longing and hope embedded in long distance text messages by way
of a flashing beacon of light.
A synonym for
counted is ‘included’ and to be counted is also to be politically empowered.
Koh is interested in more than simple data gathering; her work investigates
systems of communication, circulation and exchange. A strong sense of social
justice pervades her practice, free of the didacticism that often accompanies
art-as-activism.
Despite
radio’s omnipresence10, access to its broadcast is fairly
restricted. Spot Radio, a low-power
FM Radio transmitter in a common floral suitcase, presents a mobile solution.
Koh makes the device available to local community members to foster open
dialogue, forge connections and allow the disenfranchised to claim at least a
small portion of the airways.
A more recent
political public intervention turns real estate sandwich boards into actual architecture
by adding tent fabric to the existing hinged frame structure. Located in
neighborhoods in the process of gentrification Occupancy, 2003, playfully comments on the need for affordable
housing, not more high-rise condos for high-end clients. It reminds one of
Krystof Wodiczko’s 1988 Homeless Vehicle
Project in which the artist provided makeshift shelters out of shopping
carts. The ensuing outrage from both sides of the political spectrum (the carts
were inventive but hardly adequate accommodation) was precisely the dialogue
Wodiczko intended. Koh has also produced Squat,
a work which commemorates the use of construction sites as temporary housing.
Twenty-two percent of Canadians live below the poverty line, says Statistics Canada. The Fraser Institute, a right-wing think tank, argues that it is only eight per cent. Even without misreporting, misinterpretation and manipulation these statistics threaten to generalize and depersonalize the problem - they narrow, rather than broaden debate. Koh’s count presents the bigger picture via the smaller one, and re-humanizes in the process.
Counting can also be both mundane and reflective; one counts sheep to overcome insomnia and counts to ten to quell one’s anger. The quintessential Zen exercise involves counting ones breath as a means of mindful meditation and contemplation. A recent performative multiple titled Placebo (Toronto)11 consists of a labeled glass bottle containing twenty-five stones and the instruction “Swallow one when feeling ungrounded. Focus on its passage through your body.” Koh’s practice is often said to invoke Zen, perhaps by way of Fluxus. Her work can be viewed as quiet answers to rarely asked, barely asked questions, decisions as experience rather than exponents, census as sense of, data as Dada.
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1. At the time of writing ‘three’ is in
first place (third place?). To vote, visit http://www.sittes.net/top10.
2. Many of these works began in the
eighties and are likely informed by the AIDS epidemic.
3. Olsen is currently living in
Montreal.
4. The work also references gallery
attendance data. Many of Koh’s gallery pieces are site-specific and comment on the
inner workings of the institution.
5. This is becoming an extremely common
practice. Rent and rent any two videos of the same genre, from Blockbuster and
watch your mail for related advertising. Someone renting Westerns, for example,
might receive ads selling trips to Texas, Country music CDs, or cowboy hats.
6. The solid colour buttons also
resembled oversized museum admission lapel tags, providing the additional layer
of quiet humour that can often be found in Koh’s practice.
7. Boyle, David. The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can't Make Us Happy. Flamingo
Press, 2001.
8. Marks, Laura U. Immanent Domain. Essay
from Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, 2001) Catalogue Germaine Koh.
9. Weather features largely in Koh’s
practice: in By the Way the swooshing sounds of commuter traffic is
converted via acoustical filters and broadcast back into the driver’s car; in Fair-weather
forces: wind speed a turnstile is installed in the gallery and rotates
according to exterior wind movement, which is monitored by an anemometer on the
roof.
10. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m
constantly aware that radio waves share my living space, as uninvited guests.
11. New editions will be made available
in various cities, where the stones are collected locally. The work debuted in
Toronto as part of Anitra Hamilton’s Satchel Gallery.
Thanks to
Roula Partheniou and John-Joe Kavanagh.