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The McMaster Museum of Art presents:

Hyang Cho, K. Nicol and Joseph Beuys
predisposed(...to thinking through the eye of mutual convenience)

March 28 – August 3, 2013


Reception and Artist Talk: Thursday April 4, 6 – 8 pm

The work of Hyang Cho and K. Nicol offers a view into contemporary art practices in Canada. This exhibition looks at their recent works in the context of conceptual, “post conceptual” and systemic practices. An international perspective is provided by the inclusion of a 1968 “unique” multiple work by Joseph Beuys (German 1921-1986), an artist most-often associated with the Fluxus movement.

 

Although coming from very different cultural backgrounds, the studio practices of Cho and Nicol are characterized by notional and self-reflexive organizing and ordering systems that draw cues from the everyday, examining and selecting readymade elements, and raiding philosophy. They express time implicitly and explicitly through a disciplined performative dimension. The outcomes may be described as “obsessive”—or, as conveyed in the exhibition subtitle, “predisposed to …”—but they also share an idea with Beuys, to “function as carriers for complex ideas [as much] as their capacity to release a communicative impulse between artists and viewer.”1

 

If the formative period of conceptual and radical art in the mid-to-late 1960s was an anti-authoritarian attitude and a “dematerialization” of art as object, how does this relate to a climate of retinal consumption today, and social media that encourages unfiltered and promiscuous chatter about anything or nothing—yet done “because you can.”

The exhibition, therefore, poses questions rather than (at best) slippery and problematic definitions.

Hyang Cho was born in South Korea. She first studied at Sogang University in Seoul; received her MFA from the University of Guelph, and is based in Guelph. Hyang Cho works courtesy of the artist and Georgia Scherman Projects.

K. Nicol grew up in Ancaster Ontario.  He studied at Sheridan College and the Ontario College of Art and Design, and is based in Toronto. K. Nicol works courtesy of the artist, MKG127, and Micah Lexier. 

This is the first exhibition for both in a public museum; a catalogue will be available during the course of the exhibition. This exhibition and catalogue are generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.


1. Benjamin Dodenhoff from Joseph Beuys: Parallel Processes

 

LIST OF WORKS

 

Hyang Cho

 

Line by Line I, 2007-11
131 sheets of stacked letter size paper, with
graphite lines drawn on both sides of each sheet


There were 131 pages in the sketchbook that Cho selected:
“I tried to fill the entire paper space with lines, the simplest act of mark making. I tried not to leave any space between lines, but it was
impossible.”

----------------

Line by Line II 2010-11
fax paper roll, graphite


I had a roll of fax paper on my desk, which I purchased it because I liked the continuity, like a scroll. I wasn't conscious of it as “fax
paper” because I don't belong to that generation—I had never seen a fax machine before.

----------------

The Rest Is Silence, 2011
181 90-minute cassette tapes with cases, altered book, tape recorder
with built-in speaker


THE REST IS SILENCE is initiated from the book Works of Spinoza.  It consists of major works by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677),  including A Theologico-Political Treatise, Tractatus Politicus, On the Improvement of the Understanding, The Ethics and his correspondence with contemporaneous intellectuals.


I assigned myself the task to read and write the entire book. Instead of producing another copy of the book, I wrote the text directly on the very book with HB pencils while reading it aloud at the speed of my writing, and recording my reading on cassette tapes. Each 90-minute tape contains about 4 pages of the book. Once finished with one tape, I labeled it with the words or phrase that I was able to recall. The tapes are arranged and played in order.

---------------- 

Hourglass, 2013
unique, blown glass fabricated by Aaron Oussoren and Sally McCubbin


I collected the graphite powder from sharpening pencils while working on THE REST IS SILENCE. My original intention was to make an hourglass with the powder instead of sand, but the glass artists told me that it is problematic to insert graphite into hot glass. I then started to think about an "hourglass" as a measure of time, and time itself, without sand or graphite.

K. Nicol


flogging a dead horse 4, 2011

ink on paper with horse 4,

spent ink pen mounted on wood

 

flogging a dead horse 5, 2012

ink on paper with horse 5,

spent ink pen mounted on wood


The five count originated in the margins of other work–probably as early as the mid-1990s (when I was still in school). It was not a "counting" kind of count, but more of a nervous thing, like foot tapping.  Then it turned into drawings and as they got larger, the limits of the pen became a factor. When the pen dried out I questioned if it was reason enough to stop.

----------------

this is your life... a,

this is your life…b, 2013
typewritten ink on paper


I've taken the line "this is your life and it's ending one minute at a time" and repeated it the number of minutes in an eight-hour work day (480). The line is from the movie Fight Club (1999), though I don't think
it really matters.

----------------

carl andre quote (shelf version), 2007

typewritten index cards, stainless steel

 

I wanted to work with the Andre quote since I read it and I knew it would be a repetition piece with a bit of absurdity. It was with the limitations of a broken arm that led me to type the quote hundreds of times.

----------------

mistakes/corrections collected, 2010
ko-rec-type correction film, stainless steel

A collection of typing errors made over the course of several years. I first started working with a typewriter I found on the street around 2004. I always liked the leftover correction film and in 2010 I figured out this piece.

----------------

the button i pressed one million times, 2009
steel, plastic
Collection of Micah Lexier

----------------

One hundred different clocks, 2012, yet-to-be-editioned audiowork

Like the correction film work, I collected clocks without a goal in mind. As I worked with them and lived around them, they evolved into an audio piece.

 

 

 

 

 

Joseph Beuys 
(German 1921-1986)


Intuition, 1968
pencil on metal-stapled wooden box
from an un-numbered lifetime open edition,
issued by Vice Vesand, Remscheid (Germany)
Private Collection


Approximately 12,000 Intuition boxes were made and inscribed by Beuys. The original price was 8 Deutschmarks (approx. $2 US in 1968).

 

Circulated in the manner of a pamphlet, the slogan ‘Intuition’ records in two pencil strokes Beuys’ counter thesis to materialism and rationalism in the context of 1968 and its political debate. The empty wooden box was supposed to become an item of daily use, with intuition potentially filling it with a new meaning.