The Ruins of a Day: The Disposable Art of Koo Jeong-A

Since it includes cookie crumbs, aspirin-capsule powder, and wrapping papers, the work of Korean artist Koo Jeong-A can be situated along the lines of an aesthetic recycling of waste. Initiated by the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, this practice perpetuates itself from New Realism to Christian Boltanski, under whom Jeong-A studied in the 1990s at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Nevertheless, a world separates her from the western artistic tradition. In the hands of Man Ray or Brassaï, for instance, the debris changes scale. In Élevage de poussière or Dust Breeding,¹ 1 - Marcel Duchamp’s Élevage de poussière or Dust Breeding was photographed by Man Ray in 1920 and was published by André Breton in Littérature in 1922. the filth caught on Duchamp’s Large Glass transforms itself into a field of ruins. In Brassaï’s Involuntary Sculptures,² 2 - Photographs published in Minotaure, nos. 3-4 (1933). the subway ticket stubs found inside pockets look like relics. Likewise, in having been cast in bronze to endure, Giacometti’s Disagreeable Object (To Be Disposed of), a useless and repulsive work that one would trash as if it were garbage, is only refuse metaphorically speaking. It continues in this way until Boltanski, who, with the Les archives de C. B. (1965-1988), enclosed everything he found within his studio, from the most precious to the most trivial object, inside 646 used cookie boxes, which he then stacked up against an imposing wall of iron. Spanning the twentieth century, these works all associate art with monumentality. They present refuse as a relic that should to be preserved. Conversely, in Jeong-A’s work dust remains dust, and the swept up pile of litter remains a heap that will end up in the trashcan. Her productions make no pretence of becoming fossilized for eternity and of thus rising to a superior dimension. It is precisely the use of refuse that permits her to shrug off monumentality by denouncing it henceforth as an obsolete practice.³ 3 - In his text Présence distraite that situates Koo Jeong-A in relation to conceptual art and post-modernity, Philippe Vergne is the first to speak of her artwork in terms of anti-monumentality. He even qualifies her as being “anti-Richard Serra”… He is also the first to make a connection between her work and post-colonialism. See the ­catalogue Koo Jeong-A (Paris: Espace 315, Pompidou Centre, 2004), 18-23. In doing so, she participates in the emergence of a new kind of artwork committed to destruction without pathos.