Intimate Revolt: on Eunji Cho’s Falling Eggs

 

HA Jin, Ph.D. in Arts Plastiques

 

Work 1. Earth Thief, Berlin, 2009

Earth Thief

Eunji Cho drops soil. Once in Berlin, Cho executed a performance entitled Earth Thief. From a spot, she hits the road. Walking, the artist collects soil where she can, gathering it in a plastic bag. This bag has a hole – as she keeps walking, the soil leaks from the bag leaving a trail behind. At times this trail draws a long line, at others dotted, marking the steps the artist made. The lumps of soil that remain along her path reveal her passing by and the direction of her movement. Yet this marking is a passive one, which is dissipated by the passing people or car wheels, to fly away as dust. Finally after the rain, the soil will be washed away, to move on farther.

It is not a simple task to find soil on the streets of a city. Cho replenished her bags at construction sites, sidewalks or abandoned lots. Plastic bag is a useful material for the homeless in a city. They carry everything of what their world consist of in those bags. In accordance with the abominable mass production of our current time, plastic bags are trashed everywhere, thus they are also to be found everywhere. Cho gets them at her hand, which is a forgotten object to us by now, due to its omnipresence.

In order to name an act as theft, an owner of the stolen thing must be defined in the first place. To whom belongs the earth? Since the first time the mankind claimed for property right, every piece of ground on which we stand must belong to somebody. Be it the state or a person, the land has an owner. Should it be recognized as a theft, to take away a bagful of soil from there? Fortunately, no one would accuse another to have committed a criminal act for taking the amount of soil. More precisely, Cho didn’t steal the soil. It had just changed its location. To be moved around, it got contained in a plastic bag. Its travel started in this way.

 

‘Earth’ and ‘Mud’

Mud is one of the most primordial, simple and mundane matters, which one can obtain from the ‘earth,’ and lacks of any form or human intention. However, under the current acceleration of urbanization, mud became one of the most unacquainted matters in our urban environment. And perhaps ours is not an era that stimulates to discuss the primitiveness and purity of soil any longer. Soil is polluted with heavy metal and the overflow of debris created by humans. The only moment when we can actually step on and touch the earth is when we demolish a city that once used to stand sturdily on a solid ground. Supported by the sign that reads “under construction,” the excavator breaks the asphalt layer and frees the soil to respire.

For a performance piece in 2006, Cho wrote Exodus_Mud Poem, that starts with “I made a certain deal with the earth.” For the earth’s escape, she formed the lump of soil into a cube. After the successful escape in disguise of a cube, the moment of farewell came. Cho grabbed the lumps out of the cube and set them free.

The artist threw the lumps to the world: the mud, of enhanced viscosity with adequate amount of water, hit to the wall and the floor, making slapping sound. The stuck mud on the white wall would return to dust after the course of time, to continue the way to the earth.

 

Throwing to the World and Throwing toward the World

Work 2. Exodus_Mud Poem, Gwangju, 2008

A photograph documenting the act of throwing lumps of mud to the wall is combined with an image depicting another act to pose a question to us. The latter is an image of a person throwing a Molotov, as protest against the power of a tyrant who actually was meant to represent the people who democratically elected her or him. This act per se might be read to be violent, when perceived as a physical act charged with full force. Yet if the thrown thing is mud mixed with water and the targeted object is the wall in front of the artist, this act acquires another context. This act, of throwing mud to the wall is an act of ‘negation.’ If the target it not specified, we naturally come to focus rather on the act itself of ‘throwing.’ Why does an artist throw (something)? The answer to this question can be found on Cho’s Exodus_Mud Poem:

 

“I step, solitarily, into somewhere I don’t know.”

 

Throwing is an act of negation as well as of escape. But the place to escape through exodus and the goal to reach are not defined. Here, the place to escape is actually the system of ‘inspection’ itself. Throwing represents the exodus from and revolt against the world that surveils and inspects the self.

The artist’s act of throwing mud becomes an intimate revolt. Etymologically, intimate (intime in French and intimus in Latin)is the superlative of interior – thus it indicates something that derives from within, something that is the most personal. The literary definition of intimate is ‘existing the inmost depths of the mind, and closely personal, usually hidden from others.’ Thus the definition brings up the image of the inside of a space or of an intrinsic site. That is the reason why, when we understand intimacy, we associate ‘the interior,’ of a confined space. But intimacy doesn’t only indicate the antonym for the exterior. Intimacy is a notion whose definition has to be expanded toward the public and social significance.

To overcome the limited meaning of ‘interior’ as inner side, or something inherent and hidden, let’s examine the verbal formof intimate (intimer in French), which has the same origin. Intimate as verb indicated originally ‘to penetrate through,’ even ‘through and beyond the mind,’ while later on it developed to mean ‘to let know, to notify and to strengthen (a knowledge).’ The origins of intimate as adjective (intime) and verb (intimer) are clues to understand the broader meaning of the word. In other words, intimacy bears the ideas of interior as well as of exterior in its notion. Now it’d be adequate to discuss Jacque Lacan’s term extimate (extime).

Lacan defined extimacy to include both interior and exterior, indicating exterior that exists within a subject’s interior. In extimacy exist two disparate movements: one is interior that directs toward the outside, the other exterior that is innate within interior. Thus Lacan’s extimacy conveys both directions, which could be a useful method for understanding ‘the act of throwing mud.’

The artist’s act is connected to the social context as it happens in a public space, while it is a scene where the artist declares her intimacy through the act. At the same time, the act represents the basic human desire of expressing interior toward exterior.

The intimate relation is continuously unfolded in the relation of the artist to a matter or to the body in her performance. It is clear that this intimacy between the artist and the matter/ mud transmits to the viewer a certain power and suggests possible changes.

 

Throwing Mud and Falling Mud

Work 3. Falling Eggs, Seoul, 2016

In Falling Eggs, mud falls downward. The chunk of mud pasted by performers to the railing in the building falls down to the floor, dragged by the gravity. Falling from upstairs to downstairs, mud makes even more raised sound, amplified by the gravity. Not only affected by the power given from the person who threw it, mud adds up its own material weight in falling, to hit the floor and its architecture. The two acts of ‘throwing’ and ‘falling’ mud are fundamentally different. When the former implies a conscious act of adding human force to the throwing, the latter means to transit from human will and deed to be driven by the natural force; the power that mobilizes and moves mud is not human force but a natural phenomenon. Here, the artist accepts the materiality of mud as it is, and perceives its movement as it happens. Departing from the active will apparent in the acts of Exodus_Mud Poem, Falling Eggs initiates a scene of movement that induces mud to fall.

 

 

Intimate Revolt

Work 3. Falling Eggs, Seoul, 2016

Falling Eggs consists of performances of mud and human bodies. In the performance of body, women and men with neutral expression and attitude entangle to form a kind of a mass. The borders and limits of each body are connected and extended, where this connection isn’t restricted to specific parts of bodies but all parts of different bodies bump, touch, caress and follow

each other. Bodies move as a single lump, through a loose yet sturdy unison, a linkage comparable to the structure of a mud lump. The lumps of human bodies and mud don’t quite match, yet they merge in tune.

The movements of mud and bodies rotate, roll and interlace, without separating from each other. In the performance of bodies, each body doesn’t seem to aim for any actual movement. One movement leads the next and they naturally connect, without knowing the beginning and the end. The loosely connected bodies rub and pull each other, drag and get dragged to seamlessly continue the movement, where no power of intention is involved. They rather seem to focus on reacting to the each other’s skin and cells below it. Between a body and another as well as the gaps they create, an ever-flowing circular movement emerges.

In this circular movement that Cho’s mud and bodies create, we can read the movement of ré-volte. Révolte is the French word for revolt. The word is composed of the latin verb volvere and voluere in origin. In the sense of ‘whirling in vortex,’ it draws circular movement falling into a volution, dispersing conventional orders. Around the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, its meaning gained both temporal and spatial notions, affected by Italian words such as voluta (spiral), volta (round of time) or voltare (to turn).

In its temporal sense, it indicates ‘restoration of time’ or ‘subversion of time,’ based on the notion of its original ‘circular movement,’ while in the spatial sense, it means ‘enclosure’ and ‘covering.’ Cho’s work engaging mud and bodies is realized from this motif of temporal and spatial revolt. The work liberates itself from the familiar and narrow meaning of political and activist notion of the word ‘revolt,’ thus it is not a coincidence for us to notice the revolt of the artist herself as well as of the material of mud.

The intimate revolt that Cho pursues diffuses from herself through the material and performers to finally reach us. “It is not exclusively in the world of action that this revolt is realized but in that of psychical life and its social manifestations (writing, thought, art), … this cultural revolt intrinsically concerns public life and consequently has profoundly political implications. In fact, it poses the question of another politics, that of permanent conflictuality.” 1 Cho’s artistic revolt appeals to our ‘intimate revolts,’ as we are facing her performance of conflictuality with soft mud and subtle yet seamlessly moving and connecting clashes.

 

 

 

​1. Julia Kristeva, La révolte intime – Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse II. Paris, Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1997, p.19