WILLIAM BOOT AND SEOK IN KO
The intention of this essay is not to formally analyse the works of WILLIAM
BOOT AND SEOK IN KO, nor even to describe them. I have not seen their works
in the real for at least two years. For a writer on work this is a disadvantage—for
one is forced to focus on the image of the work, that is the work primarily as
picture and not upon the experience of image as a plastic and concrete reality,
as painting. On the other hand this distance from the actual, demands that the
writer place the work in a broader context.
From reproductions, one can glean the importance of their respective crafts
and of the matter of paint to these artists. With this in mind, what I do wish to
do is present several ideas which may locate their work within useful contexts,
and where we can take time to recover the many layers of meanings contained
within the work.
WILLIAM BOOT AND SEOK IN KO share a desire for painting to transform
matter into the Sublime. Since the 1980s these terms; painting, transform, matter
and the Sublime have been notoriously problematic—particularly in the West, where
certain streams of post modern theoretical and artistic practice questioned the role
of media specificity and the possibility of recovering content. I think here of the writings
of Adorno and the appropriations of Sherrie Levine. However recently there has
been a growing interest in this very area of content that is at once so critical
and difficult to deal with if we are to negotiate our own presentness in the world.
These terms painting, transform, matter and the Sublime seem simple; we think
we know what they are, but all of them are contested ideas or categories of
practice. I presume that we have all felt what might be called the Sublime...I will
even be arrogant enough to define it for the sake of my argument. The Sublime
is the feeling of awe, wonder, fear we experience in front of a great immensity,
■ ••the fear of the dissolution of self in the face of the real --- but when we are
asked to describe or represent this sensation our attempts turn out to be rather
unsatisfactory, (as I have just proven) ••• word or painted images tend to tie it
down — oversimplify its complexity, meaning becomes extended into an
intellectual domain rather than the moment of felt recognition that gives one the
sense of wholeness--—the relationship between convention (the language) and
the experience becomes confused ••• we easily slip into cliche rather than
archetype.
WILLIAM BOOT AND SEOK IN KO are willing to run the risk of failure, to deal
with these issues --
ON SOMETHING AND NOTHING AMID TIME AND PLACE
WILLIAM BOOT AND SEOK IN KO have had a longstanding interest in things
and no -things — in positives and negatives — as any painter knows a positive
mark creates a negative field --- this simple fact has enabled them to make
paintings which deal with these ideas, which act as models capable of
manifesting and representing the dynamic balance that this suggests.
WILLIAM BOOT AND SEOK IN KO have been working together since meeting at
RMIT in the late 1990s during their post graduate studies. They have exhibited
together in both Korea and Australia, in some ways their position highlights the
new opportunities and challenges of intra cultural dialogue.
THEY ARE PARTICIPATING IN A LIVED POST MODERN CONDITION.
SIGNIFICANT MATTER(S): SURFACING and CONTENT
For both these artists, painting's plasticity remains important and its surface
can be seen as the place where painting meets the world.
This place or site of surface is one of their key areas of exploration.
Surface is not just a physical entity, but an arena in time where perceptions
meet and change. Surface is a place for the manipulation of perception, in
order to shift and create multiple readings. Like a reflection on the window,
sometimes one sees the window in space, at other times what is behind it and
at others what is reflected on it, oneself looking. Here again, perception
demonstrates its link with intention. We perceive by excluding what is
unnecessary to us at any given time.
Stephen Melville's use of Hegel to discuss French "abstract" painting of the
1970s, has relevance here. He states:
Hegel takes the surface of painting as a divide from content. French art
took it, as a zone of division, an essential fact of that surface as a
surface—It marks painting as lets say all edges, everywhere hinged, both
to itself and to what it adjoins, making itself out of such a relation.1
I interpret this statement as meaning that we can read surface, not as a divide,
so much as a liminal space, a place of meeting and transition. This is a
position I see closer and relevant to the contemporary condition of art practice.
1 Stephen Melville "Counting as Painting" in As Painting: Division and Displacement ed.
and organized by Philip Armstrong , Laura Lisbon, Stephen . W. Mellville. Columbus, Ohio.
Wexner Centre for the Arts. Ohio State University 2001. p.21.
Painting acknowledges its own presentness ---its thereness — it
acknowledges its own superficiality—(and by implication our own). Hegel
suggests painting by withdrawing from its sculptural fullness to the
limitations of its 2 dimensional surface, or the narrow zone of pictorial
relief {my italics) ••-.is capable of bringing to us an acknowledgement of
our inwardness. For Hegel painting's surface was a limit, it was also the
surfacing of things.2
The French painter, Martin Barre, sees the space of painting as its surface.
"Surface was seen as a place where visibility and invisibility discover
themselves as one another's inner lining."3 Or where idea, sensation and
matter meet.
Barre suggests that the surface has and is an affleurement, a blooming in
relationship to light and air. I associate affleurementhere with reflection, which
is a shift from surfacing and image (Object), into passage and light (Time),
that is, it manifests an awareness of the movement of meaning via the
spectators' perception and negotiation of their viewing positions in space.4
NATURE HISTORY ART
Michel Parmentier a founding member of the French movement BMPT wishes to
confront us through painting with what he claims is an impersonal or
anonymous nature, with a fact, indeed with the silence of the painted fact,
without reference to any metaphysical scheme. He states:
2 Ibid. p. 23.
3 Ibid. p. 64.
4 Surface is a place of meeting and transition that accommodates simultaneously, many different codes of
meaning from matter, formal, indexical and iconic. Reflection creates a mirror for image, light and the
present. My understanding of Time and space, therefore, differs in degree, from artists like Helio Oiticica,
who had been influenced by the Concrete and Kinetic Art movements of Europe and South America, from
as early as the 1930s. See Helio Oititica February 16 1961, Aspiro ae Grande Labrinto. Rio de Janerio.
Rocco 1986 as quote in Douglas Fogle "The Trouble with Painting" in Painting at the End of the World p18.
His aims were to" extend the picture into space and challenge the idea of painting as an "object". The
problem of painting, illusionism as he saw it, "is resolved by the destruction of the picture, or by its
incorporation in space and time. I am not so much concerned with the destruction of the picture as with
its extension into the complexity of the world, and for it to create within that complexity, a specific
category of experience, a space for the recognition of perceiving.
"When we are in the presence of snow, we experience a natural phenomena so
when we are in the presence of painting, we are in the presence of a historical
fact."5
It is this meeting between painting as a plastic practice capable of generating
physical and imaginative phenomena and painting as the culmination of
pictorial convention (language) amid an ongoing time and place (nature(s) and
history(ies)) that come together in the work of William Boot and Seok in Ko.
Their cultural differences and similarities coexist and seem to unlike Parmentier
relish the struggle of defining new metaphysical schemes.
David Thomas August 2004
The intention of this essay is not to formally analyse the works of WILLIAM
BOOT AND SEOK IN KO, nor even to describe them. I have not seen their works
in the real for at least two years. For a writer on work this is a disadvantage—for
one is forced to focus on the image of the work, that is the work primarily as
picture and not upon the experience of image as a plastic and concrete reality,
as painting. On the other hand this distance from the actual, demands that the
writer place the work in a broader context.
From reproductions, one can glean the importance of their respective crafts
and of the matter of paint to these artists. With this in mind, what I do wish to
do is present several ideas which may locate their work within useful contexts,
and where we can take time to recover the many layers of meanings contained
within the work.
WILLIAM BOOT AND SEOK IN KO share a desire for painting to transform
matter into the Sublime. Since the 1980s these terms; painting, transform, matter
and the Sublime have been notoriously problematic—particularly in the West, where
certain streams of post modern theoretical and artistic practice questioned the role
of media specificity and the possibility of recovering content. I think here of the writings
of Adorno and the appropriations of Sherrie Levine. However recently there has
been a growing interest in this very area of content that is at once so critical
and difficult to deal with if we are to negotiate our own presentness in the world.
These terms painting, transform, matter and the Sublime seem simple; we think
we know what they are, but all of them are contested ideas or categories of
practice. I presume that we have all felt what might be called the Sublime...I will
even be arrogant enough to define it for the sake of my argument. The Sublime
is the feeling of awe, wonder, fear we experience in front of a great immensity,
■ ••the fear of the dissolution of self in the face of the real --- but when we are
asked to describe or represent this sensation our attempts turn out to be rather
unsatisfactory, (as I have just proven) ••• word or painted images tend to tie it
down — oversimplify its complexity, meaning becomes extended into an
intellectual domain rather than the moment of felt recognition that gives one the
sense of wholeness--—the relationship between convention (the language) and
the experience becomes confused ••• we easily slip into cliche rather than
archetype.
WILLIAM BOOT AND SEOK IN KO are willing to run the risk of failure, to deal
with these issues --
ON SOMETHING AND NOTHING AMID TIME AND PLACE
WILLIAM BOOT AND SEOK IN KO have had a longstanding interest in things
and no -things — in positives and negatives — as any painter knows a positive
mark creates a negative field --- this simple fact has enabled them to make
paintings which deal with these ideas, which act as models capable of
manifesting and representing the dynamic balance that this suggests.
WILLIAM BOOT AND SEOK IN KO have been working together since meeting at
RMIT in the late 1990s during their post graduate studies. They have exhibited
together in both Korea and Australia, in some ways their position highlights the
new opportunities and challenges of intra cultural dialogue.
THEY ARE PARTICIPATING IN A LIVED POST MODERN CONDITION.
SIGNIFICANT MATTER(S): SURFACING and CONTENT
For both these artists, painting's plasticity remains important and its surface
can be seen as the place where painting meets the world.
This place or site of surface is one of their key areas of exploration.
Surface is not just a physical entity, but an arena in time where perceptions
meet and change. Surface is a place for the manipulation of perception, in
order to shift and create multiple readings. Like a reflection on the window,
sometimes one sees the window in space, at other times what is behind it and
at others what is reflected on it, oneself looking. Here again, perception
demonstrates its link with intention. We perceive by excluding what is
unnecessary to us at any given time.
Stephen Melville's use of Hegel to discuss French "abstract" painting of the
1970s, has relevance here. He states:
Hegel takes the surface of painting as a divide from content. French art
took it, as a zone of division, an essential fact of that surface as a
surface—It marks painting as lets say all edges, everywhere hinged, both
to itself and to what it adjoins, making itself out of such a relation.1
I interpret this statement as meaning that we can read surface, not as a divide,
so much as a liminal space, a place of meeting and transition. This is a
position I see closer and relevant to the contemporary condition of art practice.
1 Stephen Melville "Counting as Painting" in As Painting: Division and Displacement ed.
and organized by Philip Armstrong , Laura Lisbon, Stephen . W. Mellville. Columbus, Ohio.
Wexner Centre for the Arts. Ohio State University 2001. p.21.
Painting acknowledges its own presentness ---its thereness — it
acknowledges its own superficiality—(and by implication our own). Hegel
suggests painting by withdrawing from its sculptural fullness to the
limitations of its 2 dimensional surface, or the narrow zone of pictorial
relief {my italics) ••-.is capable of bringing to us an acknowledgement of
our inwardness. For Hegel painting's surface was a limit, it was also the
surfacing of things.2
The French painter, Martin Barre, sees the space of painting as its surface.
"Surface was seen as a place where visibility and invisibility discover
themselves as one another's inner lining."3 Or where idea, sensation and
matter meet.
Barre suggests that the surface has and is an affleurement, a blooming in
relationship to light and air. I associate affleurementhere with reflection, which
is a shift from surfacing and image (Object), into passage and light (Time),
that is, it manifests an awareness of the movement of meaning via the
spectators' perception and negotiation of their viewing positions in space.4
NATURE HISTORY ART
Michel Parmentier a founding member of the French movement BMPT wishes to
confront us through painting with what he claims is an impersonal or
anonymous nature, with a fact, indeed with the silence of the painted fact,
without reference to any metaphysical scheme. He states:
2 Ibid. p. 23.
3 Ibid. p. 64.
4 Surface is a place of meeting and transition that accommodates simultaneously, many different codes of
meaning from matter, formal, indexical and iconic. Reflection creates a mirror for image, light and the
present. My understanding of Time and space, therefore, differs in degree, from artists like Helio Oiticica,
who had been influenced by the Concrete and Kinetic Art movements of Europe and South America, from
as early as the 1930s. See Helio Oititica February 16 1961, Aspiro ae Grande Labrinto. Rio de Janerio.
Rocco 1986 as quote in Douglas Fogle "The Trouble with Painting" in Painting at the End of the World p18.
His aims were to" extend the picture into space and challenge the idea of painting as an "object". The
problem of painting, illusionism as he saw it, "is resolved by the destruction of the picture, or by its
incorporation in space and time. I am not so much concerned with the destruction of the picture as with
its extension into the complexity of the world, and for it to create within that complexity, a specific
category of experience, a space for the recognition of perceiving.
"When we are in the presence of snow, we experience a natural phenomena so
when we are in the presence of painting, we are in the presence of a historical
fact."5
It is this meeting between painting as a plastic practice capable of generating
physical and imaginative phenomena and painting as the culmination of
pictorial convention (language) amid an ongoing time and place (nature(s) and
history(ies)) that come together in the work of William Boot and Seok in Ko.
Their cultural differences and similarities coexist and seem to unlike Parmentier
relish the struggle of defining new metaphysical schemes.
David Thomas August 2004
