The fan kicked with a loud drone. A gigantic red hand flopped ominously over the tape that was meant to protect artworks against viewers before I lung to me with an accusing finger. Because it was filled with airs while I breathed my breath, quietly to a cream-colored rock and tapped it lightly, as if he wants to say, That’s you. You are closed like a rock. When it comes to Christine Sun Kim’s All day all day long At the Whitney Museum of American Art you could say that the word “viewer” is a bit short. The exhibition is almost interactive in its potential to act (as illustrated by the suspected finger of the above work, ‘attention’, 2022, by Kim and Thomas Mader). Through translating acts that are hilarious, furious and moving alternative, Kim lets the air hum with the previously non -evalued dimensions of ordinary things, from the physical pressure of bureaucratic strength to the line work from movement to music in daily situations.
Those among us who understand multiple languages are fluent in the way in which one can bounce another, so that latent qualities are unveiled and the world is written in great. Kim, who is deaf, often translates between American Sign Language (ASL) and American English into her works, including drawings, sculptures, videos and paintings. In the video “Palm Reader” (2020), for example, she and Mader, a conceptual artist and frequent employee of Kim’s, the signs for different words related to authority, such as “State”, “Constitution” and “Rule.” They leave see that each takes the shape of one finger letter Tapped at the top of the palm and then at the bottom and remembered the double action of an official stamping of a ink path and then a document. This manifests the way in which governments and other authoritative authorities exert invisible but powerful bureaucratic pressure through physical actions.
Kim’s art is indeed not only the foreground of the apparently obvious Activates That knowledge with viewers. I noticed that I copied the movements of “Wise” (2022), in which she translates the minute movement of fingers against the palm into black masses of charcoal that seem to bounce off the edges of the paper. These intimate drawings are blown up in massive murals, which suggests me the kinetic energy of people in a room. When I turned around, I saw the swirling swirls of exchanges between couples, girlfriends and strangers while moving around each other on a busy night.
Kim is particularly skilled in the often ignored communicative registers of humor and gossip. In the series Degrees of deaf anger (2018), for example, she uses diagrams of mathematical perspectives to display the feelings caused by different situations that describe the words ‘good’ and ‘reflex’, which both a kind of corner and a kind of reaction. It is the type of section that is simple, flexible, recognizable and iterable, such as a meme template or a jargon. A good example: a visitor immediately picked it up and told her boyfriend: “My blunt anger would be traffic.” It helps Kim is hilarious. I laughed aloud around the “locally produced rock” mentioned in the medium line of the “attention” label, and in the pie chart “Why my Hearing Parents Sign” (2019), one of the wedges reads: “So they can tell me Secrets (they don’t do that).
Kim enjoys translation, not only between languages or systems of notation, but between concepts and feelings or experiences in works such as “how to measure loudness” and “how to measure silence” (both 2014). In the first rank, she chives “Asian flush” above “Subway announcement” but under “screaming against TSA Officer”, which suggests a volume for physical discomfort. The last work compares volume with psychological discomfort: she uses the musical notation “P“Softness indicates to notice the silent treatment as”Pppppppppp“The silence, one could say, is loud.
But Kim also acts in the boundaries and failures of such systems. In “Competon Languages I” (2020), two curved musical Notes-As-Staffs are stacked on top and away from each other, with the titular words on the opposite sides, incompatible. She also draws attention to the exhaustion of communication with hearing people in a world that we have built (“She is ruthless … dedicated to sharing her deaf experience with others,” says the exhibition text). In “degrees of deaf anger within educational institutions” (2018), she points to the Kafkaesque state to enable herself to register for a class because it is not popular enough with deaf students for the school for a one to hire interpreter. In “Degrees of My Deaf Rage in The Art World” (2018) she calls on the art world – with “Guggenheim Accessibility Manager” a certain source of anger.
But Kim’s most emotionally effective communicative instrument is perhaps her hand, which she uses to produce lyrical, agitated, playful and bittersweet tones, always with a characteristic touch that suggests variation and distortion. I think of those strikes and smears like her ‘voice’ in this specific medium, and it often vibrates with anger and pain. Feedback, we know from “How to Meas Loudness”, is one of the most intrusive sounds; In “Feedback aftermath” (2012) the staff with four lines vibrates violently. Speaking jobs also indicate this anger: in “degrees of institutional deaf anger” (2018) she fills in a corner with turbulent, almost angry overlapping strokes, with the words “Organgizer [sic] Not willing to compensate interpreters for social/ dinner hours ”in whimsical letters.
I was struck by a strange quote from Kim embedded in the wall text next to the gigantic flopping hands of ‘attention’. The work, she says, is “trying to attract his attention or to draw attention to something forever.” Coded in that strange and powerful word, “Forever”, I feel fatigue and dismissal – Sisyphus pushes his fatal rock forever on a hill. But there is also an abundance, a boundless potential of potential, in the word. From the inevitably messy translations and disagreement between ASL and American English, indeed between movement through the space and the flat surface of the page, between the intensity of the feeling and the simplicity of the spare charcoal line, iteres Kim’s work – and repeats and repeats – How wonderful, devastating, tiring, not enough, too much, funny and beautiful language can be.
and white space)
Christine Sun Kim: All day all day long Continue in the Whitney Museum of American Art (99 Gansevoort Street, West Village, Manhattan) until July 6. The exhibition was compiled by Jennie Goldstein, Pavel Pyś, Tom Finkelpearl, Rose Pallone and Brandon Eng.
