Candle light parade in Korea

The nights of candle light in Korea

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea agreed on Friday to resume beef imports from the United States, ending a ban begun in 2003 over concerns about mad cow disease.

The decision removed a major dispute between the allies, hours before President Bush was to meet South Korea’s new president, Lee Myung-bak, in Washington to discuss free trade and North Korea.

Mr. Lee welcomed the beef deal as “removing a stumbling block for the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement,” the news agency Yonhap reported from Washington.
South Korea suspended American beef imports in 2003 after an outbreak of mad cow disease, depriving United States exporters of their third-largest market for American beef.
Agricultural officials in Seoul said Friday that South Korea would allow American beef imports from cattle younger than 30 months. Younger cows are believed to be less at risk from mad cow disease. - From New York Times

The article here says Korea will import beef that is younger than 30 months. So now Korea became one of few countries that takes this aged beef and people in Korea are strongly complaining toward Korean government and the new president Mr. Lee because of the worry of the mad cow disease. Citizens gather together and hold candle light to show their dissatisfaction about the pact from FTA(Free Trade Agreement) and the decision of Korean government. According to the totalization from Korean media, now number of people who participate for this gathering are almost 15,000 only in Seoul at every night from 7 to 11 pm.

I really want to see the happening, I am sure this scenery will be beautiful.
Whether the beef is fatal to take for Korean, I think the fact that the candle lights of the spontaneous union are meaningful and it can be very political art that people can make.

LMCC

I went to the open studio of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council with my friend. One of the studio is near by Cooper Union and we only went there to see the artists and their works.









It says,
Programming at the Council stokes the cultural life of the city with art, ideas and imagination. We encourage art where it’s least expected, stimulate conversation around the ideas of the moment, and continually burnish and tarnish the links between culture and capital from our nook in New York’s Financial District.












The studio has 10 artists and they work hard. I was amazed seeing some great quality installations. And above all, I like their freedom and experimental attitude in their work.





I don't remember the artist of this fiber collage painting but I do remember he had rock band concert inside his space. It was cool.





What I were really fascinated with is Larrissa Bates' paintings.








The work of Larissa Bates focuses on cultural constructions of masculinity and gender tropes. Her painted narratives follow the ever war hungry Little Napoleons as they take over the world, one colony at a time, and face their bitter enemies, the Cry Babies. -From LMCC




I and my friend had wine with cookies. It was fun to appreciate so fresh artists' works.

Mental maps and metaphysics

Only he can be an artist who has a religion of his own, an original view of the infinite. - Friedrich von Schlegel, c.1800

At the turn of the eighteenth century, the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel described the German artist as "righteous, ingenuous, thorough, precise and profound... thereby innocent and a little clumsy." In this perfect conjunction of character traits Schlegel saw the ideal candidate to create a new mythology for a philosophically exhausted world. This notion - that the artist's personal vision could offer new archetypes, fresh allegories, and alternative explanations of the visible world - has reappeared in the drawing projects of Franz Ackermann, Mark Manders, and Matthew Ritchie, each of whom has embarked upon a multiyear endeavor of making drawings that exemplify, describe, or map out new structures through which to perceive the world.

- From the exhibtion Drawing Now: Eight Propositions

What I am scared is.....

What I am scared about is the teenagers in my country, Korea.

They are so confident about something they haven't thought about.

I don't know where this confidence comes from but they exist strongly.

If I ask them where it is from, they will answer "am I pretty today?"....

Of course I like young girls, I am male. But no thanks the group all.

That is enough.

War lover

I thought, it is impossible to love war? Can't I think war as romantic event?

And I found a Vietnamese female artist, An-My Le.

She was born in Vietnam and lived during the Vietnam War in her childhood. She experienced the war as a kid. So she remembers smell, air and feeling of the past.

Exerpt from art:21, she interviewed,

"I was more interested in drawing people into my work to think about the issues that envelop war - representations of war, landscape and terrain in war."

"War can be beautiful. I think it's the idea of the sublime - moments that are horrific but, at the same time, beautiful - moments of communion with the landscape and nature."

So I think, everything what can be criticized can also be sublimed as War.

Because everything can be art :)

Hermann Nitsch

ART, RITUAL AND RELIGION

Nitsch’ endeavour to initiate the ritual of rituals must be seen against the broader background of the idea that art is the successor of religion. To phrase it in his own words: ‘To me, art is a kind of priesthood, since traditional religions have lost their spell’ (p. 39). In a manifesto he says of the ‘existential-sacral’ painting: ‘We strive for a consequent sacralisation of art and for a thorough spiritualization of existence whereby man becomes the priest of Being’ (p. 46). And ‘man’, such is of course Nitsch himself: ‘I am the very expression of the whole creation’ (p. 64). Like Wagner Bayreuth, so Nitsch has destined Prinzendorf to be the sanctuary where on a regular base the six-day Orgien Mysterien cult has to be performed. In view of this mission, he even founded a private ‘Stiftung’.

The return of art to the sacral is – not otherwise than its dissolution in philosophy – nothing else than a stride outside the realm of art, and a regressive dream at that. The latter is always belied by historic reality. In his inaugural speech Nitsch describes the cult in Prinzendorf as follows: ‘I saw the growing horde of participants to the feast, rapt in trance, romping down the alley of chestnut trees, shouting and jubilant’ (p. 124). The reality was slightly different: a handful of actors performs the ‘orgiastic ecstasy’, gaped at by a handful of passive spectators, drinking, discussing, laughing and smoking… And no more different are the highlights from the six-day ritual, condensed into proportions appropriate for their performance in a gallery, that Nitsch has staged hither and thither. In the unshakable conviction that they are witnessing the (umpteenth) excess of excesses, the (umpteenth) transgression of transgressions, the conspiring spectators feel utterly united in the secret brotherhood of genuine art lovers, the spearhead of mankind. It is only a pity that the formerly obligatory raid of the police – the cherry on the cake, if not the proof of the pudding - tends nowadays to remain forthcoming …

Whatever Nitsch' intention may have been, his ‘primeval ritual’ is no more than a spectacle - sheer ‘Darstellungstheater’ – not at all a real ritual, merely a mere performance of it. What is performed here on the borderline between ‘faking’ and ‘playing’ – not otherwise than in a strip-tease or an sm-session - is in no way the ‘primeval drama’, suppose such a thing would be interesting at all. The alleged primal ritual staged in the ‘Orgien Mysterien Theater’ rather reminds of children playing priest, which, just like playing school, used to be the favourite business of children obliged to attend the church. And with playing doctor or blowing up frogs it has in common that such ‘playing ritual’ is the dreamt of alibi to indulge in the scorned sado-masochistic pleasures, mistakenly interpreted as sexual, as analysed above.

UbuWeb Films Hermann Nitsch (b. 1938)