Like many artists of his generation, Young K. makes work that focuses on the media, its role as a vehicle for power, and its ability to condition our perception of the world. He meets manipulation with his own countermanipulation, subverting the media’s presumed authority with acrylic paintings that look very much like enlarged newspaper photographs of monuments, landscapes, and historical events. His modus operandi, subversion through appropriation, seems all too familiar at first. We’ve seen it before—a moralistic, deconstructive strategy that has been defanged by its own appropriation into the mainstream. Yet Young K. is set apart by his ability to be self-critical, to place himself in the path of his own critique of power.
In his work of the mid ’80s, Young K. investigated the way in which our relationship to external phenomena is preconditioned, and how this conditioning is accomplished through images. Those paintings, called “ideographs,” were based on newspaper photographs to which the artist would add plus or minus symbols, which signified his own judgment of the event depicted. His point was to reveal the way we assign either positive or negative values to events, and the media’s power to evoke such simple judgments. While in those paintings the artist revealed the moment of each image’s manipulative power, in the current series he himself assumes the role of manipulator, inventing believable-looking scenes which are in fact carefully painted montages of journalistic photographs. Young K. undermines the credibility of the media by demonstrating the ease with which history can be falsified, recreated. Yet he continues to implicate himself in the very production of images, refusing to set up his art as a politically correct alternative.
This show presents seven paintings which continue the “Historiography: A Documentary series, begun in 1987. They display a sharpening of the artist’s ability to disrupt our faith in pictures. Young K. offers a cynical take on democracy by pitting a fictitious assortment of protesters against an impassive government building in Democracy: East Executive A venue Entrance, Treasury Department, Washington, D.C., 1989, 1988–89. The juxtaposition of the motley group against the imposing monument, which symbolizes absolute economic power, suggests that democracy, like the scene itself, is an elaborate illusion. By fabricating this event, Young K. practices the same deceptive tactics as the very power structure he critiques.
Another false event with real implications is Combat, Olympic, 1/250 Second, October 16, 1988, 1988–89. Tanks and airplanes exchange fire in front of a stadium bearing the Olympic logo, and all is seen as if from a camera lens tinted blood red. This painting articulates the political tension that underlies an apparently peaceful athletic competition. Both Democracy. . . and Combat. . . use media-derived strategies to debunk the myths of democracy and peace, which are themselves constructed by the media.
The artist gives away his game of deception by presenting two disparate versions of another well-known monument in the two panels comprising National Museum of History, Washington, D.C., 1989, 1988–89. In each panel, the museum is elongated almost beyond recognition. Here Young K. metaphorically alters history, but at the same time negates his power by leaving the viewer no chance to believe him. The same is true of Berner Oberland, July 1, 1979 and Berner Oberland, 3:00P.M., July 1, 1989, both 1989, two vastly different landscapes seen from the same position, albeit ten years apart. The titles match, but the landscapes don’t, and again Young K. has made his art impossible to trust.
Aptly included in this show are three photographs of Marcel Duchamp, as well as a piece consisting of several shards of glass, entitled Fragments of the “Large Glass,” Marcel Duchamp, 1915–23, 1989. This inclusion functioned as a punctuation mark for the entire show. The reference to Duchamp underscores Young K.’s irreverence for the cult of images which pervades both our society and the history of art. Far from being a self-empowering gesture, this appropriation is in keeping with the spirit of the paintings. Like Duchamp, Young K. has attempted to break an ongoing cycle of power with a deeply self-critical stance.
—Jenifer P. Borum
