BLACK HOLES HAVE NO HAIR: 박보나

BLACK HOLES HAVE NO HAIR

Bona Park

8 - 27 October 2019

0. Black holes have no hair 

When a star collapses, it creates a black hole, but all black holes we see are all the same pitch dark. Each could be characterized by mass, angular momentum if they rotate, and electricity if they have electrical energy but it's still not easy for humans to distinguish them. There is no way to differentiate between two non-rotating black holes with the same mass. John A. Wheeler, an American theoretical physicist, explained these characteristics of black holes with the ‘no-hair theorem’ which states that black holes are hairless. The idea is that they don't have hair, so you cannot easily identify their personalities. This can be taken that the differences are hard to see and indistinguishable at a glance. 

The differences and relationships are hidden like a black hole from a distance in every event but if you get closer, you begin to read unexpectedly close relationships or, reversely, notice subtle differences. Park Chung-hee's coup d'état, Korean troops deployed in the Vietnam War, and the teahouse hostage situation may seem like separate cases, but they are strongly connected. On the other hand, there is always a minute gap between the actual event and its narrative, interpretation, and representation. 

Just as black holes are hairless and look similar to each other but are actually different, all events and images in this world are not what they seem. Once you start to see the differences, the world is no longer the same.

0. <Burning> by Chang-dong Lee

The main character of the film writes. He wants to become a novelist but works at a part-time job to make a living. As the protagonist is torn between his mental ideals and material needs, two characters appear to represent each world. Wander between the two, the protagonist is lost halfway between the fictional world of the novel(let’s call it spirit) and the real world(the matter). The two worlds seem related and unrelated at the same time. They overlap and drift apart. Everything is there but invisible, and the things in front of you seem fake. He can find neither the unpredictable woman nor the greenhouse that an incomprehensible man burns as a hobby. The protagonist struggles to confirm that his world is real and to write.

A meteor falls, landing anywhere at any time, and history is written even as the rocks fall indifferently in space (Black Hole 1, 2019). The coup d'état of Park Chung-hee in 1961 seems unrelated to the coffee shop hostage crisis that has been an epidemic for some time. President Park, who seized power in a coup d'état, sent troops to fight in the Vietnam War to gain the support of the United States. Meanwhile, North Korea supported North Vietnam and intensified its armed offensive against the South, causing chaos. One such incident was the infiltration of 31 armed special forces including Kim Shin-jo, on 21 January 1968. Under the pretext of strengthening security, Park created a local reserve army and supplied them with weapons. This made it easy for the hostage-takers to obtain weapons, which they then used to stage hostage situations in tea rooms. In the tyranny of a dictatorship, individual grievances are expressed in an unusual and dramatic way.  The falling meteor, coup d'état, and hostage-taking may not be related at all, but they may be, like the events and characters in <Burning>. The mental energy and physical movements of each incident are intertwined and willingly connected in the world of images. But since everything is just the result of imperfect human choices, the connections are very unpredictable and capricious.

0. <Orlando> by Virginia Woolf

The eponymous hero is a beautiful aristocratic young man with a desire to write and a passion for love. He undergoes a mysterious change of sex at the middle of the story and lives for more than hundreds years into modern times without ageing perceptibly and continues to write. Orlando as a woman, reminisces about London's past and feels the present, she hears far-away cry of the night watchman--'Just twelve o'clock on a frosty morning'. writes Woolf. So Orlando feels, ‘All was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun’. The time when a new world begins: 'Twelve o'clock on a frosty morning'.

Black Hole 2(2019) is a two-channel video work that captures the performance of actors. In one channel, the actors repeat four actions in a clockwise rotation. In the other, the actors sit around the table talking about their performances. The clockwise performance consists of drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, praying and watching, crying, and repressing and giving orders. The actors sit around and chat, talking about performances in which their roles and movements were different, making small talk about the relationship between actors and writers, the difference between theatre and fine art, and joking about the world, creation, order and disorder. While the actors pretend not to be acting, they ask for the time. Having the coffee constantly being refilled and the time out of synch each other, slowly coming closer. The actor answering the time is always: 'Twelve o'clock on a frosty morning'. An awakening moment that reveals that two opposing worlds - chance and planning, the existence and the creation, history and image - coexist and revolve within the work.

0. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

In Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84, the hero, a writer, and the heroine, a contract killer, look at the sky and suddenly notice two moons. The moment they realize that there are two moons, they feel that their world is no longer the same. They begin to suspect that it might be fictional and that it might not be the only world. The two moons act as a stain that marks the boundary between the fictional world of the novel and the real world outside the story.

On the first page of the book, Haruki transcribes a line from the song <It’s Only a Paper Moon> by Harold Arlen and Edgar E.Y. Harburg: ‘It's a Barnum and Bailey world. Just as phony as it can be. But it wouldn't be make-believe. If you believe in me.’ The lyrics allude to the fictional nature of novel, or the representational nature of images. At the same time, it also seems like a song about how events in the real world exist.

The ball floating like a moon in the washbowl(Black Hole 4, 2019) is an image of other works in the exhibition space, of a black hole, also of the world and the whole universe. The contrived moment when the illusion of the reflected ball in the water corresponds to reality, and the moment of the viewer’s face reflected by the water, reveals that two worlds coexist. The black balls trace along the boundary of the world in the image and the real world outside, as the two moons in <1Q84>.

‘This is a world of spectacle’. As if a dream, as if reality. (Black Hole 3, 2019)

‘This is a world of spectacle’. Look closely, you see other things.

Bona Park, 2019