Whistlers: 박보나

to be with oneself in the other -G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

Have you ever laid a dinner out for someone? Bona Park’s solo exhibition Whistlers began from the artist’s connection with an organization entitled WING, which works to support the resilience of women exiting prostitution. After the artist happened to discover an interview with the organization’s CEO Jungeun Choi—who explained human self-sufficiency and rehabilitation in terms of “commitment to cooking and eating your own meals”—she took the idea of the dinner table as a site of rapport and healing and transported it into the realm of art. Within the larger discourses of contemporary art, including global crises and various contemporary issues, Park creates a small dinner table for us to share in. In place of “discourse” that broadens critical horizons, she holds out “friendship” as a way of filling our bellies. These dinner tables as spaces of intimacy center on a form of women’s practice with a deep place in the artist’s heart, conveying a message of solidarity through the layering of close connections and future encounters with her longstanding collaborators.

Bona Park and I have known each other for some time, following one of her solo exhibitions in 2007 as well as an artist-critic matching activity in 2016. We have shared our thoughts over major and minor issues relating to each other’s art and life. I have sometimes invited her over and made meals for her; these days, we often walk our dogs together. We have occasionally gone to see performances together, followed by exchanges of incisive opinions on the way home. Our text exchanges would continue to the next day and the day after that, with the process becoming a familiar part of our ways of thinking as we resolved needless misunderstandings and preconceptions: “A friend of mine is coming over for dinner. Care to join us?” These experiences of occasional togetherness, of embracing and easing, would sometimes end up leading me to unexpected places. Can I describe this as a new stage in the curator and artist’s progression toward an exhibition? Or as a chance companionship forged by two people? It is an ambiguous relationship, neither this nor yet—yet also something obvious. Perhaps I can refer to it as a form of “cultural intimacy” or “intimacy solidarity,” rather than a conceptual collaboration or rational partnership.

Over the course of our lives, we experience friendship with different counterparts in different ways. Those counterparts may include siblings, members of the same or opposite sex, pets, plants, objects, and even works of literature and art such as books. In some cases, we may sense an undeniable intimacy or identification with artists or thinkers who have already passed into the phantom realm (for me, Virginia Woolf is such a case). Through the experience of one story leading into another, through mutual reliance and entrusting and acceptance, through the thicknesses and weights from repeated reading and re-reading, we gain comfort, we learn, we grow, and we stand on our feet again. Even amid the social isolation of the past few years—now a part of our past—we human beings readily adopted unfamiliar technological media and sought news from the people close to it, if only via remote. It may be that this sense of belonging based on emotional bonds represents the minimal unconditional solidarity that must be sustained for us to survive as humans.

For a long time, women were regarded as passive objects rather than active subjects. As a result, we have been left out of the many contemplations of friendship referred to in our history—the friendships that can be found in the texts of thinkers like Aristotle, Montaigne, Blanchot, Levinas, Foucault, Deleuze, or Derrida. This may explain why even today, friendships among men are taken for granted while friendships among women are regarded negatively. I also own collected letters by various writers who shared friendships: letters between Albert Camus and Jean Grenier, letters between Natsume Soseki and Masaoka Shiki, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo. In the process, I have found myself connecting with artistic lives during those eras through the reverberations of truth associated with the letter format. Here, too, the records are all by men. It may be that women ended up alienated from the male province of friendship because of their long exclusion as active subjects; perhaps they were concealed outside or beneath friendship, never achieving proper documentation or definition. It may be that friendships among women are a new kind of relationship that we will need to rediscover going forward—or an old friend that we should reconnect with at once.

Is there truly a difference between male and female friendships? In contrast with the “solemn vows” forged under the hegemonic systems that men have been bound to uphold, friendships between women have existed in a realm closer to hidden emotions, highly subjective and fleeting: the endless choices that came with the vicissitudes of life, and the resulting realizations, mistakes, new desires, and disappointments. Céline Condorelli is an artist whose works straddle the realms of art and architecture, as well as a researcher who considers friendship in terms of the basic politics of alliance and responsibility; in “Too Close to See: Notes on Friendship,” she and the philosopher/theorist Johan Frederik Hartle engage in a dialogue on friendship as a productive concept. A few days ago, I was reading through a book that included that text, and I happened to see an underlined sentence, in which Hartle quoted some sentences from the 25-year correspondence between Hannah Arendt and her friend Mary McCarthy: “‘It’s not that we think so much alike, but that we do this thinking-business for and with each other.”^[1] The message that the “thinking-business” itself can be an effort for friendship’s sake—and that friendship can accordingly be a prerequisite for work—suggests a different direction for collaboration to those of us working in the realm of art. As these words indicate, the most sublime potential within friendship lies in the things developed together by the intellects of colleagues.

Isn’t “friendship” a romantic notion? Not at all. Operating outside or on the fringes of art for art’s sake, Bona Park had explored the back sides, undersides, and surroundings^[2] of ideologically standardized images. Yet she does not present the sort of conceptual art that challenges the system and critiques the ideas of “ownership” or “authorship” of an artwork. Instead, she observes the situations that take shape in the process of working with collaborators in their own realm, as she creates narratives that are original and even extraordinary. The creative process of two or more different individuals working together is so subjective—yet so fleeting and intimate—that it tends to evaporate into words like “labor,” “Other,” and “collaboration” before we even sense it (while remaining inscribed indelibly inside us). As Bona Park embraces these special circumstances, friendship becomes an alternative method or creation or an attitude for achieving a more equitable world: “Friendship is no longer something distinct from labor, but something that sets down roots as ‘emotional labor’ within a shared process of mutual production.”^[3]

In the artwork presented at Bona Park’s solo exhibition Whistlers, there are no contracting and contracted parties, no victims and protectors, no experts and non-experts, no art and non-art. Instead, there is the welcoming, trust, solidarity, friendship, intimacy, and tenderness that bridge the gap, lingering briefly as an “ad hoc driving force.” Park uses that shared place to begin a friendly manifesto aimed at shifting from the lives of others as art to the living truth within the lives of others. The lips of the female WING members passing whistles to each other, the ears of actors whispering out letters, the hands of the unseen artist sewing one stitch at a time—the warmth they share causes our own lips to purse, our own ears to perk up, our own fingers to move. As I look back on the last few years of us opening up each other’s worlds—becoming sources of thought for one another as artists, curators, and individuals—I feel that if time spent together can become a process of collaboration, and if the friendship created with that can produce something in the form of an exhibition, perhaps this exhibition is opening up that possibility. That may be the whistle that Whistlers shares.