Koreascapade

These jokers turned up the other day in front of Seoul National University’s modern Museum of Art. Here’s the official blurb for their antics:

Parfyme is an artist group consisting of Pelle Brage (b. 1978), Ebbe Dam Meinild (b.1980) & Laurids Sonne (b.1980). Parfyme has brought out several projects in public space within their own field of art, practical research and happenings. Highlighting the spontaneous action and using art as a tool for change, Parfyme uses their surroundings as playground for carrying out projects that covers everything from environmental reflections to thoughts on space and the way we use it and often presented with a great deal of humour.

The idea of this “installation” is very simple. The booth is the headquarters for the “artists” and the ideas boxes, complete with pens and paper, scattered about—you can see one above near the guy in the bumble-bee beanie—is their, umm, act. Actually, the idea boxes are basically the whole act, but it’s the public who are required to scribble down ideas and put them in the boxes, so the public, in effect, is doing the act, or rather the public is doing all of the thinking pertaining to the act. The best ideas were then pinned to the front of the booth, pictured below. The front of it is now covered in notepad papers with scrawls on them.

The “artists” only really had one idea. Build a booth and then just sit back and wait for the ideas of others to role in. Well, I’m going to fill out a slip of paper with my own idea and shove it in the box. It’ll go like this: “Why don’ t you bastards pack up and go home? Come back when you have actually cultivated a talent.”

You can just make out in the makeshift booth some sleeping bags. For a few nights, when it first “opened,” the jokers, or one of them at least, slept there. But nowadays the booth is completely empty. I guess the artists have left to perhaps to enjoy some warmer accommodation at nights.

One afternoon I passed the booth and there was a guy there, doing something at the little table they have to the right of the plastic booth. He was rushing about, busily walking to and fro, doing something at the table, with exacting purpose and speed. But I couldn’t see what he was trying to do, or what there was to really accomplish. Maybe he was trying to convey to observers the act of achievement in progress. It was like he was saying, “Look, I have a lot to do, and I’m really accomplishing something here.”

So, what the hell is this installation doing at MoA? It’s because the museum or gallery has an exhibition entitled “Temperance and Opulence – Art and Design works from Denmark,” and I presume these “happening” guests are part of it.

What a laugh to read that their “field of art” is “practical research and happenings.” That “field” would also describe just about anything anyone has ever done at anytime in the history of the human race. Yeah, they’ve pretty much got everything covered there, which means they can do anything and call it art. Nice strategy.

I can picture it now, how it was all conceived. Parfyme were getting pissed in a bar in Copenhagen after smoking some joints. Living off welfare was getting them down. They wanted to do something constructive with their lives. They wanted to travel to Asia.

They had received an art’s grant once for a “happening,” in which they sat in deck-chairs in a busy city mall, sun baking and sleeping, everyday for a week. It was called “Waking of the Oppressed,” and it was much celebrated among fellow installation artists around town, who were also sick of living off welfare, lounging around, and sleeping the daylight hours away.

After a few more Carlsbergs, and racking their brains to come up with the easiest and quickest piece of crap they could throw together to secure a grant, Parfyme hit on the idea that, since they were supported financially by others, why not get others to come up with their ideas as well? Then they could really sit back and relax. They drafted, on bar napkins, a cheap structure of wood and plastic they could nail together. Then they all went off to have another spliff to celebrate. And so it evolved from there.

These guys have worked out how to make life a permanent holiday. Well done!