Snail's Gallop

In the book The Agony of Eros, by Byung-Chul Han, there is a sentence that pops in my head when I see this performance. "Freely willed self-renunciation, freely willed self-evacuation. A singular process of weakening lays hold of the subject of love- which however, is accompanied by a feeling of strength.

Mr. Lee is subjecting himself to a cowering position through out the performance. He is indeed moving forward, maintaining rhythm and is making a progression. And unlike the other performance artists he not wounding any intense body horror. But he is not comfortable either. He called this Event-Logical Art. The event here was the oppression caused by the Yusin Constituition military dictatorship. This was his inert protest against it. By forcing his body into a state of hyper-restriction and repetition, he made a profound statement about the extreme social and political confinement South Koreans were experiencing daily. The Logic was the everyday torture.

Well the oppression explains the relevance in 1979, but how come a liberal, democratic audience who was not even born during this violence relate to it in 2014 and 2023? This performance is a loop, back and forth rhythmic lines, like the waves that represent heartbeat in an ECG, and two parallel footprint of the creator of heartbeat demolishing them right away. Besides the atopia or even including the atopia, how does a mass audience ranging in between 4 decades resonate with it?

The contemporary audience witness a representation of themselves. There is no one who is stopping him from glitching out of the loop. But he does not do so. Just like any average human being. The loop of a lifestyle that keeps going. The 42nd and Vanderbilt project is a great example. Pictures of the same person from 5 years apart. They don't smile wider, or wear a different kind of clothing, or take a new route to work, don't carry a different coffee order, and not dead. They are all very well alive, but the rhythm is onto an unknown abyss, and the discipline to keep up the rhythm kills every past day, because there is nothing special to remember. All the 1825 days are the same. So as they live by the day, the day is vanished.

But it is not as despairing as it sounds. The artist himself did the same performance when he was 37 and 81 years old. But there were other paintings in between. And little moments to be cherished, mourned, and LIVED.

The first time he performed, he performed as he could not overtly protest the dictators, but the last time he performed, he performed as he understood the concept of how we perceive time and quantitate life with it.