Tuning-in to the World: Bringing The Sounds of a South Korean Biennale to Chicago
Work by Kim Gordon on display outside of the Logan Center.
by Zachary Cahill, Director of Programs and Fellowships, Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry
Sun. Rain. Wind. Clouds. Dawn. Dusk. Night. Late Night. Helicopters. Cars. Diesel engines. Children’s parties. The calm that has its own sound.
Attunement.
The poet Wallace Stevens famously “placed a jar in Tennessee,” and in so doing, (figuratively) re-oriented space. By adding the object in his poem, Anecdote of A Jar, he showed how one could articulate an otherwise formless landscape. I think Stevens was telling us that sometimes our surroundings become so rote and familiar they begin to vanish from our perception until the intervention of an anomalous object grants us the opportunity to see things with fresh eyes or hear things with fresh ears.
For the past two months, I have been one of the caretakers of the Gray Center’s own “jar in Tennessee.” 11 Musicians for 11 Writers Outside at the Logan Center for the Arts constitutes the third stanza in the larger project the Busan Biennale: The Chicago Chapter. In November of 2020, writer and curator Stephanie Cristello reached out to me and Mike Schuh (Gray Center’s Assistant Director of Fellowships and Operations) to gauge our interest in partnering with her on bringing a portion of the Busan Biennale to Chicago. While the Busan Biennale was effectively shuttered to both local and international audiences due to the pandemic, Cristello thought the Gray Center might want to collaborate on sharing the sonic aspects of the biennale with students and Chicago audiences. Cristello previously worked with us on our sound and music issue of Portable Gray and is a fan of Gray Sound, an experimental music series conceived and organized by our director, Seth Brodsky. The collaboration was all the more serendipitous for while Brodsky was on sabbatical for the year, the Gray Center’s Interim Director, Ghenwa Hayek, had set our agenda with thinking about ways in which we could support artists and scholars around the world who were being severely impacted by the pandemic.
What is more, we had no plan for how to go about bringing part of the Busan Biennale to Chicago—it would be a true experimental collaboration in sync with the Gray Center’s founding ethos. Of course, the most obvious challenge was how to do ANYTHING in the context of a deadly pandemic. So we decided to let our approach be guided simply by considering what we could do at any given moment that was in line with health and safety guidelines. Obvious enough. We began the enterprise in March 2021 with an online conversation between biennale artists Kim Heecheon and Kim Gordon with Stephanie and Artistic Director of the Biennale Jacob Fabricius. The conversation was bookended with the screening of both artist's films, which gave audiences a substantial taste of their work, as well supplying some insight to the context in Busan and an overview of the exhibition. This was followed by a Livestream concert by the Busan-based indie rock band Say Sue Me. Both events were hosted by Chicago’s Empty Bottle Presents. When the vaccine rollout in the United States was firmly underway and the weather became nicer in Chicago, we were able to open the outdoor sound installation: what I call 11 for 11 for short.
What is so brilliant about Jacob Fabricius’s plan for the biennale was its call and response structuring methodology. Fabricius commissioned eleven writers to respond to the city of Busan and then asked musicians to respond to the texts the writers generated, and artists to respond to all of the above. It was this way of organizing the biennale that against all the odds kind of made it a perfect fit to travel beyond its home in South Korea and invite audiences in Chicago to safely take in art as we emerged from a year and a half of isolation. The baton-passing style of the biennale’s structure has turned out to be a great way for audiences here in Chicago to think about the relations between the arts and a sister city.
What was surprising to me was how the sound installations from a South Korean Biennale began to shift how I perceived the local soundscape around the Logan Center. How at different times during the day the volumes seemed to change depending on the activities going on around the art center—as if the pieces would come in and out of focus depending on the time of day. The texts and music also had the power to transform the spaces they occupied to make them more cinematic as my colleague Mike Schuh pointed out. The Logan Center all of the sudden seemed to have a soundtrack and that soundtrack was telling a story that both was and wasn’t specific to Busan. Both Chicago and Busan displaced each other and in so doing perhaps allow us to see them in a new light, providing us with a chance to re-attune ourselves to Chicago and well, maybe, in some way, the world too.
We would like to dedicate the Busan Biennale: The Chicago Chapter, 11 Writers for 11 Musicians Outside at the Logan Center for the Arts to artist, activist, and Hyde Park resident Gregory Bae. Our project was not conceived directly in relation to recent tragic events driven by Anti-Asian racism here in the United States but we would be remiss not to acknowledge the timing of our project coinciding with this awful moment in American History and express our solidarity with Stop Asian Hate. Greg Bae’s work and passion as Director and co-founder of Chicago API Artists United inspires us and we hope it does you too. You can find out more here: https://www.caau.net/
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The Busan Biennale: The Chicago Chapter presents: 11 Musicians for 11 Writers Outside at the University of Chicago's Logan Center for the Arts.
EXTENDED THROUGH JULY 31st
~Eleven musicians create discrete sound works responding to eleven texts~
Featuring original musical compositions from the 2020 Busan Biennale by Odæri, Say Sue Me, Kim Ildu, Choi Taehyun, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, J-Tong and JinHah, Søren Kjærgaard, Astrid Sonne, 食品まつり a.k.a FOODMAN, Meuko! Meuko!, and a video work by Kim Gordon.
Free and open all day.
**Morning and evenings are optimal viewing times for watching Kim Gordon's video**
Co-presented with the Busan Biennale, Kunsthal Aarhus, the Center for East Asian Studies, and Empty Bottle Presents.