In 2005 Pool has organized an exhibition entitled 'Money', which had approached the issue of ‘money’ in the lives of artists. Passing another five years after that, art space pool proposes in 'Money 2, the Comics' to address the question of money again, in its relation to much more specified mode of artistic conception and an intrinsic mechanism of contemporary comics practices today. Rather than repeating a sociological examination or econo-political criticism on something abstract called ‘capital’ in neoliberal global order, 'Money 2, the Comics' responds to the tangible subject of artists’ money and addresses its actual position and influence it has in the process of perceiving, conceiving and executing art practices. This project therefore is designed as an ongoing four parallel workshops which manifest particular aspects of artists’ experience of money as practice itself.
Money is not just a means of sustaining a physical survival of an individual, but a confining and repressive agent that pre-dominates the scope and capacity of creative ideas today. Transmitted in the circuit of market and systems, money demands that an individual artist should play the role of consumer in researching even small pieces of information and resources. Even after succeeding in materializing an ‘artwork,’ many of which are remained undistributed due to the censorship by the market. In spite of, or because of this surplus of artworks in stock, an expectation about an individual artist’s creative originality is getting strengthened as a selection criterion in the survival of the fittest. Then, is an innate mechanism of art conception itself fit in this money order? Could we visually suggest an indefinable logic of ‘visual thinking’ to be creative and even productive? This project finds one of the possible ways in comics.
In ‘Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art’, the cartoonist Scott McCloud said that ‘closure is essential to live in this imperfect world.’ The word, ‘closure,’ which is translated ironically as ‘imagination’ in Korean, originally means ‘closed or shuts’. The language of comics constantly follows the rhythm of omissioning, separating, cutting, emptying, pausing, resting and rebooting, just like switching off and on due to power overload. The process of perceiving is instantly transferred to an action in each frame while undergoing a structural design like expansion, delaying, extension, reduction and segmentation. This project notes the image, the language and the narrative are able to playoutside the pressure of money at least right at this point. If the comics are still a secret love of cultural producers, it is because of the charm generated from the fast proceeding of instant editing and infinite imagination we can fill in-between each frame. Comics make the whole from the perceived fragments throughout such active engagement with imagination. The readers who puzzle out the comics need for a constant and multi-dimensional communication.The world of comics is a constantly mobile interface zone operated by the mechanism of irrational, non-lingual imagination. Then, wouldn’t we be able to suspect an alternative way of creative production tentatively unbound from the pressure of money in the language of comics?
Artists: Ko Young Il, Kwon Soon Young, Kim Sung-hee, Kim Subak, Kim Yeon-se, Park Seung Hee, Beck Jong-min, Anim, Ancco, Cho Ji-eun and other artists and cartoonists
Curated by Kang Dong-hyeong, Kim Jinjoo
