ART-PRESENTATION: Haegue Yang-Handles
Haegue Yang has spent her career traversing the boundaries between geographic regions, historical periods, and artistic styles. Yang is known for combining industrially manufactured objects with store-bought, everyday items. Her large-scale sculptures and installations consist of starkly disparate materials, from clothing racks to jingle bells, space heaters to artificial straw. Hand-crafted techniques such as knitting and weaving lend her work a human touch, and blur the lines between these more domestic pursuits and fine art.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MoMA Archive
“Handles”, Haegue Yang’s installation commissioned for MoMA’s Marron Atrium, features six dynamic sculptures activated daily, dazzling geometries, and the play of light and sound to create a ritualized, complex environment with both personal and political resonance. Handles are points of attachment and material catalysts for movement and change. Yang’s installation in the Marron Atrium considers this everyday interface between people and things. Steel grab bars are mounted on the walls amid the iridescent pattern of a panoramic collage, and put to functional use in her sculptures. These monumental works come in distinctive shapes: some are inspired by the work of early 20th Century figures such as artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp and mystic philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff, and others use open-source designs for door handles to produce freestanding bodies at once futuristic and prehistoric. Mounted on casters and covered in skins of bells, the sculptures generate a subtle rattling sound when maneuvered by performers at regular intervals, and recall the use of bells in shamanistic rites, among other sources. The chorus of bells also suggests ideas of resonance, championing more diverse social and political models. While the patterns of movement in the installation echo Yang’s ongoing investigation into concerns of migration, the haptic and auditory qualities of Yang’s Sonic Sculptures animate their imposing physicality. The sensorial nature of Handles is heightened by the seemingly innocuous ambient noise of birdsong that permeates the space, which in fact was recorded at a tense political moment in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea during the historic summit in 2018. Reporters strained to hear the private conversation between the two nations’ leaders, but their audio devices only picked up the chirping of birds and the faint click of cameras. “Handles” draws on Yang’s in-depth research into various sources, ranging from vernacular craft traditions to the historical avant-garde, esoteric spiritual philosophies to contemporary political events. She integrates these disparate narratives into a visual language uniquely her own, offering a fresh take on modernism and a critical reading of its legacy.
Info: Curator: Stuart Comer, Assistant Curator: Taylor Walsh, MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, New York, Duration: 21/10/19-12/4/20, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-17:30, Fri 10:00-21:00, www.moma.org
