Time and Space: The Final Frontier?

by Jessica Sellin

Greetings, and thank you for taking the time to join me on my first foray into the blogosphere. I am currently a senior Art History and Criticism major, and by no means plan to play favorites when giving you my take on the September 10 “2009-10 Fellows’ Presentations” given by four of last year’s fellows of the Center for 21st Century Studies, under the Center’s biennial theme of “Figuring Place and Time.”

Jennifer Johung’s (Art History) upcoming book, “Replacing Home: From the Primordial Hut to the Digital Network,” looks, through a lens of contemporary art and architecture, at both the dislocation of space and a desire to belong in place. As undergraduates, we are familiar with both extremes: while we ourselves may have once had a solid sense of belonging in place at home, our college years bring about dislocation as we are forced into a state of both physical and intellectual nomadism, forced to live off of what items we can successfully transport in our parents’ minivan, and fit into an eight-by-eight room.

For Johung, Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s project, Homeless Vehicles, manages to combine nomadic living with social commentary. Wodiczko’s transportable modules provide physical shelter for the homeless at night, but by day they are used as carts to collect cans for recycling. Because these streamlined, portable spaces demand attention, the homeless are no longer rendered invisible; the vehicles enforce a social dwelling for said individuals within the community. On a different note, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Under Scan literalizes the concept of one’s home being a reflection of one’s self, as digital portraits taken via overhead surveillance cameras make up an architectural framework in Britain’s Trafalgar Square (certainly not the first time your face will appear on a surveillance camera in London).

Nan Kim’s (History) “Afterlife of Division: Korea’s Liminal Modernity and the Reunions of Separated Families,” focuses on a series of high profile, televised reunions, starting in 2000, of North and South Korean families long separated by the war. Her project speaks not only to the forced dislocation (as well as denied reunification) of Koreans, but also to the invasion of individuals’ personal spaces by the media. That these reunions were sensationalized, and set up as tabloid and media fodder, may be unethical, but the practice is not by any means off limits in today’s media-driven world. In a society where celebrity funerals are televised live, and commodities such as YouTube allow for the instantaneous and unfiltered upload of even the most private information, we have created a spatial gap between reality and the sensationalized, between morality and entertainment.

The fluctuating temporality and liminality of the Korean War, as cited by Kim, can certainly be applied to many instances throughout history, and even the present, as the effects of war are felt long after the conclusion and in locations across the globe, not just the front line. However, as Kim mentions, these circumstances are escalated by the fact that a permanent peace treaty was never reached between the North and South, so the war has technically never come to a close. The physical and ethical gaps created by war and division, while vast, leave little room for individual and personal narratives to be rectified, perpetuating a seemingly endless temporal state.

Other work more than worthy of taking the time to glance over is Bruce Charlesworth’s (Film) work-in-progress video installation “Retraction,” and Deborah Wilk’s (Art History) “’A Pregnant Text’: History and the Space of Immigration,” which analyzes the art and architecture of New York’s Ellis Island and Castle Gardens during the immigration periods of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.