1.

German radical artist Bertolt Brecht once wrote Threepenny Novel (Dreigroschenroman) (1934), a novel, as a sequel to The Threepenny Opera. It was hidden behind the shadows of his famous plays and failed to get much attention, but the novel is highly interesting in relation to our current situation. Brecht is said to have suffered a lot while writing this novel, contrary to when he was writing other works. In Threepenny Novel, he aspired to write about the futures exchange in Chicago (what was completed instead, was a story about a well-known retail chain tycoon in Great Britain). Futures trade means betting on future price changes of specific goods (wheat, petroleum, pork, etc.). For example, they bargain for the purchase price per bushel or ton of wheat to be harvested in the coming autumn. The investor loses money if the wheat price gets lower than the price at which he bought it and gains money if the price gets higher. This may look like gambling, but after many twists and turns, it was recognized and established as a legitimate financial activity.

Then, in 2018, a major financial crisis broke out in the U.S. dealing a deadly blow to neoliberal capitalism. It originated from the derivatives market that started from the futures market. At the time Brecht was observing it with his keen eyes, Chicago futures exchange traded futures based on physical goods. However, in 1972, right after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the exchange started to trade currency futures. It was the moment when a new chapter opened in the history of finance. It was the trade of purely fictitious object of future changes in the value of currencies instead of physical commodities that exist in reality. Virtual promise based on the assumption that the risk of changes in the value of currencies may be ‘hedged’ became the object of trade. It was no other than to pursue the illusion of money multiplying on its own despite bombastic rhetoric about technical creation of a means to avoid risks. So, contemporary capitalism, which is commonly known for financialization, led to the dominance of unfathomably large financial sector.

Then, what does it have to do with art? Brecht was a rare artist who intuitively understood the close correlation. He was sensitive to the historic changes such as the rise of corporate capitalism and dominance of economy by various financial products including stocks, securities and bonds. The crisis of capitalism that hit the world, especially the U.S., in 1929 demonstrated the power of financial institutions that had become too big. Financial institutions including banks and stock exchanges started to look like autonomous and independent entities creating their own profits rather than supporting capital formation (actually, interest earnings are created by taking out certain part of the profits). It is not possible to distinguish clearly between the ordinary path of capitalism, in which they hire workers to produce goods and sell them to gain profits, and its parasitic path in which money increases on its own through value increase based on interests. However, as the latter path gets more powerful, we can no longer find the way to figure out how the world goes on. We may simply say that the reality of life has become extremely abstract.

And this poses a very important problem to art. Brecht understood it. He intended to identify the secret of capitalism that had turned into a horrible mystery and planned to reveal it as the force dominating the twists and turns of the reality that they experienced. In other words, he wanted to disclose and critically reproduce the financialization of capitalism. The key target was futures exchange. However, he did not succeed, just as numerous films that tried to follow him in the aftermath of recent financial crisis failed to go beyond portraying financiers getting astronomical salaries, enjoying unimaginable luxuries and letting momentary pleasures consume themselves. It is failed realism and old-fashioned morality play. Trying to write his novel, Brecht left the U.S. and went back to Austria, traveled around and interviewed people who had spent years in the futures market, but no one gave him a good answer to how the market worked. Now, we are living in a magical world that cannot be compared to the 1930s when Brecht wrote his novel.

The capitalist production network working under the suspicious term of global supply chain (another expression for international division of labor) does not catch our attention any more. That’s not because it is hidden from our sight but because it is invisible from the beginning. Revealing the contradictions of capitalism through dramatic confrontation between capital and labor seems to be of little use today. Capital does not appear in a human-like image before my eyes and there is no place for such a capitalist in the corporate world run by the global financial market. What to do, then?

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2.

In his exhibition under the title of ‘Your Failure Is My Future,’ which appears cynical or suggests the pretense of evil, You JangWoo enters what can be called the mentality of neoliberal capitalism. What’s at the core of the neoliberal capitalist mentality may be anxiety that has become infinitely amplified. This is said to originate from self-responsibilization of individuals created by unrestrained capitalism equipped with the political institution of neoliberalism. According to this argument, one has to be an entrepreneur in the enterprise of life whose management one should be responsible for from one’s birth to death. We have heard so much of such advices, persuasions, warnings and lectures. Now, I have to take responsibility for everything that belongs to me. That’s why I am always anxious.

We are living in a world where we can no longer believe that there is a trajectory of life that can be easily summarized as in the good old days. Although neoliberalism rejoiced watching the social world of stably institutionalized life disappear and achieving new freedom from the armor that restricted human life, it led us, in turn, into a terrible nightmare in which we had to continuously measure, assess and improve ourselves, under the pressure to fulfill the freedom to improve ourselves. JangWoo says that he tried at stock investment out of the fear of falling behind, just like other young investors. And he got totally stuck with the usual routines associated with stock investment, which mainly involved obsessive consumption of all information that can affect stock prices. As the stock market is controlled by rumors and gossips, anxious individual cryptocurrency investors can’t help being desperately obsessed with everything that may influence their investment, all the more so if the words are from Elon Musk.

Musk, who runs an autonomous vehicle company, is an icon that sums up all the different aspects of speculative capitalism. Some people even say that we will not need economics anymore and it will be replaced by a manual on ‘Elon Musk Proximity Pricing.’ It refers to the fluctuation of stock prices of companies that he mentions. Once again, rumors and expectations are determining market values. Thus, it is not at all bizarre that his suggestion to accept Bitcoin as a payment method for Tesla cars led to the surge in its price. What JangWoo focuses in ‘Your Failure Is My Future’ is necrosis of language, which is a significant symptom in contemporary capitalism. He expresses sharp suspicion and cynicism over Musk’s absurd words that are extremely powerful even though they do not convey any meaning.

In the advent of the post-truth era, fact-checking has emerged to deal with rootless words; however, Musk’s words cannot even be compared to facts. His words — though I’m not sure if I can still call them words — are not based on or correspond to reality, but filled with affective load of anticipations, hopes, and anxiousness. Outburst of strange words that have no indicative function or communicative capability, but still have ‘influence,’ and ‘influencer’ that has become a title for a person who spills out such words. Those words volatilize instantly without delivering even a speck of experience or perception of the world. They lose effect and volatilize immediately because of the real-time words of ‘here and now’ that crowd out and take the place of earlier ones. Language reaches the state of near death.

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3.

The near-death of language symbolized by Musk’s eloquence cannot be blamed on it, and this is what JangWoo tries to probe into. He pays careful attention to words that have become dirt cheap and raises a question on the neurosis of people who are helplessly overwhelmed by them — just as the artist himself was. Devastated life of anxious people: although it is elegantly called precarious labor, the term that indicates devastating situation of those who have to move between short-term low-income jobs conceals more than it reveals. Anyhow, the life of youth who are forced to move between such jobs is overwhelmed by the burden of ‘anxiety’ as a psychological truth. The artist himself uneasily admits that he constantly tries to read the situation and the minds of people involved when he applies for exhibition support or artist residency.

Psychological affect of anxiety pressing down numerous people face-to-face with reality, cryptocurrencies developing a new territory of speculative finance based on such anxiety, rush of words that keeps it going, and Internet media mediating this trend as a technical basis and platform altogether form a mysterious alliance. JangWoo delivers words spreading on Twitter, rough voices reverberating on YouTube, and phrases extracted from various official documents of organizations that support and approve them to the playwright. Then the playwright imbues characters into the words. It is relayed in multi-channel installation video through words that are hardly recognizable and whose intention cannot be understood. However, what naturally stand out are portraits of insecure subjects who speak those words and in turn get shaken and dominated by them.

Here, JangWoo’s special ability is demonstrated once again. It is what we can call ‘aesthetic phenomenology’ of neoliberal capitalism. Through a series of works, he has been particularly interested in how contemporary subjects experience and experience reality. Focus Place (2019), HSMR (2019), and Chronicles of Focus (2019) that he created focusing on ‘attention’ all deal with the dialectic of distraction and attention. Distraction (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD) has been pathologized for some time, and they hold individuals responsible for its symptoms, as they always do when handling psychological phenomena. However, the vague distraction, pharmacological therapies to manage it and frenzied manipulation of images and language to draw attention all come from contemporary capitalist movements.

The artist starts from such phenomenology of subjective experience by isolated individuals, but does not stop there and tries to tie this with the work of reproducing utterly abstracted and unclear reality. Fredric Jameson proposed ‘cognitive mapping’ as an aesthetic program for this kind of work. It is to recognize the existence of a bigger social force that determines the experiences of individuals, which appear to be unavoidable, and to connect ‘experience’ and ‘perception’ through it. However, it is not as easy as one may think, especially in visual arts. For example, consider ‘immersive images’ that prevail in blockbuster exhibitions. Immersion is the artistic version of attention that JangWoo tenaciously pursues. It is becoming bewitched by mesmerizing spectacular images and sounds. It is quite different from the attitude of viewers who distractedly move around the exhibition hall without being able to focus on any artworks. Then, how to produce critical images in the face of the spectacle of images that just pours out purely sensory impacts?

JangWoo seems to be a rare artist in the Korean contemporary art scene who attempts to answer this question. He persistently argues how heteronomous are sensory activities — that are considered autonomous — coming from our obvious sensory experiences and inner self. One may suspect that he may have stopped at representation of production and consumption of such sensation, but the strategy of artistic practice that he has figured out is quite sound. The efforts that he made to produce critical images recalls those of Brecht. In the uncertain world that is further expanding, as we are surrounded by outcries over sensory experiences of isolated individuals, and as images like VR and AR that do not represent reality at all boast that they are achieving realism, JangWoo’s search continues to connect such abstract world and subjective phenomenological experiences.

Eyla Weizman, who leads the forensic architecture, discussed hyperaesthesia, which is the state of aesthetic experience in which sensory experience is overloaded yet cannot lead to perception. It indicates today’s state of aesthetic experience where there is a separation between sensation and making sense and the fact that the latter is paralyzed. It seems JangWoo’s work is situated there, too. He attempts to bridge sensation and making sense as the goal for his aesthetic practice.

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