The Expiration of Painting: Yunsook Park
by Daniel Quiles
A dozen paintings, in warm designer colors, all bearing the same text: "BEST IF USED BY" under which is the date they were created, and below that, in larger text: "PAINTING." Painting as tautological product, as mass-produced (although, wittily enough, none are identical), as bearing its own expiration date (which is also its date of completion). But what, exactly, would it mean for a painting, or for painting, period, to expire? What "use" would diminished, or even negated? Expiration connotes not just the loss of use-value in capitalist exchange (one has already bought it, and must use it before a certain time) but also death. In art, use-value and exchange-value confound each other; when art dies, it is exchange-value which has ebbed.
Yunsook Park looks to expiration as a generative phenomenon, in which the very coming-into-uselessness of the circulated object yields form and structure.* In the Good Luck Project series, used lottery tickets from New York delicatessens are aggregated into numbers corresponding to the specific game: Sapphire Blue 7's, Bonus 5, Super Match 3. They are collaged onto color fields that are in fact derived from (though not identical to) the seemingly incidental, computer-designed backgrounds of the tickets themselves. This literal conflation of Pop and optical abstraction, one atop the other, unites these two historical practices through contrasts in labor. The methodical hand-cutting and assembling of the tickets into larger numbers, as well as the laborious painting of the backgrounds are ironized in relation to their sources (the computerized graphics of the tickets): the most mindless and efficient modes of production. In the cheap dream of the deli lottery ticket, we find the paradoxical and now-lost hopes of the final years of abstract painting.** If today an extra-mediatic referent- photograph, a socially circulated object, data, film, etc.-is always required for abstraction, then the practice is already no longer what we call it; as the BEST IF series suggests, it is past its sell-by date. Yet the lottery ticket works open space within this conundrum, for here the external "source" is grafted onto the surface even as it disappears, coalescing into sign, becoming painting. Park then adds florescent, asynchronous colors to the background (altering those of the original) which force figure (the assemblages of tickets) and ground (the painted background) to oscillate; the color field keeps grabbing one's attention. The readymades thus periodically disappear, first concatenating into number, then blending into background, then reemerging once again as palpably individual units- that is, as reterritorialized garbage.
In her most recent series, Repeated Definition-01, Park has painted "NOT FOR INDIVIDUAL SALE" in both English and Korean over a series of Warholesque diptychs of Sinead O'Connor purchased via eBay from an artist in Chicago. Here it becomes clear that the artist is not just out to display the outmoded- the paintings themselves are from 1990, and feature a pop star whose heyday was ten years ago, in a much-imitated idiom of Pop portraiture- but that, in deploying the expired readymade in such a way that its very terms are inverted, she in fact believes in a profane mode of resurrection.
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*I am thinking here of Rosalind Krauss's redefined notion of "medium" as "recursive structure"- a structure, that is, some of the elements of which will produce the rules that generate the structure itself..." Krauss, "Voyage on the North Sea": Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), pp. 6-7.
** Such hopes are of course best articulated in the respective writings of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, in particular the writings of the 1960s featured in his collected critical texts, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
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Daniel Quiles is a New York-based writer and art historian who is currently writing his Ph.D. dissertation on Argentine conceptual art. He is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program.
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