Displaced Bodies in Residual Spaces
Marita Sturken and Simon Leung
Between 1992 and 1998, Simon Leung made three works that engage, in his words, “the residual space of the Vietnam War.” Involving installation, performance, and a variety of media, these three projects explore the residual effects of the violence of the U.S. war through an examination of identities forged through violence and the subsequent movements of people—as veterans, deserters, refugees, and immigrants—produced by the war. These three works reflect on the ways in which identity is conveyed through the body and through such unexpected practices as squatting and surfing.
The first of these projects, Warren Piece (in the ’70s), was presented in early 1993 at the exhibition space P.S. 1 in New York. Warren Piece was simultaneously a portrait of Warren Niesluchowski, then assistant to the director of P.S. 1, and a meditation on the history of P.S. 1, which opened in 1976 with Rooms, an exhibition that would become a cornerstone in the theorization of site-specificity and 1970s art. The work articulates a parallel between Niesluchowski’s biography— as a deserter from the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War who lived in exile in France from 1968 to 1975—and the aesthetics of late 1960s/early 1970s postminimalist art practices such as site-specificity, the aesthetic terrain of which Rooms was a part. Although predominantly abstract in form, postminimalist work from this period was often rhetorically situated by advocates within its contemporary political frame as being implicitly in opposition to the American military intervention in Vietnam. Warren Piece was comprised of three videos and various carbon copies of photos and texts that refer in various ways to P.S. 1, Warren, and the Vietnam War. The three videos included Under History Lessons 1993, an interview Leung conducted with the artist Vito Acconci, who participated in Rooms; Songs 1968–1975, a video showing Niesluchowski working in P.S. 1 overlaid with a sound track of a conversation in which he recounted his life in exile and intercut with Niesluchowski singing songs associated with the Left in their original languages, among them the “Internationale,” “Avanti Popolo,” and “The East Is Red”; and How Far is Far from Vietnam?, a video of Leung and Niesluchowski doing a series of movements from director Jerzy Grotowski’s physical exercises for actors, overlaid with a sound track on which Leung repeats the question “How far is far from Vietnam?” The three looped videos, played simultaneously, underscored the interrelation between history and biography, past and present, politics and art.
Leung completed the second project, Squatting Project/Berlin, in 1994, at the invitation of the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin for the exhibition GEWALT/Geschäfte (The Business of Violence), which addressed the xenophobic violence manifesting in the newly unified Germany, in the Balkan states upon the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere in Europe. For this project, Leung made a thousand posters that were wheat-pasted on the sides of buildings, bus shelters, and other freestanding structures around the city of Berlin, depicting a nearly life-size Asian figure squatting with his back to the viewer. Five hundred of the posters included this text (in German):
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