Blinder Beifall

»When a story ends – or ›falls into the ocean‹, as we say – it creates dreams.« (Djibril Diop Mambéty)

»Die auf Widerruf gestundete Zeit / wird sichtbar am Horizont.« (Ingeborg Bachmann)

In her work »Blinder Beifall« Jeewi Lee shows the ›records‹ of an event which will already have happened when the opening takes place, although remaining inscribed in the central installation: the performance of a circus group, volatile, almost unintentionally drawn on the floor; a performance without audience within the circle of a stage; solitary and free.
Thus, the empty circus ring becomes a memory-picture of a popular aesthetic presentation; an art of expression which still reverberates within the room when its traces are being precisely viewed–delicate and moved and rutted in the sand: the presence of a scene, presence and place; the ›base‹ of a drawing, figure and ground; notation of lost time in space.
The circus group's choreography thus creates a complex (melancholic?) ›painting‹ which conceptually and methodically resembles the works that Jeewi Lee has been producing over the past years: the largely unnoticed traces which had been taken from rooms and transferred into the format of a painting. For example in the work »Fundament«, a series of fragments from the floor of Lee's studio (big and gray, almost monochrome, raddled–the leftovers of her own practice). Or »Past Tense«; framed sections from traditional Corean paper floors. For »Blinder Beifall« (blind applause) the traces are not being transformed into an object; they are left in the room. The focus turns to their creation, in a condensed form, present and passé. A performance without audience. An audience without performance. A leftover which resists on the brink of the past. Time which remains at the outer circle.
Blind applause. Is critique being dealt out here (whatsoever »critique« is supposed to mean nowadays)? Are we always already too late? A feast without a reason? An art without future? Are we the undecided beholder in Kafka's text „Up in the Gallery“ who distraughtly watches a „lady circus rider in the ring“ and who sinks „into the final march as if into a difficult dream, weeps, without realizing it“?

Hegel writes that Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. „The end is in the beginning“ is what Beckett writes in his Endgame, „and yet you go on“.

Text: Lukas Töpfer

Special thanks to: Circus Busch