Out of Area

Julie Moon

Dear Theresa

Transcript:

NOTE: Theresa’s voice is edited throughout with reverb, delay and other audio effects, so there may be repetition in her words, some which I have marked in parentheses

00:00 

Theresa: The messenger, the messenger is the voice-presence occupying the space, occupying the space, voice presence, occupying the time between.

Narrator: For 25 years now, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University of Berkeley, California, has housed Theresa Hakkyung Cha’s body of work. 

00:28 

Narrator: It is impossible to see it in person unless you go there, where Theresa grew up and studied art during the 70s and 80s. I made a request for an appointment at the Archive over email. In an elaborate way, I said that I was a student, a student of writing. 

00:46 

Narrator: I said that I was born in Theresa’s hometown, Busan, in South Korea. I booked a flight to California. [instrumental music plays] I was given white gloves to touch the materials at the Center for Study of Conceptual Art. I could not take Theresa’s art out of this room. 

01:06 

Narrator: They could not leave with me past the glass door. I had a notebook to document as much as I could. The Cha notebook. I took this notebook with me into the dark, small viewing room in the Film Library. 

01:20 

Narrator: This is where I listened to Theresa’s sound art, viewed her video art, listened for the first time to Theresa’s voice. 

Theresa: The in-between (the in-between) time: from when a sound is made to when it returns as an echo (as an echo). 

01:50

Theresa: No one knows if it was heard (if it was has heard) when it was heard (when it was heard) when it would be heard if ever at all (if ever at all). But it continues on and on maybe (maybe) a thousand years (a thousand years). Someone’s poem (someone’s poem) someone’s dream (someone’s dream).

02:19 

[music resumes]

John Cha: People saw one thing in her work, you know, there were sort of avant-garde writers in New York… white male who had an interest in the language, well, they thought she had created a new English language because it sounded so different, you know her work. The feminists… 

02:37 

Critic 1: …This whole idea of mother in the sense of the country, your mother being a country, your mother tongue…

Narrator: Theresa’s work has already been written about, it has been written by so many different perspectives, so many different, sometimes competing, interpretations. 

02:55 

Critic 2: …post-modern writing that Cha was trying to do…

Critic 3: …Through post-colonial and feminist art and theory…in the context of the genealogy of cultural displacement… 

John Cha: They looked at her from the diaspora of view… 

Critic: actually a performance in itself on the page. 

03:12 

Critic 5: …For so many of us who are Asian-American and grow up in a cultural environment where you often feel alienated from a homeland and from where you actually are, where your home is… 

Narrator: -I am not interested in making an interpretation. 

03:28 

Narrator: I am not even interested in how they provide different layers of perception, different entries into Theresa’s work. (Unfinished.) I just wanted to get closer to Theresa. (Media and dimensions unknown.) (Location unknown.) 

03:45 

James Cha: The first time we went to Cafe Trieste, which is right up the street, it’s the oldest cafe in San Francisco and we watched a Fellini film in downtown. We walked to Cafe Trieste and we talked about the film. 

Narrator: Ok, yeah. Yeah.

04:12 

Narrator: After the days at the archive, I go to San Francisco to meet her younger brother James. 

James Cha: …And we’re sitting there talking about the day and we ate some of the cake and then we started making little castles [laughing] with the cake. 

04:26 

James Cha: So invariably, everything turned into artistic expression. 

Narrator: I Skype with her older brother in Seoul, John, who donated her work to curators after her death. 

John Cha: She was so serious. Yeah, a serious person. Blue. She was this blue… Blue might be a good way to express… 

04:48 

Narrator: I just wanted to get closer to Theresa, who made so much in such a short life. Artists book, 1975, pomegranate offering, ink stamped on linen, hand sewn with red. Book consists of linen pages sewn in sections and bound in the center with text stamped in black ink. 

05:12 

Narrator: Narrow lengths of sewn fabric… linen appears to be unbleached, round envelope cover… The text reads the word: Amare…Amerikanism, Amerikanism. 

05:33 

Narrator: Theresa who loved to learn and iterated so many different languages. What is the relationship between language and art? I wish that I could talk to Theresa about these questions. I wish she were still alive. 

06:20 

Theresa: That I want none, not one glance. 

Narrator: Theresa who invokes so many ideas, but is not herself ideological.

Theresa: Not even a glance, not one this way, not this way. 

Narrator: Is that what makes her an artist? What is an artist? 

06:50 

[music]

Theresa: This change, this void, this inscription, this erasing. All times, all times, from the very very moment any voice is conceived. Whether physically realized (or not) or not. Manifested (manifested) or not. To the very moment if and when. Delivered. 

07:17 

John Cha: …She was looking for the proper or not- right- appropriate means to express herself. She did film, ceramics…

Theresa: Glow worm. Fireflies. Everything is light. 

John Cha: I think she went all over the place because not one genre was right for her. 

Theresa: Glow worms. Everything is light. 

07:52 

John Cha: She thought, you know, certain words, or texts, lacked certain aspects…

Theresa: Everything is light.

08:15 

Theresa: Everything is dark. 

John Cha: She was fascinated by why people, why people actually speak. She wondered about that, her work is all about language. 

John Cha: She didn’t like to be categorized. 

Critic: She did not belong to any category. She did not belong-

Theresa: Everything feels light. 

James Cha: They tried to politicize it, and that was not her intention. Theresa wasn’t politically, I mean, she was aware politically-

08:37 

James Cha: All her expressions were artistic. You know, dogmatic, doctrinaire, whatever. 

Theresa: Everything feels dark. Everything feels light. Everything weighs dark. 

James Cha: Art is more direct for communication, I think, so that’s what she’s going for. Not the sort of rational…

09:05 

James Cha: Art, as opposed to identity..it’s not about the propaganda or whatever. 

John Cha: …She said, I do art because it’s the truth, and I guess that’s the ultimate. 

Theresa: 가지마 엄마. 와. 여기 옆에. 

09:44 

John Cha: When she was, like, three. She used to sit on a fence and watch the kids play. 

Theresa: 내 곁에 와, 여기 앉아 있어, 엄마. 내곁에.

John Cha: And she would say stuff about them. [music plays] Do you remember a song, 산토끼 토끼야…

Narrator: …어디가고 있느냐? 

John Cha: Yeah. [laughs] This was during Korean War time. We lived in Busan, near Songdo. The kids, those days, they would play coming in and out of water. 

10:24 

John Cha: The kids, they ran around together in a pack. They didn’t wear any clothes. They were all naked, which was fine in those days. And…. She could be sitting on a fence, sort of a stone fence. To the tune of 산토끼, she would be singing like, oh, you naked kids, where are you going? 어드로 가느냐? 발가벗은 애들 어디를 가느냐? 

10:54 

John Cha: She‘d make up this kind of stuff, and, you know, she already displayed some of the artistic qualities back in those days. 

11:25 

James Cha: She would invite me. “Oh, Jean Luc Godard is coming.” Yeah. “Wanna come?” I go, okay. [laughs] Kurosawa, stuff like that. It was great. [laughs] It’s almost like a film student’s dream, you know? I’m gonna have a cigarette, do you mind? 

Theresa: In our relationship, you are the object. 

12:03 

Theresa: In our relationship, in our relationship, in our relationship, you are the subject/ I am the object/ you are the object/ I am the subject… 

Narrator: [clears throat] Dear Theresa, Dear Theresa, Dear Theresa, Dear Theresa… 

In your 1982 film, Untitled (Paper 1 and 1), you walk into a thinly-curtained room with a table and papers on it. 

12:45 

Narrator: From its edge, your camera watches you, your black hair, long down your back, your plain sweater and jeans, your closed mouth, serious. At the center of this table is a stack of white paper. You move a chair aside and yank up the sides of the stack with your hands. 

13:07 

Narrator: The curled papers fall down, one page after another, and you grasp them as though to feel their bodies, how much they curve, how heavy they weigh. A few papers fall out, past the sunlit surface of the table. 

13:25 

Narrator: You could gather these to return them to order, but that is not what you do. Instead, you rattle the papers in your hands, rub their corners, bring them right up to your nose as though to sniff. Then, you start flinging them. 

13:41 

Narrator: You fling each page to the table’s end. Quick, sharp flicks of the wrist, far away from you, above the camera. White page after white page. Soon, you pick up a whole chunk, maybe 50 of them, then toss above your head with both hands, face still serious. 

14:00 

Narrator: You look wild. For seven minutes, you go on like this. Your motions gain severity. Near violence, you topple the stack, scatter pages all over the table surface. You lick your index finger, not to count, but to crumple each page. 

14:18 

Narrator: By two minutes 18 seconds, you’re tearing them apart by pulling at their sides. Three minutes 56 seconds, you’re stabbing a page hung from one fist with the other clenched fist. The blank becomes bent and more bent. 

14:38 

Narrator: It’s as though these papers are nothings, as though they are meaningless to you. Sometimes you even stand up to watch them flail and twirl without grace in the air, or you fan your face with two pages, up and down, up and down, as though to cool a desire. 

14:56 

Narrator: As though these blank papers are not mediums for your poems, films, sculptures, your beautiful art, your beautiful use of language. As though they are instead materials that frustrate you, as though they are limited materials. 

15:18 

Narrator: It’s 2017 and I wish you had lived past 1982 so that you could tell me about this limitation. I wish you had not died at the young age of 31. I am 23 and I’m wondering what it means to be an artist. 

15:52

[film reel countdown sound]

Theresa & Narrator: In our relationship you are the subject/ I am the object/ You are the object/ I am the subject/ In our relationship you are the object/ I am the subject/ you are the object/ I am the subject

Narrator: In our relationship you are the object/ I am the subject