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22/11/2007

Tongue, Liberated!

Insa Art Space, Seoul

Joseph Beuys
Nicoline van Harskamp
Keiko Sei
Kiwan Seong, Su-hwan Choi, Bo-jun Shim & 20 Other Poets
voiceoverhead (Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal):
Akin Fernandez
Holly Ward
C. M. von Hausswolff / Friedrich Jürgenson
Romuald Karmakar

“Issue Fighters” is an annual project that Insa Art Space (IAS) designs as an agenda-specific program.“Tongue, Liberated!”, the project for the year 2007 focuses on ‘speech act’ as it intends to be in tandem with “sound,” which is this year’s IAS curatorial theme. Speech act refers to purposeful statement made by the speaker to induce the listener to engage oneself in particular acts and linguistic behavior. Those who featured in this project include a wide spectrum of professionals such as artists, activists, poets, performance artists, and curators engaged in the experiment of various speech act formats including conversation, speech, lecture, public reading, recital, theatrical reading and performance.

As the contemporary art practices step beyond the realm of art to meet with the public, relationship building based on dialogue and communication is surfacing as the major process of artists’ work. Dialogue, in this sense, can be understood as “speech act”—sophisticated and purposeful political act carried out in a format of everyday conversation.

The concept of “speech act” was studied as early as in the mid 20th century by the philosophers of language John L. Austin and John R. Searle, referring to purposeful statement made by the speaker to induce the listener to engage oneself in particular acts and linguistic behavior (“illocutionary act”). The speech act concept finds its primary meaning in the fact that the two philosophers shed light on the performative as well as interface elements of speech that was mostly perceived as a factual signifier.

All speeches, in fact, are the most visible and direct tool of interpersonal interface based on which a wide range of social relationships between individuals are formed and thus, the forefront field of human political acts. However, we are fatigued by the noise and pollution created by the sounds and the contents of words, even before we appreciate the social and political significance of the words. Following this line of thought, this project illuminates speech as a performance and examines the ways in which speeches are constructed and conveyed as public utterance in the interface with the public. Going beyond an approach to see speech as a different media from a written text, this project attempts to differentiate the speech act out of myriads of words uttered in our daily lives.

This question leads us to have the awareness that we need even an intervention of a strategic apparatus that will help us understand the difference between simple saying and speech act, and we need to also investigate on the elements that constitute the speech act, and the actual process in which ordinary day-to-day words are converted to speech act. The core of speech act is one’s consciousness of self as the public self and the sense of the social solidarity in which one recognizes one’s speech from a social standpoint. In other words, speech act begins with an individual’s clear awareness that we posit ourselves as the social and public subject (J. Habermas). The listener, too, should the subject with the same attitude. And a series of following reactions, interactions as well as relationship building should also be perceived as social and political behaviors in the public sphere.

Those who featured in this project include a wide spectrum of professionals such as artists, activists, poets, performance artists, and curators engaged in the experiment of various speech act formats including conversation, speech, lecture, public reading, recital, theatrical reading and performance. They are exploring and developing situational context and potential of execution inherent in the act of speaking itself. The works introduce us the processes where words with a variety of function and characteristics are collected and the collected words are re-enacted. On the strategies and contexts of performing the speech act, the political and social performativity the methods of its conveyance are carried out are revived penetratingly. Thereby it aims to restore intrinsic political edginess of speech, and eventually induce us to have the awareness of ourselves as social subjects who take the responsibility for our own speech.

Insa Art Space
100-5 Gwanhun-dong, Jongno-gu - Seoul

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