ASHBERY SIGHTING: 5 WORKS TO KNOW BY ANICKA YI (ARTnews)
/In this October 11, 2021 ARTnews review of works by Korean artist Anicka Yi, excerpted below, we learn that one of her “most talked about” works was inspired by and takes its title from the John Ashbery Poem “Boundary Issues,” published in Poetry in 2009. Here it is:
Boundary Issues
—John Ashbery
Here in life, they would understand.
How could it be otherwise? We had groped too,
unwise, till the margin began to give way,
at which point all was sullen, or lost, or both.
Now it was time, and there was nothing for it.
We had a good meal, I and my friend,
slurping from the milk pail, grabbing at newer vegetables.
Yet life was a desert. Come home, in good faith.
You can still decide to. But it wanted warmth.
Otherwise ruse and subtlety would become impossible
in the few years or hours left to us. “Yes, but . . .”
The iconic beggars shuffled off too. I told you,
once a breach emerges it will become a chasm
before anyone’s had a chance to waver. A dispute
on the far side of town erupts into a war
in no time at all, and ends as abruptly. The tendency to heal
sweeps all before it, into the arroyo, the mine shaft,
into whatever pocket you were contemplating. And the truly lost
make up for it. It’s always us that has to pay.
I have a suggestion to make: draw the sting out
as probingly as you please. Plaster the windows over
with wood pulp against the noon gloom proposing its enigmas,
its elixirs. Banish truth-telling.
That’s the whole point, as I understand it.
Each new investigation rebuilds the urgency,
like a sand rampart. And further reflection undermines it,
causing its eventual collapse. We could see all that
from a distance, as on a curving abacus, in urgency mode
from day one, but by then dispatches hardly mattered.
It was camaraderie, or something like it, that did,
poring over us like we were papyri, hoping to find one
correct attitude sketched on the gaslit air, night’s friendly takeover.
(© 2009 Estate of John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc.)
5 Works to Know by Anicka Yi: Superbacteria, Tempura-Fried Flowers, Posthuman Futures, and More [excerpt]
October 11, 2021 5:44pm
Grabbing at Newer Vegetables (2015)
Anicka Yi, Grabbing at Newer Vegetables, 2015.
Photo:Photo Jason Mandella/Courtesy the Kitchen
For one of her breakout shows, held at the Kitchen in New York in 2015, Yi pumped the scent of Gagosian gallery into the famed experimental space and showed a set of boxy vinyl sculptures that were lined with dried shrimp, bowls containing hydro-gel beads, and more. But the most talked-about work of the exhibition was Grabbing at Newer Vegetables (2015), the result of a project for which Yi asked 100 of her female friends, many of whom had ties to the art world, to swab a body part of their choosing. (Its name is a reference to “Boundary Issues,” a 2009 poem by John Ashbery.) With the assistance of Tal Danino, then a postdoctoral fellow at the bioengineering department of MIT, where she was at the time an artist in residence, Yi created a paint-like “superbacteria” synthesized from all the individual samples and fixed it in agar. The final work was something like a “giant petri dish,” as Yi put it in her interview with Jones, with the phrase “YOU CAN CALL ME” spelled out amid blooms lit from below in an acrid shade of orange.
The project foreshadowed a number of thematic concerns that still course through Yi’s work. Grabbing at Newer Vegetables countered the notion that white cubes were inherently deadening and male-dominated by bringing in female matter that was quite literally alive. It also proposes that, when it comes to experiencing an artwork, vision is not the only important sense. At first glance, though not necessarily at first smell, this work didn’t seem like much. Over the exhibition’s run, however, its unpleasant scent grew unmissable.