Spartan Ruin: A Reader
Published on the occasion of Young Joon Kwak’s exhibition Spartan Ruin at Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles, September 11th – October 23rd, 2021.
Edited by Jeanne Dreskin; designed by Sandra Rosales.
Includes foreword by Jeanne Dreskin; “Spartan Skin: what is a university, when we cannot be together?” by Karin Zitzewitz; “What Do Spartans Want?” by Jeanne Dreskin & Young Joon Kwak; and a roundtable with members of Michigan State University’s Asian Pacific Islander Desi American community.
From the foreword:
For “Spartan Skin,” Kwak’s exhibition on view April 9 – May 21, 2021 at MSU’s Union Gallery, the artist recast the bronze Spartan, generating silicone molds from which they produced a group of cold-cast metal sculptural “skins” and a series of large-scale ink monoprints. Sparty’s body was dismantled and rearranged in the gallery as an array of intimately scaled, visually accessible fragments, installed with museological precision. In this configuration, the sculpture’s verticality was laid horizontal, its fixedness giving way to permeability and transience.
“Spartan Ruin” at Commonwealth & Council is both a re-presentation and an expansion of the prior exhibition. It brings the existing sculptures and works on paper into dialogue with two large-scale inked panels, a crystal-encrusted holographic breastplate, and a group of prints and sculptural skins that meld impressions of the statue with those of the artist’s own body. With these new permutations, Sparty is duly transformed. Its surfaces, creases, and chasms increasingly resist alignment with legible signifiers, finding and claiming newer spaces of abstraction, fluidity, and queerness.
This reader, offered as a companion to Kwak’s exhibition, excavates the narratives and thematics underlying the artist’s exploration of the Spartan. Art historian Karin Zitzewitz’s thoughtful reflections on Kwak’s MSU residency, studio process, and installation provide a wealth of context on the institutional origins and outcomes of the artist’s on-site experiments. The creative exchange that I was privileged to co-author with Kwak puts the artist in dialogue with a disembodied, imagined voice from MSU, aiming to crack open and unpack perspectives on Sparty held by the “Institution” at large. The reader concludes with a chorus of voices from MSU’s Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) community, offering candid and divergent perspectives on Kwak’s work. Recorded in the midst of a national surge of assaults against Asian diasporic populations, the conversation highlights the urgency of critiquing institutional structures and symbols from within, where their hierarchies—and the tools for dismantling them—can be found most unvarnished.
