What Do Spartans Want?
A Fragmentary Exchange with Young Joon Kwak

Published by Monument Lab | July 12, 2021

Introduction:

Between August 2020 and May 2021, artist Young Joon Kwak held the position of Artist-in-Residence in Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing, Michigan. In this position, Kwak was to teach courses in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design and collaborate with the campus community in order to produce a public art project engaging issues of race, gender, diversity, and inclusion. At a time when so few bodies were present on campus due to the global COVID-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders, Kwak turned their attention to the university’s famed bronze statue of “The Spartan,” the exemplary body of campus pride. This statue, cast from the terracotta original sculpted in 1945 by Leonard Jungwirth, a professor of art at MSU from 1940 to 1963, currently stands on the northwest corner of campus. It was installed and unveiled in 2005. Kwak recast it for their exhibition of sculptures and prints at MSU’s Union Gallery this past spring (the show will be represented with additional new artworks this fall at Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles).

For this piece, Kwak and Jeanne Dreskin, Monument Lab’s Writer-in-Residence, have collaboratively assembled an exchange between Kwak, who speaks from their own perspective, and an imagined voice that speaks from a subject position embedded within the MSU community. The voice’s rhetoric reveals a series of institutionally codified beliefs, traditions, and myths that Kwak found to be heavily concentrated in and around the Sparty statue. Kwak’s statements contest these predominant understandings of Sparty, reflecting the personal impressions, encounters, and confrontations that fundamentally shaped their residency experience and the exhibition that came from it.