Tim Lee
08 Jan 2008 - 10 Jan 2009
Tim Lee was the fall 2007 Capp Street Project artist in residence at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. An exhibition of the work he completed during his residency, organized by Wattis Institute director Jens Hoffmann, will be on view from January 8, 2008, to January 10, 2009. This is Lee\'s first solo project for a San Francisco public art institution.
It's Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away
Claire Fitzsimmons
Tim Lee\'s works have the deceptive appearance of simple self-portraits, but they contain myriad references. Over the last few years the artist has crafted a meticulous persona in his photo- and video-based pieces, which convey, ironically, very little of the personal. Rather, Lee articulates his artistic persona through others trying to articulate theirs. He has assembled something akin to an ensemble cast, drawing his characters—and their accompanying characteristics and ideologies—from an eclectic range of sources. These include major figures of Conceptual art, such as Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, and Bruce Nauman, alongside seminal moments of popular culture, from Carl Reiner\'s Hollywood movies to Harry Houdini\'s magic. Since receiving his MFA from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in 2002, Lee has created an oeuvre with a highly theoretical framework, which is counterbalanced by humor and politics, in particular issues of race and national identity.
Capp Street Project is Lee\'s first artist residency, which is less surprising when one considers that he does not normally work in a site-specific manner (he believes, on the contrary, that all culture travels) and that his usual way of working is a meandering process of reading, research, writing, and production, with the physical artwork realized in a relatively concentrated amount of time. Faced with two clearly defined Capp Street Project parameters—to spend 12 weeks in San Francisco and to deliver a new piece that responds to the local context—Lee had first to work out what, for him, would constitute a residency.
He had his starting point when he discovered that the comedian Steve Martin and the rock musician Neil Young had, coincidentally, both recorded live albums in San Francisco in the late 1970s: Let\'s Get Small at the Boarding House and Rust Never Sleeps at the Cow Palace, respectively. Both Martin and Young had appeared, though separately, in several of Lee\'s previous works, and their postures, props, mannerisms, and language already served as shorthand in his oeuvre for the genres of comedy and rock music.
The residency, then, became an attempt to put Martin and Young together, to create a project that would conflate their different artistic personae and histories while at the same time saying something about culture at large. To solve the dilemma of how to bring these two autonomous figures together, Lee began on paper with a rough diagram of the arguments for an integrated history. Through writing he gave material form to his attempts to use Martin to understand Young, and vice versa, and his text appears in its final form as the two essays in this publication.
The banjo was among the vital connections Lee uncovered in his research. Young has played the banjo on several recordings, and Martin used the instrument as a prop in his early stand-up routines, including the performance captured on Let\'s Get Small. Martin is actually quite accomplished on the banjo and has even played with the world-renowned bluegrass musician Earl Scruggs. On Let\'s Get Small he says, now famously, \"You just can\'t play a depressing song on the banjo.\" Lee had no previous experience with the instrument but decided to test this hypothesis by learning to play on it, over the course of his residency, one song. He selected Young\'s seminal guitar piece \"My My, Hey Hey,\" which can be either melancholic or aggressive depending on whether it is played acoustically, as in the first track on Rust Never Sleeps, or electrically, as in the album\'s final track.
Lee\'s banjo version of \"My My, Hey Hey\" represents a third, bluegrass, version and is his first-ever audio piece. In a wry and comic move, he has installed My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) / Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black), Neil Young, 1979 (Steve Martin, 1977) (2007) in the Wattis Institute elevator, which carries visitors on a very short, one-story ride between the upper and lower floors, rather than in the gallery space allocated for his exhibition. The audio installation is almost anticlimactic, even reminiscent of Muzak, that often consumed but infrequently commented upon easy-listening filler found in malls, retail outlets, and nondescript transitional spaces. Ironically, as visitors think they are on their way to the \"real\" artworks, they experience the focal point of Lee\'s project. In another sideways move, the artist gives his banjo recording sculptural form as a limited-edition 12-inch vinyl record with his texts as the liner notes (this piece is on display in the foyer).
Lee conceived the two works that actually appear in the galleries (officially these are part of his solo Passengers exhibition as opposed to his Capp Street Project residency) as footnotes to the elevator piece. The single-channel video titled Let\'s Get Small, Steve Martin, 1977 (2007) focuses on the opening of Martin\'s first live album and what was to become the comedian\'s tagline. Martin starts his routine by saying, \"I\'m sorry, I\'m really pissed off.\" He criticizes the sound man, the audience, and the local population, accusing them of insulting him as a comedian. He becomes increasingly angry until he says, now famously, \"Excuuuuse me.\" This catchphrase became a staple for him, his trademark, and inevitably the object of parody later on. Lee believes that Martin ultimately abandoned stand-up because everyone expected him to repeat this line, which was no longer funny because it was expected. For his piece, Lee reformats this moment by elongating the u in \"Excuuuuse me\" to last several minutes, creating the illusion of absurdly sustained anger. This mimicry through continual looping, the artificial building of frustration and exaggerated emotion, alludes to the entrapment of the comedian within what was once his own unique brand of humor.
My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue), Neil Young, 1979 and Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black), Neil Young, 1979 (both 2007) are two photographs showing Lee\'s shadow in poses that he imagines Young might have adopted during the original Rust Never Sleeps concert. Lee holds an acoustic guitar in one picture, and an electric guitar in the other. The images materialize something intangible, capturing not an actual performance but some part of its remnants. This idea is integral to Lee\'s understanding of Young\'s creative output—that it is restless and undefined, and that both the musician\'s persona and his music have changed with each new album.
Though the video and photographs treat Young and Martin separately, they form a triptych with the audio installation in the elevator. Collectively they become self-reflexive, mutually supporting, and they conflate the two artistic personae into an idiosyncratic, total history that represents in microcosm concerns that run throughout Lee\'s entire oeuvre. Lee referenced George and Ira Gershwin in Funny Face, George & Ira Gershwin, 1927 (2002), the baseball player Ted Williams in Untitled (Ted Williams, 1941) (2003), and the rap group Public Enemy in It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy, 1988 (2006). Through each persona Lee speaks of creative origins: why an artist makes a particular work, and the historical moment and social conditions at the time of its making. Whether he is re-creating Iggy Pop\'s backflip in the ludicrous Untitled (James Osterberg, 1970) (2004) or roped to a chair hanging upside down in homage to Harry Houdini (although the photograph of his performance is hung upside down so it looks the right way up) in Upside Down Water Torture Chamber, Harry Houdini, 1914 (2004), by taking on a variety of eccentric postures Lee also borrows their accompanying contexts. Although his characters are autonomous individuals, for the artist they exist within broader systems of representation, such as the genres from which they originate—for instance classical music, baseball, magic, comedy (as in Martin\'s case), or rock music (as in Young\'s)—and therefore connect to the landscapes, social histories, and politics of their places and times. In bringing together different characters and eras and manipulating them through formal strategies such as flipping, spinning, and role playing, Lee creates a language that is unique but has universal applications. He suggests that no one is fully segregated—that thinking about Johann Sebastian Bach in 1741, for example, might tell us something about Public Enemy in 1988, and maybe even Tim Lee in 2008.
Each of these figures also represents Lee\'s concept of the moment of the \"proper name\": the point at which a name comes to reference a single person rather than any of the other people who might share that name. Despite all the many Steve Martins in the world, the name Steve Martin, in the public imagination, refers to a single Steve Martin, and Let\'s Get Small, Lee suggests, is when it happened. Furthermore, Lee\'s idea of the proper name applies not just to the instant in which a public persona crystallizes, but also more broadly to the potential of such a public persona to shift. Steve Martin can actually refer to many different personae: the stand-up comedian of the 1970s, the family guy of his later comedy films, the art collector, or the contributor to the New Yorker. Neil Young\'s name is similarly iconic but can be associated with folk, electrified rock, country, electronica, swing, and grunge, and outside the realm of music with film direction, education, and social protest. Every one of his albums has been, Lee claims, a reaction to the one that preceded it. Lee\'s Capp Street Project looks at 1977–79 as a pivotal moment coincidentally shared, and also at how our ideas of Martin and Young have changed in the decades since.
Although Lee\'s pieces are performative, his role playing and associations are political rather than personal, particularly with respect to ideas of national identity and race. Neil Young is often thought to be American, although he was born in Canada and is still a Canadian citizen, and Lee believes that the musician\'s infatuation with America is actually part of his assertion of his Canadian identity. Lee, who was born in Seoul and now lives in Vancouver, references Young by examining the question of national identity through his own situation as a Korean Canadian in San Francisco. His evocation of Steve Martin makes the issue of race even more explicit. An important element of Martin\'s comedy in the 1970s was his play on his appearance as a Waspish male. When Lee performs as Martin, the fact that Lee is Asian is strikingly obvious, thereby calling even more attention to ethnicity than Martin did.
At the core of Lee\'s practice is a concern with the issues of particular figures at certain moments in their histories (and our larger cultural history). He takes on their problems and tries, in a sense, to resolve them while inevitably creating new problems for himself. These relationships are not about mimicry, but rather about transformation. Treating them as reference points, Lee attempts to articulate his own position, which is particularly interesting in the context of Neil Young and Steve Martin. In his research for this residency project Lee explored the various ways in which the musician and the comedian struggled with the public\'s expectations of their creativity—how Young\'s constant transformations have surprised, and sometimes confounded, his audience, and how Martin became trapped in his first persona and had to transform himself to reassert his creative freedom.
Lee, who may or may not have yet articulated his own \"proper name,\" is in a special fix: Does he play into or against expectations of his work? Are the problems of the artist the same as those of the comedian or the musician? Should Lee always be trying to deliver something unexpected, unexpectedly? Can he hope, through his work, to produce the equivalent of a catchphrase or throw his audience for a loop? Is this his moment of the proper name, or is it too soon to tell?
It's Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away
Claire Fitzsimmons
Tim Lee\'s works have the deceptive appearance of simple self-portraits, but they contain myriad references. Over the last few years the artist has crafted a meticulous persona in his photo- and video-based pieces, which convey, ironically, very little of the personal. Rather, Lee articulates his artistic persona through others trying to articulate theirs. He has assembled something akin to an ensemble cast, drawing his characters—and their accompanying characteristics and ideologies—from an eclectic range of sources. These include major figures of Conceptual art, such as Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, and Bruce Nauman, alongside seminal moments of popular culture, from Carl Reiner\'s Hollywood movies to Harry Houdini\'s magic. Since receiving his MFA from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in 2002, Lee has created an oeuvre with a highly theoretical framework, which is counterbalanced by humor and politics, in particular issues of race and national identity.
Capp Street Project is Lee\'s first artist residency, which is less surprising when one considers that he does not normally work in a site-specific manner (he believes, on the contrary, that all culture travels) and that his usual way of working is a meandering process of reading, research, writing, and production, with the physical artwork realized in a relatively concentrated amount of time. Faced with two clearly defined Capp Street Project parameters—to spend 12 weeks in San Francisco and to deliver a new piece that responds to the local context—Lee had first to work out what, for him, would constitute a residency.
He had his starting point when he discovered that the comedian Steve Martin and the rock musician Neil Young had, coincidentally, both recorded live albums in San Francisco in the late 1970s: Let\'s Get Small at the Boarding House and Rust Never Sleeps at the Cow Palace, respectively. Both Martin and Young had appeared, though separately, in several of Lee\'s previous works, and their postures, props, mannerisms, and language already served as shorthand in his oeuvre for the genres of comedy and rock music.
The residency, then, became an attempt to put Martin and Young together, to create a project that would conflate their different artistic personae and histories while at the same time saying something about culture at large. To solve the dilemma of how to bring these two autonomous figures together, Lee began on paper with a rough diagram of the arguments for an integrated history. Through writing he gave material form to his attempts to use Martin to understand Young, and vice versa, and his text appears in its final form as the two essays in this publication.
The banjo was among the vital connections Lee uncovered in his research. Young has played the banjo on several recordings, and Martin used the instrument as a prop in his early stand-up routines, including the performance captured on Let\'s Get Small. Martin is actually quite accomplished on the banjo and has even played with the world-renowned bluegrass musician Earl Scruggs. On Let\'s Get Small he says, now famously, \"You just can\'t play a depressing song on the banjo.\" Lee had no previous experience with the instrument but decided to test this hypothesis by learning to play on it, over the course of his residency, one song. He selected Young\'s seminal guitar piece \"My My, Hey Hey,\" which can be either melancholic or aggressive depending on whether it is played acoustically, as in the first track on Rust Never Sleeps, or electrically, as in the album\'s final track.
Lee\'s banjo version of \"My My, Hey Hey\" represents a third, bluegrass, version and is his first-ever audio piece. In a wry and comic move, he has installed My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) / Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black), Neil Young, 1979 (Steve Martin, 1977) (2007) in the Wattis Institute elevator, which carries visitors on a very short, one-story ride between the upper and lower floors, rather than in the gallery space allocated for his exhibition. The audio installation is almost anticlimactic, even reminiscent of Muzak, that often consumed but infrequently commented upon easy-listening filler found in malls, retail outlets, and nondescript transitional spaces. Ironically, as visitors think they are on their way to the \"real\" artworks, they experience the focal point of Lee\'s project. In another sideways move, the artist gives his banjo recording sculptural form as a limited-edition 12-inch vinyl record with his texts as the liner notes (this piece is on display in the foyer).
Lee conceived the two works that actually appear in the galleries (officially these are part of his solo Passengers exhibition as opposed to his Capp Street Project residency) as footnotes to the elevator piece. The single-channel video titled Let\'s Get Small, Steve Martin, 1977 (2007) focuses on the opening of Martin\'s first live album and what was to become the comedian\'s tagline. Martin starts his routine by saying, \"I\'m sorry, I\'m really pissed off.\" He criticizes the sound man, the audience, and the local population, accusing them of insulting him as a comedian. He becomes increasingly angry until he says, now famously, \"Excuuuuse me.\" This catchphrase became a staple for him, his trademark, and inevitably the object of parody later on. Lee believes that Martin ultimately abandoned stand-up because everyone expected him to repeat this line, which was no longer funny because it was expected. For his piece, Lee reformats this moment by elongating the u in \"Excuuuuse me\" to last several minutes, creating the illusion of absurdly sustained anger. This mimicry through continual looping, the artificial building of frustration and exaggerated emotion, alludes to the entrapment of the comedian within what was once his own unique brand of humor.
My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue), Neil Young, 1979 and Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black), Neil Young, 1979 (both 2007) are two photographs showing Lee\'s shadow in poses that he imagines Young might have adopted during the original Rust Never Sleeps concert. Lee holds an acoustic guitar in one picture, and an electric guitar in the other. The images materialize something intangible, capturing not an actual performance but some part of its remnants. This idea is integral to Lee\'s understanding of Young\'s creative output—that it is restless and undefined, and that both the musician\'s persona and his music have changed with each new album.
Though the video and photographs treat Young and Martin separately, they form a triptych with the audio installation in the elevator. Collectively they become self-reflexive, mutually supporting, and they conflate the two artistic personae into an idiosyncratic, total history that represents in microcosm concerns that run throughout Lee\'s entire oeuvre. Lee referenced George and Ira Gershwin in Funny Face, George & Ira Gershwin, 1927 (2002), the baseball player Ted Williams in Untitled (Ted Williams, 1941) (2003), and the rap group Public Enemy in It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Public Enemy, 1988 (2006). Through each persona Lee speaks of creative origins: why an artist makes a particular work, and the historical moment and social conditions at the time of its making. Whether he is re-creating Iggy Pop\'s backflip in the ludicrous Untitled (James Osterberg, 1970) (2004) or roped to a chair hanging upside down in homage to Harry Houdini (although the photograph of his performance is hung upside down so it looks the right way up) in Upside Down Water Torture Chamber, Harry Houdini, 1914 (2004), by taking on a variety of eccentric postures Lee also borrows their accompanying contexts. Although his characters are autonomous individuals, for the artist they exist within broader systems of representation, such as the genres from which they originate—for instance classical music, baseball, magic, comedy (as in Martin\'s case), or rock music (as in Young\'s)—and therefore connect to the landscapes, social histories, and politics of their places and times. In bringing together different characters and eras and manipulating them through formal strategies such as flipping, spinning, and role playing, Lee creates a language that is unique but has universal applications. He suggests that no one is fully segregated—that thinking about Johann Sebastian Bach in 1741, for example, might tell us something about Public Enemy in 1988, and maybe even Tim Lee in 2008.
Each of these figures also represents Lee\'s concept of the moment of the \"proper name\": the point at which a name comes to reference a single person rather than any of the other people who might share that name. Despite all the many Steve Martins in the world, the name Steve Martin, in the public imagination, refers to a single Steve Martin, and Let\'s Get Small, Lee suggests, is when it happened. Furthermore, Lee\'s idea of the proper name applies not just to the instant in which a public persona crystallizes, but also more broadly to the potential of such a public persona to shift. Steve Martin can actually refer to many different personae: the stand-up comedian of the 1970s, the family guy of his later comedy films, the art collector, or the contributor to the New Yorker. Neil Young\'s name is similarly iconic but can be associated with folk, electrified rock, country, electronica, swing, and grunge, and outside the realm of music with film direction, education, and social protest. Every one of his albums has been, Lee claims, a reaction to the one that preceded it. Lee\'s Capp Street Project looks at 1977–79 as a pivotal moment coincidentally shared, and also at how our ideas of Martin and Young have changed in the decades since.
Although Lee\'s pieces are performative, his role playing and associations are political rather than personal, particularly with respect to ideas of national identity and race. Neil Young is often thought to be American, although he was born in Canada and is still a Canadian citizen, and Lee believes that the musician\'s infatuation with America is actually part of his assertion of his Canadian identity. Lee, who was born in Seoul and now lives in Vancouver, references Young by examining the question of national identity through his own situation as a Korean Canadian in San Francisco. His evocation of Steve Martin makes the issue of race even more explicit. An important element of Martin\'s comedy in the 1970s was his play on his appearance as a Waspish male. When Lee performs as Martin, the fact that Lee is Asian is strikingly obvious, thereby calling even more attention to ethnicity than Martin did.
At the core of Lee\'s practice is a concern with the issues of particular figures at certain moments in their histories (and our larger cultural history). He takes on their problems and tries, in a sense, to resolve them while inevitably creating new problems for himself. These relationships are not about mimicry, but rather about transformation. Treating them as reference points, Lee attempts to articulate his own position, which is particularly interesting in the context of Neil Young and Steve Martin. In his research for this residency project Lee explored the various ways in which the musician and the comedian struggled with the public\'s expectations of their creativity—how Young\'s constant transformations have surprised, and sometimes confounded, his audience, and how Martin became trapped in his first persona and had to transform himself to reassert his creative freedom.
Lee, who may or may not have yet articulated his own \"proper name,\" is in a special fix: Does he play into or against expectations of his work? Are the problems of the artist the same as those of the comedian or the musician? Should Lee always be trying to deliver something unexpected, unexpectedly? Can he hope, through his work, to produce the equivalent of a catchphrase or throw his audience for a loop? Is this his moment of the proper name, or is it too soon to tell?