"Butler and Poster: The Shepherd's Woes", "Pop-up, Guerrilla, Partisan", and people dressed in black

We had just gathered in the waiting room and were about to descend into the dim underground. Since the audience had entered, something was supposed to begin. Isn’t a performance a space where such promises are realized? Yet, nothing has happened yet. Narration in a foreign language can be heard beyond the wall, but we are not yet allowed to know what it is. We gather in the narrow hallway, waiting for the next scene. We fumble around. No, perhaps it’s more accurate to say we are acting like we’re fumbling. At the end of the dark corridor, the silhouette of a person holding a camera is visible. The camera doesn’t reveal what will unfold in this space, but it does disclose one potential fact: this performance is being filmed and edited, and later will exist as an archival video. I realized that some of the curious-looking audience members from the archival footage of Mu:p’s performance (already) became, and had to become, part of it.

This is what I experienced when I went to see Butler and Poster: The Shepherd's Woes last December. It was the first time I had attended a live performance by Mu:p, as opposed to watching a video of one of their works. Throughout the performance, I kept questioning how the experience of watching a performance differs from the act of reenacting the audience's experience. How do the two actions overlap or separate to create the overall experience of the performance? Throughout the performance, I was filled with ongoing doubts, struggling to stay close to the real-time experience while constantly distancing myself from it. The performance was divided into three parts, and the space was transformed in ways that were fluid—walls folded and unfolded, rotated, becoming hallways or screens, taking on different functions or being discarded, following a path that led to continuous changes in the layout. It wasn’t a fixed experience of sitting in front of a screen and watching a video, but rather an ever-changing space that demanded the audience adapt to it anew each time, much like a variable installation structure. It seemed like a very free viewing experience because the audience wasn’t forced to stay seated. But in reality, the audience became an integral part of the performance, functioning as a device that revealed the effect of the performance through reactions that reminded them of their role as an audience—similar to how a ‘character’ functions in film. Of course, this happened because I approached the performance with the assumption that I would later encounter Mu:p’s video portfolio, “reconstructed from the performance,” and that the performance would eventually be reassembled into a video. I felt like a detective infiltrating an anarchist organization, as in G.K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday. The anarchists, dressed in black, with suspicious expressions, seemed to have their appearance shaped by deception and concealment. The black clothing, in this sense, was like an outer garment made from the attributes of disguise and lies. (In that sense, the black clothing serves as a transparent veil that reveals one’s secret outwardly.)

In the third part of Butler and Poster: The Shepherd's Woes, titled You rock my world, the video shown is an edited recording of the previous series of performances before Butler and Poster. The video, featuring audiences wandering in a long, bar-like space, mirrors the audience attending Butler and Poster: The Shepherd's Woes. This form of screening disrupts the audience’s fixed position, turning it into something indeterminate, causing one to question their presence on an existential level. Philipp Oswalt, in After the Act: The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art, discusses performance documentation and divides the category of audience into two types: the primary audience, who directly receives signals from the performer, and the secondary audience, who can only experience the performance through documentation.^{[ 1 ]} Referring to this classification, Butler and Poster: The Shepherd's Woes might superficially appear to be a performance aimed at the primary audience in a performance space. However, the video screening in the third part constantly reminds the primary audience that the performance is also intended for the secondary audience, who will encounter it later through the archival video. By overlapping the positions of the primary and secondary audiences, the performance disrupts the experience of the live event, unsettling how the audience experiences it as a real-time occurrence. The audience’s body is present in the performance space, but it can always be abstracted as part of the performance's effect. The audience exists as a point of intersection between documentation and performance, embodying the overlap between performance and its documentation, thus making this overlap visible.

So, in that performance, my sense of presence was very faint or almost nonexistent. I was either a being that was both here and there, or a being that wasn’t anywhere at all, replaced by the utility of a tourist, transparently wandering through the space. In fact, there is a certain aspect of becoming a tourist when we ‘experience’ a space. We pass through numerous spaces in our daily lives, but we rarely question how the function and arrangement of those spaces operate. Entering a space is almost like forgetting the space itself. When the lights come on suddenly in a movie theater during the screening, we are surprised to realize that this is not another world, but a physical space enclosed by walls. The experience of becoming aware of a space, of noticing it, is similar to the experience of “tourism.” Tourism doesn’t necessarily require traveling far. According to Azuma Hiroki, tourism is the act of introducing contingency into a seemingly fixed system, and it is encouraged as a means of awakening, reminding us that the present reality is not the best possible world.

The video work Pop-up, Guerrilla, Partisan, which reconfigures the documentation of the performance of the same name, was presented by director Paik Jongkwan under the title Didn’t You Wear Black Clothes? This work arises from the difference between space and "space experience." In this context, “tourism” is invoked as one of the conditions that enable spatial experience. According to the official description of Pop-up, Guerrilla, Partisan, the performance was based on an incident that occurred on November 16, 2019, in the center of Paris. On that day, a Black-clad protest (protesters wearing black clothes and masks) took place to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Yellow Vest Movement, which had originally started in opposition to a fuel tax increase.^{[ 2 ]} Black clad refers to a form of protest in which participants emphasize solidarity and anonymity through the use of black clothing, often seen in political and social protests. The black attire not only represents the identity and unity of the group, but also serves to conceal and protect the individual identities of the protesters. Black clothing, along with masks and hoods, helps safeguard participants and facilitates collective action.

When you search news footage from November 16, 2019, you see images of people dressed in black occupying the streets, creating barricades with cars, and clashing with the police. Violent clashes and casualties occurred between the Black-Clad protesters, who destroyed public facilities in the city center, and the police who were trying to suppress them. This protest, conducted in a foreign country in a foreign language, would likely have been viewed by tourists as one of the spectacles encountered during travel, rather than something explained in terms of specific interests. The tourist, through subsequent searches, may come to understand the protest's meaning, or remain unaware of it entirely. Pop-up, Guerrilla, Partisan experiments with how such a time lag and gap in understanding can be re-enacted through spatial experience. In the video, the chapters of the performance begin with scenes where the words Pop-up, Guerrilla, Partisan are converted into Morse code and transmitted. This performance, held in the Black Box on the second floor of the Nam June Paik Art Center, transforms the museum's exhibition space into an undefined temporary space, aiming to convert the meanings of Pop-up, Guerrilla, Partisan into spatial phenomena. As the performance description suggests, which speaks of "reconfiguring space through events that appear suddenly without a fixed base, and occur irregularly and unexpectedly via unofficial paths," we may not be physically in the square of Paris on November 16, 2019, but can engage with the protest through a ‘spatial experience’ that recalls conditions that evoke the nature of specific places and moments. The protest is restructured as a collective event that shares a similarity in experience, detached from geographical time and space. Just as the Black-Clad can be linked as a unit of anonymous protest action that is not bound by a particular country, time, space, or group, we can put on black clothes anywhere and anytime.

Umberto Eco preferred the term "under code" to describe how clothing conveys meaning. This is because he believed that the meaning of clothing does not emerge through clearly agreed-upon signs, but rather through collective suggestions and inferences.^{[ 3 ]}

Black clothing carries a certain meaning, but that meaning is not immediately apparent. Generally, black clothing suggests mourning or simplicity, but it can only be interpreted as such within specific contexts and situations. The clothing itself does not directly convey anything. However, the question “Didn’t you wear black clothes?” treats black clothing as a code that connects to a particular network. The reason for indirectly reproducing the experience of the time through the code of “black clothing” is that activities such as Pop-up, Guerrilla, Partisan are informal, irregular, and only function through the discord and gaps in the public order. An event that suddenly appears and creates a crack in the system, as a gap in the previously explainable space experience, can only circulate through ‘under codes’ rather than public language. While not all people wearing black clothes can be called protesters, the fact that the protesters wore black clothes allows for the codification of differences between citizens and protesters, tourists and citizens, protesters and tourists. Pop-up, Guerrilla, Partisan is a language invented to connect the entities codified in such differences. The planned presence of those who occupy a space suddenly and then disappear is connected through a loose network, organizing a new form of ‘protest’.

It is difficult to discuss the conditions of Pop-up, Guerrilla, Partisan without mentioning the events happening in Korea right now. We live in a state of emergency where exceptions have become the norm in everyday life. In Namtaeryeong, in Hangangjin, the streets are transformed into spaces for shouting slogans and expressing will. When the rallies are over, the streets return to their usual state, but the memory of the squares created during the protests remains as a form of spatial experience, breaking into daily life. In this way, political experiences will circulate not through clear symbols, but through a common sense – an "under code" – that reminds us that a space for resistance can be organized anytime and anywhere. David Graeber argues that anarchism does not seek to build an alternative form of the state, but rather encompasses countless communities, unions, networks, and plans of all possible scales as forms of organization. Some of these overlap and intersect in ways that are imaginable, but most of them do so in ways that are unimaginable.^{[ 4 ]} New forms of communication and ways of organizing life that are not imposed from above, creating less alienated ways of living, ultimately aim to expose the inadequacy of existing power. In order to realize the force that connects and resists outside of the existing system, anarchistic imagination may be necessary.

P.S.

In the latter part of The Man Who Was Thursday, it is revealed that all the anarchists in the organization were actually undercover detectives. Originally, there had never been any anarchists within the organization to be exposed. The twist is intriguing not only because it disrupts the novel's purpose of "disguise," but also because it points out that an anarchist organization cannot be identified as a specific group; its existence can only be approached through a ghostly, elusive path that cannot be officially confirmed. The activities of indiscriminately gathering and exploring the gaps in the system cannot be subsumed under any particular group or everyday language. The more one tries to find it, the more it will evade. We must not become members of an organization, but instead, through our individual practices and positions, meet and disperse in a decentralized way, transforming the system and thereby subverting the meaning of the organization. In this sense, Mu:p's performances are quite a fitting space for such things to happen.