KocoGarden 1.0 was open for Koganecho artists in residence to suggest activities, gathering or events they'd like to do. Joar wanted to cook a meal for fellow artists.
[Originally published in Trembling Aspen | Series_03 Here, in Koganecho | Issue_02]
You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together
~ Anthony Bourdain
We somehow fit 23 people into KocoGarden. Joar told us why he had wanted to cook the meal. He left home when he was 15 to go work on ships, which he did for 10 years. Onboard ship, travelling the world, all his meals were made for him. The absence of home cooking meant an important connection to his culture and home was slipping away. In the meantime, he started making art in what little personal space he had aboard ship, which lead eventually to pursuing a career in art. He's been doing that for a little over a year now. The Koganecho residency is another threshold, into something new again.
Joar wanted to cook the meal, as art. It isn't without precedence. Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is a pioneer in the relational aesthetics movement in 1990's New York. Relational aesthetics—a precursor to participatory art—"focuses on the interactions between people and their surroundings rather than aesthetic objects. “My starting point," says Rirkrit, "was the search for my identity in foreign places, in places where I am estranged from myself,” He is best known for performance events in which "gallery and museum-goers participated in cooking and consuming traditional Southeast Asian meals."
Joar was doing something similar, and, to my mind, in a way that had surpassed the relational aesthetics movement of the 90's, which was so dependent on the sacred cows of the art world for its power and voice. Relational aesthetics needed the New York art scene, and a gallery within that scene, and all the rules and expectations about the art being presented in that gallery, as well as an art consuming audience willing to be disrupted—here I use consuming in not the most flattering way—in order to disrupt all those conventions. Relational aesthetics needed, in other words, an exclusive and pretentious art world in order to question and disrupt the exclusivity and pretention, which isn't a critique of what Relational Aesthetics acomplished, or even of Relational Aesthetics. Just that it all seems like a limitation to me.
Participatory art "by its very nature, cuts across the art world’s conceptual and administrative boundaries. That is its strength—and its challenge...One way out of this [what is art?] maze is to stop identifying art as a taxonomy of things—forms (visual art) and objects (sculptures)—and think of it instead as an act with specific intentions. The act is creative because it brings into being (creates) something that did not previously exist, but art is in the act, not the thing. It might create an object, a composition, a performance, a story, a symbol or an experience. It can be huge and long-lasting, like the sphinx, or intangible and brief, like a haiku. But whatever its characteristics, the creation is the result and trace of an act distinguished from other human acts by its intention. ~ A Restless Art. François Mattarasso, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 2019
The meal, all of us helping to make it and then gathering to eat it, would be Joar's art. Art is about human connection, and this was Joar's way of creating connection to his aunties and grandmas, to his culture, to his home. Simultaneously, to everyone who has anything like an auntie, grandma, culture or home in their lives.