Michael Joo at MIT List Visual Arts Center

Art in America, May, 2004 by Ann Wilson Lloyd

This first museum survey of the Korean-American artist Michael Joo was organized by the List Visual Arts Center and curated by its director, Jane Farver. Joo, who was born in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1966, represented South Korea with Do-Ho Suh in the 2001 Venice Biennale. The current exhibition consists of around 60 pieces dating from 1991 to 2003. About half are works on paper; the rest are sculpture, installation and video, including a major new work, Circannual Rhythm (pibloktok), 2003, which was commissioned by the List and premiered there.

A 25-minute, three-channel DVD projection synchronized on one long screen, Circannual Rhythm (pibloktok) consists of a narrative documentary, a fictional scenario and an ersatz biology field project. The first segment shows portions of Joo's solitary 400-mile walk along the gravel road that follows the Alaska pipeline to the Arctic Circle. No decked-out trekker, Joo wears street clothes and carries a plastic shopping bag, looking colder and more exhausted as he journeys north. In an ambiguous climactic scene, he meets a man and tries to converse with him, but hits the language barrier. This launches the next, more confusing segment, in which a group of Inuit actors plot with diagrams and then gather around one character who has a seizure in the snow. In the final sequence, the screen fills with a close-up of a wolf's head, tugging at what looks like prey. Wall text explains that Joo rigged a camera inside an embalmed caribou carcass, left it in the woods baited with fresh meat and attempted to restart nature's feeding cycles. Nothing much happens to the taxidermist's specimen; as proof, the carcass is displayed nearby.

United by their various wilderness settings, the three parts also integrate many of the concerns of Joo's work to date: identity, elemental biology, metaphysics, allusive materials, political critique, life cycles and extreme performance. A good example of the latter, Salt Transfer Cycle (1993-95) first shows a naked Joo attempting to "swim" on a bed of glistening white powder, revealed to be monosodium glutamate. Then he is seen belly-crawling and hopping about on the crusty surface of the Great Salt Desert (this time, reenacting an evolutionary journey). In the third segment, a salt-covered Joe sits in a meadow, allowing a 10-point bull elk to use him as a human salt lick. Besides the elk and caribou in the videos, there are two related wall-mounted works, Improved Rack #1 (Moose), 1999, a large moose antler cut in segments and extended with metal rods, and Hunt (Balance for Left and Right Lobes), 1993-94, a resin cast of elk antlers filled with toxically reactive chemicals. Joe's shamanistic use of cervine creatures seems a wry homage to Beuys.

One elaborate installation reconfigures two slightly earlier pieces. God II, 2003 (a reworking of God, 2002), recalls the video's seizure victim with a creepy, life-size mannequin wearing a fur-trimmed parka and sprawled atop a frost-covered cube. The face is made of clear plastic, like a medical model, revealing the skull beneath. Wall text asserts that viewers' breath condensing near the refrigeration unit/pedestal will eventually accumulate to cover the figure with ice: morbid curiosity, in theory, will thwart itself. Surrounding the sculpture is Unpack, 2002 (similar to Pack, 2002), a number of variously posed, life-size coyotes modeled in resin and urethane.

Like wilderness itself, the piece is puzzling and evocative, compelling and unnerving. While Joe's undergraduate background as a premed major and his polymath pursuits sometimes push his art toward the absurd and arcane, wisdom also lurks in his mad-scientist methods. [The exhibition is on view at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art through June 6.]