Swallowing Time: Dark Matter White
esse quam videri (to be, rather than to seem)

by Shamim Momim

The event horizon, the boundary of the region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape, acts rather like a one-way membrane around the black hole... One could well say of the event horizon what the poet Dante said of the entrance to Hell: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” Anything or anyone who falls through the event horizon will soon reach the region of infinite density and the end of time.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

Common renditions of Viking origin myths include not just those of creation of the universe but also of its end. The world arose from the eternal winter of the Great Abyss, a gorge of unfathomable depth, a rupture of emptiness called Ginunngagap. The earth was fashioned from the flesh of the first ice-giant, and linked to the vault of heaven by Yggdrassil, the great tree whose roots and limbs created a circuit between the realms of the world. At some time in the future, the end of existence, Ragnorak, would return to that endless freeze; the great serpent kills the gods, the wolf swallows time. The sun grows dark, the earth sinks to the sea. All the bright stars fall from the sky. Afterwards silence, darkness, eternal winter again.

This legend limns poetically with current astronomical theories that posit the scientific fate of the universe. Ever since the work of Edwin Hubble in the 1920s, scientists have known that the universe is expanding, but most have believed that the expansion was slowing as the universe aged. Recently, however, astronomers calculated the expansion rate by studying dozens of powerful supernova explosions within distant galaxies, which can light up the entire universe. They determined then that some unknown force was pushing the galaxies apart, causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Physicists revised their equations, and realized that some “dark energy” of unknown origin, akin to Einstein’s “cosmological constant,” was acting as an anti-gravity force. Thus, the more the universe expands, the more dark energy there is to make it expand even faster, leading to an exponential runaway mode. The summated conclusion: apparently, empty space itself contains enough repulsive dark energy to blow the universe apart.

The work of Terence Koh (sculpture, installation, artists books, and performance) can be read through many of the concepts these narratives evoke—the beauty and sublime transcendence of emptiness, the intertwining of all realms of life and death, the constellations of dark matter that creates the isolate worlds in which we live. Drifting powder silencing rooms, the repetition of circular forms, constellations of cryptically linked objects that move from literally disjunctive realms (upstairs/downstairs, inside/outside, dark/light) as well as more conceptual ones. Pristine, perfectly crafted containers are protective coffins, shattered glass and mirror, the glitter of black beads, burnt, residing within—gestures of isolation that are heart-breakingly beautiful in their utter aloneness. Material specificity dissolves under a blanket of whiteness that cloaks the secret interiors of all things, flesh, inert matter, light, space. Everything is linked to everything else, constellations of energy repel and attract simultaneously, and emerge out of or reside within their own destruction.

For Koh’s first installation, entitled The Whole Family, (2003) these myriad concepts took form on two literal levels, linked together through a hole in the floor (thus the ceiling below). Like Ygdrassil, the hole functions as a conduit between disparate realms, a reminder of their irrevocable connection. On the top floor a near-empty gallery houses only a standard desk lamp, what appear to be installation detritus, and footprints of white residue. The basement beneath was layered with a field of velvety white powder, with objects arrayed around the perimeter of the room. Descending to the lower floor of the installation, initially peaceful, clean, almost sublime, it begins to vibrate with a sense of imminent disappearance—beneath all that white, a viewer might imagine, lies an ocean of death. At first glance, the rooms seem nearly empty; only with time do the objects’ presence begin to assert themselves, their near-absence becoming almost overwhelming in the space, their subtle voices like silent screams. As with the sculptures, the roughly carved circular piercing in the floor initially appears almost incidental—an afterthought or accident—when, in fact, for the artist it forms the central gesture of the exhibition, the axis around which the entire constellation of objects and experience orbits. Koh has described all of his installations as “objects revolving around each other, held together by this force of nothing,” this very emptiness thus taking on the force of that aforementioned dark energy accelerating the movement of the cosmos. The all-white sculptures in The Whole Family installation—a knife with glittering rhinestone grip, minimalist shelves whose objects reside underneath, partially hidden, a white neon sign reading “felt” in cursive script, or a polystyrene coffee cup with a secret message, “password please,” picked out in tiny diamonds inside—seem to rotate in concert with one another. The gravitational pull of the center void, like a black hole drawing all matter towards it, creates the dynamic tension within the rooms, laterally on each level and vertically from top to bottom.

Overall, Koh’s work encourages the viewer to recognize an alignment of flesh, mind, and spirit, not as separate arenas but as simultaneous interactions. Throughout the run of the show, the pristine expanses of white were increasingly corrupted; two birds living freely in the space left their droppings everywhere, over time shifting the balance of purity and baseness in a fluid trajectory that mimics the entropic motion of all systems. This insistence on subverting the perfection of form and image is characteristic: in a later version of this same installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the white powder tracked throughout the multiple floors of the building by visitors entering the room became the ultimate performance of the piece itself. In other works, pristine gold foil surfaces are irreparably marred by water, glass is shattered and contents allowed to mold, “precious” sculptural objects are destroyed by performative use.

Closing our eyes equally to deduction and induction, we insist upon imagining a revolution of all the orbs of the Galaxy about some gigantic globe which we take to be the central pivot of the whole. Each cluster in the great cluster of clusters is imagined, of course, to be similarly supplied and constructed; while, that the “analogy” may be wanting at no point, we go on to conceive these clusters themselves, again, as revolving about some still more august sphere; —this latter, still again, with its encircling clusters, as but one of a yet more magnificent series of agglomerations, gyrating about yet another orb central to them—some orb still more unspeakably sublime—some orb, let us rather say, of infinite sublimity endlessly multiplied by the infinitely sublime.
Edgar Allen Poe, Eureka

For a 2004 installation, Do Not Doubt the Dangerousness of My Butterfly Song and Koh & 50 Most Beautiful Boy (actually two simultaneous installations in the same upper and lower spaces as The Whole Family), Koh returns to the experience of cycles and circularity, as well as what has become a characteristic doubling/mirroring that similarly obviates a singular narrative reading. The upstairs gallery is again nearly empty, housing only three severely modernist glass, steel, and mirror vitrines. Trapped inside the sharp, perfectly framed geometry of the square metal frames are what the artist has called “perfect secrets,” wrapped and entombed butterfly bodies. The three vitrines; white, black, and silver, each sit against an individual wall, linked in rotation by the slowly swirling pink plaster fan in the center of the ceiling above. Inside the vitrines, known but unheard, Koh’s recorded voice sings privately to the delicate corpses, an intimate, honorific performance that holds its own destruction within, as the minute vibrations of sound are enough to slowly crack and ultimately transform the decaying butterflies to mere powder. Dust to dust, unknown.

The performative sculpture, My Coffin (2002), a mirrored box in the titular shape, similarly draws on Koh’s attendance to the notion of secrets, and the quiet, slight modesty of many of his works. Like the installations, the sculpture is activated by a viewer accessing its interior, which is packed with small white boxes. Some of the boxes densely layered within are openable, some are sealed, housing seemingly incidental objects that individually form a cryptic lexicon of secrets. In the manner of all collections of personally resonant objects or images, there is a sense of internal logic that is opaque to the viewer. Partially closed and forbidding as the hard, reflective surface of the box itself can be, like that mirror it also suggests an infinite possibility of refracted meaning. Phrases from Koh’s descriptive listing of the contents read like a private language, ingredients for a spell of unknown effect: “two vials filled with air, a comb with two circles, a present from A.A. Bronson, a ring within, five pointy objects, a spaceship, a clay rabbit head embedded in white powder.” Cumulatively, they comprise a memento mori in mirrors, fragments of time and memory. Similarly, one of the editioned “boxes” that accompanies another installation includes a booklet of vestigial images from the performance , entitled Drums and Shards. Like all of the “boxes” in Koh’s work, it contains primarily traces of and footnotes to the narrative content, reflection of his props and asides rather than a literal “depiction.”

The greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which
we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best part of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried can make us weep again.
Marcel Proust, A La Recherche du Temps Perdus

The simultaneous installation in the basement beneath the butterfly vitrines, entitled Koh & 50 Most Beautiful Boy, employed the artist’s characteristic monochrome white, and recalled the perfectly preserved decay of an ancient shipwreck, many miles beneath water. Two drum kits (titled, like many of Koh’s sculptures, separately within the installation overall, these decades that we never sleep) crusted and dripping with long entrails-like strings, sit somewhere between shamanistic totem and near-organic decay. Hanging low between the drum kits swings a chandelier of shattered mirrors, each shard of mirror refracting glints of light as it constellated in the air, blown by a fan on the floor. These ever-shifting fragments transform Jorge Luis Borges’s oft-invoked horror of mirrors into a source of dynamic power for the performance that took place—two half-naked young boys drumming furiously on the pristine sculptures, while the artist sang/screamed before them in his own private language. Both ancient and futuristic in feel, the artist has likened the room to a spaceship, the infinite motion of mirrors the engine, the boys/drums as wings and Koh the captain “that drags us into nowhere.” Transcendent, but without linear purpose, explorative rather than predetermined, Koh’s work subverts what Robert Smithson has called “the certainties of didactic discourse,” with “the discomfiting language of fragmentation.”

The futility of action—of the attempt—is often underscored in Koh’s performances. For a recent installation in which the artist created a version of the chandelier and drum kit in black, he performed/attended in a drunken rampage, and tried to have sex (wearing a giant dildo) with the objects while singing in another invented language. “It was imperative that I sing to the sculptures and slather them,” he said, “otherwise they would have been too dead.” At the same time, the truncated and unconsummated act of carnal passion exacerbates that failure through its frenetic exaggeration. “This was to make them sadder,” Koh explains. Better tragedy than mere deadness, already swallowed within the works themselves. Like the butterfly songs that the viewer can never hear, hidden among the entrails of each of the drum sets were two identical nooses. An homage to the suicide of Ian Curtis (lead singer of the seminal post-punk band Joy Division), whose music often forms the silent rhythms drawn from the artist’s process, Koh’s nooses also suggest a kind of essential fatalism. The work reminds us that to remain alive in time for other people requires that you keep dying for each one as well.

The idea of music as a transformative experience thrums deeply within Koh’s installations and objects; in a sense, the synthesis of form and content seems intended to capture that elusive experience of pure, transcendent sensation. While he is less interested in aligning any specific musical genre or musician to his work, for almost every project Koh recalls the “secret soundtrack in my head,” that sets a conceptual framework for the artist, forming an invisible underlying structure of the piece, not fixed but rhythmic in feel. Additionally, the performative aspects of several of Koh’s installations recall a ritual invocation, but one freed from a specific referent. An invented language, for example, builds a dialogue of illegibility even while its visceral intensity implies a causal effect. Smithson wrote, “words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void.” Koh’s version of this idea assumes the shattering impossibility of language as a point of departure—that lithic fracture made fluid, the void flowing into an embrace. The metaphor of fluidity and literal use of fluids in his work might better align with the word “petrichor,” meaning “the pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell,” an instance of pleasure not in a thing, but in the ephemeral result of a moment. Its etymology lends odd resonance with Smithson’s exegesis on the life of words and rocks: from petro- (rock), from Greek petros (stone) + ichor (the fluid that is supposed to flow in the veins of the gods). The rain squeezes divine blood from the earth….

For a recent performance/sculptural work in Los Angeles, Koh created a “Chinese opera,” entitled The Voyage of Lady Midnight Snowdrops through Double Star Death (2005). A performance in two parts, the first was conducted in all black, Koh covered head to toe in black glitter, the props and objects with which he battled the representations of evil shimmering with their own reflective black beading. The artist conceives the two performances again in circularity, as two spheres butting up together barely touching (a graphic in fact used for the show’s announcement), what he calls the idea of “nothing touching something.” The second part of the performance describes a similar struggle. Though suffused with a powdery whiteness rather than glittering black, it is nonetheless understood as the same event, replicated in another reflected existence. As usual, many of the sculptures used in the piece were partially destroyed in the production itself, crushed and in some cases, burned. Enacted on a silver leaf platform that reflected beneath a distorted mirror abyss of each act, performed on the night of the full moon (cosmos and constellations…), the opera evoked another ritualistic exploration of the idea of the “whole” being a duplicitous concept, that instead, all things maintain their opposites even while they coexist. The remnants of the performance reside as relics in Koh’s characteristic glass vitrines, some smashed and immolated, some preserved. The white costume, for example, still sifting powder embedded in the fabric, is curled within its case “like a snakeskin.” Once essential, protective, as intimate as the flesh on one’s body, now revered but distant, live with memory of life but ever dead.

One could say: “The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.” The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (p. 44)

Occupying an upstairs gallery space in the Vienna Secession, Koh’s most recent installation rests on the premise of constructing a room in which the artist would spend the rest of his life, a locus of self-exile and reclusion unto his own death. The exhibition is titled gone, yet still, which an observant viewer might notice replicated as a small, framed note—nearly incidental, a jotting on paper—hung in the stairwell by which one ascends to the space:

“gone, yet still/ i lie in bed/ watching the stars.”

Again invoking ritual structure, the artist has described the note as a type of “jisei,” a classical Japanese farewell poem written by a samurai or Zen monk just before the moment of his death. The stairway that links the entrance floor to that above is transformed into another of Koh’s Ygdrassil between realms. Carpeted completely in white, walls padded with panels of white fake fur, the stairway becomes a conduit, a liminal space of transition stripped of its designating characteristics and suggesting instead the permeable entrance to the silent void vibrating beneath all of Koh’s work.

Once upstairs, the exhibition is divided into two distinct realms, one comprising a profusion of (nearly 130) glass vitrines of approximately fish tank size, densely stacked and packed throughout the room, randomly but precisely arranged like a life-size larger manifestation of the boxes inside the coffin piece. All of the vitrine contents are sprayed white with diorama powder, unifying the vast variety of images packed within each—found and manipulated objects that form potential situations, opaque but narrative scenarios and occasionally purely abstract arrangements. Within some of the vitrines, for example, the figures of animals and creatures stand in ceremonial circles around clay objects, in others figures seem to be expiring in bed encircled by their mourners. Still others evoke memories from the artist’s childhood while some conjure fantastical imaginings or references to current events. The barrage of images—most in duplicate throughout the boxes—span time and culture: two marble busts of Pope John Paul connected by a plaster fiber between their mouths might occupy space with Michael Jackson figurines, Muppets, Chinese statues of re-incarnation, Hindu gods and death rituals, toys that include dinosaurs, rockets, spaceships, insects, Smurfs, hello kitty dolls, fake snakes, dollhouse pieces. Some of the vitrine contents are literally fluid, submerged in water, some vestiges—like the Chinese Opera boxes—of a previous ritual, immolated African masks perched on mirrors. In sum, the vitrines contain what the artist calls “fragments of the universe”; as in so much of his work, small, specific, clues to a larger self rather than an attempt to document a total life.

Most of the male characters sprout penises that Koh has fashioned, recalling perhaps a practice of ancient Greece where “herms” guarded points of entry and exits to towns and cities, as well as crossroads throughout the Athenian countryside. Derived from Hermes (god of transitions, messengers, and thieves), but unlike our familiar version of classical statuary, these much more common “herms” were often animal bodies merged with penis-shaped heads, or even merely large penises jutting from pillars. A more “traditional” example—an armless plaster bust of the god Hermes that resides in one of the larger vitrines, adorned with balls glued over his form—only emphasizes the notion of phallic exultation. Physical and spiritual, sublime and base, transcendent and vulgar, not just unified but never understood to be apart.

Caspar David Friedrich once wrote “the painter should not paint merely what he sees in front of him but also what he sees within him. If he sees nothing within himself, however, then he should refrain from painting what he sees in front of him.” What we see from within Koh stems from the unique position of contemporary artists of this moment, whose relationship to popular/found culture has become internalized, lacking the distance seen even in the work of artists such as Jack Goldstein, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, or Mike Kelley, who more fully elaborated the appropriative strategy, and the true synthesis of high and low (as opposed to the hierarchical, hermetic approach of the Pop artists). The remoteness seen in those precursors reflected the process of pulling away from the modernist position, the objective analysis of forms that was required to create the space in which contemporary artists now work. The earlier artists’ purified, remote emotions have been transformed into near-total subjectivity through the process of objective self-awareness without irony.

Thus, Koh’s constructions of glass vitrines can achieve in essence a wunderkammer of a single individual, though it seems to matter little who that might be specifically, just that he/she exists or has existed. The sense of the personal is not autobiographical self-absorption, but a way to connect to the ephemeral nature of the individual, holding, as the artist has said, “the idea of death around them.” The repeated and doubled forms within the vitrines reference the artist’s belief in multiple existences, like mirrors in which reflections both assure and annihilate themselves, where time generates as well as destroys. The vitrines suggest a portrait of self, but like any reflection—whether literally so in the mirrored materials Koh employs, the doubling of identical forms, or the more abstract interpretation of the word—they are filtered, skewed, partial, and incomplete. Author Wayne Koestenbaum has referred to this as the “deceitfulness” of mirrors.”A reflective surface lies,” he writes, “pretending to send back the same, it pollutes the original.”

The other “realm” of the installation, against the baroque assemblages of images in the vitrines, was inspired by the idea of most basic requirements for a room in which one could merely live and die. That is to say, the space created provides nothing but what is needed to live through a day while doing nothing, creating nothing—a bed, a chair, a shelf perhaps, a hook or two for the last outfit that one would ever wear. The sense of time passing and nothingness that pervades the installation recalls the futile imagining of George Perec’s A Man Asleep, which essentially tells the story of a man who chooses to live in a continual state of doing nothing. Against this stillness of time, the vitrines reflect a cacophony of images and ideas, swelling louder with their own internal soundtracks and concurrently making the silence of the opposite realm ever more deafening. In Koh’s work, silence is its own soundtrack. When describing the piece, the artist’s language consistently evokes the notion of the black hole—the nothingness that condenses everything against it, the circularity of all aspects of existence, an irrevocable force drawing things together as much for potential destruction as for transcendence. The notion of control thus emerges—is the “man asleep” in Koh’s version residing there of his own accord? Is the artist trapped there in this passive existence, eternally waiting, or is this the ultimate gesture of agency, of resistance against the futility of so many actions to which we give meaning? Is he Rapunzel awaiting rescue, seeking the outside and thus defined at all times against it and what is not there, or has he achieved the true sublime fullness of the interior, entirely contained?

Other aspects of the installation disallow for either answer to stand proven. Only natural light illuminates the installation, emanating from the roughly carved porthole that pierces the exterior wall. The murky, dreamlike light shifts the objects in the vitrines from sterile scientific specimens to objects of potentiality—slightly imperfect, gestational, crusted here and there with plaster, what Koh calls “embryonic galaxies.” Simultaneously, the glass vitrines become coffins of those materials, almost as if the boxes embedded in the mirrored coffin were inverted into a larger space. In these multiply mediated representations of the interior, the tomb of coffins contains the germination of full living constellations.

Koh’s repeated inversions and reversals are physically translated in the geography of the installation; the upper floor evokes the contradictory feeling of being below, deep down. The sense of being insulated and isolated, contained in some staged environment, was inspired in part by the underwater dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, particularly the popular sperm whale environment. Koh captures the sense of mystery in the floating, dispersed light—darkness of the unknown suggested in the shadowy depths beyond it. Yet, characteristically, the artists troubles the ideal completion of the scene; a number of the vitrines constellated around the room are smashed, cracked, and partially shattered as if a large heavy object had been tossed through the room. The resonance of this random, violent action draws the installation away from the preciousness of a fully sealed diorama frozen in perfection, reminded as always of its recent and possibly recurrent collapse. Throughout the single porthole run delicate silver threads, linking—however tenuously—the outside with the inside as they stretch to touch the large silver balls, like Christmas tree ornaments, that adorn a single tree outside the building. Again, a conduit between disparate realms rejects a clear or categorical reading of the work.

As a final gesture relating to the Vienna installation, an upcoming exhibition in Berlin in fall 2005 will be comprised of nothing but the artist’s gravestone. Carved in white marble, the gravestone will be set beneath a hole cut into the ceiling, allowing it (like the bird droppings in The Whole Family) to be changed, even defiled, in time by the elements of life outside. Entering the gallery exterior, its windows occluded by a false wall, the ceiling oculus will provide the only illumination. This epilogue to Koh’s Secession installation will become the locus of an enormous multi-sensory (music, dancing, food, alcohol, drugs) celebration of the artist’s death, as bacchanalian a festival as he can conjure. Beneath the round skylight, the artist describes an image of his friends rotating beneath in ecstatic remembrance and memorialization. A pathos of loss turned into jubilant commemoration, the artist has not yet decided if he will attend his own death.

And at night you will look up at the stars. Where I live everything is so small that I cannot show you where my star is to be found. It is better, like that. My star will just be one of the stars, for you. And so you will love to watch all the stars in the heavens...

Antoine de St. Exupery, The Little Prince

Throughout Koh’s work, one can see the influence of artistic predecessors such as Felix Gonzales-Torres, whose innovative use of absence-as-presence similarly delved deeply into the sensation of the instant and plumbed both its sublimity and its conflicted, contradictory essence. A sense of the ecstatic pervades, playing on the Greek origin of that word meaning to be outside oneself, a dissolution of a singular identity. The terror and grandeur of the true sublime need not be a monumental gesture, but can reside in small white boxes, on a tiny white card tattooed with miniscule silver letters that reads “boy drowned and crystal cried 50.” The approach of artists such as Koh, among others, cultivates a semi-metaphysical belief in the re-imagined world that makes it difficult to avoid comparison to the metaphorical structures of religion; however, these artists seem to search for an evolution rather than an absolution, purposeful rather than teleological. In this world, Jorge Luis Borges might be the prophet come down from the mountain (or out of the infinite Library, as it were) to speak the Word, its sacred spaces more fluid labyrinth and winding temple than mere cruciform, and Bruce Nauman, Robert Gober, and Gonzalez-Torres its lineage of holy men enacting a trinity of enigmatic, euphoric aggression, melancholic claustrophobia, and ultimately, sublime passion.

Overall, Koh’s work strives to fully realize a task initiated in an earlier moment of sculptural innovation, often called post-minimalism, which posited a new embrace of content completely integrated with its material, methods fused with chance, and, what Lucy Lippard wrote about as an improbable combination of the ‘death premise’ of primary structurists, an initial implication of intentional inactivity and self-sufficiency, with a sensuous, human, life-generating, incongruity. A handful of other contemporary artists exhibit the same inheritance of that seminal “anti-illusion” moment: the nonhierarchical, gravity-bound forms, the move toward horizontality, a sculptural idiom in which aspects of chance combine with precision and deliberation. And while much contemporary sculpture may structurally reflect Smithson’s non-sites, which made dead objects active by creating static forms that visually mimicked the possibilities of a larger, external system, it does so in almost the opposite way: by making those fluctuating systems of our lives “static,” that is to say, infusing the form with the fleeting essence of the moment.

While clearly filtered through a Minimalist sculptural language, Koh’s work resurrects premodern notions of ritual and performance within the objects themselves, baroque in content and occasionally form, where the various components suggest enactments in time. The post-Minimalists sought to return human presence, process, and temporality to their work, but Koh does so through a suggestion of broader narrative time, one that is activated by the viewer’s presence, by complicity with the work itself. This “viewer-inclusive” condition, rather than rendering the work “alien” (as Michael Fried feared in his infamous essay on minimalist phenomenological theater Art and Objecthood), does exactly the opposite. For Koh, like many of his peers, it is exactly that infection of forms and ideas that defines their work. He transcends antiquated notions of essential purity assigned to Minimalist forms as a means to simultaneously access the opposite—the impermanent, the chaotic, the base and the sublime. The preoccupation with time that characterized 1970s post-Minimalism (in a situation, for the situation) has been brought back and inserted within the object itself. Rather than remaining mute and inert, form has become part of a vocabulary that might at times produce a language, mobile and fluid by definition. Like language, the installations of objects in time are “merely” an inherently impossible attempt to articulate passion, loss, ecstasy and heartbreak, to assemble one’s desires against a framework in which they might be enacted, but more often than not will fail. The artist has said that he cannot perceive his works as discrete sculptures but rather “in relation to a set of situations and actions, often too ephemeral or subtle for anyone but myself.” In Koh’s work—seductive, evocative yet always holding its ultimate inaccessibility, its core, to itself—this is, perhaps, the final secret.

(All quotes unless otherwise noted are drawn from emails with the artist, March 2005-May 2005.)

Notes.

i. Flam, Jack, Introduction: Reading Robert Smithson, in: Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Jack Flam (ed.), University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1996.

ii. Hoffmann, Werner, Caspar David Friedrich, Translated by Mary Whittall, Thames & Hudson, London 2000, p. 26.

iii. Koestenbaum, Wayne, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn 2004, p. 17.

iiii. Lippard, Lucy, Eccentric Abstraction, in: The New Sculpture 1965-75: Between Geometry and Gesture, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1990.