I saw a Michael Joo exhibition at the MIT Media Lab today.

I can’t say I was exactly blown away by the experience. While I like an artist who incorporates science into their work (for example, a rope and noose, with a dense, two-year-old synthetic crystal structure growing on the knot of the noose), few of the pieces meant anything to me (or were even visually interesting), even after reading the descriptions. He was in the Venice Bianale recently, so I want to believe he does good work, but I really wasn’t feeling this exhibition.

Only five minutes prior to entering the exhibition, I was speaking with Robin about how some art, if you see it as a story, will leave a few key pieces missing for you to fill in. The art then makes a connection with the viewer through those missing piece. Take David Blaine for example. As far as I know, he never gave a real reason for doing his 44 days without food. I think he said he wanted to challenge himself, but that’s all I heard.

To me, his stunts fall clearly into the perforance art category, rather than protest or magic. He starved himself for whatever reason you wanted him to! You fill in the blank. Maybe it’s for peace. Maybe it’s against world hunger. Maybe he just wanted to protest against bad English food. He didn’t say, but since people can’t believe that he’d just do it for no reason, they have to assign some value to his stunt. It’s too fantastic not to! So the whole thing became political in the end. People got angry about the stunt. To me, it’s very effective art.

Wasn’t this about Michael Joo, though?

Oh well. I think I just wasn’t in the mood to fill his blanks in. Maybe I didn’t see where the blanks were. Maybe there were too many blanks. Or no blanks.