Studio Islander - Collaborative Art Unit -

torus -I can't help it

2000, CRT monitor, video, coffee, doughnut, furniture piece

dimensions: variable (video apparatus: 11”x1 1/2”)

The two pieces of apparatus that consist of small TV monitors and audio speakers are hung from above. The TV monitors are facing to the surface of coffee so that the viewers can watch the reflections of the images on coffee.

Video images are of masturbating female and male genitals. Speakers play the conversation between a man and a woman with whispering voices. The conversation shows the fundamental failure of communication. I dealt with the miscommunication that would happen in our domestic daily lives and analogized it with the conversation in psychoanalytic counseling. “Torus” is a topological shape that does not have its center as a donut, and it represents the conversation or human communication, in general, which does not reach to the center, even though we are longing for it. A British psychoanalyst, R.D. Laing, originally wrote the text. Viewers can sit down on those chairs, and they may have an uncomfortable confrontation surrounding the miscommunication between two masturbating genitals.

by the artist