Do Ho Suh’s exhibition at the Tate is so titled because traditional Korean buildings known as a hanok can be disassembled and reassembled elsewhere, a process of ‘walking the house’.
It was wonderful to be immersed in someone expressing different aspects of the home. From the physical aspects to the emotional and temporal. Seeing them all overlaid together, as they are for people most of the time but which feels rare to see in artworks. Homes can often be featured in art but rarely as the main event, often just a backdrop or fleeting glimpse. Something that tells us about someone but isn’t often the main focus.
Public/private split
Homes are usually thought of as private spaces, or at least they have increasingly been for the last few hundred years. People lived together in much more communal set-ups. Sharing rooms, beds and homes. Things that we would now consider private, like using the toilet or having sex, were much more public activities then. It’s apparently why swear words were related to religion up until a few hundred years ago – that was a transgressive thing to talk about, whereas swear words now are more about sex and toilet things because they have become private matters, things to be ashamed or embarrassed about.
Here, Suh upends that, making the private public. He has houses within houses, parts of homes which have become public spaces as they are demolished. A childhood home rubbed down and rebuilt within the gallery. Every part of the exterior traced onto paper, lines and designs, to capture the look and feel of the place. Films showing homes exposed to the public as they are demolished, private walls becoming briefly public before they disappear.
Homes in this telling are not just becoming public because we get to see the private light switches and fire hydrants of previous homes but, in sharing his artistic response to his home, he’s also helping us move from the specific to the universal. In showing us where he’s lived in a way which invites us in, creates some intimacy, he’s also inviting people to think about their own home. Helping us bring our own homes into that gallery, comparing ours with his, reflecting back on our own, seeing how others live.
Gender and homes
Homes have traditionally become a place that’s associated with women rather than men, as many, including Bowlby, Gregory and McKie have reflected. Following the split between public and private spaces, men became more associated with public spaces and women with private spaces. Perhaps if the exhibition had been by a woman rather than a man, it might have resonated slightly differently. A sense of women working within the parameters they are typically afforded. Whereas having a man make art from it, and see it as something which is worthy of making art with and from, is another way of helping to show and shift that division.
Modernity and homes
Putnam identified two successive transformations of contemporary living from traditional 19th Century models of home. The first was the emergence of the modern home between about 1920-1950 when domestic spaces were designed around the technical core of sewers, water, gas and power cables. A time when these innovations were new for most people and somewhat astonishing, or perhaps a little terrifying too. The second shift he identifies is around the 1960s, when the technical, economic and political structures of modernity became part of the background of modern home life. At that point, as what he describes as ‘the material life supports of modernity are taken for granted’, the cables and sewers and suchlike fade into the background and the home becomes a space in which people personalise their space and negotiate with each other about how it looks.
In that context it was fun to see cables, wires and light fittings represented. Those life supports, especially things like cables, don’t tend to be shown and have disappeared into a sense of what normal homes look like. Often in lifestyle magazines cables and wires get edited out of pictures, as though the items they are powering magically work without showing the plugs. That it’s not cool or aspirational to need to connect in to power sockets.
Suh shows the different aspects of the home which would normally be hidden, peeling away layers of life. Simultaneously showing the modernity of the home which is taken for granted by those who have grown up with it, and also going back to the pre-modern home where it’s not taken for granted and is instead something to marvel at. Bringing them to the fore again allows for the magic and importance of them to be seen and recognised.
Making homes our own
When people move into a place they often try and remove traces of previous occupants to ‘make it their own’. Suh shows there are many ways to make a home our own. He had to get permission from some of the landlords to make the art, a way of taking ownership of the home – it’s his art when it’s out in the world, even if it wasn’t and isn’t ‘his’ home.
In one of the pieces, he layers up aspects of different homes – light switches and plugs, light fittings and door handles. It gave me a time-travelling sense of all of the people who would have used those light switches and door handles. The different hands that had used them, the lives they have supported. As we become more separate in our homes, with much less communal living, more people living by themselves, and even within homes as we have separate spaces, overlaying parts from multiple homes gave a more communal sense of home.
Memory and meaning
For some, home is a place of practices and habits, for others it’s a place that holds memory and meaning. The pieces by Suh blur those boundaries. The practice of making art, the holding on to places and details which act as anchors for both practices within the home and also memories.
The pieces are a way of preserving the past but also, for him as an artist, of making the future – exhibitions and work, building a body of work and meaning. Tracing the contours of the building, with his childhood home literally rubbing every part of the outside of the building, capturing the details on fabric which then gets remade into a simulacrum of his home – but not a place you could actually live within. A memory of the memory. A memory that looks like the memory, in the same way a story that gets told and retold can become a memory of the story, rather than a memory of the memory.
As Brickell reflects, home isn’t just a place where history ends up but where history emerges from and, quoting Caluya, the home exhibits ‘a certain plastic tendency that enables its boundaries to expand and shrink’. This work does that too, delicately and painstakingly tracing the boundaries of the homes but with an intention for those very boundaries to go further out into the world.
The exhibition space itself felt like things were quite crushed together and could have done with some more space to breathe. Nonetheless, providing room for people to see homes as worthy of being considered art, and not just glamorous homes or parts of homes but the life support parts, created a space for thinking about homes that we can take from the gallery into the world and back home again.
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