Drunken Speech
2007

Audio CD, approx. 16 mins., voice-over: Helen Cho (English), CD player, TV set, cable box, TV broadcast/signal, headphones, sleeping bag

Courtesy of the artist


Installation view of The Sea Wall: Haegue Yang with an Inclusion by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK, 2011
Photo: Jamie Woodley

 

Excerpt from exhibition guide of Double Soul, SMK – Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2022

The audio piece, Drunken Speech, is played through headphones and can be listened to while seated on a sleeping bag positioned in front of a monitor playing free-to-air TV. Placed on the floor in a corner of the gallery, this voice-dominant work offers the mood and atmosphere of Yang’s intimate inner voice, which is both confessional and self-reflexive.

The headphones let visitors listen to a prolonged ‘drunken speech’ in a husky voice about love, obsessive dedication to work and loneliness, based on the actual notes written by the artist while intoxicated and gathered over several years. Drunken Speech was recorded by the artist’s friend, who is also an artist of similar age, but grew up in Canada, as a possible alter ego. The work expresses the thoughts of one selflessly devoted to work and, in the middle of restless travel, also contemplates the notion of love. Is it even possible to have it all? In the case of this narrator, it would seem not.

The non-synchronised pairing in Drunken Speech between the visual and audio seems to be a typical setting of what Yang often attempts to achieve. The nondescript TV set shows mundane programmes, broadcast via satellite or cable, and today, digitally. Yang sets our eyes on local communities by including channels in foreign languages intended for immigrants, as is often the case in her previous exhibitions. But we hear deeply personal doubts, cries, agonies, and bursts – what the artist depicts as ‘pathetic whining’. The disparity between the images of the TV programme and the sound, combined with two ordinary objects of the TV set and the crumpled sleeping bag, provide a rare arena for an artistic personal voice and her fixation on marginalised status. Drunken Speech is about homelessness – partly the (drunk) artist’s homeless love, and partly the reality of concrete, universal homelessness.

 

Exhibition history

Double Soul, SMK – Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2022

The Sea Wall: Haegue Yang with an Inclusion by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK, 2011

Made in Germany, Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover; Sprengel Museum, Hanover and Kunstverein Hannover, Hanover, Germany, 2007

If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your Revolution, Edition II, Episode IV: Feminist Legacies and Potentials in Contemporary Art Practice, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium, 2007

 

 

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