Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue is a video work assembled from scenes of Steven Spielberg’s feature film Jaws(1975)—specifically from shots in which the three primary colors red, yellow, and blue appear simultaneously. The video follows the narrative chronology of the original film: beginning with the peaceful domestic setting of the family home, moving through scenes in the town and on the beach, and culminating at sea with the killing of the shark.
The title Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue references Barnett Newman’s series of large-scale paintings created between 1966 and 1970. The title of these paintings served as a provocation within the discourse of abstract painting at the time, aiming to liberate color from its purely didactic function and to manifest color in its self-representation. Two of Newman’s paintings became targets of museum vandalism: in 1982 at the National Gallery in Berlin and in 1986 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
In both instances—with the paintings as with Jaws—events culminate in destruction: the iconoclast destroys the artwork, and the shark is blown apart. Because the shark, as the embodiment of a threat, remains largely concealed beneath the surface of the water, the sea’s surface itself becomes the pictorial plane. It expands into a dual projection surface: on one hand, for the audience’s elusive fear of the hidden, and on the other, for the cinematic construction of suspense. Newman’s painting, in turn, confronts viewers with their own experience within the void of the color field.
How do society and the media navigate fear? What constitutes real versus projected threats, and how do we negotiate these within the tension between nature, politics, and culture?
The stamps are an extension of the video work, showing the final scene of the movie where the shark explodes, were printed through the Korea Post service. A second photo shows an open mouth and a single postal stamp with the same movie still lying on the tongue. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, the idea of a postage stamp being moistened by"body fluids inevitably triggers the notion of a potential danger of contamination. Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue let's us think about our relationship with nature and the possible risks of other pandemic outbreaks in the future caused by factory farming, wildlife exploitation and habitiat loss.
exhibition view, Signals, Eunam Museum, Gwangju, 2021
photograph, 40 x 50 cm, color, 2021
Korea postal stamps color, 2021
photograph with film stills, 2015
photograph with film stills, 2015
When Barnett Newman's painting Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV was acquired by Berlin's Nationalgalerie in January 1982, art experts established that the painting causes anguish and the certain press produced cheap propaganda complaining about the high price, tax payers money, and its low artistic value due to just showing three colors.
The picture was heavily damaged on April 13, 1982 by a veterinary student who, according to the Berlin daily Bild Zeitung, claimed to have felt fear and felt so overpowered by it that he had to defend himself.
The student who destroyed the picture signed his deed 'Aktionskünstler, ein kleiner Beitrag zur Sauberkeit' ('Action-artist, a small contribution to purity'). He said he was convinced 'that Newman, had he been alive, would in some sense have shared my opinion. I feel that now, for the first time, the picture is really complete, because of what I have done.'
The picture was heavily damaged on April 13, 1982 by a veterinary student who, according to the Berlin daily Bild Zeitung, claimed to have felt fear and felt so overpowered by it that he had to defend himself.
The student who destroyed the picture signed his deed 'Aktionskünstler, ein kleiner Beitrag zur Sauberkeit' ('Action-artist, a small contribution to purity'). He said he was convinced 'that Newman, had he been alive, would in some sense have shared my opinion. I feel that now, for the first time, the picture is really complete, because of what I have done.'
Source: Peter Moritz Pickshaus, Kunstzerstörer, Hamburg, 1988