In the last few years, Mire Lee’s installations of eccentric machines that perform their own systemic failure while churning out viscous, colorful substances have become monumental. In “The Heart of My Machine is Golden Lead” her two-venue solo exhibition in Vienna, the artist has continued to scale up while exploring the fallibility—and poetics—of industrial materials and infrastructures, rejigging them to produce aesthetic experiences. This expansion brings out a tension at the crux of Lee’s practice: the more spectacularly her machines display their precarity and enact their uncanny glitches, the more elaborate the institutional apparatus required to stage that breakdown becomes.
At the central axis of Secession, Lee placed a rusty cement mixer on a grid of wooden beams laid across a pool of red, gold-streaked pigment. Cutting into one side of the drum to reveal its inner core, the artist connected it to motors and plastic tubing that conveyed the pigment to a sloped metal panel. The ceiling supporting the apparatus through which the liquid circulates was partially dismantled, exposing the modernist icon’s gridded infrastructure. Every seven minutes, the drum noisily revolves and fluid spurts and drips from sprinklers attached to the top of the panel, creating painterly traces that evoke the energetic gestures of Abstract Expressionism and the bodily violence of Viennese Actionism as much as menstrual flows and the toxic spillage of industrial accidents.
Yet, even as Lee’s installation reactivates—and parodies—action painting’s mythology of masculine spontaneity, individual authorship, and heroic gesture, and transfers Actionism’s physical aggression to machinery and material processes, it also converts mechanical malfunction into a formal choreography: leakage becomes painting; waste becomes spectacle. The decommissioned mixer presents an image of production emptied of purpose, one that appears to make its inner workings transparent. Most vexing is that the considerable institutional labor required to construct, operate, maintain, and repair it was concealed. The viewer, complicit in this dramaturgy, is positioned not as a worker confronted with the consequences of industrial breakdown but as a spectator invited to relish (and Instagram) its formal and affective qualities. How much effort, I wondered, is required to sustain the illusion that such systems operate independently of collective labor, and what do these acts of occlusion tell us about today’s ecosystems of contemporary art?
At the rear of the room, Lee mounted old advertising banners from previous Secession exhibitions, bearing scattered Korean, German, and English poetic fragments, including source material from Korean poet Kim Eon-Hee rendered in brass leaf, alongside marks made with lead-based solder. The decision invokes Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1901–02), housed on the building’s lower floor, situating Lee’s installation within the institution’s history of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Yet her response to this legacy left me ambivalent: where Klimt transformed the walls into a continuous ornamental and allegorical surface, Lee exposed the material and institutional scaffolding beneath the exhibition’s polished veneer. Kudos to her “neo-frieze” of repurposed signage for turning the modernist institution into both archive and waste stream. Less felicitously, it also reveals the extent to which Klimt has become a totemic touristic artifact, repeatedly conjured by artists invited to exhibit there.
As a much-appreciated counterpoint, Lee’s moving-image practice—including Faces (2016), Sleeping Mom (2020), and Veronica Moser (2022)—is exhibited at the show’s second venue, the nearby Korean Cultural Center. Under the title “Women I Loved,” the presentation brings together three different acts of looking: collected excerpts of grope porn shot in the Japanese subway; a continuous loop of the artist’s mother sleeping; and fragments of an interview with the eponymous Austrian porn star whose specialty is scatology. These films draw the viewer into an uneasy proximity with female subjects while foregrounding the social relations that govern their visibility. Taken together, they complicate the spectacularity of Lee’s machines by shifting attention from the performance of autonomous systems to the bodies, labor, and structures of looking that those mechanisms—and the art world that stages them—so readily obscure.
—Noit Banai
