"Once Upon a Time:" Storytelling as Experience in Florence Jung’s Performative Conceptualism

Florence Jung’s identity as an artist is notably elusive, to the point where she is barely recognizable as an artist at all. It is difficult to spot her, but stories spread about her work in a disproportional relation to the accounts of her physical presence. Jung actively seeks to cultivate situations that embody qualities of uncertainty and instability. These situations, in which “no facts, no evidence, no visual documentation exists,” capitalize on inclusivity, enabling the viewers to become a part of the experiences she creates. Consequently, the oral dissemination of narratives and, at times, rumors, become the primary means by which her artworks exist and endure.
How to theorize the experience of a work which takes place in a North Korean hotel room and consists of a thought not to be thought about? (Jung43, 2015) What if each visitor to an exhibition is requested to sign a legal document through which, in the course of a perceptive shift and a change of circumstance, they become a performer in it? (Jung59, 2017) How to grasp a social experiment in which exhibition visitors are hijacked to spend a night in a barn at a remote location, left in the dark about the circumstance? (Jung&Scheidegger, 2014)
In my paper, I take up with Jung’s performative ultra-conceptualism to develop the idea of storytelling as a space of experience and a way of survival for these radically contextual works. I argue that, inherently playing with the states of performative invisibility, mental conditions and situational contexts, Jung’s art can be conveyed, and experienced, by the very means which constitute it: Storytelling, rumors and tales. Moreover, I posit storytelling as a condition of possibility for these works’ afterlife (as in life-after-the-act) and suggest that they can be transmitted via accounts derived from the subjective, elusive and subversive memories. My paper draws from performance and conservation studies, philosophy, narrative theory, traditional and Indigenous knowledge and writings within the Black Radical Tradition.