Artification and Education in Kogonada's "Columbus"

Kogonada | Columbus | 2017 | 104 Min

Eames chairs, marble floors, a sunken living room stripped out of a 1980 Interiors catalogue: Columbus, the debut film of the South Korean director Kogonada, opens in a sprawling Mid-Century modern house. The Korean architecture scholar, Jae Yong Lee (whose face never greets the camera), is espying his mesmerizing surroundings, while his academic partner, Eleanor, trails behind him: a moment that serves more as an aesthetic wet dream than a plot-building exercise. The two characters are in an accidental game of Hide N’ Seek that doubles as a tour of every arresting corner of the splendorous Miller House in Columbus, Indiana. When Professor Lee moseys outside to an immaculate garden, Eleanor catches up, but gets absorbed by her cellphone. She drops it hastily when she notices Lee passed out on the rain-soaked pavement. The professor’s fate is unknown when Kogonada sinks us into a secondary storyline: Cassandra, “Casey,” a tomboyish Midwestern teenager, alternates between cigarette puffs and recitations of her tour guide script outside a modernist church under the balmy, Columbus sky. The teen is taking a drag and staring into the void—as she often does—when she peers through a wrought-iron fence and finds an unlikely figure in her sleepy town: a Korean man speaking austerely into his cellphone. Jin has begrudgingly traveled to Columbus to attend to his estranged father, Professor Lee, who has fallen victim to a stroke. He offers this rationale to Casey as they share cigarettes and walk in step along either side of the gate—until they arrive at its opening, and their narratives converge.

Casey and Jin form a tender, platonic relationship that nearly broaches intimacy. But Casey is in a love triangle: her real casanova is her hometown’s architecture. And honestly, there isn’t much else to think about in Columbus—just “meth and modernism,” as she explains to Jin during one of their drives, which serve as vectors for their budding companionship, and opportunities for Casey to proffer her favorite buildings, as if she’s the curator of her town. There is plenty to see: Columbus—perhaps surprisingly—is an architectural mecca. The library that Casey works in with a hyper-intellectual coworker and unrequited suitor, Gabriel, is an expansive domino set of bookshelves housed beneath a slanted glass roof by I.M. Pei, famed designer of the Louvre and Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And the Lego-like modernist church that serves as the backdrop to Casey’s opening scene is a cuboid masterpiece by art nouveau pioneer Eiliel Saarinen. His son, Eero Saarinen, known for the St. Louis Gateway Arch and New York’s TWA Flight Center, made several of his own marks on the city. It’s tacitly understood from both the artful setting and the film’s essayistic cinematography that Kogonada is fascinated by architecture. More central to the plot, however, is Casey’s admiration of it. 

Casey—introspective and abashed by the sound of her own voice—is a precocious, perceptive observer who sees aesthetic wonder in Columbus where others gloss over it, too blinkered by their suburban trivialities. “You’d be surprised how little people know or care,” Casey explains to Jin during their first encounter. She’s disappointed by his apathetic response: “you grow up around something and it feels like nothing.” Casey was raised with Saarinen and Pei at every turn, but to her, the architects have been a saving grace. It’s been several years since she graduated from high school, keeping day jobs in lieu of college in order to support her recovering addict mother in a kind of reverse parent-child relationship. (The dynamic is similar to that of Jessa and her father in Lena Dunham’s Girls, though Casey takes more pride in her responsibility.) When chaos ensues in Casey’s life, she supports herself with structure in its most tangible form. At a local bank—an edifice, which for a banal business, is nothing but entrancing: a resemblance of a giant paper lantern—Casey explains, “it was the beginning for me,” eyes transfixed on the building ahead. When her mom started doing meth, sometimes she’d never come home. “That’s when I started coming here,” Casey explains imperviously. “I found it weirdly comforting.” It’s an amorous scene between Casey and Jin, and Casey and the counting house. Deborah Berke, the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, designed the building. Casey met Berke when the professor visited Columbus and offered Casey a once-in-a-lifetime deal to assist her with a college admission. 

But Casey isn’t going. She couldn’t possibly find the money. Besides, how could she leave her mother to her own devices? Casey’s dissonance about college follows her throughout the film, sitting on her shoulders like a devil and an angel. And every exchange seems to wax the tension: “you of all people should be in college,” insists her unwitting, derisive high school friend, Emma, who just returned from a semester in Los Angeles and a trip abroad. “You can’t keep putting it off.” But leaving her hometown isn’t a given for Casey; her family isn’t the sort that’s defined by education. (In one particularly indicative scene, Casey tells her mom that the soup she made is supposed to taste “subtle,” and her mom responds by saying that she doesn’t know what the word “subtle” means.) Casey’s flower-picking ruminations with Jin help resolve her indecision about college by the end of the film, but Kogonada orients her inadequate sophistication as a stumbling block throughout the narrative. 

When Casey tells Jin about Deborah Berke’s offer, for example, she breaks the news by explaining that it’s an invitation to New Haven. “To Yale?” Jin asks. “No, no…she thought I could get into the University of New Haven,” Casey giggles. While Casey is a talented autodidact, this moment surfaces the preposterousness of the idea that she might be Ivy League material. Earlier, when Jin first introduces himself to Casey—a white American—she hears “Jim.” Is she uncultured? Jin, an eloquent book translator, and Rory, who has a Master’s degree in library science, serve as Casey’s well-schooled counterweights, holding a magnifying glass to her cultural inadequacy. From Kogonada’s directorial standpoint, these are not unrealistic choices; Casey does stand out in a crowd of American art zealots. Starchitects are famously known for their classical university degrees, and people who enter galleries are typically in middle and upper classes. It’s usually members of the same group who seek to understand art. But why?

Casey speaks the language of art historians, thanks to library books and expert roundtables, but her greatest gift lies in her affecting, visceral understanding of art. When she scoops up Jin and brings him to her second favorite building in Columbus: another glass bank, this time by Eero Saarinen, Jin asks Casey to talk about it. She rattles off her grocery list of knowledge, until he cuts her off. “You said this is one of your favorite buildings,” he prefaces. “Why?” She retreats back to her textbook definition: “it’s one of the first modernist banks in the United States.” But Jin isn’t satisfied. “Do you like this building intellectually, because of all the facts?” He wants to know why it moves her, not why it’s noteworthy. What follows is a flipped camera shot: we’re looking at Casey from inside the bank, through a spotless glass wall. The clip is silent, except for a subtle ambient score that creeps in to fill the reserve. Casey’s mouth moves, and a euphoric expression appears on her face as she endears the bank. Some critics have questioned Kogonada’s choice to omit the audible dialogue, but it seems central to this point: the words aren't important; her sentiment is. When an artist creates an artwork, most of the time, the goal isn’t for viewers—or consumers of the space—to memorize its Wikipedia page. Artists want to make a statement, to evoke a feeling, to move people. And that power doesn’t discriminate. 

But oftentimes, the institutions that house art and feed people into the art world, do. Gallery positions are often filled by highly educated liberal arts graduates, and exhibition openings are marked by dirty martinis and Miu Miu. Museums have famously privileged whiteness when it comes to selecting artists to show, but the racial and class foundations that art institutions are built upon are often just as prohibitive. When the Coronavirus hit the United States, art institutions with multi-billion-dollar endowments laid off their lowest level staff and cut education budgets (the latter are sometimes a step toward democratization). The same institutions have been working to bust unions—which bargain to bring entry- and mid-level staff fair pay—for years. How would Casey fare in an architectural firm in New York City? Without a college education, she likely wouldn’t get the job. Not to mention, as critic and curator Marcia Tucker once explained, that women entering art world positions are often expected to have more credentials than men competing for the same roles. 

There is no doubt that a college degree opens doors. Free admission to universities and galleries would be a great first step toward accessibility in the art and architecture worlds. But is formal scholarship a prerequisite to appreciate art in the first place? If the goal of the medium is to channel emotion, why is elite education the ticket to entry? By the end of Columbus, Casey goes off to New Haven to pursue architecture, but her passion should be worth more than some future degree. Naturally perceptive people like Casey can understand architecture, you just have to give them the chance. Through this main character’s journey, Columbus challenges us to leave our preconceived notions at the door, and ask ourselves: who is art for anyway?