2012, Vol., No.32

Lustmord(Sex Murder) in Weimar German Art

이윤희 | 2012, (32) | pp.7~40 | number of Cited : 0

Weimar Republic era in Germany(1919-1933) is the times between the end of World War I and the Nazi's period. At that time there were various tendencies such as Dada and Neue Sachlichkeit and several unique subjects had emerged as an object of concern. Lustmord(Sex murder), one of those unique theme is the subject of this research. Artists such as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, Heinrich Maria Darvringhausen started to focus their attention to Lustmord theme in the First World War, and showed diverse variations of them in Weimar era. The Theme of Lustmord has not formed the important category in French and English art, but the significant one in Weimar German art. The theme of Lustmord was associated with the environment of the metropolitan city, especially Berlin, the capital of Weimar Republic, which was the result of the World War I. A lot of newspapers which is published in Berlin reported Lustmord cases that were associated with the increase of prostitutes and the urban poor. The works of the Lustmord theme were motivated by that kind of report of journals. But dealing with Lustmord, the artists had expressed their own views on the social structure behind that cases. To the more detailed analysis, I divided the elements of the works to place and figures. The places in which Lustmord is happened are public spaces of metropolis or indoor spaces. The aspects of metropolis emphasizes the harmful consequences of the anonymity and apathy among urban people, because the target of Lustmord is the people of low status who have no one to take care. Also the women who seem to be killed indoor space are seen like the stuff that be used and discarded. These aspects is stressed by the killers who are mostly showed as the bourgeois. The works that treat the theme of Lustmord didn’t attract art critic’s attention at that time, and furthermore had to go through suffering on account of Nazi’s cultural policy. Accordingly, many of those works were lost and destructed in Nazi era. In 1990s,femminist analysis on the Lustmord image in Weimar era asserted that conflicts of the sexes and mysogynism of the artists caused the works. But the artists modified the elements of Lustmord strongly and contained the critical view on that peroid.

The Expanded Concepts of "Institutional Critique" Michael Asher's "Project"

Yoonseo Kim | 2012, (32) | pp.41~70 | number of Cited : 2

The paper explores the work of American artist Michael Asher (b. 1943-2012) in order to outline the larger context in which the shift in the meaning of Institutional Critique came about. This paper attempts to shed new light on the meaning of Institutional Critique by analyzing the work of Asher for the following reasons. Firstly, Asher continued his practice from the late 1960s, establishment of Institutional Critique, thereby providing a gateway into the entire development of Institutional Critique. If the existing studies analyzed the first generation Institutional Critique artists-such as Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher and Hans Haacke-as a unified group, this paper discusses Asher’s work from his earliest to more recent ones in order to expand the meaning of Institutional Critique and synthesize the previously scattered analyses of Asher’s project. Secondly, the work of Asher effectively reveals the strengths and strategies of Institutional Art. His attitude towards art takes on the meaning of “working” rather than “art work.” If an art work as a physical entity is independent from the situation in which it exists, art work is merely made up of materials, or exists as the situation as such. In this paper, the term “project” shares similarity with “working” but at the same time signifies “art practice” of Institutional Critique. Such understanding of “project”highlights that the methods of “project” are linked to the questioning, and subverting,the operating logic of art. Ultimately the work of Asher springs from the critical reflection on author-based art, and operates as a question of “what can we call as art”rather than replicating the existing definition of “art work.” In this way, Asher seeks to locate various possibilities of art that can only come to the surface when the structure in which art work remains as a byproduct is subverted. By exploring the work of Asher, this paper redefines the systemic function of institution and the role of art, even when the work of art does not reveal the artist or the institution or is not recognized as “art work.” Through the works of Institutional Critique that Asher has made for the past forty years, this paper ultimately emphasizes--the processes by which the issues brought forward by art have changed and expanded,while interacting within social contexts, revealing that what art can do is none other than provide an opportunity to ‘critically reflect’ on our everyday life.

The Abject "Somatic Symptom" and Artistic Sublimation in Women’s Art

LeeMoonJung | 2012, (32) | pp.71~102 | number of Cited : 5

A male body was set on the basis of gender differences in the most of the patriarchal society and other characteristics of the female body were categorized. The men's domination and discrimination over women were justified by this basis. Female artists have been trying to criticize and overcome the dichotomous logic of patriarchy which has made the body of women to be objectified and oppressed. In this process, some of women artists put women's body and the workings of them that have been dismissed ugly and despised to the forefront. Also, they combine disgusting and cruel images here. These attempts are closely related to Julia Kristeva's theory of abject. Diverse aspects of abject that mean something dirty, low and disgusting neither the subject nor the target which threat to clear identity, system and order standing in the border of the subject and the object are done the most active in the body-flesh, the mother-women area. The typical way of control and sublimation to the threat and ambiguity of abject in the society is an art. The works of art from Kiki Smith, Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta discussed in this paper have significance of feminism because their works have an implementation of a new female identity with the liberation and the subject from the targeted images of women those were reproduced in art. The combination of abject and women of flesh leads to the society of diversity coexisted to recover the value of women that has been considered to be humble and to criticize the problems of a patriarchal society. Also, if the ‘somatic symptom’ of abject is sublimated artistically, new aesthetic categories are created by showing images and behaviors those do not conform to the symbolic order,stereotypes and social norms. As a result, ‘somatic symptom’ of abject appeared in the art of women leads dichotomous world to think as an open structure not closed. Also, that dismantles the imbalanced power of uniformity dividing gender, race, mind and body, human and nature, civilization and raw, high and low grade, normal and abnormal, beauty and ugliness oppositively and guides us the new world that pluralism coexisted.

Giorgio de Chirico: Rivalry and Difference

lee, minsoo | 2012, (32) | pp.103~136 | number of Cited : 0

Artistic rivalry was fundamental to the work of the Greek-born Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. In this paper, which examines de Chirico’s frequent rivalries with his contemporaries, I analyse a selection of de Chirico’s canvases from the 1920s and 1930s which emulate the work of old masters in the light of René Girard’s theory of “mimetic desire.”De Chirico’s work was often the subject of intense rivalry between himself and other artists. In 1919, when Carlo Carrá published his book Metaphysical Art, a publication that gave de Chirico a relatively less important role in the formation of the “metaphysical” art movement in comparison to Carrá, a difficult falling out between the two artists ensued. A similar dispute soon arose between de Chirico and the leader of the French surrealist movement, André Breton. Although Breton had once seen de Chirico’s paintings as the harbinger of a new “modern mythology” based on uncanny juxtapositions of objects, by the mid-1920s when de Chirico began to make explicit references to old master paintings, Breton subjected the painter to a savage critique for producing, among other things, “ridiculous copies of Raphael.” De Chirico for his part would subject Breton to a similarly scathing assessment in his later writings. These disputes and disagreements were only two of many artistic rivalries throughout de Chirico’s career. These rivalries reached fever pitch in the 1920s and 1930s, a period in which de Chirico’s early, metaphysical work came under attack. His early work was mocked and parodied by younger artists, such as Gino Bonichi [Scipione] who depicted de Chirico’s famous manikins as ordinary objects thereby stripping them of their mystery, leading de Chirico to complain that the artist’s caricatures were directed against him. These criticism would culminate in the official fascist press in the late 1930s where de Chirico’s work was condemned for being “foreign, Jewish and Bolshevik.” During this same period, however, the artist abandoned his early metaphysical style and set himself the task of trying to rival and emulate the work of old masters. Copying the work of some 136of the most significant painters throughout history, including Raphael and Rubens but also Renoir, beginning in 1920 de Chirico demonstrated the superiority of the inherited traditions of western culture while creating a sense of his own failure and inadequacy which has persisted to this day. These works have puzzled scholars for their slavish dependence on the work of other artists. I interpret them through René Girard’s text Violence and the Sacred. There Girard formulates the theory of “mimetic desire”, a social scenario in which people's needs and wants mimic each other to the point where conflict and violence are the result. As I argue, for de Chirico, a dissolution of categories flowed from modernity’s erasure of the difference between the culturally privileged work and the banal, everyday object. This meant that everyone in society was essentially chasing the same thing and mimetic desire threatened catastrophic conflict. De Chirico’s obsessive repetition of old masters was an attempt to reassert the primacy of distinction within modern art by reintroducing hierarchies of difference which work to quell mimetic desire. However,at another level, he exacerbated such desire by relativizing the old masters and making his work as much like theirs as possible. Subsequently, in a series of Gladiator paintings of the later 1920s, he would resolve this issue by offering himself as the perpetually inadequate painter whose “sacrifice” focuses the socially destabilising energies of mimetic desire and thereby absorbs them. Rather than a simple rejection of modernity or a heedless loss of quality, therefore, de Chirico’s unusual paintings after old masters were deeply dependent on the experience of rivalry and were an attempt to avoid rivalry’s socially deleterious effects.

Whose Side Are We On? : Artistic Rivalries in Mexican Avant-Garde Art

김정현 | 2012, (32) | pp.137~174 | number of Cited : 1

Avant-garde art in Mexico blossomed in the decade immediately following the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), an armed struggle for political reform and a more equitable distribution of resources. The Constitution of 1917 offered free education to all Mexican citizens and land redistribution, among other benefits that promised to create a new society and level economic differences. Artists in post-revolutionary Mexico faced a quandary: on the one hand, to renovate artistic forms and embrace modernity,and, on the other, to employ art for socially conscious ends that would further the revolutionary project. Over the course of the 1920s, they experimented with a variety of approaches and visual languages in an attempt to find a model of modernism that would be the most relevant to Mexico. Often these efforts led to spirited debates but also to unresolvable tensions and bitter rivalries. This article examines different types of rivalries that arose in the arts of the postrevolutionary period as a means of assessing what was at stake in articulating a modernist project in Mexico. It draws on examples from literature and art, especially around the avant-garde movement Estridentismo (stridentism)—which encompassed artists and intellectuals, among them mural painters—and its offshoot ¡30-30!. Estridentismo was launched in 1921 by the poet Manuel Maples Arce through the manifesto Actual No. 1 , a rallying cry for artistic renovation. Originally inspired by the avant-garde iconoclasm of Italian Futurism and other early 20th century European movements, over the course of the 1920s, Estridentismo came to be emblematic of the multiple and contested ways of defining Mexican modernism. ¡30-30!, a short-lived movement which emerged in 1928, similarly positioned itself within an antagonistic framework, and its belligerent stance ultimately led to its censorship. Probing the rivalries and social dynamics incited by these movements sheds light on important critical debates that define Mexico’s particular brand of modernism. The article begins by examining Actual No. 1 in relation to a contemporary text by the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros as a means of setting the stage for the major issues 174that would emerge during the mural movement, typically recognized to be Mexico’s most significant contribution to twentieth century art. It then describes the mechanisms by which Maples Arce’s early collaborators who were part of the first generation of Mexican muralism began carving out distinct positions in critical dialogue with his,especially the painters Fermín Revueltas, Jean Charlot, and Fernando Leal. Turning to ¡30-30!, I address its enmity with the literary group Contemporáneos (also bitter enemies of the Estridentistas) to reveal the most extreme ideological differences. This journey through the artistic debates of post-revolutionary Mexico reveals the productive and destructive potential of rivalry for the avant-garde.

Landscapes of Nationalist Empowerment: Fu Baoshi’s Re-appropriation of the “Chinese” Rainscape Tradition from Japan

김정현 | 2012, (32) | pp.175~219 | number of Cited : 0

When Unable to Compete: Surviving Daughter in the World of Global Art

Nakajima Izumi | 2012, (32) | pp.221~250 | number of Cited : 1

The Rivalry in the Movement of Monochromatic Painting: Park Seo-bo and Lee U-fan

Nan Ji Yun | 2012, (32) | pp.251~284 | number of Cited : 13

Park Seobo and Lee U-fan are the two titans of the movement of Monochromatic Painting, and the artistic rivalry between them is manifested by the sharp contrast between their artistic paths in terms of both theory and career. The different artistic directions pursued by the two artists wrote the history of the Monochromatic Painting movement and formed the framework for the discourse of ‘Korean Modernism’. This article directs its attention not to the personal relationship between Park and Lee but to the art-historical significance of their rivalry. To begin with, the rivalry between the two artists can be explained in terms of their theories of art, namely the meaning they conferred to art. Park shared the premise of ‘modernism’ by attaching emphasis to a certain spiritual world and based the spirituality on traditional views of nature, seeking for contemporary ‘Korean’ art. He inquired into what ‘Korean Modernism’ was and worked within the frame of such a discourse. On the contrary, Lee was concerned with the material world so as to deconstruct ‘modernism’. He cast light on the diasporic identity by positioning himself as an outsider while distancing himself from ‘Korean-ness’. Paradoxically, Lee contributed to the establishment of ‘Korean Modernism’ by presenting what was not ‘Korean Modernism’ outside the boundary of ‘Korean Modernism’. Such a rivalry between them can also be detected in their artistic careers—that is, their activities in the art world. Park pursued his artistic career in the way to establish and solidify his status as an artist in the Korean art scene, and his advance to the international art scene was carried out in the continuum of his activities in the domestic art scene. On the contrary,Lee started his career as an artist overseas. The development of his artistic career took place in the way to secure his status as an artist in the world art scene, and the establishment of Lee’s status in the domestic art scene resulted from his activities in the international art scene. When Park’s artistic career can be characterized by the centripetal movement to identify his own root and to strengthen it, Lee’s, which originated in his being de-rooted, can 284be described as centrifugal movement to deny his root and to explore his relationship to the outside world. The rivalry in terms of identity between ‘Korean-ness’ and ‘diaspora’ was reenacted in the artistic careers of the two artists. It can be said that Park and Lee solidified the movement of Monochromatic Painting by constituting the movement respectively internally and externally. A bigger cultural geopolitical mapping can be done here through an examination of the social and historical conditions of the time when they lived and worked — nationalist ideologies and the relations between Japan and Korea — and the subsequent development of globalization. A rivalry can be characterized by its dichotomous conception and is of goal orientation. The fulfillment of ‘Korean Modernism’ in which the goals of the self-existence and modernization of Korea were artistically embodied, was, therefore, facilitated greatly by the rivalry between Lee and Park. The rivalry against each other critically helped their dominance in the territory of contemporary art, and those that were not conformable to the goals must have been ignored and negated in the process. In this respect, a rivalry can be gendered as masculine. The possibility of yet another history of the Monochromatic Painting movement depends chiefly on one’s realization of the prevalence of male-centrism and, if possible,on the reinstatement of women and the feminine that have been excluded and neglected owing to it. This paper looks into the movement from the perspective of the masculine logic of rivalry, namely the logic of ‘exclusion’, and its ultimate conclusion argues the need to employ this feminine principle of ‘inclusion’ in the reexamination of the movement of Monochromatic Painting.

Controversies over the Incheon Women Artists' Biennale

Kim Hyeonjoo | 2012, (32) | pp.285~318 | number of Cited : 2

The (International) Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale was held by the joint organization of the City of Incheon and the Biennale Organizing Committee from 2007 to 2011. It originated from a local group exhibition by the Incheon Women Artists’ Association in 2004, and the local project was developed into the international sphere through the Pre-International Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale in 2006. The structure of the Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale consists of three sections. The Main Exhibition invites women artists from the world and the Tuning Exhibition includes selected works of both female and male artists around the world. The Participation Exhibition not only features works of established women artists in Korea, but provides one-person shows to the local women artists who have few opportunities to show their works, in return to their financial support of the Biennale. While it was described by an art magazine as the world’s first and only international biennale solely devoted to women’s art, there were constant controversies concerning the Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale. In consequence, the City of Incheon decided to withdraw any engagement in the Biennale from 2013. Rather than evaluation of the exhibitions, disputes converged into the identity of the Biennale Organizing Committee,and how women’s art legitimately could represent the City of Incheon which had been rapidly rising as an economic and cultural hub of East Asia. In this paper, I attempted to explore the Biennale as a sign in order to grasp the essence of controversies. It was a sign in which diverse voices and positions of different interest groups were in conflict with each other, or even remained in silence: Some males,with a radical inclination who were concerned in local art world, severely criticized the conservative attitudes of the leading members of the Biennale Organizing Committee,their poor knowledge on feminist art and contemporary art, and eventually the legitimacy of women’s art for the city; conservative males, from the local as well as the cultural center of metropolitan city of Seoul, supported the Committee practically and emotionally; many feminists, who had led feminist arts in Korea, tried not to speak out their opinions on the Biennale. They opposed the Biennale by keeping in silence. By investigating the Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale as a sign full with conflicting voices, I could partly uncover the problems of cultural politics involved in biennales proliferating in recent years in Korea.

On the Sublime and the Uncanny in the Postminimal Work of Anish Kapoor

Young-Paik Chun | 2012, (32) | pp.319~352 | number of Cited : 8

In the numerous readings of Anish Kapoor's artwork since the mid 1990s, there has been an consistent intellectual curiosity over the paradoxical coexistence of spirituality and corporality. For the former, the artist's cultural background of Eastern origin has been much taken into account. More importantly, from the Western metaphysical conception, it is the philosophical notion of sublime that has been at the core of theoretical references. On the other hand, regarding of the corporeal nature of his work, the postminimal aesthetic is grounded for its material and multilateral sensations. For this connection, the psychoanalytic concept of the uncanny is provided for the work's most crucial referential point. These very different-almost opposite-two natures of Kapoor's artwork have been constituted together from his early period. In other words, it is this paradox of 'material immateriality' or 'immaterial materiality' that makes his work constantly intriguing for the critical mind. Nonetheless, the preference of most critics for immaterial references supersedes the physical and sexual associations that is evoked by his work. The fact that these less cerebral aspects of the work often remains understated while they constitute significant parts of the work. This paper thus purports to pay more attention to and thus enlighten this rather repressed nature of Kapoor's work. It is because this primary physical and psychological sensation is more relevant to what is regarded as the postminimal experience in contemporary art. This can be said the main theme of this paper. ‘Postminimalism’ according to Robert Pincus-witten, “actively rejects the high formalist cult of impersonality”. He coined this term in 1977, shedding light on it in his book Postminimalism, saying that “more recent artistic emphasis in almost directly opposed to the formalist values of the mid-sixties.” Assimilated to emerging social aesthetic imperatives, what Pincus-witten thought as 'postminimal' is referred to those art activities stressing the artistic persona and psyche, stripped bare as it were. However, I find Irving Sandler’s explanation among several most useful for comprehending Kapoor's work when he analyses Morris's work. Stressing differences from making minimal sculpture, he said that “Morris made a work more physical, the process of the work's ‘making itself’ had to be emphasized.” Whereas minimalist works reflects a geometric abstract style and its rigorous external geometry is based on certain forms and fixed structures, postminimal art is self-generating against any predestined forms or objects, aiming to the non-fixed state of the formless. When we think of Kapoor's work in relation to postminimal quality as such, the significance of its corporality and materiality is highlighted in relation to the uncanny. It is in this respect that his work is more relevant to the present time, contemporary aesthetics. Interestingly, the subtle relation between the uncanny and the sublime has been recognised since the eighteenth-century. It is well known that the uncanny has taken on crucial psychological connotations with the help of Sigmund Freud. He mentioned ‘intra-uterine existence’ in his elaboration of the uncanny that is developed in the Matrixial theory of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger as I delineated in the paper. However, it is not much recognised that the uncanny was associated with the obscure side or the nocturnal face of the sublime by Edmunde Burke. What is suggested by this is that the sublime and the uncanny are internally related against the binary opposition of the spiritual and the physical, that is the way Kapoor's work is seen. Whereas the sublime is referred to a quality of vast open spaces, the uncanny is more frequently associated with cramped and dark interiors, whose prototypes are the haunted house, the cellar, the coffin and the womb. These two notions are thus closely related to the subject's perception of spaces but in slightly different ways. Anthony Vidler puts this rather effectively, saying that “the vertigo of the sublime” is placed side by side with “the claustrophobia of the uncanny”. As these two are not to be separated at the empirical domain of the subject's perception, what we see in Kapoor's work as the cerebral in the western metaphysical tradition and the visceral in the stream of postminimalism cannot be parted in any designated ways. In such paradoxical aesthetics, this paper purports to shed light on the latter that is rather repressed but more suggestive to the current issues of the contemporary art discourse.

KJCKorea
Journal Central

Journal of History of Modern Art 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.77

2012, Vol., No.32