2013, Vol., No.34

The Redemption of the Obsolete: Materialism and Ontology in Tacita Dean’s “Cinema of Exhibition”

Jihoon KIM | 2013, (34) | pp.7~38 | number of Cited : 4

This essay examines the ways in which Tacita Dean’s gallery films since the late 1990s —work labeled as the “cinema of exhibition (Jean-Christophe Royoux)” — have engaged with obsolescence on their thematic and formal levels. I argue that Dean’s varied yet consistent preoccupation with obsolescence has served as a nodal point at which her materialist and ontological interests in film converge. From the materialist standpoint,Dean’s minimalist filmmaking marked by her uses of static shots and long takes focusing on a single object or event rehabilitates the now-anachronistic tradition of Structural film in the avant-garde cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, which devoted itself to the selfreflexive scrutiny into film’s materiality and technical processes. At the same time, Dean’s insistence on analogue film as her medium is inextricable from her belief in its analogue capacity to produce the indexical trace of the various objects and events associated with the ideas of obsolescence, decay, or ruin, as well as from her keen recognition that analogue film, its unique material and technical differences, has increasingly become outdated to the extent that it has rapidly been replaced by digital technology from the camera to the projector. Dean’s achievement, then, lies in her incorporation of these two ontological interests into her materialist approaches to film form and material. The interplay of the materialist and ontological dimensions governed by Dean’s engagement with the obsolete in this sense exemplifies an idiosyncratic achievement of the “cinema of exhibition.” For her projected 16mm and 35mm films open up celluloid’s aesthetic and historical possibilities at a time when its heyday has passed, and at a different location (art gallery) from its culturally and institutionally sanctioned place.

Creation of Painting: Reconsidering Barnett Newman’s Horizontal Zip Paintings in 1949

박준수 | 2013, (34) | pp.39~60 | number of Cited : 1

Reception and Adaptation of Abstract Art in Korea: The Case of “Gukje” Jung Jeom-shik

Chaeki Freya Synn | 2013, (34) | pp.61~84 | number of Cited : 0

A Study on “System” in New Media Art

Cheon Heahyun | 2013, (34) | pp.85~107 | number of Cited : 3

This study suggests interactivity in New Media Art as a communication between the different systems, based on the notion of system in relation to System Theory. Digital interactive system is not only a closed system, that is, autopoiesis, according to the principal of digital organization, and but an open system according to the process of function such as the interaction and connection among the various systems including both artwork and perceiver. In this respect, Niklas Luhmann’s notion of system is very efficient to clarify such a duality of system. Luhmann’s System Theory expanded and subdivided the notion of system, limited to the biological level based on General System Theory, into the four levels, for example, organic systems, nonorganic systems, social systems and psychological systems. Social systems are autopoietic systems reproducing communications constantly, and psychological systems stimulate and promote the communications in the environments of social systems. The psychological systems and social systems are not only coupled structurally, but divided as the autopoietic, closed systems. In this respect, these notions seem to be far more valid to understand interactivity in Digital Interactive Art. Digital interactive artwork as an autopoietic system generates interactions through the structural coupling between the different autopoietic systems,that is, an artwork and a perceiver. Furthermore, systems, communicating with the different autopoietic systems, organize and maintain themselves by producing differences between systems and their own environments. Therefore, systems are sure to use their own boundaries to control the differences, which has analogy to interface as a surface forming a common boundary between the virtual and the real world in New Media Art. As a result, a perceiver, especially with a bio-feedback apparatus, comes to be a complex cross-systems, that is, Apparat-Operator Komplex, and ultimately the artwork and the perceiver are combined into Responsive Systems-cum-Environmentscum-Artworks. This study seems to be significant in that it suggests a new viewpoint of understanding and regarding interactivity in New Media Art as a construction of communications between the different complex systems.

A Study on Carsten Höller’s “Laboratory of Doubt”

최희승 | 2013, (34) | pp.109~132 | number of Cited : 0

Exhibiting actively in New York and European cities, Carsten Höller (b.1961) is a German artist whose comprehensive work encompasses a multitude of genres. In 1987Höller embarked on his artistic career with an unusual combination of art and science present throughout his work, which was actually quite a natural path for him, as he had obtained a doctorate in phytopathology. In particular, Höller’s idiosyncratic approach toward art, which breaks from academism in art history, has provided motivation for this research. By employing the imagery of mushrooms, birds, insects, etc, which he had specialized in while in college, and installing mechanical devices, Carsten Höller induces the viewers to an experience of visual illusion or trickery. The foremost task in the thesis was set to classify and analyze a wide spectrum of Höller’s work and thus gain a closer understanding of his view of art and to comprehend it. Höller’s work, where communication and participation from viewers is considered a significant factor, has been importantly noted in Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud and Participatory Art by Claire Bishop. These two influential critics,having proposed critical theories to explain artistic phenomena since the surfacing of postmodernism, have had a great impact on categorizing and discussing highly convoluted and ambiguous principles of contemporary artists. Test Site, 2006 exhibited at Turbine Hall of Tate Modern exemplifies a piece of art that becomes complete only with the experience of the viewer and also creates a sense of “specific sociality”between the piece, the exhibition space and the viewers. In addition, I as the researcher paid special attention to the complex aspect of Test Site as being both aesthetical and playful. Höller has sought, through his art, to observe the viewers and focus on the process and outcome of their experiencing and reacting to his work. Among many concepts applicable, I as the researcher employed the concept of “doubt”, which I found intriguing in studying his work. This intrinsic characteristic, lead to “an expansion of 132autonomy” in the viewer; that is to say, the unusual experience and inflicted confusion,Höller argued, incite the viewers to develop their autonomy. Claiming that when a firm belief is broken, one’s self expands; Höller has experimented in a variety of ways of breaking such beliefs. Drawing a conclusion that doubt-making is the main theme which touches upon the entirety of Höller’s work, I took the title of Höller’s Laboratory of Doubt, 1999 as the subtitle of this thesis. In the contemporary art world where the matter of consilience has come to the surface and artists step outside of their traditional role and act as curators, filmmakers,or activists, to address their interests and issues, Carsten Höller has aspired to express not only optimistic feelings, like “happiness” with love for life, but also rather ambiguous concepts like “doubt” or “perplexity”. Overall, his work maintains an optimistic attitude toward the future and also evokes the issue of an establishment of each individual’s self and autonomy.

Modernity in North Korean Art: Social Realism, Joseon-Painting and Photography

Hong Ji Suk | 2013, (34) | pp.133~152 | number of Cited : 4

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Avant-garde, Neo-Avant-garde, Politics of Newness: The History and Vision of theory of the Avant-garde

Jin Whui Yeon | 2013, (34) | pp.153~178 | number of Cited : 5

This paper explores the history of the avant-garde as the major concept for the 20th century art and attempts to find its’ possibility as a valid discourse for the art today. One of the military terms, “avant-garde” became a cultural metaphor and has been adopted by literatures and art since the 16th century. However it has been defined as the politically critical perspective to society both in concept and practice by Saint-Simon in the 19th century. In the Theory of the Avant-garde (1974), Peter Büger provided the theoretic hypothesis based upon Saint-Simon and Frankfurt school, in particular, Adorno and Benjamin. He opposes to Greenbergian concept of modernism, especially criticizing the autonomy which excludes art from the society and hinders art from criticizing the Bourgeois society. Büger categorizes historical avant-garde separating from Modernism; Dada,Surrealism, Russian avant-garde, and Futurism all reject traditional aesthetics and negate autonomy while trying to reconnect social aesthetics and art. In addition, Bürger was eager to criticize de-modern art movement since 1950s due to repeating historical avant-garde. He blamed it as anti-avant-garde, because it institutionalized and systematized the historical meaning of avant-garde. Regarding Bürger’s neo(post)-avant-garde theory, Hal Foster, rebuked his idea, proposing repetition is not a negative term. He proclaimed that as Freud theorized in “trauma”, repetition makes things recognized. Therefore, neo-avant-garde produces real meaning repeating historic avant-garde; besides, the latter could not be marked in the history without the former. Whatever the differences of their theories, avant-garde is not a historic period or style; nor aims only for the negation of the convention and ideology. Even though avant-garde is regarded as the best terminology for framing something new, Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and Jacques Derrida doubt if there is anything new in the history of art. It is semiotic false if there is perfect newness. In this perspective,178“newness” is never been satisfied. Avant-garde, related to the newness, could not be grouped based upon its political or formal characteristics. In this circumstance, I suggests, avant-garde is still valid for individual experience for something special and meaningful. For example, the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Field Kapelle, a private chaple in mid-Germany, has been built in unique method with help from the neighbors of the town. Zumthor designed and worked from his inspiration coming from his own memories of every day materials. Setting a fire from inside of the chapel consisting of 120 tree logs below concrete wall, the whole church has unique features and elements, that stimulate the viewers’ senses. Smell,color black, surface textures, and light above, all provoked each viewer’s memories and experiences. Avant-garde is working expressing something unique and special, which might have aroused a new emotions and ideas. Neither a historic category, nor socio-political critical stands, avant-garde could help to expands artistic (re)production in the 21stcentury.

Reconstructing the Historical Avant-garde: Art and Politics in Constructivism and Surrealism

Jung Eun Young | 2013, (34) | pp.179~208 | number of Cited : 5

Situating Constructivism and Surrealism within the social and political context in the 1920s-1940s, this paper explores the conflict between aesthetic experiments and political engagement which the two historical avant-garde movements delineated. Intending a redemptive and reconstructive historiography that illuminates the complex social history of what Peter Bürger regarded the “failed project” of the historical avant-garde, I draw critical attention to the practical and symbolic impact of radical politics on artists and their practice. More specifically, I shed light on how and why the artistic avant-garde and the political vanguard in the early- to mid-twentieth century made alliance or split up, and address how their conflicted relationship culminated in postwar abstraction dominated by formalist aesthetics. Russian Constructivists, particularly Vladimir Tatlin and the artists who moved toward Production Art as early as the early 1920s, attempted to bring art into life by “sublating”autonomous art in revolutionary society. But the political vanguard led by the Bolshevik party increasingly “quashed” the cultural avant-garde’s unbound formal experiments in the name of the historically necessary “proletariat dictatorship”, eventually imposing Socialist Realism as the only legitimate artistic doctrine in socialist society. Likewise,French Surrealists engaged actively in international Communism after the late 1920s,attempting to equate the freedom of the mind with the liberation of mankind from socio-political oppression. Yet, opposing Stalin’s party and Fascist regime which made a mutual non-aggression pact, Surrealists turned to Trotsky as the only viable revolutionary political visionary. Breton and Trotsky’s 1938 “Manifesto for Independent and Revolutionary Art” came out in this historical context of rapidly aggravating politics at the dawn of World War II. Tracing the complex and conflicted relationship between art and politics in Constructivism and Surrealism, I examine the political engagement of the artist in revolutionary society and address the dilemma of the artist facing the historical necessity of class liberation and the artistic freedom of aesthetic creation as two conflicting exponents.

Development of “Post 89 Chinese art” and its Characteristics

Yi bo youn | 2013, (34) | pp.209~241 | number of Cited : 9

This paper examines the development and features of Post89 art, which, even though popularly well known, gives rise to major controversies among the avant-garde art of China. Post89 art began from the reflection and skepticism of the avant-garde art of the 1980s represented by the ’85 New Wave campaign at the end of the 1980s. They mainly pointed out the ’85 New Wave art from two aspects, i.e., thought and method of activity. The former is said to hinder the continued modernization and development of Chinese art due to art holism starting from the metaphysical idealism and essentialist faith,with the latter taking a blind, impulsive resistance method without considering the distinct characteristics of the government-led art system. On the other hand, Post89 artists and theorists attempted to overcome the essentialist thought based on the thought of Karl Popper and Ernst Gombrich. They contend that art should discard excessive social responsibility and return to its own context. Furthermore, they introduced de-constructivism and pop art mode and established the thought and mode of contemporary art. Due to the contradictory reality of the Chinese society of the 1990s, however, they still could not give up the selfconsciousness as critical art. Post89 art pursued gradualistic innovation strategies through systematic and lawful survival, using the art market as a medium in relation to survival and the method of activity. The <First Guangzhou Biennale> held in 1992 was its first attempt. Expanding the strategies to overseas was also sought through the <Post 89: New Art Exhibit of China> held the following year. Such strategies were considerably successful until 2008, partially realizing innovation of the government-led art system. Nonetheless, the fact that such strategies accommodated the ideology of the West-centered art world incurred criticism. In particular, when the theory of post colonialism was spread, the affected Post89 art gradually turned to the direction of criticizing the hegemonism of the West or affirmatively accepting China’s history of socialism. 1990년대 중국 아방가르드 미술의 전개와 특징 ｜ 이보연 241Considering the process of developing such Post89 art, their avant-garde logic can be said ― in one word ― to be “Anti-avant-garde avant-garde art.” This can be viewed as “Self-reflective avant-garde” carrying an internal sense of tension in thought despite being somewhat contradictory as avant-garde art. In other words, it is special avantgarde logic unique to Post89 art created by the paradoxical identity called avant-garde art that appeared during the era of pluralism and postmodernism. Still, the Post89 art that gives rise to the concern of turning extremely leftist again recently seems to need to arouse the “Spirit of creative self-criticism” stressed early by itself and the spirit of selfintrospective avant-garde.

Bioart in the Perspective of Media

Hyesook Jeon | 2013, (34) | pp.243~273 | number of Cited : 6

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In this study, I try to draw up a topographic map of the discourses on medium (media),new media, and the post-media condition, to examine the features of bio-media used in bioart and its significance as a medium. By combining the artistic media with the very different areas, digital technology and biologic technology, bioart has opened a new world of media that has not yet existed. In other words, bioart groups together the biological media using living cells and culture, not only with the artistic role which expresses the ideas, information, image,sound, color and texture, but also with digital function which encompass both biological content and artistic expression. Thus, Eugene Thacker defines biomedia as “the informatic recontextualization of biological components and processes.” This is because in contemporary biology, concepts related to biological material are informaticized in some kind of form, and reversely, information can also be transformed into biological material in some way. That is, the technologies of bio-informatics and bio-computing,under an inverse relationship, both actually illustrate how biology can become media. I have explained the features of biomedia, combining biology and digital technology,with Peter Weibel”s concept of the second phase of the condition of post-media,“the mixing of the media”. Media-specificity will disappear and all media will be fused together, stimulated by universal digital computer technology. This can, on one hand,be explained through the phenomena of media convergence. Biological methods,computer technology and esthetic meanings, previously disparate, become converged through each media layer. That is, even though they are living biological media, they can be reverted into linguistic code or data, and can be considered also as the convergence of layers producing the socio-cultural meanings and content, closely related to them. I have actually applied them to bioart works to substitute the layer of “Wetware”as the physical layer, the layer of “Dryware” as code-logical layer, and the layer of “Meaningware” as the cultural layer. Wetware, that is bio-media from the physical layer perspective, signifies the biological media encompassing the culture, cells, bacteria, and all experimental instruments while dryware, the bio-media seen from code-logic layer of biocomputing technology, becomes integrated into language, data, and logic along with DNA nucleotide codes, and finally, meaningware, the biomedia from the cultural layer,presents the content and meaning produced through the work. However, the media which has meaning in each layer become fused in bioart and is placed within converged media. The meaning of bioart is further emphasized through the “aliveness” of media which is the art and life in bioart works. However, media which is dependent on being alive also has the living being’s destiny to die one day. Bioartists place their biomedia upon the boundaries of life and death, to make us again perceive life, to expose technology which manipulates living organisms, and rethink about the hidden capital and conspiracy of ideology behind bio-technology. In other words, although they borrow technology from bio-technology, they emphasize the “natural” law of “death”, despite bio-technology”s aim for lengthening human life. The “aliveness” of the media enforces a certain burden and responsibility to the artists. This is related to the technology dealing with organisms,the expression forms and content of their art, and the message they want to deliver. The “aliveness” of biomedia not only gives influence to the convergence of different media, but becomes a greater burden and significant content to the viewer who has to read it as one converged entity. The producers of biomedia aim for viewers to possess a critical position for themselves as they realize the present state of scientific research in this area and view the various arguments and perspectives of such developments by artists. They will be fundamental meaning related to how we will accept new subjects or beings created by genetic engineering technology, what relationship human beings will make with them,and how the new demands, persistently generated by ethics and epistemology, will be solved.

Between Consumerism and Nostalgia for the Mao Era: New History Group, Song Dong, and Mao Tongqiang

고동연 | 2013, (34) | pp.275~304 | number of Cited : 2

A Study on the category and the history of “Art Brut”

HAN EUI JUNG | 2013, (34) | pp.305~330 | number of Cited : 7

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“Art brut” (raw art) is a term ,which was defined by a French artist Jean Dubuffet, to describe the works by the no named people, who are not currently related to the art field. However, Art brut has been already existed before the birth of the concept, so its history had just started in the 20th century is somewhat no sense. This paper tries to form a full-history of Art brut, starting from the pre-history of the concept, through the birth and the change of the term with Dubuffet, to the present. The first part of this study about the pre-history of Art brut theoretically examines the relation between art and madness or genius. These theoretical approaches to the genius and the madness began with psychiatrists of the 19th century, such as Cesare Lombroso, Hughling Jackson and James G.Kirnan. Marcel Réjà in France was the first person who evaluated the works of the insane from an artistic perspective. He figured out the characteristics infantile, decorative and symbolic, and brought out a formative question. In Switzerland, Walter Morgenthaler published a monography of Adolf Wölfli as an artist, a mental patient. Hans Prinzhorn in Germany suggested six basic impulses (expression, order, reproduction, decoration, play, symbol) in thousands of examples from European institutions. His study became a sensation among the artists in Europe. Especially Jean Dubuffet had found the abundant power of expression in these works, never seen in the cultural art, and he’d started to collect them in earnest. By founding the Association of Art Brut and publishing the articles, Dubuffet had defined and modified the concept of Art brut. On the basis of the collection of Art brut by Dubuffet, we can classify theoretically into three groups: art in psychiatric hospital,psychic art and art at the margins of society. However, Dubuffet had always wanted to distinguish Art brut from the art of psychiatric hospital, furthermore from naïve art,surrealistic art, children’s art and primitive art. In the 1970s, Art Brut under the name of “art singulier” “hors-les-normes” “Neuve 330 Invention” embraced the works of self-taught artists and started to have various branches. In the 1990s, “outsider art”, translational word of Art brut in English, met the folk art in America. Even an annual outsider art fair had been held. Intuitive or visionary art is coming into the institution culture. Art brut today maintains a parallel relationship with the mainstream of arts and breaking down the boundaries of arts at the same time.

On Relative Autonomy of the Arts in the Works by Andrea Fraser

Hyunjin Shin | 2013, (34) | pp.331~365 | number of Cited : 0

Andrea Fraser is an artist whose practice falls in to the category of institutional critique that asks questions on how art production relates with the world. In 1993, she coorganized a project entitled, <Services: Conditions and Relations of Project Oriented Artistic Practice> in which she posited artists as “service providers”. Service, here is defined in her introduction as “labor which is either in excess of, or independent of,any specific material production and which cannot be transacted as or along with a product.”If art practice can be named as services would it mean to give up the autonomy of art as she connects her practice to labor? In later part of the essay, Fraser declared that she would explore the creativity within “relative autonomy of art”. Does relative autonomy of art mean something different than historical avant-garde’s? Can freedom be partially given up or preserved? This thesis, thus, raises questions on what implies by giving up the autonomy of art and Fraser’s relative autonomy’s application to the contemporary art practice by analyzing institutional critique works by Andrea Fraser. Autonomy was the key concept in the opposition between Modernists and historical avant-gardists. While the autonomy of art is the constitutive element for aesthetics,art is subjected to material conditions for historical avant-gardists in principle. In the premise that combining both idealism acknowledging priori truth and materialism acknowledging physical world make up the general ideas in Modernist era, concept of her relative autonomy rings alter-modern, post-ideological thoughts and their conditions to which contemporary art is subjected. Fraser’s relative autonomy of art starts from the premise that art-world, aesthetics’operating system, is already won by capitalism. Instead of claiming the autonomy of art and art world as a whole, she divides up the art world into several art producers(the subjects in the arts) that compete each other utilizing Bourdieu’s logic. Once she clarifies borders between each producer’s authorship, her artistic expression can be protected by freedom of speech. Then she amplifies its impact through her psychoanalytic 안드레아 프레이저의 상대적 자율성이 존재하는 방식 ｜ 신현진 365performance in which her audience can empathize several roles in the art world that she embodies into herself. This empathetic approach works better especially today when the break up of the labor division occurred in the arts: producer (artist/author) ― mediator (art organization) ― recipients (audience) since relational, project-based participatory art practice blur such division the same as seen in the operation of cognitive capitalism.This allows her practice of relative autonomy viewed from the psychoanalytic perspective that passes through the dichotomy of Modernism.

A Study on Image of Deformity: Speciality of the Form of “Abnormal” and “Monster”

Pyung-jong Park | 2013, (34) | pp.367~391 | number of Cited : 2

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2013, Vol., No.34