2024, Vol., No.55

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

pISSN : 1598-7728 / eISSN : 2733-9793
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kahoma

This paper examines the meaning of ‘the afterlife of antiquity’ in the context of contemporaneity. The afterlife of antiquity refers to the phenomenon in which ancient motifs appear in early Renaissance art. Aby Warburg considered, but did not clearly define this concept or establish a methodology to study it. However, the Warburg Institute took the survival of antiquity as a Hauptproblem for cultural study, and after moving to London, attempted to take a critical approach to the concept by translating the term. In this process, survival is confused with revival, and Georges Didi-Huberman criticizes it as an attempt to establish an objective and chronological art history. According to Didi-Huberman, survival is not a chronological but an anachronistic phenomenon in which images from the past are experienced in the present, thus making art history rather impure. In fact, in Warburg’s manuscript, antiquity is presented as multiple, and survival is described not as a one-time event but as a structural phenomenon that recurs in different times and places. In other words, Warburg’s antiquity is heterochronic, and surviving images confuse the history of art through memory and empathy. The afterlife of images achieves in advance the modern concept of time, nonsynchronous contemporaneity.

This paper explores the role of memory in Rosalind Krauss’s post-medium theory. In her recent publication Under Blue Cup, Krauss declares, “The medium is memory” not merely as a metaphor but as an expression of the recursive nature―the rules and conventions accumulated onto the medium―and automatic aspects (recursivity being the automatic function of medium, rather than conscious act of an artist) through which it operates. The medium as memory encapsulates the core principles of Krauss’s medium theory, presenting the afflictions of anti-medium, anti-specific contemporary art represented by ‘installation art’ as ‘forgetting,’ and proposing the cure as a request to ‘remember.’ Furthermore, it serves to restore the medium-specificity that is almost forgotten today, through remembering the wider conventions of art history. I argue that by unfolding the idea of remembering, we can reach to a deeper understanding of Krauss’s key concepts such as technical support, automatism, recursivity, and the reinvention of medium. With all this in mind, this paper aims first to elucidate the true meaning of the phrase “the medium is memory” and then reinscribe its importance within the overall context of Krauss’s post-medium theory.

The purpose of this study is to review works by Ayoung Kim and Lindsay Seers, focusing on their world of fiction in an effort to ascertain the infeasibility of a total representation of the archival memory and examine its artistic practices and strategies. Both artists compose their works based on fragmented archival records about the past episodes, but their epics are recomposed into fictions blurring the boundary between reality and virtuality. Furthermore, they doubt the concept and system of the archive as historical evidence of the grand narrative or as a social construction of a universal symbolic order, and thereupon, advance into the archive to suggest an indirect possibility of reaching the past. In his work Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), Jacques Derrida showed insight into the contradictory duality of the archive. He argues that we are captured by a repetitive desire of regressing to the Archive as sources and origins of memory, but ironically, this compulsive desire aims at destroying the archive, while at the same time empowering it. This study focuses on the following aspects. First, I analyze the two artists’ works dramatically featuring the contradictory duality of the archive, namely, the co-existence between archival and anarchival impulses. Secondly, I argue that the archive opens a futuristic possibility of the epic recomposing the multi-sensory experiences and non-linear approaches rather than returning to the first starting point of the past memory, based on the multi-sensuous experiences and non-linear approaches.