2025, Vol., No.57

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 explores how Merce Cunningham’s choreographic principles, founded on chance and autonomy, as well as his active engagement with technology, have laid both the aesthetic and technical foundations for today’s digital performance. Cunningham deconstructed the grammar of traditional dance centered on emotional expression and narrative, and made the arrangement of movement nondeterministic and open with the principles of chance and autonomy. By emptying out semantic structures and habitual chains of movement, the dancer’s body produces movement divorced from conscious intention, constituting an aesthetic experience in its own right. His collaborations with artists from other fields such as music and visual art emphasized the independence of each element, thereby allowing time and space on stage to unfold in nonlinear and multilayered ways. His experimental use of video cameras and the employment of digital software in choreographic processes opened up new sensory realms based on virtual bodies and movements. By confronting bodies and movements completely different from those we consider human, we witness the power of interacting with them emerge on stage.

This study proposes the concept of the ‘mediatized body’ triggered by changes in the media environment. To this end, it focuses on the emergence of a constructed, variable subject supported by the ‘relationality’, ‘communitiness’, and ‘mediality’ that have emerged in the era of digital/network-based technology. This reconfigured body generalizes sensory communities at the societal level, renews identity through repetition and memory, and exists as a hybrid reality where the real and virtual overlap in the material realm of technology. Drawing inspiration from such phenomena, this paper analyses theoretical discussions and case studies at the intersection of ‘participation’, ‘reenactment’, and ‘technification’. Among these, it examines the ‘sociocultural’ implications of the body as a site of political-aesthetic subject practices, rather than as a fixed and unchanging object, through the aesthetic forms of performance and choreography in the context of contemporary art.

This thesis examines the meaning of performance as an expanded field centered on Diana Taylor’s concepts of ‘archive’, ‘repertoire’, and ‘scenario’, and applies them to the cases of contemporary Korean artists. Taylor urges a broader understanding of the meaning of performance centered on various theories such as anthropology and social drama rather than performance art as an art form or genre. In addition, since Taylor’s theory examines the process of performance centered on the activities of Latin American artists, it encompasses anti-hegemonic and anti-systemic meanings. There is a relationship between the meaning of “archive,” which preserves records, and “repertoire,” which means gestures, ceremonies, and actions that are not based on writing and are invisible. Performance becomes a powerful transmission system that conveys history centered on these two concepts. Taylor points out that intangible memory is rather a concrete living system, and she values the process of revealing the invisible. In this way, performance functions as a stage, and “scenario” plays a role as various elements for this stage in a repeated process. Contemporary Korean artists such as Bang Sung-wook, Lee Yeon-sook, Cho Young-joo, and Han Seok-kyung each directly experienced situations that Korean society has continuously faced, such as care, memories of the past, and the Korean War, and reflected this in their work. The process of constructing a work changes in multiple layers, and performativity is applied in the process of concluding it as a single work.