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‘인간가족(The Family of Man)’전의 이면: 아메리카니즘의 정치적 선전

김나정 1

1이화여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study presents an investigation into “The Family of Man”, which was planned by Edward Steichen(1879-1973), the director of Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art(MoMA), in 1955. After a huge success at the museum, the photography exhibition went on a tour around 38 nations in the world under the sponsorship of the United States Information Agency(USIA) for seven years. There is no doubt that it’s one of the monumental blockbuster exhibitions in the 20th century with the total visitors of nine million. Such a popular success and personality, however, rendered the exhibition familiar and not fully understood at the same time. In addition to the temporary conditions of the exhibition, the fact that the exhibition didn’t deal with the complete works of consistent artists made it rather difficult for the conventional art critics to cover it. Consisting of 503 works by 273 photographers, the exhibition had a variety of status and origin of the photographers and photos, which didn’t allow the critics to regard them as consistent ‘artistic works’ by an ‘artist.’ Thus this study tried to deal with the exhibition as a kind of text telling a story of America and arts in the 1950s covering the entire tour from 1955 to 1962 and assuming the curator Steichen as the text’s author. Accordingly it reorganized an artistic exhibition that doesn’t exist any more in the context of the world history and artistic history of the times. The operation was intended not only to interpret the hidden sides of the exhibition, which treated the ‘history’ of mankind of the times as the ‘mythology’ that mankind was one family, but also to reveal that America’s modernist arts and modern museums that argued for only ‘arts’ with the exclusion of ‘politics’ were actually the products and devices of the mainstream ideology that they belonged to. Based on the previous discussions that took a critical approach to the exhibition in the political, social and economic context, the study attempted to find the position and meanings of the exhibition in the history of American’s modernist arts. The impulses of antinomy inherent in modernist arts were detected in that MoMA applied the opposite positions of depoliticized aesthetics and propaganda to its ‘paintings’ and ‘photos’ respectively during the period of the exhibition. Thus the study considered the history of paintings and photos, which the conventional formalisticcriticism tried to separate, as the relational terms tangled up with each other in the cultural policies during the Cold War period. For the discussion purposes, the background of planning the exhibition was reviewed. The United States gradually formed its national identity called Americanism as there came the Cold War period after the Second World War under the social situations in the 1950s. The background of the exhibition was also examined from the perspective of arts history through the process of America’s modernist arts being institutionalized in MoMA and photography being integrated into arts there. It was under those contexts that “The Family of Man” held in MoMA was analyzed in details. The conviction in the objectivity of photographs that made the materials of the exhibition was established by the identity of photographers during the Golden Age of photojournalism after the war, the institutional device such as publications, and social discourse. The installations of the exhibition had popular features added to the abstract forms of Modernism. It’s also pointed out that the exhibition’s narrative based on the objectivity of photography and modernist aesthetics was nothing but the mythology of sentimental humanism that would erase the unique historical situations. In other words, the university of the worldwide ‘Family of Man’ that the exhibition tried to talk about was none other than the American vision for the ‘one world’ or Americanism in the end. That’s how the exhibition ended up with being used as a tool of cultural imperialism on a world tour sponsored by the USIA. Through the research process, the investigator tried to discuss “The Family of Man” as a case of Americanism’s propaganda. The trial derived from the expectation to open a place of criticism by juxtaposing the demographic potential inherent in photos, the medium of mechanical reproduction, and an exhibition at a public museum with the ideology of power that prevented the potential from being implemented. It’s also noted that “The Family of Man” employed the approach of mixture occupying the middle zone among the opposite terms comprised of antagonistic elements such as fine and propaganda art, high and low culture, and culture and exhibition value. The exhibition seems to take a unique position in the history of America’s modernist arts in that it put modernist arts to perversion and contamination crossing the boundaries of the dichotomous opposite terms of Modernism. Such an evaluation is not an attempt to include “The Family of Man” in the expanded examples of the success of America’s modernist arts. On the contrary, it’s a trial to shed light to the different sides of the history of America’s modernist arts by regarding the exhibition as a case where the purity of Modernism was contaminated and an example of the ‘culture value’ of a modern arts museum being damaged.

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