2013, Vol.37, No.

Avant-Garde Acceptance and Politicization of Art on the Lim Hwa’s Literary Criticism in Late 1920s

lee, seong-hyuk | 2013, 37 | pp.3~42 | number of Cited : 6

Avant-garde of around the First World War was the collective art movement which tried to keep a balance between art and life. It criticized the existing art as institutionalized. Avant-garde not only has destroyed the representation of the existing art but also has tried to reorganize a real life artistically through several experiments. It was Lim Hwa that did active work of such an avant-garde in the Japanese Occupation of Korea. While Lim Hwa accepted the radicalism of avant-garde impassionedly at that time, he wrote the radical and political poems digesting this avant-garde. He announced not only a literary creation but also the literary criticism which had accepted avant-garde theory. Lim Hwa started to accept the avant-garde theory while publishing the literary criticism of introducing the Italian Futurism and Vorticism. But he criticized the Italian Futurism as representing the modern pace and freshness. He accepted the Vorticism of expressing the primitive life force with non-representational. He had made the ‘proletarian literature’ as the literature expressed by the repressed life force of proletarian through selective acceptance of avant-garde. He had insisted that proletarian literature could be ‘something’ because proletarian literature did not have fixed-method. Thus he was getting into trouble how to make the proletarian literature. At that time he met Murayama Tomoyoshi and the art theory of MAVO. In the mid-1920s, Murayama Tomoyoshi and MAVO who shook the Japanese art world had refused to be a professional artist. They had practiced the avant-garde work while going across the non-art world. It had been important for them to revolute, to create and to stand on state-of-the-art through manufacturing the ‘buildende kunst’. Sculptor Kim Bok-jin tried to combine the proletarian art movement and buildende kunst accepting the art theory of MAVO. Lim Hwa insisted that the artistic activities ways of MAVO should be politicized consciously by converting it into the propaganda-agitation activities. He insisted that ‘proletarian literature’ should not be the representation of reality any more but it should be the propaganda-agitation art of changing a reality like avant-garde. In order to create the propaganda-agitation literature consciously, Lim Hwa had to surpass the proletarian literature theory which expressed the proletarian life force. It was related that Murayama Tomoyoshi not only broke with DADA but also accepted Russian Constructivism as the proletarian art. Murayama Tomoyoshi accepted the functional and practical view of art. This practicality was equivalent to the propaganda-agitation of proletarian literature practicality which Lim Hwa had insisted. Accepting the Russian Constructivism which tried to liberate the art from the esthetics, Lim Hwa employed violent language to sublate the art category completely. Simultaneously accepting the Russian Constructivism which insisted that technology, experiment and material should develop the society, Lim Hwa defined the ‘proletarian art’ as the ‘art for weapons’ of changing the world. Since accepting the Russian Constructivism he entered the movie world which needed the state-of-the-art technology at that time. He created the ‘short epic’ making full use of cinematic skills acquired there.

The Aesthetic Structure of Narrativity Applied to Arts - focusing on the critical realistic arts of 1980s Korea

Lee Joo Young | 2013, 37 | pp.43~90 | number of Cited : 2

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The artists of ‘Hyeonsil & Baleon’ who represented the tendency of critical realistic arts in Korea during the 1980s, tried to express the content of social life. In this thesis, this content is considered as narrativity in art and its aesthetic meaning is reconsidered from a realistic point of view based on G. Lukács' late aesthetics. The narrativity shown visually by the artists of ‘Hyeonbal’, could be comprised in the context of realism. Namely, they tried to represent concrete reality rather than abstract reality, and to recognize this reality viewed in the totality. Also in the standpoint for human, they did not generalize abstractly the situation of existence. Instead, they grasped the human as the ‘type’, and tried to consider them in concrete social and historical environments. By doing this, they showed their belief that people could recognize the essential content of reality and reflect it through art. In the aspect of form, there is no special type of realism. Therefore, artists can use various forms. The matter depends upon how effectively they can convey the content of narrative. As a medium, the characteristic and strength of fine arts consists of arousing the experience of life and the effect through the depiction of external things. The artists of ‘Hyeonbal’ used the power of external forms, they disposed those forms in the space, and consisted the stories of life. For this, they focused on the form itself, or took organic composition forms, arousing concrete experience of life. Or they disposed forms side-by-side in the space, they revealed diverse aspects of life. Artists who tried to grasp society with a critical viewpoint and to express conflicts through the medium of fine arts used various methods that destroyed beautiful forms. Namely, they conveyed dissonance of reality, contrast of the contradictories, and combination of fragments. They were not interested incompleteness of form. Therefore appreciators often felt inconvenienced for the aesthetic impression. The intention of artists who wanted to express the narrative appropriately for the characteristics of fine arts, influenced the form of composition. The artists used various methods to arrange forms in space and those crossed over between the classic and the modern and the Korean and the Western. Through this, they were sometimes successful in creating virtual totality, and showed artworks arousing catharsis. But some instances, some artworks, though they had fresh and affecting impression, were too blunt in their narrativity. In these cases, often premised artist's concept could interrupt abundant interpretation of appreciators. Or some artists delivered their concept so metaphorically and ambiguously, that they made their own individual allegory. This situation reflects the difficult journey for modern critical realists who had to invent methods to capture totality in reality. Nevertheless, many artists in ‘Hyeonbal’ obtained some important elements of Lukács' realism in regard of humanistic viewpoint, critical seeking for meaning of life in the ‘here and now’, and through this, suggested indirectly the perspective for a better life. Furthermore, using various modern art forms and popular culture media, they expanded the content of realism, suitably for contemporary cultural sensibility.

The Study of the Concept of ‘Sustainability’ in Eco Aesthecs - on the basis of the concept of ‘Sustainability’ in Sacha Kagan

Yu HyunJu | 2013, 37 | pp.91~124 | number of Cited : 20

The purpose of this essay is to study the concept of sustainability as elaborated in Art and Sustainability(2011) by Sacha Kagan, German philosopher of eco-aesthetics. For Kagan, sustainability in general is defined as ‘the trinity of biodiversity, cultural diversity, and the wellbeing of mankind’ which should be realized in the view of co-evolution. The system theory which Kagan rests on is indeed a crucial argument for understanding the concept of sustainability as a concept. It is closely connected with deep ecology which is based on quantum physics and entropy as a new scientific paradigm. In the view of deep ecology, all the living things on this planet are interconnected with a vast bio-system, complex system, net of huge system, earth, apart from their own independently run systems and self-organizing capacity. Kagan, in terms of system theory, criticizes an overwhelming search of Zweckrationalität in human-centric technological society and designs the practical concept for art as an environment which makes diverse communities on the planet sustainable. That is Kagan’s concept of ‘autoecopoïesis’ as an adaptive process proven on the basis of a new scientific paradigm, system theory. Autopoïesis, the concept of mechanical self-production of all the life-forms as demonstrated by biologists, H. R. Maturana and F. Varella is received as a precondition of communication by Niklas Luhmann, system sociologist. Kagan notices in Luhmann's theory of human consciousness as the self-organizing system communicates with outside itself is, for Kagan a model of consciousness in which is possible a new level of consciousness not reducible to the chemical, an emergence(Emergenz). According to Kagan, ‘autoecopoïesis’ is an effect of environmental correlation of the subconscious mind and inputs from outside imperfectly filtered through consciousness. Kagan therefore correlates ‘autoecopoïesis’ to aesthetic experience through which art creatively interrupts the process of thought. In the same context, ‘Chaosmose’, the concept of mind ecology in Felix Guattari, can be understood as the way of creatively self-organizing through the interpenetration(osmose) of chaos and cosmos for the purpose of recovering existential singularity(singularité), escaping from the logic of identification in the present capitalism society. For Kagan and Gauttari, their ecological practice is regarded as possible in art or cultural activity, as indicated by key examples in recent eco-art shows. Recently some eco arts have shown some tendencies that count for the transdisciplinary cooperation and the correlation of humans and environment in the process of making art and represent the perception of ‘connecting pattern’ and ‘connecting self’ in the holistic perspective of system. We could see that the art project such as ecovention, which is regarded as the future art practice, takes actual intervention in the environment, revealing ecological issues different from land art or environmental art in the 1960’s and 1970’s. This eco art can be said to try to resist being categorized as the art form of narcissism and the self-centric and in turn overcome narrowing limits of institutional art that remains distant from our lives. Ultimately we can discern that the authentic meaning of sustainability in ecological aesthetics comes from the cultural mind with which we as life-forms interwoven in complex system on this planet are inseparably linked. In consequence, we must try, in especial, to sustain the biodiversity and diverse culture in the co-evolving world through art and cultual movement.

The Scientific Revolution and the Rationalization of Music

Jun-Sik Won | 2013, 37 | pp.125~157 | number of Cited : 5

The Scientific Revolution has played an important role in the process of rationalization in music as well as in the inquiry into nature. The fact that music belonged to the research interests of many major scientists of the 17th century was not due to chance, because music until the 17th century was a branch of science and held a place among the quadrivium beside arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. Their scientific inquiry into music had the major influence on rationalization of music itself as well as developed the musical theses rationally. The connection between music and science forged by the Pythagorean school’s discovery of the relation between the length of a vibrating string and pitch – generally accepted as the first law of nature to be formulated mathematically. They discovered the perfect consonances of the octave, 5th and 4th, and their ratios (1:2, 2:3, 3:4), and the Pythagorean scale based on this system of consonances has been employed during Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. But with the development of polyphony in the later Middle Ages, it gave way to just intonation having consonant 3rds and 6ths, without which there can be no polyphony. Zarlino systemized the just intonation by substituting senario for Pythagorean tetractys, and thus the ratios of the consonances are contained within the numbers 1 to 6. Zarlino’s theory as well as Pythagoras’s can be characterized by number-mysticism, in the sense of taking the numbers to be the causes of consonances. Kepler, like Zarlino, advocated the polyphony and the just intonation, but insisted that the causes of consonances must be sought not in numbers but in geometrical figures. He looked for the criterion for distinguishing consonance and dissonance in the arcs of a circle cut off by the regular inscribed polygons; equilateral triangle, square and pentagon. In this sense, he also can be characterized by a kind of mysticism, a geometrical mysticism. The experimental approach to music began with Vincenzo Galilei, and his goal was to refute Zarlino’s theory. He discovered by means of experiment that the ratio of the string-lengths to produce octave is 2:1, but the ratio of the weights suspended from the strings is 4:1, not 2:1. Thus in order to get 5th, the weights have to be in the ratio 9:4. Consequently the ratios of the consonances are not necessarily contained in the first six integers. Galileo Galilei accepted the coincidence theory of consonance from Benedetti, according to which the degree of consonance of a two-note cord is determined by rarity of frequency with which the pulses of the sound-waves exactly coincide. If the pulses of the two notes coincide fairly often, then the interval is fairly consonant, and if less often, then less consonant. In spite of several weak spots, the coincidence theory became the starting point of all subsequent musico-scientific inquiry for at least half a century. The most important thing of the effects that the Scientific Revolution had on music was to expel mysticism from music theory. It is experiment that played an important role in the process of the expulsion. Experiment was the effective means to demonstrate the errors of number-mysticism and ultimately to overthrow it.

Lacan's interpretation of <Las Meninas> - Focusing on ‘Mai, 1966’ in Seminar ⅩⅢ

Ihn-Sook Nam | 2013, 37 | pp.159~180 | number of Cited : 1

Metcalf and Divisionist Concept of ‘Crafts’

Joo Hyoun Kim | 2013, 37 | pp.181~212 | number of Cited : 3

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The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.81

2013, Vol.37, No.