2014, Vol.40, No.

Rehistoricizing Video Art : Focused on Exhibitions and Discourses

Shan Lim | 2014, 40 | pp.3~40 | number of Cited : 2

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This paper proposes a few conceptual frameworks for the process of rehistoricizing video art, which identify video as an art form that differs from experimental television. A critical examination about how video art emerged over time warrants further consideration regarding the movements and various positions towards arts practice and policy. Therefore, this paper adds to the calling for rehistoricizing video art as an art genre. Some may argue that there have been inconsistent narratives about the history of video art. Equally convincing, however, is the authentic history of art movements that unfolds stories about different forms of art. A linear approach to examine the history simply interferes with the ‘inconsistent’ process of creativity and limits the opportunity for growth. That said, I intend to reorganize the history of video art with experiment television and video technology as primary elements ―this process will shape the multilayered world of video art― and to substantiate an argument that such efforts can help ensure that rehistoricizing, often decentralized and diverse, is good for creativity. This paper presents three key chapters. In chapter 2, two special events commonly mentioned in the history as for the beginning of video art are examined with regard to the context and their historical implications. Chapter 3 will discuss the ways about how the concept of video art came to birth and became operational: video art became a major player in curatorial practice and established a valuable footing in exhibitions of galleries and museums. In addition, the chapter examines the case of public broadcasting programming, which invited video technology for public discourse on aesthetics. This engaged video technology with the alternative and experimental television movement and helped to illustrate how art movements reflect socio-economic trends. Chapter 4 takes a look at a few art theories and their contributions to the academic efforts in order to understand electronic art forms with the use of television and video technology. In doing so, the theories are compared and further analyzed with a focus on the ways they informed and influenced each other whilst comprising an interconnected body of literature. After all, this paper presents a view that video art has a room for a different approach ―as opposed to the traditional approach― towards the historical examination of societal policy and practice that contributed to expanding the aesthetic boundaries of television and video. An examination of supporting funds for television broadcasting studios, publishing venues for video art, and other apparatus of video art, such as galleries/museums and the organizations of alternative cultural movements, can inform not only the development of video art but also the historicizing of video art itself. Today’s mass media and new digital art forms are changing the ways we study video art. It was the 1980s that historical narratives about video art just emerged. Now, the field is better informed about how to examine diverse art movements with more appropriate concepts and theories than the past. This is not meant to suggest that the history of video art be normalized, or that its complexity be glossed over. In light of experimental television, video technology, and today’s media art, rather, this paper intends to support the decentralized diversity in our artistic thinking and behaviour.

A moment of destruction and creation : Janet Cardiff's <The Murder of Crows> and the sound as a ‘historical object’

CHO SEON RYEONG | 2014, 40 | pp.41~74 | number of Cited : 3

Manifest of Artist : Focusing on the Futurist Manifest

Nam-See Kim | 2014, 40 | pp.75~100 | number of Cited : 4

A Study on the Aesthetic Qualifications of Shinmyong Experience

Ha, Jin Sook | 2014, 40 | pp.103~142 | number of Cited : 11

Shinmyong is being discussed as one of the essential values of Korean culture and Koreans' aesthetic feeling. Yet, it is difficult to answer in which ways Shinmyong has aesthetic qualifications and if various types of Shinmyong can be understood as a unique characterization. Therefore the research would classify the types of diverse Shinmyong experiences and illuminate the common characterization on its aesthetic dimension. If we clarify its significance structure of Shinmyong, the term of Shinmyong has its meaning as the external God or some mysterious power and internal Light, which means God would be holy spirit and Light means insight or intuition emerging to men. The combination aspect between God and Light could be explained into the emergence of God's will with drumming and dancing, an awakening to the principles of varying universe with a clear mind, and uniting with things with discarding the functions of eyes and mind. Shinmyong can be experienced into diverse types and its dimensions and aspects are different according to its types of experience. The types of experience could be classified into being possessed of a spirit, experiencing hard labor, satisfying one's resentment, and experiencing aesthetic feeling. The aspects of the types are very diverse, so they can emerge as following: identity with god, emotional enhancement, intuitional insight, dreaming float, ecstasy, forgetting oneself, collective chaos, transcendence, being awake, being light, emancipation, healing, sit-gim(washing away), fulfillment, creative jump, world consciousness as a whole, resolved recognition, immersion, and forgetting oneself, etc. On basis of the data, to extract the common qualifications of Shinmyong experiences, at first, it has the characterization to need concern, concentration, and immersion. Shinmyong has the common qualification that it can be experienced when mutual interactions get ecstasy. Concerns and immersion can be aesthetic attitudes in that Shinmyong is positive experience. Second, Shinmyong experiences has the characterization of experiencing the extension and transcendence of beings, lost in existential horizon of self. Once one comes to immerse deeply into the world of concerns, one forgets the being of ‘I’ and the world comes into the being, stopping recognizing me and the other world as a difference. This means the emergence of the unity into the things by way of intuitional insight, the beings with God, the infusion of community people immersed into passion and pleasure, and the feeling of emancipation. These experiences express passionate actions, represent static emotions, but they have the characterizations of aesthetic experiences in that it is an experience which arise when it attends to the experience itself, being immersed into it. Third, it seems that Shinmyong experiences accompany any types of emotional pleasures. The aspects of the experience are diverse, but have the common trait of pleasant feeling and light upgraded emotion. Such feelings as ecstasy, capability, fulfillment, emancipation, floating feeling, and resolve have the characterization of emotional pleasure at the moment of ecstasy. As a result, the experience of Shinmyong can be understood as the characterization of aesthetic experience.

Brain and Representation : Visual Perception in the Morphology and Phrenology

Seung-Chol Shin | 2014, 40 | pp.143~184 | number of Cited : 5

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This paper examines the activity of image in the course of modernization of brain research. The scientific investigation about the relation between the mind and the material was raging in the early years of the 19th century. The neurophysiologist, like Samuel Thomas Soemmerring and Franz Joseph Gall, dissected the brain and made a sketches to study the mechanism of mental activity. The image became a crucial factor for their investigation. Soemmerring wanted to make a realistic cross section of brain, and this morphological image gave him a visual intuition about mental activity. He believed that he found sensorium commune in his sketch, and he could take a physiological approach to mind. But his transcendental physiology was modified with the aid of Immanuel Kant. Kant advised him to focus on the discovery of location of Seelenorgan ―not Seele― and this transition made preparations for the beginning of phrenology, which was initiated by Franz Joseph Gall. Gall preferred to functional image, traced nerve fibers into cerebral cortex, and insisted the localization of brain function on that surface. In particular he classified 27 human tendencies ―based on the cranial form― because he regarded the skull as an image or trace which bears the form of cortex. The neural image finds its activity space in the fissure between mind and brain, whose mechanism and relation can not be described yet. The image is not a simple copy of reality. As Soemmerring and Gall initiated respectively morphology and phrenology with their sketch, the cerebral image makes the invisible visible with a particular purpose, and rearranges the brain in certain orders. That image is related to different discourses and builds a network with them. The cerebral image which forms a knowledge in this network, presents a brain as a epistemic object, and takes a critical part of the investigation about the brain and mental activity.

The Concept of Image Itself and the Concept of Artistic Image in Bergson

Yong-Sung Paik | 2014, 40 | pp.185~214 | number of Cited : 1

The Problem of Historicism in Gombrich's Art Historical Studies : From Hegel, Beyond Hegel

Won Chang | 2014, 40 | pp.215~248 | number of Cited : 0

The purpose of this essay is to investigate Ernst Gombrich's historicism in relation with Hegel's philosophy. ‘Hegelian’ theories have been the focal point in modern academic disciplines, and many scholars agree that they are the most conspicuous and definite factors, not only in grounding art history as a scholarly discipline, but also in contemporary studies. The powerful impact of Hegel throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be observed in complex processes of rejection and retrieval of Hegel, including at least Marxism, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Positivism, and more recently Deconstruction. By naming Hegel as ‘The Father of Art History’ in a commemorative lecture in Stuttgart after winning Hegel Prize in 1977, Gombrich called himself ‘ein entlaufener Hegelianer(a run-away Hegelian)’ and elaborated upon the hazard and fallacy of Hegel's historical philosophy. He identifies himself as a student of Viennese school which succeeded Hegel's philosophy of history, and articulates that he had aimed to go beyond Hegel's system in his lifelong work. Gombrich's descriptions on Hegel's theories are assessed as the principal conceptions that have grounded cultural history and the entire art history. Gombrich enlists five factors among Hegel's concepts which are still influential in contemporary art historical researches: ‘aesthetic transcendentalism, historical collectivism, historical determinism, metaphysical optimism, relativism’. In order to resist against Hegelian teleological concept of history's development such as ‘Zeitgeist’, Gombrich adopts Popper's ‘logic of the situation’. Gombrich did not call his art historical study in a single way but cultural history or Kunstwissenschaft(science of art). This fact shows that Gombrich, despite his deep interest and discernment in history, excludes historicity so as to overcome the ‘general risk that art history would fall’, but transgresses the discipline's usual method by covering the art of all tribes as well as fine art and decorative art through cultural historical researches. Gombrich's strength as an art historian was that he combined his academic outcome from classic research and vast knowledge with cultural theories and values such as cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, ethology, philosophy of science. In the introduction of Art and Illusion, Gombrich argues that the matter of art requires the combination and balance among cultural history, art history, perceptual psychology. Therefore, the way that Gombrich explained the relationships between culture and psychological process, society and individual, were to concentrate on the relationship between ‘schema’ and ‘correction’, ‘making’ and ‘correspondence’ in art history as well as language and perception. The most fundamental point in Gombrich's work is to provide us understandings on the view that art is the product of social and cognitive processes, in which Hegelian idea of the ‘Zeitgeist’ or the Jung's ‘collective unconsciousness’ must have been rejected for the social processes that influence on art. What Gombrich pursued beyond Hegel was to make art a part of a wider debate of life by comprehending that visual metaphors, values, and cultural products are closely related each other. Gombrich's great contribution in art history is, according to Nanyoung Kim's evaluation, that “he noticed the implications of the ubiquitous schematic styles in world cultures and the power of tradition even in realistic representation in the Western tradition, and developed a general theory to explain both of them”. Gombrich's work in art historical discipline is now expected to provide diversity to contemporary cultural studies and Bildwissenschaft, or image study in terms that he did neither limit himself in a specific area nor establish the order of priority but made it possible to approach to the holistic cultural history as well as visual art.

The Fourth World Theory in Wonil Rhee's Curating : Focusing on ‘Post-colonialism’

KIM, Sung-Ho | 2014, 40 | pp.249~292 | number of Cited : 3

This study is the follow-up of my dissertation A Study on Wonil Rhee's Curating: Focusing on Creative Paradox. This study is an investigation into his ‘perception and thematic consciousness’ of the discourse on post-colonialism and “practical curating methodology” the late curator Wonil Rhee inevitably faced when curating overseas international exhibitions as an Asian curator with an Asian identity. The researcher of this study sees the point his post-colonialist curating reached as the ‘fourth world theory’. Encompassing ‘Asia-centered international exhibitions’ and ‘Asian themes in international art shows’ to arrive at this conclusion, the researcher has closely examined international exhibitions Rhee curated, and looked through his exhibition catalog essays, interviews, and other documents. His post-colonialist perspective triggered by the ‘logic of resistance against the West and its practice’ that is represented as ‘Asian networking’ denoted in his early curating, concentrates on breaking down the line between the West and the non-West, cultural colonialists and non-colonialists, and the shift from resistance to conciliation and equilibrium. That is, his post-colonialist curating was to practice ‘hybridity’ as a way of resisting ‘globalization trying to accomplish homogeneity’. This is to elucidate that aspects of post-colonialism and neo-colonialism derived from the West's strategy of homogeneity in the name of ‘tolerance of pluralism’, and to employ the ‘hybridity’ Homi K. Bhabha presented as a way of resisting this. The concept of ‘hybridity’ emerged among numerous concepts such as ‘multiculturality, Post Geopolitics, mixed topo map, mixed culture, ground connection and Integration’. As a practical strategy for concrete curating anchored to this notion of ‘hybridity’ he defined it with ‘addictive mixture’, a productive hybridity of light. The researcher comments on this with ‘appropriation’, the concept of a post-colonialist practice by Bill Ashcroft and his fellow scholars. That is to say, the researcher understands that Rhee adopted ‘appropriation’ that uses the language of colonial ruling countries but deconstructs and reconstructs this as a strategy for post-colonial practice to deconstruct colonial rulers' dominant ideologies. Moreover, the researcher asserts that Rhee's global curating strategy is by nature nothing but an act of translation to ‘introduce the non-West to the West in the language of the West’. The researcher also takes note of a shift in Rhee's concern for ‘nonsensical time and space’ through the numerous possibilities of space-time or multi-contextual space-time on the border of the confrontation between the West and the non-West, cultural colonialists and non-cultural colonialists. The researcher coins the term ‘the fourth world’ as a wedding of sociological ‘poly-contextuality’ and physical ‘extra dimension’, departing from the notion of ‘the developing country’ from a socio-economical perspective, and explores its post-colonialist meaning as the ‘space-time of utopian conflation’. ‘The fourth world theory’ is to reinterpret Rhee's ‘absurd space-time’ conceived in the context of his curating shifting from the matter of the exterior to the matter of the interior, from the matter of the ideal to the matter of the experience. This theory is of great significance in that this may continue to his imaginary curating of ‘an exhibition in cosmic space’. This refers to a point where an ideal theory on post-colonialism was deformed and mysticized in Rhee's late curating. This change of direction serves as momentum to define him as a practitioner of post-colonialist curating who championed conciliation and equality with a new Asian thematic consciousness beyond the logic of resistance and subjugation, and simultaneously as a liberal pluralist of postmodernism and an upholder of elemental humanism.

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2014, Vol.40, No.