2021, Vol.64, No.

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

pISSN : 1229-0246
https://journal.kci.go.kr/ksasa

This study aims to reexamine the discussion of Korean contemporary art from the 1970s to the 1990s, focusing on “mediums” as a material practice. Since liberation from Japanese colonial rule, Korean art has unfolded dynamically while pursuing the continuation and development of values and traditions accepted from the West. Discussion on art is also not much different in that it was carried out centered on the discourse of identity based on the acceptance of Western culture or ethnic and nationalist ideology. However, it is questionable how faithful the writing of art history, which was based on genealogical or ideological concerns, was to the task of “what is art?” In this regard, it is an urgent task to find the possibility to read and describe Korean contemporary art in a new way. If we look into the practice of art from the point of view of mediums, we can confirm that while old and new media were mixed or collided with each other in each period, there were various emotional responses to objects and materials according to the conditions and environment of each period, such as cultural objects, industrial objects, natural objects or immaterial substances, body and actions, etc. By understanding the scope of mediums, it will be possible to open up new possibilities for getting one step closer to the artistic energy and values of Korean contemporary art.

By the 1830s, Heinrich Heine, a Parisian historian, became an important critic of Goethe’s organicism and Ranke’s ideal of objective history by rejecting the application of eternal laws of organs and reason to history. Heine’s view on history is not a progressive evolution, such as the gradual development of reason, but a throughgoing kind of vital pantheism according to which God would be manifested to a different degree in all things had we no demand that spirit only be divine, not body. Although these two anthropological concepts, body (Fleisch) and spirit (Geist), are interdependent, Christian spiritualism said the enjoyment of the senses should be suppressed, so that it demands of their followers moral conduct by denouncing matter and insisting on pure spirit. Heine’s pantheistic sensualism made him skeptical of certain teleological views of history that were also essential to the Christian idea of providence and to the historical development of this idea. In Heine’s polemic against spiritualism, the rehabilitation of the body has Saint-Simonian evidence that there has been some sort of struggle for existence between each specific idea in history. As an advocate of a materialistic (sensualistic) view of the history, Heine’s philosophy of history was foremost an anthropological attempt to reinstate the vital rights of body and matter.

The purpose of this study is to examine the intersubjective body experience with the spectator’s body based on the concept of ‘film’s body’ of Vivian Sobchack, a phenomenological film theorist. And according to the technological change of the movie, it is to reveal the various aspects and meanings of the film’s body and the spectator’s body. According to Sobchack, the film’s body is not a simple concept that refers only to the devices and their functional combinations, but the film’s body performs the activities of perception and expression while synthesizing all the devices of the movie. In addition, the spectator’s body is described as a place of perception and expression and a subject that interacts with the film. Therefore, in this study, the spectator’s body is not seen as a mere receiver but as a body that produces meaning. Since the spectator’s body experience is a sensuous and primary experience before the structured and meaningful secondary cinematic experience, the film’s body and the spectator’s body actively interact with each other as an intersubjective body experience. Based on this discussion by Sobchack, this study attempted a new interpretation of the film’s body and the spectator’s body according to the technological change of the film. The glasses for the 3D movie were viewed as the extended spectator’s body and the new film’s body. Also, the stereophonic sound of the film was also interpreted as the extended film’s body. In this way, the film’s body and the spectator’s body are not fixed, but changing.