죽음의 미학

정헌이(Hun-yee, Jung) 현대미술사학회 2011 현대미술사연구 Vol.0 No.30

This study deals with the images of death that are prevalent in postmodern art, it is not an iconographic study on death images though. The purpose of the study is to investigate and question the aesthetic meanings hidden behind the impossible task of representing death. Death has been one of the most important subject matter throughout the history of western Art. From the stick like figure of ‘the shaft of dead man’ in the cave art of Lascaux to the ‘memento mori’ images of the Middle Age, from the ‘vanitas’ images of 17th century Dutch paintings to the sweet candies presented by Felix Gonzales-Torres, all these images ask the meaning of death, and by doing that question the meaning of life. What I concern is the facts that art has been a beacon that marks the resistance to death, although it is doomed to be failed, so that it has been encircled in the repetitive performance of representing an original absence. It was Andy Warhol who re-presented the theme of death in the post modern art scene. Whether his attitude toward death is neutral and indifferent or cynical and critical was the main issue in interpreting his ‘death and disaster’ series. Yet, when it comes to the case of Damien Hirst, we witness the ‘return of the real’, the actual dead bodies that are sacrificed for an art exhibition. The audience are expected to actually observes the decaying process of corpse in the gallery space. What does it mean? What is the aesthetics behind this “return”? It seems to me that the ‘death’ Hirst conceives stays only in the level of its materialistic dimension. It does not step a inch forward from the shocking spectacle of the corpse that is returned to an inanimate object. That is how he conceives art and what he earns from his speculation on the relationship between his art and death, yet this model of objective, bodily death can not suggest any meaning of death except “nothing”. Death can presents us the possibilities of something more than the shocking phobia of its marks of decaying process. A representation of death always accompanies responsibility within culture. As Felix Gonzales-Torres made his point on this subject, we should ask a question with responsibility; what is the relation of our art to the death of others? In this question, death is not a mere limit but a way that can affect us by the way that others have died before us, and by the way that we ourselves shall die. This is the political aesthetics of death that our art of today should reconsider.

마이클 프리드의 미술비평과 이론

정헌이(Jung Hun-Yee) 서양미술사학회 1996 서양미술사학회논문집 Vol.8 No.-

The art criticism of Michael Fried was bom out of the conviction that art history has come to a crisis. What is at stake in this critical situation is whether the painting or sculpture in question are experienced as art or mere objecthood. If art reduces to objecthood, then art history, at least the modernist art history comes to an end. Fried wanted to watch over the modernist art history. The importance of Michael Fried as a aritic lies in the situation in which he participated as a par-excellent, the last modernist art critic. In other words, modernist art criticism climaxed by Fried but also dissolved by himself while he was fighting with Literalism for the right way of art history. The aesthetic of Michael Fried was that of tableau or screen. It is interesting that he made reference to the movies as the one art which escapes theater entirely by its very nature. According to him, the screen is not experienced as a kind of object existing in a specific physical relation to us. But because it escapes the war with theater or theatricality automatically by its own nature, even the most experimental cinema cannot be a modernist art. What he meant by the ‘modernist’ sensibility was to find it imperative that art defeats or suspends its own objecthood, and to experience the art-object that exist as an physical entity visually as shape. Modernist art only yields to the beholder’s coup d’ oeil. The ‘coup d’ oeil’ of modernism denies the ‘mise en scene’. Fried wanted art to defeat the condition of theater, to defeat dramaturgy. However art after “art and objecthood” developed with an interest in the vety ‘mise en scene’, with the interest in the psychological and physical beholder and his or her situation in the world. Yet, the purpose of this essay is not to reveal whether Michael Fried was right or wrong. Fried says: “... in fact it is inconceivable that he will not be wrong a fair amount of the time. But being wrong is preferable to being irrelevant.” This article is about the “fair amount of the time” in which Fried’s criticism paradoxically played a role. In a sense, ‘a fair amount of the time’ always betrays a coup d’ oeil. But Michael Fried’s moment in its historical sense deserves to be taken seriously. He run the same risks as the artist whose work he criticized. Today, the word ‘aesthetic judgment’ as a critical terminology sounds rather classical and worn-out. If we are able to give up any kind of aesthetic judgment in appreciating contemporary art it would be the transformation of critical semantics that modernist criticism ultimately bring about. Unintentionally though.

그네 마그리트의 작품에 있어서 '그리기'와 '쓰기'

정헌이(Jung Hun-Yee) 현대미술사학회 2001 현대미술사연구 Vol.11 No.-

The Position of Magritte in the modernist art history is very ambiguous. If the 20th Century art contributed art history by way of stylistic innovation, Magritte' works always remained in the 'old fashioned' space of illusionistic rendering. Modernist art overthrew the ideal of painting as window, rejected any status as a 'medium', and finally arrived at the point where art becomes the thing in itself. Perhaps Magritte walked the same road, but his method was not reductional. This study mainly deals with the ideas of 'inside' and 'outside' in Magritte' Paintings.. The idea of 'inside' and 'outside' corresponds with the concept of 'words and image', of 'mind and world', and of 'reality and representation'. What is crucial in this dual system is his conviction that canvas should lie in between these two opposites. For Magritte, the purpose of painting is not merely to describe the visible, but to evoke what is invisible within that visible. For him, the differences between images and language were not merely stylistic matters. Magritte concerned not only with the perceptual field but also with the linguistic area of representations as such. The most demonstrative example is his 〈This is not a pipe〉 series. Here, Magritte let us pay attention to the rupture between the vision and language. There is the strong interaction of picture and text which reciprocally deny each other, and finally point at the paradox of representation as such. Andre Breton, who was a leader of the surrealist movement, said that the goal of surrealism is the synthesis of perception and representation. The representative aesthetic of surrealism, the concept of Convulsive Beauty is something that happens contiguously without any preparation or expectation. There lies the paradox that how a sign, any kind of sign could be both sign and object, a reality constituted as sign, an absence transformed into presence. Magritte says that there is no ultimate signification not only in painting, but also in any representation as such. Because we never know what mind is, what mind know, what mind know when it knows something. For Magritte, painting is a kind of hole, blind area where the inside and the outside, the container and the contained, style and content, words and image merge into a new reality, the experience of which is always convulsive.

여성 작가들의 몸 그리기 : 여성 재현의 한계를 넘어서

정헌이 성신여자대학교 한국여성연구소 2001 여성연구논총 Vol.2 No.-

The identity of body seems to be more problematic nonetheless of the increasing attention on that subject in any cultural field. We can not comfortably assert what a natural body is. Gendered representation of body emerged as a central topic of discussion in both the areas of mass culture and high art. This study deals with the phenomenon of body politics in contemporary Korean culture. 'Songwha' is the heroin of the well received Korean movie〈Seopyunjae〉. Here she is represented as a Korean traditional singer who finally understands the spirit of the traditional song, 'pansori'. However she is deprived of her sight in order to get this final conquest which is an artistic maturity. 'Songwha's female body is damaged and de-gendered for the genuine quality of Korean artistic spirit. On the one hand, it seems overwhelmingly obvious that the age of images has developed new forms of illustration, yet on the other hand, the representational power of images repeats the same old story that man sees the fetish woman while woman sees themselves being seen. In visual art, many woman artist tried to present female body differently. Yoon Seok-Nam has been engaged in creating the image of mother who is seen by her daughters. Because she exists in absent atmosphere. we can not easily meet her concrete image. She lost her body but she is omnipresent in her exhibition space. As an absent presence, her body is called into question. Lee-bul's approach is very different from Yoon. Lee-bul rejects any kind of biological identity of woman. Maternity is also reputed for the ever-growing self reproduction of machine. Recently she works on the image of cyborg which threats/seduces man. The ambivalence of feeling on cyborg woman creates monster-like effect among male viewers. For lam, gender difference is no longer a problem. Because she thinks as if the gendered body is just like a clothing. What is problematic is not sexualized identity but a kind of individual realm of fantasy. Then, what is the connotation of the representation in which women say women's body? The representation of women by women does not aim at the 'right' body or 'whole' body. The ultimate goal of women's representation as such is the subjectivity of desire. Human sexuality signifies not only the biological capacity of reproduction but also complicated interaction of desire and taboo. Our body is very close to us, but the ultimate signification is never known to us. But it is important for us to rewrite and redraw the bodily map, because it is the only way how we go beyond the limit of the body.