Figuring the Social Condition: The Role of Allegory

파트릭 플로레,Flores, Patrick D. The Korean Society of Art Theories 2009 미술이론과 현장 Vol.7 No.-

The Philippines was colonized by Spain for about centuries, from 1521 to 1898, and ruled by America for around four decades, from 1899 to 1946. After recovering from the Second World War, the government started to harness human labor as export itself. In the present time the overseas Filipinos keep the economy afloat with their steady transfer of money to relatives and dependents. Through the art works, the issue which Filipinos were exploited and exported by its government has been reflected as the various allegories. As Filipinos traditionally follow and keep Catholic belief, themes of Christ's sacrifice has allegorically been represented as salvation, struggle, suppression, and emancipation of people. Through the allegory, we can interpret both the intrinsic and superficial texts. Also we can identity certain modes of the visuality of allegory in selected works from Philippine art history that in their complex mediations materialize the people and dignity of their predicament and their prevailing. Philippine art can be divided as three different features: passion, vagrancy, and mass formation. The passion stage was depicted as deep structure of Christian thought and devotional feeling, harsh capitalist system. In the pictures of vagrancy, under the regime of Ferdinand Marcos, the themes of drift, deprivation, and homelessness are reckoned through the images of pictures. The stories represented with allegory have been played an important role to bring local issues up as national ones. Those stages take us to the processes of mass formation or the depiction of the people as a moment in the totality of force. The allegorical sign refers to another sign that precedes it, but with which it will never able to coincide reach back to a previous stage and in this constant attempt at return incorporates a structural distance from its origin. The true people's art is one that radically generates transformative technologies and techniques so that it irrevocably breaks the plane of "art". In the painting, the truth is represented by functioning as foundation of a rhetoric of the image. And at this axis, the passional, the vagrant, and the mass formation tend to come together because they render the form of contingency that must be suffered and hopefully surpassed, a Filipino subjectivity that must be stitched in time.

Arctic Exposure: LOVELAND's Sublime Simulation of an Endless Apocalypse

Bishop-Stall, Reilley The Korean Society of Art Theories 2012 미술이론과 현장 Vol.13 No.-

Charles Stankievech's 2011 installation LOVELAND includes a wall-sized screen depicting video footage of a barren arctic landscape in an enclosed room, painted and bathed in white light, that appears as an extension of the imaged environment. A melodic and industrial musical score emanates from multiple sound panels and as the music increases a cloud of purple smoke becomes visible on the horizon line in the distance and gradually advances toward the viewer until it completely fills the screen. The smoke then remains, rushing about madly and lapping at the border between the screen and the room before it suddenly subsides and the spectator is again left with the desolate landscape. The entire process takes a mere five minutes and then, fixed on an endless loop, begins again. This paper positions LOVELAND as an attempt to simulate a sublime experience of the end of the world through a transposition of the Arctic atmosphere into the gallery space. Encompassing a discussion of the historical and contemporary significance of the Arctic in popular culture, aesthetics and environmental politics, it is suggested that Stankievech employs an apocalyptic trope in reference to the unstable position of the North in the current political and ecological climate. Revisiting critiques of modernist exhibition practices and investigating the perceptual and temporal dimensions of the work, this analysis focuses primarily on the experience of the installation's spectator. Visually, aurally and phenomenologically immersed, the viewer is made subject to, and implicated in, the events unfolding on the screen and within the space. Due to the looping of the video footage, this paper argues that the apocalypse imaged in LOVELAND is presented as an endless event - incessantly enacted, yet infinitely deferred - and that the spectator is enveloped in an uncertain and unceasingly extended present moment.

Considering Issues of Vision in Panoptical Representation: Bentham, Bender, Fried, and Mayhew

신희섭,Shin, Hi-Sup The Korean Society of Art Theories 2009 미술이론과 현장 Vol.7 No.-

This essay aims to develop a critical approach of interpretation in examining the panoptical condition of representation that is said to permeate the tradition of modern realism in novels and paintings. In defining this approach, I am interested in the problem or inability of panoptical representation to tell a coherent story of solitude(solitary confinement, isolation, self-absorption, etc.) in a range of texts from prison documents to paintings and novels, and also what might occasion such an inability including social, material, or stylistic contradictions and conflicting epistemological angles. This task potentially anticipates a trajectory of readings and investigations that cuts through the history of panoptical representation, which is outside the scope of this essay. In this writing, I will engage in a series of debates with what I consider as major theories and views of panoptical representation offered by Jeremy Bentham, John Bender, and Michael Fried. Based on this, I will formulate a conceptual or methodological frame of discourse that would envisage an anti-panoptical approach of interpretation. As an attempt to validate this formulation, I will offer a reading of Henry Mayhew's Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life(1862), a case of panoptical representation that produces a peculiar sense of ambivalence while accounting for sites of penal solitude.

War as Catastrophe: Jacques Callot's "Miseries of War" as Moral Meditation

Levine, Michael,Taylor, William The Korean Society of Art Theories 2012 미술이론과 현장 Vol.13 No.-

This essay examines Jacques Callot's Les Grandes Mis$\grave{e}$res et Malheurs de la Guerre (1633) as a moral meditation on war as catastrophe. It also uses Callot's Miseries to reflect on the nature of catastrophe as such, particularly as "An event producing a subversion of the order or system of things." As such, catastrophe refers less to nature or the natural gone awry, than it does to the abnegation or suspension of moral aspects of human nature. More than a reflection on war as catastrophe, and catastrophe as fundamentally moral, Callot's Miseries are a timeless meditation on aspects of the human condition; or on human beings in what amounts to state of nature-as evidenced in times of disaster. Such reflection, again, does not by itself imply that all war-even when catastrophic-is unnecessary, let alone necessarily unjust. But it does suggest that artistic engagement with war understood as catastrophic, may yield insights into human nature that are as important to human self-understanding as those represented in artistic subject matter that is more quotidian.

Remembering Disasters: the Resilience Approach

le Blanc, Antoine The Korean Society of Art Theories 2012 미술이론과 현장 Vol.14 No.-

The aim of this paper is to show how the paradigm of disaster resilience may help reorienting urban planning policies in order to mitigate various types of risks, thanks to carefully thought action on heritage and conservation practices. Resilience is defined as the "capacity of a social system to proactively adapt to and recover from disturbances that are perceived within the system to fall outside the range of normal and expected disturbances." It relies greatly on risk perception and the memory of catastrophes. States, regions, municipalities, have been giving territorial materiality to collective memory for centuries, but this trend has considerably increased in the second half of the 20th century. This is particularly true regarding the memory of disasters: for example, important traces of catastrophes such as urban ruins have been preserved, because they were supposed to maintain some awareness and hence foster urban resilience - Berlin's Gedachtniskirche is a well-known example of this policy. Yet, in spite of preserved traces of catastrophes and various warnings and heritage policies, there are countless examples of risk mismanagement and urban tragedies. Using resilience as a guiding concept might change the results of these failed risk mitigation policies and irrelevant disaster memory processes. Indeed, the concept of resilience deals with the complexity of temporal and spatial scales, and with partly emotional and qualitative processes, so that this approach fits the issues of urban memory management. Resilience might help underlining the complexity and the subtlety of remembrance messages, and lead to alternative paths better adapted to the diversity of risks, places and actors. However, when it is given territorial materiality, memory is almost always symbolically and politically framed and interpreted; Vale and Campanella had already outlined this political aspect of remembrance and resilience as a discourse. Resilience and the territorialization of memory are not ideologically neutral, but urban risk mitigation may come at that price.