Yung Bin Kwak
Yung Bin Kwak is an art media scholar, art critic, and Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Communication Arts, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea.
Winner of the 1st SeMA- Hana Art Criticism Award, the 1st major public art criticism award competition established in 2015 by Seoul Museum of Art in Korea, he received his PhD from the University of Iowa (Dept. of Cinema & Comparative Literature, now changed to Dept. of Cinematic Arts ) with a dissertation, entitled, 'The Origin of Korean Trauerspiel'.
Exploring intersections of contemporary art, (digital) media aesthetics, (post)cinema, along with critical theory and comparative literature, Kwak has taught a variety of undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on theories of (digital) film/media/visual aesthetics ('Perception, War, & Technology', 'Seminar on Moving Image Studies', 'Seminar on Media/Digital Arts', 'Introduction to Visual Culture', 'Introduction to Cinematic Arts', 'Introduction to Film Theory', 'Seminar on Contemporary Theory of Photography', etc.), early/classical/contemporary cinema ('Chaplin and Keaton', 'Alfred Hitchcock', 'New American Cinema', 'Kurosawa and Ozu', 'Understanding Contemporary Korean Cinema'), Korean studies ('Introduction to Korea thru Literature and Film', 'Understanding Contemporary Korean Culture') and Critical Theory ('Walter Benjamin as a Constellation') both in the U.S. and Korea.
On top of public talks on stellar figures of film history such as Buster Keaton, Robert Bresson, Eric Rohmer, Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, Claude Lanzmann and Pedro Costa, in the wake of major retrospectives or special screenings devoted to them at major public institutions such as MMCA, Seoul and Seoul Art Cinema. Beyond the traditional confines of 'cinema', he has also explored experimental filmmakers and avant-garde artists such as Beatrice Gibson, Bill Morrison, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jonas Mekas and Harun Farocki via public lectures and essays. A critical monograph of his extensive critical writings on these contemporary audio-visual works will be published soon as well.
Recent scholarly articles publications include ‘Melancholic Repetition Compulsion of Mourning and Mnemosyne of Disjecta Membra: May 18, Amnesty and Aby Warburg,’ ‘Ancient Futures of <The More, the Better>: Obsolete New Media’s ‘Parallax Contemporaneity’, along with <What Do Museums Connect?> (2022), <Hallyu-Technology-Culture> (2022) <Human-Media-Culture in the Age of Hyperconnectivity> (2021), and <Reading Blade Runner in Depth> (2021).
His first monograph in Korean, entitled, <Melancholy Without Mourning> further extends the Trauerspiel project of his dissertation by delving into cultural as well as political discourses of the past decade (since 2007) in and around Korea. Selected as one of the winners of the prestigious Sogang Academic Series, it will be be published in 2022.
Last not but least, he also served as a juror at various art awards and international festival such as the 2016 EXiS (Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul) with prominent artists such as Tamás Waliczky and Li Juchuan, the 17th SongEun Art Award and the 4th POSCO Art Museum 'The Great Artist' competition in 2017, and academic board member of KCLA (Korea Comparative Literature Association) from Jan. 2016 to Dec.2017.
미술평론가이자 연세대학교 커뮤니케이션 대학원 객원교수로, 미국 아이오와 대학교 영화와 비교문학과(現 '영화예술'과)에서 '한국 비애극의 기원'이라는 논문으로 박사학위를 받았다.
2015년 서울시립미술관이 주최한 최초의 국공립 미술관 평론상인 제1회 SeMA-하나 비평상을 수상했고, 아이오와 대학과 코넬 칼리지, 서울대와 연세대, 서강대와 한예종, 홍익대 등에서 (디지털)매체미학과 현대사진이론, 벤야민과 후기구조주의, 사운드와 예술사회학, 버스터 키튼과 뉴아메리칸 시네마 등을 아우르며 현대예술과 비평이론 전반에 대한 연구와 수업을 진행해왔다.
논문으로 「애도의 우울증적 반복강박과 흩어진 사지의 므네모시네: 5·18, 사면, 그리고 아비 바르부르크」, 「<다다익선>의 오래된 미래: 쓸모없는 뉴미디어의 ‘시차적 당대성’」, 등이, 저서로는 『미술관은 무엇을 연결하는가』(공저, 2022), 『한류-테크놀로지-문화』(공저, 2022), 『초연결시대 인간-미디어-문화』(공저, 2021), 『블레이드러너 깊이 읽기』 (공저, 2021), 『이미지의 막다른 길』(공저, 2017) 등이 있다.
2016 서울국제실험영화 페스티벌(EXiS), 2017년 제17회 송은미술대상전과 제4회 포스코 미술관 신진작가 공모전 외 다수의 심사위원을 맡았고, 현대미술과 영화, (디지털) 매체미학의 교차점을 다룬 책을 준비 중이다.
Supervisors: Prof. Corey Creekmur , Prof. Sonia Ryang, and Prof. John Durham Peters
Winner of the 1st SeMA- Hana Art Criticism Award, the 1st major public art criticism award competition established in 2015 by Seoul Museum of Art in Korea, he received his PhD from the University of Iowa (Dept. of Cinema & Comparative Literature, now changed to Dept. of Cinematic Arts ) with a dissertation, entitled, 'The Origin of Korean Trauerspiel'.
Exploring intersections of contemporary art, (digital) media aesthetics, (post)cinema, along with critical theory and comparative literature, Kwak has taught a variety of undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on theories of (digital) film/media/visual aesthetics ('Perception, War, & Technology', 'Seminar on Moving Image Studies', 'Seminar on Media/Digital Arts', 'Introduction to Visual Culture', 'Introduction to Cinematic Arts', 'Introduction to Film Theory', 'Seminar on Contemporary Theory of Photography', etc.), early/classical/contemporary cinema ('Chaplin and Keaton', 'Alfred Hitchcock', 'New American Cinema', 'Kurosawa and Ozu', 'Understanding Contemporary Korean Cinema'), Korean studies ('Introduction to Korea thru Literature and Film', 'Understanding Contemporary Korean Culture') and Critical Theory ('Walter Benjamin as a Constellation') both in the U.S. and Korea.
On top of public talks on stellar figures of film history such as Buster Keaton, Robert Bresson, Eric Rohmer, Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, Claude Lanzmann and Pedro Costa, in the wake of major retrospectives or special screenings devoted to them at major public institutions such as MMCA, Seoul and Seoul Art Cinema. Beyond the traditional confines of 'cinema', he has also explored experimental filmmakers and avant-garde artists such as Beatrice Gibson, Bill Morrison, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jonas Mekas and Harun Farocki via public lectures and essays. A critical monograph of his extensive critical writings on these contemporary audio-visual works will be published soon as well.
Recent scholarly articles publications include ‘Melancholic Repetition Compulsion of Mourning and Mnemosyne of Disjecta Membra: May 18, Amnesty and Aby Warburg,’ ‘Ancient Futures of <The More, the Better>: Obsolete New Media’s ‘Parallax Contemporaneity’, along with <What Do Museums Connect?> (2022), <Hallyu-Technology-Culture> (2022) <Human-Media-Culture in the Age of Hyperconnectivity> (2021), and <Reading Blade Runner in Depth> (2021).
His first monograph in Korean, entitled, <Melancholy Without Mourning> further extends the Trauerspiel project of his dissertation by delving into cultural as well as political discourses of the past decade (since 2007) in and around Korea. Selected as one of the winners of the prestigious Sogang Academic Series, it will be be published in 2022.
Last not but least, he also served as a juror at various art awards and international festival such as the 2016 EXiS (Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul) with prominent artists such as Tamás Waliczky and Li Juchuan, the 17th SongEun Art Award and the 4th POSCO Art Museum 'The Great Artist' competition in 2017, and academic board member of KCLA (Korea Comparative Literature Association) from Jan. 2016 to Dec.2017.
미술평론가이자 연세대학교 커뮤니케이션 대학원 객원교수로, 미국 아이오와 대학교 영화와 비교문학과(現 '영화예술'과)에서 '한국 비애극의 기원'이라는 논문으로 박사학위를 받았다.
2015년 서울시립미술관이 주최한 최초의 국공립 미술관 평론상인 제1회 SeMA-하나 비평상을 수상했고, 아이오와 대학과 코넬 칼리지, 서울대와 연세대, 서강대와 한예종, 홍익대 등에서 (디지털)매체미학과 현대사진이론, 벤야민과 후기구조주의, 사운드와 예술사회학, 버스터 키튼과 뉴아메리칸 시네마 등을 아우르며 현대예술과 비평이론 전반에 대한 연구와 수업을 진행해왔다.
논문으로 「애도의 우울증적 반복강박과 흩어진 사지의 므네모시네: 5·18, 사면, 그리고 아비 바르부르크」, 「<다다익선>의 오래된 미래: 쓸모없는 뉴미디어의 ‘시차적 당대성’」, 등이, 저서로는 『미술관은 무엇을 연결하는가』(공저, 2022), 『한류-테크놀로지-문화』(공저, 2022), 『초연결시대 인간-미디어-문화』(공저, 2021), 『블레이드러너 깊이 읽기』 (공저, 2021), 『이미지의 막다른 길』(공저, 2017) 등이 있다.
2016 서울국제실험영화 페스티벌(EXiS), 2017년 제17회 송은미술대상전과 제4회 포스코 미술관 신진작가 공모전 외 다수의 심사위원을 맡았고, 현대미술과 영화, (디지털) 매체미학의 교차점을 다룬 책을 준비 중이다.
Supervisors: Prof. Corey Creekmur , Prof. Sonia Ryang, and Prof. John Durham Peters
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Papers by Yung Bin Kwak
Made possible by the then President-elect-cum-the-symbolic-representative-of-victims Kim Dae-jung’s consent, this legal amnesty effectively results in the foreclosure of the traumatic massacre perpetrated in Gwangju, May 1980 within the field of legal battles, whereby nullifying the tenuous Freudian distinction between ‘mourning’ and ‘melancholia.’
This article argues that, doomed to repeat its failure, this ‘repetition compulsion of mourning’ forced the energy reserved for mourning work to ‘migrate’ from the field of ‘fact’ and ‘documentary’ to that of ‘fiction,’ more precisely by means of aphasic ‘contiguity disorder,’ which also accounts for why death among numerous films in the latter vein is rendered less ‘tragic’ than in travesty. By way of what Aby Warburg calls “migration of images” and ‘pathosformel,’ this paper critically reflects on how the desire for self-amputation betrayed by a series of figures connects to renouncing the ‘lure of the tragic,’ calling for a radical rethinking of the Void of ‘Chun’s (ir)reponsibility,’ long-overlooked by the static understanding and foregone analysis.
After mulling over for a while, I decided to narrow down my initial, avowedly grandiose scale down to 'notes' on <Shadows>(1959) and <Faces>(1968), two of his early, powerful, electrifying and often hypnotic films.
While I draw on Godard and Deleuze, along with Jean Rouch, toward the end of the piece, I note how his films no less strikingly resonate with <Titicut Follies>(Frederick Wiseman, 1967) and <Portrait of Jason>(Shirley Clarke, 1967) in terms of 'performative documentation/documentary' or 'documentary of performace.' Rhyming with Deleuze, I draw attention to grave implications of these volatile faces and bodies, whose precarious, mercurial states steadfastly ask if we have faith in them as sheer surfaces and, by extension, the world.
Note: In retrospect, this essay partakes of my decade-long fascination with and reflections on the genealogy of 'face as sur-face' in contemporary art and culture, a topic to which two of my scholarly articles readily suscribe, along with a long overdue article on contemporary Korean cinema. One day I hope I can turn them into a separate book on its own.
Limited by time and space, I mainly focused on what I'm tempted to call a 'genealogical turn of media(art)' wherein a disparate group of artists engage with a series of dilapidated media technologies or 'dispositifs' such as shadow play, praxiscope, and phantasmagoria in such a way that even VR apparatus is rendered so to speak 'outdated' in advance.
(Originally I was asked to write about 'main features and prospects of (Korean) video art since 2000 'till now.' In a sense, then, you can read my article as an oblique defiance, if not a downright refusal, to suscribe to the old idea of 'video art' in favor of subterranean mutations set in motion albeit quietly)
Currently being updated, it will hopefully come out as a scholarly article in a revised and expanded format sometime later this year.
Focusing on the relationship between ‘Time’, ‘Nature’ and ‘Technology’ in Paik’s oeuvre in terms of ‘entropy,’ we will see how they serve to illuminate contemporary discussions of preservation and conservation of so-called ‘time-based media’ as ‘performance.’ To that end, we will critically engage with the humanist take on Paik’s artworks as well as confusion about seemingly interchangeable concepts such as ‘entropy,’ ‘indeterminacy,’ and ‘chance.’
By re-reading Paik’s crucial statements, writings, artworks including performances such as “Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan,” <Confused Rain>, and his 1997 performance in a wheelchair at the Walker Art Center, we will see how <The More, the Better> as an ‘obsolete new media’ showcases what I call ‘parallax contemporaneity.’
In so doing, we will provide a necessary, if not exhaustive corrective to the extant scholarship on Nam June Paik’s art, and by extension, suggestive stimulants to contemporary reflections on new media, post-medium/media, and media archeology.
Written and published in the wake of the first retrospective devoted to his fascinating oeuvre (as well as another significant experimental filmmaker David Gatten's) in MMCA, Seoul, Korea (1.28-2.26.2017, https://www.mmca.go.kr/eng/exhibitions/exhibitionsDetailExh.do?exhId=201701130000521), my essay explores his works in terms of the way they render manifest otherwise invisible 'techniques' (distinct from 'technology') and 'time' (often literally compressed in nondescript inert materials), along with the political ramifications of various 'gestures' in view of 'Black Lives Matter' movement. Referencing, if indirectly, notable contemporary filmmakers
such Harun Farocki, Lav Diaz, John Torres, and Khavn de la Cruz, Everson imperceptibly yet decisively revises and expands their ongoing legacy. This article ends by decrypting his curious yet enigmatic suggestion that he does "not need spectators" to show how it supplements his brilliant "sculpting" of everyday gestures and craftsmanship by African Americans.
"Approaching Jidon Jung's novels (and what he claims to advocate in the name of analrealism) in terms of the erasure of distinctions or the line between work and criticism, Yung Bin Kwak considers the latter as a way "to cope with (or withstand) the contraction or evaporation of the 'horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont)'", and thereby asking us to read his (and their) works in the impossibility in which Korean literature finds itself." (Editorial board of <Literature and Society>. http://moonji.com/book/10648/)
In this study, I will investigate the strange case of <Die Another Day> (2002), Lee Tamahori’s ‘Bond movie,’ against whose theatrical release as such was picketed by Korean people. Pitting this refusal to receive the film against Tamahori’s deceptively reasonable retort, that “It’s just a movie,” I will tease out, reflect on, and evaluate some of the conundrums of the contemporary film studies as well as its political deadlock in the age of what Peter Sloterdijk calls “cynical reason.”
[2018 Note: While couched in terms of a critique of ''reception studies' and, what I then considered a deep-seated complacency of certain cultural studies approach, this paper, in retrosect, constitutes my long-standing exploration of 'fiction' or 'fantasy' à la Jacques Lacan as well as Stanley Cavell (“Fantasy is precisely what reality can be confused with.").
Also, along with my recent piece on Nam June Paik- whose central tenet concerns the 'aging new media'-, this article similarly tackles the 'strange temporality'(i.e. the idea of "fighting in the future in advance"), albeit that of fiction.]
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Widely hailed as the so-called “father of video art,” Nam June Paik lives on.
What begs the question, however, is the sheer diversity of his entire oeuvre beyond video. On top of his famous video works, Paik’s artworks encompass music, performance, painting, sculpture, cinema, TV, laser, and digital- let alone everything that wanders between or (re)mixes them. Is this simply a tell-tale sign which proves Paik as one of those avant-garde artists- who poked their noses into virtually everything? Is this not the proof of his (and their) reign whose time has now clearly passed?
Sidestepping such an idée fixe, this paper seeks to offer a different reading. For, despite the frenzy born of his dizzying changes of media, Paik’s works seem to betray a striking degree of consistency (if not stability)- in terms of what I call “states of media” wherein mediation soon gives way to the sense of immediacy or “immediation.” Put differently, his artworks mark and embody varying degrees or states of media as what not simply mediates but fundamentally transmutates humans and nonhuman entities.
I will show how these states are coextensive with Paik’s persistent, if at times contradictory exploration of Time, particularly in terms of its irreversibility, aka ‘entropy.’ In so doing, I will try to revise the well-worn myth of Paik’s (putatively naïve) humanism or anthropocentrism- in favor of what Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno call ‘Natural History (Naturgeschichte)’ in which Machine and Human age alike. This will help us to demonstrate how Paik’s oeuvre remain more relevant and perhaps contemporary than ever.
In seeking to fill this yawning void, this paper insists his works be treated as oeuvre. By analyzing the two animated features along with his shorts, I will show how radical Yeon’s works remain vis-a-vis contemporary Korean society. At their narrative core, his works, I argue, revolve around the problem of solidarity, or lack thereof among the abjected people. In contradistinction to the critical common sense whereby the supposed continuity between the two works is casually bypassed, I insist on the peculiar ways in which both resonate with difference.
Further, and perhaps more importantly, I will demonstrate how these otherwise merely thematic concerns are rendered formally in his animated works in terms of what I call “abyssal surface.” Despite his allegedly “realistic” style, Yeon’s works rather embody the utter lack/excess of trust among the abjected people as animation, i.e., ominously superficial surface beyond whose facade lurks abyssal lack/excess of mutual trust. Precisely in this double sense of the term, i.e., that thematically they touch on the roots of society, and, formally, those of animation as such, Yeon’s animation works are radical.
Drafts by Yung Bin Kwak
Teaching Documents by Yung Bin Kwak
If art(ist)s willing to characterize themselves in terms of a 'specific medium' are becoming harder to find, it is strictly due to the situations where the relationship between 'art in general' and 'media' itself has become an object of inquiry. Hence the idea of the 'post-medium.' When the status of media as a medium, i.e., what mediates (aesthetic) entities in the middle (cf. 'in media res'), is displaced/disjointed (again), and extant material coordinates are in ruins, 'media art' must be redefined anew.
With these in mind, this seminar concerns concerted efforts and works to render figural- if not ‘figurative’- something, which is- despite its essential contribution to mediating certain things to function as aesthetic objects- now somehow made virtually invisible. In this sense, we will pay attention to scattered genealogies of divisions or separations dividing 'background and foreground', 'objects and circumstances', 'subjects and environments/Umwelt', and, further, 'the visible and the invisible.'"
By carefully re(re)ading innumerable 'constellations' he crafts with Kafka, Brecht, Kracauer, Schmitt, and Baudelaire, or, on a different register, cinema, art history, politics, theology and history, we will strive to give names to those portals and pathways, some of which he could not manage to give proper names, whenever necessary. At the end of this journey, Benjamin as a constellation may shine in close proximity or in proportion to the darkness of these desolate times.
Art Reviews by Yung Bin Kwak
Made possible by the then President-elect-cum-the-symbolic-representative-of-victims Kim Dae-jung’s consent, this legal amnesty effectively results in the foreclosure of the traumatic massacre perpetrated in Gwangju, May 1980 within the field of legal battles, whereby nullifying the tenuous Freudian distinction between ‘mourning’ and ‘melancholia.’
This article argues that, doomed to repeat its failure, this ‘repetition compulsion of mourning’ forced the energy reserved for mourning work to ‘migrate’ from the field of ‘fact’ and ‘documentary’ to that of ‘fiction,’ more precisely by means of aphasic ‘contiguity disorder,’ which also accounts for why death among numerous films in the latter vein is rendered less ‘tragic’ than in travesty. By way of what Aby Warburg calls “migration of images” and ‘pathosformel,’ this paper critically reflects on how the desire for self-amputation betrayed by a series of figures connects to renouncing the ‘lure of the tragic,’ calling for a radical rethinking of the Void of ‘Chun’s (ir)reponsibility,’ long-overlooked by the static understanding and foregone analysis.
After mulling over for a while, I decided to narrow down my initial, avowedly grandiose scale down to 'notes' on <Shadows>(1959) and <Faces>(1968), two of his early, powerful, electrifying and often hypnotic films.
While I draw on Godard and Deleuze, along with Jean Rouch, toward the end of the piece, I note how his films no less strikingly resonate with <Titicut Follies>(Frederick Wiseman, 1967) and <Portrait of Jason>(Shirley Clarke, 1967) in terms of 'performative documentation/documentary' or 'documentary of performace.' Rhyming with Deleuze, I draw attention to grave implications of these volatile faces and bodies, whose precarious, mercurial states steadfastly ask if we have faith in them as sheer surfaces and, by extension, the world.
Note: In retrospect, this essay partakes of my decade-long fascination with and reflections on the genealogy of 'face as sur-face' in contemporary art and culture, a topic to which two of my scholarly articles readily suscribe, along with a long overdue article on contemporary Korean cinema. One day I hope I can turn them into a separate book on its own.
Limited by time and space, I mainly focused on what I'm tempted to call a 'genealogical turn of media(art)' wherein a disparate group of artists engage with a series of dilapidated media technologies or 'dispositifs' such as shadow play, praxiscope, and phantasmagoria in such a way that even VR apparatus is rendered so to speak 'outdated' in advance.
(Originally I was asked to write about 'main features and prospects of (Korean) video art since 2000 'till now.' In a sense, then, you can read my article as an oblique defiance, if not a downright refusal, to suscribe to the old idea of 'video art' in favor of subterranean mutations set in motion albeit quietly)
Currently being updated, it will hopefully come out as a scholarly article in a revised and expanded format sometime later this year.
Focusing on the relationship between ‘Time’, ‘Nature’ and ‘Technology’ in Paik’s oeuvre in terms of ‘entropy,’ we will see how they serve to illuminate contemporary discussions of preservation and conservation of so-called ‘time-based media’ as ‘performance.’ To that end, we will critically engage with the humanist take on Paik’s artworks as well as confusion about seemingly interchangeable concepts such as ‘entropy,’ ‘indeterminacy,’ and ‘chance.’
By re-reading Paik’s crucial statements, writings, artworks including performances such as “Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan,” <Confused Rain>, and his 1997 performance in a wheelchair at the Walker Art Center, we will see how <The More, the Better> as an ‘obsolete new media’ showcases what I call ‘parallax contemporaneity.’
In so doing, we will provide a necessary, if not exhaustive corrective to the extant scholarship on Nam June Paik’s art, and by extension, suggestive stimulants to contemporary reflections on new media, post-medium/media, and media archeology.
Written and published in the wake of the first retrospective devoted to his fascinating oeuvre (as well as another significant experimental filmmaker David Gatten's) in MMCA, Seoul, Korea (1.28-2.26.2017, https://www.mmca.go.kr/eng/exhibitions/exhibitionsDetailExh.do?exhId=201701130000521), my essay explores his works in terms of the way they render manifest otherwise invisible 'techniques' (distinct from 'technology') and 'time' (often literally compressed in nondescript inert materials), along with the political ramifications of various 'gestures' in view of 'Black Lives Matter' movement. Referencing, if indirectly, notable contemporary filmmakers
such Harun Farocki, Lav Diaz, John Torres, and Khavn de la Cruz, Everson imperceptibly yet decisively revises and expands their ongoing legacy. This article ends by decrypting his curious yet enigmatic suggestion that he does "not need spectators" to show how it supplements his brilliant "sculpting" of everyday gestures and craftsmanship by African Americans.
"Approaching Jidon Jung's novels (and what he claims to advocate in the name of analrealism) in terms of the erasure of distinctions or the line between work and criticism, Yung Bin Kwak considers the latter as a way "to cope with (or withstand) the contraction or evaporation of the 'horizon of expectation (Erwartungshorizont)'", and thereby asking us to read his (and their) works in the impossibility in which Korean literature finds itself." (Editorial board of <Literature and Society>. http://moonji.com/book/10648/)
In this study, I will investigate the strange case of <Die Another Day> (2002), Lee Tamahori’s ‘Bond movie,’ against whose theatrical release as such was picketed by Korean people. Pitting this refusal to receive the film against Tamahori’s deceptively reasonable retort, that “It’s just a movie,” I will tease out, reflect on, and evaluate some of the conundrums of the contemporary film studies as well as its political deadlock in the age of what Peter Sloterdijk calls “cynical reason.”
[2018 Note: While couched in terms of a critique of ''reception studies' and, what I then considered a deep-seated complacency of certain cultural studies approach, this paper, in retrosect, constitutes my long-standing exploration of 'fiction' or 'fantasy' à la Jacques Lacan as well as Stanley Cavell (“Fantasy is precisely what reality can be confused with.").
Also, along with my recent piece on Nam June Paik- whose central tenet concerns the 'aging new media'-, this article similarly tackles the 'strange temporality'(i.e. the idea of "fighting in the future in advance"), albeit that of fiction.]
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Widely hailed as the so-called “father of video art,” Nam June Paik lives on.
What begs the question, however, is the sheer diversity of his entire oeuvre beyond video. On top of his famous video works, Paik’s artworks encompass music, performance, painting, sculpture, cinema, TV, laser, and digital- let alone everything that wanders between or (re)mixes them. Is this simply a tell-tale sign which proves Paik as one of those avant-garde artists- who poked their noses into virtually everything? Is this not the proof of his (and their) reign whose time has now clearly passed?
Sidestepping such an idée fixe, this paper seeks to offer a different reading. For, despite the frenzy born of his dizzying changes of media, Paik’s works seem to betray a striking degree of consistency (if not stability)- in terms of what I call “states of media” wherein mediation soon gives way to the sense of immediacy or “immediation.” Put differently, his artworks mark and embody varying degrees or states of media as what not simply mediates but fundamentally transmutates humans and nonhuman entities.
I will show how these states are coextensive with Paik’s persistent, if at times contradictory exploration of Time, particularly in terms of its irreversibility, aka ‘entropy.’ In so doing, I will try to revise the well-worn myth of Paik’s (putatively naïve) humanism or anthropocentrism- in favor of what Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno call ‘Natural History (Naturgeschichte)’ in which Machine and Human age alike. This will help us to demonstrate how Paik’s oeuvre remain more relevant and perhaps contemporary than ever.
In seeking to fill this yawning void, this paper insists his works be treated as oeuvre. By analyzing the two animated features along with his shorts, I will show how radical Yeon’s works remain vis-a-vis contemporary Korean society. At their narrative core, his works, I argue, revolve around the problem of solidarity, or lack thereof among the abjected people. In contradistinction to the critical common sense whereby the supposed continuity between the two works is casually bypassed, I insist on the peculiar ways in which both resonate with difference.
Further, and perhaps more importantly, I will demonstrate how these otherwise merely thematic concerns are rendered formally in his animated works in terms of what I call “abyssal surface.” Despite his allegedly “realistic” style, Yeon’s works rather embody the utter lack/excess of trust among the abjected people as animation, i.e., ominously superficial surface beyond whose facade lurks abyssal lack/excess of mutual trust. Precisely in this double sense of the term, i.e., that thematically they touch on the roots of society, and, formally, those of animation as such, Yeon’s animation works are radical.
If art(ist)s willing to characterize themselves in terms of a 'specific medium' are becoming harder to find, it is strictly due to the situations where the relationship between 'art in general' and 'media' itself has become an object of inquiry. Hence the idea of the 'post-medium.' When the status of media as a medium, i.e., what mediates (aesthetic) entities in the middle (cf. 'in media res'), is displaced/disjointed (again), and extant material coordinates are in ruins, 'media art' must be redefined anew.
With these in mind, this seminar concerns concerted efforts and works to render figural- if not ‘figurative’- something, which is- despite its essential contribution to mediating certain things to function as aesthetic objects- now somehow made virtually invisible. In this sense, we will pay attention to scattered genealogies of divisions or separations dividing 'background and foreground', 'objects and circumstances', 'subjects and environments/Umwelt', and, further, 'the visible and the invisible.'"
By carefully re(re)ading innumerable 'constellations' he crafts with Kafka, Brecht, Kracauer, Schmitt, and Baudelaire, or, on a different register, cinema, art history, politics, theology and history, we will strive to give names to those portals and pathways, some of which he could not manage to give proper names, whenever necessary. At the end of this journey, Benjamin as a constellation may shine in close proximity or in proportion to the darkness of these desolate times.
According to the leaflet, this exhibition "contemplates the art and life tactics to respect and consider diversity, by which nature, things, and humankind can coexist.
The term ‘tactics’ used in the exhibition is borrowed from the French scholar Michel de Certeau’s concept. He utilizes it to discuss the ‘performativity of the subject,’ a method of practice by which the excluded others resisted concentrated power in everyday life in modern society.
The participating artists are making a gap by small physical performances in this wartime-like period. This exhibition tries to observe a movement by which others refuse to be a target of suppression and surveillance and create a crack in the system continuously using little stories.
It cherishes the slight hope that it might poke a hole in the solid world with these small artistic practices and look inside of it."
An extended, revised version of this review will appear in the catalogue as an essay sometime during this summer.
이 글은 1980년대 이른바 '포스트모더니즘'은 물론 '문화연구(Cultural Studies)'의 부상과 함께 영미권에서 큰 반향을 얻었던 드 세르토의 '전략 없는 전술' 개념을, '함께 살기' 혹은 '공동체'의 문제가 그 어느 때보다 첨예해진 2021년 코로나 위기 속의 세상에 소환해 풀어낸 전시 <전술 Tactics>(백남준 아트센터, 2021.2.25-6.3)에 대한 리뷰이다.
이 전시를 최근 몇 년간 집중적으로 곱씹고 있는 ‘수행성(performativity)’과 ‘픽션’ 및 '게임'이란 키워드를 중심으로 살펴보면서, 나는 할 포스터가 '퍼포먼스의 제도화'라 비판적으로 규정한 아트씬의 어떤 경향을 '게임과 구분(불)가능한 것으로서의 파업'이라는 측면에서 보다 당대적으로 제기하려 했다.
이는 트럼프 이후에도 다양한 방식으로 토양화된 '전지구적 트럼프주의'를, 벤야민이 '비관주의를 조직하기'라는 이름으로 정식화했던 간전기의 문제의식과 중첩시킨다는 것이기도 한데, 이에 대한 보다 확장된 논의는 여름에 출간될 전시도록에서 전개할 예정이다.
Parting ways with the popular understanding of Mekas as the pioneer and master of the diary mode of filmmaking (e.g. <365 Day Project>, (2007)) , marked by its irreducibly personal anecdotes and secrets, I draw attention to a different, almost counterintuitive aspect of his audiovisual images where the personal partakes of, if you will, ‘impersonal’ memories (of which Bergson and Deleuze spoke), or, a la Alain Resnais , <Toute la mémoire du monde>.
“Memories, they say my images are my memories. No no no! These are not memories: this is all real what you see - every image, every detail, everything is real, everything is real and it’s not a memory, it has nothing to do with my memories anymore. Memories are gone, but the images are here, and they are real! What you see, every second of what you see, here, is real. Is real. Right there in front of your eyes, what you see, it’s real. There, in front of you. Yes, from that screen, it’s all real.” (Jonas Mekas, <Outtakes From The Life of a Happy Man>, 2012)
Drawing on Farocki’s cryptically succinct remark (“Alle Arbeit ist Wiederholung [All work is repetition],” arguably his oblique answer to Jean-Luc Godard’s poignant reminder that labor is rarely shown in cinema, I show how his mode of investigation into myriad forms of labor effectively exposes porous boundaries or osmosis between work, play, and art- as demonstrated admirably, if in deceptively transparent manner, in <Labour in a Single Shot> (2011-2017) and <Parallel I-IV> (2012-2014).
Further, in line with Walter Benjamin’s perceptive caution against naïve theological readings of Kafka’s literary oeuvre, I note how Farocki has refused to subscribe to the tradition of ‘Arbeiter Filme,’ opting instead to capture virtually imperceptible mutations among extant forms of labor, many of whose volatile, destructive repercussions tend to be discovered after a while, sometimes way too late.
With these in mind, works as diverse as as <Interface> (1995), <Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades> (2006), and <Comparison via a Third> (2007) can be read in terms of what I call elsewhere ‘virtual montage’ in which the question of (fore)seeing something to come or adjacent even in “a single shot,” and by extension, ‘what is to be done?’ is posed.
In this regard, they partake of the larger arc that Farocki sought to construct throughout his remarkable career to which <Labour in a Single Shot> (2011-2017) and <Parallel I-IV> (2012-2014) readily subscribe, albeit on a different register.
In contradistinction to the tempting yet rather conventional attempt to recycle the idea of 'archive' along the lines of <Histoire(s) du cinéma>, I chose to render manifest the lush legacy of Jean Rouch whose pioneering attempt at 'Ethno-fiction' is here recalibrated- in conjunction with Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi's 'archeological probe'- in the midst of the Arab Spring's bitter aftermath and global islamophobia- or, the so-called 'the global civil war.'
* The original title of this essay when I contributed it was: <Future of 'Le Petit Soldat' and 'War Game', or Coughing of an 'Ardent Hope'>.
원래 편집부에 보낸 원고의 제목은 <‘소년병’과 전쟁놀이의 미래, 또는 ‘열렬한 희망’의 기침>이었다.
“For many spectators, the title of this exhibition under review, 'Imaginary Asia,' seems reminiscent of the expression, 'Imagined Communities.' As is well-known, this phrase is the title of the late Benedic Anderson's book, and yet it has virtually nothing to do with the hackneyed summary that 'a community is a product of imagination.' For, as Anderson emphasizes throughout the book, what bugs him the most was, if 'a community is (merely) something imagined, why did millions of people sacrifice themselves to this imaginary product at all?'"
In contradistinction to the conventional way of describing him as a 'multimedia artist', or his works as another 'postmedia art', I tried to revisit his artistic oeuvre anew by foregrounding his consistent, otherwise familiar reference to 'cinema.'
The secret kernel at the heart of his works, I argue, concerns the deceptively simple question as to 'what happens AFTER the world has become a movie'?
Far from making his art works allegedly 'cinematic,' Yangachi's oeuvre embody another, arguably the most timely question-- 'where is the World then'? (*This review is being revised and expanded in English for an essay article)
They showed internationally well-known works from earlier period- e.g. <Aria> (John Cage, 1958), <Lip Sync>(Bruce Nauman, 1969), <Mouth to Mouth>(Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 1975)- to the recent one- e.g. <Song> (Ragnar Kjartansson, 2011), <Beoynd the White Walls>(Jeremy Deller, 2012)-, along with selective audiovisual works by contemporary Korean artists such as Okin Collective, Yeondoo Jung, and Choe Yunseok, to name just a few.
As the counterintuitive title ('I HEAR your Face') amply suggests, I saw, or rather, 'heard' the kernel of each exhibition from the (aural) perspective of the 'original disparity or 'irreparable gap' between image and sound.
And it is precisely this primordial split, whose implications I recently tried to refine and mull over theoretically in terms of 'per/sona' a la Hannah Arent and others in my essay on Heungsoon Im.
A4 14장, 원고지 140매에 달하는 긴 분량으로, 개인전이 아닌 그룹 전시에 대해 쓴 글들 중에서는 나름 유의미한 ‘돌파’를 경험한 사례 중 하나로 기억될 것 같습니다.
이전에 리뷰를 썼거나 나름 관심을 가져온 작가분들도 계셨지만, 전시작품으로는 처음 접하는 작가분들의 작업들을 평면적으로 나열하기보다는, 그들이 전시라는 큐레이팅의 매개를 통해 얻게된 ‘인력과 척력의 역장(force field)’ 속에서 제기되는, 혹은 제기되지 않는 질문을 대면하는데 집중한 글입니다.
그 핵심에서 천착한 것은, 이른바 ‘포스트-진실‘의 시대에 ’역사란 무엇인가?’란 지극히 자명해 뵈는 질문입니다. 그것은 결국 ‘펙트체크’의 ‘계몽주의’, 이른바 ‘참교육’으로 환원될 수밖에 없는 것일까요? 이는 공교롭게도 전광훈 목사에게 ‘전근대적 세뇌’를 당했다고 간주되며, ‘틀딱’이라는 표현으로 뭉뚱그려 비하되는 노인층들의 815 광화문 집회를 통해 그 어느 때보다 ‘당대적’인 문제로 다시, 하지만 여전히 ‘공회전’되는 질문이기도 합니다.
이 글이 어떤 명확한 ‘대안’을 제시한다는 건 물론 아닙니다.
하지만 글의 결론부에서 카프카를 환기하며 강조했듯, “자신이 쓸모없어졌다는 사실을 인식하지 못함으로써 ‘역사화[la peinture d’histoire/history painting]’가 ‘역사’ 속으로 사라졌다는 것은, 특정한 역사적 사건을 그때까지 통용되던 방식으로 단순히 재현한다고 해서 ‘역사화’가 되지 않는다는 말이며, ‘역사왜곡’에 ‘팩트체크’를 대립시키는 것 이상의 ‘과제’ 또는 ‘숙제(aufgabe)’가 우리에게 주어져 있다는 말이기도 하”다는 것만큼은 분명한 ‘사실’로, 다시 말해 ‘결론’이 아닌 ‘출발점’으로서 우리에게 주어진 것일 것입니다.
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