연구동향 : 미국 미술사학계의 최근 동향

정헌이(Hunyee Jung) 서양미술사학회 1992 서양미술사학회논문집 Vol.4 No.-

반 고흐의 〈낡은 구두〉 : 하이데거, 메이어 샤피로, 자크 데리다의 논쟁을 중심으로

정헌이(Hunyee Jung) 서양미술사학회 1998 서양미술사학회논문집 Vol.10 No.-

This essay deals with the debates between Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro and Jacques Derrida on the truth in Vincent Van Gogh’s Painting of Pair if Shoes. Heidegger said that this painting let us know what shoes are in truth. This represented equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. This art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings, and this opening up, i.e., this deconcealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work. Shapiro criticized Heidegger that this attribution of Van Gogh’s picture of the shoes to a peasant woman is false. The shoes are not those of a peasant woman but of a male city dweller, Van Gogh’s own shoes at the time he was living in Paris. He accused Heidegger that he deceived himself, that he imagined everything and projected it into the painting. According to Schapiro, this painting is worth Van Gogh’s self portrait. Derrida argues that this episode is not a theoretical or philosophical dispute for the interpretation of a work but a matter of history and politics. He says that this shoes are painted shoes and they will not returned to the rightful owner, to the original subject. Painting is anterior to the discourse about truth, anterior to the desire for restitution. Finally, his essay is lodged against the discourse of belonging, against the discourse of attribution. Art History is based on the connoisseurship, in other words, the discourse of attribution. Then how can we art historians react to Derrida’s accusations? Derrida says that “one dreams of a painting without truth, which without debt and running the risk of no longer saying anything to anyone, would still not give up painting”. Yet, this resembles Kant’s definition of aesthetic experience which is ‘without purpose’, ‘without use’, ‘without interest’. The ghost step which still comes to haunt the painted shoes is not so much peasant woman’s nor Van Gogh’s, neither Heidegger’s nor Schapiro’s, but Kant’s. Derrida further claims that painting suspends its own meaning, risking the loss of meaning. The truth may have something to do with the ownership of the history rather than the truth, or than the origin of truth, the truth of truth. There exist contests for the identity and truth. Then this debate is not so much the debate between disciplines, i.e., between art histoy and philosophy of art, but a matter of world-view. Do we believe that we owe the world some debt? The debt of meaning, truth, whatever. The promise of Cezanne, “I owe you the truth in painting, and I wil tell it to you” is only a performative promise. Yet, do we expect something in his promise? Truth or not, the promise always belongs to the future which is not yet rome. Thus, promise, the promise on the truth of painting always takes the form of belief and expectation before it turns into mere traces of truth.

미술을 바라보는 ‘페미니스트적 시각’이란 무엇인가

정헌이(Jung HunYee) 현대미술사학회 1998 현대미술사연구 Vol.8 No.-

비-장소로서의 유토피아

정헌이(Hunyee Jung) 서양미술사학회 2014 서양미술사학회논문집 Vol.41 No.-

이 논문은 더 나은 삶을 위한 대안을 제시한다는 유토피아 개념이 시각예술 속에서 어떻게 이해되고 수용되어 왔는지 살펴보고 오늘날의 포스트-유토피아 미술에 나타난 예술의 해체 문제를 논의한다. 유토피아는 선한 사회에 대한 정치적 비전이면서도 동시에 ‘없는 곳’에 대한 상상의 기획이기 때문에 비현실적이이고 몽상적이라고 폄하되는 경향이 있다. 이 글에서는 토마스 모어가 처음 사용한 유토피아란 용어와 개념이 그 자체로 아포리아임에도 불구하고 반드시 현실비판에서 출발한다는 점에 주목하고, 예술가로서 가장 분명하게 유토피안 사상을 펼쳤던 윌리엄 모리스와 20세기 유토피안 아방가르드 작가들의 사례들을 통해 예술 속의 유토피안 사상이 반드시 공상적이고 허구적인 것이 아니라 보다 나은 삶의 전망을 찾아내려는 희망의 프로젝트이자 구체화된 미래상임을 밝힌다. 포스트-유토피안 시대의 유토피아 미술을 다룬 3장에서는 최근의 예술 속에서 나타나는 미술의 해체 문제에 주목한다. 매체에 대한 기술적 숙련을 거부하고 만남, 관계, 태도, 실천이 강조되는 해체주의 미술은 대개 미술의 정체성을 훼손한다는 비판을 받아왔다. 그러나 이 논문은 유토피아적 전망은 ‘헤테로토피아(heterotopia)’를, 즉 다른 공간의 가능성을 품고 있어야 하고, 유토피아는 유토피아를 거부할 가능성을 허용하는 한에서만 유토피아일 수 있다는 점을 강조한다. 끝으로 철학자 사이먼 크리츨리 (Simon Critchley)를 참고하여 예술은 허구이지만, 우리가 그것이 허구임을 알면서도 믿기로 선택한 허구, 즉 “최상의 허구”라는 점, 그리고 예술의 유토피아적 기능은 예술이 자율적 영역이어서라기보다는 그것이 자율적이지 못하기 때문에 지속적으로 자유로와지려고 노력하는 바로 그 지점에서 발현하는 것임을 밝힌다. 아직 존재하지 않고 지금까지 인정받지 못한 관점에서 바라보는 제안의 형식으로서의 예술은 그 자체로 유토피아의 구조를 가지고 있다. 바로 그점이 예술이라는 난제의 특성일 것이다. The notion of utopia had been seriously discredited since the collapse of the communist governments of Russia and of eastern europe in 1990s. However, in recent years, there has been a renewed interest in contemporary art, centering on the issue of utopia. The exhibition “Utopia Station” at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, “Utopian Impulse” at the SF MOMA in 2012, and the “Spirit of Utopia” at the Whitechaple Gallery in 2013 are three major institutional re-visitings of this forgotten idea of better life. It means that the art of 1990s which Nicolas Bourriaud called “precarious art” based on “relational aesthetics” officially entered institutional organization of contemporary art world. This study examines how the concept of utopia has been understood and embraced in the context of recent art history. Utopia as an everyday language tends to disparage the speculation about the good society as intrinsically impractical and dreamy. In this article, I pay attention to the fact that Thomas More, the founding father of utopian study conjured the idea of utopia out of critique of reality. Utopian impulse is not just fictional but concrete projects of hope that will materialize the future. In dealing with so-called ‘post-medium art’, I discuss the problem related to the negative by-product of dissolution of art medium in these utopian projects in post-utopian age. The arts of deconstruction that reject craftsmanship but emphasize relation, meeting, attitude and practice, have been suspected of destroying the identity of art itself. Yet, utopian perspective must allow the possibility of other spaces and even the possibility of the right to reject utopia itself. I refer to the concept of the “supreme fiction” that I borrowed from the philosopher Simon Critchley, and argue that utopia is “a fiction that we know to be a fiction but in which we nonetheless believe”. Art is a utopian proposition that we see what is from the standpoint of something that does not exist and which has not been acknowledged.

통섭학으로서의 생태미술

정헌이(JUNG hunyee) 서양미술사학회 2012 서양미술사학회논문집 Vol.37 No.-

This research explores a critical range of eco-senstive aesthetic practice. What is the relationship between art and ecology? Do art historians, art critics or artists ought to be intervening in the ecological issues? How can they interfere in this issue? With these questions in mind I look into several examples of eco-art projects and find out some radical changes in premise of aesthetic paradigm in artistic practice. I hope I could cogently contend that aesthetics can offer an excellent basis for ecological ethics as it have been paved the way for environmental ethics. In chapter two, I investigate three established theories on ecology since 1960s: deep ecology, social ecology, and eco-feminism. With the theoretical understandings of the current issues, I refer to the ways in which John Ruskin’s writings contributed to the expansion of aesthetic attitude toward the larger socio-ecological issues in chapter three. Chapter four is organized around four ecological art projects: Alan Sonfist’s <Time Landscape :1965~1978~ >, Beth Carruthers’ <Songbird Project: 1996-2002>, Dirk Fleischmann’s <Myforestfarm: 2008~ >, and Jennifer Allora &Guillermo Calzadilla’s <Under Discussion, 2005>. In chapter 5, I shed critical light on the methodology in which recent eco-sensitive art projects transcends the traditional premise of object based, visually-centered art form. Ecologist tends to take holism; We are living in an interconnected universe. We may be reduced to ‘selfish gene,’ yet we are beings who can ask who we are, where we are living. Nature and Human Being are neither one nor two. We don’t have to regard the relationship between Nature and Culture from the separatist’s perspective. Nature is not a ‘pure’ space that have to be protected from Culture but a sphere which is under endless negotiation. Post-media art tends to be something of conversation beyond object matter. It appears and disappears, be inscribed and erased, ask questions and give critiques, make traces in mind. Arts launch a certain community in which the members share the common limit of existence. The real media in the eco-art is “mind”. This mind as disinterested interest is fundamentally aesthetical.

그리드를 넘어서

정헌이(Jung Hunyee),진휘연(토론자) 한국미술사교육학회 2001 美術史學 Vol.15 No.-

The modernist art history is often regarded as iconoclastic in its impulse to exclude any recognizable figures from the art work. Modernist art went against any narrative based on the image and reduced its task into a sort of autistic self criticism, for the purity of self definition. Yet this article tries to find out the symbolic icon that is alway there behind the iconoclastic gesture of the modernist art. The grid, as the representative icon of the modernist art, is omnipresent in the history of modem art. As the concept of “icon” is problematic between ‘good image’ and ‘bad image’, between miracle and fetish. so the grid manifests its being both spirit and matter at the same time. Pop art that is often understood as “the return of the content” and as the beginning of post-modem art, in fact internalized the structure of grid. The “icon” in the pop art is very different in character compared with the icon in the pre-modem art. Pop imagery is a kind of ready-made, appropriated images from the mass media and commodity. Art after modernist art nulled out the concepts of originality and authenticity, and took “repetition” as one of its strategies to obtain that goal. And “repetition” is the very structure of the modernist grid. An art work is endowed with its artistic identity and value from the institutional mechanism which is in a sense getting more and more psychological and epistemological within the art-world. The identity of an art work is not what the art work has but that which is projected to it by us. Art, ironically, becomes what we believe it is. Art is not autonomous. Art which no longer has any use value had to appeal to the soul, compelled to certificate itself as art by obsessively acting itself. If art work always exceeds its very image, this surplus value is bestowed on it by the audience who not only look at but also hear from the history of modern art. There is this observation that our century is the century of image, and the power of image will be getting more vigorous. The digital reproduction and cyber technology will develope visually more powerful simulacra, and we will share the artificial reality in the cyber space as if it is actual reality. In this dotted space of technological grid, the fear of image is internally connected with the charm of the image. Magic or fetish, this is the paradox of the icon. Yet, if we cannot imagine imaginative model for the reality, the cyber space will never represent any utopia.

대학의 미술 교육

정헌이(Jung, Hunyee) 한국미술사교육학회 2015 美術史學 Vol.- No.29

한국 대학 사회는 ‘대학 구조 개혁’과 관련하여 커다란 변화를 맞이하고 있다. 이 변화에의 요구는 일차적으로는 외부로부터 강요된 것이었지만, 이를 계기로 과연 우리가 미술대학에서 어떤 교육 목표를 갖고 어떻게, 무엇을 교육하고 있는지에 대해 점검해볼 시기가 되었다. 필자는 우선 미술대학의 교육 문제를 본격적으로 제기했던 티에리 드 뒤브가 진단한 미술교육의 세가지 모델, 즉 아카데미 모델, 바우하우스 모델, 해체주의 모델에 대해 소개하고, 그가 현재의 교육 모델이라고 예시한 해체주의 모델을 어떤 입장에서 비판했는지 살펴보았다. 그가 말하는 해체주의 교육 모델은 전통적인 아카데미 교육 모델에서 중시했던 장인적 훈련이나 바우하우스 모델이 중시했던 창의성 훈련의 자리를 각종 이론과 담론을 앞세운 정치적 “태도”가 차지한 상황을 말한다. 그가 이 “태도”의 모델을 문제삼은 것은 그가 반드시 예술의 정치적 입장 표명에 반대해서가 아니라 매체나 마티에가 사라지고 오직 태도만이 남았을 때, 미술의 전통과 관습이 과연 무엇을 통해 유지될 수 있겠는가에 대한 염려라고 볼 수 있을 것이다. 나는 이러한 드 뒤브의 입장을 니콜라 부리요의 “관계의 미학” 개념, 그리고 자크 랑시에르의 “해방된 관람자”의 개념을 통해 점검해보았다. 그리고 한국 젊은 작가들의 작품세계를 통해서 시각중심주의를 넘어서는 감각의 확장과 나눔이 미술현장에서 어떻게 펼쳐지고 있는지 살펴보았다. 그렇다면 ‘태도’는 어떻게 가르쳐질 수 있을까? ‘태도’가 기존의 감성의 분할을 넘어서고 새로운 감성을 나누는 일이라면, 즉 열정이라면, 이것은 가르쳐질 수 없는 것이다. 그런데 이론과 미술사, 각종 ‘테크닉(technique)’과 ‘기법(skill)’을 가르칠 수 있어도, 예술 그 자체는 가르칠 수 없다는 말이 제도기관의 교육은 항상 실패할 수밖에 없다는 뜻은 아니다. 다만, 가르칠 수 없는 것을 가르치는 이 모순의 자리에서 고민하는 스승은 제자를 해방함으로써, 즉 제자가 내가 모르는 것을 스스로 배울 수 있는 자임을 믿고, 그의 능력을 현실화하도록 동기를 부여함으로써, 새로운 우정의 공동체를 만들 수 있다. 의식의 좀 더 깊은 곳에서 삶에 대한 자신의 감성적 ‘태도’를 발견하게 하는 일, 그 ‘태도’가 우리를 살고 싶게 하는 힘이라는 것을 신뢰하는 것, 그것이 미술교육의 숨겨진 내용이자 교육적 역량의 원천임을 조심스럽게 전망해 보았다. Korean Universities are on the process of structural reform. Although this claim for change is reinforced from outside, it’s proper time to introspect what is the aim for university art education, how to give what to the art students. First, I introduced three models of art education, academy model, bauhaus model and deconstruction model, that Thierry de Duve presented in his essay on “When Form Becomes Attitude?And Beyond”(1993). De Duve was especially critical to the new art school model of deconstruction, because he thought it drives out the technical training and medium study from the field of art education. “Attitude”, a sort of political and theoretical consciousness occupied the the place instead. He worried, if attitude becomes art form, then how the tradition and convention of visual art could survive itself. I examined this point of view through the concepts of “relational aestheics” by Nicolas Bourriaud, and “emanciated spectator” by Jacques Ranciere. And I look into the practices of young korean artists how their works distribute and extend “the sensible” across the ocularcentrism of traditional art practice. Then how attitude can be taught? If attitude is distributing the sensible beyond the partition of the senses, it cannot be taught. We can teach art history, theory, technique and skill, but we cannot teach art itself. Yet, the master who stands in this contradictory place where (s)he teach what (s)he cannot teach, can teach what (s)he doesn’t know by emancipating the students. In other words, the master should believe in them that they have the ability to teach themselves, and (s)he can teach them by being a ignorant master. Being equal, the master and students can accompany the journey together as a community of friendship.