서양의 현대 미술비평 동향 연구: 1980년대 이후 영·미권 미술사 및비평담론의 주요 화두를 중심으로

Abstract

‘The death of author’ mentioned by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes in 1969,certainly seemed to signal the rise of postmodern subject, that is, ‘reader.’ Although it was in the 1960s that postmodern art started, its main discourse did in the early 1980s. The postmodern theorists such as Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard provided the theoretically socio-cultural backdrop for postmodern aesthetics. Those concepts of ‘simulacra,’ ‘appropriation,’ ‘schizophrenia,’ and ‘disillusionment,’ were some of the key words that protested against the modernist myth and authority of the Cartesean subject. For the productive outcomes of art discourse in the 1980s, one can count on Hal Foster’s edited book, Anti-Aesthetic(1983), which includes several crucial essays of Craig Owens, Douglas Crimp, and Rosalind Krauss. Owens’ essay, for example, is a significant rewriting of the rhetoric of aesthetic postmodernism as he argues that all the invocations in that postmodernism of concepts like difference and subversion have significance only when they are regarded in the social and political realms. He thus argues that the force of feminism lies in its ability to concretize difference in specific, historically loaded ways. Krauss’s The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths published in the mid 80’s also contributes to the formation of idea that postmodernism has been repressed by modernist discourse despite their coexistence in artworks. Feminist discourse and Semiotics are prominently outspoken in the fields of art history and art criticism in the 80’s. Griselda Pollock’s Vision and Difference(1988) offers a sophisticated reading of socially constructed image of femininity based on the semiotic idea of woman as a ‘sign.’For the marriage of semiotics and the visual, photography is the one medium of which indexical sign proves that postmodern aesthetics focuses on disillusioned representations. It is in the 1990’s that art discourse meets postcolonialism and visual culture studies in art practices. Politics and strategies are involved in the two in different ways. For the former, one reveals power relations behind the visual representation of cultural differences as is done by Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. For the latter, some attempts to deconstruct the conventional boundaries for what is to be dealt in art theories. Nicholas Mirzoeff and Marquard Smith are among them who give such a challenge. What is renowned aspect in the 90’s is also the growing concern on Georges Bataille’s heterology, back in the early period of surrealism. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’s book, Formless(1997), following the exhibition under the same title, brings to art discourse Bataille’s notions of ‘base materialism,’ ‘horizontality,’ and ‘desublimation.’ They are put into use to read the contemporary works such as Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman and Allan Mccollum alongwith Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris,Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson and Cy Twombly. Coincidently it was in the same year that the sensational exhibition called “Sensation” held in Royal Academy in London. The ‘shock value’ put forward by ‘yBa’ has much to do with the Bataille’s radical notions pertaining to the disregarded realm of physicality and materiality. The term ‘globalisation’ has elicited deeper debate in the 2000s since its introduction in the early 1960s, intensifying in the 1990s. In art practice, globalisation has its origins toward the end of 1980s when the international art show such as the 《Venice Biennale》 and 《Magiciens de la Terre》 opened up to those ‘non-Western’ artists in favor of horizontal expansion. For its practical reason, it needs to be taken into account that a major reason for its acceleration in the late 1990s and the 2000s owed to the rapid spread of cheap air travel and the dissemination of electronic network. Nicholas Bourriaud’s book, Relational Aesthetics translated in English in 2002 has been much brought into attention in the era of globalisation. He shifts the emphasis away from the traditional experience viewers have with particular art objects and focuses on the interactions between people. Claiming that “the sphere of human relations” became a matter of aesthetic form, Bourriaud highlights artists’ role as generators of artistic site where social connections take place encouraging participation, conviviality, hospitality,or an exchange of gifts or services. Those works of Liam Gillick and Ritkrit Tiravanija are especially drawn into attention. Claire Bishop’s article ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’(2004), on the other hand, suggests the negative feeling such as antagonism should be needed into consideration for the interactive relations, pointing out rather simplistic and positive articulation of relational aesthetics. ‘Relational Antagonism’ put forward by her is more realistic and complicated concept, which can explain the uneasy but significant meaning out of the works of Stantiago Sierra and Thomas Hirshhorn. This research has been launched for tracing the discursive trajectory of art history and art criticism since the 1980s up to the present. The main topics and key issues brought up by the crucial publications have been highlighted in order to get hold of the mainstreams getting through the multi-layered and diverse art practices during the last three decades.