For a Complete Scene
Lee Jinmyoung / Chief Curator of Daegu Art Museum
“John Wick” movie series are currently receiving rave reviews. These days, modern arts are getting the limelight more intensely than contemporary arts do. On the other side of these phenomena, deeply lies nostalgia for the analogue days of today’s people. The analogue system is the product of a period of transition. It is like the adolescent days that existed at the interval of the progress of time between the age of transcribing by hand and drawing by hand, to be specific, putting the romantic view of the world at the tail of comet and the age of which digital culture of super computer able to block all phenomena in 0 and 1 for processing plays a role as the head of comet.
Based on instrumental reason, the analogue system left kaleidoscopic marks. However, it started to be gradually grounded when encountering the absolute realm called “digital virtuality.” The representative media of analogue culture consist in gramophone, film and typewriter. This is what Friedrich Kittler, a German media theorist argues. According to Kittler, these three elements broke the romantic view of the world to pieces. The culture constituting this romantic view of the world can be represented by three elements as well. They consist of manually written score (music notation), manually drawn painting and transcribed literature by hand. Let’s first think about sound. We are not able to hear all types of sound of the world. We select some sounds to listen. We cannot hear the chirping of cicadas coming from outside home and the radio sound heard from inside home at the same time. The sound we hear is selected. Romantic score also records some selected sound. However, the gramophone recorded all sounds in the simultaneous manner to invite us to listen to them. Thanks to this medium, we finally realized the essence of sound and the our substance of mechanism reacting to the sound. By accepting Lacan’s theory, Kittler interprets the world created by gramophone as a physical or real world.
Painting that had been highly praised as a noble object in the Romantic age also went through many changes. Painting was an art form that developed a story after forming three-dimensional illusion on the flat surface. The history of painting constituted acts of taking impossible risks of limited situation of the flat surface and enhancing the plausible form of illusion and brush stroke techniques aiming at extending aesthetic consciousness to the dimension of the sublime. Nevertheless, once development of movies started, values of painting collapsed. Compared to motionless painting, movies with sequential movement based on 24 frames per second could express a wealth of stories and allowed more imagination (the invention of camera did not bring about significant downfall though). Kittler referred to the world created by film as the world of imagination.
The best medium of the Romantic age was considered literature. It was literature that was able to faithfully express ranging different areas such as all human feelings, purpose of humans, narrativity of history and description of events and objects. The story that a boy used to listen to sitting on his mother’s lap in his childhood and falls asleep feeling warmth forms part of embodiment in him. Even after the boy grows up, he accepts literature leaning on his mother’s voice. Literature is mother’s voice. All of us read Greek classics and German romanticism in company with our mother’s voice. That is why literature is considered noble and lofty. When we read naturalist literature, we still read it in mother’s voice. By reading aloud in mother’s voice, we become completely immersed in the story. At this very moment, readers perceive some heart-touching energy and become aware of the world. The same happens when we read Bildungsroman (Coming-of-age story) of Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann as well as literature of social critiques of Günter Grass. Their handwritten manuscripts have a potent aura. Handwritten literature is far from that created by a typewriter in terms of essence. A typewriter deals with letters by structuring the keyboard on the uniform line. For this reason, a typewriter fails to portray the author’s impeccable aura. It is difficult for the letters combined by a typewriter to deal with the general phase of the world with pathos. Due to the property of medium, writing on a typewriter can easily lead to segmental, analytical and dry stories. Literature of the 20th century had no choice but to remain in the state of segmental and analytical descriptions or move towards the experimental direction because of the property of medium. Despite this, the analogue world that was born in the 19th century and reached the golden age had the hope of opening today better than yesterday supported by technology development. It is because the owner of reason is still humans themselves even though mechanical and instrumental reason had ruined the myth of romanticism. However, with the arrival of digital civilization created by supercomputers, we started to foretell the terminal of our civilization. We gradually witness the moment of which digital civilization will reach the peak. This makes us feel uneasy. It is because artificial intelligence, namely, the appearance of robots beyond human power can possibly threaten our absolute sovereignty in the world. Without doubt, two positions are sharply opposed between the progressive view of which robots can solve all human problems and the pessimist view of which robots can subordinate humans to their power. However, the opinion of which the progressive view will initiatively lead the future carries more weight.
From now on, we are to talk about art. What has been described so far is nothing but a complementary means to explain the works of artist Park Inseong. In the age of which instrumental reason used to dominate all, namely, the analogue days, painting refused to be against photography and movies and developed a completely different narrative. Painting from the age of Greek classicism to Romanticism, or narrowing down to the age from Renaissance to Romanticism focused on exploring the aspects reflected by the mirror. Since Impressionism of the 19th century, they started to have philosophical reasoning regarding the essence of the mirror itself. In other words, they began inquiring into the essence of medium called “painting.” They shifted the direction from the reproductive method handed over to photography or film to reflection on media with a view to broadening the horizon. The essence of painting lies in the fact that it is a plane-based work. Yes, painting is simply flat. Therefore, it created history of processes transforming from the concrete into the semi-concrete, from the semi-concrete into the abstract, and from the abstract to brush stroke itself. This is the facet of art of the 20th century. Nevertheless, photographic art is not able to pass the limit of the program of the developer who created the mechanism. Even if there are some works making photography look like abstract art, they are simply borrowed from references of contemporary painting and are not the fruit inevitably drawn by photographic history.
Park Inseong clips and puts camera film itself to make the primary formative/plastic art world. This film is the product of the analogue age. The figuration of combined film reminds us of contemporary painting. Even though painting moved to the axis of contemporary time, it still possesses romantic elements. Originality is one of these. Otherwise, this can be expressed as an autographic property. The primary output that Park Inseong cut / disjoined / recombined and composed photographic film can be considered reconstruction of romantic view of the world through photography. However, he prints them as a digital screen after photographing them again. At this moment, the primary medium with an autographic property transforms into one with an allographic property. Park projects the value of originality of painting that maintained from Romanticism to modernism onto the photographic medium and he made it float into the world of reproducibility of the digital age again. However, his progressive spirit is established from a deeper place. We already saw that history of painting was the transition period from the image reflected onto the mirror (reproduction) to the mirror itself (essentialism of medium). The artist must have thought about the possibility of historic narrative or essentialism of photography in the course of inquiring into the process of painting history. This must have naturally evoked him a sort of curiosity about the progressed future of photography. Photography is controlled by the program belonging to camera, irrespective of intelligence imagination and sensitivity of the photographer. This leads the photographer to limitation of program of the camera. Even an abstract photo with an extremely distorted figuration and a photo looking half-abstract with a blurry border of the object are the ones that are transformed from the sphere of reproduction. By nature, all photos are bound to the category of reproduction. Park Inseong projects adventure of huge concept that modernist artists developed on the the photographic medium. It is reasoning of photographic medium itself. To overcome the limits of reproduction, it is crucial to figure out the essence of photographic medium. Photography is an act of blocking the subtle dispersion of light source entered in the lens inside the film treated with photosensitive substances. For this reason, the root of photography lies in the film itself. The fact that the artist does not pay attention to the figuration appeared in the film and focuses on the film itself is substantially significant. Moreover, the prototype frame born through the process of scanning, cutting, putting and combining film is in line with formalism of modernism. This is intentional. This enormously progressive way of thinking is excellent in content but can overlook the form though. It can easily miss the aesthetic category while putting too much emphasis on thinking. Park Inseong substituted transformative thinking with strictly refined formalism, and this intention deserves to be called “ingenious thinking.”
Furthermore, when he understands the essence of photography as the film itself, this has some deeper meaning beneath. There are countless views on media, but they are largely divided into two perspectives. One view refers to the perspective of Marshall McLuhan defining the media as “extensions to our senses.” If this view is correct, we can say that a lever is the extension to our hands, while a telescope and a microscope are extensions to our eyes. In other words, it means that we humans constantly evolved and developed media with our rationality aiming to extend our senses. Another opposing view can be the perspective of Friedrich Kittler. He cast this notorious thesis to us, “Media determine our situation.” According to Kittler, media are not created by human’s noble efforts or will but develop by themselves in accordance with social and historical conditions. Thanks to media, humans could reestablish view of the world towards a better direction. In short, it refers to “technological determinism.” For instance, it was not until gramophones appeared that we could have true reflection on sound. It was not until typewriters were invented that we started writing in a modern manner. It was not until cameras were produced that we were able to think about the essence of visual art. It is reasonable to assume that Park Inseong is a descendant of Kittler in this context. When he was studying this medium “photography,” thanks to this medium, he could finally figure out the gigantic stream of visual art created by humans. Then what could be the complete scene Park Inseong wishes to pursue? While maintaining vivacity of myth (originality) of the Romantic age and rigidity (formalism) of modernism, his adventurous spirit to broaden the entrance of future surges full of energy. Park Inseong shows us self-confidence on which we can unhesitatingly lean even in the middle of fear of allographic flood created by the digital era. To put it simply, in the serial screens he wishes to show, we can perceive concentration of discourse of incessant struggle and reconciliation in the cultural history of the West. As his well-planned intention, his works have contradictory elements of Romanticism, modernism, analogue world and digital world supporting one another in the state of tension. The complete scene pursed by Park Inseong refers to visual thinking that allows not only simultaneous reflection on the past, present and future of visual culture but also revelation to predict them. Visual thinking of Park Inseong is all set to overflow. For this reason, I sincerely hope that he passes through the tributary and settle in the magnificent mainstream to swim with the tide in a remarkable manner. I expect that the splendid tide will arrive in the near future.