hyunjin shin

Social Meaning of Communication of the Arts and Form in the Artwork: a Case Study of Woopsyang’s Space-Out Competition Space-Out Competition is a well known art work by Woopsyang(1976- ); over 600,000 pages were retrieved from Google; both Korean and foreign major media covered. However, there are not many people who recognize the work as fine art. There are even people who copy her work so that the artist brought the matter into court. This thesis takes Space-Out Competition as case study in order to see social requirements to be recognized as an artwork using social systems theory as criteria for which it takes communications as its starting point. Social systems theory pays attention to how communication operates rather than concept of communication. This results in its position not to differentiate the subject(creator) or the objects(art work or observer) but to designate their acts of perception and cognition as ‘observations.’ In so doing, it allows us to see communication through art including not only art theorists but also general public as well as legal system in this case. According to Social Systems theory, it takes coupling between medium and forms in order for an art work can suggest any ‘difference.’ This means, ‘raison d’estat’ of an art work, such as Space-Out Competition’s is to draw a distinction to create an observable ‘difference’ to be recognized as fine art. However, the medium here, includes art works that are previously used during communication events. Thus, an artists must refer not only his/her own artwork and art history recursively (selfreflexivity) when an artist formulates a form to create a difference. After observing Space-Out Competition; its coupling of media and form, it is concluded that only first event of Space-Out Competition successfully drew distinction. Also. it can be concluded that the criteria of social success of an art work lie in whether an art work successfully articulates its distinction through coupling of medium and form regardless it is viewed by art theorists or general public including law.

Social Meaning of Communication of the Arts and Form in the Artwork:
a Case Study of Woopsyang’s Space-Out Competition



Space-Out Competition is a well known art work by Woopsyang(1976- ); over 600,000 pages were retrieved from Google; both Korean and foreign major media covered. However, there are not many people who recognize the work as fine art. There are even people who copy her work so that the artist brought the matter into court. This thesis takes Space-Out Competition as case study in order to see social requirements to be recognized as an artwork using social systems theory as criteria for
which it takes communications as its starting point. Social systems theory pays attention to how communication operates rather than concept of communication. This results in its position not to
differentiate the subject(creator) or the objects(art work or observer) but to designate their acts of perception and cognition as ‘observations.’ In so doing, it allows us to see communication through art including not only art theorists but also general public as well as legal system in this case.
According to Social Systems theory, it takes coupling between medium and forms in order for an art work can suggest any ‘difference.’ This means, ‘raison d’estat’ of an art work, such as Space-Out Competition’s is to draw a distinction to create an observable ‘difference’ to be recognized as fine art. However, the medium here, includes art works that are previously used during communication events. Thus, an artists must refer not only his/her own artwork and art history recursively (selfreflexivity) when an artist formulates a form to create a difference. After observing Space-Out Competition; its coupling of media and form, it is concluded that only first event of Space-Out Competition successfully drew distinction. Also. it can be concluded that the criteria of social success of an art work lie in whether an art work successfully articulates its distinction through coupling of medium and form regardless it is viewed by art theorists or general public including law.

Conscious Activities in the Social Construction of Meanings of the Arts
: A Comparative Analysis of Kant, Foucault, Affect Theory, Neuroesthetics, and Operative Constructionism


Hyunjin Shin*


Witnessing memes go viral and become appreciated, this thesis attempts to reconsider the criteria for the social construction of the meaning of the arts under the assumption that there are aspects where such memes perform functions of the arts. To do so, it compares theories suggested by Kant, Foucault, affect theory, neuroesthetics, and operative constructionism by examining how these theories treat conscious activities (in other words, human cognition and perception). Analysis is also conducted on the assumption that theories for the social construction of the meaning of the arts should incorporate synchrony and diachrony in order to overcome epistemology’s limit of self-reflexivity. Kant's transcendental epistemology prioritizes reason without giving proper credit to perception. Though Foucault supplemented Kant using a diachronic approach, he failed to account for the significance of individual experience: synchrony. Recently, affect theory and neuroesthetics provided scientific proof that an individual's perception and subjective cognition play a major role in the social construction of the meaning of the arts, consequently supplementing the synchronic aspect. However, they only advocate the right for individual perception to take part in art/non-art judgment, not the actual incorporation. Niklas Luhmann's Art as a Social System, on the other hand, incorporates synchrony as he observed communication on the arts to formulate the social meaning of the arts in the form of a system. This reflects his systems theory take radical operative constuctionism's position based on evolution theory. Though it may be indirect, it allows a generic individual’s conscious activity to choose the meaning of art/non-art through communication events.

There must be as many ways as the number of human beings in the world in reading Alemayehu's photo exhibition, "Exile Pattern," but I would like to imagine a prominent sociologist named Rancière and write this article as if I am him as if I am possessed by him. Perhaps the contents of this article will become something like that he will find same concepts he has asserted through his books: Division of Senses, Ignorant Schoolmaster and Emancipated Spectatre. On the other hand, I am afraid of errors due to my lack of understanding about Rancière, and I doubt whether almost vicious voice of Rancière is right. But if I take courage as ignorant, we may find a little thought or two.

It is difficult indeed to overturn your thinking habit overnight. It is even harder for someone like me whose thought is based on reasoning and and humancentricity to follw Deluezean theory because I believe being dependent on senses or subconsciousness is the same as gambling. However, I must attempt to make a brief description on Deleuzean theory; or at least what I have understood so far. His theory came about the time when Postmodern thinkings emerged and started to raise questions on logocentric, anthropocentric worldviews. Basically, his philosophy is to find alternative to the worldview established based on the epistemology of reason. He rejected the teleological thinking system of modernism which is based on there is eternal truth and according structure. He also suggested an ontological condition in which includes unlimited number of the virtuals that can be actualized by the subject that employs all sensory organs beyond the eyes and even the subconsciousness in the process of cognition. This prescribes the nature of the subject as potent beings with subconsciousness and senses that once excluded or suppressed by reasoning. His The Logic of Sense is an explanation of his philosophy through the art of Bacon. He discussed Bacon in the book and interpreted that the characters in Bacon's paintings are struggling to escape to another realm. It seems that he intended to prove that there were artists who imagined somewhere beyond the world where in which people had become mechines and territorialized lives in the name of univocal telos. There are reasons that I must attempt to explain Deleuze despite my understanding on Deleuze is limited; I was assigned by critic-workshop to form an argument in reading Nial Craven whose approaches are referred to Deleuzean thinking and Bacon's paintings. Nevertheless, my argument might have some usefulness in the sense that there are not much of chances for emerging artists to get criticism once graduated from educational institutions. Another reason is that my argument would be one of the possible scenarios in which how a theorist would identify the potentials and threats from his art practices so far. More than anything, I was embarrassed as a critic because I completely failed to read the message he intended to convey and wanted to help to form an arguement. There are various figures appear in his paintings. However, their faces are rarely shown so that it is safe to say that he does not emphasize identities of the subjects in his works. In terms of style, expressionist techniques have been generally applied and picture planes are mostly composed of parts from a body that has been deteriorated or deformed. Despite such selection as theses materials, what I have sensed was more of the warmth from the artist's gazes on to his subject rather than uncanny or visceral feelings. Or it could be said that I was able to find his warm interest toward them. Recently, there have been some changes in his works. He minimized the expression that used to help creating illusion of three dimentionality on his picture plane; forms are a bit simplified than before; and+ signs and/ or geometric lines are superimposed across the subject's bodies and backgrounds. Then again, when I received his artist statement, my assumptions were proven wrong. First, he calls himself a body painter instead he paints people. He also said that he has been influenced by Deuluezean theories since reading The Logic of Sense. He said, " my work, as you have probably already seen, is concerned with the body, ways of painting the body, and the relationship between paint and the body itself. He also added that he had experienced himself what Deuleuze termed as senseation which is referred to the experience equivalent to a 'violation against human nerves' when he looked at medical imageries of deformed body parts by wounds or scars. If so, I am getting close to an understanding on the meaning that his study of relationship between paint and the body is to incorporate " this feeling of interpreting our body by using sensation rather than vision. " It might be, like 'phantom pain,' his study is to explore the notion of what we learn from vision is not whole but also it might betray what is actually there to be sensed because the act of cognition involves brain's interpretation of sensed data in order to complete act of perceiving the reality. He seemed to have agreed to Deleuze who has discovered potentiality in the senses of body. Title he provided also was supplementary to the idea of potentiality in extra sensory perception. " Something I started thinking about, as well, was the way in which we use language to refer to sensation, and this is something that informed the title of my exhibition 'Pins and Needles'. " In terms of the techniques he applied, he added explanation as follows. " I believe the tension between the painting of the body and more abstract painting can achieve this to some degree, especially if these abstract marks can emphasize the flatness of the image. " After listening to his explanation, I felt safer to say the bold lines or small + signs superimposed over the bodies or backgrounds are

Can the value of art be defended by its autonomy? Autonomy of art is a concept that only when art practice is separated from politics, economy, religion, etc., potentiality of an artist’s subjective judgment may be realized. Based on this principle, Modern aesthetics was structured and in return, society called those who practice autonomous art despite isolation from the society and despite there are no guaranties for personal, financial gains … art professionals. It is interesting to see autonomy of art allowed art practitioners at the same time to place themselves in the position as professionals of art field and they formed the Artworld through which they enjoyed their artistic judgment’s authority and privilege in legitimizing in the process of art production and of defining where art should be headed. Then again, if the words professional and autonomy came from economic terminology, would the autonomy of art had any chance to work properly? As the pursuit of professionalism became more dominant in the society, we can easily find art practitioners acting as if they are entrepreneurs while art organizations are run in a business-like fashion.  They cannot help but showing closer proximity to capital and being caught in dilemma between supporting autonomy of art and pursuit of professionalism

현대미술과 예술계는 자율성이 존재하는가? 안드레아 프레이저는 작가 (그리고 예술관계자가) 제도 그 자체이기 때문에 자율성은 없다고 한다. 그러나 예술이 비평적 거리를 유지하기 위해서는 자율성은 필요한데 개인의 입장으로서 표현의 자유가 유지되는한은 상대적 자율성을 담보할 수있다는 입장을 제시하고 있다. 이러한 입장이 누구에게는 보수적이고 아전인수로 해석될 수 있지만 관객과 예술가, 예술관계자가 개인으로서의 표현의 자유에 입각한다면 이는 정치적인 이슈까지도 표명하는 (개별적) 예술실천을 가능하게 하기 때문에 오히려 아방가르드를 가능하게 하는 것이라는 것이다.

Since the alternative spaces in the 70s the arts was under the socialization process by accommodating the logic beyond the scope the as as social system. It seems the process has been completed now. If so, it calls for the  ontological conditions of contemporary art practices through comparative analysis of alternative spaces' activities and their strategies to the logic of politics and capitalism.

What is exhibition viewing look like in the future? Choi Haeri's art inspires me to think about it. This is half fictional and half usual review on the artist. The fiction part  illustrates a futuristic depiction of experiencing art that today’s art by Choi Haeri suggests. It is followed by text of further exploration on issues related to her work.

This paper examines three globally renowned Asian artists namely, Ai Weiwei (China), Choi Jeonghwa (Korea), Murakami Dakashi (Japan) with focus on entrepreneur decisions they made when they gained significant global recognition between the 1990s and the early 2000s. It is to examine how their entrepreneurship is related to factors in determining identity of an artist as contemporary subject.

On one hand, structuralist tradition would normally apply autonomy of the arts and would not take political and economic influence into consideration to determine an artist’s identity because each artist’s critical distance secures subjective perspectives. On the other hand, now when there is only relative autonomy of the arts, we might want to think about what we do to secure subjective perspectives.

Could Descartes, who enlightened us that humans exist because they think, have ever imagined that humans of a later age would spend such a long time in the world of thought, i.e., the virtual world? Our lives, which frequent the virtual time-space shown by LCD monitors all day long, at home and in the subway, are without a doubt moving closer and closer to the virtual world. Even in this moment as I try to glimpse Lee Chang-Hoon's world of art, I choose go into the artist's website, a virtual world. I thus begin this travelogue strongly believing that looking at the documentations on it is the same as real aesthetic experience. Where is the ideal? The first work I went to, Brilliantly scattered again into space (to the earth),1 is a piece consisting of beads taken off a bracelet and arranged on the floor in a triangle. The word " beads " is said to have come from " bidden " or " bade, " meaning prayer. Like the Catholic sister's rosary, the Buddhist priest's prayer beads, and the popular custom a few years back of wearing a pink bead bracelet if you wanted to meet a lover, the artist's idea of substituting beads for the ideal seems appropriate. Thus the artist has said that those who take the bead from the gallery are taking one ideal home. This reminds me of Untitled by Gonzalez-Torres. In this work Gonzalez-Torres stacked pile of candies in the exhibition space and had spectators take them, wishing that they would thereby be able to take with them the sweetness that had been the virtue of his deceased lover. I am not saying that the logical structure of Gonzalez-Torres and the structure of the work by Lee exactly correspond to each other. This is particularly so in terms of the sense of distance. Anyone who has experienced love at one point, the sweetness of an ideal lover would already be as close as inside that person's head. Meanwhile, the idea is in the world of metaphysics, as far as across the River of Lethe. In this work also, in order for the ideal in the metaphysical world to exist in the real world, it had to be prayed for, over and over, until it finally came rolling down in the form of beads. So the probability of anyone's interpreting the beads as a crystallization of the ideal, just because they are placed in the shape of a triangle, seems as farfetched as the distance between the virtual world inside the head and the metaphysical world. Must the distance be close? I think so. Considering the discord between the work's ideal and individual spectators' aesthetic experience, or between the ideal and the real, as a failure of truth, is a symptom of the so-called postmodern society. This is even more evident when we think about the coherence of Lee Chang-Hoon's world of art, which we will discuss hereafter.