오브제의 다양한 표현방식과 곤충표현에 관한 연구

Abstract

Rapidly changing modern arts create diverse meanings and develop colorfully through diverse media by means of their meanings. The anxiety for the appearance of new media caused changes to arts concepts by the invention of photographs in the 19th century and took the forms of various avant-garde experiments so-called modern arts, claiming its presence till this day. Generally meaning a thing or an object, an object removes the habitual uses and meanings from natural articles, industrial products, and disposable things and thus sheds a new light to the relationships between man and things. It's more than a 'discovered object' that's rediscovered in a flea market, secondhand shop or the world. In other words, it's an object with symbolic functions to make a thing that has nothing to do with arts shed off its everyday uses and to stir the latent desire or fantasy in the viewers. It's used as an everyday object or part of a machine in Dadaism. The modern concept of an objet goes beyond the surrealistic Freudian definition, shows a new development in its relationships with the information society, and expands the scope of arts by treating even a human being as an objet. By integrating painting and sculpture, objets created a new formative concept that's neither painting nor sculpture. They also played a big role in blurring the boundaries between arts and life as they were regarded as the objects themselves to express the relationships between artists and their lives. Artists play the role of a proxy of the society they belong to regardless of the times. Only some parts of themselves are restricted to the individual psychological aspects. Whether it's conscious or unconscious, they embody the characteristics and values of their times and create new characteristics and values of the times. What's common among the artists using objets is that those objets used in their works don't change or deteriorate in their symbolic meanings and serve as the media for the artists to express themselves and reveal an aspect of their ego and society. His artistic attitudes to pursue conceptual thinking and formal completeness put him in the category of conceptual artists in the artists community of Korea. But he also has a diverse artistic world that's not to be categorized as a style. His expressive methods using objets can be divided into two; symbolic and instrumental expressive method. In his Pagoda-Don't Touch, Park Bul-ddong, who loves to pinpoint the contradictions of the society with his 'pleasant bitterness,' frankly reveals the fact that a briquet whose everyday usefulness is lost can be greater than a stuffed work. The viewers take in 'today's arts' as a shock and experience newness with all their bodies. In the work, a briquet that has lost its function of setting fire is reborn as a symbolic tool of insight to induce thoughts about everyday life, power, and environment. Used in A Room without a Floor by Ahn Gyu-cheol, the cloth, metal, wood, and plaster are not traditional sculpture materials but common materials from the everyday world that are the very diverse objets. It's the result of his particular working approach, which is not based on certain materials or techniques but picks proper materials according to different ideas every time. In his work, the objets are used as the media with instrumental implications rather than symbolic ones. On the premise of those two expressive methods, two questions are naturally raised; "How can an artist express insects minutely covering not only their characteristics but also the internal aspects intended by him or her by using what materials? And what can be the ideal materials or objets to express them?" The choice of objets, of course, will not be easy at all since objets, which are subject matters themselves, alter their properties and meanings according to the process and purpose. In his Millennium Bugs in 1999, Shin Hyeong-seop, who is a Korean artist enjoying great reputations in New York nowadays, demonstrates the infinite possibility of objets. It must have been extremely difficult for him to describe that many bugs for their each and every movement using the objets by means of only thinking and handling. By using the waste articles that have been vomited and excreted by the city and are the products of today's consumption society, he defines the meanings in planar or solid works. Through the process, he combines people's imagination, which considers them the byproducts of mechanic civilization, automobiles, and plastic as the materials themselves represent, with a group of objets, which induce repenting thinking of the society by means of the discarded articles. Putting the gold bugs, centipedes, spiders, and mosquitoes in his exhibition, he particularly chooses the centipedes to demonstrate how objets are used in expressing certain objects. Unlike him that utilizes objets in the form of waste articles and discarded objects, Park Hyeong-gyu picks the byproducts of industrial society as his objets. He uses the needles commonly observed at an Oriental medicine clinic in his series, Traveling, to express insects. The needles, as a matter of fact, are perfect for the legs of an insect whose body is made of an electronic part. Those little sculpture works that he made inspired by the playful functions of arts beyond the boundaries of the fixed innocence of arts show his innocent imagination about the world that doesn't exist in everyday life. Those objets that are stuck together very closely in one spot don't feel like objets anymore and seem to make the catalyst of creation ceaselessly as if they were a living creature. It's the catalyst of creation that attracts many different media. The diverse adoptions of many different media such as electronic parts and metal in his work are the natural spread of the active realization of creation inherent in the work into other media rather than the simple logic of variations involving translations into other materials. Despite the fact, however, his basic unit of modeling has never been far from gloves. You can read the colorful changes and diverse expressions made out of the basic unit. Judging from his formative variations that differ according to materials, he employs diverse media but doesn't immerse himself into them. Although one cannot be sure that's a desirable attitude, it's for sure that his own formative language is that powerful. There lies the logic of self-confirmation that gives control to modeling and escapes one from a reckless experiment. The concepts of objets have been defined on a broader level and reestablished during creations and changes or since mankind started to do aesthetic activities. They are more than simple means of expressions by properties. They are a series of process modeled in an artist's creative activities and experimental thinking, an artistic language to imply even the artist's mentality to express them intensively, and another route through which for the artist to communicate with the audience. During the Renaissance, which is commonly called the golden age of classical arts, artists were equal to engineers. They were no different from engineers. In some aspects, it's likely that the Renaissant perception should be based on the adoption of new media, which has been a vogue in arts. In other words, we shouldn't feel awkward to call the products of an encounter between engineering and creativity "artistic works." Or we need to give up many of the epistemological biases that are laid on the heavy titles such as "manufactured goods," "articles," and "artistic works," which are the original names they gave. Some people may not be able to adopt the meaning of the existence of objet arts, believing that arts should be creative. But given that we are already surrounded by many artistic expressions in a virtual space that's not reality definitely via new media, the idea is not that insipid. If the insects expressions made of objets among the many options of materials and subject matters reflect the changes and sociality of the times and approach the audience from the perspective of rich sensibility and independent interpretation, they will have the enough foundation to be perceived as artistic works.