마치 아무 일도 없었던 것처럼: 온 카와라의 <일일회화 Date Paintings>와전쟁의 기억 (As If Nothing Had Happened: On Kawara's Date Paintings and the Memory of War)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 서양미술사학회
· 수록지 정보 : 서양미술사학회 논문집 / 27호 / 52 ~ 73페이지
· 저자명 : 우정아

초록

This paper explores On Kawara’s highly conceptual practices, including his most well-known series, Date Paintings, which was begun in the 1960s in New York. Through the analysis of the project’s formal structure, it is made clear how the artist’s tightly organized mode of production radically denies any possibility of unified meaning, order, and totality. My contention is that the artist’s concerns of bodily suffering and the haunting memories of death and violence are deeply embedded in his abstract projects in the form of repeated manual labor, inconsistent texts, and fragmentary references to fatal accidents and historical disasters.
The alignment of Kawara’s daily project of boredom with the novelist Mishima Yukio’s scandalous suicide generates an absorbing conflation to the postwar anxiety in Japanese society: the ambiguity of longing and horror of the everyday. This study attends to the aporia that the abstract and disembodied surface of the paintings simultaneously registers the meaningless replication of the looped actions of the everyday with the inherent possibility of apocalypse. The structure of Kawara’s Date Paintings presents the horrific arbitrariness of death and violence that was experienced at the end of the Second World War in its most cataclysmic form.
Despite the drastic formal disparities, the daily projects of abstract painting carry the dual operation of organizational coherence and interior disorder, thus clearly resonating with his earlier figurative paintings. In the second section of this paper, the focus is on Kawara’s figurative paintings and drawings produced in Japan in the 1950s, with particular emphasis on the Bathroom series.
During this period, Kawara espoused the vocabulary of social realism that prevailed during the Japanese postwar art scene. Yet Kawara’s radical experiments in painting technique and production procedure were differentiated from conventional social realists’ inclination toward the didactic function of figurative painting.
From a close examination of the conflict between the subject of brutality and the formal strategy of indifference, it can be inferred that this disrupted representation of Kawara’s Bathroom series registers the effect of the psychic numbing. Yet this study investigates the anxiety of postwar Japanese society in relation to major historical events rather than employing a psychobiographical reading of the works. In Kawara’s works, the formal structure and production procedure generated, rather than represented, the psychophysical terror of the disrupted home country. The primary concern of this study is bound to an ethical paradigm of art’s responsibility to respond to historical tragedy.

영어초록

This paper explores On Kawara’s highly conceptual practices, including his most well-known series, Date Paintings, which was begun in the 1960s in New York. Through the analysis of the project’s formal structure, it is made clear how the artist’s tightly organized mode of production radically denies any possibility of unified meaning, order, and totality. My contention is that the artist’s concerns of bodily suffering and the haunting memories of death and violence are deeply embedded in his abstract projects in the form of repeated manual labor, inconsistent texts, and fragmentary references to fatal accidents and historical disasters.
The alignment of Kawara’s daily project of boredom with the novelist Mishima Yukio’s scandalous suicide generates an absorbing conflation to the postwar anxiety in Japanese society: the ambiguity of longing and horror of the everyday. This study attends to the aporia that the abstract and disembodied surface of the paintings simultaneously registers the meaningless replication of the looped actions of the everyday with the inherent possibility of apocalypse. The structure of Kawara’s Date Paintings presents the horrific arbitrariness of death and violence that was experienced at the end of the Second World War in its most cataclysmic form.
Despite the drastic formal disparities, the daily projects of abstract painting carry the dual operation of organizational coherence and interior disorder, thus clearly resonating with his earlier figurative paintings. In the second section of this paper, the focus is on Kawara’s figurative paintings and drawings produced in Japan in the 1950s, with particular emphasis on the Bathroom series.
During this period, Kawara espoused the vocabulary of social realism that prevailed during the Japanese postwar art scene. Yet Kawara’s radical experiments in painting technique and production procedure were differentiated from conventional social realists’ inclination toward the didactic function of figurative painting.
From a close examination of the conflict between the subject of brutality and the formal strategy of indifference, it can be inferred that this disrupted representation of Kawara’s Bathroom series registers the effect of the psychic numbing. Yet this study investigates the anxiety of postwar Japanese society in relation to major historical events rather than employing a psychobiographical reading of the works. In Kawara’s works, the formal structure and production procedure generated, rather than represented, the psychophysical terror of the disrupted home country. The primary concern of this study is bound to an ethical paradigm of art’s responsibility to respond to historical tragedy.

참고자료

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