미국 네오아방가르드 미술의 몸 이미지에 관한 기호학적 연구 (A Semiotic Study on the Body Image in American Neo-avant-garde Art)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 서양미술사학회
· 수록지 정보 : 서양미술사학회 논문집 / 40호 / 125 ~ 153페이지
· 저자명 : 조수진

초록

This article examines the representations of the body in American neo-avant-garde art, which emerged around the 1960s, from a semiotic perspective. Neo-avant-garde art sought after originality in terms of visual language in order to challenge formalist modernism, which was epitomized the practices of Abstract Expressionism. To achieve this objective, neo-avant-gardists directed their attention to “the body as reality” which they believed to be free from metaphysical dualism and to belong to the realm of life—that is, the “real body”. Neo-avant-garde artists made the use of the real body and images of it—in other words, the artist’s or the viewer’s “body as the subject of action” and “the body as the image” in the work of art—as their strategic elements in their attempt to critically observe the tenets of formalist modernism in terms of medium, institution and perception.
Among the representatives of neo-avant-garde are included Neo-Dadaists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow who coined the term “Happenings”, Fluxus members who created events, Carolee Schneemann and many other performance artists, Robert Morris and Bruce Nauman.
This study focuses especially on works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Bruce Nauman among the above-mentioned neo-avant- gardists since I have found in their works images that signify the return of the figurativeness of the body, which had been abandoned by abstract painters and images of the body differentiated from the conventional ones. Those works consist of imprints of body parts, casts of body parts made out of plaster, fiber glass or resin, photographs and video images of the artists’ actions. They are signs that can be thought of as “indexes” that are closely related to traces of images rather than “icons” that are based on the idea of resemblance. By putting emphasis on the body images as indexical signs, this study attempts to carry out an integrated analysis of the visual artistic tendencies of the time and simultaneously to deduce the historical and social significances of neo- avant-garde art.
As a result, it has revealed that neo-avant-garde artists tried to redefine the concept of the subject through the production of textual artworks—that is, artworks that are understood as sites of signs. Neo-avant-gardists criticized the spiritual attitude of the modern subject and at the same time expressed through their textual works of art the post-capitalist conditions in which even the mind was helplessly subject to materialization with the proliferation of capitalism. Such a contradiction faced by the body in the post-war Western society was made visible through the attributes of indexical signs—the absence of the transcendental signified (the spirituality of the subject) and the resulting effects of signification such as the reification and fragmentation of signs (the infinite dissemination of the materialized body).
In conclusion, the body images as indexes in neo-avant-garde artworks attest to the fact that the body, which functioned as the symbol or the bearer of the subject’s spirituality in modernism, was increasingly being considered matter. The body, which became a material entity in neo-avant-garde art, was fragmentized into endlessly floating images, and this was the artists’ practical tactic to address the reality that is confronted by the body-subject in post-capitalist society. Neo-avant-garde artists utilized the body images as material presences to introduce a new mode of avant-gardism as a reaction to the spiritualism of formalist modernist art.

영어초록

This article examines the representations of the body in American neo-avant-garde art, which emerged around the 1960s, from a semiotic perspective. Neo-avant-garde art sought after originality in terms of visual language in order to challenge formalist modernism, which was epitomized the practices of Abstract Expressionism. To achieve this objective, neo-avant-gardists directed their attention to “the body as reality” which they believed to be free from metaphysical dualism and to belong to the realm of life—that is, the “real body”. Neo-avant-garde artists made the use of the real body and images of it—in other words, the artist’s or the viewer’s “body as the subject of action” and “the body as the image” in the work of art—as their strategic elements in their attempt to critically observe the tenets of formalist modernism in terms of medium, institution and perception.
Among the representatives of neo-avant-garde are included Neo-Dadaists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow who coined the term “Happenings”, Fluxus members who created events, Carolee Schneemann and many other performance artists, Robert Morris and Bruce Nauman.
This study focuses especially on works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Bruce Nauman among the above-mentioned neo-avant- gardists since I have found in their works images that signify the return of the figurativeness of the body, which had been abandoned by abstract painters and images of the body differentiated from the conventional ones. Those works consist of imprints of body parts, casts of body parts made out of plaster, fiber glass or resin, photographs and video images of the artists’ actions. They are signs that can be thought of as “indexes” that are closely related to traces of images rather than “icons” that are based on the idea of resemblance. By putting emphasis on the body images as indexical signs, this study attempts to carry out an integrated analysis of the visual artistic tendencies of the time and simultaneously to deduce the historical and social significances of neo- avant-garde art.
As a result, it has revealed that neo-avant-garde artists tried to redefine the concept of the subject through the production of textual artworks—that is, artworks that are understood as sites of signs. Neo-avant-gardists criticized the spiritual attitude of the modern subject and at the same time expressed through their textual works of art the post-capitalist conditions in which even the mind was helplessly subject to materialization with the proliferation of capitalism. Such a contradiction faced by the body in the post-war Western society was made visible through the attributes of indexical signs—the absence of the transcendental signified (the spirituality of the subject) and the resulting effects of signification such as the reification and fragmentation of signs (the infinite dissemination of the materialized body).
In conclusion, the body images as indexes in neo-avant-garde artworks attest to the fact that the body, which functioned as the symbol or the bearer of the subject’s spirituality in modernism, was increasingly being considered matter. The body, which became a material entity in neo-avant-garde art, was fragmentized into endlessly floating images, and this was the artists’ practical tactic to address the reality that is confronted by the body-subject in post-capitalist society. Neo-avant-garde artists utilized the body images as material presences to introduce a new mode of avant-gardism as a reaction to the spiritualism of formalist modernist art.

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