On Currents: How to Inscribe Patterns of the Pacific in Contemporary American Art History
2024-06
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On Currents: How to Inscribe Patterns of the Pacific in Contemporary American Art History
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2024-06
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This dissertation investigates portrayals of the Pacific Ocean in recent artistic projects by the American Allan Sekula (1951-2013) and the South Korean Park Chan-kyong (b. 1965), whose works address the question of globalization’s modalities and the perceptual validity of realism and documentary art. Both artists embarked on documentary projects around the nineties and differently captured the maritime world’s material and epistemological excess, revealing that, despite perceived speed and connectivity in the world of globalization and the Internet, the global economy and artistic exchanges even more powerfully rely on slow and disoriented ocean currents. They simultaneously employ and move beyond western realist methods and seascape conventions that constantly oscillate between seas as a romanticized space outside modernity and seas as a space thoroughly integrated into the extract economy and the global shipping industry. Resulting works disrupt the global economy as well as global contemporary art’s mythic visions anchored in the cosmopolitan artist’s fast air travel and uninterrupted access to art centers. The Pacific’s “modalities of movement,” combined products of universal hydraulic principles and each region’s unique conditions of labor and social relations, are further transformed into the artists’ “pictorial methods” with which they inscribe the globalization’s true patterns of movement on the work—these pictorial methods are “Wrong Direction,” “Vortices,” “Elevated Heights,” and “Detours.”This dissertation intervenes in the existing scholarship centrally aligned with poststructuralism and critical theory, which exclusively views Sekula’s work as a derivation from photoconceptualism—including Lawrence Weiner, Mel Bochner, and Adrian Piper—that attempted to deconstruct the photographic medium’s transparent link to references, or its “documentary” potential in a traditional sense, although Sekula was dedicated to revitalize the medium’s direct political engagement in a constantly updated way. This contradiction is internally solved by the critic’s confinement of the social in Sekula’s projects into western seascape traditions of the panorama and the detail and semiotic realms in which “documents” are dematerialized and exist as significatory circuits of signs, thus fracturing his texts, images, and captions’ semantic plenitude. In most readings, geographic specificities of Sekula’s ocean images are thoroughly effaced and treated as backgrounds, eclipsing the ocean’s agentive forces and his complex methods of reenacting perceptual conditions from the diverse spaces of maritime labor. On the other hand, Park’s projects attempt to critique overwhelmingly homogenizing global perceptual conditions in the nineties, an objective somewhat similar to that of the “Pictures” generation. However, Park basically retains his Minjung art colleagues’ political commitment, transforming West-derived documentary methods to capture the distorted ideological landscape and severely compromised democracy under the dictatorships of the divide peninsula. Each hailing from different artistic conventions, Sekula and Park’s documentary methods nevertheless merge through their shared interests in depicting globalization’s hydraulic modalities—for Sekula, slowness and delay embodied through swirling vortices and elevated heights that disrupt the panorama and the detail, and for Park, disorientations that ironically allows detouring the Cold War border, suggesting the artist-fisherman as a hybrid, distinct icon of contemporary art who can navigate through the Cold War the divided peninsula and its diasporas.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2024. Major: Art History. Advisor: Jane Blocker. 1 computer file (PDF); xi, 372 pages.
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Oh, Hyeongjin. (2024). On Currents: How to Inscribe Patterns of the Pacific in Contemporary American Art History. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/264341.
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