The exhibition <Myrtis: Face to Face with the Past> was started in 2010 in the New Acropolis Museum of Athens and embarked a journey since 2011 as a travelling exhibition inside Greece and abroad. The main purpose of the exhibition was to draw attention of the general public to the value of the ‘rescue excavation’ and of cultural heritage of Greece, by presenting the reconstruction bust of a girl whose skull was found in Kerameikos cemetery of ancient Athens. The new Kerameikos excavation was initiated by the construction of Metropolitan Railway lines in the center of Athens between 1992 to 1998. It revealed a pit of a mass burial where about 150 people were inhumed in a very hasty way without proper funeral rites or offerings. These bodies are identified as the victims of the infamous plague of Athens in the first years of the Peloponnesian War(430-426 BC). The epidemic disease killed almost one third of the city population including Pericles, and brought extreme fear and panic to the Athens society. The traditional funerary rites were totally disrupted, and the social decorum and the morality among the citizens became enfeebled. The plague and the civil war were the decisive factors to end the Golden Age of Democratic Athens. However, the exhibition organizers did not focus on the tragic aspect of this disaster and its casualties. Their main concern was to simplify the scholarly works of archaeological excavation and microchemistry analysis so that the exhibition viewers will easily understand and empathize the living value of the scholarly works of ancient Greek civilization. The centripetal element of the exhibition was the vivid face of an 11 years old ancient girl ‘Myrtis’, which was carefully reconstructed based on both the scientific data and artistic imagination. Also the set up of the exhibition was structured in order to stimuli cognitive and emotional experience of the visitors who witnessed the rebirth of a vibrant human being from an ancient debris. The museologists’ continuous efforts to promote projects of contemporary artists, publications, and school programs related to the <Myrtis> exhibition indicate that the ulterior motive of this exhibition is the cultural education of the present and future generation through the intimate experiences of ancient Greek life. Also this is the reason why the various museums that held the travelling exhibition try to make the presentation as a gesture of memorial service for an anonymous Athenian girl who deceased circa 2400 years ago. The pragmatic efforts of Greek scholars and museologists through <Myrtis> exhibition show us a way to find a solution to the continuous threat of cultural resources by massive construction projects and land development, and to overcome public indifference to the history and cultural heritage.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) has been widely regarded as the most original and brilliant English landscape painter in the 19th century. Admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1789, Turner was a precocious artist and gained the full membership of the prestigious Royal Academy in 1802 at the age of 27. Already in the 1800s he was recognised as a pioneer in taking a new and revolutionary approach to the art of landscape painting. Among his early works made in this period, The Shipwreck, painted in 1805, epitomizes the sense of sublime Romanticism in terms of its dramatic subject-matter and the masterly display of technical innovations. Of course, the subject of shipwreck has a long standing history. Ever since human beings first began seafaring, they have been fascinated as much as haunted by shipwrecks. For maritime societies, such as England, shipwreck has been the source of endless nightmares, representing a constant threat not only to individual sailors but also to the nation as a whole. Unsurprisingly, therefore, shipwreck is one of the most popular motifs in art and literature, particularly during the 18th and 19th centuries. Yet accounts, images and metaphors of shipwreck have taken diverse forms and served different purposes, varying significantly across time and between authors. As such, Turner’s painting registers a panoply of diverse but interconnected contemporary discourses. First of all, since shipwreck was an everyday occurrence in this period, it is more than likely that Turner’s painting depicted the actual sinking in 1805 of the East India Company’s ship ‘The Earl of Abergavenny’ off the coast of Weymouth. 263 souls were lost and the news of the wreck made headlines in major English newspapers at the time. Turner’s painting may well have been his visual response to this tragedy, eyewitness accounts of which were given in great quantity in every contemporary newspaper. But the painting is not a documentary visual record of the incident as Turner was not present at the site and newspaper reports were not detailed enough for him to pictorially reconstruct the entire scene. Rather, Turner’s painting is indebted to the iconographical tradition of depicting tempest and shipwreck, bearing a strong visual resemblance to some 17th-century Dutch marine paintings with which he was familiar through gallery visits and engravings. Lastly, Turner’s Shipwreck is to be located in the contexts of burgeoning contemporary travel literature, especially shipwreck narratives. The late 18th and early 19th century saw a drastic increase in the publication of shipwreck narratives and Turner’s painting was inspired by the re-publication in 1804 of William Falconer’s enormously successful epic poem of the same title. Thus, in the final analysis, Turner’s painting is a splendid signifier leading the beholder to the heart of Romantic abyss conjoing nightmarish everyday experience, high art, and popular literature.

This thesis is a study of artistic measures and climate refugees, based on Hack’ s World Climate Refugee Camp project. According to Hack, climate refugees appeared with the process of globalization. Hack claimed that the people who put climate refugees in danger are the industrialized nations, and therefore, their rejection of refugees is nonsense. He also stated that the fundamental solution would be the active participation of such nations. Thus, he travels around the world, encouraging participants and globalizing his project. Interestingly, the practical participation method of his climate calamity project is divided into four methods, which are all related to realizing the danger and presenting various solutions. First, the aesthetic of survival: the reason Hack focused on the warming trend and claimed that we have to accept the climate refugees as refugees comes from the thought that we are all potential refugees, and the anxiety that climate refugees may cause war in the end. The solution Hack found for surviving in such a world is to create “refugee camps”to notify people about the seriousness of climate change, and to put the “aesthetic for survival”in action. Second, a relation-oriented relationship: communication between Hack and the participants was done in various ways. They are experiencing a bond and emotions of an interrelationship through their actions in the experimental field, experiencing a new form of art, which they were not able to experience in a museum. Third, a utopian measure: Hack’s utopian measure started from the fear of dystopia but Hack still believes that it is not only a dream, but that it can be realized. He claims that even though the start may be feeble, it is possible to rescue children from starvation and to treat climate refugees as proper human in the end, when communication and cooperation is done the right way and properly. Fourth, the aesthetic of global relation, the internet: the new solution Hack is trying on the internet is to make more people participate in his project. It is fate that “human are the wrongdoer and the victim at the same time”, but according to Hack’s opinion, social disaster can be avoided through effort and it is optimistic that we can give form to the culture revolution we are experiencing now. Hack’s project illustrated the importance of daily life, compared to art inside a museum, through active participation of the people and opened up a new method of art through realistic responses to disasters. This is distinctive from the past exhibitions, where artists gave shape and form to ideals and an imaginary world, in that it shows that the artist and audience aim for creating a community-like structure, just like Bourriaud’s art method. Hack’s project of climate calamity illustrates that installation and action art is not only an art genre which shows installation and activities, but that it can include social and political issues and that it can be completed with the help of participants, consequently becoming a genre of modern art. Hack raises a question about art’s identity through various descriptions. Artists as planners, who base their artworks on their subjectivity or the characteristics of a specific period, the people as participants, the duet of art work and play, human and human, and further, human and nature. The practical participation method, as a measure for “disaster”, reveals the new art of the 21st century within Hack’s artworks. Even though there are several problems with Hack’s usage of art as a measure for disaster, it will actively open up a new page for the 21st century’s art with the theme of disaster.

This paper focuses on the social implication of new media art, which has evolved with the advance of technology. To understand the notion of human- computer interactivity in media art, it examines the meaning of “cybernetics” theory invented by Norbert Wiener just after WWII, who provided “control and communication” as central components of his theory of messages. It goes on to investigate the application of cybernetics theory onto art since the 1960s, to which Roy Ascott made a significant contribution by developing telematic art, utilizing the network of telecommunication. This paper underlines the significance of the relationship between human and machine, art and technology in transforming the work of art as a site of communication and experience. The interactivity in new media art transforms the viewer into the user of the work, who is now provided free will to make decisions on his or her action with the work. The artist is no longer a god-like figure who determines the meaning of the work, yet becomes another user of his or her own work, with which to interact. This paper believes that the interaction between man and machine, art and technology can lead to various ways of interaction between humans, thereby restoring a sense of community while liberating humans from conventional limitations on their creativity. This paper considers the development of new media art more than a mere invention of new aesthetic styles employing advanced technology. Rather, new media art provides a critical shift in subverting the modernist autonomy that advocates the medium specificity. New media art envisions a new art, which would embrace impurity into art, allowing the coexistence of autonomy and heteronomy, embracing a technological other, thereby expanding human relations. By enabling the birth of the user in experiencing the work, interactive new media art produces an open arena, in which the user can create the work while communicating with the work and other users. The user now has freedom to visit the work, to take a journey on his or her own, and to make decisions on what to choose and what to do with the work. This paper contends that there is a significant parallel between new media artists’ interest in creating new experiences of the art and Jacques Rancière’s concept of the aesthetic regime of art. In his argument for eliminating hierarchy in art and for embracing impurity, Rancière provides a vision for art, which is related to life and ultimately reshapes life. Rancière’s critique of both formalist modernism and Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern view underlines the social implication of new media art practices, which seek to form “the common of a community.”

After liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, there was the three-year period of United States Army Military Government in Korea. In 1948, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Republic of Korea were established in the north and south of the Korean Peninsula. The Republic of Korea is now a modern state set in the southern part of the Korean. We usually refer to Koreans as people who belong to the Republic of Korea. Can we say that is true exactly? Why make of this an obsolete question? The period from 1945 when Korea was emancipated from Japanese colonial rule to 1948 when the Republic of Korea was established has not been a focus of modern Korean history. This three years remains empty in Korean history and makes the concept of ‘Korean’we usually consider ambiguous, and prompts careful attention to the silence of ‘some Koreans’forced to live against their will in the blurred boundaries between nation and people. This dissertation regards ‘Koreans’who came to live in the border of nations, especially ‘Korean-Japanese third generation women artists’ who are marginalized both Japan and Korea. It questions the category of ‘Korean women’s art’that has so far been considered, based on the concept of territory, and presents a new perspective for viewing ‘Korean women’s art’. Almost no study on Korean-Japanese women’s art has been conducted, based on research on Korean diaspora, and no systematic historical records exist. Even data-collection is limited due to the political situation of South and North in confrontation. Representation of the Mother Country on the Artworks by First and Second-Generation Korean-Japanese(Zainich) Women Artists after Liberation since 1945 was published in 2011 is the only dissertation in which Korean-Japanese women artists, and early artistic activities. That research is based on press releases and interviews obtained through Japan. This thesis concentrates on the world of Korean-Japanese third generation women artists such as Kim Jung-sook, Kim Ae-soon, and Han Sung-nam, permanent residents in Japan who still have Korean nationality. The three Korean-Japanese third generation women artists whose art world is reviewed in this thesis would like to reveal their voices as minorities in Japan and Korea, resisting power and the universal concepts of nation, people and identity. Questioning the general notions of ‘Korean women’and ‘Korean women’s art’ considered within the Korean Peninsula, they explore their identity as Korean women outside the Korean territory from a post-territorial perspective and have a new understanding of the minority’s diversity and difference through their eyes as marginal women living outside the mainstream of Korean and Japanese society. This is associated with recent post-colonial critical viewpoints reconsidering myths of universalism and transcendental aesthetic measures. In the 1980s and 1990s art museums and galleries in New York tried a critical shift in aesthetic discourse on contemporary art history, analyzed how power relationships among such elements as gender, sexuality, race, nationalism. Ghost of Ethnicity: Rethinking Art Discourses of the 1940s and 1980s by Lisa Bloom is an obvious presentation about the post-colonial discourse. Lisa Bloom rethinks the diversity of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender each artist and critic has, she began a new discussion on artists who were anti-establishment artists alienated by mainstream society. As migration rapidly increased through globalism lead by the United States the aspects of diaspora experience emerges as critical issues in interpreting contemporary culture. As a new concept of art with hybrid cultural backgrounds exists, each artist’s cultural identity and specificity should be viewed and interpreted in a sociopolitical context. A criticism started considering the distinct characteristics of each individual’s historical experience and cultural identity, and paying attention to experience of the third world artist, especially women artists, confronting the power of modernist discourses from a perspective of the white male subject. Considering recent international contemporary art, the Korean-Japanese third generation women artists who clarify their cultural identity as minority living in the border between Korea and Japan may present a new direction for contemporary Korean art. Their art world derives from their diaspora experience on colonial trauma historically. Their works made us to see that it is also associated with post-colonial critical perspective in the recent contemporary art stream. And it reminds us of rethinking the diversity of the minority living outside mainstream society. Thus, this should be considered as one of the features in the context of Korean women’s art.

Julio Romano decorated the facade of his house in Mantua with a statue of Mercury to give expressions to his ideas on painting. Hereby the painter from Rome could show his home to the world as that of a painter. To be concrete, Mercury was the planet god to which visual artists belonged, and so was basically related to visual arts. In his role to deliver diverse features of art works Mercury could also convey concepts and emotions expressed in a picture to the viewer. The power of a painting to arouse certain emotions or move the mind of the viewer was further connected to the role of Mercury as the guide of the human soul. This function again related the Roman god to the characteristic of a portrait to present absent persons to the viewer. Above the statue of Mercury, a Lucian head of the god is seen, so that they together form the central axis of the facade. This seems to emphasize that the theme of the facade decoration was the powerful persuasive forces of eloquence. The two masks on the left could then refer to sources of eloquence, I.e. various beautiful expressions of a language and its generative process. On the other hand, the masks on the right could represent consequences of eloquence, for instance, prudence, evil effects which come about to imprudent listeners, and other influences on listeners. Finally, it would be useful to remind us of a line from On Architecture by Leon Battista Alberti. According to the humanist architect parts of a building which are seen from the outside, like a facade, should be appropriately designed, since the decoration of a house could play a significant role to enhance the fame and honor of the family and its fatherland. This theory of Alberti could have provided the foundation to the facade decoration of the Casa Pippi which proudly presented the profession of painting to the public in visual form.

In recent studies of art historical methodology, such as Critical Terms for Art History and The Art of Art History, subjectivity, identity, abjection, and other terms have been placed safely in the genealogy of contemporary art history. This paper questions the contemporaneity in the story of contemporary art in our time in relation to two other critical terms that have been regularly cited by contemporary critics, not only in Euro-American fields but also in Korea. The terms are post-medium and postproduction, respectively, as used by Rosalind Krauss and Nicolas Bourriaud. This paper stems from the critical condition in which art criticism and theory have their power in the rise of neo-liberalism. But this paper does not deal with the contemporary as a chronological term for art history but rather examines the three critical terms—contemporaneity, post-medium, and postproduction—that have garnered scholarly attention. I would like to put aside postmodernism for the moment; I don’t disregard the postmodern condition although the death of postmodern critical terms has resulted in the loss of its polemical power in art worlds such as in exhibitions, etc. To look at “the postproduction in the age of post-medium age after postmodernism,” I first explore Krauss’s notion of post-medium because, unlike media artists like Lev Manovich and Peter Weibel, Krauss’s post-medium condition is different and insists on medium specificity. In this sense, Krauss has turned out to be another Greenberg in disguise. For her, photography and video are expanded mediums after Greenberg, because Krauss has spent her life explicating those mediums. Under the Cup, her recent publication, came out in 2011, and discusses her desire to defend medium-specificity against the intermedia of installation art found ubiquitously in international exhibitions and biennales. Her usage of post-medium has been taken up by Weibel as postmedia in a broader sense. But whether the post-medium condition or the postmedia age, we nonetheless enter the new age of the contemporary. Consequently, this paper questions what constitutes contemporaneity in our times. It is said that there is nothing new on earth, yet I find original artistic strategies among the younger generation in the postmedia age. The contemporary justifies its place in art fields and criticism by keeping its distance from postmodernism although we still find the remnants of postmodern artistic practices and theoretical foundations. By looking at materials written by Terry Smith, I would like to examine contemporaneity as a rhetoric where artists, critics, and curators endeavor to set up a new spirit of criticism, distant from the past of modernism and postmodernism. In discussions, modernism and postmodernism act as catalysts interacting with each other while justifying their own place. In conclusion, my paper reaches to delineate where the contemporary finds its place among artists’responses and working methods. It explores the postproduction of the Internet and the World Wide Web generations, where images become data rather than representation (of modernism) and appropriation (of postmodernism). This paper analyzes Bourriaud’s text, as well as relevant artists like Pierre Huyghe, Liam Gillick, and others. By examining the aforementioned critical terms, I would like to reconsider our own contemporary art in Korea, especially among young artists influenced by digital media and the World Wide Web in the 1990s.

The aim of this paper is to show how the paradigm of disaster resilience may help reorienting urban planning policies in order to mitigate various types of risks, thanks to carefully thought action on heritage and conservation practices. Resilience is defined as the “capacity of a social system to proactively adapt to and recover from disturbances that are perceived within the system to fall outside the range of normal and expected disturbances.”1 It relies greatly on risk perception2 and the memory of catastrophes. States, regions, municipalities, have been giving territorial materiality to collective memory for centuries,3 but this trend has considerably increased in the second half of the 20th century.4 This is particularly true regarding the memory of disasters: for example, important traces of catastrophes such as urban ruins have been preserved, because they were supposed to maintain some awareness and hence foster urban resilience – Berlin’s Gedächtniskirche is a well-known example of this policy.5 Yet, in spite of preserved traces of catastrophes and various warnings and heritage policies, there are countless examples of risk mismanagement and urban tragedies. Using resilience as a guiding concept might change the results of these failed risk mitigation policies and irrelevant disaster memory processes. Indeed, the concept of resilience deals with the complexity of temporal and spatial scales, and with partly emotional and qualitative processes, so that this approach fits the issues of urban memory management. Resilience might help underlining the complexity and the subtlety of remembrance messages, and lead to alternative paths better adapted to the diversity of risks, places and actors. However, when it is given territorial materiality, memory is almost always symbolically and politically framed and interpreted; Vale and Campanella had already outlined this political aspect of remembrance and resilience as a discourse.6 Resilience and the territorialization of memory are not ideologically neutral, but urban risk mitigation may come at that price.