Many of us may recall an old popular Korean song, which goes “While drawing a circle, I happened to draw a face.” The “face” in the lyrics would be that of a loved one, who may have departed leaving his/her memories behind. This song reminds me of a mythical story of the Corinthian woman Butades, who wanted to keep her memories about her lover, who was about to leave. While looking at her lover, she noticed that his shadow fell on the wall. With a desperate desire to capture his appearance by whatever means possible, she started to trace his shadow on the wall, hoping that the image of her lover would compensate for his absence. This is a story about the origin of the image, a replacement of the real. It fascinates Jacques Derrida, a contemporary French philosopher; because this story suggests that the origin of art is not perception as the traditional aesthetic argues, but rather, memory. Derrida considers that drawing is a mode of representation motivated by the trace of presence-absence.

Yet, there have been various discussions on the status of the image in relation to the perception of truth or reality. For Plato, the image, the artist’s representation is far removed from truth because he reproduces a thing without penetrating beneath its superficial appearance. For him, the essential form of a thing is created by God in its ultimate nature. The image stands third removed from reality since it represents a particular thing embodied for our perception. For example, an image of a bed is an imitation of a bed made by a carpenter, who imitates the ultimate reality of Bed created by God. As a distracting detour, here we may think of One and Three Chairs by Joseph Kosuth( Fig. 1) as an effort to present the idea of representation of chairness, by providing a real chair -- not of the ultimate reality of chairs, but of its representation in a particular chair, a photographic representation of a chair, and a dictionary definition of a chair. Although Kosuth does not deal with the issue of the ultimate reality as presence and its representation as absence, he poses a conceptual question on the status of representation.

An image has an ability to affect the viewer since the image appeals to the senses. The sense of sight has been privileged as the highest among the perceptive senses. The power of the image to human senses is acknowledged so that graven images are forbidden: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” [Exodus, 20: 4] We can recall that the presence of God is represented in the form of rays of light or a hand descending from above. The biblical warning against the image suggests its power to appeal to the senses of the viewer. This also implies distrust of the image, which is based on the senses, as a reliable source of judgment as opposed to logic, which is believed to lead us to reach ultimate truth. The image as the mere imitation of truth has been considered subsidiary.

Thus, the image has been associated with the absence of the truth, while the logic has been associated with its presence. This binary understanding of the copy vs. the real, presence vs. absence, sense vs. logic has dominated the western understanding of the image and directed mainstream approaches in art history. In addition, the development of technology has exacerbated this issue. As Walter Benjamin argues that mechanically reproduced images destroy the aura of the original, we live with abundant copies, far from the real. With the emergence of postmodern readings of the image, visual representation in the late 1960s, the traditional binary set of relations has been critically challenged. A quest for the origin of the image turns to an inquiry about power relations; who has the power to represent, who has been represented, and in what way. (Fig. 2) The object of the gaze is powerless, whereas its subject has power. This inquiry was intended to reveal the inequalities of power relations, which have been visualized in stereotypical representations.

We are living in a society saturated with images, original or technically reproduced. Whether the origin of the image is perception, memory, or power relations, the image is a result of the encounter between the self and the other, which includes society, the world, and even another self co-existent with the self. By taking a closer look at images, we can start to learn more about the social, cultural, and historical context in which they have been produced.

Kim Hee-Young(Associate Professor, Dept. of Fine Art)

heeykim@kookmin.ac.kr

① Barbara Kruger, Untitled
(Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face), 1981
② Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965