Manifestations of a zombie avant-garde: South Korean performance and conceptual art in the 1970s

By the early 1990s, multiple Euro-American authors proclaimed the death of the avant-garde, but this was paradoxically followed by its various revivals. This essay examines the performance and conceptual art practices of several South Korean art collectives in the 1970s during the Cold War military...

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1. Verfasser: Choi, Sooran (VerfasserIn)
Format: Elektronisch Artikel
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: 2020
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Zusammenfassung:By the early 1990s, multiple Euro-American authors proclaimed the death of the avant-garde, but this was paradoxically followed by its various revivals. This essay examines the performance and conceptual art practices of several South Korean art collectives in the 1970s during the Cold War military regime, to argue that they appropriated and re-purposed Western theories of the avant-garde and its various post-war manifestations—including happenings, land art, conceptual art, and Fluxus - to mask their socio-political resistance. Their association with Western avant-garde art forms functioned as a subterfuge that protected them from censorship and persecution from the anti-Communist, and pro-American, but authoritarian government. This alternative view of ‘avant-garde art as covert political agency’ challenges dominant centre/periphery paradigms in global art history, and complicates and expands discourses on the avant-garde after its alleged death in the West.
Beschreibung:Illustrationen