아우슈비츠(Auschwitz) 이후 미술의 존재방식: 요셉 보이스(Joseph Beuys)의 오브제를 중심으로

Abstract

Writing German art history after the World War II cannot help encountering the Nazis problem. The sense of guilty about the war has been a perplex and weighty assignment for the artists of the postwar generation, which once resulted in a debate among art historians during the 1990s on what would be ‘german.’ While the german society has neglected the matter of its past but drifted into a hyperactive state of material prosperity, a philosopher Theodor W. Adorno newly labeled art’s right by saying, “It is an act of barbarism to write a poem after Auschwitz” in his dialectics. Joseph Beuys, an artist who first mentioned Auschwitz, redefined the relationship between art and life, between art and history, by switching art’s direction with his objet works. Beuys denied the concept of beauty and merchandise aesthetics to position himself within the narrative of contemporary art history. Mystifying his personal experience with symbolic significances that were added ex post facto, his objet works became the center of international debate in art world. In spite of such a debate, Beuys put his phrase into ceaseless practices to show “anyone can be an artist” and influenced on his following artists: “grey painting” by Gerhardt Richter, “history painting” by Anselm Kiefer, “capitalist realism” by Sigmar Polke, “Mietersolidaritaet” by Jörg Immendorf, and so on. From then on, the existing methods of art have varied in numerous ways. As Beuys’ art had constructed a sort of ‘objet aesthetics’ in spite of a misunderstanding as a ‘methodology of the Nazis,’ his students also acquired a freedom of expression in the society where the memory of Auschwitz is yet to get eliminated but domesticated with capitalism. Like this, Josef Beuys suggests a new direction for contemporary art which has been fallen in a dilemma after Auschwitz, and his objects is offering a new task to reinstate the dialectics of negation within the art history’s writing.