<제4집단> 사건의 전말: ‘한국적’ 해프닝의 도전과 좌절

Abstract

The Fourth Group is an art group whose livelihood was of the shortest in the history of contemporary Korean art since its activity was carried out only for about two months from June to August 1970. There is a widespread evaluation of the Fourth Group: Its attempt to criticize the then older generation and social reality through its execution of happenings was itself a happening because it was debilitated due to the oppression of authorities and the then art scene’s frigidity toward it. Scholarly attention and interest have also long been directed only to the group’s impact as a political avant-garde focusing on the assessment of the authenticity of its social-critical attitude or on whether or not its anti-system activities were successful. This study places importance on the subjective characteristics of the Fourth Group and the way that its members’ performance art pieces was rendered in order to cast light on the art-historical implication of the Fourth Group’s performance art works besides its significance in terms of social criticism. In result, this study has revealed the fact that although the Fourth Group was not a group equipped itself with certain political ideology, it was both a cultural group and a total art group which attempted to make an intimate approach to popular culture as a representation of everyday life so as to create a new kind of art. Moreover, the Fourth Group consisted of young people in their twenties and thirties who were antipathetic toward the then older generation and was a youth subculture that established their own generational identity and advocated such an identity of them through an alternative mass media of a weekly magazine. For the group Happenings meant a means to criticize the conservativeness of the then social climate and the then existing cultural and artistic scene and thus they represented something more than an avant-garde art form whose aim was to nullify the boundaries between different art forms. A Happening was, for its members, not a tool for the reformation of the system of realpolitik, but it was a tool for anti-art and further a tool for cultural politics based on the identity of their generation. The first Korean subculture was substantiated and nurtured by the Fourth Group’s Happenings as the first endeavors to create a relationship between avant-garde art and popular culture in Korea. Yet in the course of it, they located themselves in the center of the conflicts caused by the then socio-cultural oppositions such as ‘the reception of Western art’ and ‘the preservation of traditional culture,’ ‘the artist as the elite’ and ‘the populace,’ ‘the older generation’ and ‘the younger generation,’ and ‘art’s duty to engage in social reality’ and ‘art for art’s sake.’ In other words, acute disputes and new awarenesses were generated as the stances and interests of government authorities, the fine art scene and the popular culture milieu ran counter to one another. The essential significance of the Fourth Group’s Happenings lies in such a process itself—their existential status as a cultural metamorphosis in which one of the most up-to-date art forms of the West was subject to transformation as it was introduced to and interacted with Korea, which was a marginal culture. The Korean metamorphosis of Western Happening is clearly evinced by ‘the artistic structure of the Fourth Group in which the East and the West are combined,’ ‘the inertia of the then institution of art that a popular culture magazine was the only option available to be chosen as an alternative mass media,’ ‘the fact that the group came to assume a form of youth subculture through its collaboration with a weekly magazine,’ ‘the then socio-cultural circumstances that its street Happenings were understood as embodying decadence and impropriety,’ and ‘the then art scene that rejected Happening by accusing it as a form of decadent avant-garde art.’ Accordingly, it is true that the Fourth Group was frustrated in the process of its efforts to establish ‘Korean’ Happening. But the group was not a failure at all. For everything about the Fourth Group from its formation and dismantlement constitutes the cardinal nature and art-historical significance of ‘Korean’ Happening.