the Gemstones Series of Taedong Park

There was a time when form was everything about sculpture. It was the period called "modern" in the history of Western art, pertaining in particular to its mainstream that led the course of modern art, i.e. the tradition of modernist aesthetics. Form in this context refers to the "pure" form, the "beautiful" form, and the “original” form expressed or composed by the artist.
The signal that sculpture became modern is the rejection of Classicism, as is the case of painting. Simply put, this rejection means to dismiss the ideal representation of the world, the task of portraying faithfully yet with beauty the object existing in the world (primarily human, but more often the greatest figures like saints or heroes and the miraculous or historical events related to them). However easy it may sound, it was a profound reversal. This is because to refuse representation was to turn down the mission or convention of art, which had ruled the history of Western art since Renaissance or almost from its inception. This is precisely what indicates the entry of art into the "modern." In respect of the start of the modern, RodinistosculpturewhatManetistopainting.ThemodernsculpturewasinitiatedbyMonument to Balzac (created in 1898, installed in 1939) of August Rodin (1840-1917). Fully imbued with Romanticism, Monument to Balzac was the first statue among Rodin's public sculptures to renounce Classicism, to which the artist had hitherto maintained an equivocal attitude by expressing both submission to and deviation from it. 
What does a sculpture do if it refuses to represent? What if it has decided to stop showing the external world with splendor? Even as the mirror reflective of the world was broken, a brand new world emerged: the canvas and paints for painting, and stone and the mass of clay for sculpture. It was the world of the so-called material media, which had served as mere means to create that beautiful mirror and therefore had completely been left out of attention. Even though this was a radically new adventure for the visual arts, it still required an element that could grant the artistic significance to those simple matters, in that the material medium or the raw material could not become a work of art for itself. That element would be the "significant form" (Clive Bell, 1914). If so, where did this important form that transforms mere matters into artworks originate? It could not be of the world, since representation was already dismissed. Thus, the provenance of that form should only be one place: the mind of the artist. As a consequence, the history of modernist sculpture became a continuous relay of the endeavors invested in composition to find purer and more original forms, the efforts of such brilliant creative minds as Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi, Henri Moore, Tony Smith, Anthony Caro, and others.
The ambition of modernist art: the painting or the sculpture that is beautiful in its own right, without being obliged to depict the landscape (or anything else that is external to art), as the landscape is beautiful as it is! (Clement Greenberg, 1939) It asks for a great courage, even from today's perspective, to dream to be unfettered from the dependency on nature and to be its equal in the sole capacity of the pure form. With this very spirit, modernism was able to nourish the impetus for the development of modern art for about a century, in the case of painting, and for about a half century, when it goes to sculpture. Nonetheless, the day had arrived that the heroism of form met its end. It is possible, of course, to pin down this moment: the black paintings made by Frank Stella in 1959 and Donald Judd's article "Specific Object" written in 1965.
Stella disclosed that the composition of the artist, which had been believed to be the only origin of pure form, was nothing but a subjective and conceptual outcome. In the mean time, Judd pushed this further to the extent of destroying the traditional categories of painting and sculpture by creating the "specific object," which entered into the space of the spectator. What has come next is the age of postmodernism and simply of "art." In this new phase, sculpture has been substituted with the process (process art), shattered into fragments (installation art), or expanded towards the space (site-specific art, land art). Nevertheless, these diverse streams shared in common the decline of the (movable and merchantable) object and the destruction of (subjective, figurative, original, aesthetic, and enduring) form.
Has form disappeared upon the advent of postmodernism described as such? There was a truly radical yet very brief moment when language displaced form. Form has returned, however, in that sculpture, as one of the long held interlocutors in the history of Western art alongside painting, has remains an important medium for "modeling" even after it was deprived of the position of an independent category. And it goes without saying that form resides at the heart of modeling.
However, the form after postmodernism is no longer what it was before. Generally speaking, there seem to exist three types of form in the contemporary practices of sculpture: 1) the form of fetish, which reinforces the spectacle of consumption through disguising a cheap commodity into an expensive work of art (Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog (Magenta), 1994-2000, installed at the Palace of Versailles in 2008); 2) the form of degeneration and abjection, which betrays the loss of the real and the traumas the spectacle of consumption conceals (Kiki Smith's inside-out body forms with their intestines falling out or Mike Kelly's lumpen forms comprising of the ugly massed of dirty rag dolls congealed together, both from the 1990s); 3) the post-monumental form, which pushes forward the postmodernist anti-form in order to precipitate the deconstruction of sculpture (the works that spread to almost infinity indiscriminate objects in arbitrary combinations, for example, Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death, 2003 by Isa Genzken). The differences in appearance notwithstanding, these forms are in a nutshell the "fetish form" (1) or the "counter-form" (2) or the "anti-form" (3), because they are the forms not unique but trite, not complete but damaged, and not composed but accumulated. Considering the predominance of these types of forms witnessed throughout the field of contemporary art, there is little room for doubt that we are living in the age of art that refuses form. 

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Amidst these present circumstances a sculptor continues to create form, even in the methods of modernism, which have now become a tradition! This sculptor is Tae-dong Park (born in 1961), an established artist whose professional career spans three decades since the mid 1980s. This essay explores the sculpture of Taedong Park, which seeks for form in the age against it. This will provide an opportunity to question whether form has its place in the current realm of contemporary sculpture heavily occupied by the fetish form, the counter-form, and the anti-form, and, if so, where it could be. 
Tae-dong Park acknowledges that the Gemstones series commenced in 2010 divides his career into before and after. The split seems acceptable. As the title indicates, Gemstones are the objects in the shape of rough stones presumably excavated from nature. The main material is metal. These Gemstones, which all are closed polyhedrons in spite of the dissimilarities in size, color, and shape, tend to disperse and stay separated or sometimes assemble together so as to present different forms bigger than themselves (Picture 1).
On the contrary, his works prior to Gemstones utilize various styles and materials, including wood, stone, and metal, and can be characterized by the coexistence of the closed and open forms. These two forms appear in isolation but facing each other as in the Meditation series (1993) as if they are conversing, or they are together in one form that opens up the closed form like the examples of the A Tree Became Box series (1995) and the Things Thinking in Afternoon series (1998) (Pictures 3, 4). 
It is not difficult to discover an attempt to open up form among the works where the open and closed forms cohabit. In Meditation 3 the linear structure, which is stretched out like a delicate dance move towards the vertical cube that soars up bluntly, is vibrant with life in its open form, as if it flirts with the firmly closed form. Modeled in plaster then casted in bronze, this construct seems to grow any minute now like Jack's beanstalk and knock on the roof of the enclosed cube on the other side, luring the cube to open up. Sometimes the effort to unclose form comes near the destruction of from, exemplified in A Tree Became Box 2. Once standing in a mountain and now produced at a factory into a piece of timber, the wood has irregular chinks along the edges of its perfectly square form, which resembles the shape of box processed as building materials. This is a poignant work, which unveils the flesh of nature locked in geometric shapes and forges a new form by putting together these boxes that slightly expose their inside. Meanwhile, Things Thinking in Afternoon 3 is an interesting piece that opens up an enclosed rectangular metal plane in the most deductive fashion. The metal rectangle is spilling out its interior like a cascade. The artist divided the metal plane into four proportionally similar rectangles with the innermost one as the standard and made the three inner rectangles fall down by cutting only three sides of them and leaving one side attached to each other. The logic of deduction invested in the opening of the form is not strict. For example, the smallest rectangle is opened at its top, bottom and left sides, and therefore differentiated from the bigger two rectangles, which open up their top, left and right sides. Likewise, the form modeled in the shape reminiscent of a drooping tie or a loosened coat string has nothing to do with the deductive logic. Even so, one thing that becomes evident in a close analysis of these three examples is the fact that the artist was much more interested in the open form than the closed form until he embarked on Gemstones.
That interest is quite modern, for it was only in the modern period that the open form became available for sculpture. The traditional approach to sculpture had been either to add or to subtract, that is, either carving or modeling. No matter which technique the artist chose to use between the two, the traditional sculpture was meant to have the closed form. What has enabled to open up that closed and completed mass is the methods of modern sculpture called welding. Started in Picasso's composed sculptures (say Guitar) in the mid 1910s and perfected in the late 1920s by Julio González, welded sculpture has brought about in the field of sculpture a fresh prospect of the open form, namely "drawing in space." New materials have surfaced in accordance with the novel techniques. With the exception of bronze, various types of metal, including iron, stainless steel, aluminum and the like, are the modern materials introduced to sculpture along with welding techniques. Metal and welding, these are what the artist chiefly deploys in Gemstones. And his interest in form has shifted towards the closed form from the open one. All the gemstones are the closed form, even if they display a wide range of disparate appearances angulated into heterogeneous contours.  
The artist calls the basic unit or individual entity of his gemstones the "Gemstone Seed." Is the raw stone compared to a seed, as if it anticipates the day of becoming a jewel? Although the expression suggests the opulent and precious process of natural growth, it is well known that jewels are not growing in nature, but produced by man. (Some rough stones that grow for themselves, like crystals, would make exceptions, but they cannot be considered as equivalent to elaborately manufactured jewels.) The same goes to Tae-dong Park's gemstones, which are not derived from nature but produced by the artist. That being said, his gemstones and jewels are not the same thing. First of all, they are made of metal, not stone. Furthermore, whereas jewels come into existence by shaving the chunky raw stone, Tae-dong Parks creates his gemstones by attaching thin pieces of metal together. (Every now and then the gemstones are made of stone. Even in these cases, however, the irregular polyhedrons of the gemstones abide by the logic of modeling, which is incongruent with the principles of jewel cutting, which aspire to perfect symmetry.) In short, the gemstones are the unique forms constructed entirely by the artist, unlike nature or jewels alluded in their name and shapes. 

The drawings incorporated into the first exhibition, where the gemstones made their debut as "sculpture" works ('Gemstone' - Drawings & Sculpture, Jongno Gallery, Seoul, 2010), divulge the principles of form composition applied to the gemstones and the polymorphic potentialities innate in them (Picture 5). The constituent unit is an undefined polygon. The majority consists of triangles, rectangles, and pentagons, but the types of the polygons are not limited to these three. What is more crucial to notice than the number of angles in these polygons is the fact that their forms are mostly irregular. The form of each unit is determined in intimate correspondence with the final form of the gemstone seeds designed by the artist. Some forms are boldly comprised of bigger and fewer polygonal fragments, while some are densely constructed with a larger number of much smaller polygons. Some are as hefty as prehistoric megaliths, while others are charmingly petite enough to be covered by two hands.
Mainly metal, but the materials of the gemstones vary. Aluminum, steel, stainless steel and others of its kind are preferred. Although we are fairly familiar with these materials, a deeper curiosity looms after knowing that the artist has employed them the most frequently in his oeuvre. Depending on their unique qualities, the materials exert different influences to the shape and size of the gemstones. The artist respects the affective interaction between the qualities of his materials and the shape and size of the gemstones. Here intervenes another important material: color. The artist experiments in numerous ways with the colors that his materials can produce, so that he dresses his gemstones in a vast spectrum of colors beyond one's belief (Picture 6). He applies paint onto the surface, corrodes the surface with industrial chemicals, polishes the surface like a lustrous mirror, or exposes the inner color of the metal by scratching the surface and diffusing the reflection of light. Whether applying, say, candy color paints or generating the colors from the material itself, the professional coloring techniques, which the artist has studied by himself or learned from other specialists, induces the colors of the gemstones in every imaginable manners, transparent and smooth sometimes, while murky and rough other times. What color to use and how? The decision falls within the jurisdiction of the artist's intuition. To summarize, the gemstones are the variegated polyhedral forms created by welding various types of polygonal metal sheets together, then finishing the joints neatly, and lastly covering them with colors and/or luster. All these forms originate in the design of the artist. The most pivotal among the characteristics of the gemstones is that none of them are the same. However, it is equally important to note that these different forms are not extraneous to each other. This is the reason the gemstones in diverse shapes, sizes, and colors can coexist harmoniously by lending one of their edges to each other, as in A Family made in 2014. In this work, the gemstones shine beautifully alone and together as they are in the irregular forms. "Beautifully," my goodness! In this age of the unbeautiful?

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A famous saying goes "not everything is possible in every period" (Heinrich Wöfflin, 1915). It is a myth of the Modern Age that "the artist is a free creator bound to nothing," but in actuality an artwork often participates in debunking the cold fact that its creator is historically manacled to the time he is living in (and this explains the expression of "an unfortunate genius ahead of his time"). This can be buttressed by an anecdote about Stella, who dropped onto the staircase in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and envied Velazquez whose work he saw inside the museum. Stella had no choice but to accept his existence in the late 1950s, i.e. the modernism on its decline, and abandon his yearning to paint like the Spanish Baroque master from the 17th Century, so that he would produce the paintings that are dry insomuch as they feel gloomy by drawing the crosses or rectangles, deduced from the shapes of the canvas, in black bands that mimicked the wooden frame of the canvas.  
Stella's paintings of black stripes also exemplify the ways in which history acts on the work of the artist at a detailed level. The work of an artist is realized in consultation not only with the common regulations of his time, but also with the history of his own professional filed, in this case, the history of art. (This somehow bestows certain meanings upon the artwork. Otherwise, no one would and could recognize them in the end.) Such a reference to the history of art can be driven by two different motives towards the present order: for and against, which are generally formulated as "succession" and "subversion," respectively. The succession in this context means to intensify or expand the present order, while the subversion aims to resist and break from it. If it succeeds, the subversion can launch a new order, perspective, and horizon incommensurable with the past. Stella's venture into the black paintings is representative of that subversion, since it propelled the dissolution of late modernism, which was dominating the hegemonic order of the time. After the modern period, the history of Western art has been teeming with the successive as well as subversive waves. Among them, the subversive movements in the post-WWII art distinguish themselves by bringing about a sort of atavistic pattern that alternates generations. The most conspicuous case would be the apparatuses (such as monochrome, construction, photomontage and assemblage) invented by Constructivism and Dada in the 1920s for the failed cause of overthrowing high modernism, but returned, after skipping one generation, with Minimalism and Pop Art in the 1960s so as to successfully topple late modernism. (If so, the subversion can also be described as a type of succession, the atavistic succession.) What was subverted in the 1960s? It was the triad of artist-composition-form. Still, why did this tripartite alliance deserve to be destroyed and what are the consequences of this subversion?
The subversion was caused by the failure of purist aesthetics. From the inception, this aesthetics had pledged to realize the world of the fine art, where man would neither be instrumentalized nor be fragmented, contrary to the modern industrial society fueled by the principles of the division of labor. (The rejection of representation in modern art concerns this contrast between the two ideals.) And for a long time, the artist performed as the representative of the modern man by keeping that promise. In modern times, when ordinary people were in fact moored to the system of the compartmented labor, the artist spoke for the spirit of the integrated, whole, and free man, who took charge of the entire process of conception-creation-completion (Friedrich Schiller, 1793-95). Nevertheless, the artist could not adhere to the promise after all. This is because the artist was not benefited from patronage, but relied on the market. Within the system of capitalist market, which did not allow the artist to be exempted and protected from it, the work of art came to bear the fundamental paradox that it turned into a special commodity due to its features antagonistic towards the capitalist industries (the rare and unique handicraft, not the cookie-cutter products from factories). Because of the paradox as such, the fine art have been incorporated into the modern industrial society (the institutionalization of art), the battle against which was its initial pledge, and the work of art has become a luxury good secretly distributed in the specialized market (art as fetish), far from "la promesse du bonheur" (Stendhal, 1822) that would promote the dream for a better world. To overturn the world, which disguised the failed implementation of the promise as the myth of art, is tantamount to the advancement of history. In the end, the subversion was to unmask the very myth, which resulted in the death of the author-the abandonment of composition-the deconstruction of form.

The type of subversion delineated so far is still valid and perhaps even more needed today, in that this is the age when the mutual penetration between art and the culture industry strengthens the myth than ever before.Henceitisofgravesignificancetofindthestrategiesofcontemporaryartinthecounter-form,whichholdsagainsttheskullcastedinwhitegoldandembroideredwithamyriadofdiamonds (Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007), and in the anti-form, which defies the beauty of the virtual spectacle that falsifies the reality. However, these approaches share one problem: the self-deprivation of beauty. Accordingly, beauty nowadays has become the ultimate weapon for both contemporary art and the culture industry inasmuch as it is abused by the fabrication of seductive fetishes that lure the gaze.
Is it truly impossible to have the artist, the composition, and the form, which expose the irregularity and dissonance of the reality without covering them up with the fetish of glamorous beauty? If it is possible, this could afford an exit from the visual and/or aesthetic predicament of contemporary art, which has stripped itself of beauty in protest to its abuse. That exit is desperately wanted, even though the chance seems very poor. The Gemstones series of Tae-dong Park looks like a rare effort to find such an exit in the realm of contemporary art. 

August 6, 2015, Juyoun Jo (Western Aesthetics & Art Theory)