• 미술이론과 현장
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• 제10호
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• pp.85-103
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• 2010

Mona Hatoum and community make unlikely bedfellows. From her beginnings as a teenage exile to her maturity as an internationally celebrated artistic nomad, Hatoum defies classification within any single geographical or cultural community. Attempting, however, to locate specific points of contact between her and certain communities in terms of artist-in-residence projects in which she participated might be a particularly fruitful way of circumventing her notorious critical resistance to identity and her refusal of homogeneity. This paper starts with Miwon Kwon's critique of contemporary practices in community-based art, which locate an essentialising force that isolates a single point of commonality and overlooks authentic differences. It then turns to Jean-Luc Nancy's reconceptualization of community as 'unworked' and 'being-in-common' to provide analytical tools for avoiding the dangers of essentialism. By examining the three residencies that Hatoum accepted in the mid-1990s in the light of Nancy's observations and theories, and by bringing the idea of artistic nomadism and that of community into juxtaposition, we hope to show that Hatoum succeeds in finding an equilibrium between art and community, and that this sheds new light on the issues raised in recent discussions on such relationship.

• 미술이론과 현장
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• 제15호
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• pp.31-49
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• 2013

This paper delves into the recent 'paintings' of African-American artist David Hammons, which combine rubbish-like plastic wraps with the abstract-expressionist style paintings. In straddling between rubbish and art object, his works tend to blur the boundary drawn between two opposite categories in value, art and garbage, provoking the sophisticated taste of Upper-East-side white community in Manhattan, New York. Choosing the venue of his exhibition at a commercial gallery, Hammons's creative efforts is also a critique of what can be seen as the dominance of abstract expressionism and white elitism in American art history. The artist is known for his use of unconventional materials in art making such as black hair, barbecue bones, and elephant droppings, ones that are often associated with African-American experiences in all different levels. Since his debut in the art scene in the 1970s, Hammons has pursued the view of art-making as a medium for provoking contentious issues of racial relations in the States. On the other hand, the reception of Hammons's work as African-American art can be potentially quite limiting, overlooking as it does multi-faceted meanings of his art practice. His unconventional approach to art often took him outside art galleries and museums, where he was seen using a variety of common materials for site-specific installations and performances. Staged in different parts of Manhattan, these acts of art making traverse seemingly opposite communities and cultures, often blurring their boundaries. Hammons's artistic practice can label him what Abdul Jan Mohamed calls "specular border intellectual", revealing as it does the symbiosis of binary oppositions that is basic to the experience of communnal living.