- Reading Over a Reading of Bones On the double meaning of Gim Uisik's 'bones' and 'writing' Sukyung Chung Aesthetics, Art critic ■ Big bones so white they seem to emit light. There are four evenly-hung black-and-white photographs, looking like X-ray images. Hanging beside these is something like a primitive shamanic mask–perhaps a bovine skull–then after passing multiple-exposure photographs of another bone, you next come upon the large leg bone of a cow, lit by a spotlight in a transparent acrylic box. When I approach it, thinking it may be an actual bone from the earlier images, I see running lists of what appear to be written sentences, made up of character-like symbols, forming certain patterns like ngerprints. No matter how hard I look, though, it is impossible to decipher the writing. Turning in another direction, a 12-minute lm called "Hommage de Stanley Kubrick" is being shown, in which a portion of Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' has been edited to splice in a simulated image of a bone. Like this, the piece exhibited at the Clayarch Gimhae Museum gives us a compact look at the recent direction of Gim Uisik 's work, characterized by 'white bones' and the act of 'writing'. Actually, the signicance the artist gives to the writing component on the seemingly identical white bones varies from one piece to the next, and from one period to another. In our interview, Gim said that the bones used as the material for 'Nature' (Work 1) concern the subject of trauma, objectied by a trafc accident he had a few years earlier. He described the indecipherable writing on the bones as some sort of obliviating procedure (manggaksul, 忘却術) to erase painful memories. Regarding the (at rst glance seemingly identical) materials in 'Bone' (work 2), he gave an explanation involving archetypal proto-traces of human mortality, and described the writing as a historical record in the form of some sort of collective mnemonic. While quite compelling, at the same time, hearing him talk was very frustrating, sounding somehow like sophistry. ■■ These explanations Gim gave of his work remind me of a passage from a story from Ficciones, a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), called "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" : "Cervantes' text and Menard' s are verbally identical, but the second is almost innitely richer.” This obscure or exasperating argument, misused as a justication for plagiarism, seems to be repeated by Gim. To those who feel exasperated by Borges, Gim must be exasperating, too. Just as Borges went to great lengths not to sound sophistic, Gim' s explanations also require additional subtle elaboration. ■■■ A somewhat outlandish and dry semiotic approach seems inevitable. The possibility that the content of the Don Quixote written by Pierre Menard - word-for-word identical to Cervantes' Don Quixote – is subtler and richer than the original exists only if the identical words (the signiers) are imbued with different meanings (the signied) when each of the authors uses them. Likewise, the justication for Gim' s explanatory method depends on whether we accept the argument that identicallooking materials and acts (the signiers) can be imbued with different meanings, even when used repeatedly by the same person (the artist himself). Thus, in light of the unique way that change occurs in the dimension of meaning in Gim' s work, with no change in the dimensions of signiers or materials, and in light of its editorial character, might it not be just the thing to name Gim' s work "Reading Over a Reading of Bones"? (This is, of course, a parody of 'writing over a palimpsest'.) 'Bones' and 'writing'– or the pseudo-letters that result from the act of writing–are the recurrent signiers in Gim's artworks. Then, how can the two signiers homonymously be articulated in manifold ways? The important thing is not the theoretical possibility (the possible), but the actual potentiality (the virtual), that is, the real possibility of activation . The feasibility of this potentiality (the virtual) depends on the active substitution of the signier, in other words, how much each signier is able to attract other signiers to where it is. Of course, Gim does not forget that it is the physical and sensual allure of his objects that pulls the trigger in the process of substituting such a signier (or, the "free play" or "slippage" of the signier). He uses a technique of growing a single bone to an enormous size, agglomerating bones that are not large, and mounting them on an overwhelming scale in a somewhat dry and somber space, reminiscent of a museum of natural history; this is a brilliant and clever device which immediately grabs the viewer' s attention and allows the bones to evoke a plethora of diverse meanings (the signied). Let us rst consider the case of bones. What is a bone? More than anything, it is a trace. The bones are clearly placed before our eyes, but the way they are articulated is not as a practical presence. As a trace, a bone serves as an index/indicator pointing to something else. That is the way we have routinely represented bones. In fact, a 'bone' is a very fascinating object with a lot of 'hooks' . For all that, it was not right from the start that artist Gim used bones as the chalkboard for his obliviating procedure (manggaksul, 忘却術) to forget the trauma and the pain. Various everyday objects once took the place of those whitishly discolored and stripped bones. Somewhere along the way, the bones that captivated Gim through the shock and pain from the horrible scene of his trafc accident have since overpowered other objects, holding a multilayered fascination that other everyday objects cannot surpass. The next step for the person who has discovered the bone as trace and who is 'hooked' by that fascination is to also trace. Both the artist and the viewer are tracers. Tracing may point towards a very personal and traumatic past–a trafc accident–or may point towards something shared and universal–the more ancient past of life forms (like something from a museum of natural history). In this tracing process, the same signier–the bone–allows for articulation of variously different meanings (the signied), such as pain, accidents, violence, death, primitive tools, nature, history, and so on and so forth. ■■■■ The Austrian psychoanalyst, Viktor Emil Frankl (1905-1997), who sublimated his experience at the Auschwitz concentration camp into academic study, presented an interesting insight in the book that brought him public renown, Man's Search for Meaning (1946). The insight is that Homo sapiens–human beings who have the power of thinking–best demonstrate their inherent ability to seek meaning when they are in situations of suffering. So, making a slightly twisted rhyme on 'Homo sapiens' , he coined the term "Homo patiens" : "the suffering man, the man who knows how to suffer, how to mold even his sufferings into a human achievement." Frankl' s insight into the human condition offers another clue for understanding Gim' s work and how he explains it. In Gim' s act of writing on bones in his work, the starting point is, above all else, pain. However, from the outset, it is not possible that the obliviating procedure (manggaksul, 忘却術) for erasing the memory of that pain can serve as the be-all and end-all of the work. There is no such painful memory that can be erased simply by effacing it. The massive insight cast by the notion of 'Homo patiens' is that, in order to desensitize pain so as to prevent it from further affecting the subject, in fact, the operation of forgetting absolutely requires a process of assigning a different meaning to the pain, that is, signifying it differently. This is similar to the repeated projection process that Freud discovered when healing trauma patients; semiotically speaking, this process follows the same logic of Derrida's différance, referring to "difference and deferral of meaning," in which there is glissement or slippage of meaning between one signier and another. This process is both the reason, and at the same time the principle, under which Gim continues to endow his 'bones' and 'writing' with different meanings. Therefore, it is very signicant that the work, which was begun as an obliviating procedure (manggaksul, 忘却術) to erase painful memories, is completed by performing the act of 'writing' on 'bone,' the subject of trauma. To wit, 'writing' is essentially an action of 'meaning' or 'signifying'. Although the resulting symbols are indecipherable pseudo-characters that appear closer to patterns, the process of the writing act must have been rife with a multitude of meanings that appeared inside his head. Might that ood of meanings not have ultimately transcended the objects–the bones–and the action of writing, entering a dimension of new meaning, beyond the meaning that was effaced? It seems that, from the beginning of time through the space age, from the sensed material world to the supersensory world, those meanings from Gim' s mind and memory have undergone repeated expansion. ■■■■■ The question that now remains is how long these artworks will be repeated. I just want to raise the concern that, although in principle Gim' s artworks have an open texture of homonymous proliferation, if he keeps repeating this recent style of work, it seems that he could become trapped in a tautological closed circuit of iterative cycles. According to Frankl's logotherapy, discovering sufcient meaning in suffering soon leads to healing, so there is no reason to keep circling around the trauma. I hope that someday, if not right now, that not only the trajectory of meaning but also the trajectory of objects can move forward into an open texture of proliferation.