People / Critic

Narrative and Image by Song Sanghee: The Living and the Dead

posted 02 May 2019

Anthropology of Images and Contemporary Art: Image and Death (1)

Image culture researcher Lee Nara’s column “Anthropology of Images and Contemporary Art: Image and Death” introduces Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Hans Belting, Georges Didi-Huberman, and other image theorists and their ideas to examine the history and present status of image and its intimate relationship with the anthropological subject “death” in light of selective contemporary artworks that incorporate anthropological and art-historical images and videos. In doing so, Lee attempts to map out the migration of image—its perenniality and universality transcending of time or territory.

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Installation view of 〈Come Back Alive Baby〉 by Song Sanghee. Photoⓒ Kim Heunggyu

Those leading communal lives constantly try to establish a relationship with the dead. For the living, the dead are either subjects for exclusion or summon. The living attempt to imagine the course of death—the journey through which the once living depart and reach the land of the dead—adopting fictional instruments to configure a relationship with the dead hence disrelated. Ancient Greek epic poems are one form of those fictional devices deployed by the living. In countless stories delineating their battles and glories, heroes appear as those who have surpassed life; they’re painted, not as superhuman beings originally excused of birth or death, but as mortals who go on to transcend life. In this narrative lies the irony that, for these mortals to become life-transcending heroes, they must befriend death, wrestling beasts and fighting battles on earth. Roland Schaer points out that in 『The Iliad』, the death of the heroes, namely Sarpedon, Patroclus, and Hector, and the disposal issues of their corpses serve a particularly important role in establishing the idea of “immortality.” Leaving their families, land, and livestock behind, the heroes of 『The Iliad』 arrive at the battlefield—the walls of Troy—where they must fight like wild beasts. Wars birth heroes, and heroes seek revenge. Revenge, of course, procreates more revenge, among ways of which violation of the corpse is key in these epic poems. Only after the families have retrieved the heroes’ corpses, held a funeral, and burned them down to a handful of ashes could the bodies escape the laws of nature—flesh of the dead recycled by the living—and acquire the right to be remembered. The valiant Hector is slain by Achilles, and his corpse is tied to a chariot to be dragged around. Despite his wife’s dissuasion, Hector’s father runs to Achilles, kisses the hand of the man who killed his son, and begs for the body. Achilles accepts the aged father’s entreaty and spares his son’s body from the humiliation, becoming the first epic hero to deviate from the vicious circle of war, revenge, and disgrace.

In a similar way, images also create a pedigree of the living and the dead. Georges Didi-Huberman discusses the meaning of “imago,” the origin of the word “image,” found in the literary work by Roman naturalist Gaius Plinius Secundus. An imago is a funeral mask modeled after the face of the deceased, and therefore, the “resemblance” found in an imago is a resemblance to someone who is both related and lost, a resemblance achieved via direct contact with the deceased body. The Romans were known to be obsessed with genealogy, hence obtaining the imago of the dead as a funeral ritual and keeping it in their homes afterwards was a way of securing the family’s heirloom status. Reflecting on the imago, one of the first uses of image, Didi-Huberman leads our eyes to a history beyond the history of image as an artistic category of visual reenactment as has been perceived by art historians. Instead of determining success or failure of an image and its purpose in the context of visual similarity or dissimilarity, Didi-Huberman proposes that images should be understood as measures of private ritual bridging the living, the dead, and the dying, and in the context of their anthropological resemblance. (Geroges Didi-Huberman, 『Devant le Temps』)

Song Sanghee: The body and skin of history

Two of Song Sanghee’s works were exhibited face-to-face inside a large gallery space at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea. 〈This is the Way the World Ends Not with a Bang but a Whimper〉(2017), installed across from 〈Come Back Alive Baby〉(2017), was a work of Delft-blue tiles paired with recorded sound playing from speakers. Song explains that she drew out images of mushroom clouds—explosions that had destroyed cities and left countless casualties—and turned them into Delft tiles. Seeing as that her tiles look like computer graphic pixels, Song decided to arrange the tiles in random order, allowing for an illusion of blue monochrome as an effect, which hinders immediate recognition of the reproduced subject. For the audience to piece together the image, they must step up, listen, and examine. Looking at the blue tiles, I recalled, oddly enough, the ballpoint pen series by Jan Fabre. Surely, it was just a spontaneous association triggered by the blue color, nevertheless, I decided to take some time to think about the two artists in one context. The blue was specifically the hue and shade of Dutch Delft tiles, but it was also the color of Virgin Mary’s cloak, often painted in particularly exquisite detail in Flemish Renaissance paintings. Fabre, who had produced sleek yet obscene works using bodily fluids at a time when the horror of AIDS epidemic had consumed the planet, employed monotonous strokes and the specific blue in his ballpoint pen series, tactfully referencing and ridiculing the Flemish art tradition—this explains why terms like “bodiless,” “atypical,” “lower materialism” coined by Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille have been used in commentaries on his works. By introducing bodily fluids none other than semen and blood, Fabre made a garish carnival out of death—death, if one had to choose between life and death, that is. The art world had already defined Song’s works as “the return of the bodiless” earlier on, but the “body” in her works, or the lack thereof, manifests itself in a different way. The body, in this case, is a mark of sort; the body only begins to exist when the dust on the floor starts to adhere to the industrial tape tightly wrapped around it (Song Sanghee, 〈Cleaning〉, 2002). While Fabre mocks the history of traditional art sacralizing death, Song mourns the death of the “bodiless” who have failed to become a part of that history.

Song Sanghee’s three-channel video 〈Come Back Alive Baby〉 begins with a story of someone dead, or rather, murdered, though it could just as well be a story of someone who’s survived, or rather, been resurged. Song weaves in the “Agijangsu” fable—about a baby who’s murdered by his own parents immediately after birth then brought back to life, only to be murdered again by the government troops—in between the history of war, state violence, and catastrophes. She creates variations in time and space, entwining an archetypical story with a true story of a certain time and place (history-story), and intermixing self-produced visuals (drawings and videos) with found visual sources that testify to events such as the Mincheonghangnyeon¹⁾, the Inhyeokdang²⁾, and the Dongbaengnim³⁾ incidents, and the fascist eugenics experiment. The parents kill their child and claim that the child didn’t resemble them; the state kills its people and claims that the people didn’t resemble the state.

Song, who had initially planned a science fiction type of work on disasters, discarded the idea upon her first visit to a massacre site. Instead, she traveled to photograph the current sites of the Nazi concentration camps, the Lebensborn human experiment lab, the Ukrainian famine-genocide Holodomor, the bankrupt city of Yubari, and Chernobyl, often finding herself staring into the remaining ruins and particularly, walls. 〈Come Back Alive Baby〉 begins with an image of a tiled wall covered with myriad unmistakable thin lines almost like knife marks. With scenes from the “baby farm” and the old bed remaining in the deserted space as hints, the viewers begin to deduce the meaning of the tiled wall shown in the opening and closing scenes: they must have been the tiles inside the Lebensborn project lab; the marks must have been left by the victims of the Nazi brutality. The evidence of confinement and desperate writhing testify to the violence forced upon the victims’ bodies. And in this respect, the “victims of history” are remembered in the opposite way of how the heroes in epic poems are remembered. If the heroes in epic poems are celebrated and immortalized only after their bodies have been honored by physical battles and cremation, it is only when the physical body or the marks left thereby prove their past existence that these victims of history cease to be objectified. It is only due to the lingering materiality of the evidence that the victims are warranted, by the living, historical and existential dignity. And I must repeat: what we need to recognize from works like 〈Cleaning〉, 〈Blue Hope〉(2004), and 〈The Story of Byeongangsoe〉(2015–2016) is how Song seeks to re-experience and reinterpret history through bodily evidences and paradox.

In a written piece about 〈Come Back Alive Baby〉, Song states that, to her, the wall against which the concentration camp victims were executed, the tiles in the human experiment lab, and the burial site of the victims of the Bodo League massacre⁴⁾ felt, in a way, like “the skin of history.” And seeing the scratched-up tiles inside the screen conjures up memories of a wall tagged with a faint doodle left by an anonymous someone. Out of the whole body, Song chooses to work with the image of “skin,” a disputable organ. In her work, anonymous skin, covered with severe burn marks, overlays tightly onto the image of the tiles, onto the image of the beach dotted with artificial eggs , then to the camera, the screen, and finally, the beholder’s eyes, closing in with fervent intent. After the fable is told and another disaster scene is summoned, the heavily burnt skin reappears along with the images of the tiles and wall, only this time, a hand enters the screen to gently pat the tiles and brush the skin. Maybe it’s the textual context lining out the baby’s cry and the intimidating woman’s plea of her case; maybe it’s the image of the woman with burn marks from hydrochloric acid sprayed by a man; or maybe it’s the skin from the opening scenes of 〈Hiroshima Mon Amour〉(Alain Resnais, 1959), an image now emblematic of post-World War II trauma; but I can’t help but imagine the burnt skin in 〈Come Back Alive Baby〉 as that of a woman. Female skin has historically been a subject of regulation and restriction. While skinless men have been portrayed as heroes who have overcome limitations, skinless women have been labeled as damaged or contaminated. Instead of overturning the predominant representations of victims and women, Song overturns the overriding twentieth century representation of skin as a separating barrier. In 〈Come Back Alive Baby〉, skin is a symbol of contact and infiltration, not separation, and thus the skin is prepositional to the wall. The wall serves as the body, and the skin serves as both history and image. The tiles and skin are surfaces, scarred and marred. But owing to the wounds, the surface becomes a stratum, layered with deposits of time—the surface and stratum become indistinguishable by the countless gestures the body poses as it loses its physicality, or by the marks left by the struggle. This is why images of death are often surfaces with depth.

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Installation view of 〈Come Back Alive Baby〉 at the MMCA. Photoⓒ Song Sanghee

Georges Didi-Huberman once used the bark of a tree as a metaphor for historical image. Because a tree expresses and presents itself to us through its bark, the bark is less an external layer of the tree but more of something the tree manifests itself through. Didi-Huberman asserts that the irregular, discontinuous, uneven bark “is no less true than the trunk,” that “it lies somewhere in the interface between a transient appearance and a lasting inscription. Or else it designates precisely the inscribed appearance, the lasting transience of our own life decisions, of our experience undergone or undertaken.” The trunk of the tree is upheld by the bark, which is not to say that the bark is always absolute and intact. The bark may be clinging to the tree at one point, but it may also unravel and fall into our hands at another. In other words, the bark is something that undergoes constant death yet still remains. The bark is inherently an object, therefore could never be pure. Through this metaphor, Didi-Huberman addresses the impurity, contingency, truthfulness, affluence, and relativity indwelling images of history. In this sense, it would be safe to imagine what Song described as “the skin of history” as the bark.

Film Clips and Found Footage

We remember the early-twentieth-century outpour of war documentaries and news footage that ensued the world wars. As strategic propaganda became essential, one by one, national military forces began to establish new units dedicated to video documentation. Lighter-weight video cameras began turning up. Day after day, the public stared blankly into the images on the news. A full-scale war and the post-war paradigm encouraged the desire to video-tape and archive every minute event. Video, or “film,” was considered as the solution to total and complete documentation of history. Film critic André Bazin praised the truthfulness of the all-recording camera but also feared “total war,” that is, imaginations of “total history” that seemed to be emerging with the film era. In “On Why We Fight: History, Documentation, and the Newsreel,” an essay about 〈Why We Fight〉(1946), a found-footage documentary film produced by writer and filmmaker Frank Capra, Bazin expresses foremost his bafflement towards the conspiracy between the war and film. Bear in mind that this was 1946, a time when everyone was haplessly exposed to shocking, graphic images they had never before seen or imagined—mounds of cadavers pouring out from the concentration camps, for example—in respect to which some have written that “perspective” in this particular period had to be “pure,” inevitably due to its lack of distance from the atrocious images of history. At such a time when people were collectively traumatized by the horrific images of the war and redefining the idea of human malice and justice, Bazin sought to address the indecency and violence of film, notwithstanding its audacious exposé of injustice. Looking at the flood of video recordings, documentary films, and live broadcasts post-World War II, standing before the piercing eye of the omnipresent camera, Bazin feels the kind of exhilaration a Roman emperor would have felt looking down at the burning city of Rome. From Bazin’s perspective, a world sieged by cameras continuously sheds image, its outermost skin, hence calls into question the contingency and truthfulness of “the bark” (image) upholding the trunk (world), as discussed earlier.

The English and French words “film” and “pellicule” originate from the Latin word “pellis,” meaning “a thin piece of skin,” and the Late Latin word “pellicula,” which means “removed skin, peel, or foreskin.” Today, the French word “pellicule” is used to signify both skin and film, and the English word “film” also refers to the thin tape used in motion pictures as well as other thin-layered objects. In 1946, Bazin was already aware of the linguistic proximity between skin and film, writing, “As soon as it forms, History’s skin (la peau de l’Histoire) peels off again (pellicule).” Bazin perhaps envisioned something like the slough of an insect, skin removed from the body. He would have wanted to see historical events, fast-engraved onto film even before they’re endowed with meaning (depth), as “the skin” of history. Though rather pessimistic, Bazin sensed early on, the ambivalence of the external surface: how it’s simultaneously superficial and revelational, visual and sensual like the skin or the bark. After watching Nicole Védrès’ found-footage documentary 〈Paris 1900〉(1947), Bazin wrote in a critique titled after Marcel Proust’s 〈In Search of Lost Time〉 that documentaries incorporating found footage can be remarkable tools for portraying death, therefore life, loss, and contingency, as he foresaw the advent of an era in which worldly meaning can only be found within the superficiality of the film.

In 2017, individuals with smartphones and camera drones at their disposal upload realtime reports more prompt and provocative than films or TV broadcasts. In 2017, the physical world is instantly processed into data to become information, and events are documented and saved in an external repository, without having to be processed by the confined human memory. In 2017, Song Sanghee writes: “I see these days, in the papers and online, reports of attacks and bombings, photographs of missile drops from all around the globe. War has now become an everyday image. The catastrophic realities exist as images surrounding us, and we live surrounded, emotionless and hollow.” Song continues to collect the pieces, the skin of history, but also feels exhausted by the removed peels that have failed to gain meaning. And as viewers, we need to pay closer attention to this aspect of dilemma in her works.

Installation view of 〈This is the Way the World Ends Not with a Bang but a Whimper〉. Photoⓒ Kim Heunggyu

Removed pieces, placed pieces

If the ’50s gave rise to dramatic, documentary, and experimental films with recycled footage of educational videos or news broadcasts, the ’80s introduced VHS, thanks to which found footage was widely used in films. Today’s digital archive era provides extended access to and manipulation of recorded content. As much as archiving is a remembering and preserving process, it is also a process of subsumption and exclusion. Archiving is a means of domination, but can also be an act of resistance towards the mainstream archive. Archiving is also a desire for placement as much as it is an attempt for displacement. By rearranging archived images, Song tries to resist the carpet-bomb of images that disable us. She almost seems to believe that we can overcome the inability only when the “sentiments” of history infiltrate into our senses and minds. 〈Come Back Alive Baby〉 is an effort to rearrange the skin, the film, the archive of history, in order to give life to the sentiments.

Regardless of nitrocellulose or cellulose acetate, film, being a delicate and sensitive imaging, recording, and projection medium, has become almost obsolete in filming environments of the digital age. But found footage—a section extracted from reports, personal videos, documentary videos, or even dramatic films used in its original or modified form—particularly calls to mind the etymology of the word “film” and its context as “a piece of removed skin.” Film as a fragment of skin instead of a whole—as Jean-Luc Nancy had appropriately pointed out, the “removed” skin no longer holds value as a “cover.” The removed pieces of film do not, or at least not immediately, constitute “total history.” Consumed with the idea of “history’s skin,” Song “removes” the photographs and video clips archiving the history of violence and “places” them next to the images of lands and walls tainted by history. This found footage is pieces of evidence that point to the people excluded or erased from “total history,” people raped of their human existence and dignity. The first part of 〈Come Back Alive Baby〉 shows photos of victims’ trial records, drowned in what looks like a developing solution. As the light refracts and the liquid moves, the photos begin to resemble scarred or wrinkled skin. If not, it almost feels like the timid movements around the photos are gently shaking the benumbed scars of the past awake. The requiem of the candlelight flickering over the picture of the Holodomor has the same effect. For Song, a requiem is, most importantly, an act of breathing life into the defeated, the immobile, the frozen moment in time, allowing them the energy to squirm again. In other words, “the skin of history” is like a scarred surface that has long lost its grain (context). A scar is a mark left by loss, but more importantly, a mark left on the still-living. Thus the scar imbues the skin with historicity. Song discovers and extracts marks remaining from incidents, and leaves her own mark on the photographs. Then through the powers vested in media such as water, fire, and moving camera, she agitates the marks as if to stir up forgotten sorrows.

But then again, when these images—residences remaining in a disaster-stricken city, Holodomor victims on the ground, drawings of two insects facing one another—are placed in a line next to one another, I can’t help but wonder: is 〈Come Back Alive Baby〉 an endless act of reverting individual events and subjects back to one particular “form”? The piece stumbles noticeably when Song, who has, up until then, picked up the fallen pieces and faced the loss, attempts to revive the souls. Images, sound, and words compete with one another just to become another ornament. The captions that read “Baby, I can’t speak” or “I no longer have a tongue” over the muted scenes of the “baby farm” cry out too loud. The clips and voice of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, falls right within the time frame of the “Agijangsu” fable, within the narrative: “We must kill this baby in order to realize our ideals.” Moreover, the camera reposes the wrongful deaths and moves onto the grave of Yun Isang, the venerated composer (his music is used in the opening scene of the piece), as if to come to a conclusion that the spirits of the dead were guided off into the arms of a “good father.” The caption, “The revived baby flew up into the air like a white hawk,” appears last before we’re faced with a hand appeasing the tiles, the wall, and the burnt skin. Does this signify reconciliation of the gap between the seen and the unseen, between the tale and the evidence? Without this gap, how can we protest to history?

I wrote above that Song Sanghee seeks to access the sentiments of history. The history Song is concerned with is that of the lost. She makes us look around for such fragments of skin—scarred with a history of loss—the surface, the fragment, the depth. In discussing the sentiments conjured by historic images, Georges Didi Huberman once noted that we can never “entirely possess an image” but can only “follow its movement as far as possible.” Videos documenting Chernobyl are results of the calamity itself in historical context; we must never forget this. But fragmented records create breaches in between recorded history to write it anew; we must never stop this. This is how we follow the movements of “the surviving images.” Song cordially identifies fragmented images both created as a result of and neglected by history, yet her requiescent archiving process proceeds dubiously back and forth mending the gaps between the fragments and placing a cover over all.

1 Mincheonghangnyeon Incident: In April 1974, more than 180 students and social figures related to the Mincheonghangnyeon (National League of Democratic Youths and Students) were wrongfully arrested and prosecuted for attempting to overthrow the nation under Communist control.
2 Inhyeokdang/People’s Revolutionary Party Incident: In 1964 and 1974, innocent individuals were wrongfully accused of socialist inclinations according to the Anti-Communism Law and National Security Law, respectively, and prosecuted for what turned out to be government-fabricated incidents.
3 Dongbaengnim/East Berlin Spy Incident: In 1967, the Korean government forcefully abducted and repatriated more than 194 artists, intellectuals and students residing in Europe, wrongfully accusing them of spying for North Korea.
4 The Bodo League massacre: In 1950, during the Korean War, an estimated 110,000 civilians suspected to be Communists were mass-murdered by South Korean soldiers, and the massacre was concealed by the government until the late 1990s.

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