멈추듯 흐르듯 나무와 함께 해온 원로 조각가의 일하는 삶
참여작가ㅣ심문섭

2년전 국립현대미술관에서 대규모 회고전을 가졌던 심문섭은 사실 우리에게 <목신(木神)> 연작으로 익히 알려져 있는 원로조각가이다. 80년초부터 긴 시간 나무에 매달려 온 그의 특별한 시리즈 작품을 미공개작과 더불어 집중적으로 조명하며 한국에서는 처음으로 미술관에서 목신만 모아 보여주는 이 전시는 살아있는 나무를 품은 건축으로 유명한 블루메미술관에서 선보인다. <나무와 만나다-전후 한국현대목조각의 흐름>,<조각의 속도>전과 같이 한국 조각사의 흐름을 새롭게 해석해온 공간에서 심문섭이 오랜 기간 다루어온 나무와의 일은 모든 인간의 조건인 일하는 삶에 어떤 영감을 줄 수 있는가 일의 관점에서 원로조각가의 작업을 새로이 고찰해보고자 한다. 돌, 흙, 나무와 같은 자연의 재료를 주로 다루어온 심문섭은 형태 중심의 조각보다 있는 그대로의 물질과 조각가의 행위 사이에 다양한 관계의 스펙트럼을 드러내는 장으로서 작품을 만들어왔다. 그 중 그가 1982년부터 14년간 <목신>시리즈로 나무에 몰두한 작업은 다른 재료와의 만남보다 작업의 온도와 그 언어의 너비가 넓다. 그리하여 결코 단일하지 않은 삶의 은유를 많이 포괄하고 있다. 여러 개의 캔버스천 모서리를 사포로 이곳저곳 마모시킨 상태, 다수의 점토판에 긁거나 찢거나 누른 흔적들 같이 물질에 행위를 가한 즉물적인 상황들을 나열한 듯한 작품이 나무에는 없다. 물질의 정직한 표정이 드러나는 행위의 순간 자체를 연장하기보다 나무는 “어딘지 머물고, 귀결되지 않는 일”로 그를 이끌었기 때문이다. 멈춤이 있지만 끝나지 않는 것. 흐름과도 같은 일을 그는 깎기의 과정으로 담아내었다. 덤벼들지 않고 관조를 허락하는 멈춤이 있는 일이자 그가 나무를 깎는 과정은 결론을 염두에 두지 않고 리듬을 타는 일이기도 하다. 그는 끌로 나무의 표면을 처내거나 안으로 파가는 반복적 행위가 기계적으로 반복되는 것이 아닌 “미묘하게 변해가는 리듬” 같은 것이고 그것이 “어떤 자연적인 것, 나무가 자라나서 생성하는 그런 리듬과 통한다”고 말한다. 마치 품에 안고 깎은 듯 80년대 초반 표면이 반들반들해진 작은 작품들에서부터 무심히 처내기만 한 듯한 크고 거친 작품들까지 나무의 끝자락인 표면에서 느껴지는 손의 리듬은 오브제의 윤곽선에 갇히지 않고 공간으로 나아간다. 이는 그가 공간을 정지된 배경으로 삼는 것이 아니라 확장된 장으로 나무가 지닌 본래의 자연적 에너지 그리고 나무와 만난 인간의 리듬이 그것이 머무는 공간을 흔들림의 상태로 이끄는 것이다. 이때 흔들림이란 미니멀리즘 이후 관객의 공간과 실제적 시간, 장소성 등을 포괄함으로써 조각이 갖게 된 가변성, 불확실성과 연관된 것이기보다 많은 평론가들이 ‘시적’이라고 평한 단일하지 않은 지각과 인식, 정서의 두께를 포괄하는 상태에 가깝다. 이러한 상태는 그가 세우지 않고 바닥에 뉘여 ‘배나 관처럼 인간의 몸을 이동시키는 사물’(카트린 프랑블랭)을 연상하게 하거나 ‘떠나려는 의지’(박신의), ‘물의 기운’(김호기)이 감돌고 있는 듯한 수평적 작품에서 극대화되어 있다. 작가의 손을 떠나서도 고정되고 닫히지 않는 무언가로 남기 위해 그는 한동안 나무에 몰입하였고 그 몰입의 과정은 “완결성을 뛰어넘어 ‘일’로써 귀결되기를 원한다”라는 작가의 말처럼 그의 <목신>은 다분히 조각적이면서도 단순히 조각적이라 축약할 수 없는 의식적 움직임을 담고 있다. 그가 나무를 다룬 것은 ‘대상에 대한 사역(使役)의 흔적’이 아니라(타나 아라타) ‘이해의 한 형태’였다(루디 치아니피)라는 평은 정확하며 그의 예술작업은 관계의 연결방식으로써 삶의 언어로 확장되어 가는 것이다. <목신>에서 그가 벌인 자연과의 일은 예술적 완결성을 향한 누군가의 노동에 국한되는 것이 아니라 생명형태의 본질인 관계를 향해 자신을 무한히 열어나가고 흐르게 하는 살아있는 모두의 일로 겹쳐지는 것이다. 사람과 같이 기억, 대화, 연결로 가득한 존재인 나무와의 일을 통해 그는 매일 타자와 세계와의 관계 속에서 일하며 살아가는 모든 이의 삶으로 연결되고 있다. 

후원ㅣ문화예술위원회
기획ㅣ김은영
진행 및 교육ㅣ김소영, 김민지, 이회남, 박경민

The path of pausing and flowing with the wood
Participating artistㅣShim Moon Seup

Shim Moon-Seup, who had a major retrospective a couple of years ago at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, is an elder sculptor who is actually well known to us through his <Wood Deity> series. Focusing on his work series from the lengthy period between the early 1980s and the mid-90s that were devoted to wood, along with his unpublished works, this exhibition provides an opportunity to solely gather and show the <Wood Deity> series in a museum for the first time in Korea. It was Japan that first paid attention to his wooden works. Beginning with his solo exhibition at Tokyo Gallery in 1985, the merit of <Wood Deity> was recognized the following year in Milan, and also in New York and Paris as well as many cities in Japan. In Korea, the first exhibition that focused on these works was held at Hyundai Gallery in 1990. After some 30 years, we are reexamining his <Wood Deity> here at the Museum. We hope that the architectural mission of Blume Museum of Contemporary Art that was built to encompass a living tree, and the space that has been reinterpreting the flow of Korea’s history of sculpture through exhibitions such as <Encountering Tree - The Flow of Korean Wooden Sculpture Since the 1960's> and <The Velocity of Sculpture>, will enable his work to be read in yet another language. We want to consider the works of the senior sculptor from the perspective of how the artist's long handling of wood can inspire the working life that is the condition of all human beings. Mainly working with natural materials such as stone, soil, and wood, Shim Moon-Seup has been making sculpture which, instead of being form-oriented, reveals the spectrum of various relations between the materials themselves and the sculptor's actions. Among them, the <Wood Deity> series in which he devoted himself to wood for 14 years from the year 1982, has a greater range in temperature and language than his matchup with other materials. Hence it covers not just one, but various metaphors of life. There is nothing in his wooden works that seem to parade instantaneous situations acted upon the material, such as signs of the edges of the canvas sanded down, or the scratching and tearing and pressing applied on multiple clay tablets. This is because according to him, wood has led him to what "resides at some place and is never concluded", rather than prolonging the instant of the act itself in which the honest expression of matter is revealed. That, which halts yet does not end. He has captured this flow-like work in the process of carving. Carving the wood requires him to first wait. The action begins slowly through a long conversation with the object where the raw nature contains “the principle of incompletion”, and the original shape of the wood is examined in which it was cut into “a block of wood and has been weathered”. The action is minimized by respect and discovery, not by purposeful control or regulation. Thus, his wood sometimes remain as vertical pillars which reveal the fundaments of Mother Nature recorded in the trees that are the great connectors of nature, and by passing through a process of death that is as long as their lives, appear in space as old objects that emit much more individualized emotions and symbols from their human years. His first encounter with wood was when he made a slingshot in his childhood to play soldiers amongst the tree-trunks. He says that the memory of branches of the trees rooted in the ground, creating movement in the hands of people instead of the wind, and the encounter during the restoration of Namdaemun in the 1960s with an old wood that had been drenched and dried for over a 100 years, gave him the thought of instilling a new life to it, becoming the beginning of the <Wood Deity>. Frequenting the Wangsimni Sawmill where old timbers that contain the years with humans are piled up, and working with the wood that go beyond arm’s length and are spread out as though entering the inside of a large trunk tree, such as big floor reinforcements of modern wooden architecture, seem to have come from a mere observation, to gradually include the process of vibrating in unison. His process of carving wood is a work that allows for pauses and contemplation rather than plunging into it, and it also involves getting into the rhythm without giving thought to the conclusion. He says that the repetitive action of chiseling or digging into the surface of wood is not a mechanical repetition but rather some sort of "subtly changing rhythm," and that it is "connected to something natural, the kind of rhythm that the growth of a tree produces." From the small pieces with smooth surfaces of the early 80's that seem to have been cuddled whilst being carved, to the large and rough pieces that seemingly were uncaringly cut out, the rhythm of the hand that can be felt at the surface of the wood is not confined to the outline of the object but radiates out into space. He does not use the space as a stationary background but as an extended field, where the inherent natural energy of the wood and the rhythm of human beings that have encountered the wood leads the space that it resides into a state of vibration. Here, the vibration isn’t related to the variability and uncertainty that sculpture came to possess since minimalism by incorporating the space of the audience and actual time and place, but is closer to the state that encompasses the depth of non-uniform perception, understanding, and emotion, which many critics have described as ‘poetic’. This state of being is maximized in horizontal works, which he does not erect but instead lays on the floor to be reminiscent of "objects that move the human body such as a ship or a coffin", and where the “will to leave" and the “aura of water" seem to be hanging about. The image of wood that connects with the horizon rather than standing vertical like a human being overlaps with the environment of the artist, who grew up in Tongyeong. Like the words of the artist that seeing the wood being made into oars in the oar manufacturer of the village, where its livelihood depended on the sea, was his first experience of its completion, wood to him is a being where retention and flow coexist as in a ship's berth that holds the premise of departure. Hence he does not seek completeness in handling wood. He and the wood each face a state of incompletion, as though claiming that the reason why there are more horizontal works than vertical works is because what is vertical is integral whole so that there is no room for him to enter. For something that remains unfixed and unclosed even after leaving the artist's hands, he immersed himself in wood for a while, and like the artist’s words that he wants the immersion to “go beyond perfection and end up as ‘work’”, his <Wood Deity> is very much sculptural yet contains conscious movements that cannot simply be summarized as sculptural. The criticism that he dealt with wood not as a “trace of fatigue labor”, but as a “form of understanding” is spot on, and as a connection method of relationship, his artwork extends to the language of life. What he is doing with nature in the <Wood Deity> is not just someone's labor for artistic perfection, but overlaps with the matter of all living beings that make him open up and flow unlimitedly towards the relationship that is the essence of life-forms. Through his work with wood that is full of memory, dialogue, and connection just like humans, he is daily connected to the lives of everyone who lives and works in a relationship with the others and the world.