Prologue: Transcendence Neurosis

 

 

 

 

On Saturday, November 18, 2023, at 3:00 p.m., a small seminar was held at Hongik University, bringing together graduate students in painting and a few invited contemporary artists. It was an occasion to share the research process behind my recent book, Street Art is Not on the Street, published just a month prior. Rather than offering a simple summary of its contents, I chose to speak about the process through which I attempted to extract a new critical vocabulary for contemporary painting—via a form of expression that has long been marginalized in contemporary art discourse: street art. My goal was clear. I wanted to articulate, with precision and logic, why street art deserves a place in critical discourse and art history.

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​One of the key theoretical tools I employed was Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of Postproduction. Defined by practices like DJing and programming, Postproduction provides a useful framework through which I explored the ways both street art and postproduction art reconfigure the relationship between art (as software) and the institution (as hardware). I tied these modes together through a single keyword: intervention. In both cases—whether street art is transformed into a marketable medium, or postproduction art becomes a form of immersive experience—I proposed the idea of staged intervention, or in other words, simulation. Both genres of art, I argued, heighten their game-like characteristics.​

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But something was missing. I hadn’t yet articulated the larger tendencies of contemporary painting, nor the language that could name them. I needed something drawn not from theory but from life—something specific that still resonated universally. A few nights before the seminar, I found myself flipping through Nation and Aesthetics by Kojin Karatani, a book I often keep close like a talisman. A passage I had underlined caught my eye. It was a meditation on Freud’s theory of the death drive and its cultural implications. Karatani writes:

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“Even after its end, war is repeated in the nightmares of war neurotics. It is not the war as an observed fact, but the invisible war repeated in dreams that changed the framework of Freud's psychoanalysis.”

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Like a hip-hop DJ laying a new beat over a sampled track, I felt compelled to riff on Karatani’s sentence. So I rewrote it like this:

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“Even after its disappearance, simulation is repeated in the objects of simulation neurotics. It is not simulation as a visible practice, but the invisible simulation repeated in artworks that defines contemporary art in the broadest sense.”

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This sentence helped me conclude my presentation and allowed me to gain the support of a few peers. After the seminar, we began discussing how to shape this idea into a theoretical basis for future exhibitions and research. Eventually, we decided to rename the project from “Simulation Neurosis” to Transcendence Neurosis. The name was inspired by the anime Dragon Ball, in which the main character, Son Goku, learns a teleportation technique on a distant planet. Teleportation is a technique in which the index and middle fingers are placed on the forehead, and by thinking of a location, one can instantly move to that place. When we compressed the repetition of simulation into a single word and visualized it, we thought that our consciousness, constantly moving across countless pieces of content, was undergoing an experience similar to using a transcendental ability like Son Goku’s teleportation.

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Transcendence Neurosis is the repeated illusion and frustration of transcendental sensation that occurs in the process of moving between contents or platforms. Digital space seems to offer the experience of intervention, but in reality, it places restrictions within a set of possibilities laid out on a predesigned map. Even if digital technology provides simulations that are close to infinity, they only encompass categories that are computationally measurable. In this way, our imagination and body become subordinated to numbers. A confrontation between the infinity of consciousness and the finite number of possibilities. This is the art of Transcendence Neurosis. By this, we now face a critical historical moment. A crossroads lies before us: whether we will once again attempt a great leap through the expansion of human consciousness, or remain content within the illusion of transcendental sensation. We now face a historical crossroads. Will we pursue a new leap forward through expanded consciousness—or settle into the false transcendence we have come to mistake for freedom?

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Marshall McLuhan, a pioneer in media theory, once wrote in the preface to The Mechanical Bride that his method sought to apply “the techniques of the arts in the practice of social criticism.” This book, however, imagines that logic in reverse. Inspired by McLuhan’s aphoristic style in Understanding Media, I have sampled and recombined fragments of contemporary media in order to confront art with new problems. And like McLuhan, I treat art as a kind of radar for detecting the tremors of technological change. His oft-quoted line—“After three thousand years of explosion by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding”—still rings true. Simulation may be the inevitable destination of that implosion.

This book attempts to map its velocity. If Transcendence Neurosis is the name for this phenomenon, then this work may be understood as a landscape drawn in its wake.

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Hong Sik Kim