The question of the art system, and the individual's positioning within, is a broad-based issue, addressed in various ways by these exhibited works. As such, the art system is an abstract structure organising the production, context, reception and distribution of artworks, as well as at the same time retroactively defining meaning – even when the artist's work singularly lacks any such intention. This process generates a variety of disciplines, such as the construction of meaning, symbolic relations and the distribution of power (visibility), which provides internal regulation, not only of knowledge, but also of value, both with regard to an individual artwork as well as entire regions that may (however unwillingly) be represented by a single piece. Within the geopolitical topography of art, the uncompromising abyss of distinction between Western and Eastern contemporary art is becoming ever-more exposed.
Such distinction reflects the geopolitical reality of contemporary political systems common to the first (“developed”) world – which are not indigenous to art – whilst at the same time it is this very reality which gives birth to the internal, symbolic topography of art, defining all Eastern art on the basis of some new specific identity, painfully constructed through the creation of art and culture.
The question of the art system, as an instance in the construction of knowledge as to art and appraisal of its value, not only pertains to broader realities of individual cultural identities not indigenous to art, but also notions which are completely art indigenous, such as questions as to the author (and the related market value); questions pertaining to the search for one's prehistory (the ambivalent (in)ability to refer to similar artistic practices in the past, as well as the construction of one’s own history); the question of (in)ability to choose one's own position or identity within an organised network of art and social habitat within a local or international milieu; together with the question of contextualisation of art within the ‘museumalisation’ of the artwork and within the construction of national icons and related value symbols, which may extend the circumstances of its meaning/value/market value within limits that are unpredictable.
These are the questions addressed by the exhibited works, as individual points of reference in a symbolic intertwining of the art system within a systematic network structure – in the broadest sense of the word. Rather than focussing on the search for answers to a single range of questions, the exhibition simultaneously poses allegedly various and unrelated questions (such as the issues of Western and Eastern art, and the question of originality) in order to point to their intrinsic and complex intertwining, which determines the very nature of the art system, and simultaneously assumes brutally real as well as extremely speculative characteristics as regards structure.
In his work entitled Death Anniversary, Vladimir Nikolić stands against predominant western ideology, which doesn't allow artists from the Balkans any existence other than those which are peculiar or, ethnologically, geographically and politically marked by their region. Thus Nikolić ultimately paraphrases this western orientalistic view of a Balkan individual, and finally becomes this homo balcanicus who in his own exotic, picturesque, ethically-anti-modern and prehistoric way pays tribute to the memory of Marcel Duchamp. The Anniversary therefore becomes an earmark of forced »balkanisation« and voluntary orientalisation of contemporary eastern art, for an imposed identity which beforehand defines its character and position, whilst at the same time efficiently silencing its voice under the forced mask of an ethnologically-tribal curio. Alban Muja’s Free Your Mind, deals with the pantheon of international contemporary art. He frames the selection of resounding names in the tense countdown of role models, which – because of Muja’s desire for his own sovereign artistic identity, free of any such role models – becomes some sort of exorcism of the artistic spirits. In the perspective of a young artist from a country deemed to be at the margins and periphery, the list of names oscillates between wish and frustration; namely, Muja’s legitimate wish to create his own artistic identity within the densely populated past and present of contemporary art, is drastically conditioned by the geopolitical realities of the environment he was born into. One’s own historical and political identity is simultaneously a blessing and a curse on the road to dominion and autonomy in artistic creation. Such is also the topic of The Art of Bosnia and Herzegovina Is Within the Borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Veso Sovilj. His work reflects the current question of »pro-Bosnian politics« in post-modern Bosnia, where the territory is the ultimate notion and where the very preservation of Bosnia-and-Herzegovina as a state is based on ensuring the continuity of its domain. In such a way, Sovilj paraphrases the situation of contemporary art in Bosnia- Herzegovina, which is – due to the geopolitical determination of the environment and the systematic closing-up of borders within the state – pushed to the margin, and consequently erased from the international map of contemporary art.
Authors from a country which is not integrated in the »proper« historical order, and are, accordingly, incompatible with the development of modern and contemporary western art, share a similar predicament. The Meeting or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet by Şener Özmen and Cengiz Tekin paraphrases any engagement, even the most earnest – such as, for example, Courbet's – as an act of tragicomedy and farce doomed to mockery. Artists from a country which lacks an authorised history of modern art can face the situation of engaged artistic practise merely through trivialisation and banalisation of hallowed history. Which raises the question: can engaged practise within the endless thicket of benign contemporary art today only present itself as an absurd travesty? The attributes of modern and contemporary art are dealt with in a similar way by Igor Eškinja. In his work Untitled (Realism), he creates on a gallery wall a Babylonia of markers which seem to lose their proper reference because of their crossing and intertwining, thus becoming real, the actual realism of the system of art history. In this light, the categorisation, classification, systematisation and distribution of knowledge of contemporary art become a game with empty markers, an absurd complicated mesh of adjectives that can no longer grasp the essence of artistic work or harness it into the dominant narrations of modern and contemporary art. In his work Chronos Devouring His Own Children, Nemanja Cvijanović reduces the statement of an artwork to bare materialism. He ironically praises possession as the ultimate threshold of the piece, and something which is only realised upon closing the deal; only when the customer gains title, is the artwork made possible/realised. The issue of authorship is thus driven to the utmost cynical point, the very one which ultimately – in the name of capital – also labels the territory of a gallery as private property, and by way of that addresses the issues of vanishing public space.
The subject of authorship is also tackled in Namepickers, a work by the Irwin group. In a straightforward and simple way – and with an elegant allusion to prostitution – Namepickers points out that the essence of the artwork is determined by the author's name. Namely, rating of the artist’s name affects the market value of the work, and, retroactively, also his identity, which is perceptively – ironically – completely identical in any case. Thus we are facing the perfidious logic of a market also capable of capitalising the speculative values of the author, even when these prove to be practically indefinable. A different ranking system of artistic identities is addressed by Zlatko Kopljar in his works K11 Gotovac and K11 Demur (from the K11 series of portraits) in which he portrays his colleagues, outsiders in the recent history of art, whilst simultaneously recognizing his own position. These portrayed artists – at this exhibition the portraits of Tomislav Gotovac and Boris Demur – have been excluded from the official mainstream of contemporary art as »non-aligned«, non-adapted identities which by way of their marginal position and own freewill, form a somewhat parallel reality to the recent art history and the present.
The fact that the value of authorship may ultimately be instrumental within the establishment of national icons and a national mythology is revealed by Uwe Laysiepen – Ulay’s work There is a Criminal Touch to Art. In this artistic action, documented on film, Ulay reveals the mechanism which contextualises artwork as a national icon, a mechanism that includes suppressed exclusion, nationalism and xenophobia, and which – at a critical moment – bursts to the surface as the very essence of an instrumentalised artwork - the Poor Poet by German romanticist painter Carl Spitzweg. The issue of the art system working in mysterious – if not inconceivable – ways is addressed by Franc Purg and his public installation entitled Art-System. This intervention, with its annoying direction of the visitor towards the gallery entrance, imitates at a metaphorical level the absurdity and imperative dominance of any system and its rigid forms, as well as tests the individual's obedience, which is also submitted to systematic rules of power positioning and distribution within the art system. In their work Waiting for a Curator, Jakup Ferri, Driton Hajredini and Lulzim Zeqiri stage this power game between two significant protagonists – the artist and the curator – in the contemporary art world in an ironic way. In the context of the power relationship, social recognition and the artists' international success are played through the mechanisms of social capital accumulation, which pushes the artwork into complete irrelevancy and anonymity. In their work Ordungen der Liebe - What Went Wrong with Manifesta 6? (in which they engage a therapy group to play the key figures in the production of Manifesta 6), Inga Zimpich and Ingela Johansson show that the art world too has its victims of weak and self-interested human passions. Over the process, their work becomes perceptively deceptive analyses of cultural and economic organisation, political naivety and notoriety, thus revealing the view of the very viscera of the art system in which concealed power relations within the field of contemporary art determine a lot more than may be perceived at first sight.
Martina Vovk
Participating artists:
Nemanja Cvijanović (Croatia), Jakup Ferri & Driton Hajredini & Lulzim Zeqiri (Kosovo), Igor Eškinja (Croatia), Irwin (Slovenia), Zlatko Kopljar, (Croatia), Uwe Laysiepen – Ulay (Holland), Alban Muja (Kosovo), Vladimir Nikolić (Serbia), Franc Purg (Slovenia), Şener Özmen & Cengiz Tekin (Turkey), Veso Sovilj (Bosnia & Herzegovina), Inga Zimprich & Ingela Johansson (Germany & Sweden).
Concept and coordination:
Yane Calovski (Macedonia), Alenka Gregorič (Slovenia), Tevž Logar (Slovenia), Mihaela Richter (Croatia), Martina Vovk (Slovenia), Mara Vujić (Slovenia), Vanja Žanko (Croatia).
Post je objavljen 16.09.2008. u 23:59 sati.