IS UTOPIA POSSIBLE?
FICTIONAL STATE OF OBSESSIVE DETAILS
(ON VOJISLAV KLAČAR’S PROJECT)

Miško Šuvaković

How to achieve a perfect state? Is state a necessity or an evil? How to formulate a concept and the effect of a state? The ‘perfect state’ syntagm does not mean reaching an ideal state: justice, welfare, unity, laws, etc. The ‘perfect state’ syntagm points at instrumentality, at the state that functions, which works transparently, at the one that is protocolary performative and publicly visible. This state is political and it seems as if the artist defends a political state. An obsessive focus on details of state’s protocological functioning is a challenge that leads to a macro-project in itself: an art piece in process. An art piece does not look like an art piece, but as a representation of the ‘state reality’ or as game – a language game – playing with transparent state instrumentality. The real state is impossible, because the fictional construction of a state and state-constituted myths is what covers and conceals the symbolic order of power struggle (punishment, supervision, control, regulation). The fictional construction of an ideal game with a state is performed within a non-ideal world of transitional postsocialism and neoliberal movements, in other words a positioning within the contemporary southeast Europe. The artist is the one who produces modalities and possibilites of a state as language games with transparent instrumentality of state functioning. State transparent instrumentality is approached to as an obsessive object. The artist repeats his desire for visible state functioning. The state that becomes visible within its functions is the spectacle. The spectacle of institutional exposure. An accumulation of the visibility of state functions and instruments is spectacular. The artist is obsessivly consistent and dedicated to the state as to the rational machine of the public game, or more concretly, of political protocols performed according to rules. The artist shapes possibilities of ‘a game’ through various media presentations: from election simulacrum and exposure of election procedures, to construction of spatial and political living aspects, or web system ‘state identity’ presentation.

The state emerges as a mechanism detached from the life of the society. The artist formed and staged the state without a society. The state itself versus the deferred society. The state as a machine with all its functions and functional effects is consistently represented. The consistency of performing the state without a society is a cynical act. The state itself is the perfect machine, which escapes the concrete meaning.

The artist’s obsession is production of visual fictions about the state. While doing so, he is solemn, cold, distant and consistent. Sometimes even frighteningly consistent. The artist performs the game that follows complicated rules of complex political system’s functions (acts and laws on elections, political parties’ organization, monarchistic institutions, functions and instrumentality of the parliament). He offers to the perversity of normal state the transparency and rationality of a fictional state. The impossible fictional state by its transparent exposure escapes the real one. But, all this happens in biographic conditions and circumstances in which the real state of his living is unstable, traumatic, almost impossibly ghostly. The artist finds himself in a gap between the perfect functioning of a fiction and unperfect frictions within the everyday living. His project of ‘the state’ is therefore: a case of inner traumatic and transitional postsocialism. But, what is the traumatic postsocialism? How to confront the fact that there is critical tension between the fictional and the real state? Capitalism, liberalism, communism, national state, republic, monarchy, parliamentarism, anti-parliamentarism, etc. Not conflict, but the challenge of constructing rational procedure and its contradictions. Postsocialism or postmodern of post-historical, apparently post-political states, is above all European (Serbia, Russia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, etc.) historical problem of leap, delay, return and loss, which, in uncertain specific formulations, touches realsocialistic third world states/cultures as well (China, Vietnam, North Korea, Iraq, Algeria, Cuba, Asian countries created by collapse of the Soviet Russia). Postsocialistic transitional cultures are contradictive, conflictual, and entropic cultures. These are societies of permanent crisis, societies obsessed with impossibility to achieve a functional state. In these societies a permanent conflict exists between the state and the society. It seems that the artist selects the state, while the writer of these lines selects the society? What should be protected, a state from a society or a society from a state? Is this about insanity as a platform for rational levy a state to the society? Is the state without a society a spectral? How that spectral overcomes our life? What is one single life within an initiated mechanism of a state. Are they, initiated mechanisms of a state, expressions of pragmatic rationality or madness that initiates the Law, which escapes control? The state is a spectral of transgression that in its apparent transparent proceduration conceals the horror of madness of the Law. Mad Law of a state in its own rational and consistent forms is the Great violator. That’s it!

The artist builds a world of obsessions. He is obsessed by: functions, instruments, public rules, protocols and procedures. He rejects the madness of a state in a name of rationality of state functioning – and in this very switch lies the drama that is re-performed at any scene of a bilboard, a computer screen, theatre, an image or a speech. An obsession and the obsessions are paradoxly revealed as contemporary technologies and as archaic invoking of life and death confortations. The artist could be some focused and concentrated player of chess or some other game, one with cards, figures, illusions, screen operations, or … But, he ‘plays’ with the state in a state which is not perfect nor an ideal one. In time the ‘game’ becomes an art practice. Work of production that leads to production of infrastructure and functions of a state. The artist cartesianly rationally enters fictionation of obsessions while, at the same time entering the everyday, where fictions of the real society in transition have been performed irationally, painfully and glidingly. That is a contradiction and that contradiction through art gains its aureatic effect. The artist works with atmospheres of political events. He works with the political density as a game of power in distinction of politics as public performance (vita activa). The state is there without a society … The state of obsessions and the obsessions. Phantasm is bening formed through exposure of protocols and procedures of a state. Protocols and procedures of a state expose themselves as concealing of a madness that violates every Law. Madness that violates every law is exactly the Law: the mad Law.