Towards establishing a new regime of thinking art practice
(a theorization of intervention made by a series of live events in procedures of exhibiting practices)
Vlatko Ilić
Contextualization: How art has been forced to self-explanation
Contemporary (1) art practice is confronted with two leading problems.
This hypothesis should not be accepted as a call for clarification or a solution, but as a demand for problem-based thinking, observing art practices. The first problem should be based on questions about/concerned with the placing of an art piece, work, practice, and/or an artist into the world. The second, more complex one deals with the status, functions and operations of art pieces, work, practice and/or an artist. In the middle of the 18th century, German historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann performed a thorough classification of objects from the history of cultures and proclaimed them to be valuable art pieces, based on criteria that he created for that reason. (2) This simplified locating of the ‘source’, which is an important historical moment, is significant because the then founded discourse of History of Arts enabled the audiences in later years to ‘understand’ art. Even more importantly, to ‘enjoy’ – art pieces or the act of ‘understanding’ - which will provide them with the unmistakable feeling of belonging to the civilisational order – the notion of development that emanates from ancient cultures. (3) That is how our visits to museums, theatres, music halls, have been giving us that comforting sense of assured moving towards achievements. We are part of it, and we are (standing) still at the side of progress. Despite other and/or different examples, which remained un-recorded, un-remembered, un-processed, or else did not manage to threaten the paradigm of beautiful/sense-coded and ‘understandable’ art, the 20th century started with more relevant subversive strokes. Still, today the artistic riot from the beginning of the 20th century is often considered within the framework of cause-and-effect crises and overcomings, that is of the narrative matrix. However, it is far more probable that the epistemological changes have been grasping the art production as well. The paradigm immanent to the History of Art originated from contextually determined circumstances, and in the same way it is endangered today.
Art practice is not happening under the safe cover of one dominant meta-discourse, that is, in the framework of a clearly understandable system of references, but within multitude of potentially equally dominant discourses, or else, the discourse-atmosphere. (4) To ask which one of these two situations is better or worse is impossible, even pointless, but one of them is probably more complex. The dominance of one discourse points at a singular power centre and adequate mechanisms of proclaiming a piece, work, practice to be an artistic. On the other hand, the plurality of discourses, with an illusion of decentralization, causes a higher complexity of mechanisms of placing and thinking (not understanding (5)) the notion of art. The contemporary art piece, work, practice can not subsist without filters, layers of interpretations that introduce (through critics, theoreticians, and more often artists themselves) a piece, work, practice to a market (the world of material exchange) or the Art world (the world of public production and consumption of meanings). It would be naïve to believe that before, in some previous era, art operated regardless of the market (of money or meanings). However, it seems as if the rules of the game were almost self-regulated. Today, these rules are multiplied, and definitely less firm. They are being constantly re-invented, re-produced, re-established, while the machines of their inclusion, re-ordering and consumption are working faster and faster. Your site has to be updated at every moment. This shouldn’t be accepted as a relief or a burden either. Still, as a consequence, and not the aimed one, it has a production of unrest, for all the participants in acts of proclaimed art – artists, theoreticians, critics, audience. Simply, we lost the right to enjoy the feeling of security, order and certainty. Restless artists, they talk, write, explain, while trying to (successfully or not) (re)produce for themselves suitable system of reference, on time.
Which brings us to the second problem, which deals with questions on/about the status of art in contemporary times. Art is not pretty any more, we can not hold art in our living rooms any more, we can not enjoy it, we do not understand it. On the other hand art holds on – it is exhibited, performed, financed. What does art do/do we do with art? While other fields are importing strategies of aesthetications from the artistic action, it relies more and more often on various other apparatuses – cultural, gender and media studies, theory of arts, social activism, genetic enginering, programming, etc. It is certain that art practice has no exclusive rights on isolation, as it never had, but what are the consequences of (over)flowing protocols and procedures from other fields on arts. The acts of crossing, moving, blurring borders are significant, and they bear a subversive potential of re-questioning tacitly approved and accepted (doxies), but also a possibility of inclusion of art practices in almost equalized (above all commerical) strategies and/or tactics of great media companies. (6) On the other hand contemporary theory puts forward the thesis about art in a gaseous state. (7) If art today is more an atmosphere than a public social production, what is happening with the effects of its performance? Should we, and how, accept the concept of a free heterogenic plurality of various practices, or the radically opposing notion of un-declinable dominance of global post-fordist capitalistic market. Is it possible to thoroughly and critically consider the effects of an artistic performance today?
Artist's statement: On the politics of art (re)production
As two artists coming from different backgrounds - fine arts and theatre, over the last three years Vojislav Klačar and I have been developing a model of collaboration and art production that will provoke a newly articulated identification matrix. One that is more interdisciplinary, critically orientated, context aware, pro-active. (8)
Our artistic practice includes presentations, discussions, lectures, texts, publications, and our goal is to produce, along with our works, an atmosphere around them - an atmosphere which is theoretically, ideologically, politically ‘conscious’ and can potentially cluster into a platform which enables the realization and recognition of contemporary artistic practices as relevant critical activities. Thus, we intend to create works that are context-sensitive: that re-question the disciplines within which they operate, spaces in which they are performed or exhibited, the positions they are taking or intend to take in the world of arts, etc. We believe that meanings surrounding us are negotiable, and that is why we re-use already socially signified spaces (the Assembly room in Belgrade City Hall), we insist on the active role of the audience (it participates in the decision making mechanisms), we involve the experiences of new medias (the structure of Parliamentary History of Koreta was based on the Internet’s operative protocols) and mass production (public events are unique and can not be re-played), or we question present dominant grand narratives (exposing processes of creating History).
We strongly believe that art is not an innocent practice, but that it is socially, economically and politically determined, and thus, we intend to actively and transparently participate in creating, performing and constituting social reality. This is possible by re-inventing hybrid tactics and strategies that will initiate/cause constant paradigmatic shifting, in order to resist the global market and mechanisms of inclusion, which breed de-contextual, a-political, marketable art pieces.
Concretization: Is it possible to enjoy acts of negotiations?
Is it possible to work and/or to think art in unrest, and/or to enjoy thinking performances/effects of contemporary arts? If our enjoyment was based upon a defaulted participation in a singular positivistic signifying meta-matrix, of us-artists and us-audience, is it possible to enjoy in/during/despite/because of the unrest?
Contemporary time is marked by an order of meanings that is changeable, unstable, liable to negotiations, switches, discourses, converses. If a protocolar openness is immanent to the contemporary era, and is followed by the constant production of unrest, then the unrest becomes its most desirable effect. Because it reminds us on a multiple potential of each event – on probably unpleasant fact that we are to be asked, that every consumption of art work depends equally upon us, the consumers, as on the ones and institutions which enable their materialisation and their placing into the world (of arts). Therefore, the unrest should not be referred to as a feeling, error, slip, but an engine, the machine-unrest. That is, not as to the unavoidable, but the crucial. Agreements on/in arts are not a game in an autonomous field of high-aesthetic criteria, nor should it be believed they have ever been. (9) Art is actively and significantly participating in acts of power re-distribution, since art operates within mechanisms of showing presence/demonstration that are immanent to the capitalistic society of spectacle.
The spectacle emerges when social/state apparatuses, political parties, capitalistic market institutions or cultural formations reach a visible level of accumulation, that is, when they demand and impose public presence/demonstration and visibility of processes that can be seen as practices of identification based on ethnicity, race, class, profession, generation, gender, market, etc. (10)
The events of Koreta expose us on one side to the uncertain field of constant agreements on procedures of performing and consuming art. Each one introduces a translation of specific protocols, hybrid ones or ones immanent to other fields of social acting, that differ depending upon the occasion. Thus, each event causes the activation of archives, the archive of Koreta but also the archive of agreements on performances of Koreta art works. On the other hand gallery, scene, auditorium (a physical or virtual one) fills with intensities, which have to be processed, that is, spent, invested. And these very acts if investing work/of work/in work ask for a complicity before numerous intimated decision makings and their proclamations. Regardless of how many times the decisions and their proclamations are prolonged, delayed or still happening, those intensities of not-yet-articulated, not-yet-signified, just-before moments are the ones exhibited, performed. Thus, the presence at the performance, or exhibitions of Koreta is actually a participation in becomings: state becoming, art work becoming, public event becoming, becoming events of negotiating meanings within/of arts, politics, society, etc. (11)
Koreta is always in-progress. Is it possible to enjoy art in-progress? Is it possible to go to a gallery, theatre, online, to open a book and to enjoy the acts of investing, the events of negotiating? If so, this assumption demands a re-coding of a notion of enjoyment, since it can not be initiated any more by mechanisms of re-confirmation of one assured meta-narrative, but by the uncertainty of thinking that each time has to re-map a possible system of reference, that is, directions of moving within the discourse-atmosphere. But once our enjoyment becomes set on/sensitive to the potential of critical acting within fields of arts as well as in the context of various social practices, it becomes guaranteed.
(1) At this moment it is important to accept the term ‘contemporary’ not qualitatively but in contextual terms – a practice that exists today, within culturally/economically/politically determined space – that is now and here.
(2) For more information see the chapter Istorija umetnosti i istorije umetnosti, in: Šuvaković, Miško, Diskurzivna analiza, University of Arts, Belgrade, 2006, p. 270-293.
(3) All arts have double purpose:offering pleasure and tutoring, (Sve umjetnosti imaju dvostruku svrhu: pružiti zadovoljstvo i poučavati.) Winckelmann, from: Šuvaković, Diskurzivna analiza, Diskurzivna analiza, University of Arts, Belgrade, 2006, p. 270. (4) For more on the loss of dominance of one mate-discourse in a contemporary time see: Lyotard, Jean-François, Postmodern Condition (Postmoderno stanje), Bratstvo-Jedinstvo, Novi Sad, 1988.
(5) The difference in terminology here is one of high importance. Understanding demands for clear and united social (language) contract on criteriums, which are through the acts of understanding constantly (re)produced. Thinking about something positions the one thinking independently from the notion that is thought about. Thinking something does not make that distance, it admits it is ‘involved’ in certain question by the act of thinking, and so it promises the potential of critical acting.
(6) See: Vuksanović, Divna, Filozofija medija: Ontologija, estetika, kritika, Faculty of Drama Arts, Čigoja štampa, Belgrade, 2007, and texts of Lev Manovich at http://www.manovich.net/
(7) See the chapter Umetnost u rasplinutom stanju: od odnosa do atmosfere u kulturi, u: Šuvaković, Miško, Diskurzivna analiza, University of Arts, Belgrade, 2006, p. 474-479.
(8) The Kingdom of Koreta, the multi-disciplinary art practice of visual artist Vojislav Klačar, has been actively present at the local fine art scene. During the last three years several live events and performances (The Third University Foundation in the Kingdom of Koreta, Leipzig, Parliamentary History of Koreta, Belgrade, The Ninth Government Constitution of the Kingdom of Koreta, Belgrade) that operate within this practice came as a result of the collaboration between Klačar and theatre director Vlatko Ilić.
(9) Althusser names state ideological apparatuses (DIA) as following: religious DIA, educational DIA, family DIA, juridical DIA, political DIA, union DIA, informational DIA and cultural DIA. See: Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, iz Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New Left Books, London, 1971.
(10) Šuvaković, Miško, Diskurzivna analiza, University of Arts, Belgrade, 2006, p. 490
(11) See: Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Phelix, Kafka, IK Zorana Stojanovića, Sremski Karlovci, 1998.
Vlatko Ilić
Contextualization: How art has been forced to self-explanation
Contemporary (1) art practice is confronted with two leading problems.
This hypothesis should not be accepted as a call for clarification or a solution, but as a demand for problem-based thinking, observing art practices. The first problem should be based on questions about/concerned with the placing of an art piece, work, practice, and/or an artist into the world. The second, more complex one deals with the status, functions and operations of art pieces, work, practice and/or an artist. In the middle of the 18th century, German historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann performed a thorough classification of objects from the history of cultures and proclaimed them to be valuable art pieces, based on criteria that he created for that reason. (2) This simplified locating of the ‘source’, which is an important historical moment, is significant because the then founded discourse of History of Arts enabled the audiences in later years to ‘understand’ art. Even more importantly, to ‘enjoy’ – art pieces or the act of ‘understanding’ - which will provide them with the unmistakable feeling of belonging to the civilisational order – the notion of development that emanates from ancient cultures. (3) That is how our visits to museums, theatres, music halls, have been giving us that comforting sense of assured moving towards achievements. We are part of it, and we are (standing) still at the side of progress. Despite other and/or different examples, which remained un-recorded, un-remembered, un-processed, or else did not manage to threaten the paradigm of beautiful/sense-coded and ‘understandable’ art, the 20th century started with more relevant subversive strokes. Still, today the artistic riot from the beginning of the 20th century is often considered within the framework of cause-and-effect crises and overcomings, that is of the narrative matrix. However, it is far more probable that the epistemological changes have been grasping the art production as well. The paradigm immanent to the History of Art originated from contextually determined circumstances, and in the same way it is endangered today.
Art practice is not happening under the safe cover of one dominant meta-discourse, that is, in the framework of a clearly understandable system of references, but within multitude of potentially equally dominant discourses, or else, the discourse-atmosphere. (4) To ask which one of these two situations is better or worse is impossible, even pointless, but one of them is probably more complex. The dominance of one discourse points at a singular power centre and adequate mechanisms of proclaiming a piece, work, practice to be an artistic. On the other hand, the plurality of discourses, with an illusion of decentralization, causes a higher complexity of mechanisms of placing and thinking (not understanding (5)) the notion of art. The contemporary art piece, work, practice can not subsist without filters, layers of interpretations that introduce (through critics, theoreticians, and more often artists themselves) a piece, work, practice to a market (the world of material exchange) or the Art world (the world of public production and consumption of meanings). It would be naïve to believe that before, in some previous era, art operated regardless of the market (of money or meanings). However, it seems as if the rules of the game were almost self-regulated. Today, these rules are multiplied, and definitely less firm. They are being constantly re-invented, re-produced, re-established, while the machines of their inclusion, re-ordering and consumption are working faster and faster. Your site has to be updated at every moment. This shouldn’t be accepted as a relief or a burden either. Still, as a consequence, and not the aimed one, it has a production of unrest, for all the participants in acts of proclaimed art – artists, theoreticians, critics, audience. Simply, we lost the right to enjoy the feeling of security, order and certainty. Restless artists, they talk, write, explain, while trying to (successfully or not) (re)produce for themselves suitable system of reference, on time.
Which brings us to the second problem, which deals with questions on/about the status of art in contemporary times. Art is not pretty any more, we can not hold art in our living rooms any more, we can not enjoy it, we do not understand it. On the other hand art holds on – it is exhibited, performed, financed. What does art do/do we do with art? While other fields are importing strategies of aesthetications from the artistic action, it relies more and more often on various other apparatuses – cultural, gender and media studies, theory of arts, social activism, genetic enginering, programming, etc. It is certain that art practice has no exclusive rights on isolation, as it never had, but what are the consequences of (over)flowing protocols and procedures from other fields on arts. The acts of crossing, moving, blurring borders are significant, and they bear a subversive potential of re-questioning tacitly approved and accepted (doxies), but also a possibility of inclusion of art practices in almost equalized (above all commerical) strategies and/or tactics of great media companies. (6) On the other hand contemporary theory puts forward the thesis about art in a gaseous state. (7) If art today is more an atmosphere than a public social production, what is happening with the effects of its performance? Should we, and how, accept the concept of a free heterogenic plurality of various practices, or the radically opposing notion of un-declinable dominance of global post-fordist capitalistic market. Is it possible to thoroughly and critically consider the effects of an artistic performance today?
Artist's statement: On the politics of art (re)production
As two artists coming from different backgrounds - fine arts and theatre, over the last three years Vojislav Klačar and I have been developing a model of collaboration and art production that will provoke a newly articulated identification matrix. One that is more interdisciplinary, critically orientated, context aware, pro-active. (8)
Our artistic practice includes presentations, discussions, lectures, texts, publications, and our goal is to produce, along with our works, an atmosphere around them - an atmosphere which is theoretically, ideologically, politically ‘conscious’ and can potentially cluster into a platform which enables the realization and recognition of contemporary artistic practices as relevant critical activities. Thus, we intend to create works that are context-sensitive: that re-question the disciplines within which they operate, spaces in which they are performed or exhibited, the positions they are taking or intend to take in the world of arts, etc. We believe that meanings surrounding us are negotiable, and that is why we re-use already socially signified spaces (the Assembly room in Belgrade City Hall), we insist on the active role of the audience (it participates in the decision making mechanisms), we involve the experiences of new medias (the structure of Parliamentary History of Koreta was based on the Internet’s operative protocols) and mass production (public events are unique and can not be re-played), or we question present dominant grand narratives (exposing processes of creating History).
We strongly believe that art is not an innocent practice, but that it is socially, economically and politically determined, and thus, we intend to actively and transparently participate in creating, performing and constituting social reality. This is possible by re-inventing hybrid tactics and strategies that will initiate/cause constant paradigmatic shifting, in order to resist the global market and mechanisms of inclusion, which breed de-contextual, a-political, marketable art pieces.
Concretization: Is it possible to enjoy acts of negotiations?
Is it possible to work and/or to think art in unrest, and/or to enjoy thinking performances/effects of contemporary arts? If our enjoyment was based upon a defaulted participation in a singular positivistic signifying meta-matrix, of us-artists and us-audience, is it possible to enjoy in/during/despite/because of the unrest?
Contemporary time is marked by an order of meanings that is changeable, unstable, liable to negotiations, switches, discourses, converses. If a protocolar openness is immanent to the contemporary era, and is followed by the constant production of unrest, then the unrest becomes its most desirable effect. Because it reminds us on a multiple potential of each event – on probably unpleasant fact that we are to be asked, that every consumption of art work depends equally upon us, the consumers, as on the ones and institutions which enable their materialisation and their placing into the world (of arts). Therefore, the unrest should not be referred to as a feeling, error, slip, but an engine, the machine-unrest. That is, not as to the unavoidable, but the crucial. Agreements on/in arts are not a game in an autonomous field of high-aesthetic criteria, nor should it be believed they have ever been. (9) Art is actively and significantly participating in acts of power re-distribution, since art operates within mechanisms of showing presence/demonstration that are immanent to the capitalistic society of spectacle.
The spectacle emerges when social/state apparatuses, political parties, capitalistic market institutions or cultural formations reach a visible level of accumulation, that is, when they demand and impose public presence/demonstration and visibility of processes that can be seen as practices of identification based on ethnicity, race, class, profession, generation, gender, market, etc. (10)
The events of Koreta expose us on one side to the uncertain field of constant agreements on procedures of performing and consuming art. Each one introduces a translation of specific protocols, hybrid ones or ones immanent to other fields of social acting, that differ depending upon the occasion. Thus, each event causes the activation of archives, the archive of Koreta but also the archive of agreements on performances of Koreta art works. On the other hand gallery, scene, auditorium (a physical or virtual one) fills with intensities, which have to be processed, that is, spent, invested. And these very acts if investing work/of work/in work ask for a complicity before numerous intimated decision makings and their proclamations. Regardless of how many times the decisions and their proclamations are prolonged, delayed or still happening, those intensities of not-yet-articulated, not-yet-signified, just-before moments are the ones exhibited, performed. Thus, the presence at the performance, or exhibitions of Koreta is actually a participation in becomings: state becoming, art work becoming, public event becoming, becoming events of negotiating meanings within/of arts, politics, society, etc. (11)
Koreta is always in-progress. Is it possible to enjoy art in-progress? Is it possible to go to a gallery, theatre, online, to open a book and to enjoy the acts of investing, the events of negotiating? If so, this assumption demands a re-coding of a notion of enjoyment, since it can not be initiated any more by mechanisms of re-confirmation of one assured meta-narrative, but by the uncertainty of thinking that each time has to re-map a possible system of reference, that is, directions of moving within the discourse-atmosphere. But once our enjoyment becomes set on/sensitive to the potential of critical acting within fields of arts as well as in the context of various social practices, it becomes guaranteed.
(1) At this moment it is important to accept the term ‘contemporary’ not qualitatively but in contextual terms – a practice that exists today, within culturally/economically/politically determined space – that is now and here.
(2) For more information see the chapter Istorija umetnosti i istorije umetnosti, in: Šuvaković, Miško, Diskurzivna analiza, University of Arts, Belgrade, 2006, p. 270-293.
(3) All arts have double purpose:offering pleasure and tutoring, (Sve umjetnosti imaju dvostruku svrhu: pružiti zadovoljstvo i poučavati.) Winckelmann, from: Šuvaković, Diskurzivna analiza, Diskurzivna analiza, University of Arts, Belgrade, 2006, p. 270. (4) For more on the loss of dominance of one mate-discourse in a contemporary time see: Lyotard, Jean-François, Postmodern Condition (Postmoderno stanje), Bratstvo-Jedinstvo, Novi Sad, 1988.
(5) The difference in terminology here is one of high importance. Understanding demands for clear and united social (language) contract on criteriums, which are through the acts of understanding constantly (re)produced. Thinking about something positions the one thinking independently from the notion that is thought about. Thinking something does not make that distance, it admits it is ‘involved’ in certain question by the act of thinking, and so it promises the potential of critical acting.
(6) See: Vuksanović, Divna, Filozofija medija: Ontologija, estetika, kritika, Faculty of Drama Arts, Čigoja štampa, Belgrade, 2007, and texts of Lev Manovich at http://www.manovich.net/
(7) See the chapter Umetnost u rasplinutom stanju: od odnosa do atmosfere u kulturi, u: Šuvaković, Miško, Diskurzivna analiza, University of Arts, Belgrade, 2006, p. 474-479.
(8) The Kingdom of Koreta, the multi-disciplinary art practice of visual artist Vojislav Klačar, has been actively present at the local fine art scene. During the last three years several live events and performances (The Third University Foundation in the Kingdom of Koreta, Leipzig, Parliamentary History of Koreta, Belgrade, The Ninth Government Constitution of the Kingdom of Koreta, Belgrade) that operate within this practice came as a result of the collaboration between Klačar and theatre director Vlatko Ilić.
(9) Althusser names state ideological apparatuses (DIA) as following: religious DIA, educational DIA, family DIA, juridical DIA, political DIA, union DIA, informational DIA and cultural DIA. See: Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, iz Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New Left Books, London, 1971.
(10) Šuvaković, Miško, Diskurzivna analiza, University of Arts, Belgrade, 2006, p. 490
(11) See: Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Phelix, Kafka, IK Zorana Stojanovića, Sremski Karlovci, 1998.
