Slovenian selection
See-saw in (e)motion-mess society
Welcome to the Art Millenium
The first decade of the new millenium, so euphorically, massively, and "media-supportedly" awaited, is slowly turning into the second one. Art is still around and seems to have turned another page, into staggering social conciousness on one side and intimidating mediocratic attitudes of industry on the other. Among the consequences of the presence of technological artefacts are the shifting perception receptors making them obvious in both so-called professional circles and among accidental audiences. One of the most important issues for the art of the last decade was success—driven by demands of funding, either state or private, acknowledgment of the public; and further recognition by the press or vice-versa, depending on the way some artists were marketed—in attracting the curiousity of the masses and in the end, on a very basic level, in getting bought by a collector who already supported the artist from the beginning and probably even sponsored the whole 'artistic chain'.
Andy Warhol said, "the most important art is the art of making money", which I read literally, via art vocabulary, to mean 'making something'. Art is about making, about making objects, physical artefacts I order to satisfy very primary human needs, to have and to possess. This completely runs against the higher notion of art as that which leads us to contemplation or other metaphysical experiences. To me, reducing artistic creation simply to a way of fulfilling some kind of function seems very rude; but since artists are allowing it to happen and taking on this role in a capital-driven society, I would lay blame neither on capital nor on the arts. Even though such a constellation of socially driven forces brought about cognitive self-reflection that led to the conclusion that there is something wrong in paradise, no matter how attractive and nice the situation is depicted. Relationships between the physical and metaphysical are being defined by money and art, on the one hand, and media and art, on the other.
Some might wonder how I went from money to media by means of such a short equation, leaving art on both sides of the brackets. Media art or new media art is the first art defined formally by 'the message', as Marshall McLuhan would suggest. Until now, art was preceded by adjectives unveiling its nature, history, or purpose, e.g. fine art, Rennaisance art, or applied art. But now we find ourselves in a contradictory definition in which one kind of metaphysical is being defined by another metaphysicality. Media or medium, if you prefer, is a vast territory with numerous meanings and historical applications, from esotheric references (humans as media) and communication usage (to mediate) to mass media (probably used mostly in the popular sense) and artistic creativity. At the same time art is something metaphysical, beyond physicallity and beyond science, out of reach; something inaccessible to the average person, reachable only in the domains of god-like creatures and in special circles.
Artistically, media allows for much more variety than media art or new media art are bestowing upon both media and art. The meaning of media is narrowed down to electronic devices, such as radio, televison, or the computer and its adjacent circuits, which at least broaden the scope and expand it into new fields of creativity that could be defined by means of interdisciplinary approaches. Somewhere in between lies photography, although media also means 'oil on canvas' or airbrush or marble or bronze. Lately, media has become even more intrinsically tied to digitality, since digital equipment has become ubiquitous and we no longer classify photography or video with the adjective 'digital' to define its functioning principles. Still, getting into a long analysis of the meaning of media and art (and the monetary) in actual society may seem to entail too much of a debate. These are just terms that have already been negotiated and accepted, and I would like to claim that it is extremely important to understand contemporary streams of human-kind, human-mind and human-intentions.
Uršula Berlot: Pulsation
Uršula Berlot's subtle, almost fragile art works—sometimes taking the form of installations, sometimes of material pictures intertwining solid matter and light, artistically citating optics—reveal her background in physics. She is usually working with plexiglass or other transparent materials, creating imaginary landscapes. Her picturesque objects are revealing their soul when lit and placed at the proper angle or distance to the wall or floor, depending on what their content is meant to be. By changing this distance, the zoom and dimensions of the 'original' image are changed. Not only does it evoke a debate about the relationship between 'original' and 'copy' when original artwork is used as a source for the 'real' image, which is a projection of the original, so that copy and original change their thrones; it is also a comment on the material and virtual, which are morphing from one into the other, depending on our position in the space.
The artistry bathes in science, joining higly developed 'metier' with simple natural laws. Using transparent materials and mostly no colour emphasizes the absence of the artefact. Artefact becomes purely media or an interface that enables the light shining through to produce an image on the surface. The difference between the material and projected image is the reaction of the light and other environmental influences, from the power of the light source to the colour and shape of the projected surface. Berlot's objects are gloomily tender, with their transparency and optical effect created by a light source that projects an image from the transparent material onto the wall where the appearance of shadows creates a juxtaposition of the 'real' and 'virtual' image. Her parallel worlds, doubling what could be perceived as 'object' (material) and 'subject' (projection), are unveiling the complex processes of art, when physical development of an object is preceded by metaphysical structuring of the final result.
While this may sound contradictory, the relationships in Berlot's creation process 'ab ovo' could be symbolically defined as a flow of particles that are constrained within the solid matter, which is separating the photons that should continue from those that should be stopped. Even more physics is involved in some of her other work, such as the 2005 Attractions series (Attractions / Similarities, Principle of attraction, Attractions), which creates "pictures" on a 2D surface by means of rotating magnets and metal particles, creating a 3D 'real-world' sculpture and 2D electro-magnetic field drawing.
In Berlot's work Pulsation images of her brain taken by means of a scanning method unfold, displaying her mental functions on the 'silver screen' through a higly aesthetisized video projection. Mirroring images placed on an aluminium support create a colourless and dematerialized landscape that reflects cold, sharp, and unusually glaring light, bringing together abstract, organic motives and immaterial elements in changing projections, as Berlot reveals in her artist statement. The spectator is faced with the fragility of the artist's insight into her grey matter, which is pulsating in rhythmical sequences. Artwork that is bio-amorphous in form references nature, which, in this artistic interpretation, becomes unnatural, remote, and utopian. The video conjures up play by transposing the material into the immaterial, searching the intelligible in the sensual. Rather than reproducing natural landscapes it makes manifest energetic mental, immaterial, but nevertheless bodily constituted organic topologies.
The video and fractal compositions are formally based on an x-ray scan of the author’s brain; the cerebral tissues, in particular, present a unique point of contact and an indivisible link of the organic body to energy level. Pulsation presents a pulsating light phenomenon, the bodily / organic and technologically generated hybrid as light apparition—composed through the layering of light reflections, a video projection of the radiological scan of the artist’s brain, and its video-recorded, digitally modified images.
“The work is conceived to form a metaphorical space of dissimilative analogies, as a projection mirroring relations and replications, thus constituting a challenge for expanded perceptional experience and allowing the viewer to create ever-changing, imaginary, entirely individual mental landscapes. The installation creates a floating, volatile, ephemeral space of fleeting illusions and incorporated apparitions, oscillating between spatial and temporal dimensions of perception and offering to the viewer an open frame for his/her interpretations, inter-connections, creations of new connotations and an expanded (self)reflection,” reveals Uršula in her statement.
Berlot's piece is an 'inner state' of her personal, consious, and sub-conscious travel through her 'ratio' and emotion, which she is unveiling through the scan of her brain. The recordings expose the functioning of her brain to the professional, in this particular case a doctor, and to the common public. They are mainly mapped paths through her inner self revealed via the internal landscape of the most vital human organ. We might as well be put into the position of an observer on the nano-level, travelling through the artist as if in the movie Inner Space (1987), in which a human is shrunk to a size that allows for him to be injected into another human's vascular system and travels around the body, endangered by bodily defense functions.
Marko Košnik: Ditopia Signpost
After having taken an imaginary voyage through the artist's self, we find ourselves enlarged to the size of a normal human body again and stepping into the real world; images of city maps sequenced into an animated and interactive system overwhelm us. In his Ditopia Signpost Marko Košnik / Institut Egon March emphasizes a participatory experience for the audience through a stop-motion animation of thousands of photographs depicting and presenting a snap-shot of city situations in which the artist found himself within certain time frames, e.g. Istanbul during the May 1 demostrations, Novigrad-Cittanova in summer etc. The work consists of an interactive system based on topographic animations that is arbitrarily navigated by the movements of the visitor.
Ditopia Signpost has a special place in Marko Košnik's ditopia series, which he has developed in research cycles since 2004, when Ditopia 05 premiered in co-production with Station Mir in the suburbs of the city of Caen in France. If the first phase was primarly dedicated to the interaction with the audience, which—by means of a 'tracking' system and software environment—could play with video samples captured live from its 'behaviour' in front of a digital mirror, the ditopia from Novigrad-Cittanova above all explored an unfolding walk through spaces, presenting itself as a navigable path through the town—'mapped' step-by-step by the artist with a digital camera—by using animation technique and allowing the audience to choose directions in navigating the digital high resolution shots of the actual topos.
In Ditopia Signpost both aspects, the spectator in front of the projection and the subjective video-camera promenading inside the projection environment, intertwine into a correlated organism: moving in a designated space in front of the projection, spectators direct the travels of the subjective video camera, for which they can define direction, speed, and the zoom into thousands of topographical photographs for which presentation parameters are simultaneously calculated.
Being created specifically for the Biennale, the artwork Ditopia Signpost, with its programmed levels, is also touching upon a 'vertical' historical level that reveals itself in relation to the Signpost, an object which the group Most (Bridge) exhibited at the 14th Biennial of Young Yugoslav Artists in Rijeka in 1987, from there moving to the survey exhibition Grupe u jugoslovenskoj umetnosti osamdesetih (Yugoslavian Art Groups of the 80s) in Apatin in the same year. Besides featuring topographical actuality in an intensive way and an object that was one of the first technologically "self-contained" artefacts, Ditopia Signpost references the change of orientation in understanding space, which has been transformed by communication technologies for the last quarter of the century. Through the seemingly endless resolution of each single photograph (the different topoi the artist has catalogued in the last years range from 1500 up to 14.000 units per project), on the one hand, and the animation moving through space, in which the spectator is placed, on the other, the project raises questions about the perceptive qualities of the experience of a walker today, which are shaped through mobile GPS services and the "city view" of the Google Earth platform.
Luiza Margan and Miha Presker: Formication
Where Marko Košnik is making his outwardly focused way around cities among humans and Uršula Berlot invites us to take an internal tour of her brains, Luiza Margan and Miha Presker are opening the locative topography of an ant colony and projecting its daily life onto the industrial landscape of huge machinery at the working plant as construction site. Juxtaposing two usually separate worlds through the metaphor of ants as hard-working beings, a concrete behaviouristic concept reveals a multitude of relations between humans and the world, as well as other creatures. Most of all it is about our perspective on nature and its role in 'our lives', even though we should observe it the other way around and ask about the role of humans in nature. Formication is more about human prejudices within the living system than about the system itself. The system is just a medium, only a surface you need to scratch in order to see through.
The installation Formication (2007) deals with the meaning and function of the individual in a sociological system of constant progress. The project explores the structure of an image through the layering and merging of its parts. The installation consists of 6 transparent drawings positioned further away from or closer to a source of light, an overhead projector. A living organism, a real ant colony, is connected with the layers of the drawings by moving independently and functioning as a kind of error inside of the image. The middle layer is the most active, since it is the one which is in sharp focus and through which the ants are moving in order to get to food and back to the colony.
Only through the intervention of light is the installation made complete. The overhead projector projects the final image (a construction site), together with the ants' motion, onto a large-scale wall. The viewer has a chance to observe and compare fragments of drawings and the merged image in the projection. He can follow the process of sculptural change in time, since the installation is an unpredictable process, constantly changing as the ants carry sand and food across the drawing.
Media art is a tame and fragile structure of often meditative recordings placed into the gallery environment in the form of extremely non-attractive pieces of equipment or more visually inviting installations, using all kinds of artistic principles and media to attract the attention of visitors. These works put in front of us paths to the modern world, the most necessary and indispensable gadgets of contemporary realities, the material for the virtual, the body and the flesh of her and his majesty—the wire, the socket, and the apparatus itself, where the human body is only a necessary addition to the reality, a piece of equipment, sometimes unmovable, sometimes in the role of an automaton, and sometimes frozen in time serving the higher developed species of electrical gadgets. Often there are only various kinds of equipment present, without any human being.
But Margan and Presker's artistic insight is not plain commentary and not black-eyed deduction of reality or even pessimistic prediction of our future. It is more of an artistically twisted mirror of an aesthetisized environment that gives an existentialist overview of a self-positioned and behavioural representation of a situation beyond the imagination. Margan and Presker show us what we already see and hear all the time and what influences us every moment of our lives, while we don't think about it and take it for granted. Unawareness is the most dangerous state of mind as it is obeyed in order to serve and open for manipulations of each kind, either on a wider scale—political, economical or social—or on a more intimate level, personal or in the family.
son:DA: Panorama
This statement becomes clearly visible and audible in the work of son:DA. In one of my previous texts, I wrote about one of the brightest duos in the field of contemporary arts: "Over the years Metka Golec and Miha Horvat created their own artistic language centered around the signal-to-noise ratio and the illusion of connectivity through modern-day technology. Their installations, which they combine with graphical interventions, consist of broken wires, incompatible plugs and sockets, wrongly connected cables and stripped hardware. The line between parody and reality of today's networks has never been as thin." Glorified beauty of electrical equipment.
My KIBLA colleague Aleksandra Kostic adds, "son:DA fetishizes peripheral, ordinary objects of the technological age, such as sockets, plugs, cell phones, cables. son:DA creates icons, drawn with the computer mouse, that, in opposition to the paradoxical illusionism of Rene Magritte, speak: »This is a socket!« Exactly that which was hidden by the armoire will now be installed as an image on the wall before the armchair and be admired for its minimal aesthetics and functional perfection of technical construction. Without them—the sockets—there is no communication in this world. On the other hand, it is the building of an image-story that is showing the conditions of their habitat. Fetishized forms are the essence of suspension in a metaphorical scenography: people wrapped in cables and hanged on cables plugged into the ceiling […] due to the force of circumstances in a post-industrial environment full with wires that come from everywhere and create paranoia. And what are drawings doing together with spatial and sound installations? The effect of disturbances, of noises. That is why the image of the socket is perfect. In spite of a still life scenario, there is a neverending anticipation of connection. We hear electric noise."
The diagnosis of son:DA's 2004 debut show titled Multimedia Mxhibition at the Multimedia Center KIBLA in Maribor, Slovenia, was: "The subjects of the drawings made by means of a computer mouse are fetishized details of modern interiors, such as sockets, distributors, cables, plug-ins, mobile phone chargers... These are installed on the walls in the exhibition and public spaces in almost sacral manner, although the satirical connotations in relation to the technological world are obvious. More monumental formats include genre images of 17th Century Holland interiors (common people in common environments) transfered into the future. Allusions are made to paranoid visions of the captured urban person who is connected with cables to a traumatic social enviroments of survival."
It's all there in Panorama, a wallpaper computer mouse drawing in which technology is not only among us, but can be heard screaming, "You're one of us!" Electrical equipment stepped into our place and changed the position of the subject in the painting, where humans are replaced with various devices. Hence we discover that it is not important anymore what a human being looks like; it is replaced with technology in the central and most upfront position. Media is not only a message, but became a concept of contemporary society, its framed picture on the family mantelpiece. In its domesticality and as a commodity it did not only become an extension of the human body but—transforming our being into users and our society into the information society—gained a most precious role. Technology became a human pet. Through son:Da's reinterpreptation technology is perverted by letting the noise in. This also is the starting point of their performances, which play with electric circuits connected to mixers, audio systems and TV monitors—from sound to picture, from plain to manipulated, from signal to noise, as both are part of us.
Let me quote my friend Harald Szeemann, who, after visiting KIBLA, satirically introduced son:DA in his 2003 international exhibition Blut und Honig (Blood and Honey) at Sammlung Essl near Vienna: "son:DA provides the collective at the PC with ideas of rationalisation; everyone is sitting on the toilet like the guests at the erstwhile dinner party in Luis Bunuel's Le Fantome de la Liberte (1974); then, one by one, they occupy the toilet in order to eat."
Bon appetit!
References:
Uršula Berlot: Artist statement – http://www.ljudmila.org/~berlotur
Marko Košnik: Concept and background – http://web.me.com/marchegon
Luiza Margan & Miha Presker: Formication 2007 – http://www.margan-presker.com
son:DA: Texts about son:DA – http://sonda.kibla.org
