Exhibitions by Ivan Petrovic, Vladimir Mojsilovic and Natalija Simeonovic
Film Closing
Making Off, an art exhibition by Ivan Petrovic
Ivan Petrović's exhibition Making Off includes a documentary, printed frames taken from edited and unedited material, and a set-up of photographs.* This three-part project offers a technical comparison of different media formats, so thanks to Petrović, Walter Benjamin's remark made a hundred years ago is relevant again: The difficulties that photography gave to inherited aesthetics were children's play in comparison to the difficultiesthe inherited aesthetics had with film. Petrović's film (in addition to numerous panoramic shots and situations within the private environment) is composed of several scenes of conversation with Serbian artists. In these, the emphasis is not on dialogue but on the atmosphere and experiential importance of the presence of recorded subjects. In his photographic opus, Petrović had earlier treated his actors in a socially analytical way. Branislav Dimitrijević described his photographs not as images of events but as events of images.*
Petrović's approach, in which the recording process also represents the role of the author in the process, can spark our associations to many different artists in art history, not only within the cinema-verite movement, but also to Baroque painters who, like Rembrandt and Velasquez, enigmatically represented themselves in the social and political context of their time. The choice of portrayed characters here is as interesting as the choice of situations in which they find themselves: from group bohemian identification, through individual poetic melancholy, to collective creative exhibition, these actors possess official wit, team spontaneity and deliberate timidity, presenting themselves as sub literate persons, privately close, not only to the photographer, but also to the supposed auditorium of the exhibition. Because of this distinctiveness, what can be interpreted as the author's subjectivity in the choice of protagonists is actually an objective analysis of his audience. These characters are not determined by the degree of social authenticity, but by the degree of expertise in staging an authentic impression, thus being conceptually closer to being protagonists than social heroes, and Petrović's focus more closely matches the profile of the lyricist than the typology of the visual artist. Figuratively speaking, Petrović's characters form a kind of night watch for the entire domestic art auditorium; these portraits testify to our total affiliation with historical time and potential catalogs of the future.
Unlike the exhibited photographs, the conflict of interest between personal, public and private, as well as the dilemma of whether the author chooses actors or actors choose him, leave traces on Ivan Petrović's film work. Hence, the visual suggestions in portraying the characters act more like his desire to glorify his heroes ideologically than to establish a common relation to history through a critical distance towards them. In a way, Petrović's photographs displayed at the Making Off exhibition are historical testimonies devoid of political significance. We see exactly the opposite case when it comes to his film - here we get political testimonies of controversial historical significance.
Therefore, the photo album from the film speaks of the degree of difference between the two types of visual expression: while Petrović's film aesthetics lead us in the direction of cinematic documentation, his photo-aesthetics is closer to the world of dramatic fiction. Frames taken from the film are not in the function of propaganda material, but vice versa - Petrović's film is a behind-the-scenes program on making photo-tropes on the same subject. On the other hand, the landscapes in the film seem more realistic than the mimetic representations of nature in photographs (frames). The authorial fluctuation between documentary (visual) and fiction (dramatic) is a dilemma that has largely captured the whole of 20th-century mediology. This exhibition shows how a visual story became more intriguing and provocative category than a visual document, and how much the reading of a painting today is a more avant-garde act than viewing it. That is why Petrović's indulgence in cinematic impression simultaneously raises a twofold authorial question: is a direct film without a screenplay really more convincing than a photo of life that has a screenplay?
Published in the exhibition catalogue MAKING OFF, 2019
* A documentary, as well as frames from unedited and edited material, have the same title as this exhibition, and date from 2011 until present time. Exhibited photographs date from the early 2000s and are part of Ivan Petrović's private archive never shown in public.
* Unexpected Stagings – On Ivan Petrovic’s Photographs, exhibition catalogue Everything is Good, Center for Photography, Belgrade, 2017
First two photos above - Making Off in Dom kulture Studentski grad: Maida Gruden, Ivan Petrovic. Photos by: Dusica Stojanovic. Instalation view, decembar 2019, photos by: Ivan Petrovic
A Surplus of Artistic Liberty
Little Civil Discussions with Boxing Gloves, an art exhibition by Vladimir Mojsilovic
This exhibition of works by
Vladimir Mojsilovic has been set up in the Gallery space of the National Bank
of Serbia. The connection between this exhibition and its venue is not in any
way incidental. Mojsilovic had shown us on previous occasions his special
interest in the relationship between economic and political current events and
visual communication. This relationship, in fact, represents a type of mannerist
riddle, which beckons an answer from the spectators attending the exhibition:
Do these paintings represent a form of social critique, political irony or
state propaganda?
This exhibition includes new
works as well as previously exhibited works from public and private collections
(Wiener Staditsche, Zepter, and the Shadow Museum, among many). In these paintings
there are depicted numerous famous persons and characters out of history,
mythology, religion and popular culture. The images and faces of Marx, Pluto,
Tesla, Benjamin Franklin, and Dart Vader, are included in Mojsilovic’s
associative system but at the same time they are evocations of a generational
mutual experience in the reception of information from the mass media. However,
this poetic naiveté possesses certain duplicity in meaning and is not as
dangerous in expression as it may seem at first glance. That is why
Mojsilovic’s conditional stylistic lighthearted playfulness is enriched with
“more masculine” thematic combinations, extending the author’s field of
showmanship with motives from the world of Epic fantastic literature and Mediterranean
arche-typologies.
Mojsilovic’s poetics are placed
in-between neo-primitivism, infantilism, oneiricism and eroticism, and may seem
arbitrary only at first glance. When we undertake to ”read” this narrative
rather than letting it confuse us with its thematic provocations, it then
becomes all too clear for us. Here we are referring to the endeavor of this
author, in the light of the influence of the European Avant-garde from the
previous century, to reset the narrative to its historical beginnings, to its foundations
– classical expressionism.
Mojsilovic’s retrospective focus
reminds us of the global exhilaration when, at the beginning of the 20th
century, the world had discovered that it could transform its own intuition
into a work of art. But this moment in history soon after resulted in belligerent
political reaction, trans-oceanic mobilization and global artistic migration.
Thus, it was no accident that there exists a very close connection between
expressionism and Americanism, and between the political left and political right.
This connection is exemplified in the “transportation” of avant-garde culture
in the previous century, which had carried over its atomic communicability in a
chain reaction, into the expanses of larger Protestant laboratories. This,
exactly, is what Mojsilovic’s irony is a reflection of, and it is directed at
the symbols of consumerist liberalism, corporative capitalism, and even Chinese
transitional socialism.
Mosilovic’s narrative
imagination is seemingly of an affective nature. In it the artist’s inner drama
had been shifted towards the reshaping of the outer realm, based on the model
of expressionist structure. However, today, a century after the establishment
of these narrative mechanisms, the notion of the unconscious is not a question
of artistic liberty rather it is more of a problem related to social
stereotypes. The danger of being late in the avant-garde was heralded by Walter
Benjamin at the beginning of the previous century. This was the same Benjamin
that had said that the profile of a painter engaged in modern art – is that of a
perfect ignoramus. Goethe dealt with a similar problem in his novel on Wilhelm
Meister – about what happens when the ideals of artistic liberty become out of
fashion and when they are no longer needed by anybody.
However Mojsilovic’s
symbols are not in the service of artistic liberty, rather they show his (and
our) obsession with other people’s artistic liberties, media sensations that we
had been adopting spontaneously during the course of our development having
become greatly accustomed to arbitrary reception. This is why Mojsilovic’s
figures do not belong to the future, but rather belong to the past experience
of the study of the unconscious and thus they are not a part of his individual
past, rather they belong to the universal memory of many generations. However,
that which is truly his artistically and that which has been copyrighted in the
sense of authorship, is nothing else apart from this exhibition itself with
which this generation is being represented by.
With this the artist
asks us:
Is this visual art game that we are viewing
perhaps too big a bite for bourgeois culture? Is not the aesthetic peculiarity
of the previous century (the one that we know as the fundament of contemporary
education) more belligerent, more vulgar and more dangerous of a category than
it had seemed at first glance? Perhaps the problem of culture in the previous
century and the issue of the spectators in the new century are to be found in
this vivacious creative spontaneity? Has the inherent power of the artistic
subject or agent taken on forms of symbolic violence, when analyzed through the
lens of sociology?
The symbolic center-point
of political and social revolutions, psychoanalytical theory and the
phenomenology of the subjective had been seen in the avant-garde waves of the past
century, in the heart of movements such as Surrealism, Cubism, Existentialism
and many other ones. All these experiments had possessed a common denominator:
a creative libido that does not ponder on the external consequences of its
actions
Though different
in their origins, these artistic styles had found their avant-garde “late
coming” position and consecutive outcome in the editorial program of elitist
Serbia prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. And, behold the wonder, they again
had mobilization as an outcome, but this time at the close of the century, in
the heart of heroic Metohija, the last
active feudal center of Europe (Jurgen Habermas).
While differing from
the gestalt notion of the artist-elitist and his “overwhelming” impact on the
auditorium, Mojsilovic is seriously interested in the concept of social
reception and the relationship of the spectators towards his own artistic
authorship system. That is why the public dialogue with colleagues and critics,
which had been going on over the internet while this exhibition was in
preparation, was exhibited as its central exhibit, in the form of a Facebook
Monograph. One can say that this exhibition is subordinate to the function of
the catalog.
Artistic
inspiration is here present as realistic dialogue with his immediate social
environment and not as an intuitive trance that requires the spectator to take
up a double role: to be theoretically analytical towards that which the author
had presented concretely, but also to take sides or to be biased, i.e. to
explain every perceived narrative problem as a peculiarity of the authors
identity. This dominatorial principle in the relationship of the artist
creator, the critics and the spectators had been engrained in the previous century,
just like when in the feudal system the Landlord had always subsumed his subjects to be a part of the physical space instead of
being a part of a historical process. Mojsilovic shatters this artistic myth,
playing around with its creative roots. Concluding that the identity of the
avant-garde should be in possession of the new artist, and not the one from the
previous century, Mojsilovic does not alter his eccentric style, however, with
an enigmatic storyline and the illustrated process of the development of
particular interesting cultural, social and political ideas, he thus offers us a
story of criticism so that we could, in a joint discussion, debunk the artist’s
image of himself, so that we could, through mutual denunciation of that very
same image of ourselves, finally discover the meaning -- of the exhibition.
New Moment, 2020.
An Other Circle
An Other Two, an art exhibition by Natalija Simeonovic
As in the previous exhibition A-Part-Ness, Natalija Simeonović continous to interpret the history of alchemic symbolism through visual arts. Characteristic of the alchemic procedure, the framework of the exhibition An Other Two is thematically contextualised by the synthesis of two academic fields: science and art.
The subject matter of these paintings and the techniques used are not just means for transferring expression but they depict the aim of a transcendental ritual which invokes the spirit of the times when elements of the creative act did not only operate through the meaning they conveyed but also through the physical and chemical characteristics used in a process that does not symbolize the incarnation of the divine state into the human body (From Father to Son) but the redirection of the human body into divine state (Ascension of Virgin Mary). Representing the archetypical path of the feminine creative principle, these images of fеminization want to transform the gaze of the observer from the viewer towards the reader, from the pupil to the master, from Mars to Venus, from man to woman, further in Circle.
Publihed in exhibition catalogue An Other Circle, 2013.
https://www.markokostic.com/2014/06/my-generation.html
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