Mapping the Art AUTHOR: Maja Petriæ
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TITLE: Mapping The Art AUTHOR: Maja Petriæ The world is geographically divided by borders, and within every border lays a bordered culture of “distinctive” identities that differentiate themselves from others, and others found them different. Consequently, the art produced within a certain border is differentiated from other arts. I am inquiring into which ways art made in the territories of ex-socialistic European countries is Eastern European art. (My focus was based on the sense of Eastern Europeanism in the art by Authors of Eastern European Contemporary Bookworks, go_HOME, Tomislav Gotovac, Kugla, Marilena Preda Sanc, Dan Perjovschi, Tadej Pogaèar, Škart, and Krzystof Wodiczko.) All 10 of them originate from Eastern Europe, and were presenters of politically charged contemporary art in New York City in the association with Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Location: Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. Martha Wilson founded Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. in 1976. At this time underground art was coming out in public spaces. Such content for mass audience didn’t get traditional media’s approval, so they tried to keep avant-garde under the ground. Therefore, Martha Wilson stated that she was inspired “to present, preserve, interpret, proselytize and advocate on behalf of avant-garde art, especially forms that may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect, their ephemeral nature, or politically unpopular content”. For 26 years Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. has been archiving documentations of performances and other time-based arts, collecting artists' books, publishing artists' books, exhibiting time-based arts, funding artists, and digitally presenting archived material. They provided the space for art work by Laurie Anderson, Vito Acconci, Barton Barnes, Eric Bogosian, Karen Finley, Coco Fusco, Gilbert and George, Guillermo Gomez Pena, Barbara Kruger, Ana Mendieta, Nam June Paik, Annie Sprinkle, and many others. Many of the “difficult” artists at Franklin Furnace were representing the avant-garde tradition in state socialist culture. Starting with Krzystof Wodiczko, Franklin Furnace hosted art from that side of the world that was isolated from the Western world. Art that had been jailed in 1 socialist countries gained attention in the US. However, Eastern European anti-state art stayed only on the margins of the art world, and for that reason remained to be Martha Wilson’s choice. In 1997 Franklin Furnace closed the experimental performance space to open a complex virtual performance space at www.franklinfurnace.org. The new place still includes art functioning as political opposition, and will be used by Croatian artist Zlatko Kopljar in 2003. Region: Eastern Europe Eastern Europe is the term that stands for a space which is determined by historical facts and political reality. In other words, Eastern Europe is not a precisely bordered geographical territory, but a segregated area that has been distinctively organized. Organization has been ruled by 27 different socialist systems, which are now transitioning from the common wealth toward the democratic capitalism. Eastern Europe, stigmatized as a nest of evil, continues to migrate through the challenges of post-war reconciliation, regional integrations, and promotions of democracy. According to Michael Foucault, “Our epoch is, above all, the epoch of space.” In the text “Of Other Spaces” Foucault explained how in the 17th century Galileo’s revelation that the world revolves around the sun caused a replacement of open space with localizations. Humanity defines itself by locations where they are being active, and where others also define them as one of the same group. Definitions made through localities are alleged ethnicities that signify how people are different from other people in other places who share different national and regional origins. Therefore, today’s localized spaces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Republic, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Yugoslavia set the region of Eastern Europe. The place called Eastern Europe has its own space, but the location is not marked and therefore doesn’t exist. According to Foucault, places of that kind are heterotopias, "They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down… The heterotopias are capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible." In 1917 and then in 1945 more than 40 ethnicities and cultural groups 2 were unified by common non-self-organized dictatorial socialism that was imposed by the former Soviet Union. Plainly stating, after the World War II, Eastern Europe suffered from severe dependency on Moscow. The authority of the Communist parties, based on Marxist-Leninist ideology, struggled against capitalist imperialism. Proletarian internationalism violently solved the problems of national and ethnic minorities. Starting in the early 1990s, they again were forced into a new form of social organization called capitalism. The Cold War strongly segregated east and west, and the representation of it was the Iron Curtain. The situation resulted in high economic inequality, massive migrations, international division of labor, expenditure of armed forces, and more animosity towards and from the US. Unavoidably, political happenings affected the destinies and mentalities of the curtained community. This atmosphere resulted in specific cultural realizations of the current public space. The concept of space changed after the fall of socialism, mostly because of the rapid transition to a digital world. The digital world’s geography gained the capacity to find communication solutions that physical places could not. Virtual reality can bring together distinctive elements of different cultures that often cause conflicts. Nevertheless, the reality with no fatal differences remains to be virtual one. My main inquiry is form and meaning of signs produced by Eastern Europeans. Since the construction of the sign system is impacted by hyper-politicized reality, produced signs reflect this impact. Public art is one of the most direct reflections of the realm. It has been asking how we define art, the public, and the community. Active art uses the experiences of those elements in order to move away from the creation of a fine aesthetic style toward a provoking structure with social context. State: Croatia “Kugla”, “Zeinimuro, The Actions of Pictures” “Kugla”, in English “The Sphere”, was the leading performance group in former Socialistic Federative Republic of Yugoslavia during the late seventies and eighties. The five members of Kugla - Damir Bartol Indoš, Damir Prica, Zlatko Buriæ, Goran Šuljiæ and Renata 3 Demiroviæ Šuljiæ - began performing in Zagreb in 1975. Their performances were considered to be highly alternative, visually metalized events tracked by insane sounds. Today, the leader of the group, Damir Bartol Indoš, perseveres “Kugla’s” aesthetic while working under the name “D.B. Indoš – House of Extreme Music Theatre/Kugla”. On February 23, 1991, “Kugla” presented the performance “Zeinimuro: The Action of Pictures” in Franklin Furnace. The group explained the performance was about “…the main character - Zeinimuro Candandze, the pilot of a downed fighter plane. Caught in the chaotic memories of his experience, he became an anachronistic person. Lost in the collective past, Zeinimuro founds himself enveloped in the sounds of his heart beating, nerves firing and blood circulating. He creates abstract, surrealistic images, which delve deep into the realm of subjective truth. A flow of images and sounds, as well as soul stirring dance, creates intensely emotional and psychological experience. “Noticing the similarity of Cage’s and Gogh’s physiognomies, he begins to make a link, Cage-Gogh, and continues it with the image of the ear. Cage embraces the ear, Gogh gives it up. Cage-Zeinimuro-Gogh live together. Gogh’s paintings lure Zeinimuro to detect their movement with radar and a reenact the movement. “I seehear-hearsee the soundwawes coming out”. Perceiving the action of the painting, he makes his own action and undergoes the phantasmagoric experience.” The performance was packed with medical symbols of contamination, trauma, and survival that turned theatre into the ritual. “Kugla” kept on performing fairy tales that convey political activism trough narration about schizophrenic life caused by social-political conditions. They were inspired by political events of the frequent RAF’s (Red Army Fraction) interventions, kidnapping of Ald Mor, etc. As the result, in the performance “Action 16.00” they used real cars, guns and other army machinery. The motif of the performance “Horse Tail” was the Serbian general called Arkan (Arkan in Tartarian stands for the horse’s tail). The theme of “Horse Tail” was a soccer ground in Sarajevo, which was turned into a graveyard during the Bosnian-Serbian war. Kugla continued to make political statements in symbolic performances: “Laika – the first dog in Space”, “Laborem Exercens”, “Jedadde-Jedadde”, “Man-Chair”, etc. Damir Bartol Indoš stated for the Croatian newspaper “Zarez” in 2001 that he will not perform in Serbia until the Republic of Yugoslavia hands in at least 3 war criminals. 4 Tomislav Gotovac, “Point Blank” Tomislav Gotovac is a filmmaker, performer, and visual artist. He started radically presenting