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Serbian (Latin)
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Cedomir Vasic
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Branko Pavić, Put IV/ Highway IV, 1990.
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As always, the end of a century, that ideal measure of human duration, at this time exactly poses the same question: "Where do we come from? Who are we? Where do we go?" The question becomes particularly dramatic at the end of a millennium and the appearance of catastrophic associations and fearful forebodings induced by the magic of numbers, too big for man but insignificant for the universe. It is specifically traumatic for the art (visual), which has experienced in this period, after having gained its independence somewhat earlier as a creative and intellectual activity, a number of stresses and turns in anticipating or accompanying the epochal changes that befall the human society, human thinking and behaviour.
The awareness of the relativity of our existence has grown in the course of this century, supported by Freud's interpretation of dreams, Einstein's theoretic conclusions, scientific realizations of Werner von Braun, social achievements of Lenin, sorry, Lennon and Co., by media expansion of McLuhan's village, the digital linking of human individuals by the little computing machines of Bill Gates. The speed that fascinated Marinetti has annulled space and become so elusive that it now, after Virilio has turned it into invisible light, abolishes time and history, leading us all to the infinite moment of simultaneous reception and transmission of billions of pictures which we pass through like some stations connected to the global network. Irrevocably imprisoned in a civilization of pictures, we develop in ourselves a feeling of subjective superiority, based on a plain registering of those visual sensations, while we carefully try to avoid the trap of seeing them properly and understanding them. Superficially and aimlessly we float on the mass of pictures, driven like Volta's frogs by change in voltage, conscious and unconscious at the same time of our individual infiniteness and the multitude we belong to. This contradiction between the broadening of our self and a fear of our own insignificance establishes a permanent domination of relativity and vagueness in our understanding of the world, previously subjected to the firm coordinates of spiritual contemplation.
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Branko Pavić, Put III/ Highway III, 1900.
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On the other hand, the enormous spreading of the rational and positive knowledge has made it possible for Man to conquer Nature and its secrets, to adjust it to the extent of his own needs, even endangering its balance or destroying its bio-reserves and numerous life-resources, in order to dominate the substance of life, to programme and direct it artificially. The triumph of the insubstantial and positivistic understanding has curbed the spiritual into the ghettos of the exotic, ethnographic or culturally commercial, putting forward the pleasures of social and material comfort as its final goal and the only meaning of life. This has suited the development of ideological and consumer mind; the natural needs are exchanged for fictional, the social awareness for an acquired reflex. The principles of Orwell's pan-topia and Paul's advertocracy rule there; a domination of virtuality over reality subdues the direct experience for the sake of the credibility of advertising messages. The world is based on an unbroken chain of supply and demand, on a momentary inciting and satisfying of desires, towards the cancellation of every physical activity by affecting brain impulses through bio-energetic extensions. In expectation of the happy moment of total human dematerialization and the ultimate integration in the cosmic energetic system, accompanied by a possibly nostalgic extravagance of producing perfect human individuals of synthetic origin (Blade Runner), artistic curiosity and creation remain as rare aspects of doubt versus the clearly traced planetary road to future.
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Dejan Grba, Thermica I, 1996.
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An overall presence of the visual media, their accessibility and the pressure they execute by liberally bestowing countless pictures upon us, mostly of electronic (TV) origin, in the artificial environment we inhabit, make us lose a direct contact with the real world, encompassing the whole structure of opinions, beliefs and conducts born out of our dialogue with Nature. Our mind is steered and limited to acting within the sphere of simultaneous rules and regulations of a virtual world.
The means of public and mass communication and advertising – the media, created with an ambition to broaden the market of goods and ideas, as an economic and political propaganda, bear the characteristics of their primary purpose: to win the consumers and followers in ever greater numbers. Adhering to their totalitarian logic of covering and satisfying the potential interests of each individual, the media permeate all pores of life shattering it to bits and pieces. The picture they make is a fragmentary, torn representation of different areas of life, received in a synchronous pulsation of its parts. By those numerous pieces of information emitted continuously, the media hold their viewers in a state of stupor, of presence without participation, of recognition without understanding. The ever more fierce and frequent shocks shift their stimulus threshold, the human code is filled with a mass of data that make other relevant human features disappear: like compassion, belonging, mutual understanding. The viewer approaches the picture as a course of electric charge and discharge, as a means of physical relaxation without a stronger emotional participation or cathartic effect. The possibility of choosing an infinite number of channels and programmes offered by world networks is the cave of Ali Baba full of an unlimited assortment of pictures, positions, views, manners.
Boasting of their democracy and openness, the media create their own reality, which they pronounce the only valid reality in any area – from the social to the intimate, from spiritual to sensual. It relieves one of all illusions, turning everything into a grandiose virtuality of media existence, capturing in it its consumers for ever. Its climax are Warhol's fifteen minutes (or seconds) of glory, the unrepeatable moment of passing through all the points of the media sphere. "The simplest surrealist act: to get out into the street with two guns and shoot randomly at a crowd as large as possible", as suggested by Breton, has often proven to be the simplest way of entering the media, the only relevant reality, as an easily accessible aspect of the final fulfillment of one's own existence. In equalizing of illusion and reality, similar to Baudrillard's eradication of the borderline separating life and images, the sentimental human quality is abolished by the efficiency of video- and computer games, and moral dilemmas are lost in an amusement which demands quick reflexes and business-like reasoning, fear vanishes at this safe distance from everyday risks and dangers; the only rules to be obeyed are those of a certain programme or a certain machine.
The above is significantly supported by the development of technology, particularly the computer technology which reduces everything to the binary principle of zero and one, in and out, good and bad, black and white, permeating all contemplation and comprehension of the world, and reducing our experiences to the predictable reactions instigated and channeled by rational economizing in space and time. Rationalization and classification represent the dominant operational methods and means of the technological mind that controls all our activities and corrects all our imperfections and particularities by the measure of efficiency. In order to attain the perfection of the system or a machine, human organism, strained to the limits of its possibilities, turns to techno-chemical resources (the so called energizers) thus entering a new circle of illusion. The techno-reality, "hacker", "rave" or "cybernetic", expresses the desire of man to get connected with the machine, his extension. The conflict between this desire and the fear of losing one's soul is illustrated in Hoffman's Olympia and Frankenstein's fiancee, precursors of the cyborgs, the posthumous beings already inhabiting the virtual reality of film ("The Lawnmower"). However, since they are constructed out of a billion of information data, they no longer suffer for the loss of soul and emotions.
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Dejan Grba, Thermica II, 1996.
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Virtual reality[1] as a simulation or substitution of reality in a developed technological environment, has a spectacular but also intimate way, by means of certain appliances (actuators and sensors), of turning the objectively inexistent into the subjectively real. The main goal of media effectiveness is thus achieved – to make individuals believe they have command over reality, regardless of how virtual it is. It appears to be much more exciting and attractive because it requires an inter-active participation, contrary to a rather passive viewing of other visual media programmes. This reality, more real and much more interesting than the existing life, threatens to exclude and replace this life.
The cybernetic vision of the man and the world has its counterbalance in the part of mankind where poverty and hunger, irrational beliefs and conflicts prevail, but as an idea of the Western civilization and its global supremacy, it penetrates all. Of course, it conceals, beside the fearful, also some encouraging possibilities for the human kind and other live species, in a possible attainment of an exceptional degree of wisdom, in a harmonic arrangement of the world and an equilibrium of order and chaos.
And so, the highly developed technological world, where all working and physical processes have been made utterly easy, appears as a perfectly efficient organization which offers its consumers an unlimited choice and an unrestrained access to data, also the choice and practice of life style and preferences, an existence in the chosen kind of illusion. In such a world everything is possible, accessible as in a supermarket, the climax of the consumer or pro-spending (Toffler) mentality. Simulacrum transcends death as well, the death of relatives or one's own, since there is "no death" in the reality of illusion, there is no physical or bodily disappearance, there are only images and pictures. the famous hit song Unforgettable turns, in its video spot, to a place where Net King Cole meets his daughter Nancy, thirty years after his death; the film Deep Red deals with the desire to exist at any price, even as a ghost, in order to win the victory over the last remaining inevitability, in order to conquer the remaining fear. By making the very notions of life and death relative in the reality of illusion, one steps over the last barrier of the previously valid understanding of the humane and is directed to the paths which are difficult to predict.
The civilization we live in is not satisfied with this, but strives to materialize illusion to its full realization. This objectification of illusion implies that whatever is behind real objects and phenomena, of metaphors and metaphysics will disappear and fatally change the meaning of our existence. The extent of this surrender to parallel, illusory realities and their materialization can be seen at the meetings of collectors and lovers of historical events, particularly battles, who most attentively study and reconstruct to the tiniest detail the costumes, the arms, tools, eating habits, behaviour, organization, movements, maneuvers of certain military formations in a historic period. Afterwards, after having dressed up and fitted out, subjugating fully to the discipline of the given historical moment, they "enliven" and "re-enact" them totally transferring themselves in the past. This transference in another, bygone reality, is not only a kind of passeism, but a direct realization of the virtual. The borderline between the realities is erased and the participants frequently get home with bruises.
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Dejan Grba, Thermica III, 1996.
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The arts that originate in such circumstances are faced with the problems of place, role and purpose. During this century, it has been an autonomous and exclusive area for expressing independent views, fantasies and experiences born in the encounter of the outer world and the internal world of the artist. At the present moment, the growing number of pictures of the most diverse origins (newspapers, films, television, advertisements) has so much occupied the everyday space that a work of art has lost all its specific quality and value as a carrier of messages. Moreover, the possibility of manipulating the entire visual legacy, packed in computer packages, creates new pictures for a great number of people and the artistic creative act no longer has the exclusive quality of a unique moment, of the superiority of human mind over the material and banal daily life. The equal importance of all pictures creates a state of visual entropy in which everything is in motion, fluctuating, and due to these quick changes, pictures either gain or lose their significance and meaning. The energetic pulsation of all visual media is dominant, but in that area visual arts have no firm groundwork from which or contrary to which they would originate, because in such a reality everything is only illusion and delusion. In this Worholia things have only their appearances and no contents, for the viewer, looking becomes the same as seeing, perception turns into recognition, to experience means just to register. The surrogate of reality is the foundation of artistic molding and arts is reflected in the recycling of the existing pictures, an esthetization of the estheticized. However, although just an illusion of an illusion, art continues to exist.
Concrete artistic forms are hard to predict because of a huge span of planetary, poetic, material points of departure that are involved. In their infinite game of combinations involving the most divergent processes and procedures, there is a substitute for the authenticity which has lost its ground in a confrontation with the generally accepted standpoints and standards, the peculiar "fascism of seeing" dictated through the media. Therefore, artistic responses are frequently in revolt toward the imposed views of human singularity and uniqueness (the individualistic myth) and examples of this spread from a total denial of the civilization we live in to an identification with this civilization's technological aspects and attempted effectiveness through these most obvious means of communication. In realizing their ideas, visual artists use all kinds of materials, from rudimentary to complex electronic appliances, and create works that express the state of their mind in most diverse ways.
In order to confirm one's own place and work in the constantly changing conditions of the environment, in the virtual reality that each day gains ever more material (virtual) forms, artists are drawn to concrete things, certain applicability, even design, seemingly devoid of messages. The works created, most frequently spatial or ambiental forms, show an extraordinary sensibility for the materials and objects used in their structures, their physical and tactile properties, their industrial but also organic origins, toward their expressive effectiveness. Regardless of the place they occupy, in galleries like installations, as spatial arrangements or in open spaces, making use of the particular spot, topos, and its latent possibilities, these works want to make their viewers aware of their bare existence and presence, there, on the given spot and in actual reality. The dialogue takes place on all levels, from the geographic, through urban, ecological, ethnological, sexological to social and etymological, in order to make the artist a real necessity, to make the space more substantial. Graffiti, murals, light projections, electronic walls, spatial ventures or architectural interventions are not there only to beautify, to estheticize or take part in useful decorations of the city, but to single out some particular features of the city, to find the hidden dimensions of its actual existence. The artistic reality takes over many elements of reality in order to retrieve the lost contact with the environment and the objects around us, which are, however, forgotten under the influence of the media and computer spheres. "Art should be literally made of the ordinary world, its space should be our space, its time our time, its objects our ordinary objects, the reality of art will replace reality". This idea of Claes Oldenburg, although conceived many years ago, is undoubtedly applicable today.
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Branka Kuzmanović, Diskontinuitet kontinuiteta / Discontinuity of Continuity, 1996.
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The above should be distinguished from the esthetization of reality which is done by the media, their standards and the desire that each thing, each being should be packed in attractive wrappings, where design becomes the key word and activity. In the media sphere, design is in the forefront of the battle for a new virtual reality with the goal to give it full legitimity, plausibility and primacy. The perfection of execution, propounded by design, is based on external attractiveness and the functionality of form, with traces of psychological allure. However, these "beautiful objects" are not parts of the dilemmas of reality, they exist self-sufficiently in the passive lives of media users. Having penetrated all areas, design has proclaimed itself the only art of the epoch at the turn of centuries. If everything is information, then all art is exclusively design. Since the only important thing is the appearance of reality, not its substance, design emerges as the prime esthetic-expressive form of virtual reality. It becomes the supreme principle and, comparable to the rise of interest in the applied arts at the turn of centuries (remember the end of the 19th and the 18th centuries), everyday forms resolutely influence the molding of taste and artistic opinions, but also have broader implications. There are, however, opposite powers bringing overly subjective traits and artistic procedures in design, the issues of a desire to emphasize the artistic nature of this activity and make its media promotion spectacular. Certain artistic interventions (techno-art), observed from without, come close to design in appropriating its features on purpose and using the shell in order to imply some other contents and motives. In that way we arrive at the subversion of design that has its own match in manipulating the media for the sake of art.
The use of media in art is accompanied by the danger of blending into their order, unless one insists on their expressive properties, on penetrating their technological roots, on developing their hidden dimensions and the establishment of new linguistic possibilities. The critical view of an observer whose duty is to warn against underwater rocks during the voyage across the media ocean may become totally obsolete if not expressed through the media. Although they foster a certain amount of criticism, as part of the universal packet of the supplies, the media are able to absorb the opposed opinions easily by their logic of transmitting and receiving of messages. Therefore, many artistic performances are based on the idea of manipulating the media, and their divergent qualities are used as the means of subversive action. By this paradoxical use of the media, artists want to break the compact sphere of virtuality in which the media are trying to imprison us. Advertising panels, putting of advertisements in the papers, promoting of spots on television or Internet ads are not used to advertise one's own artistic products but to challenge the means of mass propaganda by those inserted messages. This conscious and delicately contemplated use of the media properties is now applied to dissolving their strong fixed-purpose and obligated structures and functions. As a part of the reality, the media thus become the area of artistic activity, providing diverse responses which range from contest to negation.
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Darko Gajić, Dermatografizam/ Dermatographism, 1997
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The means of communication have been incorporated in the artistic activity for some time now and from there stems the notion of network, which assumes the use of mail, telephone, electronic and optic carriers of information and an exchange of artistic messages and works. Born out of the joy of global communications and planetary connections, it has turned out to have infinite possibilities for artists to unite and organize around important topics of broader social impact. As part of the computer connections, electronic mail and Internet it has better conditions, but, on the other hand, it is to a certain degree subjected to code coordination and the conventions that are sometimes not able to follow the artistic discourse of critical and problematic disposition. It may happen then that the magnificent means of communicating and understanding become the means of confusion and misunderstanding, that the proclaimed democratic attitude disappears or appears only as a commercial attraction. Another open question is the problem of the relationship between the local tradition and a universal language, and of messages whose meaning differs between a rich communication and none at all. However, the mutuality that develops in this artistic traffic, represents one of the important links in comprehending the coming artistic practice.
By introducing the computer technology and computers themselves into their own sphere visual arts have begun the dialogue with the most complex means of producing pictures. It has proven to be all-encompassing, powerful and omnipresent, with a repertoire and archives of pictures from overall visual legacy; it has also proven to be able to imitate all of the existing visual media, to adapt, redo, connect millions of data of visual, graphic, photographic, cinematographic, electronic or digital origin, in a minute and custom-made. It is, therefore, the ideal means of an era that economizes with all categories of existence in order to suck them into its own reality. By pressing a key on the keyboard, one summons pictures-signs of predetermined meaning; ideas and emotions convoke into new wholes of most impossible combinations. "Click the icon", as a simple computer instruction suggests, does not only mean to enter a certain programme, and reach for a ready-made form and a known procedure and arrive at an optimal solution, but to accept the way of thinking in which the whole reality is coded and our life evolves in the world of symbols exclusively. (Let us remember those collections of funny stories from years ago, where each joke had its number, and "Joke No. 7" would provoke roars of laughter, while "Joke No. 396" would get no reaction, because it was a bad joke.) The absurdity of transforming complex contents and messages into an archive of signs – icons (and their very name in this region has an additional meaning), speak of the road the visual arts have covered from the time of "Praise the icon" to "Click the icon", from an uncertain adventure of a creative procedure to a symbolic pressing on keys in order to invoke a routine effect.
This, however, does not mean that the visual, plastic creation is expelled from computers and their operations. On the contrary, it frequently happens, accompanied with a triumphant enthusiasm of mastering a new tool by applying those infinite variations of simulated procedures otherwise pertaining to other media. Working on the level of the existing programmes and operational systems, artists open the doors of the art of this medium and establish a specific expressive language. One of the conquered postulates is relating and matching of the given or ready-made pictures – the principle of contextualization which derives from the media line of thinking and the current intermingling of the visual means and disciplines. With the already adopted conceptualization (projected thinking), visual creation, on computer or without it, becomes less the molding of form and more the process of relating the ready-made parts. There is no great difference between them, but the latter requires a different application of elements and their structured coordination.
The advantages of the computer technology are used by all visual art disciplines, first of all, for practical purposes. Painting however, although physically closest to computers in its two-dimensionality, is momentarily in the background. Its recent mastering of the computer as a new technological foundation, guarantees that a New Illusionism will be born as an outcome of its entering the programmes of virtual reality. In the meantime, spectacular virtual projects are being made. Their origins are in film, since film has already accomplished real virtuality and the magnificent achievements of technology, tricks and effects – think of Spielberg. The popularity of these undertakings lies in the human quest for new excitements (the American cultutainmental olympism) and old romantic adventures. However, as long as there is a need for experience, for emotions, art has a chance, even in the world of illusion.
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Dejan Dimitrijević, Velika apstrakcija / The Big Abstraction, 1996.
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The primary target of both the media and artistic realities is human individuality – they are interested in it, but approach it from different sides. Both realities appreciate the fact that an individual is worth his or her existence only by his subjective reality in which he lives but fosters in his own way. The logic of the media desires to absorb the specific reality by a multitude of diversified programme supplies in which the individual, previously depersonalized with the same medium, finds his lost reality and identifies with it. Therefore, the individual is showered with data he has to mold ("television as the engineer of human views and appearances"), and his extraordinary properties are always glorified. In earlier films man was the hero who was able to stimulate a group or the masses by his own deeds, i.e., with a common goal, in recent films man flights against all and every, corporations, individuals, the system or television, and his inevitable victory strengthens the myth of the absolute significance of an individual. There are no general truths, no mutual horizon of expectations, no collective consciousness, no sense of belonging. There are only lonely individuals with their subjective realities of equal value, who either survive or are ruined. In virtual reality, this subjective reality seems to be the only protection and shelter. The technical possibilities of manipulating this huge number of the pictures of reality facilitate the storing of all individual moments and serving all individuals in the gigantic eidotheque of subjective reality.
The artistic ambition to create a specific reality by yet unseen pictures born in the unique encounters of individuals and the material – overall reality, endeavours to create a vision that would be of significance for others as well. The artist, a lonely individual, wants to communicate with other individuals, to share the pictures of his reality with others, to spread out his nature infinitely. In that he sometimes falls victim of media reality and manipulation, because he wants to exchange his own individuality for a moment of infinite spreading. He develops a kind of selfishness, authoritarian behaviour, reservations, all of them justified by his instinct to survive, the necessary mechanism of defense. In him, however, there is a spark of revolt, because true individuality is always either beyond or before the system.
Parallel to the cult of individuality, media reality is brimming with multiplied pictures and forms by which it emphasizes democracy (everyone can have his own Mona Lisa) but also the terrible power of self-reproduction. Therefore, works of art frequently appear as series of similar or repeated forms that fill the galleries, of landscapes or screens that reveal their roots in the means of technical reproduction. The imposed obsessiveness, the enclosing within a limited space, that these works presume, can be compared to the sound amplified to the limits of endurance, in order to test the physical, intellectual and emotional abilities of the audience put in direct contact with it. This principle of sampling the reality, da capo al fine, reflects the state of infiniteness, of dwelling and remaining in the sphere of virtual reality, supported by certain psychedelic effects and techno-trance. And, as the media slowly devour the viewer with their constant repetition of messages, substituting his personal images by their products, so the artist tries to drag the viewer into his reality by spreading out the same, producing a repetition in space and time, creating the expressive quality of a serial product. The multiplication of the same creates a virtual space of a strong, concentrated effectiveness and depersonalized expressiveness by which the work of art broadens its dimensions infinitely.
The element of mediation and inference, inherent to the nature of the media, can be found in the visual art works still under construction. It is apparent in the fact that frequently there is no obvious relation between these works and any kind of reality. They have an expressed tendency to divert one to something else, beyond themselves, but not steer toward a purpose, reason or message. These refined objects, attainable only in the virtual reality of the materials they are so perfectly modeled in, suggest the unspeakable and indiscernible. Their untouchability underlines the absence from, and an independent existence with regard to, the viewer. Their formal perfection creates a tactile illusion and its mediation likens the frigidity of the media in transmitting messages, in informing without interpreting, in expressions without metaphors. In being directly concrete, they herald inference as the supreme goal. Everything else happens in the viewer himself. Different techniques are applied in order to achieve the concentration necessary for sustaining the opulence of experience which will be transformed into a work of art. This stretches to the limits of physical endurance and bodily self-torture, so that, like in religious rituals, one could achieve the state of enlightenment and rouse from sleep the appropriate spiritual content. This kind of dedication and devotion originates in an individualistic obsession and bears the imprint of a kind of religious and spiritual ecstasy during the creation of a work. Behind the seemingly indefinite forms there are concrete, very personal contacts with the reality and they represent their deep expression, commentary and criticism. The issue of this is a growing interest in various aspects of human body, one's own or somebody else's, its anatomic and physiological characteristics, in its natural or disfigured state, horrible or humorous, the resident inevitable cover of our sensorial and intellectual apparatus. This is related to a latent or open inclination toward the ritual, the showing off, displays, performances, happenings, because they broaden the effectiveness of the body in space and time, in action and motion, and confirm its existence as a live reality. If in this one reaches the unpleasant, the shocking and terrifying, it will be due to the old need to produce something unusual, astounding, in order to break up the state of convenience and media stultification, and our growing indifference and disinteredness. We encounter here some common points with the birth of Naturalism toward the end of the 18th century and the desire of artists to confront the viewer with brutal reality (Caravaggio). This inclination toward violence in art is not only the revolt of personal frustration or limitation, but a state of mind which cannot be expressed in any other way, or find its own place and confirm its existence. It is also a revolt against the proclaimed reality, virtual, of course, and its promises that cannot be fulfilled (Kassovitz: Hatred).
The aspects of reality which we have shown here and the aspects of artistic conduct we have discussed, suggest a lot of unknown elements that await us in an environment of virtual reality, in an environment really nonexistent but virtually real. Art can be either more real, more substantial and confront the illusion, or it can be even more unreal, super-transparent, with spectacular inventions of a new, imaginary world in an infinite space with absence of time but infinite duration. Time will show whether it will be painfully tactile, to the limits of physical temptation or torture it wishes to wake us up with, or just stimulate us virtually, lulling us in with light entertainment and excitement in a slow brain activity ("brain is a medium") to our total physical inertia and transformation into stimulated vegetating organisms. (These are only some of the possible directions of artistic movements.)
Each new medium has taken some properties over from the preceding one, thus opening a new field of effectiveness. Each new one seems to be the absolute, because it combines all the characteristics of those before it, but complete their operations faster, more correctly, and more efficiently. The development of the media, and the media civilization, opens new artistic non-commercial dimensions in order that the reality itself, confronted with its substitute, virtual reality, may become the area of artistic activity. Real life as an artistic medium and a means of expression is turning into the target area of all artistic endeavours. Life as metaphor, otherwise expelled from human creations, life as the ultimate sense of existence is the unavoidable form and content of the art of real virtuality. Therefore, the proximity of illusion and lucidity, vision and providence is not accidental. The realized vision is a providence for art and its new role in the times to come. Then, the realized illusion is not the end of art but could be its new beginning.
(1997)
1 I hereby express my thanks to Dejan Grba for letting me read his yet unpublished text "The Silicon Weaving of Reality" (1995), which I have used in preparing this paper.