The decision to expand the book Andreja Kulunčić: Art for Social Changes with works that have come into being or have developed since the first edition started up a debate, not only in the direction of additional analytical considerations and the positioning of the new works vis-a-vis their predecessors, with respect to their points of contact, overlaps and divergences, but also in the direction of wider discursive interrogations. For example, the question of how to fit the new works into the existing critical and analytical structure raises the issue of the flexibility, resistance and permeability of the analytical discourse set up, as well as introducing new theoretical perspectives and keynotes. It draws in, on the already ramified map of the author’s artistic practice, additional junctures and new overlaps in the disciplinary network, broadens the field of reference and the communication media.

A new chapter, dedicated to four works – Creative Strategies, Vrapče Pillows, ART-ACT-BOX and EQUALS takes up where the first edition of the book left off, as a kind of postscript, a text that while paying due respect to what was said earlier wants to say something else. Strictly speaking, the word is not used quite correctly, for the form postscript implies some previously rounded and finished letter. But the work of Andreja Kulunčić is not closed system. It is a letter that is constantly being written out again and filled with meanings established from differing disciplinary fields. Even when the author completes a work, it goes on with its multifarious dialogue, like, for example, Distributive Justice, Closed Reality – Embryo, some segments of Creative Strategies or Performing the Exhibition: ART-ACT-BOX.

Then again, the new works can be comprehended in the light of analytical considerations and determinations that are provided by The Poetics of Social Changes with this postscript
limning their specific features, but also certainly being able to open up doors that were invisible or closed during previous reviews.

Technically, the text and its appendix segment the work of Andreja Kulunčić chronologically, yet they should also be seen spatially and synchronically. Like her art practice, in their diverse performative and discursive forms, they too are inscribed into a complex cartography, divided by permeable borders, of widely dispersed socially engaged practices that afford the tools for social activity.

Performance

The work Performing the Exhibition: ART-ACT-BOX speciously at least stands out from the other works by this artist. But the discursive and performative game that takes up, in the choreography of contemporary dancer Zrinka Užbinec, the theme of conceptual art practice from the holdings of four museums, derives from the same logic from which the big works of this artist also developed, works like Distributive Justice and Creative Strategies. Although, provisionally speaking, quite small and untypical of the author, this work marks an important connection within her oeuvre and like a bridge links practices of engaged art that are temporally and geographically distant. Apart from this, it introduces the concepts of performance and body into the discourse about this artist’s oeuvre. The concept of performance is not connected to any particular artistic form, rather it describes a paradigm through which to comprehend things. It signifies the production of reality and takes for granted contingency, interaction, transformation, a system of interaction... The dancer’s performance is called Performing the Exhibition, but this performance is symbolic. What is actually performed is artistic declarations, models of transgressing norms, the production of new paradigms. By performing, the dancer produces and performs knowledge about it. A backward glance shows us the kinship with the artist’s other works, in which different symbolic forms, disciplinary paradigms and models of knowledge, via different peformative acts and constructed situations (a social laboratory) take part in the production of new paradigms.
By emphasising the metatextual levels of this work I would like to support the hypothesis, to be developed during the essay, that the socially engaged projects of Andreja Kulunčić, in their parallel layer, even if this is not the artist’s intention, show the contradictoriness of the social functioning of art. While on the one hand the artistic interventions, standing in for the inadequate functioning of politics, are capable to making social advances, the art system, often too enclosed, will tend to reproduce the hegemonic structure of politics, following the same agenda. In so doing, it nullifies the function of art to transform. Working from the edge of the system, then, is the artist’s strategic choice, for only that kind of activity can evade the control of the system and dislodge its firm boundaries.

Inscription of the body into public space

Within the concept of performativeness that derives from Austin’s theory of speech acts, later theoretical visions have focused on the body that in its particular materiality, just like identity, is constituted by a performative act, with actions and gestures, or by the social constellation that produce it. I mention this in order to draw attention to the close link between body, identity and performance and, making use of this context, to the importance of public space in the construction or deconstruction of representations of identity.
The body is produced in discourse, say champions of the concept of culture as text. To exist, it must be expressed. But 500 pounds a year and a room of one’s own (1) is an area that was won long ago. Female suffrage is standardised, migrant quotas are fixed, statistical lists are orderly, the labour market is free, society is democratic and politically correct. But culture still cuts her out. The minority body is subordinated and brutally exposed to the violence stemming from the dominant position. These are the problems that are defined by the collective EQUALS. If we compare this work with others in which Andreja Kulunčić works with minority groups, for example with migratory workers in Bosnians Out! and 1 CHF = 1 VOICE, with the impoverished communities of Mexico City, psychiatric patients in Vrapče Pillows or with women in index.woman, we shall see that only by being positioned in the public space of the dominant culture – the street, museum or gallery, or the virtual, heterogeneous space of the social networks – is the political subjectivation of the minority body achieved. It is a matter, then, of performing the body. It is positioned, it is established in a relationship, it is inscribed into space and becomes a free body the movement and gestures of which can escape control, as in laughter (we recall Hélene Cixous), or a movement of desire (2). It can doubly endanger dominant society: by breaking down the borders that society has imposed upon it, and its closed system. And so the minority body, which is liminal, since it belongs to two systems, is subversive, for it transgresses boundaries and weakens their cement. By being inscribed in public space, it ceases to be just a place of difference in relation to which the dominant society is defined but, putting before it an ethical demand, becomes a potential corrective of it.

Provocation of the institutional margin

As if they ring out in the resonance of the repetitions of the words “no, no, no, no” of Annie Le Brun, (3) which so well describes the passion of both of these female artists, the works Vrapče Pillows, Performing the Exhibition: ART-ACT-BOX and EQUALS as well as segments of the projects Creative Strategies, Conquering and Constructing the Common and Toolkit for a Joint Action  mirror the artist’s refusal to be a subaltern. In two ways. First of all through artistic activity – creating and activating forms of informal education and advocating for disenfranchised and minority identities - and then by self-positioning in the system of art. Repelled by the centres of power in the system that, involving a fair degree of givenness and dependence, reproduces the neoliberal agenda, Andreja Kulunčić, in spite of a career in art that is quite considerable, or perhaps because of it, works from the institutional margins.

Except for the Mexican segment of Creative Strategies and the performance ART-ACT-BOX, which she put on in the framework of museum projects, she has initiated or completed her other works as productions of her own. Independently of this, these are projects that are balanced on the intersections of disciplinary fields, blurring the boundaries among them, ultimately being resolved by concrete contributions in the field of not-art. If she does put some of them on in a museum or gallery, like Creative Strategies and Vrapče Pillows, then this is a part of the artistic strategy, of using the institution for the transfer of marginalised identities into the dominant cultural space.

Andreja Kulunčić is aware of what she has going for her. The status of female white artist from Europe, with an outstanding CV in the art system, confers on her the ability through the medium of exhibition or artistic work to subvert the prevailing dispositive. “The dispositives in disciplinary society”, explains Agamben, “through a series of practices and discourses, knowledges and exercises, aim at the creation of obedient but free bodies that acquire their subjective identity and freedom in the actual process of their own enslavement. A dispositive is, then, above all a kind of machine that produces subjectivation and only like this is a management machine” (4). Subversion of the dispositives, then, implies processes of re-subjectivation, and since this is a matter of a conditioned configuration, then all who are caught up in it go through re-subjectivation. And positions of power are in the process shaken and overturned. To prompt change means, then, to threaten one’s own position This is not an easy decision to take and this is the reason when many engaged artistic projects are not in fact that, representing, more often than their politicalness, their political image. Between representation and change, however, Andreja Kulunčić chooses change, aware that it is possible only on the margins of the system.
I shall argue that this negotiation from the margins is more than the author’s strategic withdrawal into the shadows; in fact, it fundamentally characterises her artistic practice.
Let us begin with the assumption of art as a separate social system that secures for each element of it the quality of exclusiveness and particularity. Different systems, however, political, economic, artistic, educational and others, impinge on each other, overlap, interfere, taking aesthetic and communicational forms from each other. In this interference, art, particularly engaged art, is in the constant tension of the policies immanent to it: affirmation of its own separateness inside society and alignment, even disappearance, in everyday life (5).
But in the works that we are considering, extension over both fields is constitutive. It is both artistic process and product. Temporarily occupying a museum, for example, is an artistic procedure that enables the marginalised, impoverished communities of Mexico City to become visible and to move into the dominant culture while the aesthetic and ethical cultural framework the artistic work is established. The simultaneous embedding of the work in two systems and the transformation process that the actors and the public undergo give it the character of the liminal. But this is a source of unease in both systems. If dichotomies are an instrument for describing the world, and hence the regulations of our working and behaving, then knocking them down “means not only the destabilisation of the perception of the world self-perception and perception from outside, but also the undermining of the rules and norms that govern our behaviour” (6). This leads to change in both systems.
Now it remains to analyse the levels in what is said. On the one hand, it is a matter of liminality at the level of artistic politics, at the other of the art work. I shall stick to the first, for something has already been said of the second. While art is balanced between aesthetic paradigms, one of which comes close to everyday life and in its radical form does away with it there, the other retains its autonomy and exceptionality, the art system takes over the hegemonic model of the political and economic system, being founded on a clearly placed norms and rules. Breaches from a second system jeopardise its border, which is anyway fragile, for the systems constantly overlap, forming a heterogeneous field of reality. The question posed, which Ranciere speaks of, is not aesthetic transformation, passage from the artistic field to the political for each of them has its own aesthetics, but how to find a place for mutual understanding. It is this question that Andrea Kulunčić indefatigably and successfully answers.

Irena Bekić