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Nada Beros |
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Andreja
Kuluncic: Volume-up
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Andreja Kuluncic's area of interest is a societal space that is comprised of invisible, inaudible, absent, superfluous voices, in other words, all those "unimportant voices" that are rejected in statistics. However much these voices belong to small communities, ghettoized groups, "outsiders" and "others", some sort of islanders in a sea of mutually linked and dependent groupings, without which, it seems, society could function quite well, their sum, undoubtedly, in the long-run presents a seeming "silent majority". This is the same majority that has no influence on public opinion, that has no spokespersons or its protectors, which is neither black nor white, and precisely because of its non-existence of sharp contrasts uninteresting to agencies researching public opinion, harmless for political cartographers, faceless for manufacturers of history, unproductive for visionaries of the future… Whether the subject is about laid-off female employees from the department store chain NAMA (NAMA - 1908 employees, 15 department stores, Zagreb, 2000) or the anonymous inhabitants of a tourist coastal city who have no influence on its development nor any relations of power in the city (City Walks, Zadar 2001); or even about the "worldwide artist brother/sisterhood" (self)isolated from social currents and the flow of capital (Artist from…, Manifesta 4, Frankfurt 2002), or on the illegal migrants whose fates are sealed in more or less civilized detention centers for foreigners (Sight.seeing, Graz, 2003), the position from which Andreja Kuluncic approaches her subject is far from a documentary-like recording of the actual facts. Articulating her visual language in the marginal area within which artistic methods mix in with non-artistic media (billboard ads, tourist brochures, fliers, etc.), "postponing" the desired effect with its specific disguise of media, and placing her work in public spaces which are not primarily intended for art (billboards and advertising panels, streets, a tourist office, a hotel reception area), the artist establishes a necessary distance - an interspace, if you will - using "Verfremdungsefekt" in order to jerk us out of our indifference, resignation, detachment, and paving the way for critical thought. The artist does not take on the role of a ventriloquist, nor does she wish to lend her voice to the "voiceless". Rather, she believes how it is possible to participate in consciousness-raising, in "strengthening" the existing voice. As with many who formed themselves as artists during the nineties, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, during the era of strong social and economic restructurings, equally in the West as in the East, she is aware that art can no longer offer radical solutions nor change the world. Unlike the critical art of the sixties and seventies, which authentically argued for the possibility of social change through art, art at the turn of the new millennium can offer as its program only a mending of the world, striving, with its meager "patching-up of things", to make life on this planet bearable. It is with good reason then that Nicolas Bourriaud claims that grand narratives, characteristic during the modernism era, are being replaced by micro-utopias. The artists of the nineties are aware that they are not expanding the boundaries of art, rather just testing the resistance which art proffers within the global social field. Andreja Kuluncic, the paradigmatic representative of art at the turn of the new millennium, of "art as a production of knowledge" , is interested, above all, in this world, the here and now. There is no "other place", the artist commented in one interview. Having grown up and been brought up in turbulent times and place (born in 1968 in Subotica, Yugoslavia; educated in Belgrade and in Budapest in the late eighties and early nineties; from 1995 lives in Zagreb), Andreja carries with her a specific place and time as her "luggage" - equally as a burden and as a valuable inheritance. The time of transition in post-communist countries brought out the worst of two worlds - capitalism and communism - a free market combined with ideological fundamentalism, whose accompanying manifestations will become the central issues in her work. Not satisfying herself with the illusion of democracy, which has come to have all the more followers and victims, and committing herself to the role of the artist, and not, say, the role of a political activist or journalist, Andreja Kuluncic firmly believes how it is possible, through art, to act on the "society of spectacle", how it is possible to participate responsibly in the creation of change of consciousness, the creation of a critical mass which could realize social "repairs". In the time of "global paranoia" (Žarko Paic), "battles of everyone against everyone" (Pierre Bourdieu), the state of general uncertainty, to dedicate oneself to the ethic of new solidarity, however much this may seem naïve to cynical intellectuals. Indeed, critical minds the likes of Pascal Bruckner, state how the system is programmed as such, so that through finding fault renewal takes place, drawing out its vitality from attack, just like communism "saved" capitalism. Is there, therefore, any hope that neoliberalism will tire itself out, desert? Is there such a thing as an alternative to capitalism? In an indirect way, Andreja Kuluncic poses similar questions, making use of art documentation as the underlying medium. Her work is accessible to the public in the art space only via art documentation. Setting up the art documentation of a project which takes place in a public space, in the form of an installation in an art gallery, the artist, using the words of Boris Groys, through resiting and inscription into an actual space, transforms the artificial into something living, adding to it an aura of something original and unrepeatable. Rendering the boundary of life and art unclear, Kuluncic undoubtedly confirms Groys's thesis on the role and place of art in the time of biopolitics. "For those who devote themselves to the production of art documentation rather than of artworks, art is identical to life, because life is essentially a pure activity that does not lead to any end result," claims Groys It is not surprising then that the works of Andreja Kuluncic, often the result of cooperation with a team of experts from various fields (Closed Reality - Embryo, 1999-2000; Distributive Justice, 2001-2003) - creating a type of social laboratory - are not easily distinguishable from life, from statistical analyses, tables, graphs, decrees, plans, which are also the dominant media for biopolitics. What is remarkable in these team works is that the boundary between life and art is completely arbitrary, while the artist strives to remain on the sidelines, maintaining the position of observer whose standpoint cannot be determined with certainty, just as with life itself. Andreja Kuluncic's neutral standpoint, however, is only an illusion: with the conscious pulling back into the background, the artist strives to expand the space of the observer in order for them to take on their own standpoint and to speak out in their own voice. TRANSLATION: Susan Jakopec
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