Ben Rutter

Published in NY Arts Magazine, July/August 2005

The Croatian conceptualist Andreja Kuluncic wants to help her fellow Eastern Europeans crack the New York art world’s oldest codes. Whom to meet? Where to show? Kuluncic has spent her residence at Art In General, the non-profit gallery, assembling a manua about how to build the art world social capital necessary for success–a how-to guide for arrivistes. At a recent lecture there, she set aside the research and spoke about herself. Yet if the small crowd in attendance was denied insider leads, it was introduced to a range of work canny in construction and broad in its appeal. And anyhow, wasn’t that Pierre Bourdieu in back?

Like her New York primer, and conceptual work in general, Kuluncic’s projects have a prankish flair. An online applet has Croatians rate their President, then scraps their grades and offers him a perfect score. This is cheerfully enraging, especially if you’re from Zagreb. Another site unveils a cyborg-supply store–a parody of Amazon–whose patrons stock their carts with upgrades straight from Asimov. The work is sharp, though it would register lightly were it not weighted throughout by a policymaker’s deep concern for the actual choices–economic, aesthetic, political–that ordinary people have to make.

Choice is the engine of Kuluncic’s web-based work, which accounts for half her oeuvre. A typical piece asks a user to identify herself (age, sex, temperament), and then delivers her into a thicket of options. The scenarios–ranging from the bionic (design an embryo) to the pragmatic (design an equitable distribution of material goods)–are inveigling, and we point and click contentedly. The larger point, meanwhile, emerges when these choices re-confront us in the aggregate of charts and graphs. How do you, a sporty Turkish girl, compare to businessmen from Spain? If Kuluncic’s polling plays a riff on social science, it does not seek to undermine its claims. Rather, her earnest wit and sharp concern make it seem hip to be a wonk.

Since the web first helped to free her from a country isolated by its wars, Kuluncic’s online work–at www.andreja.org–has grown sophisticated. This technical accomplishment is a departure from the canons of conceptual art, which has traditionally scorned–or lacked, at any rate–an interest in design. Still, Kuluncic appears refreshingly unconcerned with precedent. The bright, smooth surface of the web is offered not in rebuke to the more disheveled 1970s, but as an invitation to the common passerby. Heady yet accessible, her projects have the sane appeal of public television. And if the past is any indication, her handbook to the storming of New York will blend ethnographic wit with practical advice. That could be useful, especially if you’re from Zagreb.