No More Heroes Any More is a reversed Jeux interdits; namely, the game in it is Obligatory, as in sports or politics. The film is similar to Jeux interdits in that it is not an illustration, but rather a commentary on war, on the theatrics of military mechanics. It suggests that war is a (strategic and tactical) game; that weapons are the toys of adults; that people are toys; that at the end .there is always a force that transforms most ordinary competition into a relentless fight for life - or against it.

And there is an element which places Heroes close to the Ninth Circle, if not right inside it: the backdrop of the video-film by the sculptor Marko Kovacic is predominantly characterized by sets and props, and not by people. The toys are granted souls, while human characters become - or remain or are subjected to - grotesque stereotypes. Stereotypes that are well acquainted with the most important politicians in the world.

Marko Kovacic had previously filmed Declaration of War. At that time there raged a media war, one that seemed to have been almost won. But it's possible that the present war is still the same one. Perhaps it will end only after everything has been destroyed, when there is nothing left to destroy - which is what happened to Babylon, Troy, and Armageddon.

Marko Kovačič creates ambients which conceal a significant cleft somewhere within their structure; they are homely, ordinary, all too familiar, but they nevertheless air a particular, unmistakable discomfort, though its edges are smoothed down with irony and a great deal od tenderness, even love for what is presented to us. "Somewhere within their structure", we said. The exact spot is ellusive and difficult to pin. On the first level, there is the presentation as such: it is less an ambient, strictly speaking, than pieces of ambients, transplanted into the exhibition room(s), displayed, arranged into a kind of niches, incomplete wholes. Marko Kovačič's objects are produced, carefully and in detail. Still, the association to ready-mades is not a coincidence. Kovačič's objects are recycled, and while their "first" context, the one they were first created for (or, say, their "original purpose") still rings in our minds (if we follow Marko Kovačič's work, that is), these (same) objects are ceaselessly rearranged for new presentations and continually create new metaphorical contextual layers.

It is not only Kovačič's objects that are recycled, but also images; objects pass into images (Heroes), images become objects: a set of images at this exhibition are stills from his video Forth Into the Past, and it is through them, perhaps, that we may best experience the world created by Marko Kovačič. The heroes of this video (at least in the present writer's view) are plastoses, animated child dolls and toys which have been, by means of various interventions (fine mechanics? surgery?), transformed into monstruous creatures - yet Kovačič treats them with affection, and justly, because in a way they are more human than humans. British writer of horror Clive Barker comes to mind, with whom one cannot miss his affection for his monsters, regardless of the atrocities they commit - for it is because of their fate that they commit them and not because of a "will for evil".

Nerina Kocjancic: After we have seen the real death (and we are still watching it) from our comfortable seats, Marko Kovacic appeared with his video which, however, does not represent a condemnation of violence and atrocities of war, but rather deals with our Gaze from the Armchair. Isn't it that the real death gradually turns into a video play, or -- as demonstrated by Marko Kovacic -- into a grotesque game of chess on the red-and-black chessboard... War games do not substitute for the real ones; they are simultaneous, for the Gaze from the Armchair should not be deprived of the New Reality produced by the electronic image.


Tanja Lesnicar - Pucko:
The multimedia project by Marko Kovacic is one of those products which first drive us to laughter, but later this laughter acceleratingly mixes with the dreadful associations which -- in our times and places -- cannot be avoided. The play with stakes upon the victory of prestige turns into total devastation without a winner. From this standpoint, Kovacic's work is undoubtedly the most subtile contemporary anti-war warning produced in Slovenia.

Janez Strehovec:
Marko Kovacic's "fallen heroes" instigate violence, and focus it more and more sharply; nevertheless, violence in this project is effectively featured from its stylized, aesthetic, and ironic angle -- for example, with referring to Hitchcock, but also with introduction of a parallel play on the chessboard, when objects-mobils-toys, partly grotesquely partly comically designed and actually more Disney-like cool than really slaughterous, go mad and start to fight. Stylized is also acting of the performers, especially with the choreography of mechanical mime; namely, the actors move like protagonists of some Bauhaus stage, say in the manner of the mechanical ballet by Oscar Schlemmer and Lothar Schreyer. The performers surely have a mechanistic, machinelike image -- a man-machine then, brought to light with anthropomorphisation of machines through technologies of violence.

Lilijana Stepancic:
šKUC Gallery is thus remade into museum. The installing of things, the mutual disposition and interrelations of the exhibits prove that this is not some National Museum, but rather the private collection of an enthusiast. The collected items do not seem to be documentarily recorded, systematised or evaluated; there is no national museum structure or card index behind them. They rather remind one of the wunderkammer of some great eccentric of mannerism, the period so similar to present times. The artist-collector has made his decision to collect in order to fulfill his personal aspirations. The collected items are objects from a fallen political regime and its iconography, and this was also the time of the artist's childhood and youth. They form the basis on which the museum is yet to be structured.

Most frequently, the exhibits in Kovačič's museum are seen through various optical devices or the screens of his TV sets. They are not presented directly, but through a medium. In this way they evoke the idea of the significance of spectacle as a functioning form of our civilisation. They also speak about television which is becoming a way of life and our window to the world. But Kovačič's museum is not an analysis or critique of a particular choice of collection, i.e. of a point of view of the world. It is a kind of deconstruction, very close to the meaning of Derrida's term.

Miha Zadnikar
MKTV - A Short Course in Telestatic Skills
Kovačič's installations - even the minutest, the most intimate, those removed from the hated box into a kaleidoscope, camera lucida, the roundabout of gadgets or memorial cabinet - are not merely deconstruction, dismantling, derivation of some concrete TV set, but also construction, assembly, the synthesis of some abstract TV set. As such they are the museum of all those autobiographies which in this electronic era were changed into a mass of material(istic) dimensions. Marko Kovačič is a sculptor who has bypassed the traditional figure and the spiritual plastic in order to preserve the full figurativeness and plasticity of the spirit. He is our most abundant television station.

Nevenka Sivavec:
BOXMAN
Mister A., a retired professor of history is a funny guy. He has been living alone for years, in an apartment full of different objects. he is the only one to know how to circulate from one room to another among paper boxes, paintings, old information signs, flags with their sticks. Mister A. almost never leaves his apartment, he likes to sit in front of the TV; recently they have started showing the old partisan movies again, thank God. Sometimes he sits down in the front of the stow, puts on his glasses and watches the bread baking or the chicken getting golden yellow. He possesses practical little stool which can be effortlessly moved to the bathroom where he can overlook attentively for a whole hour how the colored laundry is turning in the machine. Those rare people who come to see him will never find out why he does not open for such a long time although he's always home. There is nothing Mister A. enjoys so much as when he can observe the visitors through the little hole on the entrance door. They seem so funny through Mister A.'s optics.

But once the situation was quite different. Some young TV people announced themselves to interview him for a special culture broadcasting, to show the audience his unusual collection and talk with him about different things, about his past and present.

Mister A. agreed, and it made him feel good. But when those young slightly arrogant people arrived and were immensely amused by his collection, he regretted it. They put on the lights, the eye of the camera looked at him with expectation... and he did nothing. He could not pronounce a word. This documentary or interview never took place.

Nadja Zgonik:
In his most recent project, entitled Laterna Magica, Marko A. Kovacic places various optical apparatuses and contrivances alongside one another, combining them regardless of the logic of development and regardless of the fact that more elaborate mechanisms have replaced and entirely substituted the simple ones. He anachronistically combines netting constructions, which weave themselves into a didactical manifestation of different concepts of usually invisible perspective structures; peepholes illuminated with artificial light and equipped with lenses through which one can see various real and imaginary settings; and photographs and video clips. The artist wishes to convince the spectator of the simultaneous actuality of different representative models.

By paying attention to visual themes, Marko A. Kovacic has turned from his original orientation, i.e. sculpture - by definition directed to haptics - to optics. He has condensed the procedure of touch which works on several levels, into one sole compressive point: vision. Thus Kovacic elaborates the point where the eye touches the material. He uses obvious representative models to transform sight into a materially present fact. He makes no effort to rearrange and interchange the roles of the subject of looking and the object, but rather wishes to freeze the optical fact itself, to keep its distance from the bearer of the view. He directs us into the world of looking itself, into the universal, super-historical point of the emergence of optical perception. Therefore we can say that artist's basic intention is to make visible, evident, and thus perceptible to the eye, the fundamental discourse of the ocular-centric society, i.e. the discourse on the visible - its complex structure is returned to the point of the emergence of sight, the eye, only to be liberated of the ideological frameworks of time, space, and the sacred.

An integral part of the exhibition was a calendar-catalogue which added a time dimension to Kovačič's exhibition: it means that his work accompanies the spectator throughout the year. The calendar form points to the entwinement of artistic activity with everyday life, the spheres which in Kovačič's case are much combined, since his collecting of objects is a matter of daily walks around the city, or casual rummaging among waste objects, and it does not necessitate a special artistic concentration. The artist's imagination is excited only when time adds the weight of history to and produces the selection of these objects. Thus, in the end, time appears to be the basic substance of the artist's work. Historical time is faced with the present, the active time of the artist's creativity with the passive time of the transformation of objects into obsolete symbols. Finally, the doubt arises as to whether our perception of linear time, and the progress it is supposed to bring with it, really corresponds to the world we live in.

Rastko Mocnik:
the all-encompassing giant’s outlook, the secret dwarf’s participatory view, the two avenues to the world of wonders and of puzzlement we have all indulged in, and which we all have equally lost. A world we can only nostalgically recollect - until Kova~i~ makes us recapture it, together with the sharp consciousness of its irretrievable loss. We not only see, again, the illusion - we also “see” the sight that contrives it and is charmed by its own product. And if, amongst the trivia of our childhood, we come across the red star of the daring hopes of past humanity, the historic shades of its tragic abuse comfortingly blur with the shadows of our own idiosyncratic traumatisms, the distantly aching companions of our childhood - the solid rock of our present subjectivity. And we know: we will never come to terms with the tears of the child within us - while it is precisely this incapacity of ours that makes us humans who we are. We will never consent to the treachery of history - and it is this very resistance that makes us face the treason we have to live.