Pogačar's "systems" of art, culture and society are based on the notion of parasitism of a multifaceted character:

(i) There are certain analogies with the parasitism of living organisms (an organism always hangs onto another organism; the relationship with the other organism, body, system, institution is vital and productive, but also lethal).

(ii) An intentional analogy is being established between a live organism in nature and an institution of society, which is expressed by representing the fictional institution (the model of an institution as an artistic system-work) as a parasite that hangs onto (inhabits, consumes, uses, exhausts and brings death to) the "real" and "existential" social institutions (museums, archives, agencies, anti-institutions enacted by homeless people, as well as private institutions of everyday family life).

(iii) The establishment of parasitism as a systematic and permanent artistic act is based on the conviction that a work of art, understood as a life vocation, allows for parasitism and shows that art is no longer the product of the artistic work (piece) but, rather, the use of the "world of art", "culture" or "society" engulfing this piece of work and making it either necessary or unnecessary.

The artist consents to being a "parasite", but only when he presents himself as a "parasitic institution" that finds its body within the institutions of society, culture and art. The starting point is a conviction that society, culture and art are "environments" (artificial systems providing the context, eco-systems1 ) that include institutions (the analogy with live organisms) which, through their dominant and powerful needlessness, allow for parasitism (a relationship with others). Pogacar's parasitism is an indeterminable counter-transfer that starts from non-institutionalism and leads towards the institutional power exerted by culture and society. He gives back to culture and society what they offer to him through their criteria of power and domination. In fact what we have here points to the fact that the institutions of society, culture and art exist for their own sake, that they feed on themselves, multiply and become perfected. In other words the artist is invariably just an external deficiency, someone who does not fit into the game of domination and power played by culture and society. The absence of any function of their existence renders them devoid of morality because they serve neither man nor art. If this is true, the act of parasitism is an extremely moral gesture aimed at establishing "justice" within the activities of culture. Needless and self-sufficient institutions (museums, archives, agencies, the homeless, or family homes) become sensible and needed through the arbitrary and often haphazard actions of the artist. The artist challenges the system of "normality" and the distribution of roles in the world of arranged needlessness. The artist does not offer an act of positive sublimity (like the OHO group in its later stages or Družina in Šempas) or negative-critical-cynic sublimity (in the manner of the NSK movement), but discovers sense in an arbitrary unfolding that arises from the linking of the institution of power with a parasitic institution. In the same way the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary; the relationship between the institutions of culture and art are also arbitrary. Culture and art are separated by a void. In the Sixties the American minimalist Carl Andre said: Art is what we do: culture is what is done to us.2

Pogacar does just the opposite: he shows that art today is what he does with culture within the realm of his own micro- and eco-system which, in turn, is part of that culture. Culture becomes the object of his act of work through art. Indeed Pogacar deals with the very arbitrariness of the relationship between art and culture, alternately showing them as very motivated, motivated, weakly motivated and unmotivated. An example of a motivated approach would be his naming the exhibition of Slovene art in Muscarnok (Budapest) in the Nineties the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E MUSEUM, since this is an exhibition that could be staged by any other museum taking the Nineties as the theme. An example of an unmotivated approach is his exhibition of office equipment in a historical museum. Every one of these relationships is, however, relative and subject to change because the changing of the standpoint transforms motivation into un-motivation and vice versa. His artistic practice does not consist of shaping the form (as in painting or sculpture), or composing the structure, or assembling an object (as in avant-garde art). His artistic procedure consists in transforming "strategies" of ready-mades into processes of manipulation (he is concerned with the motivation or de-motivation of the relationship between the institutions of art and culture), the processes of simulation (the creation of a "realistic" situation using aspects or systems of culture or society within art), and of transgression (he is concerned with the very Laws of culture and society, which he exposes as the reverse side of "normality"). According to theorists belonging of the French intellectual tradition, ranging from Bataille, to Lacan and Žižek, a transgressional element is an element of the Law of normality itself; that is, the Law of everyday reality.3
The procedures of manipulation, simulation and transgression are the basis of his parasitism, as contrasted with the existence, acting, effects, priorities and status of the institutions of culture. His work can thus be contained in the formula:
manipulation + simulation + transgression = parasitism.

Misko Šuvaković

Notes
1 Tadej Pogačar, P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art and New Parasitism,
in The World of art - Theories of Display, SCCA Ljubljana, 1998, p.49-57.
2 Carl Andre, Interfunktionen, Cologne, nov. 1970.
3 Slavoj Žižek, Hegel with Lacan, in Philosophy through Psychoanalysys, Ljubljana 1984, p.18.