More about the project
The traditional definition of an artwork contains an idea according to which work or art is a specific (aesthetic) object that enables art to establish its shape, i.e. to become instantly present and visible. Kosuth’s claim art is the definition of art redefined this tautological scheme by issuing its basic assumption that everything made in a conventionally defined medium (painting, drawing, sculpture, gra-phics) is art. In other words, when art is defined by itself, a wide spectrum of possible artistic activities opens, which means that the list of “media” has enlarged — from the ephemeral ones such as concepts, “live art” (Guy Brett), site specific works of art, to the concrete ones such as photos, videos, installations and documents. On the other hand, defining art with art itself is risky bussines, since it can easily cause art to begin reproducing itself from itself and to wear up, vanish or abolish itself in that monotonous perpetuum mobile rhythm. The History of art of the 20th century is based on a story of radical(ised) movements, which are based on quick, syn-chronised and successive changes. A large number of examples are based on desire to relate life and art. Regardless of the way that connection was realised, the initial desire could not be separated from the intention to provoke limited and ossifying structures, that is, artistic institutions founded on a hierarchy of different artistic practices, upon national principles and economic power, on the principle of separating the artist from the viewer, upon the principle “look, but don’t touch”, upon commercial art-market logic, upon privileging products and not artistic processes, artistic work and art. The emphasis was set on experimenting, on art as a method of reality research.
In his essay Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art docu-mentation (Documenta 11 Platform 5: Exhibition, documenta und Museum Fridricianum, Kassel, 2002.) Boris Groys pointed out that in our age of biopolitics, when destiny/happiness/nature do not con-trol our lives, but when our life becomes “time artificially produced and governed”, documentation presents a basic source on which the production of (spare) time leans on. In other words, documen-tation as a collection of burocratic and statistic facts produces life itself. If modern life can only be documented but not displayed, than we can expect that contemporary art will use documentation as medium when wishing to refer to life. R. Mutt’s act of selecting an object i.e. taking “a found object from life” and placing it in a way “that its’ original use vanishes under a new name and a new point of observation” (Duchamp), through situationist understand-ing of culture, has grown into an act of appropriating context of life itself and its’ reality. Thus, exhibiting a usable industrialy produced object, is broadened first by appropriation of reality through one’s own physical, emotional and intellectual investments and then through documenting experiences, situations, the real, as a more comprehensive act of description, interpretation, participation and dispute of reality.
The documentation could be approached as an act of relocation, which Boris Groys implicates when considering Benjamin's inter-pretation of difference between an original and a copy within a perspective of possibility not just making a copy out of the original but also vice versa. In other words, if a difference between the original and the copy is interpreted only as topological and con-textual, it means that the original has its’ specific place through which it has been marked in history as a unique object and that the copy hasn’t got a place like this, and in that sense it is virtual, and ahistorical. So, if it is possible to de-territorialize the original, it is also possible to re-deterritoralize the copy, says Groys.
Production and consumation of documentation presupposes that on the both sides there are people who have their personal biographi-es, experiences, knowledge and skills. In that sense, meanings are not closed or fixed. They should be an object of public communica-tion, through which they should also be established, which leads us to the concept of relational aesthetics, to the concept of realisation of the work of art through the process of dialog, exchange, active participation, defining personal positions, political processes and resistance strategies.
In its gist, documentation has an imitative character. It is an essen-tially realistic media, not because it reflects reality but because it carries and constitutes the dominant meaning of reality. A docu-ment substitutes the reality but at the same time it creates it and this relation between document and reality represents skeleton of symbolic power, the power which, according to Lacan, gives meaning to the real and builds our everyday reality in which we can recognise our real, into which all of us invest meanings which are relevant to every one of us. Artistic documentation participates in this process of affirming and denying the reality. In fact, a relation-ship between bureaucratic and technological documentation to-wards artistic documentation is a relationship of shifting from affir-mation towards denial, in other words from the notion of the symbolic real towards notion of symptom, of non-symbolised existence or something that yet needs to be symbolised.
The production of Zoran Todorović is quite heterogeneous but it has two pervasive elements, two forms, two media, two types of medi-ation, two “key words” which are interdependent and complement each other: the event and the document. Almost every work of art is believed to have a specific “here” and “now”, regardless of whether it took place on some exhibition or as a private event (meaning that the authority of the artistic institution is irrelevant in verifying that something actually happened in the sphere of art), and which is shaped in “there” and “then” via documentation.
Agalma, 2003, actions: operation, recycling, bathing. A historic perspective that “reconstructs” the motive/topic of this work runs from the classicist patterns, nourished for centuries, of representing the ideal/perfect/disciplined human body, down to a “ready made” body in artistic practices through 20th century (the futuristic and dada undisciplined, anarchist body; the body as “a main carrier of socio-political, existential and cosmological content” [Badovinac, Z.: pref.cat. Body and the East, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, page 13] in artistic practices of 50’s and 60’s; fragmentary postmodern and multicultural body, assemblage that substituted the stereotype of modern, unique body). It reached for technology and its time-excess production policy in relation to the one that is biologically pre-determined, in order to avoid potential endangering body surplus created by an undisciplined consummation of life. A common operation ceases to be just a mere operation with intention to make undesirable, ugly, amorphous human mass which would conventio-nally provoke uneasiness and disgust, into traditionally nice, aesthetic object — such as minimalist sculpture in ephemeral, ex-pandable material, multiple in limited edition of four copies. This object (x4), except its’ a priori role to be beautifull, is also intended to be “sacrificed”, to be consumed, melted, to vanish so that some other body could be clean and beautifull, of course. A soap becomes an artistic object thanks to the fact that its’ organic structure be-comes social construction, that is, it can reproduce and produce social meanings. In other words: “the body is the medium of the Real however multifarious that Real becomes and is manifest” as Kristine Stiles says [“Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions”; Out of Actions, Between Performance And Object, 1949-1979; MOCA, Los Angeles/ Thames and Hudson, 1998, page 228].
Documentation has an ability to evoke uniqueness. In fact, it re-peats selected fragments of certain “there” and “then” and with the help of them it reconstructs the reality of which was going on “there” and “then”. So, we can say that the documentation is like a replicant, to which a degree of similarity, in other words a degree of development of referential relationship with the real world ensures life, duration and enables the reproduction of history. And, when the history is made, one enters once more the field of circulation of social meanings and within that field uniqueness is defined, the “copy” becomes the “original” and the documentation becomes artistic form.
Jasmina Čubrilo