PLEH in Sarajevo

PLEH in Sarajevo –For the democratization of art!

Charlama Depot Gallery, 25. juna - 25. juli 2010.

CENTAR SKENDERIJA, SARAJEVO charlama.galery@gmail.com

Exhibition PLEH in Sarajevo –For the democratization of art! –takes part within the new project of the art group PLEH entitled PLEH/REFERENCE which explores and investigates art concepts, personalities and phenomena that had marked the history of the contemporary art in the region and farther. For the Sarajevo exhibit PLEH has taken as its main idea the artistic statement: ‘For the democratization of art!’ from the 1979 series of the conceptual artist, member of the PLEH group, Marijan Molnar. In the 1980’s Molnar also had collaborated with the artists gathered around the Galleries PM and Poodrom in Zagreb.

By selecting works that broadly correspond to the quoted sentence, PLEH will attempt to revitalize and revive the meaning of this artistic statement.

The art group PLEH, consisting of member-artists Kata Mijatović, Marijan Molnar, Vlatko Vincek and Zoran Pavelić, was formed in 2007. The same year PLEH initiated its project PLEH in the periphery with its main idea being the problem of distinction center/periphery. As part of the project, the group has organized exhibition PLEH in Koprivnica in 2008 (Gallery S, Koprivnica) and PLEH in Subotica in 2009 (Gallery ‘Dr Vinko Perčić’, Subotica).

KATA MIJATOVIĆ

Screaming , video/audio installation

The work consists of eight videos filmed with pre-school children in kindergarten exteriors. The content of the video is the following: the group of children (ten to fifteen), stand and scream in the fixed take of several seconds.

The intention is to provoke an instant 'awakening', a momentary awakeness and to evoke the same elemental instinctive reactions that exist in the act of screaming: the revolt, the rebellion and the warning. An important element of the work is the subversive nature of screaming. In this work, children’s scream would come at the exact opposite end of the Munch's scream that emanates horror and pain. Their scream I perceive as an elemental confirmation of one’s existence, a concentrated broadcast of one's existence that purifies and heals. Their scream in this work alsorepresent calling for attention, and a warning that this world belongs not to us but those that just entering it.

MARIJAN MOLNAR

EU verifying of the artwork –action for the exhibition opening night in Sarajevo.

1. I Want , video installation, 2009.

2. Walking on the EU Eggs , photographia, 2009.

I Want Individual desires that intertwine with global events speak about frustrations caused by „walls“ as well as about irony caused by the conflict and imbalance between these proportions. The artist, as a desolate figure in the middle of events expresses his wish: wish to belong.

Walking on the EU Eggs The works are connected, one being an installation and other performance They are connected by the use of eggs.

Installation Walking on Eggs, the eggs are put on the floor where visitors have to walk. They are marked by the visible EU logo/EU sign and the flag.

In the performance, eggs are used for throwing them at the artist in the moment when he alternately raises two banners. On one, there is a sign „I want to make the EU art”, an on the other “I want to be the EU artist“. Calling onto the older work, for example, the one where I have introduced eggs in my artistic practise for the first time (see the work: Every Morning, one Egg as part of the project Two Places, Two Destinies, from 2002). I have also remembered an old saying: Art or egg , that is the question!!

ZORAN PAVELIĆ

Artistic, 2010 Intervention on the title page of the newspaper OSLOBODJENJE (‘Liberation’) Re-naming of the Sarajevo newspaper into ARTISTIC 49 copies of the independent paper OSLOBODJENJE re-named into ARTISTIC are placed on the wall of the Charlama Depot Gallery in Sarajevo The copies bought the same day are distributed to guests at the opening night!

Artist, 2010, installation (fire extinguishers, stickers) Fire extinguishers are placed in three corners of the Charlama Depot Gallery in the way every building or museum disposes for its safety and fire protectio

VLATKO VINCEK

Vive la morte, vive l’avantgarde, vive la revolution Video, 12 minutes, 2009 In 1984, Michael Klier won the first price at the video manifestation for the film Der Riese (DIV). His work was a simple montage of the surveillance cameras recordings, taken in different German cities. Klier commented that, for him, the video surveillance is „the end and recapitulation of his art“. „The solemn farewell to the man behind the camera, the complete disappearance of his visual subjectivity in an ambience technical effect, a kind of pan-movie that acts without our knowledge, turning our most ordinary movie making procedures and the way of seeing into a brutal, fearless and ignorant vision“ said Virillo.

Virgej noticed: “You have used a devils language in your work.“ But he is a friend of mine, he can tell me anything.

“This is one of your best works“ said Zaga, but I sleep with her, so how can I trust her?

Dual relation- rules a game, a ritual and a regulations sphere.

Polar relation- relation of paradoxes Digital relations- distributes the space of codes and patterns.

Baudrillard put it nicely.

Derrida connected it in the universal game of three logics. He marks it also as „seduction of the ambient of ludic erotisation of the universe without roles“

Through the experience of the world, I experience myself.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty Title of the exhibit ‘For the democratization of art’, taken from the Marijan Molnar 1979 action, opens the question of this theme’s continuity. The collective organization and identity, the collective making of exhibition’s meanings, is a phenomenon that we link to the aforementioned motto with its multiple meanings: in a sense that everyone can make art; that (contemporary) art should not be elitist; that it addresses broad audience (in the 1970’s through the strategy of agitation, today through virtual technology and media). Questions of identity and diversity are equally collective and individual. The inner cohesion of the group that acts in the manner of multiple unities is the mode of art’s self-inquiry, but also a call to negate the world with one’s individuality. creation of art with totemic quality (life itself as pure activity, as pure being which is, in that fashion, inaccessible to traditional arts); intuitive creation that springs from Will (Schopenhauer); action performance; optical unconsciousness in the sense of a cognitive level added to figurative reality, and a relation toward society marked by affirmative nihilism –all these are some of the continual attributes of the collective members’ works. The difference between the reality of art and reality in itself lies in the ascribing of meanings. Pleh (or brass), an alloy of copper and zinc, reminds us of brass instruments, the labrosones activated by sympathetic vibrations of the mouth and that follow key events in individual and social life –parades and funerals. Pleh also alludes to the spatial surface (thin metal sheet), to subtle materiality but also to banality –jewelry not made of gold; the metal that is not on par with the popular perception of it; the name of the group also points to an attempt of establishing the balance between the opposites through art.

Picture can be understood as a sign that does not point at anything, but is rather the sign of something. It brings to light, or it makes present. The larger portion of our subconscious life is the result of the variety of external social influences. Thus the personality concept does not amount to much because each person is truly composed of many varied, fragmented and illusory perceptions of ‘self ’. Stendhal declares that one’s visual taste is closely bound to one’s personal and social value system. Artist is not a master of one’s images; he is rather ‘space of images’ in the anthropological sense that understands medium as an extension of one’s body. Picture is a demonstration of being of something that in itself has a non-pictorial status (according to the Gadamer’s hermeneutics). Pictorial that has emerged from thought; happening in the sense of returning: always reinterpreting, we attach to previous works that activate our imaginary seeing. Representation understood as a renewed presence, the image as a result of personal symbolizing –extend the notion of happening to the happening of a picture, of it becoming visible. Richard Serra comprised a list of 100 verbs that will serve him as a source for future artworks (for the’ structuring of chaos’). One can ‘make shapes’ even with actions such as ‘to hang’, ‘to erase’, ‘to link’…

Traumatic realism (Hall Foster), i.e. hermetic art expression of the collage procedure, with Vlatko Vincek is grounded on the semantic shift of things and signs; on the intertextual and auto-aggressive manipulations. Cézanne had painted fourteen pictures of the two card players in a café. He had not painted their faces as objects; rather he painted thoughts, not the visible. Vlatko Vincek, unnoticed from the observed individuals, records the ritual of the card playing whose actors through politically incorrect discourse (insulting, demeaning, and arguing) discuss the history of the avantgarde (trivialized; and for dummies). By similar ‘spitting of oaths’ strategy, at the opening of the exhibition, Vlatko Vincek scrawls with car paint mottos such as ‘Art stinks’ and ‘Art is sickness’ (perhaps paraphrasing Stilinović words ‘Work is sickness’?). The major element of the video is recording with the control camera. According to Chris Jenks, the contemporary alternative to strict separation of self from the others in sociological research, has become embodied in a

sterile, methodological manner of observation. Thus established perception is visually and quantity-wise one-sided,; it is also linked to the procedure of archiving.

Kata Mijatović’ video captures screaming children acting collectively in a playful recess from the rational processes of education. Kata Mijatović compares children’s’ scream to Munch’s Scream as something formally related, but semantically opposed (we might add the impossibility of a shout in Wes Craven’s series Scream ). Psychoanalysis reveals a language structure in the unconscious, i.e. the unconscious structured as language. According to Freud, symptom is the type of creation (the quoted Stilinović would have declared: “With me pain is not a shout –but a condition.’) Scream is also a continual motif in the art history. ‘Painting of the word’ of Rene Magritte (The Living Mirror, 1928) thus had linked the pictorial and linguistic system of representation; the idea and the concept –the image of a landscape presented by text in comic book fashion –in the bottom right angle is written cris d’oiseaux –in the sense of bird’s song, despite the bird’s scream.

According to Hermes Trismegistus, art is an inarticulate scream that reminds one of the voices of the light.

Zoran Pavelić renames the Sarajevo daily paper ‘Liberation’ into ‘Artistic’, and marks the edition with the autobiographical note, and his age (49) –by this act he makes the paper personal, but not any type of art papers, but his own, artist’s, artistic newspaper. Similarly, Sanja Iveković in her new project Lost and Found, notes that by the privatization, came the rejection of terms symbolic of the former ideology and collective perception. These included signs in public space of the city of Zagreb such as FREEDOM, UNITY, or VICTORY. The Commodity Sculpture, ‘sculpture as commodity’, refers to popular brand names that were displayed as art objects in the 1980’s. Zoran Pavelić to the contrary expresses desire for geographical and historic relocation –by traveling into the pre-media and pre-consumerist world. By linking both newspaper names –art indeed ‘can liberate’ (Macht Frei).

In his distinctly autobiographical and process-oriented works (transferring from act to action), Marijan Molnar distinguishes the at hand and covert/absent from the view (but still present). Opposing the often-controversial contents he induces the sensation of unease, tension and melancholy. When he lifts the banner that expresses his desire to become the European Union artist, and for the creation of the EU art –he prefers his own life. He rejects ‘things by themselves’ while at the same time he questions the national entity and the path of his desire. If the wish were granted would the art of Marijan Molnar have changed? The audience pelts the artist with eggs –but these are the EU eggs. Breaking of an egg does not potentially indicate killing of chicken. It is emptied from the accidental traces of life; it is made up.

Further, the Pleh collective four pose a question of the importance of creating and exhibiting their art. The exhibition in Sarajevo, of artists active in Zagreb, comes after the showings in Koprivnica and Subotica. It is in a way comparable to the three categories of Ljubo Karaman –the provincial, the border and the peripheral art (according to its degree of merit). The border setting lies at the crossroad or at the connecting point of two cultural circles, i.e. it has two sources. The author differentiates peripheral art from ‘provincial’ (as an earlier synonym): peripheral art has distinctly positive connotations located between two large cultural circles, yet sufficiently removed from both so it can avoid the pressure from either of the two. It is also close enough to ‘draw upon’ both sources as their creative synthesis, and ‘the dialectical unity of opposites’. That type of a situation results in creative freedom that would not be possible in a ‘dogmatic’ center. Contrary to this, ‘provincial’ art is imitative, never reaching up to its models; it is dependent, with mostly negative meaning. And as Baudelaire had declared that the finished work is not necessarily completed, and that the completed is not necessarily finished, so will Pleh exhibit continue to travel through the fertile periphery of art.

Silva Kalčić Translated Into English By Boris Gregoric

“Each of the four protagonists of the aristic organization PLEH has individual artistic interests, ways of working and biography. Points of convergence appear only conditionally, not programatically or linguistically. Media practice, discret, but careful and minimalistic procedures, interventions within binar spaces as well as social awareness could be noted as characteristics present in the work of all authors, but remark must be made that all these values whithin the individual artistic handwriting, as well as in their interconnection, in many cases change, interfere and are being abandoned.” (Marijan Špoljar)“Each of the four protagonists of the aristic organization PLEH has individual artistic interests, ways of working and biography. Points of convergence appear only conditionally, not programatically or linguistically. Media practice, discret, but careful and minimalistic procedures, interventions within binar spaces as well as social awareness could be noted as characteristics present in the work of all authors, but remark must be made that all these values whithin the individual artistic handwriting, as well as in their interconnection, in many cases change, interfere and are being abandoned.” (Marijan Špoljar)

Biography Kata Mijatović 1956. born in Branjina – Croatia/ 1988 - 1991. member of the informal art group »The Swamp« 1991 - 1993. studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy/ 1993 - 1996. studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia/ 1997. graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia. Lives and works in Zagreb. adress: Žitnjak 53, 10000 Zagreb / Croatia/ e-mail: zoran.pavelic1@zg.t-com.hr

Vlatko Vincek 1959. born in Koprivnica. 1983. graduated painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb . 1983/84 he was collaborator of the Mastersʼ Workshop of painters Lj.Ivančić and N. Reiser He lives and works in Zagreb and Koprivnica mob: +385- 91 504 44 57 / e-mail: vlatko.vincek@zg.t-com.hr

Zoran Pavelić 1961. born in Osijek/ 1988. -1991. founder and member of informal art group The Swamp, Baranja.

1998. graduated painting from Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb/ Lives and works in Zagreb freelance artist adress: Žitnjak 53, 10000 Zagreb / Croatia/ e-mail: zoran.pavelic1@zg.t-com.hr

Marijan Molnar 1951. born in Reka near Koprivnica, Croatia. 1976. graduated painting from the Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb, Croatia. From 1976. to 1979. he was collaborator of the Mastersʼ Workshop of painters Lj. Ivančić and N. Reiser. In 2002 he published the artistʼs book with texts and photo-documentation of his works.

He lives and works in Zagreb, Šenkovečka 12 (phone: ++385-(0)1-363-07-14, e-mail: marijan-molnar@inet.hr.