Roundtable discussion: Connection lost. Isolation as a choice in the Montenegrin contemporary art
Denis Maksimov and Adrijana Gvozdenovic, courtesy of Kunstverein Schichtwechsel
How “contemporary art scene” has become one of the components of in the checklist for the new nation state formation? After the reading of the text by Natalija Vujošević, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Lenka Djorojevic on the currents of the context in Montenegrin contemporary art and launching Institute of Contemporary Art of Montenegro, Denis Maksimov spoke about the functional approach towards contemporary aesthetics in emergent states, craving for recognition and validation of individual identity.
The event was part of the programme of “The Silver Lining”, the Collateral Event of 56th Venice Biennale “All the World’s Futures” that was hosted in the Palazzo Trevisan courtesy of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, also home to the Salon Suisse.
More information about the event
Interview with art collective AES+F
courtesy of AES+F collective
Interview was originally published in The Brussels Times Magazine (October 2015 issue)
AES Group was originally formed in 1987 by the conceptual architects Tatiana Arzamasova and Lev Evzovich and the multidisciplinary designer Evgeny Svyatsky in Russia. Exhibiting abroad from 1989, the group expanded its personnel and name with the addition of the photographer Vladimir Fridkes in 1995. AES+F’s recent work has developed at the intersection of photography, video and digital technologies, although it is nurtured by a persistent interest in more traditional media — sculpture especially, but also painting, drawing and architecture. Deploying a dialogue among these media, and plumbing the depths of art history and other cultural canons, AES+F’s grand visual narratives explore the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary culture in the global sphere. By now the subject of almost 100 solo exhibitions at museums, exhibition spaces and commercial galleries worldwide. AES+F achieved worldwide recognition and acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007 with their provocative, other-worldly Last Riot (2007), the first in a trio of large-scale, multichannel video installations that have come to define the AES+F aesthetics. In 2015 AES+F presented the new project Inverso Mundus at 56th Biennale di Venezia. AES+F visited Brussels in September for the opening of the solo show ‘THE TRILOGY plus’ in Aeroplastics Contemporary gallery and the opening of the exhibition ‘2050. A brief history of the future’ at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts [which Denis will review in the next issue of poliaesthetica], where their work is also exhibited.
Denis (DM) met with Lev Evzovich (LE), the ‘E’ of the group, to discuss collective’s work and it’s context.
DM: How do you define the medium in which you work?
LE: I think ‘-isms’ are passé. We don’t want to find ourselves in ‘boxes’, transdisciplinarity is the key today. We started from blending neo-Baroque rich imagery with realism and certainly have special relations with surrealism - which someone once told in our case can be called ‘social surrealism’.
DM: Is writing important for contextualisation of your creations on the vast territory of contemporary culture?
LE: Texts, that accompany our exhibitions or shows, are generally speaking unimportant to us. We focus on the image as the ‘discourse generator’. Interpretation of the image by viewers can be quite far from what we actually were thinking while producing the video - but this is something that we definitely enjoy. The role of the artist, in our view, is not to deliver perfectly articulated message.
DM: And what about response from ‘the art world’ - critics, curators, etc.?
LE: Critics and curators for us are less interesting than response we get through Facebook, Instagram. That’s where ‘the life’ is now. We saw over lunch in Venice Australian collector David Walsh, who recently built museum in Tasmania, and he said about our work that it is specifically interesting for him because half of the audience find it just visually ‘beautiful’ and don’t think of reflecting on it’s symbology, while the other half start to reflect on what we tried to hide behind this ‘beautiful surface’. I think he correctly noticed the foundation of what we intend to do: it’s somehow a game of aesthetics.
courtesy of AES+F collective
DM: So you prefer not to occupy the audience with the context?
LE: We don’t want to explain anything. We are beyond political activism. We offer freedom of interpretation of our work and embrace it.
DM: Have you thought of directing a full-featured length movie?
LE: Some of our works reach as long as 1 hours 10 minutes in length, so it’s already quite close to cinematographic format. At the moment we would have considered seriously the offer to work on the full-featured movie, however it of course requires considerations about budgets and another level of collaboration.
DM: I bet you were certainly compared before to Matthew Barney ‘Cremaster Cycle’ series. Renaissance and to some extent Baroque share this spirit of the idea of ‘the ultimate object of art’, the great masterpiece. Do you have an ambition to create it?
LE: We don’t think in this category at all. We are situated in the process of critical analysis and react on the world ‘as it happens’. For now we made a trilogy, our own ‘La Divina Comedia’ so to say. But Inverso Mundus [one of the latest video works], that is now exhibited in 56th Venice Biennale in as a part of collateral project, is rather different, unconnected chapter in our work both thematically and technologically.
DM: Does mysticism occupy special place on the background of your aesthetics? Would you side with Freud or Jung in conversation about the nature and sources of unconscious sensations?
LE: We side with Jung. Mass ideology, mass mythologies are very interesting subjects for us. Religion for us is more interesting as the system of signs. For example when the shape of beard is more important than Surahs of Quran and this pure symbolic feature becomes the reason enough to ‘validate’ justification of a murder. When the visual codes and symbols in religion, for example, overpower it’s scripts. We see it Russia now - the current ‘revival’ of Orthodoxy is not the revival of intellectual and spiritual anti-Soviet existential philosophy, but rather ‘white trash’ dogmatism that serves as the reason enough to justify violence and stupidity. This ‘rituality’, that becomes the basis of the idea for new identity building, concerns us very much. In Inverso Mundus for example, we take on the subject of bizarre subcultures of the suburbs in the big Western cities, setting the scene of orgy of those rioters, that were smashing windows and burning cars in London and Stockholm recently, with police in the royal Versailles-like huge bed, covered with sheets made with Fortuny fabrics, the most expensive in the world now.
courtesy of AES+F collective
DM: Strong aesthetic absurdity is very powerful when it’s full of complex, but easily recognisable symbolism.
LE: Indeed.
DM: The ‘political’ in aesthetics is important for your work.
LE: Politics is very important for us. The art that doesn’t contain politics to some extent is just not relevant. But at the same time, keeping the approach to politics on certain level of criticism in arts is no less important. We avoid by any means vulgar propaganda that sometimes is named ‘art’ - when the political message is on the surface and becomes the very reason behind the ‘production’ of so-called art.
DM: Is AES+F is open for ‘+’ someone else?
LE: We are a collaboration now and certainly will never close the door for engaging and working with other interesting people.
Embrace the Other(s)?
courtesy of AES+F collective
this op-ed was originally published in The Brussels Times Magazine (October 2015 issue)
As the European Union faced the biggest migration crisis since the end of the WWII, the problematics of ‘otherness’ revealed itself in the ‘old new’ light. Jacques Derrida praised arrival of ‘the Other’ as one of, if not the most important event(s) in one’s life. The notion of ‘stability’ and human’s inherent desire to live in the constant ‘present’ is the main enemy of better futures. Illusion of life’s course going on some kind of predictable track helps to mitigate existential anxiety.
Human life so far remains in the core of the values in the Western society. Michel Foucault, the great historian and archeologist of ‘normality’ and ‘deviations’, nailed the term ‘biopolitics’ to describe the prevailing approach to citizens by the states in postmodernity. The main value of biopolitical approach in the government planning is to create institutions of control over our health and potential hazard to it. In a way, it is something like a network of prisons (hospitals, schools, etc.) to variety of our choices about what to do with our life and health. Preservation of life at any cost as the highest goal of enlightened secular state of today.
Cameroon-born philosopher and political scientist Achille Mbembe recently proposed the new way to look at the evolution of biopolitical approach to managing societies, adjusting original Foucault’s writing to contemporaneity of muddy geopolitics, process of postmodern deconstruction and further inevitable reconstruction of ideologies. He introduced the term ‘necropower’ and ‘necropolitics’ as it’s functional apparatus, claiming among other things that “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death (necropolitics) profoundly reconfigure the relations among resistance, sacrifice, and terror”.
The motto and guiding principle of Foucaultian biopolitics can be summarised as ‘live and let live’. We all share the same planet with quite limited resources and fragile ecosystem (that we’ve managed to fuck up quite intensively led by ultra-capitalistic greed and selfish ideological dogmatism in last centuries - but that’s another subject). The goal of each individual, as the goal of the society then, is to allow equal opportunities for the life to be preserved, to flourish and have chances to pass genes to the next generations, of how in obituaries it’s often referred - to be ‘survived’ by someone: children, spouses, etc. This ‘living and letting living someone else’ as the concept went beyond nuclear family and is considered nowadays in an enlightened society as a definition of responsible approach to coexistence of peoples.
However reality of the challenges in contemporary geopolitics present a ‘new normal’ - where ‘live and let die’ approach comes into play. Mbembe’s theoretical constructs suddenly acquire physical shapes: the EU border controls are preventing migrants from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and other unfortunate places torn by (often inflicted by consequences of colonialism of those very EU members) all kinds of wars from ‘living’ by blocking their access to a possibility to survive. The hair-thin line of division between terms ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ became a battlefront that will define the number of those who will get a change ‘to live’ and those who will be assigned ‘to die’ in all by naming it like that.
While the economists, pundits, leaders of public opinion are ideologically divided on several fronts of actively-moderately-kind of defending or opposing possible details within designs of policy of granting asylum to millions of people who try to enter the EU, the underlying issue of Western world turing back on it’s fundamental principles of universality of basic values of humanism remains somehow hidden. Hypocrisy, that find itself masked by state-driven nationalism, is so crippling that it even undermines the very essence of the foundations of the European Union and even Western Enlightenment, that still ambitious enough to call itself ‘universal’.
The migrant crisis is indeed far not the only one problem, that Europe faces in the currents. However it well might (hopefully) be that very ‘alpha’ issue, that will define the future of the European project itself. Will it collapse under the pressure of inward-looking, retrograde nationalisms, that presume absence of potential for citizens of Europe to embrace the challenge of arrival of ‘the others’? Or will it use the opportunity, that was lost during Greek austerity crisis, to treat this challenge as the oh-so-needed-kick-in-the-ass of the European project?
truth is a question of the standpoint
ParisTexasAntwerp art space, Antwerp
The on-demand guided tour was performed during the group exhibition ‘The Game of Roles’, curated by Matteo Lucchetti (21-28 June, 2015). From the exhibition catalogue: 'Visitors can book a guided tour around the exhibition. The context of the tour is not aligned with visions of participating artists and curator. The power of interpretation allows to re-purpose space and objects by assuming the power of the role ‘guide/interpreter’ and the medium of spoken language.’
the world as it’s seen by (Russia) - video
ParisTexasAntwerp art space in Antwerp
The performance (June 21) and installation were part of the group exhibition ‘The Game of Roles’ at ParisTexasAntwerp art space in Antwerp (Belgium), curated by Matteo Lucchetti.
All the Worlds
The review was originally published in the 2015 summer issue of The Brussels Times Magazine
The world is changing and changing fast. Today’s world political structure, founded on the legacy of the Westphalian Peace Treaty from 1648, is evidently out of date. The global geopolitical map that followed after the end of World War II does not represent the actual political weights between today’s global powers. Futurologists speak of Europe as a ‘global pension house’ in 20-30 years’ time, as the median age in Europe will increase to 45 years by then.
We, as mankind, don’t live in ‘the world’ in the singular sense anymore. Just like before Columbus, we inhabit ‘the worlds’. They are interconnected and close to each other, thanks to technology. But it is quite obvious that the solidity of ‘the world’ as a neoliberal, democracy-driven ‘train’, with the United States as its engine, doesn’t exist any longer. The train has lost its steam, speed and the conductor got confused. Europe is one of the leading ‘wagons’ of this train and the actual ‘designer’ of the whole train in the first place. It is confused and lost:
although it denounced its past colonialist approach in order to maintain its conceptual world primacy, it still didn’t manage to come up with an alternative vision for its place in the new world. Europe is at a point of strategic reconfiguration of its self-esteem. Like a person in a mid-life crisis, it needs to take decisions that will affect its development for decades to come.
Venice is probably the most inconvenient city in the world for staging massive art shows. But that fact, on the other hand, makes it a perfect poetic space for
exhibiting contemporary art. The Venice Biennale established the format of the international art exhibition in 1895, which since then has become a benchmark:
there are more than a hundred biennales around the world at the moment. The Biennale in Venice remains the most prestigious of all. It is, in a way, the fair of fairs and the show of the shows. Every two years, one of the most prominent curators in the world takes over the planning of this magnificent, multidimensional event.
The event is colossal: 2 main exhibitions, around 100 ‘national pavilions’ and 50 ‘collateral’ events is just the official program of the Biennale. Each pavilion and
collateral event is basically an exhibition on it’s own. The two main exhibitions are so big, that you would need at least a day to just walk one through without too much haste. The whole experience of the Biennale is uniquely impactful: each day makes you feel like you have read hundreds of books.
In this year’s edition, the curator is Okwui Enwezor, the director of Haus der Kunst in Munich, the first chief curator of Venice Biennale with an African origin (he was born in Nigeria). The central theme of the mega-exhibition this year is at the height of what it means to be ‘political’ - ‘All the World’s Futures’. Enwezor’s
message is very timely - he invited hundreds of curators from all around the world to reflect on the subject of possible futures. The universality of the Western-led model of liberal democracy and capitalism is questioned. The world has already become multipolar, even though the leading ‘superpower’, the United States, will still occupy a special place on the world map for some time to come. The other global players - China, India, Brazil, the EU and Russia - seem to have the ambition to work out alternative visions of the world.
The point of departure and central text in the exhibition is Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’. I’m afraid that this is the biggest conceptual disappointment of the curatorial concept. Speaking about the future with the 19th century text of Karl Marx sounds to me rather outdated. I am not saying that this text is unimportant now - quite the opposite. The actuality of Marx’s legacy is the very essence of ultra-capitalism: the reduction of life to materialism explains why
his book is the most re-printed edition in human history after the Bible. But I would argue that it is much more important to look at the possible futures
with contemporary philosophical and conceptual perspectives. The works of John Rawls, Thomas Piketty, Gilles Deleuze are ‘fresher’ and more relevant
to current events.
Enwezor’s Biennale is definitely worth a mindful visit. Both main exhibitions, one in Giardini (the gardens, that were the first location for the exhibition more than 100 years ago) and the other in Arsenale (the former military arsenal of Venice - makes one recall that Venice was a mighty state once) provide plenty
of food for thought. The pavilions are still presented by countries, making Biennale look like a world fair (which is also staged in Italy, in Milan, by the way - just a few hours of train travel from Venice).
The ‘Olympics of Contemporary Art’ comes to mind, especially as one learns about the ‘Golden Lion’ awards that are presented by a committee for ‘best
artists’ and ‘best pavilions’.
The Canadian pavilion, which was playfully renamed to ‘Canadassimo’, is my personal favourite. You enter a fake regular small shop, the kind of which you find at gas stations in Canada, the US or elsewhere. It is full of junky stuff, but most of them are strangely blurred. The reference to our ever speeding consumer culture is evident: we don’t focus on precious items anymore. The abundance of logos, boxes of every kind and the crazy colour palette of the shelves makes us feel dizzy. You go further in the second room and find yourself in a ‘factory’, where copies and imitations are produced. Templates, paint cans, brushes, tools and everything else that is necessary to copy, paste, imitate and massively produce. Finally, you go upstairs to a constructed external balcony where you are invited to put a couple of euros into a meta-slot machine: and then observe how the coin will pass through the bouncing mechanisms and end up stuck somewhere in the transparent wall of the pavilion. The whole pavilion reads as a playful introduction to the market economy. The pavilion of the Nordic countries (Norway, Finland, Sweden) presents an amazing installation named ‘Rupture’ by Camille Norment with broken windows and sound pieces. It is produced by very unusual musical instruments.
The Belgian pavilion, directed by Vincent Meesen and curator Katerina Gregos, unpacks a post-colonial outlook from a group of artists covering history and present. The Netherlands pavilion treats Herman de Vries’ multidimensional artistic research about the future. The Spanish pavilion looks at the future heritage of pop culture by referring to the past.
Apart of the main projects of the Biennale covering the topic of ‘All the World’s Futures’, numerous respectable art foundations and centers also stage their own exhibitions in different locations around the city. Fondazione Prada is an ‘absolute must’: the conceptual quality of the show is at the very top of the spectrum. During the Biennale, the show ‘Portable Classic’, co-curated by Salvatore Settis and Davide Gasparotto, explores the origins and functions of miniature reproductions of classical sculptures. It showcases more than 80 artworks. ‘The copy of the copy of the copy‘ exhibition illustrates how Renaissance artists employed small-scale copies to elaborate hypotheses on the missing portions of the classical originals.
When you plan your travel, keep in mind that the best time to visit the shows is when they are not overcrowded, for example in August. The downside of this period would be the extreme heat, up to +40 degrees. Another good moment would be end of November, which falls during the last days of the Biennale. Some of the events, for example ‘Eccoci!’ (‘Here we are!’), a performance piece by Brazilian artist Berna Reale (imagine an artist who is also a forensic investigator in Belem’s police force in Brazil), will be re-staged during the last three days of the Biennale.
Aestheticisation of referent power milieus and the ideologies of futures
Aesthetics and power intrinsically intertwined. Aesthetics is a sensation of love for beauty in all the diversity of it’s possible forms. These sensations are neither linear nor limited to some number of dimensions, their forms and realisation is subject of constant flux.
Power, ultimately, is also a sensation. Just like definition of the complex notion of ‘love’, ‘power’ is simplified and reduced in common understanding (in the Western-led Christian/Enlightenment discourse) to something connected with political authority. In Ancient Greece, writers were describing at least six different types of ‘love’. ‘Aesthetics’ and ‘power’ are bridged via multiplicity and complexity of notion of ‘love’.
Theories of ‘power’ nowadays depart in their classification of types of power from several bases: means of it’s execution, motivation in obtaining it by the subject, type of impact it causes on the objects. Bertram Raven spoke of legitimate, legal, referent and expert powers from the bases of source, communication/execution and impact. Referent power is defined by loyalty, led by charisma, consequently providing basis for the discourses of nationalism, patriotism, sense of attachment to personas, institutions, organisations and even products in marketing. In Raven’s words - “Referent power, as an aspect of personal power, becomes particularly important as organizational leadership… is increasingly about collaboration and influence rather than command and control.”
However referent power is multifaceted and composed of the system of milieus*, or micro-discourses, that define societal perceptions and emotional response to power narratives. Irrational decisions, that confuse economists like Vilfredo Pareto and make them turn to sociology later in their careers, are masked by a certain types of “imposed quasi-rational logical assessments”, in politics or marketing are dictated by the matrixes of milieus. Aesthetics and process of aestheticisation of milieus on micro and meta levels allows to legitimate those ‘quasi-rational’ matrixes and embed them of unconscious level into the everyday life.
Milieus are multidimensional systems of interconnected and symbiotic referent powers. It is an adjustable level of power analysis that incorporates individuals and institutions together with their environment as a population controlled in concert with its already given, a priori surroundings: a milieu. Milieus as designed in form of fictional construct are legitimised through the means of appropriation and contextualisation of referent power networks. Milieus can only be contextualised and appropriated through understandable language of signs, that legitimises it and converts it into “reality”.
Milieus create frames of manipulation and reality production, that are beneficial for certain groups. Without proper aestheticisation, milieus are not sustainable - ‘soft power’ of legitimisation of milieus is contemporary art, design, visuality of different modes. Narration is another tool: media plays crucial role in their fundamentalisation. But importance of visuality is growing now because of high saturation of the information and constant acceleration, which leads to shortening attention span, which becomes more scarce and dispersed. In order to fundamentalise or to critically challenge fundamentalisation of certain milieus, it is necessary to sustain aesthetic picture and be innovative at all times. Contemporary, post-conceptual art is a laboratory for testing out new aesthetic strategies, that in their expansion affect the way reality perceived, knitted, legitimised, communicated, enforced.
Risk perception depends on how solidly the network of milieus is perceived. When milieus are deconstructed people are getting lost - and there have to be offered another framework of milieus, as they, like Moirai, are forming the reality itself. Vision of ‘desired future’ is in the centre of the discussion - more this ‘desired’ picture articulated, easier it’s direct people towards evolvement, however illusory, of its implementation. Forming this pictorial idea of ‘desired future’ is an extension and further development of already existing milieus, mapping and designing its further evolution.
Referent power is distributed and aestheticised unevenly at all times, creating a hierarchy of morality, ethics, social stratification, etc. Milieu matrixes are the actual basis of power hierarchies and inherent source of inequality. Exchange inside their borders is performed through power currencies, which are (as well as the hierarchies themselves), defined by the quality of communication and legitimation, provided by aesthetics.
The importance of critical theory in providing the apparatus for dissecting through power milieus is therefore more than paramount.
*…To summarize all this, let’s say that the sovereign capitalizes on a territory, raising the major problem of the seat of government, whereas discipline structures a space and addresses the essential problem of a hierarchical and functional distribution of elements, and security will try to plan a milieu in terms of events or series of events or possible elements, of series that will have to be regulated within a multivalent and transform able framework. The specific space of security refers then to a series of possible events; it refers to the temporal and the uncertain, which have to be inserted within a given space. The space in which a series of uncertain elements unfold is, I think, roughly what one can call the milieu… It is therefore the medium of an action and the element in which it circulates. It is therefore the problem of circulation and causality that is at stake in this notion of the milieu… The apparatuses of security work, fabricate, organize, and plan a milieu even before the notion was formed and isolated. The milieu, then, will be that in which circulation is carried out. The milieu is a set of natural givens – rivers, marshes, hills – and a set of artificial givens – an agglomeration of individuals, of houses, etcetera. The milieu is a certain number of combined, overall effects bearing on all who live in it. It is an element in which a circular link is produced between effects and causes, since an effect from one point of view will be the cause of another… Finally, the milieu appears as a field of intervention in which, instead of affecting individuals as a set of legal subjects capable of voluntary actions – which would be the case of the sovereign – and instead of affecting them as a multiplicity of organisms, of bodies capable of performances, and of required performances – as in discipline – one tries to affect, precisely, a population. I mean a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality in which they live. What one tries to reach through this milieu, is precisely the conjunction of a series of events produced by these individuals, populations, and groups, and quasi natural events which occur around them. - Foucault, Security Territory Population: 11 January 1978, p.20-21
Untitled: Chapter 2
The Louvre, Paris
The set of performances was staged in The Louvre Museum and involved artistic strategies developed in Situationism, Dadaism and Relational Aesthetics. "Untitled" is the initiative launched in 2015 in Sao Paulo (Brazil) by Denis Maksimov and Halim Madi, engaging artistic strategies in interventionist manner.
The future of the ‘Artist’: challenges of transdisciplinarity and the expanding field of art
Participants: Matteo Lucchetti (freelance curator, curator Visible), Tobias Sternberg (artist), Daniel Blanga-Gubbay (researcher, founder Aleppo), Moderator: Denis Maksimov (theorist, curator and researcher)
Artists take over more and more the status of different specialists: the artist as anthropologist, artist as scientist, artist as philosopher, etc. Due to the stronger liberalisation and flexibilisation of our current economy, the role of the artist seems to be turning into a flexible, self-motivated and innovative individual: artist becomes a ‘transdisciplinary agent’ and 'cross-sectoral diplomat’. Increase of artists collectives is another interesting trend that illustrates transformation of the artist’s role and function in the society. How is this change affecting their work and how can they develop their practice under these circumstances?
How is this influencing our notion of 'art’? What are the effects of co-productions between different fields in the realisation of artworks, artists infiltrating into other fields, cross-disciplinarity and knowledge exchanges? Which new discourses or art forms have been created because of this shift and how could the outcome function as a way to reinvent and rethink the present day to change tomorrow?