AESTHETICS IS DEAD, LONG LIVE AESTHETICS?

Exhibition: Art is Beautiful, Art Pavilion, Zagreb, November 10 – December 31, 2011

By: Tihana Bertek

Art is Beautiful is a multi-layered project, both conceptually and practically, designed for the Art Pavilion in Zagreb and managed by the sculptor, designer and exhibition author Ante Rašić. This multimedia exhibition with a provocatively banal title happens on several levels and in several stages. Although the entire concept is based on sculptural installation/space intervention, Rašić also uses elements of performance, audio and urban installation, all supported by elaborate web and Facebook pages.

The relation between the exhibition’s concept and Art Pavilion’s space is of particular importance. As the most representative exhibition venue in Croatia, especially for anthological presentations, retrospectives and big art projects, the Pavilion is dipped in history that cannot be handled easily while putting on a contemporary art display. In spite of that, in recent years, there have been many contemporary shows thanks to the head of the Pavilion Radovan Vuković. These are site-specific, oftentimes new media materials that represent a strange mix of historicism and contemporary which, regardless of expectations, can function as an organic whole.

Art is Beautiful consists of five works, the most striking being the installation Historicistic Cabinet of Curiousities, a giant sculpture of Apoxyomenos decorated with approximately 300 mobile mirrors and a geometric drawing on the pedestal. Almost comically enormous, Rašić’s Apoxyomenos successfully dominates the centre of the Pavilion. Consciously flirting with kitsch, Rašić uses mirrors to reflect the splendour of the historicist ambient, merging heritage and contemporaneity. Moving around the sculpture is a great pleasure because the reflections and the perspective of the space change according to the position of the visitor. Another work, Oval Sculpture, is a cold and slightly threatening installation in the right wing, composed of 50 metal horizontal pipes placed on the wall in different angles. The pipes are static, but every few minutes one of them drops on the floor with a loud bang, startling the visitor. In the left wing, there is Art is Beautiful, a painting installation with performance elements, a piece made by pouring paint from barrels (photographs are available on Facebook). Under the motto of ‘impossibility of painting is possibility of ambient’, this piece functions as a blend of painting and installation; bewilderingly corporeal, although devoid of content, it is a painting on the edge between flatness and three-dimensionality. Ja-ja (play on words, Eg(go)-Eg(go), while ja means I, and jaja means eggs), is a site-specific installation with minimal light effects (the meaning of which is not very clear), with 37 000 plastic eggs spread in a dense pattern over the floor. Visitors can walk on this seemingly fragile surface, and Rašić counts on creating suspense, since the eggs are expected to break under the people’s weight, in addition to the effect of the sunlight that falls on the egg-covered floor (either planned or unintentional). The last part of the exhibition entitled On the Edge is dislocated to another building, the Academy of Fine Arts. It is a truly astonishing sculptural intervention in public space, consisting of a wooden doll which is placed on the edge of a long bar raised 15 metres up in the air. The bar bends under the weight of the doll which, from the worm’s-eye view of the passers-by, looks like a real person getting ready to jump. Rašić is toying again with people’s perception, invoking feelings of insecurity, anxiety and even fear.

Rašić is successful in creating an expressive ambient by merging different media and introducing dialogue between the works and their space, but also the viewer. This kind of postmodernist approach weakens author’s recognisibility, which brings the institution of the Author to the brink, just like the wooden sculpture on the bar. We also discover that the issue of aesthetics in art does not belong to the past, although we have believed it to be so for decades. The exhibition presents an uncommon mix of serious and playful, kitsch and minimalism, with a surprising lack of complicated, theoretically-charged texts by the curator. In this regard, it is a shame some of the issues were not thoroughly explored, being only hinted at in the text, for instance, ‘representational aesthetics’ as the thematic guideline of the project, the relationship between eclecticism and kitsch, or what ‘aesthetic impact’ even means nowadays. So, there is a certain discrepancy between the experience of the show – which reveals not only a preoccupation with the phenomenon of a work of art, but also the issue of relating different media – and the short, explanatory text – that may want to set a more serious tone for the exhibition or add a human element. Instead of dealing with the topics above, issues of ego, tension and fragility of the modern man are brought up. Even though these topics can emerge from, for example, Rašić’s playful treatment of fear and uncertainty, these are not crucial for the concept itself, and since a more detailed explanation is lacking, they appear unconvincing. With that in mind, unfortunately it remains unclear and even confusing when we read that the show ‘sublimates contemporary art experience and problems of the modern man.’

Tihana Bertek