REVIEWING THE ARTIST’S POSITION

The Dimitrije Basicevic Mangelos Award Finalist Exhibition, Remont Gallery, Belgrade, 17/06-6/07/2012

By: Bojan Krištofić

The finalist exhibition of the Dimitrije Basicevic Mangelos Award given to the best Serbian visual artist under 35 was held from June 17th to July 6th at the gallery of the Belgrade independent art association Remont. At the same time as this event was taking place in Serbia, in the Zagreb gallery Galzenica visitors could come and see the sibling exhibition of the Radoslav Putar Award finalists. Both awards have, in fact, been established in 2002 within the framework of the Young Visual Artists Awards program which, by developing a network of such awards in Central and South Eastern Europe, aims to advance the working conditions for young artists. In the countries where the YVAA awards are presented, Serbia included, the winner receives a scholarship for a three-month stay in New York and an opportunity to hold a solo exhibition in his own country. Whereas the Putar Award finalist exhibition has failed to deliver in regards of quality, the Mangelos Award finalist exhibition displayed several intriguing artistic concepts. The expert jury had a hard time selecting the winner, but in the end, this year’s Mangelos Award was given to a young artist from Novi Sad, Slobodan Stosic (b. 1989). His winning work 10 i po / 10 and a half ironizes the award itself and places Stosic alongside the ever-growing number of young artists to whom a critical exposure of the art institutions represents the focal point of their interests.

Unpretentiously, Stosic exhibited a framed A4 black sheet of paper together with a theoretical explanation of the transcendent and material nature of this everyday object. He did not write the explanation himself but composed it by taking sentences from the statements of former Mangelos Award recipients in which they elucidate their award-winning works. It is, however, remarkable that when reading this absurd ‘cut-and-paste’ text the readers/viewers will have a hard time recognizing that they have in front of them a well thought-out and structured collage of sentences since its theoretical vocabulary is so generic and predictable that it can be applied to any of the exhibited works and not just to Stosic’s. On the one hand, this vocabulary has become a standard tool for artists to promote their works of art, while on the other, art critics and theorists use it as a verified interpretative device in the analyses of contemporary art. Stosic emphasises the willingness of the artist to participate in the game as the practice of recognized methods and actions often means a fast positioning and affirmation in the art-world institutions. The author did not compose the theoretical explanation arbitrarily, nor did he choose the black rectangular paper accidentally, but together they work as a metaphor of the depicted condition that dominates the art scene. In fact, this universal motif has the ability, not unlike a black hole, to absorb the whole art history of the 20th century. It functions as a fetish that can transform even the most radical concept of art for art’s sake into an intellectual décor of the petite bourgeoisie who embraces institutional art as a device for social legitimation and not as an incentive to examine its own social position.

A somewhat older Ana Krstic (b. 1978) is troubled by similar questions regarding the perspectives and working conditions of the artist in an ideologically divided and technologically automatized world. Krstic is quite forthright and vocal in revealing her position. In the displayed artwork Upoznajte nominovane –Meet the Nominees (2012) she combines the interviews of the prestigious British Turner Award finalists with her own miniature sculptures made of multi-colour paper which she makes during breaks at her work place in her home town of Mionica. While the British award, receiving substantial financial backing, has somewhat of a show business appeal (interviews resemble those found in typical tabloids)

the Serbian award is made possible thanks to the enthusiasm and perseverance of the organizers, in spite of the current unfavourable cultural and economic circumstances. Krstic succeeded in showing this gap between the two awards by juxtaposing the low-budget sculptures and the ostentatious presentation of the world famous finalists. She has also demonstrated her own position of an artist facing constant existential challenges, an artist who ingeniously searches for a space of freedom of expression in the prosaic and quotidian reality. Hers is a reality of an uninteresting manual job and the pure joy of spontaneous creativity.

The remaining three finalists (Aleksandar Dimitrijevic, Bojan Radojcic and Sasa Tkacenko) exhibited works of art divested of open polemics, works that explore diverse aesthetic phenomena and the artist’s intimate world. One work stood out in particular. Dimitrijevic (b. 1997), an already established painter, exhibited a piece titled Artefakti / Artefacts (2012) in which he, remaining within the boundaries of his own recognizable authorial word, incorporated multi-coloured structures of numbers and letters, based on score sheets of different card games and games of chance. This time, instead of presenting us with a painting inspired by these motifs, he displayed the source of his inspiration itself – a pile of small pieces of scrawled sheets bursting with scribbles, score sheets he had collected from his friends. For the artist these jottings comprise authentic testimonials of human nature, our need to impose and our innate competitiveness, as well as the different layers of communication emerging in highly tense situations. These sheets are also visually stimulating as they are a proof of how people with no artistic background can inadvertently guess a line flow, draw interesting hatching lines or make an unusual composition that to a trained eye can open the window to a whole new perspective. It is also intriguing that such inspirational excesses are usually found on the sheets’ margins, that is, at the limits of the subconscious – a subject that Dimitrijevic has been exploring persistently in his artwork.

Finally, it is important to point out that this exhibition made it clear that the younger generation of Serbian artists has not resigned with the current precarious state of the cultural production in their country and the rest of the Balkan region, nor did they go for the reproduction of the hermetically sealed content and form, the approach taken by some of this year’s Radoslav Putar Award finalists. On the contrary, this year’s Mangelos Award finalists wanted to communicate with their work that they are persistently trying to re-examine their own artistic position even when they seem not to be particularly interested in an open political discourse in art. Even though the finalists didn’t manage to avoid a certain predictability in bringing their ideas to life, either as a consequence of following too closely the existing tendencies, or because of their own aesthetic predispositions, this year’s Mangelos Award jury showed with its selection of the winner that this established prize is still capable of encouraging its participants to critically challenge the very awards and the wider social context in its totality.