The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

Sonja Briski Uzelac
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We like to find the basis for identification in
the open field of historicity meeting the con-
temporary. We recognise in that basis the sta-
ble shapes of our beloved continuity of the
well-known. despite the already-existing con-
science that the sequence of illusion itself consists
of mirror images. Speaking from the contemporary
experience of "post modern era", the rational-
objectivistic or linear founding of the value in art is
just a construction written into the body of art,
deeply scarred by psychological, social and spiritu-
al marks. "The time lived," says Peter Sloterdijk, "has
an opaque core: the dark glitter of the moment
mixes the tension and cravings impossible to
resolve through one's own clarity of con-
cept."1 Thus the stage of the world, with all its
light and dark places, is subjectively tattooed.
This is also the source of the particular, practi-
cal power of the individual: their material,
bodily, sensory existence is not capable of tak-
ing quite everything, especially not in different
forms of tyrannides and the processes of
hypostasis of collectivity. This resistance of
the human "material", despite its constitution-
al fragility and ephemerity, is what survives all
THE MISFITS I 18
the flows and breakdowns of history, thus provid-
ing the significator's materiality (the production of
meaning and sense) with its most constant histori-
cal basis. This is to some extent a "naturally" de-
totalising power of individual existence, containing
the risk but also the power of metamorphosis of
culture and its re-evaluation. But this makes its pri-
mary, most life-like defining factors actually nega-
tive: the refusal of mere adaptation to the legiti-
mate Meaning, the refusal to accept unconditional-
ly a pre-told truth about life...
Like the human body. the body of art is resilient: it
does not live off guaranteed Meaning, but rather off
traces of meaning written within it. Especially
today. when it is more and more obvious that art is
getting transferred into the area of "other", culture,
society. politics or sexuality.., and is becoming more
and more context-dependent. until it drowns in the
"context of the arms" on its own. In high mod-
ernism, certainly until the middle of the last centu-
ry's 60's, the context was unimportant for the
reading and perception of a work of art (which
was red directly through its material, linguistic
and phenomenal aspects); in those time, the
art was an "unattainable" object of longing,
the personification of the "autonomous
object" of art within the system of art, in an
extremely differentiated and specified form of
extraordinary ("original") artefacts, separate
from the effects and functions of culture.
The transfiguration of art and its re-orientation
towards culture starts parallel with the process of
general cultural reconfiguration in the sixties, as
well as with the re-investigation of the status of the
object of art, the subject of the artist, and the con-
cept of art. This movement was initially followed
by the growing conviction that any work of art
shows traces of the (historical) contexts through
which it has passed in its creation and reception.
and that those contexts appear as individual
'traces'. 'traces of traces'. and 'erased traces of