The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

concept of the artist which includes the idea of subversive activity regarding the cultural imperial-
the author (meaning a person conceiving and ism of the "Western modernity" model ('interna-
projecting the work of art) appears, in light of tional language), while in the early eighties a great
history, as Narcissus' gaze at the reflection. 'comeback' of regionalisms was announced, fol-
When the early eighties saw the start of lowed by the "nomadic culture of postmodernism",
Lyotard's story of 'post-modern condition', no offering unlimited consumption of fragmentary.
longer dominated by 'grand narratives', it context-less semantic and semiological products of
turned out that they had already started mov- civilisation, escalating in the production of
ing into transitional cultures, in an inversed form, "ecstatic media culture", of incomparable ref-
mixing with small, fragmented (and local) stories erences and criteria of correspondence (the
(ideology of domination, coexistence, fragments of 'amassing of significators).
the project of classless society, "unfinished" mod- This framework of cultural transfigurations
ernisation, the trauma of the primary accumulation can be introduced, as a paradigmatic example
of capital). reflected in the traces and muddled in (symptom). into the work of artists who had
each other. The reflections showed that global passed through the experience of radical criti-
openness is confirmed by local closeness (i.e. the cism of the subject of art, and even late-con-
reflection of Western European post-colonial trau- ceptualist (the artist of post-avant-garde is
matic survival or facing the possibility or impossi- aware that theoretical propriety of conceptu-
bility of multiculturalism). while local closeness al art is nothing but another idealisation of the
dreams of universal all-inclusiveness (i.e. the "subject of art"). I wish to stress here the artis-
dream of "trans-nationality of contemporary tic strategies that survived as a problematic body
art"). From the self-realisation of the contem- within a monolithic, pre-transitional historical and
porary global society as "finally" post-commu- cultural situation, continued their operation show-
nist, post-utopian, post-industrial, post-mod- ing entirely autonomous promises of the end of
ern, and even post-sexual (with the appear- ideological separation of the worlds, and offered to
ance of AIDS), the subject of the discourse (the the Western scene a paradigmatic code of actuality
one producing meaning, sense and value) mixed with the fragments of various and diverse
leaves the given hierarchies and subordina- traces of ideologies and identities. In the entire
tions, spacialises, spreads in space like a body half-century term, therefore, there appears the
(towards the gender, cultural, and other in constant of ideology as a vector of culture, politics
general). Coming from rigid systems in which and art: from the traditional understanding as the
only one kind of ideological production of natural world of origin in which the subject is
identity was functional, the one with a totali- immersed, through modernistic, with the large
tarian mark, in the resulting desert, the subject emancipating phantasm which sank into the meta-
has developed different productions of identi- physics of utopia of a better possible world, drag-
ty, among which the annihilation of the ging along a number of victims7, all the way to mul-
'breach' between "East" and "West" stands ticulturalism as the ideology of synchronised traces
out. While in high modernism any culture of identity, plurality as the contextualised indexes
apart from the international became a region- of culture. Thus ideology as the cultural destiny ties
al and marginal pattern of mis-fitting, 'back- history and geography, metaphysics and the hum-
wards' world, late modernism already sees drum, system and gender... One remembers the
23 I THE MISFITS