The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

the optical illusion or a mental effect, it is all production and consumption: from goods to
framed by 'significator games'. Thus, the effect the meaning, value and ideologies... and it is
overcomes the episteme: however, this is less rele- "all extraordinary, but we don't know why"8.
vant when compared with what the artist is trying On the scene of language games of combining
to achieve: it is less important to see or fix a certain and varying possibilities (with the old unso-
'visual form' than it is to be present/participate in phisticated ludism, like the one unforgettable
the event of metamorphosis of the object. spa- in the approach of Ivan Koari, in just 'delet-
cialised in the ecstasy of the spreading of light and ed traces'), the rules are the "law", but cannot
the selection of light information. be completely deciphered, despite the myste-
The dominant strategies of conceptual post-avant- rious desire to decipher. The paradox is found
garde of the nineties, otherwise founded as much in in the ambiguity of the "framework" of the
neoconceptualism as in the domination of mass game. which, beside the signs or objects, also
media in post-modern culture, which in turn owes includes the concept of working with the
to poststructuralist theory on art, culture, politics world (knowledge. history, ethics...) which sur-
etc., turn to the research and provocation of rounds them and turns them into cultural
social/cultural mechanisms of creation, exchange codes. From this position (EgoEast; Ivana
and consummation of meaning and value: from sim- Keser. Patience, 1992: Aleksandar Battista
ulation models of reconsideration of political and The Encyclopaedia of Dialogues, 1992). the
ideological markers of late communism/post-com- order of subject and discourse is exchanged by
munism as the language of their everyday life the arbitrary order of the rules of the game.
(Exploitation of Dead Signs. Mladen Stlinovi) which are, in fact a specificator operation, with the
to interactive simulation tendencies which use effects of significator chain and network connec-
the digital space as an artistic medium (Closed tions, or the linking of media culture. After episte-
RealityEmbryo, Andreja Kuluni), an inter- mology and ontology, the turn comes now to the
active work which provokes the social impli- logic of significator, not located in historical time
cations of human genetic engineering). But the but rather in the electronic time of continuous
recent media Babylon (text, image, photogra- present. From that "heightened" vantage point, any
phy, film, installation, ready-made, video, point of the planet seems available, both as central
computers etc.) is merely a symptom uncover- and as cantered, but also as both local and specific.
ing the language elements, relations and con- The artist has definitely taken over the figure of
stitutions of post-modern conscience, which is misfitting nomad, his skin tattooed by traces of cul-
a joint horizon both for artists and those who ture through whose worlds they pass. But, what
follow them. Starting with the deSaussurian about us?
tradition of the relation between the significa-
tor and the signified (the arbitrary relation of
object and language), all the way to the open-
ness and instability of 'language games' based
on 'discourse machines' (from Baudrillard and
Guattari to Virilio). all of them are participants
and witnesses to the free floating of significa-
tor effects of 'media' in the culture of mass
271 THE MISFITS