art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

The entire adventure of contemporary art, from Actionism, the art of the installation
and the performance, of the social subversion of reality qua image of the realistic
cynicism of the neo-liberal ideology of globalisation can be summed up today in
a metapolitical strategy for the surmounting the limits of art, life and capital.[6]
By analogy to the realistic possibility of overcoming systems from within, which in
contemporary critical theories of globalisation means the acceptance of the level of
the world historical positivity of capitalism as technological, scientific and cultural
development, contemporary art today can no longer be outside the process.
To speak then of multimedia art as the leading genre for the scrutiny of the
contemporary artist with spectacular metamorphoses of capital at “the end of history”
no longer seems correct. Multimediality is a label for the technical and instrumental
appropriation of the resources of IT culture. This no longer corresponds to the real
“nature” of the reversal of culture as new ideology of globalisation.
The turn is not in the performative and conceptual attitude to the object of the artistic
deconstruction of reality, rather in the attitude towards the reality of deconstruction
itself. In other words, the artist does not choose his object as “new reality”, rather the
reality that is the spectacle of virtuality at work/in the event requires the choice of
new artistic strategies. Instead of Beuys’s equation of art and capital and instead of
the closed story of the multimedia artist of our age using IT culture – digital images,
computers, stage setting, live and simulated performance, the iconoclasm of modern
art, the semiotics of the text, audio-visual installations, video and laser technologies
– the time has come for such an artist to be called his real name.
The transmedia artist is the true subject of the spectacle of the nature of capital.
His main role is in the social criticism of the fetishism of the commodity. The change
of term is not just a witticism in the creation of new concepts for the reality of the
artistic practice of IT culture. On the contrary, only in this way is it possible properly
to understand the intention of transmedia art to deconstruct the order of the global
ideology of neoliberalism. Instead of the nation state and its modern concept of
the sovereignty and autonomy, today the transnational corporations are the main
subjects and agents of rule in our lives.[7]
A paradigmatic case of the transmedia artist who reflects the essence of this term
is seen in Dalibor Martinis’s realised project Variable Risk Landscape. A one-year
project, put on in 2004, it was directed to the “artistic intervention into the territory
of the economy” as the artist himself explained the project. On January 1 2004,
Martinis bought 365 shares in the investment fund of Zagrebacka banka for 37,000
euros, and recorded the trends in its value. In the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary
Art it was possible the whole year long to keep up with what was happening with the
rise and fall in the value of these shares on an installed virtual wall.
Every month the artist went up to the hills and mountains measuring out the curve
of the growth of the shares, measuring the height with an altimeter. This year-long
experience of hiking produced the fascinating photographs of Boris Cvjetanović and
the artist himself. Reporting on the curves of the trends in the value of the shares
became at one and the same time reporting on the movements of the artist in the
real landscape of nature. All this could be tracked at www.variablerisklandscape.com,
the space-time of the transmedia artistic event.
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