art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

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The project was brought to a close on December 29 2004 with the grand division
of the profits in the Museum of Contemporary Art to the visitors who happened to
be there as joint stock-holders in the project. Dalibor Martinis gave dividends of
150 kuna to each of those present at the close of the event. Almost all the winners
who were gathered at the end of the year in the Museum were figures from the
underground of the big city, to use the phrasing of the already forgotten social
criticism novel of Vjenceslav Novak. The group of “losers”, collateral victims of the
Croatian economic and political transition in the period of post-communist capitalism,
had for the first time ever put their foot into the premises where contemporary art
occurs or is exhibited.
Instead of the glamorous spectacle of the humanitarian ideology of fake charity, the
ultimate act of cynicism of the global system of the perversion of the idea of justice,
equality of opportunity and individual freedom, which is during the Christmas and
New Year holidays some kind of corrective to the avaricious consumerist euphoria of
the social power elites, the end of the Variable Risk Landscape project was a first-rate
social subversion of the Croatian kitsch ideology of charity. Finally, the end of the
project marked a completely new approach in contemporary art to the transmedia
experience of the encounter between artist and at-risk social groups.
The penetration of the closed structures of the ideological network of the meanings
of spectacle, nature and capital as accumulation of images, protection of the landscape
and deconstruction of the idea of capitalist investment in individual riches was at
once produced as an immanent critique of the cynicism of global capitalism against
the “poverty” of the nation state.
In the Variable Risk Landscape, Martinis changed the manner of understanding
the object and representation of contemporary art. The Beuys formula was radicalised
by other means. Just as the key for the understanding of capitalism in Marx’s Capital
is the so-called triple pattern of commodities – money – capital, so for contemporary
art in the age of global capitalism the key to understanding is the relationship of
spectacle, nature and capital as against performativeness, conceptuality and the
installation practice of networking events in the space and time of the intervention.
Martinis’ project in its very name hits at the essence of the contemporary system of
the neo-liberal economy as reigning ideology of globalisation.
The Variable Risk Landscape is a space and time of the spectacular movement
of capital through a space bounded by a mathematical concept of time as annual
profit on the stock market. The sociological characteristic of the society of risk, in
line with the postulates of Ulrich Beck, derives from the very nature of the capitalist
economy and the information society.
Risk is a characteristic that the society produces by its own foundation. It is not an
irrational threat to the system, rather a rational response of the social environment
to the permanent crisis of the market-organised societal community.
Hence risk groups in contemporary society are not just those who have contracted
AIDS, but primarily the rejected and marginalised social cases: the tramps, the
unemployed, those who are maladjusted to the social mobility of capital, victims of
the transitional and clientele economy like pensioners relegated to begging in the
streets.