art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

sold in them.[3] Andreja Kulunčić related to the difficulties of societies in transition
that influence everybody’s life including that of the artists themselves.
Igor Toševski, from Macedonia, embarked on a long-term project called Dossier
in 1996.[4] As did Andreja Kulunčić in her NAMA work, he dealt with industries and
societies in transition, providing his personal artistic comment on the changes.
The Dossier project investigates the “widespread bankruptcy of non-competitive
factories and their subsequent privatization.”[5] He visited these dysfunctional places,
photographed and recorded “piles of rejected objects, tons of decaying materials”[6]
lingering at the threshold of a free market economy. His documentation and part
of the retrieved goods were then composed as installation pieces and exhibited in
an art gallery in Skopje, the Macedonian capital. Taken out of their original context,
these objects did not only reflect the current difficulties of industrial production
and management but also pointed to the desolate state of the exhibition venues
themselves[7] and therefore to the condition of culture and more specifically to that
of the visual arts. In the end, Dossier implied a statement about “artists living in
unstable political and economic regions in times of transition”[8] as well.
Toševski and Kulunčić, both from the so-called Balkans, are two of many artists
who dedicate part of their work to economic conditions in general and those of
artists in particular and therefore concentrate on the issue of their own complicated
survival strategies.
A much more direct and straightforward approach is taken on by Plamen Dejanoff
from Bulgaria. Dejanoff’s projects can no longer be referred to as mere artistic
comments; he rather becomes an active participant in the refined system of western
capitalism. Coming from a country still in the middle of a very difficult transition, a
culture that remains indifferent to visual artists, Dejanoff has been living in the West
(Vienna, Berlin) since the mid-1990s and almost aggressively adapts marketing and
commercial strategies in his interventions. One of those projects is his collaboration
with the automobile manufacturer, BMW, from which he got a fancy Z3 Roadster.
In return, he used all the exhibition space given to him at art venues, including all
upcoming catalogue pages, as an advertising vehicle for the car company.[9]
More recently, Dejanoff has signed a one-year contract with a Swiss software
company where he indeed “sold out” by receiving a regular salary and reciprocally
having to distribute the company’s business cards as his own plus having to transfer
a certain percentage of his gallery sales to them.[10]
Dejanoff’s provocative interventions, a list of which has lengthened over the last
nine years, are all united by a “well balanced symbiosis between art and economy.”[11]
By the same token, they can be considered as a real time experiment on the artist’s
role in capitalist society, even more so since Dejanoff grew up under communism
and still oscillates between Central and Eastern Europe and the Western system.
In a less persistent, but similarly effective way, Polish artist Paweł Althamer became
involved with the business world. In the late 1990s, the Warsaw-based publishing
house Cash commissioned him to design a realistic figure of a businessman. They
had heard of his skills as a doll maker—an occupation with which he and his wife
supported their family. The figure was meant to serve as a trophy for the Businessman
of the Year award, and was readily accepted by the company. During the process of
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