art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

or Jeep. The fourth category would be an oldtimer, but this is a step he would take
later on to not impede the current appearance of his youthfulness. Before deciding
upon which car to take, Dejanoff produced 30 small models in crystal, which are sold
though his galleries as extension of the artist’s self-representation, or, in McLuhan’s
sense, narcissistic auto-amputation. The result of this advertising strategy is the
transition “from the consumer picture of product to the producer image of process,”
leading to the fact that the “corporate image of process includes the consumer in
the producer role as well.”[2] Hence, the buyers of Dejanoff’s art manage to share
the iconographic values of the artist’s life as suggested through advertising.
Dealing with the phenomenon of real estate, Dejanoff has not only worked with
magazine ads but even goes one step further in the large-scale project Made in
Bulgaria. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, Dejanoff uses this circumstance as a cultural
means of branding. After having acquired a number of buildings in the Bulgarian town
Veliko Tarnovo, Dejanoff is planning to highlight the status of this place by presenting
international art collections of museums which operate as sponsors by using and
maintaining Dejanoff’s houses. One of the first projects in this series was realized
in the frame of Dejanoff’s solo exhibition at the Viennese Museum of Modern Art
(MUMOK) in 2006. In cooperation with MUMOK and the Soravia group, one of the
first buildings in Veliko Tarnovo will be renovated as of 2007 in order to host parts
of the collection of MUMOK. In the long run, there will be several “branches“ of
museums next door, presenting a wide range of contemporary art. The architecture
of the individual houses will be determined by various materials. As a precursor,
Dejanoff presented a large bronze-grid structure in his Vienna show which was about
to symbolize the facade of the MUMOK branch in Veliko Tarnovo.
A further visual marker of the MUMOK exhibition which continues Dejanoff’s work
method from the 1990s was the presentation of a black Porsche Cayenne, which the
artist acquired with exhibition money, sponsoring by Porsche and the sale of miniature
car glass objects. The production of the miniature car models has resulted from
Dejanoff’s image consultation. In addition, Dejanoff has produced a number of other
glass objects, among them wheel rims, which became very popular collection items
and reflect the artist’s notion of contemporary sculpture. The latter was continued in
a performance and video project at Kunsthalle Kiel in 2006 and Michelle Nicol Fine
Arts in Zurich in 2007. In these “car tuning“ performances, parts of the car such as
rims or tail pipe were replaced with highly sophisticated models. In Kiel, a crane had
to lift the car into the courtyard of the Kunsthalle, where the whole action was filmed
and later turned into a three-screen road movie video installation with sound. The
Zurich version was performed in the inner courtyard of Credit Suisse, which included
a new business partner in Dejanoff’s economy-related art production.
With the mechanisms at hand and their orientation to western economical
systems, or, in other words, a tactically well balanced symbiosis between art and
economy, Plamen Dejanoff achieved to position himself within the international art
market and the demands imposed upon a business-oriented artist. Though being
criticized for submitting to the rules of neo-liberal tendencies within the structures
of global economy, Dejanoff succeeded in fulfilling the laws of supply and demand
in communicating his work as an artistic service. Through the transfer of market-
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