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political, economic and individual differences the contemporary art community
speaks the same language. Since the collapse in the seventies of what could be
termed the option of the left, an option which determined the system of values
and the consistency of language on which the above illusion was based, this
institutionalized communication framework has been showing its cracks and
fissures. It has shown itself inadequate, yet at the same time it remains the only
model linking separate individuals and groups. It protects them from sinking
back into more or less primitive national and local communities.
By trying to circumvent the institutional framework, and to ignore the
potential of skilful professionals who would inevitably try to place the event
within an established context of reception, the Transnacionala project
deliberately provoked what could be called a communication noise. It placed the
event in a certain margin - a margin that was constantly bringing up questions
about the point of the participants' own activity, about what makes the project
different from a tourist trip abusing art as an excuse for stealing national and
international funds in the interest of structuring pleasure, as well as various selfaccusatory
images in which the participants saw themselves as a bunch of
demoralized, neurotic individuals in pursuit of some abstract private utopias,
non-existent relations, and deficiencies that cannot be compensated for. These
feelings gradually took on the status of a unique experience, of a state we had
deliberately provoked. They became the subject and theme of the journey.
The problem of the structure and dominion of the public is specifically that
power which decides whether a particular individual or collective art production
is a real part of the public exchange of values - or merely what could be termed
the hyper-production of an alienated subject, to be stuck in the cellar or attic of
a private house, in the inventory of a bankrupt gallery, in a collection that has
lost its value overnight, or in some other of history's many dumping grounds.
In view of the prevailing East European provenance of the artists who had
embarked on the adventure of discovering America - the central myth of the
West - we repeatedly posed a basic question to the American public present at
our public events: what does the American cultural public understand by the
notions of the East - of Eastern art, of Eastern societies? What already exists in
the minds of our interlocutors? On the other hand, we were faced with the
question of how to present our real historical, existential and aesthetic
experience in such a way as to transcend the cultural, ideological and political
headlines linked to the collapse of the Eastern political systems and the wars in
ex-Yugoslavia and the ex-Soviet Union. How to define historical, cultural and
existential differences in the context of global, transnational capitalism? And
finally, how to transcend sociological discourse and establish conditions for
aesthetic discourse? Communicating and associating with various American art
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