Descarcă revista în format PDF - idea

Sanja IvekovićLady Rosa of Luxembourg, 2001, installation with gilded polyester, wood, and printed and video archival material,figure: 240 × 160 × 90 cm, collection of the artist, © 2011 Sanja Ivekovic’which the umbrella term “Fluxus“ is applied, covering a broader fieldthan just one specific trend of the period.The exhibition of the Croatian woman artist Sanja Ivekovic’, curatedby Roxana Marcoci, has already been the product of this new attitudeof MoMA. As it became clear at the press conference, the mainreason for exhibiting her was not her geographical origin, but herconnection to feminism. The museum wanted to start to correct itsnarrow canon with an artist with a double “handicap“. By the samemeans, as the sixties is currently the most fashionable period dueto its oppositional and political character, feminism is also in a frontposition on the basis of its criticism of the exclusive and patriarchalcanon and its institutional critique; both aspects are highly relevantnowadays worldwide, even if the motivations are diverse in differentgeopolitical regions. In New York City, it is the rapid commercialization,institutionalization, and “the state of exception“ in democraciesthat radicalizes the art making practices and interpretations. In ourregion, the overwhelming power, control, and arbitrariness of thestate and institutions are the engine behind this drive.The exhibition of Ivekovic’ was very touching and thought provoking,despite the fact that its presentation was very modest, even puritanical;there was no fuss around it. The local interpretations were basedby and large on gender reading – which is not some curiosity anymore,but part of the professional discourse – mostly because thefeminist context was given (although the text of the catalogue triesto broaden it) and because the institution was cautious about playingthe Cold War card. The very political nature of her art still comesthrough, as it is nurtured by any kind of suppression, whether it ispolitical or gender based.The third heavy-weight player in the game was the Guggenheimwith its big-shot, Marina Abramovic’, who greatly utilized her capitalof radical oppositionality still after she left Yugoslavia in 1976, butwhich became less and less sustainable. Her performance and installationentitled Balkan Baroque in 1999 at the Venice Biennial was sooverwhelmingly stirring that it received the Golden Lion Award, andrightly so. However, at the Whitney Biennial in 2004 the representationof the fratricide and its violent bloodshed was narrowed into theconflict of the lapse of Serbia from the European Union. The sort ofappropriation of the conflict and its molding into “Serbian martyrdom“generated harsh criticism from the ex-fellow citizens in ex-Yugoslavia. Her video-installation named Balkan Erotic Epic in 2005in Chelsea launched her overseas career, rather than showing commitmentto her ex-socialist experiences. In her quite controversialperformance reenactments, Seven Easy Pieces, one already couldhardly find even traces of that cultural heritage anymore.Instead of a compulsive justification of an illusory mainstream,the artistic strategy of Ivekovic’, who remained in her native country,seems beneficial and rewarding. She takes a firm and persistentstand and from that angle shows the invisible traits of the issue,the canon’s blind spots and its incompatibility with other parts of theworld outside of the imagined centers. The worn-out slogan of Westernfeminism, “the personal is political“, for example, is of absolutelyno use when applied to its East-Center European version; better yet,the very opposite is relevant, that is: “the political is personal“, whichmeans that the politics saturate even under your skin. The reversedposition is greatly revealed by Ivekovic’’s work Triangle (1979) inwhich she makes obvious the strictly monitored borders between privateand public life. She is sipping whisky, reading a book, and pretendingto masturbate at her balcony at the same time as Tito isvisiting Zagreb and passing by with his procession. The celebratingmasses and all the public spheres are under constant surveillancefrom the roof by armed representatives of power, and not even theartist’s “private“ deviance can be avoided. The small photos speakrelevantly about the constant control and patrolling the borders andthe need of crossing them, at least symbolically by artists. The personalelements were present in her works from the very beginningof her activity, however, never for their own sake, but rather to shed90