Silva Kalcic
Streets are our Brushes, Squares are our Palettes
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"What ’s (that) gleaming white in a forest green? Is it snow, are
that flocking swans?…". The Slavic antithesis, the introductory part
of Hasanaginica poem by an anonymous author, certainly without that intention,
but successfully describes the usual reaction of an audience to Public art projects.
The public art is leaving a gallery ’s White Cube addressing to potentially
new consumers of contemporary art, demanding from an audience to observe or
to take part (the audience as the other party in a dialog) and of course an
indifference is always the undesired feedback of the audience -that was Heisenberg
who contested the dogma claiming that an object is independent of a subject
observing it ("Big Other "). In a case when contemporary art is placed
into a public space, Nada Beros considers that "it ’s being addressed
in that way to a larger audience, a number of potential "consumers"
increases and a work of art becomes more accessible, although not necessarily
more available to the wide audience. Therefore the context of a public space
is pretty often acting as a double edged sword, incurring damage to the audience
as much as to the work of art.". At the time of postscientism, or as Houellebecq
would say "the third metaphysical mutation ", a visual aspect of perception
is dominant, and as well as the visible object is prior to a visual medium,the
visual culture also takes "precedence "over a notion of "visual
arts " (the limits and rules of (un)contaminated visual perception are
comprised in a statement of J. Gagarin, the first man who entered the outer
space: "I was watching and watching, but I haven ’t seen the God!").
Being an expression of active relation of artists towards reality, the art,
instead of being conserved in traditional exhibition areas, is rather confronted
(to paraphrase Marina Grzinic’s statement) with its social milieu -albeit
the attribute "social "is denounced for its bad reputation, often
being "simplified and misused" in the past. The art in public spaces
abrogates entirely the boundary line between "high" and "popular"
art, but there is also a danger hidden in it -art is exposed to an influence
of industry of entertainment and art prints manufacturing ("making concessions
to the people"), and because a rejoicing in aesthetics could be merchandised,
a "beauteousness" moves to the area of design, to supermarkets and
factories, as an inversion of Warhol’s statement that "to be good
in business is the most fascinating form of art ".
And that place of materialism and ecstatic communications is the city; "Nature,
being everlasting opponent to a man, is going to be overpowered by means of
modern technology and compelled to serve to a happiness of mankind " (F.
Fukuyama). An ordinary citizen of a western city observes, assimilates and recognizes
about 16000 logotypes every day. The public art is mainly related with an urban
space and an urban feeling (unlike land art); "Streets are our brushes,squares
are our palettes!", Majakovski has exclaimed that before.
...
As a part of the manifestation Zadar Alive 2001Darko Fritz installed a site-specific
close circuit video installation on the main city square (Narodni trg).A key
part of it was a surveillance camera capturing the prose of everyday life -a
direct wireless live coverage of a movement of the people in that public area
(in a manner of public television’s panoramic snapshots). From the top
of a candelabrum -the urban furniture, erected in the middle of a square, the
surveillance camera (light-motive of Darko Fritz’s work) was taking pictures,
broadcasted simultaneously on two locations on the square, on the Renaissance
Municipal Loggia and on the opposite Baroque tower clock, where a screen was
placed behind a transparent back of the clock, hands of which had been removed
for restoration. The intention of the project was to bring round the urban environment
and spatial relations on the square by mean of live coverage -media mediated
perception of an "actual" moment. An interaction of the exterior and
architecture was strongly manifested,and both, synchronic and diachronic dimensions
of the square, reality and meta-reality -became fused.
How many people live in their place of birth? Darko Fritz (resident in Zagreb
and in Amsterdam, in 2001 by Zelimir Koscevic proclaimed to be "the greatest
non-institutional exporter of Croatian culture" at the moment) posed that
question in his project Migrant Navigator, dealing precisely with migrations,
repositioning, identity, nostalgia (in a sense of saudade, an untranslatable
Portuguese word) and a conception and significance of home as a relict of familial
and national community in a period of all-pervasive atomisation of society.
Migrant Navigator is a work-in-progress, the multi(hybrid) -media -and public
art (implicating Web as a public space)project that started in April with a
"mis.informing" Web page, decorated with a frieze of Home icons (of
a renowned internet provider) introducing you to its content. The second phase
of the project was off-line: from June to October of 2002 as a part of the project
Talking the City, in the public area next to the railway station in Linz , was
planted a horticultural installation entitled The Future of Nostalgia. From
the grassy area a piece, 9x9 meters in size, "was taken ", and a pictogram
of a house was made by carefully arranged flowers, or more precisely the same
Home icon of the Web browser was translated in to the floral arrangement. The
railway station was thoughtfully chosen location for planting -as a place of
transits and a check-in post for emigrants, the point of a warping and a distortion
of space, where passengers can eat, sleep, make transactions, shop, pray...
Such spaces Augé denominates as non-places (non-lieux), with no identities
and relations. Even the installation itself goes through transitions climatic,
organic, changes of local municipal authorities what might result in a stopping
of weeding and watering of beds of flowers (or the seasonal replacement of flowers),and
it is even exposed to a possible anonymous act of vandalism …The third
phase of Migrant Navigator was realised in November as a part of a Motel Jezevo
project. A poster measuring 2x2 meter in size, made in silk-screen technique
with a replica of Home icon, blown up and computer processed, with a cyber-aestheticized,
cold, elegantly bright-silver background was placed on central part of existing
advertising screens (of a standard, aggresive, billboard format) on both sides
of Croato-Slovenian border. The poster does not contain any further informations
except the pictorial one, inducing a series of associations in those ones crossing
the border and at very best it could inspire them on rethinking the identity
-a national one (as a socio-cultural construct) and a personal one (as its biological
substratum). In the age of civilisation of communicating, the Web reduced the
globe on to an attainable size, while, at the same time, in the real world border
formalities drastically decelerate our movement, even calling it into question...
Borders are the places with their own "psychopathology" ; the border
crossing between Croatia and Slovenia (almost an unnoticeable borderline without
any official structures until 1991, in a little while becoming the eastern "Schengenian"
border) is a critical point of intensive trafficking, drugs & arms smugglings
…
The posters with Home icons have spread out "virulently" to Zagreb,
posted on the advertisement pillars of the Ban Jelacic Square and next to the
Main railway station, on the billboard in Savska street, intended for the view
of pedestrians and commuters.In a relation between the visible object and the
visual medium (billboard - strategic place of advertising campaigns), Darko
Fritz in a conciliatory way handle with a functioning mechanisms of consumerist
society, inspiring beholders to a "wishful thinking "; the appropriation
of marketing strategies is evident also through the concept of an exhibition
as a product -namely, it has its own sign and "logo".
...
Zivot umjetnosti magazine, no. 67 - 68, Institut za povjest umjetnosti [Art History Institute], Zagreb, 2003