from 'The Photographic Lens and the Inner Eye;
The Imitation of Life Studio'
by Vladimir Gudac, Camera Austria no.30, 1989.:
They work as artistic partners, all their works
carry the signature of both without leaving a possibility to find out the
part any one of them has had in their creation - there is no visible 'handwriting
' to give away individual authorship. The Imitation of Life Studio show
some definitive tendencies of today's art - the creation of new things
according to the will of the artists in their credo. They use visual artifacts
from their environment, their physical and spiritual milieu. The title
of the one of their exhibitions - ėLontano dagli occhi, lontano dal cuoreî
- tells of the reverse creation process. If the heart is not the eye's
drawing well but its place of deposit (not producing but perceiving) it
can only be kept alive by collecting things that have been seen. The absence
of the visual weakens the emotional ties to the outer world while the inner
objects emanate their influence of their own strength: momentarily pushed
aside as if not all exist or as if there were no other influences or no
subjectivity.
Duplication, the use of photocopies from which
photographs are then made, unprinted clichés - these are technique
in the vicinity of the Pop-Art-processes of the industrial society, not
confirmations of just any high-tech realism but an affirmation of a special,
apparently undeclared order of things becoming effective within the networks
of a previously designed strategy. In the development of the highly capitalist
western society and the references to societies only marginally participating
in this process (Yugoslavia, for instance) the image has fund its level,
a level on which, within the socio-cultural scene, many old ties
have been broken. This breaking of old ties put young artists in the position
of being a 'distributor of self' in a society rendering the ego, because
of the process of aculturalisation, no longer worthy of credit. In such
a situation, when things are no longer self-explanatory, the artist himself
must take charge and develop a sound, outwardly presentable program, while
personal matters remain self-evident. In such a system things, images,
texts and objects are arranged in a parallels, neatly separated without
ever getting mixed up. |