ARTWORDS

Magazine for the fine arts. International edition of LIKOVNE BESEDE, Slovenia.

Winter 2014

001

ARTWORDS International is the first edition of the interna-

tional online publication conceived by the editorial board of Likovne Besede magazine the main
Slovenian publication on the visual and fine arts,
which has been published continuously since 1985.
The online edition was created with the aspiration to
connect related publications within the region, share
articles and raise awareness about the specificities of
artistic production in the various regions of Central
Europe. Beside the Slovenian authors featured in the
magazine, this volume also includes guest writers
Andreas Trossek, editor of the Estonian magazine
Kunst EE from Tallinn and Sotirios Bahtsetzis, contributor to the Pavilion journal from Bucharest.
Mojca Zlokarnik

Contents

MIHA COLNER:
SOTIRIOS BAHTSETZIS:
Mojca Zlokarnik:
Adrijan Praznik:
MIHA COLNER:
Silvester Plotajs Sicoe:
Miklav Komelj:
Andreas Trossek:
Oto Rimele:

The Economics of Contemporary Art | 6

Eikonomia: Notes on Economy and the Labor of Art | 9
Alenka Sottler, The Consistent Researcher of the Relationship
between Word and Image | 15
Kunst hauen! | 24
An Interview with Ren Block | 28
Diary | 39
Photographs as Emanations | 42
When a Melancholic Becomes an Export Article (Extended Cut) | 46
The Image and its Shadow | 50

ISSN 0352-7263
Publisher: Likovne besede
Editor-in-Chief: Mojca Zlokarnik
Editorial Board: Miha Colner, Petja Grafenauer, Mojca Zlokarnik
Graphic Design: Ciril Horjak
Slovenian to English Translation: Arven akti Kralj Szomi
English Proofreading: Arven akti Kralj Szomi
Layout: B&V Co.
Address of the Editorial Office: LIKOVNE BESEDE / ARTWORDS, ZDSLU, Komenskega 8, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Tel.: +386(0)1 433 04 64, Fax.: +386(0)1 434 94 62; e-mail: likovne.besede@zveza-dslu.si, http://www.facebook.com/likovne.besedeartwords
http://likovnebesede.org/
To subscribe or order back issues of Likovne besede please contact us via email.

Topical

Miha Colner

The Economics
of Contemporary Art
On the book by Bojana Kunst, Umetnik na
delu: bliina umetnosti in kapitalizma [The
Artist at Work: The Proximity of Art and
Capitalism], Maska, 2013

engaged contemporary arts, in the field of which, the mentioned occurrences have still not been brought to full attention. To follow, she also addresses the role of the contemporary museum, which has been marked by Charles Esche1
as an active space of experimentation and discovery, and
exposes its inner clockwork. She places the institution of
the museum side by side to the way that democratic authority structures and corporations function and communicate
today, within which a constant absorption and distortion
of any kind of criticism goes on: this is usually accepted
with open arms as the ultimate expression of transparent
operation, encouraged and even financed by these same
structures, and consequently often completely disarmed.
There are therefore plenty of paradoxes in the art world.
Recently, a relatively wealthy private foundation in London, supported by public and private funds, which presents
engaged art practices in the spirit of the time, was looking
for volunteers to work in its gallery space, which consisted
of looking after the exhibitions, providing service in the
gallery caf and performing hands-on organizational tasks.
Even though this is not an isolated case by any means, it
was precisely this that spurred on public protests, which
the management of the institution took into consideration.
However, it did not implement any changes in the working conditions, as there was clearly a high enough demand.
In this respect the question that Bojana Kunst poses is very
apt: why do people want to work in an art environment so
much that they are willing to work for nothing at all? And
how can the workers especially in London afford this
anyway?
One of the more likely and frequent answers would be
that the reason lies in the general belief that art is just that
social and economic division, which may, in exceptional
circumstances, produce high added value. Bearing in mind
market speculations in economic terms, artworks may
reach a value that far exceeds their production value. On the
other hand, it is precisely art that serves as the adhesive to
ideology during times of significant social upheaval. Artists
are therefore mostly driven by the aspiration of achieving

At a time when the social and economic system, which

was established in the second half of the 20th century in
the Western world, is collapsing, many questions are being
raised about a new order that would revalue todays pretty
much global models of individualism, entrepreneurship,
competitiveness and materialism. The values of the current
times largely follow the logic of neoliberalism in all spheres
of society, including those endeavouring to reflect on and
raise awareness of this state of mind. In her book, The Artist
at Work, Bojana Kunst, publicist and theoretician of contemporary art practices, attempts to break down as clearly
as possible the phenomena of internalizing the principles
of the neoliberal economy and the organization of work in
the world of art, and to partly link it to the general state of
mind in society. In her extensive analysis, she relates to the
changes in working methods and relations that are rapidly
taking place in societies that are (still) relatively prosperous.
In this sense it is precisely art and autogenous activism that
are the fields, which even though on the social margins
still allow for a space of open public discourse and criticism. On the other hand, art and its protagonists are often
inconsistent in their activities, since they are implicated in
identical modes of production and social relations on several levels, which they so often criticize in their substance.
In order to express disagreement with the prevailing economic, political and cultural realities of their immediate
surroundings, artists and art institutions are often forced
to use similar modes of exploitation as they are subject to
themselves.
One of the most pressing problems in the functioning
of the art system today is precisely unpaid work, through
which particularly museums, galleries or individuals engage
mainly young cultural workers and promote voluntary
work of artists, who fill up the programmes of institutions
at their own expense in hope of breaking into the artistic
elite. As the author notes already in the first chapter, it is
precisely this inconsistency that is the main affliction of the

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

1 Charles ESCHE, Whats the Point of Art Centres Anyway. Possibility, Art and
Democratic Deviance, 2004 http://www.republicart.net/disc/institution/esche01_
en.htm

Miha Colner

of the 1960s and 1970s. A reduction of material means of

expression and the proverbial breakdown of the boundaries between life and art is typical for these, as the artist no
longer confines himself to the framework of a single discipline or manner of presentation in his activities, but passes
fluidly between various contexts. The practices of contemporary dance, relational art, marginal performance or art
activism usually sway towards the process-based as opposed
to a completed whole, advocating the dynamic rather than
the static. The focus is therefore on the practices that take
the artist away from being a producer of representations of
reality to being an active participant, a producer of sociality.
The contents of the book do offer a historical analysis of
such practices in terms of artists connectivity (and subversion) with dominant models of economic activity, although
the final thesis only reaches completion in the current time,
as the neoliberal model has come to life in full light after
its longstanding development process. Todays cultural
workers or self-employed, the former freelance artists the
author exposes an obvious ideological shift in the neoliberal
discourse between the definitions of the two are thus the
ultimate workers of the late capitalist ideology. They are
flexible, adaptable and immensely ambitious. Promoting
various types of competitiveness among the deprivileged
social groups and perpetually rousing the aspirations for a
breakthrough into a higher social class are the basic keys to
establishing the vicious circle.
The contemporary artist is labelled as a producer of
sociality, who at a time when individualism is rising
creates various forms of social interaction, like a social
agent, constantly questioning the role of art in society and
his own position within it, at the same time also addressing
the integration of work as an activity (labour) into the artwork (work). Extensive theoretical concepts are backed up
again and again by the author through the use of examples
from practice, which also serve as orientation in the multifaceted interpretations of the state of things. An example of
a loss of critical stance in artistic practice, its contradictory
positions in the production of subjectivity and, ultimately,
its exploitation, is excellently recapped by the case of the
famous correspondence of a dispute between two icons
of the contemporary performing arts, Yvonne Rainer and
Marina Abramovi. Rainer accused Marina Abramovi of
exploiting her position of power, a lack of ethics and contradictoriness. Namely, Abramovi was invited to prepare
a scenography and dramaturgy for a gala dinner for the
donors at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. She invited young performers to participate for the
meagre payment of ($ 150). Following a carefully crafted
scenario, they performed a reconstruction of her performative actions, which in their time dealt with precisely the
issue of disciplining the body in the context of social reality

Bojana Kunst, Bliina umetnosti in kapitalizma, Maska, book cover,

courtesy of: Maska 2012

success a visible social position and material security. This

is particularly evident in the competitive environments of
the major centres of power, where funds for activities of
non-profit initiatives and individuals are much more difficult to access. In the same vein, artists (and cultural workers) also want to leave some sort of trace behind, which is
why it is precisely the inscription into the collective story
that propels them to accept jobs in unenviable working
conditions, where the boundary between work and private
life (free time) becomes completely obscure.
Considering the value and organization of work within
the artistic practices, as well as addressing work through
artwork, is actually the main subject of the book, in which
the author focuses on very specific fields of creative activity.
Thus, she embraces those art practices that can be broadly
labelled as performing or live arts. With that, she aims at
performance art, contemporary dance and live events that
demonstrate a clear political tendency in their exploration
of new ways of working and performing. She also deals with
the more static forms of the visual arts, those arising from
the conceptual foundation of the historical avant-gardes of
the first half of the 20th century and the neo-avant-gardes

Topical

and questioned the impact of ideology on the body of the

individual. The naked and silent performers at the dinner
were relegated to being an ornament to a wasteful dinner
(the bodies of the performers, who were not allowed to
communicate with the surroundings, nor react to any possible physical harassment, actually just acted as a decorative
element of the space and the laden tables). So late in her
career, which was built on completely different principles
of production and ideology, Marina Abramovi operates
in a fundamentally corporate manner, since she wishes to
monetize already produced artworks without producing
any new ones.
At this point one of the key issues is raised about the art
of today and its declarative active participation in changing the dominant production models and social mentality.
Ultimately, it is precisely the capitalist logic that advocates
eliminating time-consuming production at the expense of
faster short-term returns that create added value without
any great investment. The work of contemporary artists
today has therefore managed to thoroughly capitalize on
the economic and social potential of its original subversive stance based on immateriality and the reduction of
resources. As in the case of Marina Abramovi, the young
generations of artists looking for success in the art world
nowadays are facing a much tougher task than their counterparts four or five decades ago.
In this context, it is possible to read about the immense
self-referentiality of todays contemporary artists, who
continue to expose their own unenviable production conditions. But the problems of cultural workers and artists that
are extensively analyzed by Bojana Kunst, are at a given
moment the problem of the entire population, particularly
its younger part, that in comparison with their parents
generation simply does not have comparable conditions
to live and work. This is why reducing the contents of artworks to a self-referring discourse on the position of the
artist in society and forever mulling over his production
and working conditions is a rather futile act that only goes
to show the short-term particularity of interests of a certain
interest group. This type of behaviour suggests the definitive corporate thinking, which embodies the attributes of
the capitalist structure such as selfishness, individualism
and competitiveness that stand against the discourses of
solidarity central to the art world. By refusing to address the
broader social reality that goes beyond the discourse about
artistic functioning, artists reduce the general relevance of
their work.
In such a way Bojana Kunst raises many issues which
can quickly be recognized by many cultural workers. Even
though she retains the neutral position of an observer
throughout the book, she defends the disciplines and

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

authors that she discusses at the end. By defending the

relevance of existing art practices, she strongly opposes
the catchwords about the economic value of art and art as
a way of life (and not just work), while at the same time
setting up a three-point argument on insubordination,
which marks the aforementioned practices. The author
notes that it is necessary to show that art is not linked
to the economy of producing value, but is much closer to
squandering in the dark, that one should resist defending
usefulness and justifying art through human work, which is
why numerous artworks of the second half of the 20th century are interested in ways of working that are incestuously
related to laziness and non-work mistake, minimum
effort, coincidence, duration, passivity, and that one needs
to defend the sustainability of (artistic) work in contrary
to completion, since art should last and show the potentiality of the human strengths, which have not yet been put
into practice.
Despite this, a decisive critique of the (same) methods,
which become entangled in their own archetypes and
ambivalence, can also be read between the lines of individual chapters. A particularly fascinating fact here is that
the author deals with the selected phenomena in (almost)
real time, without any great distance of time. The processes
of functioning and creating, which she addresses as the core
of the convergence of art and capitalism, are admittedly not
new, but in the current social and economic situation they
are thoroughly radicalized, which is why the book points at
yet another important fact, namely, that also the considered
art production, which is based on the continuity of the 20th
century, and the structure within which it operates, will
sooner or later undergo radical changes. The discursive
field of institutional and academic art, particularly when it
wishes to remain radical, is nowadays somewhat outdated,
considering the analysis in the book, and also extremely
unsuccessful, as it is mainly based on the (unconstructive)
criticism of the current time. The transition into the 21st
century indicates many, not necessarily positive, breaks
with the social (and artistic) structure and values of the
20th century, which will need to be built anew. And on the
entrenchments of these ideas, we will undoubtedly also see
artists. n

Miha Colner (1978) graduated in Art History and is an independent curator and art critic. He is a curator at the Photon Gallery and a member of the
DIVA project group at SCCA Ljubljana, which is developing an archive
of Slovenian video art. He writes critiques for the music and culture editorial office at Radio tudent, where he is currently editor of a show on
contemporary art called Art-Area. His critical appraisals are also regularly
featured in Dnevnik newspaper, Fotografija, Likovne besede and Folio magazines, as well as other expert publications. He lives and works in Ljubljana.

Sotirios Bahtsetzis

Eikonomia: Notes on Economy

and the Labor of Art
Much has been told about the dangerous impact of a
superficial, lifestyle-based and money-oriented culture,
which has been often identified as the major reason why
people become passive, docile and easy to manipulate, no
matter how disadvantageous their economic conditions
might be. Following the illustrative critique of two eminent
proponents of this criticism, Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer, the culture of our times is endangered by the
uncontrollable spreading of cultural industry into higher
artistic production, which manipulates the masses into
passivity and cultivates false needs1. Art that produces
standardized cultural goods reflects a peculiar type of aestheticization of the everydayworld: a dream-like immersion into massproduced commodities of culture industry.
This immersion is equivalent to the adoption of behavioral
stereotypes and judgment of taste linked to a continuously
advertised petit-bourgeois phantasmagoria, but also reflects
the advanced commodification of social life.
Furthermore, this conviction has had an enormous
impact on the current understanding of art as a derivate
of a monopolized market, which functions on the same
terms as the general financial market, a view that experts in
art business share. What is at stake in the contemporary
art field, according to so many of its critics, is that the art
market as formed in the 19th century has been replaced by
art business since the mid-1980s, reflecting not only that
contemporary art has become a serious factor of wealth, but
also making visible the devastating influence of neo-liberal
financial doctrines formed by pirate capitalists, corporate
lobbyists, and uncontrollable fiscal policies upon an art
system that now runs on the basis of speculation and selfpromotion.2

But is arts relation to money so transparent, so that it

can be seen solely as a heroic struggle against its subjection
to commodification and an opposing attempt to assert its
aesthetic autonomy? The implied dialectic of autonomy of
art, a central concept in Adornos critique, refers to a complex condition that can only be understood through a more
dialectical critique. As Peter Osborne observes, the integration of autonomous art into the culture industry is a
new systemic functionalization of autonomy itselfa new
affirmative culturethat promotes arts uselessness for
its own sake.3 Ultimately, the self-legislated laws of form
in pure artautonomous meaning production by the
workis an illusion. Works of art are thus autonomous
to the extent to which they produce the illusion of their
autonomy. Art is selfconsciousillusion.4
Let us concentrate on this point, as it allows for a further meditation on the connection between the art system,
postcapitalist economic power and official, mainstream
politics. Considering how politics work, we witness first
that the systemic functionalization of autonomy observed
by Osborne, can be also seen as the grounding force of
the post-democratic forms of hyper-capitalism. In other
words, it appears that contemporary arts usefulness offers
to contemporary politics a model of moral justification, as
this art, in itself, becomes synonymous with the absolute
autonomization and aesthetization of both commercial
pragmatism and political functionality. Art does not expose
its own uselessness for its own sake, but, most significantly,
it reflects the uselessness of neo-liberal administration and,
by extension, a post-capitalist market.
Post-capitalist economy and neo-liberal politics mime
arts claim for autonomy as one of the grounding ethical

1 M. HORKHEIMER and T.W. ADORNO: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as

Mass Deception, London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1976, p. 121.
2 Interestingly, the moral justification of this neo-liberal cult in economy coincides with the phenomenon of the artist as a superstar, which actually commences
with the so-called third phase of contemporary artart since the mid 1980sand
should be seen as symptomatic of an equivalent transformation in society. As Olav
Velthuis remarks in his insightful sociological analysis of the art market, the year
1980 marks the first time that the highest price was ever paid for a work of art by a
living artist, $1 million for the painting Three Flags by Jasper Johns. What is more
significant, however, is not just the winner-take-all economic model that began to
inform the art market, but also the so-called superstar circuit that emerged in the
New York art world of the 1980s. According to Velthuis, Julian Schnabel is the representative case of an artist whose rapid rise of the price level of his work (and equally

fast decline), have characterized the markets mentality and its aggressive superstar pricing strategy. (In a period of less than seven years, Schnabel prices soared
from $3,000 to $300,000, improving with this increase of prices the symbolic and
financial position of the artist, his dealers and his collectors.) Warranted or not, this
mixture of show business and stock-market mentality linked to prospective financial
success has, since then, infiltrated the art world and resulted in a Darwinian network
of success or burn-out. Olav VELTHUIS: Talking Prices. Symbolic Meaning of Prices
on the Market for Contemporary Art, Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2005, p. 145.
3 Peter OSBORNE, Imaginary Radicalisms: Notes on the Libertarianism of Contemporary Art, in: Verksted No. 8 (2006), p. 15.
4 OSBORNE, p. 18.

Essay

values of Western civilization. In other words, the alibi of

autonomy, which has been the main assertion and declaration of modernism during its constitution in the historical
avant-garde, works today for the benefit of politics and
market of commodities, which acts in disguise as (modern)
art. For example, Andy Warhols conflation of art and business attacks the culture industry by adopting its rules. On
the other hand, this same culture industry attacks Warhols
subjective liberalism by adopting his artfulness. From this
standpoint, art must reflectively incorporate neo-liberal
politics and post-capitalist market into its procedures, not
in order to remain contemporary (neo-modern, postmodern or alter-modern) but in order to keep on offering the
ontological proof for the contemporaneity, by necessity,
of both market and politics. By contrast, of course, they
guarantee the contemporaneity and validity of such an art
within a given system. This is a win-win situation. Every
art produced today that doesnt comply with this system
of mutual recognition is automatically ostracized by disappearing from global media and, in this respect, from the
public consciousness.
But what exactly does this systemic functionalization
of autonomy being at work in both art and politics in economical terms mean? What is the actual reason for such an
interdependence of art labor, fiscal games and artful politics
that seems to monopolize the art discourse today? Isnt the
debate of autonomy versus heteronomy a rather masked
way to talk about the fetishism of commodity one of the
major concepts of Marxian analysisand by extension, to
expose the onto-theological conditions of such a functionalization of autonomy bestdescribed with the term capital?
In Marxs concept of commodity fetishism, capitalistexchange value is constituted at the level of social labor
as a measure of abstract labor. It is not materiality of any
object, which assumes its fetishistic nature, but the commodification of labor that results in the value of objective
commodities.5 Although fetishism is immanent to the commodity form, it conceals not simply the exchange value of
commodity, but, most significantly, the exchange-value of
abstract labor that stands for the product of labor.6 Based
on that Marxian observation and linking it to the concept
of the functionalization of autonomy described above,
we can assume that the fetishistic character of commodities should be seen as a form of aesthetization of pragmatic
human activity and autonomization, a disjoining of human
action from any moral or social realm. In this regard,
individuality and morality are evaluated in terms of their
materialistic creditability. Modernity within the condition

of alienation demands this level of sophisticated abstraction

between labor and value. Isnt this the real reason why we
keep buying our Nikes although we are fully cognizant of
the unbearable exploitation of humans in their production?
Nike as a golden calf is the emblem of commodity fetishism that sustains, in a sensuous way, our alienated understanding of our inter-subjective relation to others: a totally
crude form of paganism, which also illustrates the theological nature of Marxs early socio-economical thinking.
Does art possess a particular status quo within this
theoretical edifice? Drawing on Marxs seminal concepts
of labor, alienation and objectified species-being (Gattungswesen) of being human as described in the Manuscripts of 1844, we can argue that an artwork represents a
specific type of product of human labor.7 It is not outside
the human condition and social- being (das gesellschaftliche Wesen), which means that it partakes in humankinds
universal sense of alienation, which is an inevitable intermediate stage within the so called socio-historical process.
However, the product of human labor as a sovereign and
self-contained force (unabhngige Macht), which is independent from its producer, potentially entails the means to
overcome the alienated stage of current social-being.
Radicalizing this Marxian analysis, we can then offer a
more refined description of autonomous artwork. Artworks are, in any case, a product like any other and thus
a part of the capitalist exchange system. However, they are
defined by a special type of resistance; not a resistance to
being subjected to their capitalist commodification, but by
another type of immunity. They tend to refuse commoditys own raw fetishization, which, when unconcealedthat
can happen at any timesimply exposes its uselessness,
drawing attention directly to the masked social constitution
of capitalist exchange. It might be easy to see behind any
simple commodity as fetish and expose the exchange-value
structure that sustains it. It becomes, however, very difficult
to look behind an artwork as it constantly negates its capitalist exchange value while preserving the concealment of
abstract labor assigned to it.
We can draw on the consequences here and argue that
art is somehow different from any other type of commodity. Above all, the debate between autonomy and heteronomy of art, or fiscalization of art and aestheticization of
the everyday world, does not take place between the value
of pure or autonomous art and its exchange-value as a
commodity, but is a combat between two forms of fetishist character. In this regard, the artwork (either as pure, or
commercial, or even anti-artwork) is a fetish commodity of
a second grade: an intensified fetish. The functionalization

5 Stewart MARTIN, Critique of Relational Aesthetics, in: in: Verksted No. 8

(2006), p. 113.
6 MARTIN, p. 106.

7 Karl MARX, konomisch-philosophische Manuskripte, Kommentar von

Michael Quante, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009, p. 195.

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

10

Sotirios Bahtsetzis

of autonomy might be seen as this additional fetish character of art, which constitutes a reversed notion of fetish
as described by Marx. This is a category immanent only to
the artwork. It conceals not only the exchange-value of the
product, but, most significantly, the generic fetish character of commodity or capital in general, and, therefore, the
commodification of labor, which constitutes the value of
objective commodities.
The work of art comes to be an acheiropoietonnot
handmadeand thus theologized. The term has been used
in Byzantine theology to describe icons, which are alleged
to have come into existence miraculously, not created by a
human painter. According to Alain Besanons reading of
Hegels Aesthetics, the notion of modern art is closed to
such a concept of an icon.8 One might assume that, even
after the Hegelian proclamation of the end of art, the concept of art as an acheiropoieton prevails, transcending arts
demise despite its continuous secularization and humanization. If arts function were to make the divine visible (as
in ancient Greece), its function in the modern era is to
make the visible divine. In other words, over and above the
common phantasmagoria of commodity (Adornos position), we have also the asceticism of the work of art. In
this regard, an acheiropoieton appears to be outside human
nature and its social order, possibly following another disposition or systemin other words, creating the illusion of
autonomy from the (human) labor from which it arises and
to which it belongs. An artwork has the tendency to reside
outside the normal mechanisms of the market, to exist as
something that cannot be sold, as something that resists
exchange, thus creating the illusion of a non-alienated
social-being, although it is placed at the very heart of neoliberal speculation.
Let me give you a banal example from the everyday
world of art business in order to provide evidence for such
a paradoxical thesis. We can honestly say that the reason
for the hostility with which galleries face the mercantile
practices of auction houses can be traced back to this double nature of the artwork. By simply offering an artwork
to open sale, an auction house often degrades the artwork
to a mere commodity of exchange-value. In this case, the
artwork appears to be an interchangeable equity, like realestate and stock-market bonds, stripped of any mystifications and negating its character as intensified fetish as an
acheiropoieton. Usually we experience only the negative
results of this double bind between the economy of commodity and the economy of the intensified fetish. The
practice of an auction house can potentially pose a threat

to the controlled pricing and validation policy of a gallery

or transform an artists career into a speculative bubble,
with the subsequent sudden drop in price due to uncontrolle manipulations. Suddenly, the artwork loses its value;
it becomes a nothing, a useless playor, looking at it from
another perspectivea non-alienated product of human
labor! On the other hand, galleries, through their preferences for particular buyers (collectors and museums), often
try to protect the symbolic and universal value of the artwork as something that cant be sold. Having enough cash
doesnt make someone automatically eligible to buy art.
And this false exclusivity is not simply a matter of the conspiracy of art, or the privilege of insider-trading attached
to art by its practitioners, as Jean Baudrillard remarks, but
an inherent quality of the artwork. In other words, the
conspiracy of art lies precisely within this paradox: the
artworks unreachable nature, in fact, guarantees the commoditys disposability.9
It can be argued that the artworks double nature has
enormous consequences for a capitalist market system.
Actually, its character, as an intensified fetish safeguards
any commoditys struggle to be presented as an acheiropoieton, which thus can be disguised and sold as a pure
artwork. The new systemic functionalization of autonomy
itselfa new affirmative cultureis a coy description of
this fact. Such a belief is gloriously performed in the contemporary culture industry, which produces commodities
that must be sold, however frivolous, unnecessary or even
impossible (like Japanese gadgets) they might be. They
only manage to do so if they can be masked with the aura
of freedom that stands in for the allegedly autonomous artwork. The culture of logos, luxury goods and cult objects
benefits from this almost theological dimension of the work
of art. This fact should be seen also as the true reason why
contemporary art is so valuable to the financial market and
political business today, and not necessarily the other way
around.
Can we go even further and argue that contemporary
arts innate tendency to replace the general fetishism of
commodity with the particular economy of the artwork
is the model for any and every semblance of societal pragmatism today? Inlight of such a comment, and if we ignore
the fact that the art system is actually subjected to the dominant social relations of capitalist exchange as argued above,
every wealthy collector appears to be a radical trickster,
idealizing himself as a romantic hero and spiritual Parsifal,
as some collectors indeed claim to be. Indeed, they might
represent a kind of hero if we consider the fact that one can

8 The sensible rises toward the divine and enters art only at the state of ideality, of the abstract sensible. Art thus lies nearer to the spirit and its thinking than
purely external spiritless nature does. The matter it exerts itself on is a spiritualized
sensible appearance or a sensible appearance of the spiritual. Alain BESANON: The
Forbidden Image. An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 205.

9 Obviously, the conflict between galleries and action houses as presented here
is a theoretical example. The reality is often simpler: Because auction houses not only
often present the appearance of a free market, but also a powerful system of interdependencies between a gallery, an auction house and a private or corporate collection,
they controland monopolize prices and values.

11

Essay

easily earn more investing in the stock market and currencies, rather than buying art. Investing in art is simply not
lucrative enough. If we take this statement seriously, the
choice between the two forms of investment is actually a
combat between two forms of commodity fetishism: the
labor versus the intensified fetish. Both types of investment
are potentially unstable and they demand the readiness of
the investor to take risks. But only the second can safeguard
capitals ontological foundation.
We can expand the discussion and argue that a work
of art in times of economic crisis, such as the current one,
actually represents the ideological means for capitals own
survival. Economic crisis is linked to fluctuation of what the
fictitious capital to which, mainly, credit and speculation
capital belong.10 According to Norbert Trenkles analysis of
the current economic crisis, the growth of fictitious capital
not only provides an alternative choice for investors, but
also constitutes, when viewed on the macroeconomic level,
a deferral of the outbreak of crisis, which is inherent to
capitalist system. (Such a crisis is a crisis of over-accumulation, or, to put it in the vocabulary of contemporary macroeconomics, a crisis of over-investment. In this case, a proportion of capital becomes excessive measured according
to its own abstract rationality as an end in itselfand is,
therefore, threatened by devalorization.) As the outbreak of
a series of capitalist crises from the 1970s until today have
shown credit and speculation capital to be extremely unreliable, they threaten always to translate a particular crisis of
devalorization into a genuine global-market crisis. Credit
and speculation capital grow too fast because of electronic
transactions automation offered by digital technology
and, as a result, create virtually instantaneous financial
bubbles, always ready to burst.
Art as intensified fetish always masks its own existence
as fictitious capital, eliminating in this way any moral consideration regarding its speculative nature. We can then
assume that arts fictitious capital represents the best possibility for a continuous deferral of the outbreak of an unavoidable capitalist crisis, and, for that reason, view art on
the macro-economic level as the best option of safeguarding
the system deflecting a crisis of overinvestment. Compared
to credit and speculation capital of a digitally multiplied
finance, art represents in this regard a slow type of fictitious
capital. It requires its own investment time. This would
mean that art is the perfect defense mechanism, an optimal
deferral of the possible outbreak of systemic crisis inherent
to a capitalist system. Art can combat the stagnation of the

valorization of capital in the real economy. If so, collectors

are indeed the heroes of macroeconomic planning.
This is true. However, in search of a better understanding of the current status quo, it is important to choose an
alternative perspective: In the current state of hyper-capitalism, human labor guarantees both the over productivity
and the accumulation, not of goods, but of commodities
in the form of information. As Franco Berardi Bifo notes:
for the postoperaist thought (Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi) social labor is the endless
recombination of myriad fragments producing, elaborating, distributing, and decoding signs and informational
units of all kinds. Every semiotic segment produced by the
information worker must meet and match innumerable
other semiotic segments in order to form the combinatory
frame of the info-commodity, semiocapital.11 If commodity fetishism conceals the exchange-value of abstract labor
(according to Marx), then labor stands today for the attentive and affective time we produce and consume. Labor
today is both a semiotic generator and a creator of organic
time (of attention, memory and imagination) to be produced and consumed. Let me give you a simple example:
Television advertisers purchase advertising time slots. The
question is, however, from whom do they buy this time.
Arent the millions of spectators who offer their attention,
cognitive engagement and time while watching commercials the actual creditors of media and creative industries?
This is modernitys credo. However, one must add that
information theory does not consider the importance of the
message, or its meaning, as these are matters of the quality of data, rather than its quantity and readability. In this
regard, the message quality distributed through the television is of no importance. Semiocapital pays no attention to
the importance of distributed messages. Such a disjuncture
between informational quantity and quality of the communication finds its equivalence in the economical system:
Since the abandonment of the gold parity rule, the value
of monetary currency is determined through its informational value, its exchangeability in stock markets.)
In addition to that, todays extreme acceleration of production and distribution of semiocapital has reached its
capacity, so that deep, intense elaboration becomes impossible, when the stimulus is too fast.12 What if the presentday crisis of capitalism, which obviously has reached the
critical moment of an overwhelming supply of attentiondemanding goods, is a crisis of goods, which cannot be
consumed? What if current crisis is not a financial crisis,

10 As Norbert Trenkle explains, credit and speculation capital is fictitious because it only apparently serves as capital. For it yields high interest rates and speculative
gains it for its owner in the relative absence of real valorisation takes place, which
always presupposes that abstract labor is spent on the production of commodities
and services and that a proportion of it is siphoned off as surplus value. Norbert
TRENKLE, Tremors on the Global Market, in: http://www.krisis.org/2009/tremorson- the-global-market#more-3383

11 Franco BERARDI BIFO: Cognitarian Subjectivation, in: Julieta ARANDA,

Brian KUAN WOOD, Anton VIDOLKE, (eds.), Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, e-flux journal, Berlin: Sternberg, 2011, p. 135.
12 Ibid., 138.

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

12

Sotirios Bahtsetzis

but a crisis of governance and distribution of the produced

semio-time? What is the alternative to this condition,
which art can offer?
Art represents a very particular type of semiocapital.
In contrast to the accelerated and digitally self-multiplied
capital of the globalized finance system, the semiotime produced and consumed within the system of art is slow; and
it is personal. You need some ninety minutes to watch a
film, but only seconds to consume a TV commercial. With
modifications, the same applies to the reading of a painting, or a book of poetry. Furthermore, art deals primarily
with the importance of distributed messages, not with its
informational quantity. In this regard, quality equals the
intellectual labor and cognitive activity invested by the production of art workers and the reception of connoisseurs of
art. It is the deceleration of intellectual labor and cognitive
activity offered by art that makes the difference. Deceleration means to focus on the creation of deeper, slower and
intensified time, to concentrate on the production and
reception of meaningideally the maximum quantity of
infinite and, for that reason, inconsumable meaning! (This
might be another way to describe what Adorno has called
arts muteness, as for Adorno art is critical insofar as it is
mute, insofar as what it communicates is its muteness.)
What if present-day crisis of semiocapitalism is at the
same time a crisis of current political order? In order to
elucidate this last thesis, I would like to link the notion
of the work of art with the notion of oikonomia as analyzed by Giorgio Agamben. The theological doctrine of
oikonomiaoriginally meaning stewardship, or wise and
responsible management or administration of domestic
life was first developed by early Christian fathers in order
to interpret the divine intervention of a personal God into
the world. This concept was introduced in order to reconcile monotheism as an emerging state religion with the
doctrine of the divine nature of the Son (within the Trinity) and thus explain and justify the intervention of Gods
house, the Church, into the earthly world. The extremely
sophisticated Byzantine discourse of oikonomia is directly
linked to an elaborate conceptualization of the icon (mainly
that of Jesus and, by extension, of all imagery) as being part
both of the heavenly and the earthly realm.13 Understanding oikonomia (or dispositio in Latin) as a Foucauldian
project, Agamben interprets it as a general theological
genealogy of modern economy and governmentality. Modern political and economic doctrines, such as the invisible
hand of liberalism over a selfregulated market and society, go back to these early-Christian theological concepts,
which refer to Gods activity in the world. Such a genealogy of economy meaning of a government of men and

thingsis pertinent to a critical re-orientation of thinking

concerning key socioeconomic concepts such as the capitalist ethics of work (according to Max Weber) or fetishism
of commodities, alienation and human labor (as per Marx).
Not only various political concepts, but also the triumph
of financial thinking over every other aspect of life in our
times, testify to this close connection of modernity to the
secularized version of the theological concept of economy
and governance. The novelty of Agambens claimechoing both Walter Benjamins ideas of capitalism as religion
and Carl Schmitts famous thesis about the modern theory
of state as a secularized theological concept is that modern power is inherent in not only to political and financial
administration, but also to Glory, (doxa) meaning the ceremonial, liturgical acclamatory apparatus that has always
accompanied it: The society of the spectacleif we can
call contemporary democracies by this nameis, from this
point of view, a society in which power in its glorious
aspect becomes indiscernible from oikonomia and government. To have completely integrated Glory with oikonomia
in the acclamative form of consensus is, more specifically,
the specific task carried out by contemporary democracies
and their government by consent, whose original paradigm
is not written in Thucydides Greek, but in the dry Latin of
medieval and baroque treaties on the divine government of
the world.14
It is exactly the issue of what is perceived as the visual
manifestation of power sustained by the semio-time offered
by consumers- creditors of semiocapitalism, which allows
mediation regarding arts current state and future role. In
view of capitalisms tendency to commercialize everything
as part of global financial speculation, could artunderstood as affective and sensuous timeoffer an alternative?
If economy alongside biopolitics is the secularized pendant to oikonomia and technological spectacle produced
by modern industries of the imaginary is the equivalent to
Glory, then the question that arises is: If the work of art as a
dispositif of acheiropoieton can be turned back against the
doctrines, what caused human labor to appear as a commodity at the very beginning, and current society to look
like a network simply of fiscalized info-producers?
It is pertinent to us that art permanently assumes its
position as acheiropoieton a slow and mute iconoffering the impression that it is situated outside the world of
labor (semio-time) as part of a particular economy. In this
regard, the economy of the art work might be the hidden equivalent of both the governmental machinery and
the economic control power within our alienated society.
Because of this, art strives to infiltrate current society with
the ascetic notion of the acheiropoieton and to hijack the
14 Giorgio AGAMBEN: The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy
of Economy and Government, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, p. xii; Doxa
in Greek means both Glory and the common belief or popular opinion.

13 See: Marie-Jos MONDZAIN: Image, icne, conomie. Les sources Byzantines de

limaginaire contemporain, Paris: Seuil, 1996.

13

Essay

secret center of power: capitalisms political and financial

mechanisms and the spectacular glory that sustain them.
Eikonomia15, an economy of the work of art, can be the
Trojan horse against the appealing and seductive deluge
of accelerated information produced by creative investment-managers, film-producers, software developers and
corporate advertisers, which sustain commodity fetishism
and direct consensual political decision-making. Such an
alternative economy does not exist outside the given system of hyper-capitalism. It simply works outside the given
informational parameters of this system. It produces an
inconsumable and intensified semiocapital slowing down
affective and cognitive timeor, in the words of Lazzarato,
it creates novel time-crystallizationmachines.16[16] This
is its hidden surplus value in view of a future society in
which labor is not a commodity, but the production and
consumption of content-time.
It is indeed difficult to imagine a world in which the
economy of the artwork will have a stronger influence on
the global distribution of images, stock-market courses and
the bio-politics of labor and will be able to establish a paradigmatic shift in society. But even if such a world remains
utopian for the moment, arts double nature, which intervenes both in cycles of financial speculation and in actual
productive economy of affective time, still offers options
for working within the structures of managerial, economic
and political control. Beyond any romantic ideas of revolution, which might end the evils of capitalism, the marketability of art should not be seen as its handicap, but as
its safeguarding screena trompe-loeil until a universal
economy of the artwork can be established. This might not
cancel out the condition of alienation that is inherent to the
human condition and create a society free of conflictsthe
romantic dream of all social revolutionsbut it might be
able to suspend its force to destroy our inherent socialbeing. The price to be paid is often very high: present-day

impoverishment and precarization of intellectual labor,

which makes artists (and, with them, inventors, philosophers, therapists and educators) appear simply as ornamental accessories of economy. Indeed, present- day immaterial and creative workers belong to the most exploited
part of the labor society. Not so, though, if we evaluate
this labor not with economic, but with eikonomic criteria.
Nevertheless, in a futuristic post-human scenario, in which
semiocapital is not only produced but also consumed by
those who are able to deal with its endless acceleration
meaning by intelligent machinesand in which humanity exists only as a beautiful, viral bubble within a gigantic
technological, informational and fiscal Gestell (the beginning of which might be the so called Internet of Things),
the intensified, nonfiscalized and creative time offered by
art would be our only recourses. Focusing more on labor
as praxis, as a bringing forth and taking into account
human labors product as an acheiropoieton and its specific
oikonomia, might offer us some solutions: worshiping less
the golden calf of semiocapital and creating invisible dispositivs of intensified time! This project will require its own
economists, theorists and workers. Even if, for now, leading a life that is as creatively intense as it is economically
effective shouldnt be seen as tabooone should also urge:
Watch to whom you offer credit! n

Sotirios Bahtsetzis is a writer, curator and educator based in Athens

and Berlin. He holds a PhD on Art History and he teaches history of art at
the European Culture Program of the Hellenic Open University and at the
National School of Dance in Athens. His research interests include image
theory, political theory and contemporary cultural analysis. Recent publications: The Time That Remains (e-flux Journal Vol. 28 & Vol. 30), Image
Wars (Afterimage Vol. 38); recent exhibitions: SelfConscious (2014), Roaming Images (2011), Paint-id (2009), Women Only (2008), Open Plan 2007,
and An Outing (2006), the first major exhibition on Greek art in the 21st
century.

15 I freely use the term eikonomia in reference to theoretical debates during

Byzantine iconoclasm. See Emanuel ALLOA, Bildkonomie. Von den theologischen
Wurzeln eines streitbaren Begriffs, Image, Ausgabe 2, 6 (2005) p. 13-24.
16 Maurizio LAZZARATO: Video-philosophie. Zeitwahrnehmung im Postfordismus, Berlin: B-Books, 2002.

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

14

Mojca Zlokarnik

Alenka Sottler, The Consistent

Researcher of the Relationship
between Word and Image
ALENKA Sottler: I began as a painter, but my work at
the start was still quite unformed, so I could not change
my paintings into a commercial object that could provide
me with a livelihood. Illustration came up as an option,
but at first I was not aware that I could make it into more
than just material security. My second passion was poetry
and literature, and I had a strong interest in social issues
and society. I do not know if anybody knows this, but
after my studies at the Academy, I studied on the Socio-

Alenka Sottler (1958, Ljubljana) received her first lessons in drawing and sculpting in the studio of her father,
a sculptor. After completing her degree in Painting at the
Academy of Fine Arts and following her postgraduate specialist study, she initially only painted but subsequently
became increasingly involved with illustration, which took
complete hold over her. She has established herself as an
outstanding artist, particularly as a master of reworking
the black-and-white spectre. Her illustrations are produced
using a variety of inventive techniques as well as through a
very select mode of working, by which she emphasizes the
subject matter of the text in consideration. In this respect,
she is extremely innovative, which is why her illustrations
outgrow the role of complementary images, becoming a
multi-layered work of art. They are intended for different
audiences, including adults. In 2012 she presented them
in two separate exhibitions: Good Morning in Kibla Gallery in Maribor, and Good Day at the Alkatraz Gallery in
Ljubljana.
She has received numerous national and international
accolades for her illustrations, an award for excellence
in Japan (2001), several awards at the Bologna Book Fair
(2005, 2008), a Golden Apple at the Biennial of Illustration
Bratislava, a White Crow in Munich Among the latest
worthy of a mention are the merit award at the 33 The
Magazine of Contemporary Illustration Professional Show
No. 9 and a nomination for the Hans Christian Andersen
Award in Denmark (2012). She has also received several
awards at the Slovenian Biennial of Illustration and has
been the recipient of the Preeren Fund Award for 2014.
MOJCA ZLOKARNIK: You have attained an outstanding
position as an illustrator. You have established illustration for
adults as something special that does not really exist in Slovenia, with the exception of popular science illustration. The
new aspect that you have introduced recently is also to first
do the illustration and then look for a publisher, or someone
to add to the text. In such a way you have given illustration a
new role, for which I sincerely congratulate you. How did you
build your way up to this point?

Alenka Sottler, 2012, Kibla, Maribor, photo: Botjan Lah

15

Interview

vice versa. Sometimes I added to the contents myself, supported the theme that
the author had started, made it stronger,
even though it was not written down.
Logically, this led on to more and more
complex projects. I mostly worked on
them as a sideline.
What do you mean as a sideline?
I took on uncommissioned projects as
a sideline to making drawings for magazines and books. Or I applied to calls for
submissions for which my heart sang. It
perhaps happened that someone arrived
with a modest request in which they did
not see any potential and I made something more out of it. Later, poets also
started to seek me out because they sensed that I understood their poems.
The danger in childrens illustration is
the sickly sweetness, the conviction that
illustration should be in colour and conjure
up an idealised childrens world. Your illustrations are totally different.
I always tried to purify my illustration, to take up a stance on what I considered my most important line. I always
had to decide whether to go with colour
or the graphic nature of the work. I went
for that which more closely reflected my
sense of culture. I stem from the artistic
family of a sculptor, which is why light,
shadow and form are something almost
automatic for me. It would be a shame
to leave that out. Also, the culture of the
Alenka Sottler, Fear, illustration from Visions, the book by Niko Grafenauer, 2006,
Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts was
black and white tempera on paper
always part of my life. This is where I
logy of Culture course for a year as an outside student. I found much inspiration and I thought it would be a shame
never made it official, but I did read lots of books on the to not incorporate this affinity into my work. I simply foltopic during that time. It became apparent that by wor- lowed what I loved most and it happened spontaneously.
king in illustration, I combine two things that I love most:
Theoretically you also exposed the relationship between
word and image. I also recognise it in myself that I am the
strongest in the transition between word and image. This word and image in a very analytical way. Can we say that
grew organically, slowly. In Slovenia, illustration was illustration is symmetrical to the text in its relationship? Does
mostly for children, its function being to support the text, it open up anything new?
The relationship between word and image has very
so that children could grow a fondness for the Slovenian
language. It had a subordinate role, but given how hig- much been in question in the recent years. This issue has
hly we honour our language, illustration also had a lot to also made it into the contemporary gallery. Globalisagain from it. It had good conditions to a point. This was tion raises the issue of communication. The vast array of
the path I embarked upon as well. Later I noticed that I language groups has swung illustration onto a new level.
have a very good understanding of the written word, that I In the moment that we expected illustration to collapse
understand how one code is transformed into another, and along with classical printing like something old-fashioned,

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

16

Alenka Sottler

there was a turnaround. Adapting to globalisation propels research within art

and illustration. Illustration is regarded
as a means and a way of forming a new
language. Similarly to the Egyptian hieroglyphs that were half image and half
word, and could be used to communicate.
In the catalogue text of the Bologna fair,
I noticed that wordless picture books were
the great new thing. With the wish to be
understood by the whole world, these are
books with no words. Today, almost everything is seen globally. A book, which will
not be understood anywhere else, is a matter of luxury or curiosity.
We have two poles, there is the mass production on the one hand, and the book as
something unique on the other. A publication as a fetishised object, the book Visions
(Prividi), which you illustrated, is just like
that. Each copy bears an original signature.
This is an anomaly of the Slovenian
arena, where it is possible to realize such
curiosities that are contrary to all social
and national mixes. This is not within my
control. I could only decide on whether
to draw such a book or not. We have to
be aware that there is very little opportunity for the realization of such a project.
Which is why it is difficult to refuse. Even
though it possesses certain functions that
are not wholly aligned with what I would
like to say.
You are therefore more interested in how
Alenka Sottler, Silence, illustration from Visions, a book by Niko Grafenauer, 2007, black and white tempera,
accessible the book is and how easy the
stamp drawing on printed paper
visual language is to understand?
Not really, I am just observing the
direction in which things are developing. I am interested around their neck. Since time cannot be described in any
in how illustration together with text grows into an orga- other way, banks have started using drawing. They have
nism, into a lyrical medium. It can be used especially in started using drawn lines, diagrams. In order to explain
philosophically reflective subjects to disclose certain rela- what will happen in all this time, they have made a step
tions within society which cannot be done with the word from verbal language into visual language. Of course
alone. An image is understood as soon as it is looked at. they used this to their own advantage. This is the position
Something that has been written down can appear totally when illustration can step in to explain things, which are
unattractive and incomprehensible; but when drawn, it otherwise too abstract and hard to understand. This is an
presents the issue in all its dimensions. I am concerned interesting position to me.
about the subject of time right now. I am afraid of it in
You have brought a lot of elements into your illustrations
a way because we are constantly being hit by new truths.
Every month a new segment crumbles, revealing new facts. that we sort of meet in a concealed way in everyday life. Such
That is such an abstract dimension that we can simply not an example are the barcodes on the products that we buy
imagine it. This quality has caused many to put a noose every day. Also the words that make up some of the images in

17

Interview

music, slogans catching your eye at every step. You have

to establish a healthy distance towards all this surplus of
information. Lately, I am letting very little information
filter to myself. There is more of a battle for inner peace
and reflection as expansion. It is the pulsation; when you
need new information, you go back to get it. It is vital to
see things holistically. Peace and the effort to understand
the whole.
By this you mean the developments within society and in
the world?
Of course, we are on the threshold of major changes and
we are falling apart. Major transformations are taking
place and people are scared. No wonder they are afraid,
they are not ready, they are not armed for these rapid
changes.
If we go back to the experience of printmaking and the
graphic. You mentioned somewhere that your mother would
bring home old newspapers, so these letters that we meet in
your images probably originate from here?
Of course, and I also consciously tried to add this as a
quality. My mother was employed at Delo newspaper and
would bring home newspapers and comics every day. I was
constantly in the papers, we all drew over these papers.
You made some of your illustrations at the International
Centre of Graphic Arts as etchings, if I am not mistaken?
That was a modest commission, a cycle of seven prints,
which were supposed to illustrate some poems. Their
author, the French poet Malcolm de Chasal, who was
actually of French origin but lived in Mauritius, was a
contemporary of Picasso and Braque. He was also a friend of theirs. This production of prints was a collaborative
attempt which came to a halt and I decided I would rather
buy my own printing press. I felt that it all took too long as
I prefer to resolve things more quickly and efficiently.

Alenka Sottler, illustration for Pomes 119 by Malcolm de Chazal, 2007,

black and white tempera on printed paper

the book Visions (Prividi) are very well chosen. For instance
you used the well-known phrase: The copy is the same as the
original. When do solutions start to appear during the work
process? Already at the beginning of the creative process?
You have to get the idea.
The sovereignty that your basic starting point gives you,
the fact that you are a painter, is of great help. That is a strong
starting point. You are very open to experimenting. I see this
as your great advantage.
Of course, this is how it is in the world as well. An illustrator who is not a good painter can not function at all. It
merely becomes an accumulation of pictures. In the mass
of images that you have to make, you have to withstand
the visual theme, maintain your visual language. Every
writer throws you into his own atmosphere.

A bureaucratic attitude can also be counterproductive for

creativity.
Yes, you enter into a contractual relationship.
How did you prepare the plates? I admire their precision of
execution.
I carried out a photo process. I had the films made and
went to an engraver. We took a blind shot at it and it came
out well. The series, at which I was not present as it was
being etched, came out over-etched. The procedure will
have to be repeated. I have not had the opportunity to continue this process as of yet. I would like to transfer my images into a cleaner graphic print.

There are popular observations that we are flooded with

visual information. The superficiality of the gaze, generated
by posters, adverts What do you think about this?
I look at all this as little as possible. This is how it is with
all the other information, there are speakers bursting with

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

What do you mean by cleaner?

18

Alenka Sottler

Alenka Sottler, Good Morning, 2012, exhibition view, Kibla, Maribor, photo: Botjan Lah

In a quiet way I am constantly thinking about printmaking. I think that if my works were produced as graphic
prints, they would acquire that real graciousness that I am
striving for. This can be said for a lot of things that I create
in black and white.

My great role models are the black children who create

something out of nothing. They get the most out of something that has least promise. Transforming something out
of nothing, getting the most out of something with least
promise.

How do you work otherwise, in which technique?

I like to experiment, I work with scratch-drawing and
gouache ; I invent new techniques. I have often talked
about how I am inspired by the new insights in biology, the
construction of the cell for instance, so I bought up all the
biro refills in Slovenia. I wanted to draw with big drawing
tools, with lots of them, like nature, which builds organisms with masses of cells. I would like to build an organism
out of a mass of illustrations myself. I have already made
drafts for these cycles. I thought that I would build the
organism of illustrations out of micro-particles, which is
why I have to take up different methods. I use the computer a lot to obtain information and this is why I may not be
able to talk to people so much, but I do not want to use it to
create because I really enjoy the materiality of things. The
material represents the living relationship. Sensuality is
important because it takes me back to my personal power.

Illustrating Cinderella must have certainly been a challenge for you. This is a great and frequently interpreted
theme. How did this fact restrict or inspire you?
I found it very hard. As you can see, illustration really
suits me because it allows me to experiment a lot and
change themes. Seemingly I am very tied to one field, but
on the other hand there is a greater dynamic to it all. I find
it very hard to persevere on just one topic for a long time
when I am doing a book, but at the same time this forces
me to focus. Cinderella was difficult for me because I decided to use the greys. Already the title, Cinderella, indicates cinders, ashes, while I also had a need for vibrant
tones. Also because of the Asian origin of the story, I wanted to combine the gamma of Japanese painting with the
Renaissance tradition of classical painters such as Piero
della Francesca. This was an entry into an entirely new
colour atmosphere for me. I drew sketches for six months,

19

Interview

This is just one aspect of Cinderella that caused me

most difficulties. The second is the content. I did not want
to change the relationship between word and image in this
book, in the sense that we spoke about before. Because of
my childhood dream, I wanted to preserve the story the
way it should be. I did not want a Cinderella that drives
up in a moped, an American frivolity coming from a cartoon I focused on the message that even if you are alone
and if you are in distress, you still have the animals, you
still have the world. In Cinderella, the birds are the helpers. Even if a child finds himself in a difficult existential
situation, it can be solved. This is why I made the cover by
highlighting this gaze towards the little bird.
This book was very well accepted worldwide. You received
many awards for it.
This is true. So many that it is hard to believe. So I came
to the belief that it is better to have few books, and good
ones at that, rather than a production of forever new projects following the capitalist method. I am completely reassured now that I do not need to produce things mindlessly.
It will be published by Seven Stories Press in the anthology
The Graphic Canon of Childrens Literature in October.
My illustration of Cinderella will be the one to represent
Cinderella among the greatest achievements of childrens
literature worldwide. The selection was done by Russ Kick,
a very famous anthologist in America. I am not sure how it
will look, but let us hope for the best.

Alenka Sottler, cover illustration Cinderella with the Birds, adapted from the Brothers
Grimm, 2006, tempera on paper

which were so horrible that I did not think that I would

be able to make it through. The biggest problem was the
colour. I chose some hues with which I had never worked
before. I was in a completely new situation. For a long time
nothing matched, I needed to develop my sensibility to it.
Very slowly and through serious crises, the colour atmosphere, which I had previously never worked with, began
to emerge. The job I performed with this book became my
foundation. I pulled out a new colour drawer, a new register of creating in colour, which I will never forget. Even
though I hardly ever reached it in Cinderella since it was
all so new. For months and months I worked on these illustrations, every day I painted for It was a real nightmare until I broke through. But I also had the experience
that I should not throw away what I had done in the past,
when I cut it all up or painted over it. I knew that I had to
maintain this effort, that it is preserved in the illustration.
That uncertainty of the not completely achieved. Many
of the illustrations in this book are on the edge. If I were
making it today, I would be able to unfold it totally. The
knowledge that I gained with it, this unknown land, was
still in coming months and years afterwards.

Well done! Did you ever look at how many illustrations

have been made for Cinderella?
I did, but I did not really want to look for Cinderella
exactly. Now post festum. There is a portal for Cinderella,
where she is analyzed in all possible ways. It was made by
the worlds greatest masters, English, French ; and especially after Disney. And there was also the greatest kitsch produced, which is not surprising, since Cinderella is
very hard to illustrate. It does not really have a storyline
where the hero would travel, for example, the nature
would change The story is relatively long and there is no
polygon for the illustrator to elaborate on. Until now, all
Slovenian illustrators mostly avoided Cinderella. Which
is why it has been illustrated only as a minor publication
in Slovenia, and not as a big representative picture book,
despite the fact that it is a classic. In this aspect it was also
very difficult to interpret.
You mentioned the impact of Japonism. I noticed that already in your interpretation of Oscar Wilde. Are you attracted
to that culture?
Yes. I often take something contradictory, something
that brings unrest, chaos and then chaos really sets in.
It all seems so simple, but just a small change actually

But you never got to the point of abandoning the idea or

changing the method of work? Was it too much of a challenge
for you?

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

20

Alenka Sottler

Alenka Sottler, On Horseback, illustration from Cinderella, adapted from the Brothers Grimm, 2006, tempera on paper

triggers a whole arsenal of movements. At the end you see

that Renaissance paintings can only be possible in a certain gamma, only with certain means. Of course, it was a
challenge to understand all these styles and master them. I
have always found that exciting. In the end, you discover
that you can not paint a Renaissance painting with Japanese paints, but there are points of overlapping. That is
where this can be established. You have to find the points
of transition between the two language lines. The problem in the Renaissance is analogous to that in illustration.
They had to paint a lot of figures in the Renaissance, like
we have to in illustration. They used drapery to solve the
figures placement within a space. They drew the head,
hands, and then everything was already an abstraction.
Picasso came up with a great solution by abstracting the
body into cubes. He changed the body, hacked it up, he no
longer had a need for a realistic pretence. This is similar
with the depictions of geishas in Japanese art. There is a
vast amount of drapery, which allows for abstract solutions. Then you are only left with a few details that change
this painted piece of cloth into a figure.

This lets you get rid of hard transitions. These kinds of

explorations make illustrating possible. This is an opportunity to introduce such elements in places.
You have used a Renaissance colour scale in the illustration of Cinderella, which we have before us.
Yes, here it is more Renaissance, and in some other illustrations more Japanese. This shift, which I conquered,
now allows me to make a sketch as I go along. The manner
of building up the image has become ingrained in my subconscious.
I find the colour scale of the early Renaissance extremely
inspiring as well. The images are built up in a way that could
today be described as an anomaly, the most saturated colour,
for instance, occurs in the shadow area. Yet, these images are
extremely effective.
According to which key something can be regarded as
an anomaly is an extremely interesting area. Illustration
allows me to carry out such investigations.
I see that the book Why is Grandma Cross? has been
published in several languages.
No, those are just mock-ups. They were designed by

The autonomy of the pattern that flattens the space, for

example.

21

Interview

Alenka Sottler, Medania and Medushko vignette from the book Why is Grandma Cross? by Lela B. Njatin, 2011, paper cut-out

which indicate the bonds between the grandmother and

the grandchildren. It might even encourage children to
cut something out themselves. Through this internal campaign, I wanted to show that it is possible to make a book
from A to Z. You can expect to attract attention as far as
global competition goes with such a book, perhaps even get
a prize. We do often not know how to make a breakthrough due to various internal processes, or the product remains mediocre due to a trivial difference in the cost of its
execution. I wanted to go beyond such thinking. I want the
book to be as good as we can make it.

Vasja Ceni and I am very happy with them. The first

version of the book was designed by the author of the text,
Lela B. Njatin, but unfortunately it had to be rushed due
to funding concerns and lack of time. The book is nice, but
the cover is not so appealing. When I found out that the
book would be published in Croatia, I gave up my fee just
so that the designer could get another chance. I look at this
book every day and caress it. The book is as it should be, I
can take it to any fair in the world.
It is extremely attractive as a whole.
The cover is extremely important for a book. There are
also many nice details on the inside. I did not change the
illustrations much. I only cut some of the motifs out again.
I used the old-fashioned technique of cut-outs from the
time of the grandmother. The motifs are connected by lines

That is very important. You have quite an international

presence. Did you find your own network? How did doors
start to open for you?
One small step after another small step. It is all about
attitude. You see that you must move forward. The simple
awareness that you are working for the entire world sets
higher criteria in your head. The first version of the book
might have been good enough for the local scene, but it
is not so by world measure. This criterion spurns you on
constantly. I think that the path of the artist is extremely
longstanding, with few exceptions. If one is brimming with
questions that must be resolved, if one is very curious, this
indicates a complex personality, which is good, but one
needs time for it. An artist needs time to develop. Look at
how Marlenka Stupica, Jelka Raichman, Anka Gonik
Godec, Marjanca Jemec Boi are gaining attention
again. Their brand names are just rising. The tail of this
success is very long. It takes pretty long to seep into the
consciousness of the scene. This also defines you. You get to
a point on your own and then you need some help. When
I was young, I imagined how great it was to be successful.
And now I found out that it is not so great. This came as a
surprise. Success brings along a whole host of things, more

Alenka Sottler, Medania and Medushko vignette from the book Why is Grandma
Cross? by Lela B. Njatin, 2011, paper cut-out

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

22

Alenka Sottler

mail, more correspondence and even before you were

working flat out. How far can you go on your own? You
come up against limitations, physical, time-bound Your
peace and quiet disappears, time evaporates. You are forced to take on new obligations, which do not belong to the
basic investigative endeavours that you would like to concern yourself with.

The book is my medium; it is an intimate gallery into

which anyone can enter. This is a personal address, which
I wish to have. The gallery is a space for me, which could
be skipped completely. In the field of colour, in which you
work, the situation is different. Colour needs scale. The book
is an intimate materialization of ideas; another thing that is
topical is the Internet. The question that you raised is certainly interesting and worth thinking about. Nowadays, people have become the gallery, they themselves have become
the surface on which to bear the message that they wish to
convey. Something interesting happened at the Ski Jumping World Cup, when one of the contestants had an accident. The adverts worn by the ski jumpers suddenly included: Morgi, were with you! An intimate message pushed in
among all the advertising banners. The ski jumpers realized
that they were a notice board. Art is competing with advertising, it is spreading into street art, the floor surfaces

At this point you would need some help.

Everyone who gets to this point in Slovenia has no
beaten path on how to proceed. The question is how to
organize your life in order to move forward. I have been
revolving in this circle for a while now. And then I stumble
upon financial boundaries as well. I also change into an
ordinary citizen who must provide for their own survival. I
must ensure for my basic survival and provide for this higher standard of thinking about art by assuring some sort of
earnings.

Do you ever have a problem with the gap between your

original and the printed publication? Do you want to have an
eye on the printers, or do you simply say, Ive done my job?
I want to simplify my life. There are many hiccups in
the Slovenian arena, many things are carried out halfway
or three-quarters of the way. I want to oversee things if I
feel that this would be productive. Sometimes a five percent of that something extra requires a hundred percent of
your tenacity and time. You may even be hostile towards
the situation, which is why I also leave it up to the situation to show me how far I can go.

You dedicate a lot of time to mentally prepare and research

each individual project.
Actually, a lot of time should be devoted to this. The
thought of the artist being productively creative as soon as
he sits at his desk is essentially extremely naive. That is the
penultimate stage of the creative process. The longer this
process, the better quality products you will allow yourself
to produce. This is also a matter of how much space you
can force for yourself. How many existential problems and
media noise you are able to push away. If anyone in our
country manages to create anything, this is actually a very
fortunate occurrence.

You embark on each task in a very studious and analytical

way, regardless of whether the work is for commission or for
your own self. How much time do you spend on a book?
Recently, this has surpassed all acceptable limits. The
more you want, the more complex the pattern is that you
weave. This increases with time squared. There is so much
speed in the world, we want to produce everything so quickly, think quickly This must be rebelled against! There
is no need to produce some unresolved rubbish all the time,
and waste your time and the time of your loved ones. n

Do you teach Illustration at the Academy of Fine Arts and

Design now?
No, I was there for half a year and I felt it like a burden.
I am trying to not let this system, which is in an agony and
is putting people in distress, get to me completely. When I
got there, I realized that the system would get to me there
in its full capacity. Because of my own doubts, I find it
difficult to put myself into a position to teach anybody
anything, since I still have a lot to learn myself. I must and
I want to be an independent person.

At some point in life, the reflection of how to spend the

rest of time, becomes crucial. It is a great privilege to be able
to make a living doing what you really love and doing so by
giving it all that you are.
That was a privilege. Currently I am dealing with problems that are very much part of life.

Mojca Zlokarnik (1969, Ljubljana) obtained her BA (1993) and MA

(1995) in Painting in the class of Prof. Metka Kraovec at Ljubljanas Academy of Fine Arts and Design. In 1995 she studied Painting at the Academy
of Fine Arts in Prague for three months. In 1998, she also obtained an MA
in Printmaking in the class of Prof. Lojze Logar at the same Academy in
Ljubljana. She furthered her studies in New York, Bulgaria, Paris, and on
numerous other, less formal trips abroad. Based in Ljubljana, she has taken
part in many solo and group exhibitions in Slovenia as well as abroad, and
is an accredited artist by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia. She has been editor-in-chief of the art journal Likovne besede / Art
Words since 2001, and the co-editor of Ljubljana Personal, Alternative City
Guide since 2009.

Sometimes you show your illustrations in a gallery space.

What does the gallery space open up for you as opposed to the
book, which is an intimate event.

23

Diary

Adrijan Praznik

Kunst hauen!

Adrijan Praznik (1988, Ljubljana) is currently completing his undergraduate studies in Painting with Prof. iga Kari at the Academy of Fine
Arts and Design (ALUO) in Ljubljana. He was awarded the scholarship
for talented students from the Municipality of Ljubljana for his work and
was also the recipient of the ALUO award for special achievements in the
field of painting (2012). He has shown his works in numerous group and
solo exhibitions at home and abroad. He has been published in the Tribuna
newspaper, Stripburger and Fotografija magazines, as well as the Praznine
bulletin. He is active in the field of visual and fine art with an emphasis on
painting practice. He lives and works in Ljubljana.

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

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25

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

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27

Interview

Miha Colner

An Interview with Ren Block

At the beginning of 2010 the prestigious exhibition entitled
Quartet Four Biennials Reflected in Prints, created and
prepared by Ren Block (one of the most visible protagonists in todays world of curators) arrived at the Ljubljana
International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC). This is
an exhibition (or at least something close to it) of graphic
prints or specially printed editions that served to obtain
funds for various festivals and biennials in the (extended)
field of fine arts. Through these graphic prints Ren Block
found a way to self-help and self-sufficiency, and through
this approach he managed to help fund the biennials in
Hamburg (1985), Sydney (1990) Istanbul (1995) and Cetinje (2004). These graphic folders represent a special type
of artwork that does not depend on its originality, but is a
result of the reproductive nature of the graphic medium
and is created in a precisely defined series. As the printed
editions were always sold out it is obvious that with notorious names such as Marina Abramovi, Joseph Beuys, Nam
June Paik, Allan Kaprov, John Cage, Richard Hamilton,
Dan Perjovschi, to mention just a few, collectors no longer
demanded the otherwise highly desired uniquenes. The
graphic print editions live their lives in various collections
and contexts and in most cases their fate is unknown as
they were dispersed and divided amongst numerous owners.
Working in the direction of creating graphic folders
originated from the role of Ren Block and the spirit of
the 1960s when he was starting his gallery and curatorial
path. At the young age of twenty-two (in 1964) he founded
the Block gallery in Berlin, where he presented the socalled new wave of artists who derived from the influential FLUXUS movement. After this he changed numerous
working environments: he was a curator in Neuer Berliner
Kunstverein, he worked at the Berlin Fine Arts Academy,
was head of the DAAD residential program in Berlin, and
alongside all this he single-handedly curated numerous
group exhibitions and biennials (from the beginning of the
1980s onwards). Between 1997 and 2006 he was the head of
the Kunsthalle Fridericanum in Kassel, and after the end of
his mandate he founded TANAS (in 2008) a platform and
exhibition space for contemporary Turkish art in Berlin.
Ren Block represents a specific model of a contemporary curator, for he deals with his trade in a broad and
interdisciplinary way. In the discussion that emerged
merely moments before the opening protocols took place

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

at the MGLC exhibition (when Block spent a few days in

Ljubljana) he spoke about the exhibition, the operational
tactics, his curatorial standpoints and curatorial practices in
general.
MIHA COLNER: The exhibition entitled Quartet Four
Biennials Reflected in Prints is somehow the jigsaw of your
four curated projects in Hamburg, Sydney, Istanbul and Cetinje, but you are curating many festivals, biennials. Why did
you choose those particular four events for this exhibition and
this edition of prints?
REN BLOCK: Each of these four biennials has a special story and each one had its own character. But three of
them also had a need for additional money and the print
portfolios were a way to get this. Producing a print portfolio for such a purpose also involves the solidarity of the
artists for such a project, as they donate the prints. And
there is another aspect, too. From a more distant view, the
portfolio functions like an artistic document of the event,
it keeps some of the biennials character for later generations in an authentic form, as artworks even. As a curator
of a biennial, I am in a very special position. I have to create a project for a certain place, which has its own artistic
situation. I develop a concept from this existing situation
and open it for an international workshop. That is what a
biennial has to be: an international workshop for a certain
local situation. Everything else is just an exhibition that
could take place here and there, or even travel. An important part of the whole concept includes finding the venues
for the exhibition. Venues, which should already represent
the spirit and characterize the place. I have always understood my duties in these four parts: developing a concept
for the place, working with artists on its transformation,
finding the right venues for the realization, and at the end
even finding the financial support for the realization. Here
the portfolios were helpful, even in quite different ways. In
1985, I was invited to organize an exhibition for the city of
Hamburg, which was intended to be an Art of Peace Biennale, travelling each two years to a different city. The idea
came from French artist Robert Filliou, who had taught at
Hamburgs art school.
The city gave a certain amount for the realization but
it was very soon clear that this was not enough by far. As I
had longstanding experience with publishing in such different fields as books, records, multiples or prints, I proposed

28

Ren Block

ejla Kameri, Frei, 2005, 2 colour offset litograph, Cetinje

to 8 artists among them Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Nam

June Paik and Lawrence Weiner to produce a print portfolio to support this Biennale. The city was impressed by
this initiative and the officials could be convinced to take on
the whole edition and give the project the missing money.

support from a German institution for the production of a

portfolio for a biennial in Australia. However, it became
a wonderful artistic document for The Readymade Boomerang Biennale. The edition was purchased by museums in Australia and New Zealand, as well as by private
collectors and also allowed us to realize the performance
program. Completely different again was the situation in
Istanbul in 1995. Also here, there was a lack of money. But
the management was immediately on my side and financed the production. In 1995, the Istanbul Biennial was
completely financed by private foundations and sponsors.
Also, there was no museum for contemporary art to sell the
portfolio to. We used it as an exchange-offer to additional
sponsors. If they were willing to support the Biennial with
a certain amount, the Biennial thanked them with this
portfolio, which contained the works of 20 Biennial artists.
As a result of this trade action, this portfolio is not collected by museums but distributed to a number of companies,
which might still show some of the works framed in their
offices.

So in a way, this is a DIY principle of how to help yourself

to found a biennial?
Yes, it was this way that the curator and the artists
together managed to find a solution. I do a lot for art, but
I do not go knocking at the doors of so-called sponsors and
beg for money. When I was working in 1990 for Sydney,
the chairman of the Biennale guaranteed the budget for
the exhibition. But my concept included a larger music
and performance part too, which was not included in
the budget. When I proposed the production of a portfolio with 20 artists to the board to raise the needed money,
they were quite open to this possibility. But later I refused
the money for its production. In my panic I negotiated
with a state institution in Germany to borrow the money.
It was the Berlin artist-in-residence program, for which I
was working at that time. Their understanding and trust
was so high that it was agreed. A curious situation indeed:

So there was never a problem in selling these portfolios and

editions?

29

Interview

Fortunately it worked as hoped. But I

must say that I never involved myself too
intensively in the process of distribution
because there were other things to do during
the biennial preparation. But again, I like
to repeat the three different ways of distributing, as it also says something about the
different cultural backgrounds: in Hamburg, in 1985, the complete edition was
bought by the city. In Sydney, in 1990, the
Australian museums and private collections supported the Biennale by purchasing
the portfolios. In Istanbul, in 1995, the portfolio was given in exchange to sponsoring
companies.
And I like to underline the other important point for me: to create, through these
editions, an artistic document to accompany three important biennials. This aspect
was decisive for the production of portfolio number four, which is related to the Cetinje Biennial
Love it or Leave it. This edition was started after the
Biennial had taken place. This edition is a kind of rsum
of my last years work at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum
in Kassel, where I could visualize my involvement on the
art scene of South Eastern Europe in different exhibitions.
The most comprehensive project was entitled Balkan Trilogie and started in 2003 through the exhibition In den
Schluckten des Balkan in Kassel, and concluded in 2004
with the Cetinje Biennial. For the portfolio, 30 artists had
been invited to participate with prints in all kinds of printing techniques. While the Istanbul portfolio shows some
Turkish artists in an international context, the Cetinje
portfolio connects South Eastern Europe with Istanbul,
the place from where I started to discover the Balkan art
scene.

Ben Vautier, Am I or is Australia Far Away, 1990, silkscreen, Sydney

well as Cantral Istanbul. At least three banks started to

support spaces for contemporary cultural activities like
the Garanti platform, the Ak-bank gallery and Yapi Kredi
with the Taskent Galerie and their publishing house,
which started a series with monographs on contemporary
Turkish artists. Other foundations are working on plans to
open museums for contemporary art and started to collect
systematically.
If we stay here for a while, with the Turkey scene. What
was the turning point for the scene to start growing? Until
1995, you said, there were almost no artists working in the
field of what we could call contemporary art, and the impetus
came from the Biennial. On the other hand, I heard that the
art scene in Turkey is not so centralized, that there are certain
cities with a strong scene. You were mentioning the Kurdish
town of Diyarbakir.
The Turkish art scene is based in Istanbul and Istanbul
is the centre. Like the cities of Paris, London or Berlin, it
functions like a big magnet. These capitals attract all those
who wish to participate in the cultural life. There are art
schools in Ankara and a very important academy with a
long tradition teaches young art students in Izmir. But
they will soon move to Istanbul.
Interesting though, I see one exception in the Kurdish
dominated region around the city of Diyarbakir. A number of very active and productive artists decided to stay
there and work from there. A number of them had already participated in the Kassel exhibition in 2003 and also
in the Cetinje Biennial. For the first time, this new scene
is shown in an exhibition. Not in Istanbul but in Berlin,
where the Turkish art scene is very present with TANAS.

In 1995, you said, the scene in Istanbul was not developed

to the point that there would be public institutions for contemporary art, but after that the situation changed. Istanbul
is now a very strong city, also in terms of contemporary art.
That is absolutely right. Some people call it the Wunder of Istanbuls art scene. In 1995, when I worked for
the 4th Biennial, there was no institution involved in contemporary art. A contemporary art scene didnt exist.
Artists worked undiscovered in hidden places. Only very
few people occasionally bought their works. But with
hosting the Biennial as an event of international importance, the whole Istanbul situation changed rapidly. A
new generation of open minded, interested and also wellinformed people started to collect and to establish the first
institutions for modern and contemporary art. Istanbul
Modern was founded, the Sabanci Museum followed, as

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

30

Ren Block

The private institutions permit a large independence.

This is very important. If countries do not have a long
democratic tradition and experience, the independence of
cultural activities is essential.

So TANAS is the centre for Turkish contemporary art in

Berlin. How long has this organization and exhibition space
existed?
We opened TANAS precisely two years ago, as a late
result of a conversation with the Turkish Koc Foundation.
This took place already a few years ago and was a kind of
brainstorming to develop strategies to support contemporary Turkish art in different fields: by publishing monographs, as there was almost no catalogue printing in Turkey due to missing institutions; by starting a systematic
collection of artworks; by supporting artists abroad, as
there had never been any official support by state institutions if Turkish artists were invited to participate in international exhibitions abroad. When I moved back to Berlin
in 2007, I saw this wonderful empty space in a former factory building and it did not take a long time to convince
the Koc Foundation to open a Centre for Turkish Art here.
Something that should have happened in Istanbul but
didnt for many reasons. The policy of TANAS is simple.
We invite Turkish artists for monographic exhibitions or
we invite Turkish curators to realize projects.
Those projects can be and should be international, to
open a discourse.

What about the artists themselves? In one of the interviews

you stated that artists from the Balkan region are a lot more
politically oriented in their artistic expression than their colleagues from the western countries. What about Turkey? Are
the artists also explicitly politically engaged there?
They are. But it is not an engagement which is simply
plakativ. The recent TANAS exhibition for instance, is
a political manifestation. All of these artists share a clear
aesthetic language. Their work involves a critical reappraisal of conflicts and prejudices, opposition to authoritarian
structures as well as the unmasking and breaking of cultural and political taboos, still existent in Turkey. Another
commonality among the artists is that they advance their
critique subtly through the icy bite of irony, through exaggeration to the point of absurdity, or simply through the
poetic feel of allegory. And I found this way to express
critique with many artists from the Balkan countries
too. Irony and poetry are the better political weapons.
For instance, for the Hamburg Art of Peace Biennale I
did not allow any anti-war works or statements. We all
are anti-war. To be negative is easy. But the question is,
how to be positive? What means peace to us? A wonderful example about reflection is the video Road to Tate
Modern from 2003 in which the artists Sener zmen and
Erkan zgen are playing a kind of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and are travelling through an empty Kurdish
landscape for 30 days. When they finally meet another traveller and ask him for the right way to the Tate Modern,
this guy shows a direction and says It takes a while. This
is a poetic and ironic reflection on how to find a way to the
global art world as a Kurdish artist.

What kind of relations are there in Istanbul for instance,

between Kurdish and Turkish people, because there are constant tensions between them? Is that also affecting the art
scene?
In our recent exhibition at TANAS entitled Not Easy
to Save the World in 90 Days we show a video of Sener
zmen and Cengiz Tekin, both playing, one as a Kurdish,
the other as a Turkish young man, a hate and love relation in a Buster Keaton way, as a funny slapstick. And
indeed, I have never seen any negative effect of this conflict to the art scene. If there are explanations, they happen
between different generations, but not between origins.
When I started my relationship with Istanbul during the
early 1990s, I was surprised to find the strongest artworks
made by women. I admired Fsn Onur, Ayse Erkmen,
Hale Tenger and Glsn Karamustafa, the youngest was
Esra Ersen. The exhibitions of that time were dominated by those artists. Now, ten years later, I register a new
generation of male artists. Ten of them have been brought
together for the first time in the TANAS exhibition. That
this generation comes mostly from outside of Istanbul is
the new phenomena. Who of them is Turkish, Kurdish or
Armenian?

I remember this video piece now that you are describing it.
It was also shown in Ljubljana in one of the group exhibitions
in kuc Gallery.
It is shown often since Kassel and Cetinje. It describes
the situation in 10 minutes, in a way that everybody can
understand.
Lets go back to the editions. These portfolios and printmaking is somehow your personal tradition. You started in 1966,
two years after you opened a gallery space in Berlin, when
you published the first edition of prints. What was the impetus for you at the beginning to start that concept?
In the mid-1960s there was a big call for the democratisation of the art market as a side effect of all this new
political orientation by the younger generation. There
was this political romanticism that artists should go into

Yes, my question was set because usually cultural policy

could affect those relations, but as you said most of the institutions and foundations are in private hands. So apparently
this is good for the scene because there are no political pressures?

31

Interview

und $ 10, he tried to operate against the art market. But

the market is stronger. Collectors like to buy names and
not nameless objects, even if they are very cheap. As Maciunas was producing only through orders, many of these
works designed for unlimited editions only exist in very
small editions since he died in 1978. The German ViceVersand-Edition followed this concept of Maciunas, but
not repeating his mistake by publishing under the artists
name. Those small objects for the price of DM 8.- German
Marks, equivalent to a pocket book, were selling very well,
depending on the artists name. The contribution of Beuys,
a small wooden box with handwriting and a signature by
the artist, called Intuition for instance, received an edition of more than 20.000 pieces. But I have no information
on how many workers purchased it.

the factories and show their works to workers. And they

should produce works that workers could buy. Many symposiums concentrated on the question how to destroy the
aura of so-called high culture. As a young person running
a gallery and working with politically involved artists of a
new generation, such as Brehmer, Beuys, Vostell, but also
Polke and Richter, I was following those ideas. Their work
was not expensive at the time, but the editions would be
cheaper still. The classical way of multiplication is printing. This was done for centuries. I myself had studied
different print techniques. But the newest development
was called multiple. Multiples are three dimensional
art objects based on Duchamps concept of the readymade
and industrial production. Multiples, like prints, are original artworks, created for the process of multiplication,
and exist in a certain number. As such, they can be offered
for a relatively small amount. From 1966 on, I consequently followed this idea to open the market and to offer art
for everybody. During this time, the concept of the art fair
was invented by a group of German galleries and together
we started the first art fair in Cologne in 1967. To explain
the idea of the multiple, I like to remember the Cologne
Art Fair of 1969. With Joseph Beuys, I had produced a
large and important sculptural work based on a Volkswagen-Bus. Beuys had added to this vehicle of high technological development in contrast to the first thinkable
vehicle of man, the sledge, used even before the wheel was
invented. In this work, a group of 24 sledges jumps out of
the back of the car like a pack of animals. The sledges were
prepared with a small fat sculpture, a folded blanket from
felt and a flashlight. The title of this installation piece was
The Pack. As a major work of this artist, it had to have
a certain price, which I based on the paintings of Warhol
and Rauschenberg. But at the same time we produced 50
sledges, slightly different types, as multiples and offered
them very cheaply. For only DM 300.-, which is 150.today. All of them were sold, mainly to young people.
Many students paid in several rates, as they did not have
DM 300.- in their pockets. Now, after 40 years, the single
multiple sledge bring more money in at auctions than the
main piece, The Pack in 1969. But that is a different
story.

How did you manage to convince certain artists to participate in those editions in the field of printmaking, especially
later, in later editions, because you were collaborating with
artists who were not really working in this field, for example
Marina Abramovi? How did you convince them, as this is
something completely outside of their usual line of work?
I think all these four portfolios are very unique. It was
not difficult to get the artists interest to participate. With
a few, who were not experienced with the different techniques of print production, I had to discuss all the different
possibilities. As an editor, I am very interested in offering
a wide variety, from etching, stone lithograph, woodcut or
silkscreen, to offset lithograph, we had to find the best and
most suitable technique. Often we had to visit different
printing studios. And to tell the truth, for the editor, this
is the most interesting part. And it is wonderful to watch
how often artists fall in love with printing after their first
contact with this medium.
We can compare the printed editions to the curated exhibitions. What was the process of working and what was your
role as the selector or curator of the editions? Could you influence the content and the final results of the works?
It is a very similar process. A portfolio is an exhibition
in itself. It follows the same rules of quality and harmony,
a dialogue between the different selected works. As artists
usually have different proposals, the selection of works for
a portfolio follows the same rules and intentions as curating an exhibition. Just the format is different.

So it goes along with that ideology of conceptual art, when

the artists themselves acted against the market in some way
by not producing art objects?
Ideally, those editions should have been unlimited. This
for instance was the concept of George Maciunas and his
Fluxus editions from the 1960s. He realized a number of
small boxes following the concepts of his artist friend. His
concept consequently neutralized the authorship of the
boxes. Their identification was the label of Fluxus, for each
artist and product designed by him. With a price of aro-

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

So, since we are talking about curating, I would like to ask

a more general question about the role of the curator today,
when it seems that it is even bigger than the role of the artist,
even if the curator should be a kind of mediator?
The role of a curator is important. I like to compare this
function with a conductor. A conductor selects the program and determines the interpretation. The orchestra

32

Ren Block

Nam June Paik, Fluxband, 1985, grease crayon on offset litograph, 6073cm, Hamburg

consists of musicians of different experience, the first violins, second or even third violins. But at the end, they have
to play together to create one sound. A perfect exhibition
is like a symphony. It has to have a dramatization which
guides the visitor from one part to the other. But I have
rarely experienced this feeling. The ethic of curating is lost
with the many fast food biennials around the world. It is
not possible to study curating at university and it is nonsense to discuss curatorial strategies. A curator has to grow
with certain artists, has to live with them, and has to assist
them for several years. Then he might be an equal partner
one day and might even be able to conduct.

the curatorial approaches before that? Was it really such a big

turnaround with the mentioned event in Kassel?
Before Documenta 5, larger exhibitions were usually
organized by a team of several people, as museum directors and critics, who decided together as a collective. Documenta 5 was for the first time in the hands of one person.
Harald Szeemann was precisely this kind of conductor that
I described before. He grew up with certain artists from his
earlier projects. He had a family of artists around him.
With the members of this family, he worked during his
lifetime, of course in different combinations. But he had
this base, his own sound or spirit. And we should not forget that in 1972, his position was not called Curator but
Documenta Generalsekretr.
At that time only two biennials were on the map, Venice
and Sao Paulo. Sydney started at that time as a local project and only its fourth edition called European Dialogue

I agree that the curator is more or less the figure from

behind, but this has definitely changed. The crucial point
for the enforcement of curatorial practices is believed to be
Documenta 5 with Harald Szeemann in 1972. Which were

33

Interview

field of art is fantastic. But I see many very

young curators with their concepts, based on
philosophy, trying to fill their theory with
some artworks found in books or catalogues,
or seen in other exhibitions and create their
own exhibition out of this. I have never worked from a theory, always from a found situation, from a place and for a place. Always
from the artists and the artworks. And with
the 15 years-long experience of running my
private galleries in Berlin and New York in
the 1960s and 1970s. That means, like Szeemann, I am part of an art family and work
from this position.
So you can start with one particular artwork and then the whole exhibition will grow
around that. This brings us back to the beginning. You said that usually you were a curator
with many tasks, finding the space, finding the
funds. Is there any biennial with proper funds,
maybe the Venice Biennale?
The Venice Biennale, the so-called mother
of the biennials is still a completely different model, as all participating countries
have their own pavilion, their own curator
or commissioner, their own budget. There
are rich countries and there are poor countries. It is a really interesting situation. I like
this competition between all these countries
and their pavilions. And there is almost no
communication between the artists, curators. The classic Venice Biennale is not at all
curated, except the unnecessary exhibition in
Arsenale, which is additional. I think there
are only a few biennials which have proper
funding to enable the curators to work in an
independent and free way.

Allan Kaprow, Yard, 1990, 2 colour offset litograph, Sydney

had international ambitions. This Biennale was the first to

be organized by one person only, who was appointed as the
artistic director. Also, when I organized the 8th Biennale
in 1990 as the first non-Australian, my position was called artistic director. Nobody used the term curator. But it
is interesting that all biennials later followed the Sydney
model to employ one person. The term curator was imported from the English speaking world and started its inflation since the mid-1980s.

I think some of the biennials are based more or less on the

international art scene without paying attention to the local
scene. What is your approach to that? When organizing a
biennial, you probably move to a particular place and try to
identify with the local scene.
Why should one organize a biennial without paying
attention to the local art scene? The biennials that I was
invited to organize have always been an exhibition around
a workshop situation, a temporary workshop for a certain
cultural situation under specific conditions. I understand
a biennial as an artistic contribution to a certain place. It
is very important to involve the local art scene and put it
in contact with the invited artists. The biennial does not
necessarily need to imitate the perfect white cube exhibi-

It is complicated
Yes, it is complicated. It is complicated because so many
young people have the dream to be curators and to study
curatorial secrets at university and then conquer the art
world. On the other hand, this interest in working in the

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

34

Ren Block

tion. It can endure a lot of improvisation, depending on

the venues. But the atmosphere of the whole event, the
communication between the artists should be absolutely
functional.

museum of ethnology. This building was offered as one

of the 5 venues for the Biennial. I immediately remembered this work by Heta when I saw the embassy. I wanted
a political statement, even a fantasy product, outside this
building to prepare the visitors for a number of real strong
and shocking political contributions by artists like Marina
Abramovi, Maja Bajevi, Zoran Naskovski, Milica Tomi
or Sanja Ivekovi.
Hetas work had to be seen in this context. But some
blind people saw only his work and did not even enter the
venue. They made a scandal out of it and destroyed it. We
had set a conceptual trap and they run into it. To place
Hetas work in this position was a curatorial decision. I
took responsibility.

That means that all the artists should be there on the spot.
Considering your phrase temporary workshop, you were
including all kinds of creativity in your biennials, like music,
performances and public actions. Especially music is not so
usual in the context of the visual arts. Why did you decide to
put it in the program?
I grew up in the family of Fluxus artists. Music, film,
visual art, performance, poetry are not to be separated.
And if I work in Sydney or Istanbul, I have to introduce
this aspect of Gesamtkunstwerk. It is my confession.

We are talking about the flag of Kosovo although Kosovo

didnt exist at that time as an independent state. It was somehow the imaginary flag then?
It was imaginary, of course. But even now I see it in the
context of the other works. I cannot see Hetas piece isolated from the installations inside.

You were working with Nam June Paik and maybe he is a

good example. First of all he was a composer, even if we know
him mostly as the pioneer of video art.
In fact, a great part of the development of video comes
from experimental music. As Nam June Paik was working
as a composer at the electronic studio of Radio Cologne in
the early sixties, he transformed natural sound into artificial sound with the help of synthesizers. Consequently,
he was trying to transform electronic images, as used in
television, in the same way. With a Japanese engineer, he
developed the first video synthesizer, which was a visual
revolution. It was possible to change colours and forms of
the moving images. He continued to work with video as a
time-based art, with a musical concept in his many early
videos. The next step lead him to video environments and
video sculptures.

Did you expect that kind of reaction from the local society? Montenegro is quite known as a traditional country, also
divided between those two entities, and this was a very touchy
topic at that time.
It was a very interesting political situation in 2004 as
Montenegro was in the process of gaining independence. I
understand that for some radical politicians this was pure
provocation. They have no distance. They cannot laugh.
I found this quote by writer Andrej Nikolaidis, one of
the rare independent critical journalists in Montenegro. He

You have been dealing with the contemporary art of the Balkan region lately and one
peak was the Biennial in Cetinje in Montenegro in 2004, which caused a big scandal at
the time. The most shocking case there was the
work entitled The Embassy of the Republic of
Kosova by Albert Heta, which was withdrawn
and destroyed before that. What is your perspective on it now?
I had heard about this work by Albert
Heta some time before the Cetinje Biennial.
He had planned it for an exhibition in Berlin, but the organizers had not allowed us to
post arms and the flag of the Republic of
Kosovo outside on the facade. In Cetinje,
the former capital of Montenegro, buildings
still exist, that used to be embassies a hundred years ago, but have a different purpose
today. One of these buildings is the former
embassy of the Kingdom of Serbia, now a

Aydan Murtezaoglu, Untitled, 1995, 2 colour silkscreen, Istanbul

35

Interview

Maaria Wirkkala, Unaccompanied Luggage, 1995, 4 colour offset litograph mounted on silkscreen, Istanbul

stated: Cetinje is a town where nobody interrupts morning

coffee and small talk until the bomb explodes in the middle of
the main square. And thats why this town is the ideal place
for performing conceptual art. And he continues that everybody just saw this flag, but on the other hand he was bothered
by Oleg Kulik and his performance of the raping dogs. So this
is just one of the reactions, but all this was really a big media
issue at the time.
Oleg Kulik happened during an earlier Biennial. I did
not see it. Hetas contribution in 2004 was misused for a
stupid political discussion because the context was not
accepted. Some newspapers sold it as provocation. That is
business, too. But after that, I was not recommended to go
to Serbia again because there could have been problems.
When I received an invitation to curate the Belgrade October Salon in 2006 one year later, I was really surprised.
And this exhibition was also very political. I must say that
the art community, and people interested in contemporary
art in general, are not so burdened with those issues and
they are not politically blind.

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

So this project with the centre in Cetinje had this idea of

connecting the Balkan region. Additional events were taking
place in Dubrovnik and Tirana
as well as in Diyarbakir in Turkey. It was a Biennial
with satellite projects to neighbouring countries.
Was it successful also in the sense of bringing contemporary art to the broader public?
This is something that you can never control. The Biennial had many visitors. Some of them might have seen this
kind of art for the first time, and some of them might have
understood some of the works and the messages behind
them.
Lets go back to the current exhibition. Is the exhibition
entitled Quartet Four Biennials Reflected in Prints on
tour? Where has it been shown already?
There was an exhibition of the prints from the Istanbul
and the Cetinje Biennial in 2005 in Istanbul. That was a
kind of due. The Quartet, all four portfolios, have only
been shown together in Berlin two years ago. I have never

36

Ren Block

Halil Altindere, Love it or Leave it, 2005, 4 colour offset litograph, Cetinje

seen all these prints together and realised that there is even
a lot of context between all the works which represent a
period of 20 years. So we published this catalogue. I must
admit that I am very happy about the possibility of seeing
the prints again in Ljubljana, and the place here, the beautiful rooms of the Centre for Graphic Arts, brings them
into a very special constellation. n

Miha Colner (1978) graduated in Art History and is an independent curator and art critic. He is a curator at the Photon Gallery and a member of the
DIVA project group at SCCA Ljubljana, which is developing an archive of
Slovenian video art. He writes critiques for the music and culture editorial
office at Radio tudent, where he is currently editor of a show on contemporary art called Art-Area. His critical appraisals are also regularly featured
in Dnevnik newspaper, Fotografija, Likovne besede and Folio magazines, as
well as other expert publications. He lives and works in Ljubljana.

37

X/X

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

38

Silvester Plotajs Sicoe

Diary

Silvester Plotajs Sicoe (1965, Ljubljana) graduated from the Ljubljana

Academy of Fine Arts in 1988. He continued his education path by taking
on a postgraduate study in Painting and Printmaking at the same Academy, and an advanced study at the Minerva Academy in Groningen in The
Netherlands in 1990. He has shown his artwork in numerous group and
solo exhibitions, including: How to explain art to a rhinoceros? (Mestna
galerija Ljubljana, 2010) and The Heart is Invisible to the Eye (Equrna,
Ljubljana, 2011), Tha Magic of Art / The Protagonists of Contemporary
Slovenian Art (Villa Manin, Italy, 2014). In 201 3, he received the Rihard
Jakopi Award, the main national accolade for special achievements within
the visual arts. He works as a free-lance artists based in Ljubljana.

39

40

Avtor

41

Interpretation

Miklav Komelj

Photographs as Emanations
1.

These faces were looking at me with the closeness and

distance of the faces that I meet in my dreams.
With this power of evocation, Goran Bertok comes
closer to the greatest painting than most of those that nowadays smear paint off their brushes onto canvas.
And yet: there is absolutely no similarity to painting
here. There is something entirely different at stake here. It
is the specific nature of the photograph, which is precisely
in this, that it has nothing in common with human painting, pure emanation. Not the emanation of the photographer. The emanation of the photographed being. Photography is the illuminated emanation of the photographed
being. (Brassa writes about this really nicely in his book
on Proust.) Emanation, precisely because this is vision
without human feelings, without human contamination.
(Brassa writes exactly about this: a-human vision, identification with the vision of the photographic lens, as a kind
of catharsis of the eye.) Merely a trace left by light on a sensitive substance, without memory, without fantasy. That is
the emanation of souls. Like every body is an emanation.
Like every face is an emanation. And yet: the face is not a
part of the body.
And yet: memory. Montesquiou: Photography is the
mirror that remembers.
The face is the emanation of the soul precisely in the way
that each of its features embodies the memory of all the
movements that have produced it through repetition. Each
unrepeatable feature is the trace of repetitions.
As I look at these photographs, a conversation is taking
place beyond the conversation, an encounter beyond the
encounter, a vision beyond
Four of the photographed faces have their eyes closed.
Regardless of whether the eyes are open or closed they
see.

Goran Bertok has entitled the cycle of photographic portraits

of people who survived the extermination camps of World
War II, Survivors. Yet this is no longer the type of survival
that is the postponement of death (each survival of this sort
is merely temporary). Everything here is beyond life and
death.1 The way in which the image connects the presence
and absence of the photographed being, life and death in
relation to it no longer represent a simple opposition. Just
like momentariness and continuance do not mean it either.
(Proust wrote to Madame Straus in a letter that photography
is the momentariness of that which lasts in a person.)
A gaze from eye to eye beyond death and life.
The emanation of that presence of the soul from which
death can no longer take anything (more).
This is what I saw in Bertoks exhibition at the National
Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana.2
The photographs that were exhibited had been processed
so that the effects of light and dark converge in a kind of
twilight but at the same time also in this approximation of
darkness, the light glows all the more. (In the photograph as
such, light and shadow mysteriously and paradoxically
come together precisely at an extreme disunity. Possibly the
oldest poem in the Slovenian language to talk about photography published in 1868 by Fran Levstik praises photographs as the images arisen from the suns rays, whilst
at the same time marking the photograph as the shadow
of shadows.) The first impression I got as I walked into
the space was as if the light of yet undeveloped negatives
was shining into me. As if the film was directly illuminated
by souls. As if these positives were the negatives of souls.
Goran Bertok has managed to make me see these positives
as the negatives of souls.
But at a point I exclaimed within myself: These are no
longer photographs, these are photograms of souls!
I got the feeling that through the photographs of Goran
Bertok, I met with the souls of the people photographed
more intensely than most people I usually meet with in the
flesh in daily encounters and conversations.

2.
These faces are placed into a common area in relation to
the same gaze.
Which? Whose?
Jean-Luc Nancy wrote in his text on Henri Cartier-
Bresson that the gaze as the gaze is always the same, a
part of the infiniteness of all gazes, as vision itself is always
the same, vision of a person who contemplates the world,

1 Yet also survival as endurance; how harrowing it was at the exhibition in

the Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana to read the book of impressions
accompanying these photographs and the note dated 7 March 2014 which said: We
have survived. We are still here. Internee H.
2 This was on 15 March 2014; this text was written between 15 March and 12
April 2014.

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

42

Miklav Komelj

Goran Bertok, Joe Hlebanja, Deported to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, 2013,
photograph, 66.5 100cm

Goran Bertok, Milo Poljanek, Deported to the Neuengamme Concentration Camp,

2013, photograph, 66.5 100cm

contemplates someone in the world and contemplates the

world of that someone in the world. (As I was looking at
Bertoks photographs, I discovered the intensity of the gaze
that was looking at me, through me, in every detail; at a certain moment I was surprised how every detail, including a
button on a shirt, could shine with the same intensity of the
soul as the eye.)
But there is something here that is outside of the world.
These are the people who survived the Holocaust. Their
gazes are placed into a relationship towards something
which is (was) not the world. (In Lanzmanns film Shoah,
a member of the Polish resistance movement speaks about
his illegal visit to the Warsaw ghetto with tears in his eyes:
This was not the world This was not the world )
How many manipulations on these themes happen over
and over again! Here though just an eye-to-eye encounter. Goran Bertok has not put these people together in order
to use their faces to illustrate a story, an experience, but has
looked each one of them in the eye. Open or closed. These
people are not an illustration of something, but each with

their own life united in that which they have seen. Each of
them is completely singular. Each of the faces of these people has formed in their deepest solitude.
And yet they are connected by the same gaze. A gaze
into the unimaginable, into that which can not be the
world. Known are the testimonies of the Nazis, who told
people upon arrival at the concentration camps that even
if they would survive and wanted to testify to it, that no
one would ever believe them because what took place there
could not be inscribed into the symbolic structure of the
world.
Goran Bertok does not confront this with some sort of
humanism, but with a gaze that has never retreated in the
face of anything.
The gaze of the camera is not the gaze of man.
And yet it is his gaze.
There is no emotional closeness in that. In the wonderful
text Proti fotografiji [Against Photography], Bertok wrote
about the photographers who pose with their cameras in
their self-portraits:

43

Interpretation

Goran Bertok, Franika Deisinger, Deported to the Ravensbrck and Ravensbrck

Grneberg Concentration Camps, 2013, photograph, 66.5 100cm

Goran Bertok, Elizabeta Frst, Deported to the Auschwitz, BuchenwaldGelsenkirchen

and BuchenwaldSmmerda Concentration Camps, 2013, photograph, 66.5 100cm

Such emotional closeness with the Machine has always

been alien and disturbing to me. I certainly see considerable simplicity, perhaps also innocence in this pose.

3.
He was able to meet with these gazes in such a way, confront only the gaze that never evaded the boundaries of life
and death in such a way, only the gaze that endured the
gaze upon very terrible things.
Goran Bertok has never shied away from terror with sentimentality and ideological appropriation. He has always
known that beauty is, just as Rilke says, the beginning of
terror that we are barely able to endure. And he has always
explored, to where we can endure.
Goran Bertok had photographed the terrifying beauty of
sadomasochistic rituals. Goran Bertok had photographed
the heads of the dead, as they are blown up by fire in crematoriums. Goran Bertok had photographed the faces of
frozen corpses.
Only the gaze that had confronted all of this, could have
in such a way met, in such a way confronted these gazes.

When the human gaze and the gaze which is not human
merge as the same gaze, they merge without closeness. This
gaze is the same precisely in its absolute disunity.
Bertok recognises it as the disunity of photography itself:
And so Im battling with photography Actually, Im
battling with the disunity in photography.
Only the gaze into the gaze of this disunity can confront
this, by which the gazes of these people, with each one
being absolutely singular, connect into the same gaze. What
needs to be experienced in order for the gaze to meet with
the gaze? (Even if the eyes are closed.)

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44

Miklav Komelj

It is a long time since I have seen so much grace, light,

beauty, tenderness and exaltation in a show. As I looked
at these photographs, I exclaimed within myself that I did
not know that even the faces of people can be so beautiful.
Precisely because Goran Bertok makes them appear beyond
any kind of human sentimentality. Something in them
reminded me (not that I would want to establish any sort of
comparison) of the beauty and tranquillity that I discovered
in the photographic portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
What does it mean to see a face? Alberto Giacometti
could not make a portrait, without falling in love with the
person portrayed during its making. But he fell in love once
he recognized in her face the terrible, unsurpassable distances, the Sahara between the nostrils Love that means
walking straight up to terror, says Kurt Anders in Passion,
a story of Djuna Barnes (based on a quote by Josef Pieper).
Goran Bertok knows that a strict formalization is required
in order to endure unbearable intensity.
Our discussions are a great pleasure to me when we
occasionally meet, as he usually tries to confuse me with
bizarrely excessive subject matters, but in the end always
speaks primarily about the rigorousness to oneself, about
how people would have already disintegrated into an amorphous mass without rigorousness.
Beauty. Not aesthetisation. Auschwitz has discredited
aesthetisation, not beauty.
In contrast to aesthetisation, beauty must be constantly
redefined. We need beauty so that we can try to confront
terror.
Goran Bertok, Sonja Vraj, Deported to the Auschwitz, Ravensbrck Ravensbrck and
Sachsenhausen-Haselhorst Concentration Camps, 2013, photograph, 66.5 100cm

5.

Without a hint of victimological hypocrisy.

Goran Bertok is merciless enough to his own self to
know that the photographer places the person portrayed
into the role of the victim. In such a way, Henri CartierBresson, who was able to photograph most intimately, most
subtly, most considerately, with the greatest respect, spoke
of his sitters as consenting victims:
If you want to catch the inner silence of the consenting
victim when doing a portrait, it is very difficult to put
the camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.

We need the gaze. Goran Bertok makes us see how the gaze
pierces the eye. n
Goran Bertok (1963, Koper) graduated in Journalism from the Faculty of
Sociology, Political Science and Journalism in Ljubljana in 1989. Since 1990
he has shown his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including:
Body, Flesh and Other Stories, Kunsthalle, Feldbach, Austria, 2013; Death
Nature, Galerija Simulaker, Novo mesto, 2011; Post Mortem, Photon Gallery, 2007; Forbidden Death, Center for Contemporary Arts Celje, 2009;
Borderline Biennale 2011, Le Demeure du Chaos, St. Romain au Mont d`Or
(Lyon), France, 2011; The Magic of Art, The Protagonists of Contemporary
Slovenian Art 19682013, Villa Manin, Passariano di Codroipo, Italy, 2014.
Miklav Komelj (1973) is a poet and art historian. He has published the
collections of poems: The Light of the Dolphin (1991), The Amber of Time
(1995), Dew (2002), Hippodrome (2006), Unnadressable Names (2008),
The Blue Suit (2011) and Hands in the Rain (2011). He has also published
numerous scientific articles and essays, including: The Diptych of Federico
da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, Piero della Francesca (2009), How to
Think Partisan Art? (2009), Ljubljana. Cities within a City (2009) and The
Necessity of Poetry (2010). He has selected and edited the manuscripts of
Jure Detela, Orphic Documents: Texts and Fragments from a Legacy (2011).
He also dedicates his time to translating poetry and drama (Pessoa, Pasolini, Neruda, Davio, Vallejo, etc.).

4.
From where am I looking when I am looking at these photos? From which fire? Am I alive? What horror do those
gazes see there, from where I am observing them?
Some people find the photographs of Goran Bertok
murky. But no: the photographs of Goran Bertok are
immensely beautiful and bright.

45

Interpretation

Andreas Trossek

When a Melancholic
Becomes an Export Article
(Extended Cut)
1

Dnes Farkas, Evident in Advance

17. I11 V 2014 Kumu Art Museum, 4th
floor, A-wing, graphic arts cabinet.

Dnes Farkas belongs to a generation of artists who were

too young in the 1990s when global interest in Post-Soviet
regions was at its highest. Clearly, nothing has come easily to this generation. When they started out in the 2000s,
standing in their way were not only the artist-dissidents
who had emerged triumphantly from the Soviet era but
also their own teachers, who had met with moderate international success and continued attention from curators
abroad. It was therefore somewhat predictable that, compared to their forerunners, this generation developed their
author positions in the Estonian art scene over a significantly longer period of time and in the process of a much
larger flow of information relying on (glocal) evolution

rather than (local) revolution as the key word. Indeed,

why should a 21st century artist in Estonia be occupied
with patricide on the scale of some local village brawl if
they can think bigger instead? So Evident in Advance,
last years Venice project now on display at the Kumu Art
Museum, is also a result of thought processes that originated in and around 2006 or 2007 when the artist, of Estonian and Hungarian roots, began to photograph his series
of paper models, which were mostly accompanied by quotations and textual fragments in multiple languages when
displayed at exhibitions.
As an art historian I have categorised Dnes Farkas as
a post-conceptualist.2 No creator likes categorisation, but
there are several reasons in the background in this case.
First, Farkas combines images and words in his work so
that the text is never reduced to mere caption nor the image
to mere illustration. This kind of artistic thinking only
becomes possible in the second half of the 20th century
when conceptualism declares the idea to be more important
than the execution and modern art museums across the
world fill with texts, books, archives and other such textual
installations by artists that place verbal information in the
foreground. (True, before that cubists and Dadaists too had
cut up fresh newspapers and glued together collages, but
the result in one way or another was reduced to a part of the
composition.) Second, Farkas handling of the material and
retro aesthetic of the image also indicate a conceptualist
legacy: we see here an artist who, in our current digital age,
continues to work with analogue technology and exhibits
a series of black and white photographs which inevitably
leave a nostalgic impression and are essentially not far
removed from, say, Bernd and Hilla Bechers architecture
photography of the 1970s. Third, there is also the historical background because traces of conceptualist thinking,
which subsequent generations of artists were in one way
or another compelled to critically relate to, were also to be
found in Estonian art of the 1970s and 1980s.

1 As always, different versions of this legend exist. According to one version

there was simply an extra zero in the price list, according to another version the
works were exhibited without a fixed price. (As always, the truth is out there, however, let us admit that the legend is always more powerful than the truth.)

2 Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia, online database (2012), see http://
www.cca.ee/kunstnikud/denes-farkas.

Three years ago when Estonia was in the midst of adopting the euro, a fine art photography fair was held in Tallinn
showing, among others, examples of work by Dnes Farkas,
an artist approaching his forties. Installed in display cases,
these black and white analogue photographs of delicate
paper models were suggestive of quiet, staged interiors,
exteriors and objects. Legend has it that the works were
not sold, despite the fact that due to a careless typo the
prices had been listed in kroons rather than euros.1 In other
words, the visitors all missed the chance to buy artworks
that will remain in the art history of Estonia of the 21st century at giveaway prices. Indeed, this may be declared with
some certainty now that Farkas has represented Estonia at
the 55th International Art Biennale in Venice and his work
is being shown at first-class art fairs like the Armory Show
and ARCOmadrid.

Glocal v. local

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

46

Andreas Trossek

Dnes Farkas, Evident in Advance, 2013, black and white photograph

47

Interpretation

The legacy of conceptualism and

methodology of deconstructivism

The marketing effort

Evident in Advance was the 2013 Estonian Pavilion show
in Venice and is therefore yesterdays news, as it were, for
the professionals. However, the subsequent fate and marketing efforts of the show within Estonia have been remarkable. While most of the previous Venice projects have been
shown to the local public in the Tallinn Art Hall block
or the Estonian Artists Association Hobusepea Gallery
(either before or after the Biennale, depending on the circumstances), this year the whole Venice project was hurled
into vans, basically on the closing day of the Biennale, and
brought straight to Kumu Art Museum as a newcomer
to shine in the Parnassian glory amidst the classics of art
history. This gesture can be read as an institutional compliment extended by the national museum to the Center for
Contemporary Arts Estonia, who has been producing the
Venice projects since 1997, but also as a desire on the part
of Kumu to museumise as quickly as possible each contemporary artist who has poked their nose outside of Estonia.
Lest it happen, God forbid, that a Venice artist should end
up receiving more recognition outside Estonia, as happened, for example, with Mark Raidpere in 2005 or Kristina
Norman in 2009. On the other hand, the facilities in Kumu
are always neat, clean and well lit, so why not. n

Alongside conceptualism, Farkas laconic pictorial language

has also drawn on the minimalist tradition, which necessarily adds a certain commerciality to his works-especially
in the Estonian context with its collective habits of consumption, where for decades Nordic modernist design
has been considered a sign of good taste. Still, the artists
fragmenting approach suggests destructive rather than
affirmative primary impulses: he does not believe; he does
not hope; he does not really engage in anything but sowing
doubts.
Also noticeable is the artists reliance on deconstructivist philosophy, or at least its methodology, which is often
associated with conceptualism. Like Jacques Derrida before
him, Dnes Farkas too seems not to believe that it is possible for him to tell the viewer his whole story since some
connotation, a trail, a translation error, a diffrance always
remains somewhere around the corner. It is therefore
hardly surprising that as a literary text Farkas project Evident in Advance leaves the impression of an intentionally
failed interpretation of Bruce Duffys book The World
As I Found It (1987), which in turn leaves the impression
of a failed interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein biography and so on.
The failure, therefore, is programmatic. A failure that
always takes us back to the logocentric prison of language,
speech and writing; one that is inevitably inscribed in this
chain of communication from the outset. What cannot
really fully be uttered cannot fully be thought through
beforehand either. There is no way out. And after the failures, we are left with only silence.

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

Andreas Trossek is an art historian who lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. In 2007 he completed a masters degree in Art History at the Estonian
Academy of Arts, where he is currently studying for a PhD. He works as
a writer and editor-in-chief of the KUNST.EE magazine for contemporary
visual art. His academic research focuses on art in the former Soviet Republic of Estonia during the 1970s and 1980s. From 2005 to 2010 he worked
as a curator and editor at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Estonia. He
specializes in the fields of creative photography, documentary projects and
new interdisciplinary approaches to the medium.

48

Avtor

49

Essay

Oto Rimele

The Image and its Shadow

The Static Frontal Image
How do we communicate with a work
of art, which we see hanging on the
wall in front of us? As observers, we
first move around in order to find the
best position possible for observing,
which would enable us to peacefully
explore the image in front of us. Our
gaze travels over the surface of the
image, sometimes encompassing the
whole, and sometimes only a specific
segment of it. Despite the dynamics
of movement of the eyes and the gaze,
it can be said that the observer views
a work of art statically and frontally.
Communication takes place between
the face of the paintings composition
and the observer who is not in motion.
The observer communicates with the
paintings statically and frontally.
(Figure 1)

The shadow parts appear in a

many paintings, and we say that the
artist has painted a shadow. The attitude towards the painting of a shadow
has undoubtedly changed during the
history of art. Although the shadow
has appeared in different forms during its optical existence, as well as in
different light and chromatic values
within a paintings composition, it has
always designated shadow in terms of
sign and symbol. The painted shadows, together with other elements
of the material as well as immaterial
world, form an integral part of the
paintings surface with which the
observer communicates statically and
frontally.
The observer communicates statically and frontally with the shadow,
which is an integral part of the image.
(Figure 2)

From the Frontal Image to

the Expansion of the Image
The observers communication with
a painting is not always frontal. For
instance, when looking at (Roman)
ground mosaics or Baroque ceiling
paintings, the observer changes the
vertical position of his/her body and
head. Robert Rauschenbergs Monogram is an example of the activation of
the dimensions of the ground space. It
is a ground combine painting, which
he created in the period between 1955
and 1959. An example of a contemporary ceiling composition is the spatial
ambience called Outside, Insight by
the American artist James Turrell. The
human body and perception are also
tested in the spatial compositions by
the artist Anish Kapoor, as for example
in the activation of the ground composition called Turning the World Inside
Out.
The frontal way is not the only way
the observer communicates with
paintings. (Figures 3, 4, 5, 6)

Figure 1:
The frontal approach in communicating with an
artwork

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

Figure 2:
Henry Matisse, Portrait of Madame Matisse, (The Green
Line), 1905, oil and tempera on canvas, 40.532.5cm,
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

50

Figure 3:
Andrea Pozzo, 1680, trompe loeil ceiling, SantIgnazio
Church, Rome

Oto Rimele

Figure 4:
Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 19551959, mixed
media, 106.6163.8cm. Moderna Museet Stockholm

Figure 5:
Anish Kapoor, Turning the World Inside Out II, 1995,
chromed bronze, 180180130cm, Anish Kapoor

Figure 6:
James Turell, Outside, Insight, 2011, Ytterjrna,
Sweden, photo: Stefanie Hessler

I introduce frontal communication with an image, which differs in

its activity from the ordinary static

Figure 7:
Oto Rimele, Illuminations (ILZ), 2003, Galerija Boidar Jakac, Former Monastery Church, Kostanjevica na Krki,
photo: Boris Gaberik

51

Essay

communication with a frontal painted

image. This kind of communication
can thus be called dynamic communication and demands from the observer
an active body position and perception.
Due to the activation of marginal and
(or) dorsal parts of the image and the
changing daylight, slow but evident
changes appear in the perception of the
image. We are witnessing the changing
of the image. This kind of work activates different points of observation,
and the phenomenon of the changing
image triggers the process of perceptive continuity in the observers gaze.
This means that the observer does not
contemplate the frontal part of the
image from an ideal point of view, but
his/her function is rather to activate
different points of observation. This
kind of observation demands a summing up of views. The daylight enables
this kind of image to generate different
images, and the observer is aware of the
continuity of the emerging and disappearing or changing of the image in
time. This kind of communication triggers in the observer the awareness that
the image is dependent on the moment
in which the observer, the image and
the daylight meet. When images which
emerged in the time of our observation disappear, they remain in the time
of our non-presence. This process of
continuous communication triggers in
the observer a mental co-creation of the
images.
Continuous communication demands an active observer who cocreates the dynamic space of his/her
inward mental image. (Figure 7)

Painted Images as
Generators of Colour and
Illuminants
A painted image communicates with
the observer through the forms and
colours articulated in the composition.
The observer communicates with the
colour and the form from the frontal

ARTWORDS 001, 2014

surface of the canvas. The colour enables the observer a sensual perception,
an emotional experience and a cognitive response. In this way, it activates
in the observer a space and an integral
perceptive experience. Colour is matter
which comes to life with the light in the
space and brings the observer information and a message of the state of light
but not the light itself. It is separated
from matter only by the human mind.
In the past, artists managed to separate
light from matter to a certain extent in
stained glass windows.
In my works, the materiality of
colour is hidden to the eyes. Colour is
present only in the reflection outside
the painted surface. A non-material
reflection appears as a reflection of
the colour matter. This reflection can
also be called a chromatic shadow of
the image because it emerges like a
shadow. When this non-material part
of the image, which surrounds the
image, is a chromatically intensive
shadow, which passes into chromatic
radiation, the shadow becomes its own
contrast the light. In the changing
appearance of the chromatic nonmaterial part, the light and the space
connect integrally with the painting
materiality into a non-material image,
which emerges and changes in the
observers active experience.
In my works, shadow is non-material, changeable; it is the most chromatic part of the image. When the
shadow changes in its radiation, it
takes over the function of light and
it becomes an illuminant.
(Figures 8, 9)

From Image to
Mental Space
For an observer, an image is thus not
only a matter enabling a sensual experience, an emotionally cognitive dimension of communication, but a spiritual
experience. Empirical and historical
dealings with images, which are placed

52

Figure 8:
Oto Rimele, J-H2-V, 2006, wooden construction,
colour, 1292227cm, photo: archive of the artist)

Figure 9:
Oto Rimele, OVUM-RO, 2011, plaster construction,
colour, 625113cm, photo: archive of the artist

in the frame of social and cultural studies, are very informative, but they need
to be understood only as part of communication as a layer which enables
the observer a socially based insight
into the already mentioned content
layer of the image. I believe that we

Oto Rimele

need to search for a form of communication of a higher quality between the

observer and the image. I have in mind
a more direct communication with the
work of art itself and the activation of
non-material bridges. An art image is
a body with which we communicate,
and we need to start believing again in
the authenticity of the direct experience and communication on a personal
level of an individuals spirit. We need
to walk away from the alienated individual characterized by numbers and
towards the real individual and his/
her spiritual potential and individual
being.
The notion of ambience includes
both, images and the individual. A
perceptive state of material and spiritual entities emerges, which form a
whole. The observers body and the
paintings body enable, together with
the material presence of the architectural space, an intertwining also
on the level of ideas and the mental
psychological state. The artist and the
observer appear in this intertwining,
and together they determine the image
and enable the entrance into the area
and the potential of the spirit.

Figure 11:
Oto Rimele, Paintings, 2010, Galerija Boidar Jakac, Lapidarium, Kostanjevica na Krki,
photo: Andrej Cvetni

The world of images that I am presenting is born in me as the artist

and continues as a confrontation
with the spiritual potential of the individual. And so we are here in order
for the individual non-materiality to
be triggered in us.
(Figures 10, 11, 12, 13)

Figure 13:
Oto Rimele, The Light of Shadow, 2014, Crculo de
Bellas Artes, Madrid, photo: Damjan varc

Figure 10:
Oto Rimele, Illuminations (ILS), 2003, Galerija Boidar
Jakac, Former Monastery Church, Kostanjevica na
Krki, photo: Boris Gaberik

Figure 12:
Oto Rimele, virtual installation at White Cube, 2013,
London

53

Oto Rimele (1962, Maribor) is a painter, creator of artistic spatial placements and musician,
who experiments with the expansion of the
medium of painting by means of light catchers and generators of coloured shadows. He is a
professor at the University of Maribor.