SANDRA KRIŽIĆ ROBAN

Gorgona: A Thought for March — “Nothing”

Gorgona is best viewed as a complex whole from which it is difficult to single out a particular activity or a dominant art medium. The mythical status of this group—whose members are connected by existentialist philosophy, spaces of isolation and quietness, as well as by intellectual contemplation on “nothing”—has been achieved by subversive activity within the framework of the dominant ideology of that time, beyond the boundaries delineated by politicians, institutions, and other players on the official scene. There is no universal definition of this group, because, as they put it, “definitions are only a simplified description of facts … they describe just one thing”.¹ Gorgona is also often mentioned as a proto-conceptual group that anticipated art practices of the 1970s, such as the book as artwork, the art of behaviour, language as a medium, and art as idea, among other things.²

pokretu (Highlights – Collection in Motion) (Zagreb: Muzej suvremene umjetnosti 2009) p. 21.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 121/2013, pp. 9–17.

SANDRA KRIŽIĆ ROBAN

Miljenko Horvat: Heralding Sebald

Miljenko Horvat was the youngest member of the Gorgona Group, an architect and artist whose poetic collages are a reflection of his introverted nature. Assembled from different objects, they look as if they heralded W. G. Sebald’s method of exploring memories introduced several decades later. We perceive them as remnants of a self-denying activity involving a careful selection of “discarded and trivial material”,¹ often considered in the context of Art informel. However, contrasted with the work of other artists within the movement, Horvat’s approach to collecting objects and saving them from oblivion is unique.
By the beginning of the 1960s, he had been noticed for his innovative ideas, for compositions that were actually a reflection of his state of mind; often incomprehensible to others, they managed to retain his privacy. He introduced word samples into some of his compositions as unavoidable traces of life, but he covered them with white paint, obliterating the meanings and connections that could indicate a narrative, transforming the reality he faced. He achieved a similar effect with scenes shot in different European cities; he was interested in anonymous places, stairs, dilapidating walls, and passageways with graffiti covered by layers of torn posters. This reflected the atmosphere of the Gorgonian nothing—“a void in which essence dwells”.²¹Zdenko Rus, Apstraktna umjetnost u Hrvatskoj 1: Slikarstvo, egzistencija, apstrakcija (Abstract Art in Croatia 1: Painting, Existence, Abstraction) (Split: Logos, 1985), p. 55.²This is a paraphrase of Lao Tzu’s words. See Josip Vaništa, “Misli za februar” (Thoughts for February) (1964), a type-written text on paper, in Branka Stipančić, Josip Vaništa: Vrijeme Gorgone i Postgorgone (The Time of Gorgona and Post-Gorgona) (Zagreb: Kratis, 2007), p. 30.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 121/2013, pp. 17–20.

JOANNA WARSZA

Into a Nightmarish, Unknown Future

A.R. is a unique phenomenon amidst artistic and civic practice in Poland. Active since 1974, the group—which is situated among the fields of performance art, theatre, urban intervention, civic disobedience, film, music, publishing, social and cultural research—has produced a large body of non-conformist and uncompromising work. Rooted in the tradition of student theatre and counterculture, they started off as a collective of six members: Janusz Bałdyga, Jolanta Krukowska, Cezary Marczak, Zbigniew Olkiewicz, and Krzysztof Żwirblis, as well as Wojciech Krukowski in the role of artistic director. Their undertaking was called “theatre of behaviour and visual narrative”, believing that “radical art and social commitment do not have to exclude each other”.
Looking back at A.R.’s practice, one can draw a calendar of socio-political events in communist and post-communist Poland: from the “socialist welfare regime” under the leadership of reformist Edward Gierek in the 1970s, followed by the rise of Solidarność and the implementation of martial law in the 1980s, to the round-table negotiations and the first free elections in 1989, as well as the confusion, euphoria, and disappointment of the shadow economy and the turbo-capitalist 1990s. A.R. was always there, diagnosing what had gone wrong (e.g., in the different versions of their theatre performance “Życie codzienne po Wielkiej Rewolucji” [Everyday Life After the Revolution] that has been ongoing since 1991) and where it is leading us to.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 121/2013, pp. 21–31.

WENDY TRONRUD

Where I′m Calling From

Alejandro Cesarco’s artwork, “Where I′m Calling From”, borrows its title from this (Raymond Carver′s, ed.)story and bares a number of affective likenesses. Like Carver’s story, the story here is in the references, its borrowed intentionality, the use of pictures to not only allude to the importance of a particular person, text, or experience, but to illustrate that the place of address is its own context, is in the act of telling itself. As in many of Cesarco’s pieces, the issue of authorship is an affective one. Similar to London, who thanks the source of his blatant appropriation, Cesarco also creates thankfully. We see this through the more explicit presences of Susan Sontag, Lawrence Weiner, Cole Porter, Ellsworth Kelly, Roland Barthes, among others.
The artwork clearly alludes to the form of a book; it is a book of stories told by pictures. After the dedication to Sontag, “A Way to Begin”, provides a conceptual framework for the piece itself. This page is comprised of actual beginnings Cesarco photographed from a variety of Jorge Luis Borges′s stories. The quotation is material: Cesarco visually tells us that these are another’s words through their photographic reproduction. The beginnings appropriated here, like in Carver′s story, portray moments of hearsay or the retelling of a story told by someone else. Together they make clear that the act of retelling is less an example of faithful repetition than it is itself a new story, a new beginning. The act of remembering is partly an act of fiction, in other words. The use of the book format allows for the narrative structure of this kind of address to be the real subject of this piece.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 121/2013, pp. 49–58.

T.J. DEMOS

Spectro-Aesthetics 1/4 On (In)Sensible Politics

Once your eyes are opened to the world of ghosts you start to see them everywhere. Most recent for me was viewing the ambiguous, tantalising photographs of Trevor Paglen that investigate the shadowy existence of “ghost detainees” rendered to “black sites” by “spectral companies”.¹ What’s interesting in these images, as well as his related shots of classified US satellites and drone aircraft, is that although Paglen provides proof of various “war-on-terror” procedures and technologies—through extremely long-range shots and digital enhancement techniques—the results remain murky at best. His photographic “evidence” could also be said to reveal the indeterminate meaning at the heart of such images, contingent as they are on the artist’s explanatory framework, as much as anything else.
To get a better grip on those pictures, I consulted Thomas Keenan’s essay included in the new Zone Books publication Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism.² The book challenges the standard interpretive practice of directing the analytical gaze solely on the image, in favour of taking account of the wider “image-complex” that surrounds it, including the social, economic, and political conditions of production and distribution in which the image is embedded. For otherwise, we risk a certain fetishisation of the isolated representation, and a “spectralisation”, I would add, of the wider mesh of framing conditions that surround it. As such the book revitalises a contextualist methodology for image and environmental analysis.

¹ See Trevor Paglen and A. C. Thompson, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (New York: Melville House, 2006).

² Meg McLagan and Yates McKee (ed.), Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism (New York: Zone Books, 2012).

Text feature in Camera Austria International 121/2013, pp. 73–74.