Category: ARTMargins Online: Articles

The creative aspect of the humanities has not yet found its recognition in the established classification and methodology of scientific disciplines. Are the humanities a purely scholarly field, or should there be some active, constructive supplement to them? We know that technology serves as the practical extension (“application”) of natural sciences and politics as the extension of social sciences.

Both technology and politics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study objectively. Is there any activity in the humanities that would correspond to this transformative status of technology and politics? In the following schema, the third line demonstrates a … Read more

About a year ago when Emil Hrvatin and I proposed a performance project addressing collectivity, I couldn’t anticipate the resistance and confusion the term alone would bring.

A dozen responses from programmers, critics, and theorists from the experimental field of European dance and performance, whom we asked for a critical reflection on the project proposal, resonated in a consensus of questions:

“Aren’t you aware of how ideologised and outmoded the term is? Do you mean collectivity as a modus operandi or as a topic of research? In other words, are you working collectively or on collectivity? We would be happier … Read more

Oleg Aronson, Metakino. Moscow: Ad marginem, 2003.

Cinéma-1: L’image-mouvement (1983) and Cinéma-2: L’image-temps (1985), Gilles Deleuze’s two famous books on the cinema, are hallmarks in the history of film-theory: they display a shift of interest from thinking about the peculiarities of the medium to a much wider context.

For Deleuze, the main authors-directors of the history of the cinema do not think in notions, but in pictures. His writings on the cinema bestowed philosophical dignity on the field. That film-theory has gained a better reputation in institutions of education and culture all over the world during the last … Read more

In his essay Musealization of the East, Boris Groys lucidly detects a basic problem in the attitude towards the visual arts of Eastern Europe (the former communist states).

He claims that it is not the excessive exoticism of East European art that would cause it not to be musealized in the West because things perceived as foreign and exotic are successfully included in the Western museum environment.

The reason it cannot be understood as art in the west lies in the formal and aesthetic similarity between Eastern “non-art” (the western perception) and Western “art”.

The decisive difference, however, is … Read more

Vladimir Dvornikovic, an enthusiastic Yugoslav, imagined the Yugoslav supra-ethnic entity as a collective voice of the South Slavic “blood and race.”

Since publishing his monumental study on ethno-psychology entitled Characterology of the Yugoslavs in 1939, that marker of identity has disappeared twice: in 1941 as a consequence of invading Nazism, and in 1991 as a consequence of imploding Titoism.

Blood and race were once again tied to language as a distinguishing marker of ethnic particularity.

The latter fragmentation of Yugoslavia through the formation of new state entities arrived as result of the differentiation of the Yugoslav idea through the notion … Read more

Public vs Private: Cultural Policies and Art Market in Central and South-Eastern Europe Conference, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, 4 February – 4 April, 2004

Within the framework of the second part of the Balkan Trilogy project, initiated in 2003 by Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, the conference Public vs. Private: Cultural Policies and the Art Market in Central and South-eastern Europe in Ljubljana took place in early April.

The second partner of the conference is the European network project republicart, which organizes a series of conferences and symposia that take place in 2004 in Vienna, Linz, Ljubljana, London, Lüneburg … Read more

Art and the indeterminacy of urban society

In civilisations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.(Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 no.1 (1986): 272.) – Michel Foucault

Consider the physical – and figurative – context within which a majority of our thoughts are taking place. The city is the place (physical or otherwise) from which most journeys emanate and are directed towards:

The model for the contemporary world. As large urban concentrations of developing countries expand in an abnormal fashion, new urban schemes are … Read more

Rethinking Malevich, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, February, 2004

In February of 2004, the New York based Malevich Society organized a two-day conference Rethinking Malevich, in celebration of the 125th anniversary of the birth of the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich.

The Elebash Recital Hall of the CUNY Graduate Center located in New York’s glamorous intersection of Fifth Avenue and 34^th Street housed the event.

Two years ago members of the Malevich family established “The Malevich Society”, a private non-profit organization, with the mission to advance knowledge about the pioneer of modern art, Kazimir Malevich, and his work.

By … Read more

Call Me Istanbul ist mein Name, ZKM, Karlsruhe, 18 April – 8 August, 2004

Mangelos (retrospective) and a project by Marjetica Potrc, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 20 May – 19 September, 2004

L’arte del mediterraneo, MACRO, Rome, 3 June, 2004

Cetinje Biennial, Montenegro, July 2004 

Coming from Slovenia – a young nation state ever-navigating between the ideas of Central Europe and its recent Yugoslavian past, and slated to join the European Union in May 2004 – I am intrigued by the increasing interest that the region referred to as the Balkans, or as the more politically correct … Read more

Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, 8 October – 30 November 

Despite the ongoing vogue in rehabilitating “avant-garde” and “experimental” artists within the institutions of art historical orthodoxy, one artist whose work has so far escaped systematic anthologisation is the post-war American painter Cy Twombly.

In Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois’s 1997 study, Formless: A User’s Guide, Twombly is enrolled as an exemplar of certain tendencies (otherwise associated with European artists like Wols and Fautrier) towards the scatalogical and deconstructive in American art.

Or, to put it otherwise, a “Europeanisation” of American art—precisely that against which such critics as Clement Greenberg had … Read more

Kunst & Verbrechen: Art without Crime. Hebbel Theater am Ufer, Berlin, 10.31-11.02.2003

The book “Blue Lard” by Vladimir Sorokin was taken to court in 2002 on the first of November by the Putin-linked youth movement “The United Ones” on pornography charges. The Propagate-man of pornographic literature was going to the detention cell of the police-department in Berlin.

On the weekend of October 31st a new theatre-project opened in Berlin. The Project, became an investigative zone in which the laws of art, the business side of the art world, and the law itself were all under examination.

“Kunst … Read more

The project “Russian Art 1860-1940 in Western Museums: Information Database on the Internet” is a new development of the major Cultural Heritage Database Project with the web address art-russia.org. The entire project is implemented under the patronage and with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.

The Project is funded by a number of foundations operating globally, such as the Solomon R.Guggenheim Foundation, the Judith Rothschild Foundation, New York, and Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne & Zug; and by the Russian government, the Russian Cultural Initiative Foundation, and the Rosizo State Museum and Exhibition Center.

The Initiator … Read more

Site Specific Art Projects in St. Petersburg, July 2003

2003 saw the Russian City of St Petersburg celebrating its 300th anniversary. The traditional Birthday mix of nostalgia and future plans and possibilities is manifest in the festivities with particular emphasis on cultural exchange.

This has brought with it increased international interest much focused on the city’s architectural heritage and future physical and cultural expansion.

A brief internet search brings up various conferences highlighting these themes: The International Architecture Forum’s “St. Petersburg: window on the future” and “Preserving the World’s Great Cities,” the Faberge workshop on architectural preservation, “New uses for … Read more

Grzegorz Sztwiertnia, The Painter’s Eye and Hand, 6 May – 18 June, 2003, Zderzak Gallery, Cracow.

For many years Grzegorz Sztwiertnia has been playing with various definitions of the artist’s persona and its relation to artistic production.

During the 1990s, the thirty-five year old artist was recognised, hiding himself behind a screen of his erudition and mockery, only by a limited number of viewers.

Such an attitude allows him to examine the sick body of culture and focus on the missing elements of our incomplete cultural mosaic.

Sztwiertnia has mastered both the brush and the pen; in addition to … Read more

When Hitler took power in 1933, many artists and intellectuals left Germany and continued their work after emigration. One of the countries that provided a new “home” to a number of those exiled was Czechoslovakia.

By January 1934, a group of German artists had already published in Prague the first issue of a satiric weekly magazine called Simplicus. Although the Czech version of this periodical was terminated early on, the German version, initiated by Hans Nathan and Heinz Pol, continued to be published under the title Der Simpl through 1939.

Bringing together Czech and German artists and writers, including … Read more