{"id":116,"date":"2009-04-24T15:33:51","date_gmt":"2009-04-24T13:33:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.worldofart.org\/current\/archives\/116"},"modified":"2018-07-25T15:41:28","modified_gmt":"2018-07-25T13:41:28","slug":"branislav-dimitrijevic-workshop2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.worldofart.org\/arhiv.worldofart.org\/current\/archives\/116","title":{"rendered":"Branislav Dimitrijevi\u0107: Interpreting and Situating Contemporary Art: Observation, Participation, Motivation, Research and Empathy"},"content":{"rendered":"

WORLD OF ART
\nLaboratorium of Curatorial Practices
\nSeason 12: 2008\/09<\/p>\n

Seminar \u2013 Workshop No.3<\/strong><\/p>\n

May 15-16, 2009<\/strong>
\nSCCA Project room, Metelkova 6, Ljubljana
\nApplication date prolonged: May 13, 2009<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

“Art is what makes life more interesting than art.” One of those catchy sayings that we feel will bring us closer to the \u2018essence\u2019 of what we want to say or what we want to do with the fact that we want to say something about and do something with what we consider art. I am not sure where I read it, but I may recall that it relates to the work of the performance artist Gina Pane, or maybe to someone else of that generation, because in general it has that air of the 60s and 70s when the question “What is art?” not only mattered, but was asked to the point of obsession, ending up in ironical violence as in the seminal work from 1977 by Ra\u0161a Todosijevi\u0107 : Was ist Kunst?<\/p>\n

Nowadays, the question is no longer what art is, but what can we do with it.<\/strong> It seems that the answer to the first question has become obsolete, unnecessary rhetoric, something to keep silent about. As one curator recently maintained in his “curator\u2019s statement”: “I think that if you are constantly pointing out where or what art is, you may underestimate the spectator\u2019s ability to relate to it.”<\/p>\n

It is a symptom of contemporary art which tends to champion (real) experience over interpretation.<\/strong> But, a certain overvaluation of “personal experience” is evident everywhere. Only-in-direct-experience-we-trust!, may be a slogan of the times; experience becomes the basis for true, reliable and authentic knowledge about culture and the self. Contemporary art is just one of the manifestations of this overvaluation, with the most apparent ones to be found in the confessional mode of the popular media \u2013 from television talk shows to big brothers and trauma drama. There is therefore an established ideological connection between “experience” and “voyeurism”, between a desire to be an active participant in the world-at-large and an ultimate commoditization of experience.<\/strong> How does one handle this without reinstating established types of media critique or reverting to the evident recognition of the standard logic of developed capitalism? Debord cannot help us any longer.<\/p>\n

Cities on the move, artists on the move, transitional spaces, transitional societies, mobility, exchange and direct participation: here is how the contemporary art world is usually described. The type of artist created here does not belong to any fixed circumstances, but is dedicated to mobility, globetrotting, to discovering differences, to a constant contextual flux.<\/strong> “Artists must be tourists in our society to stay alive,” says another curator\u2019s statement.<\/p>\n

Mobility comes out of a need for individual self-organization outside of institutional confinement. Yet that mobility is linked to the governing mechanism itself of developed capitalism. The capitalist entrepreneur and his critical “other” are on the same mission of permanent mobility. As Brian Holmes remarked, “The whole ambiguity of capitalism, in its concrete, historical evolution, is to combine tremendous directive power over the course and content of human experience with a structurally necessary space for the development of individual autonomy”.<\/p>\n