CZECH DREAM - a post socialist hypermarket :: Jana and Jiří Ševčíkovi

Barbara Kruger, an American artist, is the author of the famous statement I go shopping, therefore I am. The slogan from her poster - an ironic perversion of a famous philosophical statement - brings us into a situation, in which all the media perform different forms of seduction in order to fulfil our needs, in which even culture has long ago become a product and we have all become entangled in the market system. It was this circulation into which Marcel Duchamp has placed art one hundred years ago. He exhibited a mass production object as an object of art and thus turned the artistic creation into an equivalent of a capitalist production. The products are consumed in a feverish tempo and the accelerated consumption requires an increased production, which again encourages consumption, as we all know in theory from Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Today the artists use the fact that consumption and production become more and more entangled and that production becomes post-production, that is making use of, sampling, creating collage, cutting out of the ready made products. This was very well described by a French sociologist Nicolas Bourriaud in his book Postproduction. Culture As Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World.
The artists move happily in this global culture and hedonically consume in order to produce and vice versa. According to Bourriaud, a DJ and a programmer become the heraldic figures of the new age. The question remains how to avoid being drowned in the consumer culture, how to keep a critical view in the never ending process of satisfying one’s delight of consuming. In order to fulfil their old critical duty towards the society, the artists have to look for new strategies. They have to get around in the same way as hackers do: they have to acquire the system, identify with it and occupy it as thoroughly as their own house. If they treated the system ironically or passed moral judgements over it, no one would believe them. Only when the artists control the system and seemingly totally identify themselves with it, they can uncover its obscene basis. At the same time they put the viewers in a situation that requires his or her critical attitude. They do not answer their questions, but ask them.
We believe that this is the context of the CZECH DREAM project, that has started as a shooting of a film about those, to whom the statement of Barbara Kruger /I go shopping therefore I am/ applies. But the project has grown and a stage for a spectacular show was created as its “postproduction” or its parallel product. It illustrates what our “realistic” socialist life has turned into. For some of the participants, the staging of this show might change an entertaining game into an unpleasant awakening. But this is the role of contemporary art: to show how manipulated our everyday “reality” is by the means of this very “reality”.

SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: STILL NO ANSWERS :: AMY TAUBIN

The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, the sixties counterculture at large, and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

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STALKER AND ME :: Igor Grubić

Tarkovsky’s film Stalker aligns with the works rendering spiritual quests on screen in a most complex manner, conceiving meanings outside the real and ordinary experience in the domain of human unrests and subconscience, and addressing fundamental bonds with the nature and anxieties over the future of humanity.

The film obliquely dwells upon resistance to the domineering patterns of collectivism and respective idolatry, and convictions opposed to the prevailing social systems and conventions, suggesting that the only revolution is the individual spiritual evolution propelled by courage of each person who dares pursuing a loftier sense, a self-cognition.
A group of people enters an imaginary zone where only a few of them can survive. Apt and brave individuals live surrounded by dark totalitarian and detached systems, and passive and indifferent mediocrity.
The zone is a spiritual home they pursue, the only home befitting them – a road they must take to achieve a higher purpose.
Their urge to find and enter the zone can be viewed as a desire for an inner peace, self-cognition and spiritual purge.

Back in the 80s I’ve seen almost every film Tarkovsky had ever made. However, I managed to get a copy of the Stalker much later, at the outset of the war in Croatia. Somehow, what was going on around and inside me deeply corresponded to the contents of this film. And, perhaps, this is why it had such a deep impact on me, being for a while a true relief in whatever I was doing.

Beginning of the war in 1991, proximity of death, and cruelty of people found me in a state of shock and severe identity crisis.
In this outer destruction I have seen and recognized an inner self-destruction. I realized I did not want to belong to a group of people sharing a passive existence, and allowing for alien circumstance to govern their lives.
I’ve decided to take full responsibility over my own. In order to accomplish this, I had to face my inner demons: laziness, conformism, egoism, self-obsession, fear of authority, greed, and various mechanisms of self-deception.
Thus, like in the Stalker, began my quest, a personal spiritual revolution, an ongoing struggle demanding ever alert self-observation.
Through this work on myself changes occurred – release from fear, and opening to others.
The sense of rapid passing of life brings me to a conclusion that the only life worth living is conscientious and responsible one.

Translation: Irena Šentevska

YOUR SHIT—YOUR RESPONSIBILITY :: Škart :: 2000-present

Škart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, as a 2-person-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Škart (means ’scrap’ in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protić and Djordje Balmazović, who call themselves ‘collective-in-progress’ and base their activities on ’selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication’. Škart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management. Their work is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation’s populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Škart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

Jelena Vesić

ARTICULATION OF PROTEST :: Hito Steyerl :: video-lecture

Every articulation is a montage of various elements - voices, images, colors, passions or dogmas - within a certain period of time and with a certain expanse in space. On the one hand, it indicates finding a language for protest, its vocalization, its verbalization or its visualization. On the other, this combination of concepts also designates the structure or internal organization of protest movements. In other words, there are two different kinds of concatenations of different elements: one is at the level of symbols, the other at the level of political forces. The dynamic of desiring and refusal, attraction and repulsion, the contradiction and the convergence of different elements unfolds at both levels.

Naturally, protest movements are articulated at many levels: at the level of their programs, demands, self-obligations, manifestos and actions. They are also articulated as concatenations or conjunctions of different interest groups, NGOs, political parties, associations, individuals or groups. Alliances, coalitions, fractions, feuds or even indifference are articulated in this structure. At the political level as well, there is also a form of montage, combinations of interests, organized in a grammar of the political that reinvents itself again and again. According to which rules, though, is this montage organized? Who does it organize with whom, through whom, and in which way? What is the image of a protest movement? Is it the sum of the heads of speakers from the individual groups added together? Is it pictures of confrontations and marches? Is it new forms of depiction? Is it the reflection of forms of a protest movement? Or the invention of new relations between individual elements of political linkages? With these thoughts about articulation, I refer to a very specific field of theory, namely the theory of montage or film cuts.

Hito Steyerl

* The video-lecture by Hito Steyerl was recorded and presented as a part of discussion program of No More Reality-Step 2, held in Belgrade in 2006.

CALL FOR DEMONSTRATION :: Annika Ström :: 2006

If my son demonstrates for a Museum of Contemporary Fine Art now it could take 20 years for it to happen. Then he’ll be 25 and he’ll have been fighting for a Museum for 20 years.
Annika Ström’s videos, songs and paintings are centered around the banality and the preoccupations of her own everyday life as an artist. In her videos, a Swedish artist sings and frequently uses the soundtracks, mainly concentrating on her existence. Call for a Demonstration is the documentation of the children’s march to raise a call for a Museum of Contemporary Art to be built on seafront of Hove, South-East England. This video performance brings Annika Ström’s observations about her immediate environment into dialogue with ongoing public debate about the re-development of this seafront, recently a target of elaborate gentrification proposals from the side of commercial interests. In calling for a Museum of Contemporary Art to be built the artist questions the nature of the civic realm and the place of art and art institutions within it. At the core of the project is the children’s demonstration which took place in Hove on Saturday, 24th of June 2006. Call for a Demonstration archives Ström’s act of preparation for an unexpected museum of the future, and further creates the possibility for it to arrive. Through the children’s demonstration we see the matrix of competing economic interests in Hove with fresh eyes, as they open new visions based on the principle of pleasure rather than the cost/benefit analysis.
Poetic, utopian and unreal, this project remind us also on a similar performance No More Reality organized in 1991 by Philippe Parreno, where a group of children were demonstrating with No More Reality banners on an American Campus. Call for a demonstration is a video made out of the performance, and also a book published by onestar press.

Claire Staebler