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1997
action
A
person was begging in the gallery
at the opening of the Murder1 exhibition.
Ignoring her, Belgrade audience
was admiring the photo.
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"Thus, for example, the action of the association p.RT (then signed as "Anonymus authors") which was performed in the course of the group exhibition named "Murder 1" is based on series of unrecognisable instances, on crossing the "barrier" of artistic and non-artistic restraints; insofar that both the artistic creativity and the place of the spectator are out of focus, the proscribed unity of time, place and media is abandoned as well as aesthetic or anti- aesthetic puritanism, be it engaged or autonomous. Two of the photographs on the wall of a gallery appear "aestheticized"; by the simple procedure of blurring the scene so that it becomes out of focus, (one is a scene from the street , and the other is an outstretched hand holding a coin) they do not affect our consciousness as a mirror image of the world around us, but rather as an afterimage of that world, as a simulation of the image that has been recorded in our memory. These photographs speak about the reality of photography, and express the same thought Susan Sontag expresses at one point: "photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life."1 On opening night, the whole action, however, is a question for the spectators to answer considering their own experience on entering the gallery. Namely, there was a little beggar girl for them to encounter; she was begging in the middle of the exhibiting space and on average, she got the same sort of reception as she does in the street; some people chased her away, some ignored her pretending not to have seen, others were more generous. The barrier between the social space and the space intended for the manifestation of art did not exist, just as in the minds of the people present there was no connection between the exhibited photographs and the presence of the little beggar girl. The artistic activity was completely that of mimicry, whereas the activity of reality was excluded as a non-art, as something belonging to some other domain implicating other type of relations. The whole action was taking place at a non-place, the place without organic coherence, where there is no chance of the meaning of art or social relations being understood, let alone the possible interdependencies between the two. A gallery became "a non-place",
which can be defined in Marc Auge's terms of non-symbolised space which
occupies it, as opposed to symbolised space which occupies places. The
gallery becomes just a transit zone (as an airport, metro station, or
an elevator) where "the individual feels himself to be a spectator
without paying much attention to the spectacle".2 In other words,
an spectator comes in with a traditional preconception that a gallery
is a place of transfiguration ; that that which is inside it still has
something to say about that which is elsewhere, so that "elsewhere"
continues to be the primary category, to such an extent that "here"
stays unperceived. The already mentioned work of the association p.RT
treated the "murder" announced in the title of the project as
an exclusion by means of ignoring and the art exhibition as the place
where lapse of memory concerning social disorder is at work." |
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