Andreja Kuluncic: DISILLUSIONED ART (original) (raw)
Related papers
Survival tools in the art of Andrea Kulunčić
2014
Media information control and the impossibility to access education and acquire work skills within the economic and ideological matrix of neoliberal capitalism, lead to the political passivization of an individual since the political power is concentrated in the hands of the ruling minority, such apolitically passive individual-is also a victim of the unjust distribution of social goods. If we agree with Ranciere's saying that art can become a powerful means of struggle for distributive justice and more ethical social order, active field of art is unquestionably political in nature or at least artists like Andrea Kulunčić consider it to be such. Concerned with the question of how to become aware of the necessity of politically class / gender conscious relation to reality, artist Andreja Kulunčić seeks the alternative to the existing hegemonic social order in the ideas of self-management and direct democracy, that is in the inheritance of a failed social experiment whose system of social values is seen by her as an incentive for simultaneous critique of the existing situation, but also for its transformation in accordance with the idea of justice and social equity which are part of the positive experiences of socialism. Her artistic projects thus also have the character of collaborative social (micro) experiments-platforms for the exchange of knowledge and experiences in self-organization. Artistic / political strategies used by the artist are directed toward encouraging an individual / a citizen to take responsibility for the political processes in their own, and therefore in the wider community. By deconstructing the myth of liberal democracy as a space of pluralistic harmony and consensus, Andreja Kulunčić at the same time reveals the mechanisms that generate permanent inequality. Economic and social crisis (Greece, Spain), attempts of collective resistance (the Occupy movement, Indignados), the phenomenon of precariousness which annuls the differences between "traditional" social classes, and a range of other social, economic and political phenomena are all arguments in favor of the dusk of a spent, unjust social order. But on the other hand, we are witnessing its toughness, its capacity to assimilate and transform, which can be prevented only by a clear vision of a new and just society. But if we agree with Heraclitus which claims that one can not set foot twice in the same river, and accepting at the same time the thesis about a series of positive values of the socialist experience, the question which arises and which Andrew Kulunčić tries to answer in her works-is exactly the one about the relevance and functionality of ideas of self-organization and self-management-today. In the text thus we are dealing with the works of "community art" in the way in which Andreja Kulunčić defines it, as well as with the analysis of (cor)relation of political and artistic strategies, taking her work as case studies through which we explore the nature and characteristics of artistic discourse which sees / founds itself politically, training us to take control over the working conditions, self-organizing and political action.
2010
This proposal suggests an interdisciplinary approach encompassing the combination of urban sociological research and artistic intervention in urban settings. We will consider the integration of digital artworks in public spaces, chosen for their ability to generate engaging and innovative experiences as well as extending a virtual layer of meaning over real spaces. It is our premise that the aptitude for critical analysis and research of objects and tendencies within daily experience normally invisible through habitual perceptions that certain artistic interventions carry, might contribute to the development of an enriched relationship between art and the questioning processes typical of sociology, more specifically concerning its objective of deconstructing reality for analytical purposes. We will thus seek to demonstrate that such a critical analysis of daily existence, which can be found both on the artistic and sociological productions, might become a fertile ground for an emerg...
Urban Public Space. Facing the Challenges of Mobility and Aestheticization. Editor Oleg Pachenkov, 2013
Urban public space continues to be the focus of debate regarding its conceptualization and how it is designed, (re)produced and managed. Nowadays public spaces are facing new challenges conceptually and practically. This book focuses on two of them: mobility and aestheticization. Mobility and flows are considered to be key characteristics of the post-modern era. While for some scholars it means the «end of place», others are trying to re-conceptualize it by bringing together notions of space, place, mobility and identity. Still surprisingly few authors address the concept of public space in this respect. Principles of aesthetic and diverse forms of aestheticization seem to have affected urban space and culture throughout Modernity, forming a dimension where power and conflict around urban space are performed. In this book nine authors with social science and arts backgrounds from six countries discuss how these processes shape the life of modern cities, and where the social sciences should move for a better understanding of them.
The author addresses the problems of the metropolis, philosophy of localness and the arts. The metropolis is a topographical, physical and communicative, as well as cultural entity. Behind the cultural valence there is however still something more-a metaphysical community. The local orientation of a human being brings about the common creation of the space, which involves not only pride in one's identity, but also a sense of the infinite, the impossible, the incomprehensible, and the strange. The author analyzes the exhibitions of The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. How does CCCB describe the experience of localness and the metropolis?
Creation of relations as an art medium. On the art practices of Andreja Kulunčić
FRAKCIJA, a Performing Arts Magazine, nr. 58/59, 2011
The modern art discourse is primarily a discourse of exhibition practices, and that discourse implies a sort of disorder in the traditional division of labour within the artistic system; one where the artist creates, the curator selects and exhibits, and the spectator observes and contemplates. The fact that there is no "ontological" difference between creating and exhibiting art has been clear to us since Duchamp, and that results in, amongst other things, blurred roles of two of the three functions, those of the artist and the curator. It remains to be seen what happens with the third function; the one of spectator who was, first through dominance of poetics of the open form, and later through practice of the so-called institutional critique, extricated from the comfortable position of an "innocent" observer and who became involved in the production itself. In his 1998 Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud offered a reading of artistic practices of the '90s inspired by information culture. Bourriaud based his insights largely on reception theory and the critical practices oriented toward the perception sphere, in other words, that which is usually referred to as the "second wave" of institutional critique; which is to say, those artistic practices oriented towards not so much the artistic apparatus, or the museum-gallery system together with its economic and political context, as towards the social network of art, the wider ideological context, or in Bourriaud's words, "the whole of human relations and their social context". In doing so, we should be "learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical evolution. In other words, the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist". 01 Thus, the artist gets involved in the already existing global trend (in the '90s, these were the spaces "colonised" by the mass media and the culture of spectacle) and the governing production conditions, and it is relational practices in particular, according to Bourriaud, that better fit the contemporary socioeconomic circumstances. Namely, during the dominance of the tertiary sector or the service industry, artists, as post-political producers, become providers of cultural services, which is a thesis he elaborates on in his subsequent work, Postproduction.
2019
It is impossible to consider that architecture relies solely on its own systems of representation because space always comes through images. The history of architectural representation testifies that modern media of photography, film and TV are a relevant component of its historical evolution. It means that we trust camera as a model of a faithful reproduction of a reality and the possibility to represent this reality in our collective cinematic imagination. Likewise, presenting recorded spaces on screen means that film becomes a vast intellectual archive of the daily practice of urban space, the changing society and material culture. In this way, film presents evolving conceptions of architecture and urban spaces. Curiously, what happens in reverse is that the screenic environment has redesigned architecture, at least the way we think of architecture. Therefore, to talk about architecture is to talk about the screen as space-framing device in the media environment. This post-Cartesian space of mediated vision remains within the delimited bounds of a frame, on a screen.