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history practical info |
Pogačar's "systems" of art, culture and society are based on the notion of parasitism of a multifaceted character: (i) There are certain analogies with the parasitism of living organisms
(an organism always hangs onto another organism; the relationship with
the other organism, body, system, institution is vital and productive,
but also lethal). The artist consents to being a "parasite", but only when he presents himself as a "parasitic institution" that finds its body within the institutions of society, culture and art. The starting point is a conviction that society, culture and art are "environments" (artificial systems providing the context, eco-systems1 ) that include institutions (the analogy with live organisms) which, through their dominant and powerful needlessness, allow for parasitism (a relationship with others). Pogacar's parasitism is an indeterminable counter-transfer that starts from non-institutionalism and leads towards the institutional power exerted by culture and society. He gives back to culture and society what they offer to him through their criteria of power and domination. In fact what we have here points to the fact that the institutions of society, culture and art exist for their own sake, that they feed on themselves, multiply and become perfected. In other words the artist is invariably just an external deficiency, someone who does not fit into the game of domination and power played by culture and society. The absence of any function of their existence renders them devoid of morality because they serve neither man nor art. If this is true, the act of parasitism is an extremely moral gesture aimed at establishing "justice" within the activities of culture. Needless and self-sufficient institutions (museums, archives, agencies, the homeless, or family homes) become sensible and needed through the arbitrary and often haphazard actions of the artist. The artist challenges the system of "normality" and the distribution of roles in the world of arranged needlessness. The artist does not offer an act of positive sublimity (like the OHO group in its later stages or Druina in empas) or negative-critical-cynic sublimity (in the manner of the NSK movement), but discovers sense in an arbitrary unfolding that arises from the linking of the institution of power with a parasitic institution. In the same way the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary; the relationship between the institutions of culture and art are also arbitrary. Culture and art are separated by a void. In the Sixties the American minimalist Carl Andre said: Art is what we do: culture is what is done to us.2 Pogacar does just the opposite: he shows that art today is what he
does with culture within the realm of his own micro- and eco-system
which, in turn, is part of that culture. Culture becomes the object
of his act of work through art. Indeed Pogacar deals with the very arbitrariness
of the relationship between art and culture, alternately showing them
as very motivated, motivated, weakly motivated and unmotivated. An example
of a motivated approach would be his naming the exhibition of Slovene
art in Muscarnok (Budapest) in the Nineties the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E MUSEUM,
since this is an exhibition that could be staged by any other museum
taking the Nineties as the theme. An example of an unmotivated approach
is his exhibition of office equipment in a historical museum. Every
one of these relationships is, however, relative and subject to change
because the changing of the standpoint transforms motivation into un-motivation
and vice versa. His artistic practice does not consist of shaping the
form (as in painting or sculpture), or composing the structure, or assembling
an object (as in avant-garde art). His artistic procedure consists in
transforming "strategies" of ready-mades into processes of
manipulation (he is concerned with the motivation or de-motivation of
the relationship between the institutions of art and culture), the processes
of simulation (the creation of a "realistic" situation using
aspects or systems of culture or society within art), and of transgression
(he is concerned with the very Laws of culture and society, which he
exposes as the reverse side of "normality"). According to
theorists belonging of the French intellectual tradition, ranging from
Bataille, to Lacan and iek, a transgressional element is
an element of the Law of normality itself; that is, the Law of everyday
reality.3 Misko Šuvaković
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