Branko Cerovac

LOGOS, LOGOs AND CORAL ISLANDS

POSSIBLE SUBTITLES: Marx + Engels + McDonald's and the supernatural
SIGNATURA RERUM in a Baudrillardian world which records itself

THEME: visual records of a world traveller and new media "photographer"
B. Štoklja 1997-1998 (series of seascapes and other landscapes)

In the words of the young Marx of 1844, the depiction of the creation of the Earth received a powerful blow from geognosis, a science that portrays the "creation" or the emergence of the Earth as a process, or auto-creation. In the mellow romantic, mystic-poetical sense, this could have been presented as some kind of pre-Baudrillardian, autoreferential autopoetry, centuries older than cibernetics and the enthronement of the computer. The young post-Romantic Marx continues with an entertaining witticism saying that GENERATIO AUQUIVOCA is the only practical rejection of the theory of creation. In our time, the logo(s) of COCA-COLA rises and spreads from the sun drenched soil of the New World! From digital oceans rise "untouched" coral islands, virgin authochthony, as at the time of Genesis, which are born of the moist womb of Primary deterministic chaos and the fractal-geometric "creative evolution" of Mother Nature! However, the computer manager ("the creator" or Marx's unslain "practical being") serves only as a post-sacrificial Baudrillardian mid-wife at the birth pangs of "nature" that the newly created autoreferential world automatically writes (records, registers) itself. Štokelj adopts the role of new-media master of the signatura rerum, or the world traveller, researcher, visionary, discoverer, the artistic "photographic witness", sharp-eyed recorder of digital, electronic and fresh natural logo-seascapes and other logo-landscapes devoted to the secret of "logos", supernatural mythical hyper-reality. And this is in the best tradition of the genre of painting/recording landscapes. The extremely plastic or sculptural talents of this multi-media artist and trained sculptor are the virtuoso expression in computer processed logo-samples. From these endless and "aesthetically sublime" landscapes rise monumental "natural new sculptures" of mystically transformed and anamorphotographic configurations of "archetypal" and fascist emblems (the swastika) and the logos of the multi-nationals McDonald's, Coca-Cola and CNN. Štokelj's many years of exploration and artistic study of the idea-logic and art of totalitarianism, late capitalism and "globalisation", touches here on the Heideggerian fundamental ontological question of the sense and language of being, in the spirit of pop-art and post-modern "secularisation" and simulation. As if some artful and evil Mephistopheles of art had sent us from the digital apparatus fascinating showy advertising-tourist postcards of its liberating-cosmogonic successes.

Branko Cerovac, a.d. 1998H