MYTH AND CULTUREOBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE CODES AND THE STAR ABOVE OUR HEADSThe conversation, an excerpt of which follows in the continuation, took place on July 13, 1996, on a volleyball ground in Med, Kansas.
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MYTH AND CULTUREOBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE CODES AND THE STAR ABOVE OUR HEADSThe conversation, an excerpt of which follows in the continuation, took place on July 13, 1996, on a volleyball ground in Med, Kansas.
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Yuri Liederman: We are trying to set a boundary between our subjective and objective perceptions but, in fact, there's another limitation. Recently, I tried to imagine my mental universe as a system of many, many points. Some of these points are very subjective and some of them are very objective. And all of them vibrate with different amplitudes and speeds. All we do is try to find some resonance between our mental points so as to be able to present them as belonging to one system and thus be able to establish an outside point of view. But this is not really possible. These vibrations include our personal experiences, the things we know from literature, theory, movies and so on, and the whole thing is growing into a shinny and magic system of different points of vibration. But the truth is that you can't establish just one outside point of view to reflect this system, you can't bring the system in one resonant position. Therefore, I wouldn't define this problem as a boundary but as an endless vibration.Art from my point of view can be compared to an iceberg of which you can see only a very small part. Therefore, my position in art is to look for misunderstanding, for something that is hidden. I'm looking for something that I can not understand, in which I can not be involved. Some of the points vibrate with me and others don't, this is a living system. And I never said that art and communication are not possible in this living system. Alexander Brener: If we can't see the whole iceberg, which iceberg then are we talking about? What is that which is hidden? The food I'm digesting, the things I'm only thinking about? What are these vibrations? For me, art is an absolutely open field. Nothing is hidden. Yuri Liederman: For me, it's just the opposite. Everything that is completely open, fully presented, is nothing, is empty. To me, it is logical that you can't be and simultaneously present your being. Either you are or you are presenting your being. If something really is, it is un-presentable, it is partly hidden. |
 Borut Vogelnik: Can we say that through an artistic action you are bringing the hidden in some form of manifestation?Yuri Liederman: No, I can't discover anything through action. I just think about it, I try to create my own interpretation, which, I know it in advance, will be a wrong interpretation because I live, I search for truth, for understanding, and I never achieve it because I'm a human being. Alexander Brener: What we can say about this star above our heads is absolutely clear to everybody, and all that we can say about it, we can say it to everybody. Yuri Liederman: I don't agree. I think this star is a very good example. This star is absolutely different for everybody. What we can say about it and what is understandable to everybody is its name. Does it mean something? It doesn't mean anything. Borut Vogelnik: Yuri, what you are talking about is directed to the question of truth, of meaning and understanding that you can derive from it for yourself, but in art you have the audience, you are in a relationship with others. For them, the situation is different. Through your process of understanding, you, as an artist, are also telling something to others. Yuri Liederman: That's true, but in the contemporary situation there's this collective desire of the viewer, which is a perverse desire. The spectator is looking for clearness and for understanding, for some gain, and I find this perverse. I think - and perhaps this is a big mistake - that people in the contemporary world need exactly the opposite, they need something hidden, unclear, they need to understand the inevitable failure of such an approach. Roman Uranjek: You think that the spectator is always wrong? Yuri Liederman: Contemporary visual art is like tourist sightseeing of a ghetto. And its political role is not something that could be taken as a compliment. |
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SHIFT INTHE LOGIC OF PERCEPTION. SPACE AND TIME.
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SYSTEM OF ART AND HOW TO STRUCTURE OUR ENGAGEMENT
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 Yuri Liederman: I want to keep it like a kind of destiny. I'm in the position to make art and through this I'm involved in the existing system of art. And my involvement is quite unsuccessful because I come from the East, because I'm an outsider and so on, and so on. But I view it as my destiny and I don't want to analyse it. I want to analyse only myself in relation to this system. For me, this system is the same as the rhythms of day and night, the fact that I have to eat, it's the same as my jet lag or my flue. I don't want to analyse it. It's happening. That's all. It's just one possible position. That is how it works with me. And I also believe that our position in metaphysical terms is not such a failure. We have an outside position and this can be an extremely rich point of view if you know how to use it.Eda Cufer: I agree that our position of outsiders is rich, and I also believe that it is important to discuss the art system from the position of outsiders. I think that we, and especially you Russians, have a certain tradition and that is the historical avant-garde. The question is why the avant-garde functioned at the beginning of the century in Russia. Who financed it? Who wanted it to function? I believe its existence was possible because at that time your country still shared in the myth of the future and wanted to play a major role in it. Yuri Liederman: I will give you an opposite example. In the 7th century China, writers, poets, and artists knew each other although they lived hundreds and even thousands of miles apart. And there was no transportation at that time. Maybe they met only once or a couple of times in their lives. But they knew each other personally, they made an effort to get in contact with one another. And there was no system that would unite them. Can you think this way, too? Why do we have to think about the system only?...You can't participate and analyse your participation at the same time. Either you are present in a certain system or we are analysing it. Borut Vogelnik: This is an extremely fatalistic position. You have different possibilities. You can enter the system to find out what it is all about and then decide to participate in it or not. If you look at Duchamp's work you can see that his subject matter was linked with the logic of the system itself. I've read an interesting book about this, where I found a very precise definition saying that Duchamp replaced the word beauty, which was the key word at that time, with the word art. It is as if he ate himself and thereby caused the situation we are facing now. Yuri Liederman: Yes, because he established his own system which became a system of art at large, but the point is that, prior to that, this was his individual system. Borut Vogelnik: At that point art started to eat itself. And that's why we not only have the right to but need to speak about this. Otherwise, we remain outside this switch, which was a historical turning point in art. Miran Mohar: People who participate in the art system usually don't speak about the system. They usually talk about the quality of art and artists.
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Alexander Brener - artist and writer, from 1997 lives in Vienna Borut Vogelnik - artist, the "IRWIN" group, lives in Ljubljana Yuri Leiderman - artist, lives in Moscow Miran Mohar - artist, the "IRWIN" group, lives in Ljubljana Roman Uranjek - artist, the "IRWIN" group, lives in Ljubljana Eda Cufer - critic and theoretician, from 1993 works with the "IRWIN" group, lives in Ljubljana |
Eda Cufer: Sasha, you said you would like to speak about myth.
Borut Vogelnik: It is also possible to view it differently. Isn't the quality of visual art its capacity to structure its own field? And precisely this ability makes it interesting to politics. Literature tries to explain something speaking directly to the reader. The switch from the concept of beauty to art itself, this shift, is interesting and it happened in the last hundred years. Contemporary art is expressing a system instead of a beautiful object. It has become a signifier in itself. And art was always used by some system, it was always subordinated to a certain system of social values. Therefore, I disagree that the times of myth are over. Just the logic of perception has shifted. Architecture - for example - was very important for the establishment of the most basic criteria of orientation in society: visual and conceptual criteria of society which were based on moving, walking through space. But the logic of society changes. We don't walk through space any more, we mostly drive through it, and here in America in particular, we can see architecture that was designed for driving through. A similar shift is also observed in visual art. The quantum of society's rhythm has changed. Western societies are currently experiencing the limits of modernism, they are experiencing a shift in their quantum. The East has problems following this shift, it is still open to the typical modernist questions of subjectivism, to questions which are no longer relevant to the West. And that's its main setback. This may appear as a repetition of outlived models and experiences, but "one cannot step twice in the same river," and that makes this problem interesting. Today's cyber circles no longer speak about the global myth, but this doesn't mean that they are not confronting each other on the global level.
Eda Cufer: On the one hand you have art as individual experience and on the other you have art as a social system. I'm going to ask you a very pragmatic question. We come from Slovenia and you come from Russia. We both come from societies which, for some reason or another, have never built any consistent contemporary art social system. Do we want this system to be built in our countries or not? Which system we are actually talking about?
Eda Cufer: The question is whether or not we accept the contemporary art system, which is well developed in the West and totally underdeveloped in the East and South, as something which also belongs to us, to our experience of art and position in it? Do we participate in it or not? If we don't, then we can make art which has its own meaning, logic, significance, and who cares what else. Because outside this system everything is possible, everything has meaning in itself, and it doesn't matter if anyone sees it or not. Your artefact can exist by itself or even in your mind. But if we participate in the contemporary art system, and we all do, then we have to think about our position in it. That's our due to artistic truth. Such as it is, the art system is just another set of skills, another language. Like colours, composition, image. If you want to write, you have to know the alphabet, grammar and so on, depending on what you want to achieve with your writing. But our skills in the area of the contemporary art system are poor, we are uneducated in this respect. And we feel frustrated and naive every time we meet people whose mastery of these skills seems to be the most natural, even banal, thing in the world. Like our ability to write, which is something quite normal for us, as if we were born with it. But we learned it in school during a long process.
Eda Cufer: Yes, and this is nice. We all like chatting about art and art life in cafes and at openings. You may even get drunk a bit and talk about your individual and private problems with art or problems in general, and then go to bed and return to Moscow or Ljubljana or Belfast next morning, but you never discussed the force that had brought you together. In Atlanta, everything was nice and fine as long as we remained on this level, but as soon as we touched upon the question of the system we are involved in, the dialogue was cut off and we nearly got into a fight. No one wants to think of himself or herself as a puppet in the system. But under socialism we learned that we are puppets anyway, and this is a fact just like the exchange of day and night which Yuri mentioned before. We live in social systems, but these systems differ.