BOGDAN LEŠNIK Marko Kovačič: Catastropolis. Heading for the Past

Where is the world going? What can we expect from the future? The ‘catastro’ before ‘polis’ is ominous enough.

An earlier work of Marko Kovačič, The Prophecy of Zeus, suggests that our view of the future is actually a gaze back, all the way to the childhood trauma that freezes time and becomes represented in the very idea of catastro-phe.

If the future is an image of the past, then we already know everything. Not in detail, but certainly the essentials. No experience, however pleasant or (more frequently) unpleasant, is really new, or at least we are not surprised that it is possible. Sometimes it is made possible or even caused by our very anticipation.

According to psychoanalysis, what we call ‘novelty’ is actually a stereotype. It brings up something familiar - it triggers the feelings attached to the dominant experience of the ‘new’ in childhood. Our experience of a nov-elty is thus always modelled after an earlier example. Forward to the Past should therefore be taken to mean that we are permanently bound to the past and will remain so, whatever the future may bring, including our death.

While we ourselves may already be dead (Requiem), which implies more than one death, Catastropolis (the city) lives in more than one sense. It is brought to life by its story, and it survives on its own, independently from its author, at the same time as it resumes his recurring motives. This in itself is a sign of a successful work.

The unusual inhabitants of the city, plastoses, like to offer themselves to our gaze through an optical device. One of the recurring preoccupations of the author is precisely the research of gaze. In the background lies an inven-tion of the Renaissance, the optical device called perspective; while in the foreground, there are various optical and other labyrinths, which we suspect to have a societal foundation (Programming the Gaze).

The gaze is one of the most important tools of both little and big re-searchers, and ‘we’ are here nothing but voyeurs. We are placed to this posi-tion in Catastropolis by the author who once searched for a way to lead the spectators through the labyrinth of meaning. He found the answer while re-searching something else - they need no such guidance, only the right position to start with, from which they are perfectly capable to orientate themselves. They are never passive observers of images and scenes; they already have a role in them. Their fantasies complete the work of art, and so they become ac-complices, as it were, in its making.

On reflection, scopophilia seems always, though sometimes only im-plicitly present in the gaze, particularly on works of art created for the gaze (like, for example, the nudes). Without this instinctual impulse the gaze could never have achieved such an extreme importance for our enjoyment of art.

The instinctual support is a condition, but of course it does not define the work of art. So what is this animal? It is not difficult to answer. A work of art is what is taken as a work of art; how, if at all, to take something as a work of art is the subject of discourse on art. Yet we cannot speak of ‘art’ on the one hand and of the ‘discourse on art’, parasitically depending upon the former, on the other (an obvious example is art criticism). What we take as ‘art’ is con-stituted in this very division of work between the production machine and the reproduction apparatus. The latter has conjured up the ‘autonomous artist’ as the constitutive part of the former. It is a very elaborated fiction (which, after all, is the preferred domain of art).

How is this relevant for our subject? For one, we support that fiction. This is an almost routine assertion, yet necessary to dissolve certain illusions. And how do we support it? By indulging in its orgies, and enjoying it. (The question of the origin of powerful impressions characteristic for the enjoyment of art again harks back to the childhood and its fascinations.)

But there is another gaze taking part in Catastropolis. The plastoses are presented from the standpoint and in the fashion of science (lab, lectures, symposia). Indeed, there are noticeable voyeuristic traits in the way science selects and observes its objects.

We know from psychoanalysis that voyeurism comes coupled with ex-hibitionism, and art certainly shows a tendency to ‘exhibition’. Similarly, sci-ence exhibits its objects in showcases, archives, and museums (cf. Saïd).

Yet there is also a significant difference between the two procedures. A work of art is made to be exhibited, while the object of science is rather forced into it. Moreover, while the work of art co-creates its context, science tears its object from its context; the museum is not its natural habitat, as it is for the work of art.

A still bigger difference is this. What gets exhibited in science is not in the first place the object but knowledge (or ignorance, depending on our point of view). Here, the pair voyeurism–exhibitionism returns to its origin, to the same infantile subject, before it has split to the object and the subject of gaze. This split is a condition for artistic enjoyment; science, however, offers only the narcissistic pleasure of knowing. Catastropolis re-creates another Renaissance story - Leonardo’s inclination to scientific research. It is recon-structed almost to the letter of Freud’s analysis. What is ‘Dr. Skavčenko’ if not a knowledge-craving scientist, who has come to love the plastoses (as he says himself) precisely because he studies them - because for him, investigation is like sexual activity?

Marko Kovačič is neither the first artist to take scientific procedure as the object of artistic treatment, nor the first to dress up an artistic project as a scientific one. The ‘scientific approach’ serves the economy of his narration; it provides his creation with a background, a history; it produces a myth that re-sembles many scientific myths. On top of this, Kovačič’s confrontation of sci-ence and art offers a much more effective distinction between them than we can provide with this schematic analysis. We enter the world of plastoses through science that exhibits both its infantile fascinations and its lab-style sterility. Opposite to the self-indulging scientific gaze, however, the artist has placed creatures with which we can unreservedly sympathise.

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