MUSEUM
MARKO
A. KOVAČIČ
Two Stories
NADJA ZGONIK Laterna
magica
BOGDAN
LEŠNIK
Ambi(val)ents of Marko Kovačič
BOGDAN
LEŠNIK
Visions of Ordinary Life
JURIJ
V. KRPAN The
Lost Horizon
MARKO A.
KOVAČIČ Star?
RASTKO
MOČNIK
The Loving Sights
JURIJ V. KRPAN The Lost Horizon
Which horizon are we referring to and how is it lost? Granted: anybody
can lose something, either by carelessness or by accident. Just as we
lose the keys to our apartment, which have become an item of our personal
inventory to the point that they are a compulsory, yet an anonymous addition
which fail to provoke any emotions in themselves. Irrelevant of whether
the keys have a beautiful key chain, the keys are a functional and technical
vulgar addition that loll in our pockets. They can be forgotten or overlooked
with each time they are set aside after use. Actually, it's rather interesting
how an element of such key importance in our everyday life, imperative
for identification, occasionally even a symbolic attribute, can be suppressed,
obscured and reduced to a minute metal undesirable item. This is the type
of loss that I am referring to. To forget something so close and 'right
in front of our eyes' that it cannot be seen anymore and so it is easily
overlooked and forgotten. The circumstances that are reinstated at that
moment always implicate a view – retrogressive reminiscence of the past.
We can also lose something towards which we are heading; something which
we knew was there, yet upon our arrival we determine that what we were
searching for is missing. Where did that something that we knew we were
searching for disappear to? Did we really come to where we thought it
was? Did we possibly go astray? Did we miss, or obscure the object of
our desire, or the location where we thought the object was? If the object
of our desire betrays our expectations and fails to be where we think
it is, we can still feign the possibility that we lost or forgot it somewhere
along the way, or that it is lying somewhere along the way and that we,
ourselves, went astray. Something lost is never on account of the object
itself. The object is always somewhere, only that it is lost - suppressed.
When something is lost, the desire, which is compelled either to search
for what is lost or to reconstruct a new object that has yet to become
it's justification, doubles. Anticipation is almost a physiological need,
although the lost object calls from the past as if it were etched in our
consciousness.
What of the horizon? Here we are in the field of the visual, or actually
at its edge. The horizon is the 360 degree demarcation line between the
visible and what is anticipated beyond the visible. The visible (scopic)
is here, while the imaginary is beyond. Although the simple differentiation
that the scopic, which due to its indirectness embraces the observing-perceiving
subject now, and that the imaginary beyond the horizon occurs only when
we arrive at the horizon that is, later, is not valid. No, the scopic
and the imaginary fields are both here and now; they are two levels of
images that fill the perceiving subject simultaneously and sometimes even
interfere, overlap and cause an image, an unexpected apparition in the
direction that we are looking, to paste itself over our eyes. The multi-levelled
field of the visible often deceives the eye, renders it unreliable and
reduces it to the mere existence of an organ, an instrument for perceiving.
Let us apply video and new media as an example. Practically everything
is possible from the point of view of visualisation. The image is generated
and mediated. Optics, that is the system of lenses, encompasses the reflection
of light, while electronics reduces the visual material into an electronic
mass that can then be transferred, layered and remodelled. Images, whose
elementary probability is attained by the media - the screen, and whose
perception is secured by film or video editing, are created on the screen
before the viewer.
The installation set up by Kovačič in the Kapelica Gallery interchanges
the above mentioned intimations: a) the constituent loss of an object
which b) fascinates the artistic beauty of the scopic field and it's c)
syntax. This installation cannot be clarified with a single word, it can
only be discussed. Despite its unobtainable character, attributes of its
images - apparitions - can be ascribed as they are being assembled while
the installation is being viewed, and their significance, identity and
structure can nonetheless be determined. Significance can thus be conceived
as a question of the constituent loss of the subject, identity as a question
of fine arts and structure as a matter of the syntax of assemblage.
a) It seems that the industrial complexes are a metaphor for the Russian
ideology of constructivism and an allegory for artistic constructions
from which all the decorative rubbish has deteriorated and delineated
the artistic age of the avant-garde, which postulated a new individual
for the aesthetics that it produced. This imaginary new subject who ruled
over our imagination at the time, is today substituted by the promised
object for which we strive in our everyday aspirations for a better tomorrow.
The mechanics of a consumer society, in which aesthetics is responsible
for creativity - the production of objects that are to dictate the structure
of our desires, are today set up against a totalitarian phantasm where
an individual, spared the corporeal passions of profit, stands in the
horizon. Loss, which is ascribed to our phantasmal world at the level
of systems, does not represent the defeat of the malediction of socialistic
dogmatism on account of idealistic democracy, but rather a radical loss
– an obliteration merely of insignias and ideological matrices which cannot
be mentioned, even in jest, as exorcist rituals and corporeal categorisations
would be triggered immediately. If a compromising image (such as a red
star) were to paste itself upon our eyes while surrounded by acquaintances,
we would be expected to play off a blasé pretence, as if we hadn't noticed,
and thus prevent anxiety and discomfort to sneak up on our companions,
as we can never really be sure of how one of society's individuals is
labelled. The emotions of zealots happen to replace the bitter cognition
that nothing more fundamental than a change in the ideological inventory
occurred throughout the entire historical upset. A czar is still a czar,
a sheep is still a sheep.
b) The imagery material, entirely projected with the aid of a video and
slide projectors, is predominantly composed of an iconography of complex
industrial landscapes in which the domineering features of water towers,
cranes, enormous power presses etc., are alternated and interwoven with
the overwhelming mesh of a steel baton, the fundamental construction element
in factory buildings, adapted to the dimensions of heavy mechanics. Control
towers are thrusted atop the piles of raw materials or atop the deposited
waste materials which form an artificially hilly landscape and are generally
black or dark colours. The projected images of heavy metal industry are
structured with heraldic accents of the governing ideology, which subscribed
authorship to the projects of the period for which it believed manifested
its heroic integrity. The colour red, stars, hammers and sickles all fuse
as a totalitarian scale of industrial production that was not directed
towards the individuum of a consumer society, but rather towards a baroque
presentation on the subject of the great deeds that the system already
materialised with it's improvident gesture. Behind this improvident world
lurk the beliefs of futuristic phantasms of constructivists who reflected
the dramatic changes in the world through the aesthetics of constructions
and machinery.
c) The imagery mass is mediated such that it cannot be embraced with a
glance. The revolving panels reflecting the projected images deform the
images and create an impression of dynamic perspectives which devise the
illusion of three-dimensional spaces. The viewer thus has to enter the
space of the mass of imagery which embraces the viewer entirely – the
viewer is wholly inside (… 'the view within the scopic field is outside,
they are watching me, that is, I am the image'. Lacan, J. 1981. The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, Norton.). The revolving panels, which constantly change the space
of movement, additionally compel the viewer into movement. The scopic
field establishes a physical connection with the viewer, who is imminently
aware of it (aware that he/she is in the image), even when his/her back
is turned. The illusion of spaciousness and the actual operation of the
machines is all the more convincing as the imagery mass presents the intertwining-assembling
(in the sense of film editing) of inactivity and video shots on the walls
of the gallery and inactivity and video shots on the revolving panels.
The dynamics of the deformation of images on the revolving panels, the
dynamics of operating videos and the dynamics in the real space of the
revolving panels produce a dangerous fusion of images that are strongly
reminiscent of the random pulse of images that invade the imaginary space
from the subconscious. 'The unconscious is structured like a language'
and the present installation is a distinct speech.
(from the catalogue of the exhibition The
Lost Horizon, Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana, 1998)