Paper, Scissors, Rock

Defamiliarization. To take an object out of its own every day automatism and putting it into a different context in which it gets a new meaning, or “Art is what I say art is”.

The author as a metacurator.

The author chooses the position of ‘the absence of the author’, the path of conceptual art. She takes a simple everyday object and puts it into the context of an art gallery and thus gives it a new meaning. The author obtains the objects in different ways (in this particular case by purchasing them, at the Serbian sell-it-yourself online portal “Kupindo”): a remote control, car handles, rubber faucet o-rings, cloth straps, socks, monitor holders, etc. It is a wide selection of objects which she places into a gallery space, thus making it a space with a new meaning – metaspace. The work starts as a photo of an object on the Internet, which had taken the same path the other way – from the object to its photo on the Internet) then it develops to the printed and framed photo of the object, proceeds to the object itself, all the way to the enhanced photo printed on billboard paper. Around and inside of this space a perception emerges, partially framed, exposed and illuminated by the implicit assumption about the problem of value, both aesthetic and material.

The further away from the object, the closer we are to understanding its meaning.

The author reexamines the possibility of a sculptural microcosm as a specific space of an art piece: the space (gallery), the space (body) of the object and a symbolic space. The question is whether accepting “non-art based content” and its “artistic” contextualization serve (only) to indicate the fact that one thing means and becomes “the other” when it is placed into a different context.

The Artificial world. Not made, but remade.

The artist labels, specifies, then adopts the art object and it becomes the edge of its own materialism which is turned into meaning. But the meaning is still not the essence.

From meaningless objects to microcosm.

The borders of meaning as the path to essence or – is the essence outside the meaning of the object?

From metacurator to metacosms or longing to reach the insensitive world? When are we on the trace of conceptual?

*The transmission of objects and their transformation as a particular (conditional) deobjectification leads to the formation of microcosm. The semantic core of these microcosms is (still) in their materialization. Microcosms as metacosms or symbolic existence inside existence is the inside world which creates beautiful-ugly dichotomy as an artistic whole. Meaning is formed through the recipient’s response to the object, resulting in a world of clashes. Clashes between objects and objects’ meanings as well as clashes between the experienced and non-experienced, result in a reality where essence is vague. The realness of the object still generates the realness of its meaning. In other words every mindful construct is as vague and incomplete as any thwarted interpretation.

Text: Jovana Buljugić Trifunović
Photo: Luka Knežević – Strika