Boxheart
Gordana
&
Marko Zivkovic
Art Inter/National, Here and Abroad 2005
Art Under Siege [3.5MB]
Artist Statement
This project comes from reflecting on how to respond to one's space, one's environment, how to engage with it in an artistic way. This made me think about my relationship to my new environment here, as well as the one I left behind in Yugoslavia (an imaginary country par excellence). I examined my own responses to what surrounds me here, what moves me to create. And it turns out that what engages people around me here, is not what will engage or move me. But then, it is not as simple as saying that
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my
"
space, the space that I find meaningful and moving, is something called Serbia or even Belgrade. That's why I started examining the very idea of what it is that one can call one's space – one's place in the world. This is, for me at least, not something defined by geography or political boundaries. And it never was.
What makes one's space, what makes it meaningful, I am realizing, is meeting with other people. So even though other people I intersect with here might have relationships with their space that is different from mine, and although what moves them might not move me, I am finding that I am nevertheless responding to their projects and stories, and thus some sort of mutual meaningful space is emerging. So my project is really extending this thinking further. What I am particularly interested in, however, is not just
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thinking
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and talking but giving a visible form to such collaborative space-making.
If at any point art was secure in its position of an undisputed Good, parallel to, or even substituting for Religion, this is no longer the case. Together with the vestiges of the old awe and pious respect, there is an ever stronger sense today that art is a mere ornament, a luxury, of no real consequence. The elitism of high art is denounced, low and high blurred, the aura of the original dissipated (scattered) by the inundation of mechanically (and electronically) reproduced copies. Life and art merge, the author is proclaimed dead. Leonardos of today work in advertising, professors write books on the Death of Art. As always, there are Lamenters and Rejoicers. Art should ride the currents of commercialism, it has never been better for art Rejoicers, exclaim exultantly. Markets are good for art (the old survival of the fittest), the death of art, of high versus low, of craftsmanship, and originality is liberating. Lamenters lament: the cuts in funding, the loss of status, the disappearance of values and standards.
This project aims neither to Lament nor to Rejoice, but to sense the currents of the Here and Now, and to give them form through focusing on the figure of the artist. If the identity of art is in flux, it is the artists who feel it viscerally (whether as elation or anxiety, most probably both). Their questions about who they are in today's world are what I want to attend to.
Images of artists. What would it be like to create images of artists, images they have of themselves, images others have of them? I want to create these images. These images will be images of our world.
I chose to present artists' hands. One thing I want to avoid is presenting art as being about
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practiced hand
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. I think it is the mind, not the hand that makes art. My focus is rather on the fact that art is about something being made, and the hand is (usually) that point of contact between mind and object. I also don't think it is terribly important what our faces are like, where we are and what our names are, but that something is touched and created. And when I say mind creates, I think that mind doesn't stop at the boundaries of our skins – materials, objects, tools, even society we interact with – all of these things together comprise mind. This is just to give you some idea of why I want to present hands as a part of this project.
