Interview to Vladimir Nikolic
By Emanuele Guidi
I’d like to pick up the first dialogue of Land Art where the person who seems to be a TV/Radio show host speaks about you (the artist in question) as an artist who produced his last piece in 2004. This was Death Anniversary, in which you employed a Montenegrinian dirge singer to compose and sing a mourning song for Marcel Duchamp. With her, you then travelled to Rouen, to Duchamp’s grave to honour him. After four years you produced a series of works where the legacy of a certain conceptual scene it’s still very strong. Nevertheless I have the impression that those references are not a way to pay a tribute to those figures and art movements…
During the 90's and little bit after, being an artist from the Balkans meant mostly producing artworks about geopolitical reality, dealing with communistic past, transitions, growing nationalisms, war, victims, questions of guilt, etc. It also meant bringing exotic documents of anti-modernism, local heritages and weird customs, which were still possible to find in Balkan countries. All of that was about local reality, in a too realistic way. Art was secondary here. I guess it was a result of common western stereotypes about the outside world, and following the response of artists from the Balkans who used the opportunity to create international carriers by feeding these stereotypes. So Death Anniversary is, in a way, a reconstruction of a situation in which at the same museum where you can usually find Mondrian paintings, Duchamp ready mades or a Minimal Art piece, you could find a work which tells you how they slaughter lambs and chickens during religious holidays in some Balkan or Middle East country. This is putting together wrong things at the wrong place, if you ask me, and I tried to reconstruct that in Death Anniversary. How wrong can it be paying a woman to cry on a grave of a person who left the epitaph: “Anyway, it’s always other people who die”? How wrong it can be to apply a pre-modern ritual on a person who represents the most universal value and heritage of a modern art world? Dirge singer on Duchamp's grave is an ultimate contrast. As I see it, the same type of contrast was happening when you enter a western museum or a gallery with contemporary Balkan kunst.
But this is in the past, some other parts of the world are 'Balkan' now and finally we can talk about more general art problems, without this burden of geographical origin. In the new works, the legacy of the conceptual scene appeared mostly by accident in the beginning. At that moment I had a lousy camcorder and video clips I made looked awful. So I set up my camcorder to record in black and white and the result was much better. I am shortly uncovering this situation in the dialogue when Mark say: “...perhaps he couldn't afford a decent camera”. The image was still ugly, but this ugliness was historically accepted aesthetic - you don't question the production quality of the art works from the 70's. So, I was adjusting the art concept to a bad equipment conditions. I think it turned out well, because all the dialogues are leading to the point where characters start fighting about contemporary art problems and I think its interesting to watch this arguing from the perspective of the past. Imagine two persons from the 70's looking in the future, at today's art. I believe they would be disappointed, just as I am, and sometimes I feel like I belong more to the past. So maybe, after all, there could be some sort of paying a tribute to those figures and art movements in my works.
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I’d like to pick up the first dialogue of Land Art where the person who seems to be a TV/Radio show host speaks about you (the artist in question) as an artist who produced his last piece in 2004. This was Death Anniversary, in which you employed a Montenegrinian dirge singer to compose and sing a mourning song for Marcel Duchamp. With her, you then travelled to Rouen, to Duchamp’s grave to honour him. After four years you produced a series of works where the legacy of a certain conceptual scene it’s still very strong. Nevertheless I have the impression that those references are not a way to pay a tribute to those figures and art movements…
During the 90's and little bit after, being an artist from the Balkans meant mostly producing artworks about geopolitical reality, dealing with communistic past, transitions, growing nationalisms, war, victims, questions of guilt, etc. It also meant bringing exotic documents of anti-modernism, local heritages and weird customs, which were still possible to find in Balkan countries. All of that was about local reality, in a too realistic way. Art was secondary here. I guess it was a result of common western stereotypes about the outside world, and following the response of artists from the Balkans who used the opportunity to create international carriers by feeding these stereotypes. So Death Anniversary is, in a way, a reconstruction of a situation in which at the same museum where you can usually find Mondrian paintings, Duchamp ready mades or a Minimal Art piece, you could find a work which tells you how they slaughter lambs and chickens during religious holidays in some Balkan or Middle East country. This is putting together wrong things at the wrong place, if you ask me, and I tried to reconstruct that in Death Anniversary. How wrong can it be paying a woman to cry on a grave of a person who left the epitaph: “Anyway, it’s always other people who die”? How wrong it can be to apply a pre-modern ritual on a person who represents the most universal value and heritage of a modern art world? Dirge singer on Duchamp's grave is an ultimate contrast. As I see it, the same type of contrast was happening when you enter a western museum or a gallery with contemporary Balkan kunst.
But this is in the past, some other parts of the world are 'Balkan' now and finally we can talk about more general art problems, without this burden of geographical origin. In the new works, the legacy of the conceptual scene appeared mostly by accident in the beginning. At that moment I had a lousy camcorder and video clips I made looked awful. So I set up my camcorder to record in black and white and the result was much better. I am shortly uncovering this situation in the dialogue when Mark say: “...perhaps he couldn't afford a decent camera”. The image was still ugly, but this ugliness was historically accepted aesthetic - you don't question the production quality of the art works from the 70's. So, I was adjusting the art concept to a bad equipment conditions. I think it turned out well, because all the dialogues are leading to the point where characters start fighting about contemporary art problems and I think its interesting to watch this arguing from the perspective of the past. Imagine two persons from the 70's looking in the future, at today's art. I believe they would be disappointed, just as I am, and sometimes I feel like I belong more to the past. So maybe, after all, there could be some sort of paying a tribute to those figures and art movements in my works.
read more on...
