| As this large-scale international exhibition set out to explore issues of the multifaceted relationship between art and life, it is important to note the place where it is held. Ambitiously planned and successfully executed, “Art, Life and Confusion” was located in a city far away from global art-world meccas. The 47th October Salon has as its task the transformation of Belgrade’s art scene, after years of isolation, into “a beacon, which will (alongside the Istanbul Biennial) transmit cultural impulses across South-Eastern Europe.” |  |
Art, Life and Confusion – Jovana Stokic
As this large-scale international exhibition set out to explore issues of the multifaceted relationship between art and life, it is important to note the place where it is held. Ambitiously planned and successfully executed, “Art, Life and Confusion” was located in a city far away from global art-world meccas. The 47th October Salon has as its task the transformation of Belgrade’s art scene, after years of isolation, into “a beacon, which will (alongside the Istanbul Biennial) transmit cultural impulses across South-Eastern Europe.”
The Salon’s organizer, the Belgrade Cultural Center, invited world-famous curator René Block to organize the exhibition, which will bring famous artists to Belgrade and, at the same time, will allow local artists to be shown in an international context. As Robert Storr, chief of the jury of the October Salon, rightly noted; this is a kind of biennale model. The question that this exhibition, as much as any other biennale, has to pose to itself is related to the idea of the biennale as the world’s fair of art and also its significance in different geo-political contexts. As Robert Storr noted in terms of the question of the biennale’s goal, “one should ask, is it an institution which exists in the service of a kind of globalized market or publicity network of art, or is it actually a system in which cultural differences and distinctions become more vivid?”
There is a strong sense that, through such a mix of international and local artists from Belgrade—where a strong infrastructure does not exist, and where there is almost no market at all—everyone can be mainstreamed into the system which is predominately market-related. But also, that the larger art audience, who may have seen certain images in magazines and on the internet, will finally see the actual works of art.
“Art, Life, and Confusion” is grounded in works by maverick artists of the 60s and 70s who relentlessly pushed for art’s relevance to life: Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow. As in any other power field, the art world was, at the time, a man’s world. This show, although it does not claim it explicitly, cannot escape being a showcase for the increasing relevance of women artists in today’s art world and, as I would claim, in life. Women artists imposed themselves on the art world not because they had to be shown in order to compliment men with feminine sensibility, but because they proved themselves to be leaders in media such as photography and video.
The curator’s selection here points to the necessity for the existence of permeable boundaries and non-hierarchical communication and exchange on every level. Following the phenomenon of art world stars, Block introduced the Belgrade audience, for the first time, to works by artists such as Sam Taylor-Wood and Sophie Calle. Taylor-Wood also received the main prize at the October Salon for her idiosyncratically macabre video, Ascension. Other established international artists shown in Belgrade were Salla Tykka, Rosemary Laing, Candice Breitz and Kimsooja. Candice Breitz imposed her appropriated image of Hollywood, which ruptured all the stereotypes created by the film industry. Salla Tykka’s videos start as a showdown of female fears, but achieve a cool, destructive beauty, as is the case in her latest, the Hitchcockian video Zoo.
Videos by Russian artist Olga Chernysheva represent an un-enhanced, unsentimental segment of Russian reality. Artists who are interested in self-representations, such as Aino Kannisto and Elina Brotherus, embark in a similar way on an unsentimental journey to the core of feminine identity. Their mirror image is an all but staged, beautified version of the feminine, intimate (self-)portrait. Swedish artist Anneé Olofsson goes a step further by representing her own image in a still-frame video: she lends her voice to the victims of violence—in her monologue the different voices emerge, all of them brutally murdered and describing, in first person, the ways they died. The artist, with her head completely still on a pillow, lets the viewer direct his or her sympathy towards the victim, making herself only a transmitter, neither a subject nor an object. A suspended emotional atmosphere is achieved in an installation by young German artist Birgit Brenner, while a video by Susanne Kutter deals with the stuffy atmosphere of a home—a traditionally feminine space. Her Flooded Home represents this home as it becomes completely flooded. Thus, under water, the usual hierarchy of this gendered space is made absurd, and ultimately, redundant.
Salon showed women artists from the Balkan region who are internationally known: Milica Tomic, who is unrepentantly critical of injustices related to globalized politics, and Bosnian Maja Bajevic, who created a critique of nationalism in a billboard statement: “I believe more in a horoscope, than I believe in nationalities.”
The biggest impression was made by the series of paintings on steel by young Montenegrin artist Jelena Tomasevic, a continuation of her works which represented Serbia and Montenegro at the 51st Venice Biennale. Tomasevic created an installation comprised of eight big formats on which figures and architectural objects hover in a disjointed, post-utopian universe. The figures are not really engaged in any of the actions—they are merely posing as replicas from fashion magazines. Female figures in high heels, dressed in cool urban outfits insinuate ominous actions in which violence is only suggested. They signal the advent of the late capitalist culture of the spectacle—as a represented version of the world, which pushed itself to a dead-end. These representations, often of a domestic feminine space, show how the artist conquers a “heroic dimension” by using “male” material such as steel on such a large scale. Among young artists who are ready to be shown on the international art circuit, Natasa Kokic stands out due to her painterly skillfulness. Her small oil paintings represent nighttime cityscapes of a particular vision, which does not have to be feminine, but is.
Personal biases notwithstanding, it is important to mention interesting artists who are not women—Mircea Cantor (Romania), Nedko Solakov (Bulgaria), Paolo Canevari (Italy), Christian Marclay, Mario Rizzi, Felix Gmelin, Zoran Naskovski, Talent Factory, Vlado Martek, Jakup Ferri, Braco Dimitrijevic, Jovan Cekic, Mladen Stilinovic, Rasa Todosijevic, and Wael Shawky.
