THE GLOVE IS THROWN
History is provoking that of which it is made: it is irrelevant whether the characters and events are real or imaginary, as long as they are efficient. At the difference of history, the artistic documentation as action, is always a story, and evokes the unrepeatable of life time. This project is offering a provocative image of a moment. The artist is problematizing, based on his memory and courage of acknowledgment, the correlation between location and evocation of the material and non-material, of the touchable general and the personally felt.
The visible, pressured by the past previously taught, faced with what is forthcoming, has no other option than to fall apart into itself. History is lacking a maneuver and it is, in this sense, finished in every moment, and the events, if they are not fetishes, have a retrograde nature. We have displayed a game of historical and recent fetishes.
The documentation is happening in two different ways. The first way is a conceptual use of the documentary materials. An integral part of and the ambient installation is the symbol of the former common state: the flag dirty and faded, as one of the layers. The respect and status has been taken away but not the fetish meaning as well. The highest level of the fixed part of the installation is an artistic scheme of the Straight of Piran with a thrown white glove. This layer has a recent, dramatic aura, and is a collective fetish in the focus of interests. The last layer is dried leaves as moving, changeable veil.
For the second way, the introduction of documentation as artistic form is an important time of the lasting of this event. The project is ending tonight, has lasted for 4 hours and will not be accessible to the public, in this form ever again. The project will stay as a memory for the participants and the media (video, photography, sounds). The documentation about this event and performance is becoming an artistic artifact. All that has been is remaining as unique proof which, because unrepeatable, is becoming artistic but also remains a document.
The project here is attributing meaning to the changeable, the personally experienced social and cultural milieu. A personal attitude has been offered. This was achieved through the relativistic deconstruction of the conditioned reality, the questioning of conventions, the lack of uniformity and usualness.
Postmodern concepts are emphasizing the differences, fascinate in their change, and are enabling the mixing of styles and tolerance in terms of fragments at the difference of the usual stylistic order. We are becoming conscious that life has dramatically changed because of the influence of media structure and so the social conventions are not explained only as traditional social norms and values. We do not believe in science anymore. It has become the tool of progress, but has not solved problems, as was expected from it. Almost too often, science is striving, under a veil of neutrality, serves as an excuse for domination, manipulation and oppression. Science connects too often with the interests of the few mighty ones, because it legitimizes their decisions and effects. The capital, politics or institutionalized religion are not interested with one man. An individual is unimportant. What is important is to have a mass with which one can manipulate. Because of a higher ideal, an individual can die, be hungry, and simply vanish. The heroic is ascribed to the one who does something for the interest of that imposed goal. The illusion is not only efficient when it is being used but also when it forces man to behave they way it wants him to behave, even man knows it is an illusion. Even more so, the illusion is then more effective because the facts become less clear, and there is great effort needed to understand that this world has hungry, sick and different people living… Tolerance and indifference reflect the same intention: to separate the outside world from that level of consciousness at which the knowledge intertwines with the consequences. Information is not the tool anymore but rather the arsenal in which we permanently reside. To prevent indifference which tends to bring scarcity, artists strive to care. Burhan Hadžialjević is a goal-oriented actionist in that sense.
The individual sentiment of belonging to space, location and place provides a unique security. However, belonging to a micro-location does not have to be colored with nationalism, religion or any definite color. There are people who do not have any national, religious or any other sentiment of belonging to a mass. The
“ghetto-isation” of any specie is unknown to them. And, again, we turn to science but it fails our expectation once again: Science has given the main mechanisms of social division and horizons and only offers us the calming medicaments. There is question of lack of education. Postmodernism is bringing a new ways of observing the world which is questioning many accepted facts that seem natural to us. Old theories and paradigms of family, education, religion and similar have to be rebuilt from scratch in a new world. With this project, the author, through construction, deconstruction and reconstruction is offering an initiative for the establishment of a new sensibility of understanding the meaning of main trends and possible directions of a new age.
A chain of consequences without causes, is creating that danger is perceived not at the level of threat but at the level when damage has already been made. Remember: ecology is coming into play once pollution has reached a critical level and when decontamination is impossible. Burhan Hadzialjevic is alerting to time. He is quietly throwing the glove in the middle of the Straight. The straight, as possible reason for the production of new coffins. The straight, as an inspiration for new war novels (“Piran Marlboro!”). Are we truly taught that, because a perpetrator tells you something you do not appreciate, we send our sons and neighbors in bloodshed?
We appreciate this white glove, thrown in this, academic way. It stimulates to thinking.
Eugen Borowsky, 2005, with the project CONSTRUCTION, DECONSTRUCTION, RECONSTRUCTION.