Author: Stevan Vuković
The three projects presented at the exhibition “In the Ravines of America” were created, just like its title, by means of recomposing elements, recontextualizing and relabeling the taken material into which local phantasms about America had already been inscribed in some way. Namely, Mladen Miljanović used a Bosnian folk song about the role of the United States of America in the creation of the statehood of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had already been developed in three mutually opposing versions, in order to combine all those versions in a new arrangement and perform it in the form of a video performance together with a musical composition. composed of war veterans from all three sides in the war in Bosnia in the nineties, who mostly did not know each other before that, and whom the author brought together for the purposes of the project. Radoš Antonijević took over three Yugo car shells, as a kind of relic of the phantasm of conquering the American market with a Yugoslav product, and reshaped them, i.e. narrowed them along the axis of symmetry, giving them the functions of sculptural objects, with the fact that he tied a barrel to the roof of the second one in the series , and the third is the washing machine casing. And Nenad Malešević made the postage stamp with the Statue of Liberty motif, as a symbol of the realization of a dream for over 12 million immigrants who passed by it when immigrating to the United States of America, the starting point of a complex project, for the needs of which he himself stepped in for the first time on American soil and visited that monument. The results of that project were then incorporated into a space that was constructed specifically for its exhibition, and within its framework, by way of setting, that postage stamp acquired the status of a kind of fetish object, the viewing of which became an act that ends the journey to the center of the labyrinth, on which also includes differently formatted drawings (in the form of books and animations in which they are introduced), as well as the author’s travelogue text, and a reproduction of the painting “Harvest” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, from 1565. The travelogue text, in addition to reflecting on the course of the project itself, also done as a kind of guided tour through quotes taken from philosophical and literary texts, and art literature.
The title of the exhibition “In the ravines of America” takes over and transforms the name of the exhibition that was organized in Kassel, Germany, at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum at the end of 2003 by René Blok, the director of that museum. It exhibited the works of 88 artists from 12 countries that were treated as if they were from the Balkans. However, Slovenia and Romania were also among them, whose territories definitely geographically do not belong to the Balkan peninsula, but, since its author referred to Charlemagne when he took the title of one of three fantastic adventure novels from his ‘Balkan’ cycle, (“In the Balkan ravines”, i.e.: “In den Schluchten des Balkan”), and Slavoj Žižek’s claim that the borders of the Balkans are imaginary and fluctuate, few questioned the legitimacy of the geographical determination of the author’s origin at the exhibition. Therefore, René Blok claimed that his approach to the examination of the topography of the area that he had determined for himself as a research space was nevertheless different from the approach of Karl May, who wrote novels about the Balkans in the same way as those about Vinetu and other heroes of his imaginary Wild West, and that he never left not only Germany, but even his native German province, Saxony. Namely, on several occasions during the preparation of the exhibition, René Blok conducted research trips in the terrain that in his view would be described as “Balkan ravines”, examining the positions of a wide range of artists and institutions that were involved in contemporary art in that area, but, considering the way the results of that research were formatted within the exhibition and accompanying materials, and the way it became part of the wave of ‘Balkanist exhibitions’ of the time, few really gave it a significance that would go beyond the framework of Orientalist discourse.
The fact is that the exhibition “In the Balkan ravines”, since it was held from the beginning of September to the end of November 2003, could not be distinguished from the other two exhibitions held in the region immediately before it, with almost the same theme, perhaps only slightly differently formulated. These were the curator Harold Zeman’s exhibition in the Esl Collection in Klostenburg, Vienna, called “Blood and Honey” (with the claim that in Turkish “bal” means “honey” and “kan” means blood), realized with the help of curators from BAN (Balkan Art Network) network, and the exhibition entitled “In Search of Balkania”, organized by Austrian artist, lecturer and curator Peter Weibel, publisher Roger Conover and dramatist Eda Čufer in Graz, in the New Gallery at the National Museum. Those two exhibitions, together with the exhibition “In the Balkan ravines”, were seen as a wave of penetration of Austrian and German cultural policy to the southeast, within the framework of neo-colonial aspirations towards the Slavic countries in the east and southeast, that is, as a continuation of the nineteenth-century aspiration named as “Drang nach Osten”.
René Blok was later, together with Barbara Heinrich, the artistic director of the 47th October Salon, which was held in Belgrade under the name “Art, Life and Confusion” from September 29 to November 5, 2006, and two years earlier on the fifth (and last ) Biennale in Cetinje, under the slogan “Love it or leave it”. He incorporated them into the “Balkan Cities” project, which he initiated with the funds of the museum in Kassel, which he was leading at the time, and it all started from the symposium that followed the exhibition “In the Balkan Ravines – Report”, which was designed by Marius Babias and Bojana Pejić. and realized under the title “Reinventing the Balkans: Geopolitics, Art and Culture in Southeast Europe”, on October 25 and 26, 2003. The quality of most of the works that were presented at those exhibitions was quite high, and few of them were enough. known in the environments in which they were shown, but the context that was imposed on them was more than problematic, especially after the studies of Maria Todorova “Imaginary Balkans” (1997), Vesna Goldsworthy “Inventing Ruritania: Imperialism of the Imagination” ( 1998), and Milice Bakić-Hejden, who together with Robert Hejden published the study “Reproduction of Orientalism: the case of former Yugoslavia” (1992). In all these studies, the Balkanist discourse was treated as a specific variant of the Orientalist discourse.
One of the significant contributions of those studies to the study of the process of orientalization and balkanization of the art and culture of Southeast Europe was in demonstrating the way in which their subject was constructed from a side view, and mainly in times of great crises and wars, when it was necessary to detect some “heart” darkness’ in the depth of the European continent, on which the phantasms of irrational otherness would then be projected, that is, everything that is suppressed in the culture of the West. The ‘Balkan’ was thus used as a signifier of the exotic and mythical, dystopian and anachronistic, as a place of return to some pre-civilizational level of behavior, and at the same time as a frightening representation of the potential future of the West, as a constant cultural and territorial fragmentation, i.e. dissolution into a multitude of small, mutually opposing and war-affected entities, which is already the standard lexical definition of the term ‘balkanization’ today. In the eyes of the West, the Balkans almost never played the role of a demarcated geographical area, but only a mere phantasmatic space, and this also enabled Karl May to project his fantasies about primitivist societies precisely on the spaces of Southeastern Europe and the American Midwest, without even trying to informs about the history of those areas, and about the peoples who lived there. For example, in the novel “Kroz zemlju Šiptar”, which was written immediately after the novel “U balkanski gudurama”, and was published in the same year (1892), he stated that Serbs and Albanians speak the same language, while the movements hero was quite inconsistent with the geographical data on the ground, and depicted only some imaginary topography of the region. This, of course, was not characteristic only of Karl May, and of the type of adventure literature he wrote. Vesna Goldsworthy, in her research into the links between imperialism and the imagination, which she published in the book entitled “Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination” showed in all the ways that British popular literature, and that in a very wide range of genres and authors, from Anthony Hope to Agatha Christie also had a very active role in constructing the Balkans as a mythical area, and its use for the entertainment industry. And it is one of the few areas of its kind that survives even today, when under the impact of the decolonization of heritage, it is no longer possible to legitimately write, or even create artistic works in any media, on the topics of isolated mythical areas, if they were to be located somewhere outside of Europe. and America, and especially not in the global south.
The exhibition “In the ravines of America”, which is realized in the space called “Bioscope Balkan”, precisely introduces the “ravines of America” into the “Balkan ravines”. It shows that, in fact, America is the heart of the Balkans, and that phantasms about it are hidden in the depths of the “heart of darkness”. America enabled statehood for Bosnia and Herzegovina. America has changed the production of cars for the needs of the working class in a socialist society into a project to conquer the Western market with small and cheap cars that can be the second or third vehicle in a more affluent household. America, as the “empire of freedom”, as Thomas Jefferson called it, provided the rest of the world with ideas about freedom, from the free institutions that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about, to the free verse introduced by Walt Whitman, whose book was included in the setting of this exhibition, and who proudly signed himself as “American” and “bard of democracy”. That’s how America is fantasized “in the Balkan ravines”, and at the same time, “in the ravines of America” they fantasize about how everyone else fantasizes about America.
Thus, through the thematic combination of the works in this exhibition, a picture of an imaginary America is created, which serves as an external landmark, that is, as a kind of otherness compared to the everyday life in the “Balkan ravines”, but also as a kind of “internal foreign territory”, whose existence constantly makes it known that in all that local Balkan language, no one is completely immune to Americanization, which takes place continuously, slowly and imperceptibly. Popular culture, media content and art that are seen as global, without any privileged place of origin, often have very strong roots in a specific, particular culture that tends to present itself as universal. American culture is an example of this phenomenon. In this exhibition, the works of three authors, Mladen Miljanović, Radoš Antonijević and Nenad Malešević, were introduced as a context for re-examining its influence. They were created independently of each other, although the artists were in mutual communication all that time, in a constant exchange of opinions and experiences that has been going on between them for some time, although they do not form any formed artistic group. They recognized the mutual harmony of the works and their thematic kinship only when the works had mostly already been created from different motivations, and had already been exhibited individually, so that the key element for the decision on a joint exhibition would be the good fit of those works in the space they were given offered for disposal.
Mladen Miljanović’s work introduced a moving image and sound into the space of the installation, and ambientized one of its segments, but at the same time leading the viewer to look at it from different perspectives. The work of Radoš Antonijević provided the exhibition with three strong accents of the direct physical presence of sculptural objects, created in the form of variations and recombinations of recognizable forms in solid material, taken from everyday life, then physically transformed and re-labeled, creating a tension between the formal and narrative aspects of the works. And, finally, the work of Nenad Malešević introduced architecture into the space, which is filled with very precisely positioned material fragments of the narrative, but can only be read by physically moving through that environment, and that in the ways that are foreseen by the spatial scenario. Interrelated, these three projects form a unique visual-spatial narrative with clearly defined references.
Mladen Miljanović: Sounds of the native region
Mladen Miljanović’s ambient setting counts on observing the work from several positions, because only with a view from the balcony can the map of Bosnia and Herzegovina, dotted with stones, be clearly seen. It defines that segment of space in which a video projection of three versions of Ante Bubal’s song “Napravila Amerika od Bosna druzju” was installed, performed by veterans of the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, from all three ethnicized military formations: the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Army of the Republic of Srpska and the Croatian Defense Council. They made up the musical ensemble, which Mladen Miljanović collected and put together for that specific occasion through friendships and acquaintances. Everyone in that composition already had experience of performing original folk music. The difference in the arrangements is only in one stanza, which focuses the narrative from the perspective of members of one ethnicity, and the performance of all three versions moved each of the participants from the position that was originally attributed to them, and introduced them into two others, once quite openly, and now latently to it. opposed. The arrangements remained as they were already found in the published editions of the three versions of that song. In this sense, since it combines, merges and recontextualizes already existing songs, this work can be considered an assisted ready-made that strives to achieve a totality that would unite three opposing and even completely antagonistic positions. The author claims that in such a performance of a resemanticized national discourse, he aspired to further expand the notion of “delegated performance” introduced by Claire Bishop in her book “Artificial Hell”, which in one variant includes precisely the creation of different compositions of people to perform songs that are somehow it concerns their identities, whether they are professional musicians or just a hobbyist.
The work was recorded in May 2018, and the first showing of that work was at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republika Srpska in Banja Luka in 2019. Immediately after that, it was shown in Aberdeen, Scotland, the same year, then in Dresden, and for the first time in Serbia in 2020 in Čačak, where he was awarded the 30th Nadežda Petrović Memorial Award. Although, according to the author, the focus of the paper was on the unification of different and mutually conflicting positions of nationalism, in order to compare and make them meaningless together, within the same performance, he in fact rather shows how these three ethno-nationalist positions are constitutively conditioned by each other, but that only in the constant comparison and mutual clear demarcation can be performed in an effective way. Combined at the same time, without demarcation, they only seem comical and absurd, unless some kind of discursive alternative is taken into account to the fact that, in terms of identity, for a large percentage of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s viewpoint, ethnic identification is the main basis, which they can hardly give up. In this sense, this work does not pretend to provide any answers to those identity questions, but to take the participants of the performance, and probably many of its observers, out of their comfort zone, and lead them to instead of fixed, predefined and inherited ethnic and other identities , begin to rely on the positions they build only as subjects in a complex social structure, that is, in a concrete network of social relations.
The irony, which dominates this work, rests on the fact that since the time of the war in Bosnia in the nineties, in which it appeared as a kind of Deus ex Machina, and especially since the Dayton Agreement, interventionist America has often been treated as the sole guarantor of sovereignty, both in political theory and in pragmatics. and the integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a single state. This is reinforced by the constant re-actualization of fears that without American guarantees it would very quickly balkanize, that is, break up into ethnically defined states in constant mutual conflict. In this sense, Bosnia and Herzegovina is very often spoken and written about as a “Balkan point of the pax Americana”, whose sovereignty is protected from the outside, not by the functioning of institutions that operate within society, and all three versions of Ante Bubala’s poem take this as their starting point.
Nenad Malešević: Project America
Malešević’s “America Project”, in the work called “America Manuscript”, also in some places implements the sentence about sovereignty, norms and decisions. They appear in the register related to the controversial philosopher of law from the era of Nazi Germany, Karl Schmidt, whose views in the last decade were often recycled and rearticulated in various ways, so that he also appeared as a diagnostician of the complete hypocrisy of the liberal world order, on led by the United States of America, whose arguments were then used by right-wingers like Richard Spencer, and left-wingers like Chantal Mouffe, but also precisely as the creator of theoretical legitimation for Pax Americana, in the version promoted by George W. Bush. Malešević placed Karl Schmidt in a relationship with Agamben and Kafka, and insisted on Kafka’s redefinition of the appearance of the Statue of Liberty, which in the novel “America” does not hold a torch but a sword. Malešević’s style is not analytical, nor does he plead in any way for a theoretical definition of the relationship between sovereignty and American interventionism, but moves in the domain of, as he claims, “prose stylistic exercises”, that is, “multi-genre prose closer to a soliloquy and confession than to a scientific discussion”. The text slowly merges into diary prose, which follows the author’s journey from finding a reproduction of the Statue of Liberty on a stamp bought in Zemun, across the road to New York and visiting that monument, and provides data for reading a very complex installation made of part of the material accumulated and generated throughout that process, and introduced into a very strict minimalist environment.
The central part of the installation is a postage stamp measuring 4.1×2.4 cm, in an open box on a 130 cm pedestal, specifically designed and constructed for this installation, on top of which a pyramid is captured, as a small additional elevation on which the box rests . That particular stamp, with the motif of the New York Statue of Liberty, provided the initial impetus for the generation of Malešević’s project, which entailed going from the image to its referent, that is, a visit to the Statue of Liberty, and a travelogue that followed the entire process of travel and stay. In the installation, the postage stamp is reached through a relatively simple labyrinth on the walls of which, before facing it, the visitor is presented with fragments of the narrative that she initiated. Opposite that pedestal is another, on which 9 books with drawings are arranged. Each has 98 leaves, they are hardbound with a black cover, and sealed, so that they form a small pile. They are grouped by size, since they were made in three series of different dimensions, namely 15×10×2 cm (two books), 22×14×2 cm (three books), and 22×28×2 cm (four books) . There are also photographs, which according to the author’s testimony were taken in 2019, on February 21 at Liberty Island, on February 24 at 53rd Street in New York, and on February 26 at the Metropolitan Museum.
The precision of the description of the works, as well as the details of the origin of their elements and the manner of installation, is in counterpoint with the multiplicity, variety and expressiveness of the drawings, which were created for four whole years, as well as with the incomprehensibility of the interrelationship of the quotations that are integrated into the test accompanying the installation. The drawings were made according to the illustration of the Statue of Liberty from the postage stamp, which, in addition to the image, also contains textual parts, a price indication and a trace of a postage stamp. In the accompanying text, they are defined as affect maps, although they are tied to the presentation of one motif, obsessively, repeatedly and over a very long time, and leave traces on the representation of the motif. The accompanying text opens with a quote from Deleuze and Guattari, from their book “A Thousand Planes” and celebrates this multiplicity, and introduces the interpretation of the traces of an expressive approach, which is additionally supported by Emil Nolde as a reference, as well as the insistence on replacing meaning with intensities. With this insight, the presentation of drawings in closed books acts as an additional compression of intensity, which seems to resist being closed into some fixed forms. At the same time, the audience is not completely prevented from viewing those drawings, only that they can actually be seen only on the screen at the very entrance to the labyrinth, as if incorporated into digital animation.
Radoš Antonijević: Yugo America
Seemingly quite a simple series of sculptures made of Yugo car shells, cut and narrowed along the axis of symmetry, with the addition of a rope-tied barrel on the roof, in one case, as well as washing machine moldings in the other, inevitably awakens narratives and opens up various referential fields for each observer, at least at the level of their recognizable characteristics. As reshaped and somewhat hybridized relics of the past, they close the narrative that began at the Belgrade Motor Show in 1980, where small city cars, designed for families with a modest budget, were to replace the legendary “Fić” for the first time. (car built on the basis of the Fiat 600 model, whose official name was Zastava 750, and in the modified version Zastava 850). Fiat was approaching its thirtieth birthday, for which production was to be suspended, and the management of the Crvena Zastava Institute decided to find a successor, whose engine, instead of Fiat’s 633 cm³, would have as many as 903 (like the Fiat 850), and instead of Fiat’s 23 horsepower ( at the beginning of production, i.e. 27, in the last year) had a full 45, which led to the name “Zastava Jugo 45”. In the first years of production, a very small number of pieces were made, and work was constantly being done on its improvement, before entering real mass production. In fact, it was a symbolic struggle for the growth of the standards of ordinary people, workers, according to which this car was made, in contrast to other, more expensive and luxurious ones, which were available only to the functionary class (the so-called red bourgeoisie) and even then the already growing affluent. a class that included small businessmen, returning guest workers and various intermediaries in international trade, who had already personally begun to integrate themselves into the parts that their companies had made.
At the beginning of the eighties, the models Zastava Jugo 45L, Zastava Jugo 55 and 55L were developed and presented at the fairs (where those with the designation 55 already had 55 horsepower and a full 1116 cm³, and could reach 145 km/h, unlike Fić’s 100, which were brought up to 124 only in the last versions). At one of these fairs, he was spotted by an American businessman of Yugoslav origin, Miroslav Kefurt, who contacted Zastava with a proposal to cooperate in a large export project for which the market would be the United States of America. The name of the car is changed from Yugo to Yugo, and Kefurt founds the company Yugo Cars Inc in California and seeks the approval of Fiat (which, as a partner and source of licenses, had to be consulted for the export of all Zastava models), and realizes the first presentation of the Yugo at the Auto Show in Los Angeles in 1984, where Malcolm N. Bricklin jumped into the game and bought the rights from Kefurt. It drops the advertised price from $4,500 to $3,990, and requires a number of changes to various aspects of the car (from emissions control to the interior) to go into distribution. After 14 months of hard work by a large number of Zastava experts and 528 changes, the Yugo America project is also underway. The campaign lasted from 1985 to 1992, and sales in the United States began on August 26, 1985. In eight years, as many as 141,511 were sold there out of a total of 256,691 exported, which was mostly contributed by its very favorable price ($3,990), which made it competitive in the class in which the leading Korean Hindai Pony (Hyundai Pony) was, but with a slightly higher price ($5,200) and could serve well as a second or third car in a household. At the beginning of the war in Yugoslavia and the trade embargo, that project stopped, and only in 2003 did Bricklin re-sign the contract with Zastava, with the fact that somehow the “Red” thing was avoided and that the cars were marked ZMW (Zastava Motor Works), but on BMW reacts to this and threatens to sue, explaining that it is too similar to the name of their company, after which Bricklin withdraws and cancels the contract. Yugo production is slowly winding down, because buyers in Serbia are increasingly choosing used cars rather than new Yugos, so the last Yugo was produced on November 11, 2008. Today, it is used more as a motif for art works focused on the past, than as a means of transportation. .