The air smells of madness
The origin of the slogan “The air smells of madness” is tied to the trajectory of artistic exploration, primarily archival in nature, undertaken by Milica Rakić during her work on the project “I Am as Beautiful as a Revolution.” It appeared on the facade of the Balkan cinema in October of last year, as a piece exhibited as part of the project “Staying here with you – moving,” which was conceptualized and realized by curators Ksenija Samardžija and Maria Esther Jungo, with support from the Saša Marčeta Foundation. After the exhibition ended, the slogan, with the agreement of the curators and the foundation, remained on the facade until now, functioning both independently and detached from the original exhibition, without direct association with the author’s name or body of work, and even without a clear indication that it was an art piece. Given its location, visible from a car or various other angles without approaching the building, and lacking any signature below it, most viewers encountered it in its “deauthorized” version. Thus, to many, it may have initially seemed like part of a somewhat unconventional marketing campaign, certainly not exuding the typical authority of art. This ambiguity helped the slogan enter public discourse, spreading among people who don’t regularly engage with official cultural rituals or frequent galleries.
This was also aided by the fact that the slogan doesn’t describe or critically examine any specific state of affairs that would be necessary for understanding it in its original context. Instead, it invites reflection beyond clichés, and where that reflection leads depends largely on the individual. The goal of the piece is to captivate the audience, to pull anyone who encounters it out of the inertia of everyday thought processes. Consequently, every adoption of this slogan becomes a form of interpretation, as evidenced by the abundance of Instagram and Facebook photos where people have already captured and shared it. In some cases, interpretations have been highly personal and specific, while in others they have been shaped by the dominant social and political contexts of the moment. The absurdities surrounding Belgrade’s street lighting at the time of the slogan’s appearance, followed by public outrage over extreme air pollution, contributed to these interpretations, as did the psychological warnings that could be read into the slogan during the lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The allure of this and other slogans the artist employs lies in their resemblance to linguistic patterns frequently used in everyday speech and the clichés we lean on when conversations lose momentum. Seemingly, they are ordinary, harmless truisms, neatly packaged and ready for various uses. Who knows, someone might put it on a fridge magnet or even use it as text for a new tattoo. If that were to happen, it would mark a greater success for the work than any official award in a professional context. To intervene in the linguistic habits of its audience, disrupting the standard ways in which unreflected, borrowed language narrates personal experience, the slogan must get under the skin—literally, if necessary, via a tattoo needle. Only when someone embraces it as an expression of personal belief or identity does it become truly effective. At that point, its subtle indeterminacy and instability of meaning, which no contextualization can fully resolve, come into play.
It’s important to note that the slogans used by the artist are not simply ambiguous or open to multiple, equally valid interpretations (in the sense of polysemy), allowing everyone to select a pre-existing meaning for themselves. On the contrary, their indeterminacy prompts the continual regeneration of what might constitute their semantic element (in the sense of dissemination). This quality aligns them with the nature of poetic language, as defined by philosopher and art theorist Julia Kristeva, in a sense far broader than the disciplinary field of poetry. Kristeva emphasized the revolutionary power of language that undermines established coherence of meaning and destabilizes the symbolic order.
Milica Rakić, a revolutionary by life choice, does not confine her activities to thematizing various emancipatory struggles with revolution as their ideal and source of meaning. Rather, she also focuses on the language through which these struggles are mediated. In this very substance of language, she finds an equally powerful foundation, much like in the traces of revolutionary history she revives in works that more directly address the fronts of various political battles.
In this way, her slogans act not merely as linguistic devices, but as tools of disruption, encouraging a rethinking of how meaning is constructed and conveyed, much like Kristeva’s view on the subversive potential of language.
For Milica Rakić, language is a tool for individuation and subjectivation. This is evident in the large number of her slogans or catchphrases that begin in the first-person singular, many of which are deeply self-ironic or rest on a fundamental paradox. Yet, this does not spare the artist from the criticism she directs at others and at society as a whole. She is not a small soldier in some grand revolution imbued with eschatological characteristics, where individuality is erased in favor of collectivism. Rather, she starts her struggle with herself, seeking to revolutionize her own attitudes, actions, and everyday life.
Hence, slogans like “If I am not a hero, then what is a hero?” or “Fear requires strength, and I am a lazy woman,” where the external socio-historical context is clearly not the main reference point. Just as her work does not rely on unwavering allegiance to emancipatory events preserved through art to shield them from historical revisionism, it also does not use them as the foundation of subjectivity.
Stevan Vuković