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CONTEXTUAL PRACTICES WITHIN THE ROOMATE ARTIST IN RESIDENCE PROJECT

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The text examines contextual practices through the example of The Roommate Artist in Residence Project launched by the Visual Arts Department of Students’ City Cultural Centre and performed at Students’ City (New Belgrade student campus) in late 2014. While taking into consideration the local context and specificities, the text reveals the key aspects and strategies of participatory art applied within a specific project, namely: research and work with community, shedding light on a specific social problem, placing emphasis on the creative process and unforeseeability of the outcome of the art process, appropriation of methods and forms of everyday life communication in art projects, delegated performance. The problems of students residing at Students’ City, no longer aparent for becoming habitual, were seen in a new perspective and attained transparency through the analysis of art activities of the internationally performing artist Aleksandar Jestrović or Jamesdean, the first participant to the The Roommate Artist in Residence Project. The text inevitably links the reflection of micro-context experiences with the examination of changes and courses developing in a broader social and historical context.

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THE UNDERGROUND AND ITS CONTEXT

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The Emir Kusturica’s film appeared in 1995 and immediately it stirred spirits. After winning the Golden Palm in Cannes, an even more inflammable debate ensued. Not only film professionals but also philosophers, culture workers, politicians joined the debate. It spilled over to the countries of the west as well, and in the meantime the film has gained popularity with the audience, which raised the stakes in the public debate. This paper partly describes the course of debate development and lays out several different viewer standpoints which, depending on the context the viewer acknowledges, open up a number of political and also cultural issues regarding history of Yugoslavia. The most accessible level is the level of melodrama, comprehensible to viewers all over the world. Also, there are issues related to communist ideology in a multinational country and the role of the Communist Party. The most intricate and also most important ones are the issues regarding the film role in the history of Yugoslavia, its ideological position and the manner in which the film was used to manipulate the masses, being the most popular, influential media available to widest public.

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ORIGIN AS A GRIMASE: NIETZSCHE’S VIEW OF GENEALOGY

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Classical understanding of genealogy sees it as a process of tracing an origin though lineage: a search for the beginning. It descends all the way to the first ancestor and tends to take the very beginning out of the lineage, to consider it as something atemporal, something that is created in itself, that has no origin, but produces one. That atemporal beginning is considered necessary. Since it has no origin, it has no context to come out of. Nietzsche’s genealogy, however, shows that the beginning is always arbitrary: it is always contextual, because it has its own history. There is always something that precedes that which is seen as an original, someone who is „more first“ than the first. Establishing a beginning is always a matter of convention. Classical genealogy de-contextualizes the beginning, while Nietzsche’s genealogy does exactly the opposite: it puts it in a context, it contextualizes it. The consequences of Nietzsche’s understanding of genealogy, as Foucault shows us, bring not only a radically different understanding of a method, but also crucially affect the understanding of the Greek arche – the basic principal that transcends time and any historical context. Genealogy shows how precisely that context determines even what is considered to be originless – something that escapes every context.

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PARADOXES OF CONTEXT: MICHAEL FOUCAULT’S HETEROTOPIES

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This paper investigates the context – cultural context and culture as a context – as a paradoxical structure that is simultaneously found within a space and outside of it. Therefore the paper differentiates between the space as a given category, and the locus as something that contextualizes space by giving it identity. The context needs a referential point and that point, paradoxically, belongs to the context (it is a foundational myth) and also resides outside of the context since it cannot be contextualized (that point is outside of time and space). Heterotopies emerge as theoretical instruments that indicate that every culture while demanding homogeneity still comprises varied spaces, different loci, nonconformity of words and things, as well as things and their contexts within a culture, thereby leading to a problem of establishing an order, rules of the order and its effectiveness. This postulate leads towards the language and the problem of communicability of culture, i.e. two opposed forces that act in every context: the one force that tries to close and thereby preserve the autonomy (politics of identity) and the other that opens toward different contexts (politics of translating).

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IMPLICATIONS OF DIGITALIZATION FOR THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK

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The aim of this paper is to indicate possible development of the book as a media in the contemporary and future digitized social context. The first part of the paper discusses development of the book as a media. The second part of the paper analyzes current cultural context of books and indicates book industry circumstances, their distribution and reading scope. The third part tries to indicate possible future development of the book. The aim of this paper is to confront comprehension of a book as a static media, to indicate the fact that it existed, in various forms, even before Gutenberg revolution and that it will continue to exist even after digital revolution. Historical perspective and different forms of book existence will enable us to understand its evolution into digital form as something that is necessary in contemporary social context as well as to comprehend that the printed form of the book is far from vanishing. The book has not always had the form we know today (printed on paper with hard covers) over which many already lament depreciating its future. On the contrary, it has been changing its form with the advance of technology and literacy thus evolving into advanced printed forms as well as e-form which we have today

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DEFINING ART

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There are two opposite approaches when we speak about art and status of a work of art. The first approach, according to the essentialist theory, tries to find some intrinsic property of art which it considers to be independent from social and historic influence. The existence of such essence would give to such work of art a universal and timeless transhistorical and transcultural value. The second approach starts from the premise that the status of a work of art is always a matter of convention, not essence. This view rejects the perceptual and phenomenological approach, emphasizing a whole series of contextual conditions – social, cultural and institutional – without which it is not possible to talk about the status of a work of art. Art is redefined on contextual, rather than aesthetic qualities, taking into account the historical and social context in which works of art are created, presented, interpreted and finally – consumed.

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SKETCHES FOR THE THEORY OF NEW MEDIA

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The text “Sketches for the theory of new media” suggests open problems for eclectic discussion of new media in the field of contemporary aesthetics and art theory; it indicates the status of new media artwork and the replacement of the concept of artwork by artistic apparatus. More precisely, ‘new media’ denotes different artistic practices that are based on innovative working with artistic or extra-artistic media. ‘New-media artistic practice’ denotes introducing non-standard media into a standardized and customarily closed art discipline. For instance, new media may signify introducing photography, film or video into the respective contexts of painting, sculpture or music. ‘New media’ also denotes experimental investigations of the relations between various traditional and new media within traditionally defined mono-medium practices. Therefore, ‘new media’ likewise denotes all those intermedia and hybrid art practices that emerge in combinations of different kinds of media (the mixed media, multimedia, poly-media, extended media, art and technology, computer art, cyber art, tactical media, etc). Whereas the hybridization of media was important for the 1950s and ’60s neo-avant-garde practices, it was introduced into art education only in the seventies. ‘New media’ denotes precisely those art practices that are based on artwork-programming (computer art, digital art, cyber art). In parallel with ‘new media’, one may also use the term ‘meta-media’, as defined by Lev Manovich. Meta-media is identified with computer multimedia and digital communication networks. The new-media art is no longer interested in observing and presenting the outer world in a new way but in finding new ways to approach and use data previously accumulated in the media. Meta-media art and culture are based on the digital computer as a technology vital for processing, representing or simulating information, which means imitating and positing the sensory effects of all other media.

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PERMANENT CRISIS

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The term crisis is primarily associated with the world economic crisis and thus the question of relationship between capitalism and crisis comes to the fore. Is a crisis something that disrupts normal functioning of the system from the outside and assumes short duration followed by restoration of balance and return to the normal process of market regulation and setting? Or is it an essential and immutable characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, which leads to conclusion that capitalism is historically presented as a continuous movement from one crisis to another, indicating permanent crisis as the main feature of late capitalism and the present moment? What are the consequences of entering into a permanent crisis?

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CONTEXT – DIFFERENT THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS

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This article presents different theoretical frameworks for analyzing the notion of context. It starts from linguistic interpretation as the earliest attempt of defining the context in relation to the performative: conventional and participatory context. Then, it continues with deconstruction of the context which represents breaking with the linguistic approach and, at the same time, raising the context to the level of a term. The next theoretical framework is the Bourdieu’s concept of a social field as a field of forces that gives to the context a relational character – set of relations rather than elements – and sets it free from substantial recidivism. Nevertheless, the Deleuze’s term of a rhizome and assemblage as rhizomatic model of connectivity makes a radical shift from dualistic matrix evident in all previous approaches: formalistic (artwork vs. context), linguistic (text vs. context, subjective vs. objective), deconstructivist (presence vs. absence, the recipient vs. sender) and the social field as a field of forces (in vs. out). The liquid context – the term taken from Bauman (liquid modernity) is a new framework for defining the context which is related to contemporary moment and contemporary art and includes achievements of all previous theoretical frameworks.

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EDITOR’S NOTE

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