Archive for: Текстови објављени у часопису Култура на страном језику

This theoretical study takes its starting point in the blemished photography The Face by Damjan Kocjan, Slovene author (b.1970), contrasting it with the Duchamp’s Replacing Portrait. Through its interdisciplinary approach, the study has tried to illuminate the continuity which the artist’s idea achieves through the fluidity in time, as well as the different impacts caused both by the recipients’ identity and the cultural patterns it itself was grounded upon.

The disguising strategy, as the two authors’ crossing point, deals with the issues of the original art work, i.e. photography, the gender variability, and finally, with the role of the disguised subject in the public space. The whiteness caused by the destructive, iconclassic features on Koncjančić’s portrait, has anticipated the co-authoring issues, the matters of space in the context of heteropathy and the modern society tendency to postpone its own temporality both by technical intervention of the face and the spectacularly acts. With its possibility to reproduce individuals, people and the history, the photography, through its phantasmagoric disguise and the identity of others, opens up a space for a non-responsible game. In that process, the public face of the spectacle as an advertising means, converts its own merit into the economic, cultural and social equity, fashioning the people for prestigious society classes, granting them the power of superior and dominant faces.

The technical view of the new world order, as Virilio puts it, is only but a media glimpse shaping our identities, making ourselves the photographies of our own destiny in which we are objectified by technology and its destructivness as the final point of conformity existence, when in the name of culture, the predominance over origin, in a brutal and merciless way, is taken over by the technology.