The Slovenian Cultural Day passed with the usual rituals at the level of politics and cultural institutions. The latter opened their doors free of charge to visitors, held recitals in Vrba and in Ljubljana’s Prešeren Square, etc. There was a varied event at the level of the municipality of Kranj and there was a big national celebration, which politics had already taken care of by handing over the reins to the Coordination Committee for National Celebrations. The Prešeren Fund was thus left without autonomy of a view from which the muses of art should be honoured. However, at the Prešeren Prize ceremony, the President of the Prešeren Fund’s Board of Directors, Jožef Muhovič, poetically discussed art.
For many, this publication was also the first encounter with this year’s laureates and their creative work. In this sense, the institution of the Prešeren Prize has fulfilled its task, and in doing so has also taken upon itself the right – which it has, like everyone else – to interpret art, while at the same time missing the opportunity to tell the widest possible public something new about their art in our time and in this time from the laureates themselves.
The keynote speaker pointed out, among other things: ‘Artists have always worked at the border where the known and the unknown, the routine and the visionary meet. They venture into the unknown and take part of it with them as they transform it into form, rhythm and image. They move the unknown closer to the articulated, expanding horizons, metabolizing experience and paving the way from the insignificant to the significant. Art is therefore a rite of passage into an “other state of things”, another state of perception, of the existence of forms and of coexistence between the world and people. This state cannot be programmed or created at will or dictated. Sometimes it cannot be created at all, but only the conditions favourable to its emergence can be prepared.”
To put it simply and in other words, and thus a little differently: art is the capacity to create the new, which – if this new can be called – passes into culture and also becomes a means of social communication. It is an activity whose purpose is to create, to form works of aesthetic value. It therefore requires skill and knowledge in the field of creation, as the fact that the word is derived from umeti, to know, from which we derive also to comprehend, tells us.
Art could therefore be, loosely speaking, a creation that we have made from what we have understood. But a cursory glance at the creative process and the works of artists often shows us the opposite. Many works of art are the result of the artist letting his or her own unconscious take over.
We asked our interlocutors, Mirko Bratuša (M.B.) and Methodo Frlic (M.F.), both renowned academic sculptors with a vast body of work and fellow members of the Inštitute NAPREJ, what is worth considering in this context.
M. B. The unconscious is an added value. We are used to equating art with production and we expect art to do that. Then we like to classify things and concepts and name them. Some time ago, Peter Rak wrote a very interesting article in Delo: “Culture is everything we do and don’t do, according to the poet, writer and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger, (…). This thesis is actually quite alien to Slovenians, we are used to completely equating culture and art, even the Ministry of Culture (…) was actually the Ministry of Art. And perhaps culture in the integral and broadest sense of the word, i.e. cultivation, is what we miss the most – if the rule applies to art that nothing comes from nothing, but the new is always composed of the old, whether as a quotation, an interpretation, a modification or, last but not least, as a negation, this is even more true for culture.”
Art is first and foremost an exploration, especially of perception, understanding, messaging, social communication, materials, technologies and their influences, etc. To make an artist seem tamer, we look for unconscious layers in his work. The artist is the catalyst of society and its culture, and so we find in his work messages and contents that move us in a peaceful slumber, convinced that we have safely stored them away somewhere in our depths.
Is today’s art characterised by a surrender to the unconscious process of creation, or is there more conscious creation? What currents are marking the Slovenian artistic landscape?
There are a few artists who could be said to be indulging in the unconscious, like Zupet Krištof, which is one of the reasons why he is overlooked in the awards, but they are a minority.
The mainstream of creators works through rational and quasi-scientific theories, which are then visually illustrated, seeking their own ray of attention.
You can feel the stuffiness of our small space, which does not have a lively art market. It does not exist because we are too small and too poor. Sculpture is the primacy of rich nations. We do not have a well-seeing and well-standing middle class to drive development. Of the extremely rich, very few are interested in fine art and even they have no consciousness to become patrons and thus promote the development of culture and thought in the nation.
assistant professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, who lives and works in Malen Vrh in the Poljanska Valley and in Ljubljana. He belongs to the generation of sculptors who formed at the turn of modernism into postmodernism and expanded the notion of sculpture beyond the form and the object to a wider, also social space and to the level of the concept. His work is characterised by the interplay of classical sculpture – from individual sculptures to objects – with multi-media spatial interventions and installations. Conceptually, his work focuses on socially engaged themes, in particular on the critique of various anomalies of contemporary society – from the trafficking of human organs and the decline of Slovenian industry to the position of the worker and the critique of capitalism. He raises the language of sculpture to the level of the grotesque, combining traditional sculptural materials with typical contemporary, even banal materials and serial products that define today’s society.
It is important to remember that good working conditions influence the development of an artist because they allow him or her freedom. It is like a car; it gives you the freedom to move around, but you have to buy it and then maintain it and fill it up with fuel. And all this costs money. To make a sculpture, you have to have the conditions – which is a constant cost – and then you dismantle it and you can’t sell it. Then you put the statue in the corner of the studio because you have no storage. That reduces your space to work, you get lost in your works and soon you are left with no space to work. Or you can destroy the works and not even allow them the distance of time in which to check whether they are the bearers of a quality idea. Therefore, a large warehouse where the artist could put his works – they could be exhibited, but he would remain the owner – would be very welcome, and if there was a buyer, a percentage of the storage fee would go.
When we draw a line under all this, we understand why there is so much support for conceptual approaches to making art – including from the state. Many events are written in biographies that cost little financially. Theory goes to the fore, decoration is recycled. All that is needed is for the media to cover the event and for the artist to get his few minutes of attention. We have become an instant society based on ‘show’ and privilege, which in turn is the result of individualism and narcissistic egoism. We cannot afford more because of our limitations, and that is our reality.
Do the works that contemporary art puts in front of our society show that we have grasped this modernity?
M. B. We like to think that we have grasped it. It reassures us and we like “art” that is a feast for the eyes and the soul. Art does not put itself before society!
We often work and build in the belief that the façade is the surface of our building. The surface reveals the internal structure and it is good to be aware of this from the foundations. Someone has said that everyone is responsible for his own face. Yet, we are destroying nature, the climate, society and ourselves. We all think that our little dabbling goes unnoticed, unrecognised. What have we understood?
Do works of art effectively address our present, or do they only appeal to our aesthetic sense?
M.F. Art addresses the present because it cannot be otherwise. It deals with the problems of our time, uses new materials and is surrounded by the latest technology. Given the diversity of what is on offer, many times the buyer chooses works that merely appeal to the aesthetic sense. However, such a choice says more about the buyer than it does about the maker. This is often the moment that time must cleanse. If an artist is ahead of his time, he is misunderstood and will find it difficult to sell because he has no following, like Vincent van Gogh, for example. If he is a best-seller, maybe he has caught the zeitgeist, or maybe he is just a commercial train and history will throw him out. You can have two roughly equivalent artists, one of whom sells very well and the other of whom sells nothing. That happens because some aesthetics are attention-grabbing and have substance, and others don’t. But history can turn that on its head when society changes, so they rediscover some artists, like El Greco, who was forgotten for three hundred years and is now admired.
Sometimes you question the meaning of what you are doing, but you are still drawn to engage with the material, to breathe a message into the world. We no longer know how to put a statue in a public space, relieved of a certain commemoration, but we want it to be poetry, a gesture in the space of this time for passers-by. When we look at the statues that are being erected in our capital, we realise that the space of the sculptors is being occupied by architects, because they are stronger in influence and they are more confident. They are no longer statues, but designed signs that bear no personal imprint of the author, no emotion. Everything has to be clean and empty, like most of the architecture of today, which looks only at the profit per square metre. All this is the result of neoliberalism’s attempt to make us numbers and hard workers. Today, the wealthy do not compete with each other to see who has the best statue or the most statues in the park.
Once upon a time, sculpture was part of the marketing world; someone had to ‘advertise’ for saints, martyrs and warlords. That changed when we got the screen, which has replaced a lot of that, made it cheaper and more attractive. Despite the fact that we humans are haptic creatures, society is losing its desire to touch. This is good to see in young people, who are losing the desire to make love and reproduce.
Which of these is taking precedence in our art at the moment?
M. B. The art market and the growth in the number of art consumers are in vogue at the moment. In general! Otherwise, the most appreciated themes are sociological and daily political, such as migration, various emancipations, ecology and similar, definitely politically correct themes. Rarely does anyone care about the structure and syntax of a medium, the uniqueness of the message and how it reflects the current moment and the immanent content or truth. We are used to declarations and punch stories, but Wittgenstein tells us that ‘the dew falls when the night is at its quietest’.
And it’s not just the St. Florian Valley!
Michelangelo was overlooked for three hundred years, but with the advent of psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century he was rediscovered, first by artists like Rodin. Michelangelo was most interested in the tension between what the artist does and what the viewer wants to see. It is the famous non finito, already present in his earliest works, which he could have ‘finished’ a hundred times over with his diligence. Gestalt psychology is also highly developed today, and art historians still argue about whether Michelangelo finished his statues or not, even though it is clear that such artists leave nothing to chance.
Full Professor of Sculpture at the Faculty of Education, Department of Art Education, University of Ljubljana, and Associate Member of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2019.He initially established himself in the generation of Slovenian sculptors working under the label of “New Slovenian Sculpture” at the end of the 1980s, but his humour and fascination with materials made him stand out even then in an atypical way. He likes to experiment with unusual combinations of “old” sculptural materials, clay, wood, bronze, ceramics, with new, industrially produced materials, polyurethane, kerrock, electrical wiring and cooling systems. His anthropomorphic figures are social allegories that have undergone many transformations. Since 1992, he has been installing them in sculptural installations that are often interactive and incorporate unusual technological solutions.
Does aesthetics, the sense of the beautiful, change as the artistic message changes?
M. F. Aesthetics changes according to the evolving society. The cause of this natural process is broader. One of the problems is the power of the big Western countries, which set the artistic standards for all other countries. They write the history, they set the artistic names, they support their artists, they buy up the works of most of their artists for the permanent collections of the museums that are spread all over the Western world, and most of the same names are repeated. This is the globalisation of the art market, which becomes the standard for the rest of us and at times uninteresting.
A similar thing is happening in our own little space. Certain groups of influential people in the field of management and creation have occupied the spaces of management of the politics of art. There is almost no market for the arts in our country, and some people are trying, but to no avail. That is why it is necessary to keep a tight grip on the budget money, so that it can finance ‘their own’, who are then sent to exhibitions abroad. Of course, the works must not be too heavy or awkward, the best ones are foldable, small, so that they go in suitcases. Then they give such artists awards and, consequently, jobs. This is all part of our everyday life, and if anyone says anything, they are quickly cut off.
How do we get out of this? You try to create the conditions to work, you reduce the format of your works and you continue to live in your dream world and explore. Maybe a glimmer of hope will shine through, but you’d better not count on it. We know that Francesco Robba almost went bankrupt when he made the Fountain of the Three Rivers of Kranj – today’s Robba’s Fountain.
For most, prestige is social status, not the quality of a work of art. But talent alone is not enough to succeed on the art scene. It is how he is connected to the political parties that control culture, and what his sexual orientation is, the DNA of his family and its financial power, etc. Only the sum of all this makes a successful artist.
Will the works that art has put in front of us in the past year be able to become a means of communication between us, a means of understanding and comprehension between us? Are these the works honoured by the selection on the occasion of the cultural holiday, or are there perhaps other, overlooked, more appropriate ones?
M. B. Through all these works, artists are already communicating with us, the only question is whether we have the right receptionists and reception apparatus. A lot depends on us, the consumers, how receptive and open and sovereign we are in a certain field. Spoken and written language is our most sophisticated means of communication, with an incredible range of nuances, undertones and emotional layers. But specific artistic media have developed specific languages. Do we know enough of them to communicate sovereignly?
I miss the sculptor in the selection of this year’s winners. The number of winners is limited, but I respect the selection, especially since it is an art medium whose language I am not very familiar with. I enjoy the work of each of the winners to the extent that my cognitive apparatus determines, even though I try to get to know each medium individually and all of them together.
Creation is, after all, a service: what should artists themselves, what can the state do and what can the public do to ensure that art fulfils its creative function in order to improve our communication, both interpersonal and internal, understanding, etc.?
M.F. There is an interesting contradiction. There is an increasing conceptual approach, most of whose works then cannot be sold, at least not in our space. So this creation remains on the cash shoulders of the budget or the European funds which pay for the project financing. The works are then recycled or thrown away because there is no way of storing them. This brings us to the point where we, the creators, are mostly left as entertainers who take the works home when the exhibition is over. There are no buy-backs, but exhibition fees have been introduced and galleries have washed their faces a little.
Everyone will be able to choose a project on the Internet, to print it in 3D and have it at home, if they wish, on payment of the copyright. So we will all be happy. Just as the food tastes of our youth are disappearing, so will the views on art of our times, and a new reality will come, we will just have to accept it.
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