Stevan Vuković
Media Archeology and Visual Art in Serbia in 1990s: Discussions with Artists „The characteristics of television are its immediacy and a characteristic anti-archive quality“, wrote Branislav Dimitrijević in a text on the history of video art in Serbia, when referring to the specific features of it’s development in 1990’s. According to him, video art practices of the times were demonstrating „a possibility to control television as an ideological mechanism, a possibility for manipulation and creative subversion of the television image“1. He was mainly referring to the video Good evening by Association Apsolutno, realized in 1996 in collaboration with Aleksandar Davić, as obtaining a relation between „the television transmission and a video recording“, but that statement could be also related to a number of other works of that period. This series of discussion with artists who have, during 1990s, made some of the paradigmatic works thematizing television as a medium, attempts to provide with an account of strategies used to cope with the obvious paradox related to the social role of television, as having a significant democratic potential, but mainly performing a role of pacifying power, which extends „over the whole of cultural production, including scientific and artistic production"2. If these artists really have managed to control the mechanism of television and subvert the image it produced, that was a considerable step towards reclaiming social memories from the domain of media manipulation. Another task crucial for this discussion series was to investigate how the „characteristic anti-archive quality“ of television could be dealt with. In other words, this task was of finding ways to cope with media contents that were in specific political and social settings broadcasted with a goal to produce a predefined response from the audience. If their performative effect was context specific, relying to the impact of immediacy of televisalised images, if one would simply archive the materials recorded from television, without supplementing them with some discourse that would point to the contexts of the broadcast, the very process of archiving would not make sense. This task was even more important because this discussion series extend on the project initiated in Academic Film Center in October 2006, under the title of Media archaeology, that had as one of the aims the establishment of „a new model of archival practice, in collecting and presenting the corpus of audio-visual material“, through a series of lectures and discussions „growing into a wider platform of public discussion and exchange of media content“. Therefore, the stress will be on the manners in which the artists have appropriated images and formal characteristics of their framing on television, to produce a work which escapes the logic of televisualised experience. Each discussion is on a specific artwork realised in 1990s, in the context in which it was made, and
with references to the general artistic strategies of the artist which has produced it. The list of the
dates, titles, names of authors and specifications of the work is the following: Good Evening , by Association Apsolutno In the circles of people opposed to Milošević’s regime in Yugoslavia of 1990’s, the prime time evening news on the state television (RTS Dnevnik 2) were referred to as the synonyme of oppression, and ideological manipulation. The reason was simple: these news, not completely unlike news in general, but perhaps in quite an exaggerated manner, were offering more than information. The were offering a complete worldview, embedded into the discourse which was, as Snježana Milivojević and Jovanka Matić have demonstrated already in 1993, „much less founded on telling facts, and much more on presenting interpretations“3. In reaction to that, on protest gatherings and rallies there were always slogans or drawings commenting on „television, the drug of the nation“4. In some cases tv sets were ceremonially destroyed, which brought even to a dispute, after the 1996 protests, when Ivan Pravdić, a member of Magnet group, publicly reclaimed autorship over that act. Namely, he was claiming that „the students’ breaking of television sets was a plagiarism of a similar action by the Magnet group and citizens of Niš“. While the largest parts of the local independent art scene were practicing active escapism, which was defined as “the creation of parallel fictional reality and quite personal histories, though these would not have been created if there was no cause in the existential reality which sometimes outdid the fiction itself”6, and some art groups, as Magnet, were using direct action of mainly a demonstrative character, Apsolutno has aimed at grasping the existing reality by conceptual means, and site and media specific strategies. Therefore, in an attempt to cope with the language of television, they have utilized samples of its regular use as raw material for a video experiment. Good Evening was the second video project on which Association Apsolutno have collaborated with film director and video artist Aleksandar Davić. It was produced by the Student Cultural Center Novi Sad, as a part of the wider Apsolutno project, titled 1995-2000, which was to bare witness the evolvement of the last five years of the century and the millenium. A year before, they have worked together on the video under the title Absolutely Dead, witnessing the slow death of two unfinished new ships falling into ruin in a Novi Sad shipyard. Made as some kind of a report from the inside of the ships, it played with the conventions of media representations of police investigating the crime scene, while members of the Association Apsolutno impersonated the investigators. As in the other works by Apsolutno, the starting point for it’s development was a discovery of a site or a situation which had a “symbolic or metaphorical potential in relation to a wider social context”, but which got so much naturalized into something quite familiar, common and usual, that could, therefore, be “no longer even perceived as something unusual, out of the ordinary, and worth further exploration”7. These sites and situations were then declared to be absolutely real, and a visual testimony was produced to support that act of transfiguration. In the case of Absolutely Dead the site is the dysfunctional shipyard. The situation is the arrested development of the process of construction of two ships of titanic dimensions. The symbolic potential disovered in them relates to contexts including the undead state in which Yugoslavia was at the time, to the state of the local art system, with sets of institutional venues with no profile, no programs nor substantial finantial support, symbolically dead, but physically still existing. In the case of Good Evening, the site is the mediaspace of television channels reachable from Novi Sad at that time. The situation is of the greeting address of a tv presenter. The symbolic potential discovered there relates to the performative effect of the act of addressing in framing the content which is to follow it, showing television acting as an ideological apparatus. XY Ungelöst - Reconstruction of the Crime, by Milica Tomić Aktenzeichen XY... ungelöst, which translates as File XY... Unsolved, is in the history of televison programming considered as the first significant show dealing with unsolved offences with the aid of viewers, in order to to combat and perhaps help solving crimes. It made a model on which the BBC show Crimewatch and its US equivalent America's Most Wanted were made. In the first 35 years, between 1967 and 2002, exactly 3,228 cases had been featured on the show, and 1,182 had been solved, including 624 murder cases. It has used the framework of Öffentlichkeitsfahndung, or the public participation in finding facts on the crimes commited, and on various suspects that might have coomited them, within which 1,880 people had been sought, out of which 914 were caught. Milica Tomić remembered watching it as a child, while living for a couple of years in Germany, and when she was invited to produce a work for the second annual exhibition of the Soros Center of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, that made murder for it’s topic, she has used a slightly altered version of this title, calling her work XY Ungelöst - Reconstruction of the Crime. The work is a 2 channel DVD installation, reconstructing the crime that committed in Kosovo on March 28, 1989. That was the day when the Assembly of Serbia has passed amendments 9 - 49 to the Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Serbia, which has decreased the autonomy of the two provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo. The process of amending the Constitution was announced and began in November 1988, so that the Albanian opposition in Kosovo reacted with a five-day protest march. It did not bring significant changes, so the protest actions have continued, intensifying shortly before the adoption of the constitutional amendments, and, following their adoption, on March 27 and 28, 1989, they grew into riots, which were brutally supressed. A number of protesters were killed, but that was absent from the media in Serbia proper. That was the very moment when, as the final achievement of demonstrations and rallies supportive of Slobodan Milošević's policies, under the name of Anti- Bureaucratic Revolution, he was to be elected President of Serbia (on May 8), and shown at Gazimestan as the leader and unifier of the Serbs who brought their „state, national and spiritual integrity back“ (on June 28). What was absent from the media in Serbia proper, Milica Tomić did read of in the Slovenian student press, the Mladina magazine. The images she saw there were hounting her until the very moment when she got herself caught in a similar situation, during the anti-regime protests in Belgrade in 1996/97. When most of the protestors started shouting at the police officers that they should not supress demonstrations in Belgrade, but go to Kosovo instead, she decided to go the opposite way. She did not send the police officers to Kosovo, but herself. She went to the place and the time of the crime she knew of, trying to reenact the traumatic event. Traces the bodies have left in the snow, and pieces of clothing the victims did wear, were the only foundation she could build upon, for no other visual presence of theirs left in the media. Therefore, she put the clothes of similar visual appearance on herself and her close friends, and have reenacted the scene of bodies falling into snow, making traces as the ones one seen on documentary footage. In difference to the strategy of Aktenzeichen XY... ungelöst, and similar tv shows, XY Ungelöst - Reconstruction of the Crime does not hunt the perpetrator of the crime, engaging the viewers into that hunt. It is also not a collaborational piece, made to help the police, nor does it sell the pain of the victim for the profit of the moguls of infotainement. It puts us in the shoes of the victims, in a demand for a representational image of them, challenging the „political and artistic iconoclasm as the dominant characteristic of the attitude to state –’perpetrated violence in this country“. War Frames, by Zoran Naskovski In 1999 the war came home. It came to the homes of residents of Belgrade, and some other towns in Serbia, but this time not only through media. Air raids and detonations of bombs sounded differently than on the television. Up to then, the war was happening somewhere else, and media were considered as means of representing it, until, suddenly, it became quite obvious that the media were the ground on which most of the battles were fought, for „war consists not so much in scoring territorial, economic and other victories as in appropriating the ’immateriality’ of perceptual fields.“11 Media were part of the war machine, as they always are. There was no reality of the war to be represented by the media, it was constituted throught the media, even much before the real war started. As Zdenka Milivojević wrote, „armed conflicts were directly preceeded by a process of militarization of media discourse, which started already in 1990.“ On March 24, 1999, NATO began launching air strikes against targets in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which has issued decrees of an imminent threat of war on March 23, and a state of war on March 24. Already on 2:50 that morning Radio B92 was banned from further broadcasts, while its equipment was seized. All local electronic media houses which wanted to keep their licences have turned patriotic, so only the internet was left to host information and statements that were not apriori taking the Serbian side, nor supporting the so called humanitarian bombing. That way, internet became the medium which was used as a specific meta-medium, for criticism of the printed and electronic media, in their relation to the reality of war, its causes and goals. An ordered collection of screen shots of footage from the local TV during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, took shape of a web and installation project by Zoran Naskovski, titled War Frames. On the level of form, that looks like a standard ready-made practice exploiting the strange juxtapositions of, say, a scene from a Disney cartoon and the sign for air raid, within the same frame. But, in the work of Naskovski from that period there was always something more to the process of finding a perfect form, through manual execution of a piece, or introducing found objects or images into a specific setting. In a text on a video video by Naskovski, from the same year, and with a symbol of red star as a title, Ješa Denegri has pointed to the manner in which the visual material and the thematic narrative, taken from a tv broadcast of a basketball game, were trasposed by slow motion and blown up13. There is a parallel to that in the manner in which the tv footage was structured in the War Frames, but that is still just formal mastering of a medium. The crucial feature of this work is related to the use of one medium to problematize another, and that is something Naskovski has started developing already in 1994, installing an appropriated photo image, a reproduction of a photo by Edward S. Curtis, with his monochrome painting.14 Jasmina Čubrilo has interpreted that as an attempt to „think over the experience of painting through the intermedial praxis“15, but, as later works have shown, it was not necessarily related only to the reflection of personal experience, but the way a medium works in general. As Dejan Sretenović noticed in a text pinpointing this shift from formalist to functionalist approach, “a dream about an absolute FORM has been dispelled before a dream that has come true, a dream about inFORMation, about non-objective and automated consumption performed by pressing the button.”16. So, on one hand, the visuals in the War Frames seem to be of the kind which could be acquired by zapping throught the tv channels, and pressing a button, in non-objective and automated manner . On the other, they narrate a fragmentary story on televison as a medium, its social use, and the ways in which different constellations of visual signs pass as information. |
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