Editorial

Editorial

The present issue, in all its diversity, brings to light the position of art today, in which art’s very powerlessness is revealed as a potential capacity for a new beginning. While the belief in the potential power of art was very much alive not so long ago, today only a handful of people believe in its political power. It becomes clear that the introduction of new concepts no longer suffices for the emergence of basic/fundamental conditions that would lead to changes in the field of artistic creativity. The naive belief in the authenticity of the work of art or in its a priori emancipatory power has also lost the potential for generating changes in the field of art. Instead of this, in the present issue, we offer new paths and observations, we go back to the very beginning with the authors of the texts, and we make room and do away with the conceptual burden grounded in ideology that is part of the capitalist structure.

We observe that the power of art today is slight because of its reliance on the “giant economy that depends on those resources that public funds and private capital delegate directly to contemporary art¹,” or rather because of its dependence on funding that comes from the market. Even the roles of those that produce art are fundamentally changing; this is the topic of Beti Žerovc’s text, which compares the roles of the curator and the director. Hence, it is very reasonable to ask what art today can offer as “an alternative to the things about which there exists social consensus, things such as parliamentary democracy, the free market or the devaluation of the communist hypothesis²,” to quote Oliver Frljić.
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¹ Beti Žerovc: The Exhibition as Artwork, The Curator as Artist: A Comparison with Theatre.
² Pia Brezavšček, Katja Čičigoj: an interview with Oliver Frljić.

We did not look for an answer to this question in engaged art, for “a critical and engaged position may well be the subject of the most extreme mass commodification and economic exploitation in the world of art, taking place under the fashionable banner of Art&Politics,” as Katja Čičigoj demonstrates through her analysis of the artwork Episode 3 by Renzo Martens. It seems that the strategy of creating counter-images is also unsuccessful, for they, not unlike images, are inscribed into the “dominant” fictions, representations and forms that feed the collective imaginary, whose content is determined by the powers that be. The continuous deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of meanings, images, views and the perverting of various images are already part of the capitalist structure, as Pia Brezavšček explains in her text about the performance SO FAR AWAY: Introduction to Ego-ology (TAM DALEČ STRAN. Uvod v ego-logijo) by Betontanc Ltd. Surrounded by the quantity of production, we change from individuals into dividuals, trapped in “heterotopies, which accumulate almost endless amounts of time and divert attention,” especially in the direction of “quantitative” formats, among which the festival format has lately been the most prominent. Andreja Kopač and Rok Vevar offer different approaches yet similar findings about festivals, while Stefan Jonsson, in his text about the analysis of the masses, argues that discourses, instead of describing or revealing, represent things and thus confirm existing ideologies. Jonsson uses a number of artworks and their analysis to mount the thesis about the powerless, yet important, position of art.
Leaving behind/setting aside the attempts to find authenticity in art, we discover with the authors of the texts that more radical, political voices of art can be found by going back to the basic starting points; they can be found in unpretentious moves and new conditions of work, which directly intervene in our modes of perception and reception of art, which is the topic of Bojana Kunst’s text. If we move on to Cheap Lecture by the artist Jonathan Burrows, we run into numerous parameters of contemporary production, based on the model of post-Fordism, which invite us to contemplate the power(lessness) of artistic creation:
“When we least think
we are working is
when we be-
gin to work.”

We would like to seize this opportunity to express our gratitude to the authors of the texts, the proofreaders Eva Horvat and Eric Dean Scott, and the translators SunčanStone, Rawley Grau, Andraž Golc, Polona Petek, Aleksandra Rekar, Urška Zajec and Špela Drnovšek Zorko.