Dan Oki – A Meditative Complexity in Formal Simplicity
Dan Oki is an author who very seriously takes his field of action. Therefore his works look serious as much in their form as in their contents and narration. His experimenting is never a purpose for itself, but always contains some general artistic, and even ethical explanation. Therefore, Dan Oki (Slobodan Jokic) is an artist. And not in a pejorative sense of that word.
Dan Oki does Art film, video and computer animation with artistic prudence, always bearing in mind the whole, even if it were explicitly or selfevasively emphasised. Were it conspicuous or hidden, the idea of the whole and its completeness remains the mark of the artistic procedÈ of this author, already active for many decades. The completeness of the whole, the finalised expression, the longing for a message from an author’s work… What is it that these characteristics of an individual ‘artistic style’ have in common with (or to be more precise, contrary to) the spirit of time in which ‘the artist creates his work of art’?
Even when he uses the word ‘tape’ as a material background for his works – what could be connected to the thing that the other media calls the text – Dan Oki creates the coherently shaped works. The work, as Frederic Jameson says, is a category of traditional artistic origin and as such is not comparable to the fragmentary nature of contemporary media and their digital dispersion, eclecticism, incoherence…
With all that has been said, with his understanding of the artistic media in which he acts, Dan Oki could pass as a guest on the artistic art scene, a guest from the experimental movie milieu, that streams more to film than ‘video’. But does it make him less interesting for the video media? ON THE CONTRARY!
Through his art pieces, Dan Oki creates a very special collage of different formally-stylistic picture entries that, as I have already mentioned, construct a completed whole. His ‘video texts’ are thought about and conjured from contemplative consistency and pureness rarely comparable to other video authors originating from this geographical zone.
Jokic never hides the fact that the important source of his delicately finished artistic structures, is philosophy itself, especially ethics.
However, there is another question of how comparable can this emphasised aesthetic, post-modern media such as the video and its particular moral “coldness”, be with the ethical, modern approach.
In theory it is not so, but in the case of artistic practice of Dan Oki this approach is legitimate, extremely convincing and perceptively interesting.
Jokic’s latest work, finished this year, a combination of film and video, ‘Divine Beings’, is an ecological-humanistic narration based on a true concern about the living kingdom. The author narrates (“off” the screen) his fascination about animals, that goes back even to his childhood, when he had his private little zoo, hidden in the basement of his home. With clearly formed consciousness about the incoming ecological cataclysm, Dan Oki calmly and monotonously talks about his experiences with endangered species in general, collected in the course of his lifetime. The pictures that accompany the story follow the one association. They are not easily explainable, but with their surpressed, bleak “black-and-whiteness” enrich the artistic completeness and audio-visual effects of the work.
Pictures from a public park in Tokyo are opposed in contrapunct with the distant noise of the city. The silence of the park is even more perceptible through its numbness and artifice. Everything is calm in the park, there is no living soul … The only moving thing is a fish’s tail in an artificial pond…
The contrapunct of the artificial silence of the park nod almost “natural” noise of the city is compleded with the calm voice of the narrator, whose tone suggests how it is probably already too late for anything. The rivers are polluted, forests cut down, and the living world captured in parks such as this, in an almost virtual world of contemporary hi-tech Japan. The howling of wolves phantomly attracts the Munch’s “Scream” from the most famous expressionist canvas… An elephant thump against a door of a building reminds of schizophrenic disturbances of an individual in a end of the millennium. Oki’s memories from his childhood as if are coming from some ancient times when there was still hope. The critic of human negligence towards their own environment and the living world in it, turns into an anguished attitude about the helplessness of human society to do something about protection of its surrounding.
“Sometimes it is very sad to be a human.”
With this very explicit sentence, Oki concludes another artistically coherent whole. The whole that presents morally-ethical self-consciousness in a such unapparitionable Zeitgeist that we witness, and which makes all contemporary phenomena relative. The phenomena that are no more discussed on the basis of some human existentialism from the end of our century.
Oki is persistent about bringing to life some of these surpressed marks of the long forgotten humanity, the humanity expressed towards the living world as well as towards the man. All this through the almost unbearable lightness of narration and the incredible consciousness about the media he uses. Formal and simple, and yet so meditative and deep!
This, “movie video-text” should be watched again and again to discover Dan Oki’s philosophy and human concern about the world we live in, the same as the meditative complexity in formal simplicity.
Marijan Krivak
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Dan Oki (1965, Zadar, Croatia)
From the second half of the Eighties works in Europe, in various fields of media art such as experimental movie and video, installations, computer animation, the Internet, photography and performance. He studied film and video on De Vrije Academie in The Hague, in the class of Frans Zwartjes, as well as the Department for Visual Art at Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, Arnhem. His works were exposed in numerous European and world cultural centres and institutions for new-media arts…
