Davor Mezak selects everyday objects and stores them into the gallery space; “white cube” is a neutral, white exhibition area, backdrop “staging/mise en scene”, being not just passive envelope of “things “, but treated by the author as a “cohesive environment” and a “body” with multiple perspectives. Gallery is becoming a simulacrum of a flat in which the author “implants” scenographic properties from a TV talk show, having triffled with an imperative of illusion of reality which is a traditional art feature, he creates a framework for “reception” of media mediated electronic images making commercial and artistic convergence. Baudillard talks of a postmodern world based on the idea of simulation preceding reality and not vice versa, while “pornography is more sexual than sexuality”, simulation is “more realistic than reality”, causing a fade out of reality. Appropriation, deconstruction and remake of objets trouvés – for example a piece of furniture penetrated by video displays, “immersible” technology – and use of mass media structures are modes in which the author creates new feasible empiric worlds. By simultaneous video-loop projections he re-examines semantic (speech as an institutionalisation of symbols, an articulated language as a symbolic abstraction) and genetic (genetics as a linguistic system of nature) systems and their intertextualism.
A triple onscreen projection showing intimate (indoor) genre scenes (such as cuddling a child and changing baby pampers) is incorporated in an outworn ready-made two-seater settee, being a peculiar reality show of post-national family: an exogenous bipolar couple (Lévi-Strausse mentions three types of products whose circulation generates social entities: those are woman, energy and information), bound up by a marital vow and a child having heterogeneous racial characteristics (Bauman defines a family as “an uncontractual organic corporation of direct integration”). On this spot also is a tautological objet trouvé: a doll-size baby carriage as an imposture – a simulacrum of perambulator. There are three video versions (accompanied by sound-background testifying of a continuous presence of public media broadcasting as an “associate” member of a family): the sublimated one, one as a simulacrum of damaged black & white file tape projected from an “eight ” and the one in bluish tone, being in the colour concordance with a furniture hue in a simulacrum of bourgeois, middle-class ambience. In discrepancy with the previous there is a doubled (performed on two monitors coated in sea grass, the fill taken out from the inside of the two-seater settee) omnibus-video placed on the bed, computer rendered sex-files, hard-core illustrative scenes distributed via/through internet (in the spirit of postmodern citation, concepts of authorship, originality or personal handwriting are being rejected as expendable by the contemporary art). Explicit heterosexual and homoerotic scenes in the form of a video clip testify of different mode of practising sexuality, at the level of primordial or acquired instincts (excluding procreativity; virtual sex is desirable in the era of undesirable reproduction) and for the purpose of commercial exploitation. In compressed scenes of “dramatic directness”, with sounds of inarticulated voices in repetitive rhythms, fake flash-backs are imputed, frames of a mummy walking towards the spectator (the author juxtapositions indignant “artificial” scenes, simulations) – Mezak\’s (in terms of self-irony) virtual-reality portrait, computer generated for the purpose of amusement of visitors in the Parisian Museum of science and industry. Pornography todayfunctions less as a social subversion, serving more for canalisation of frustrations of a man “having aspirations to eternity, but could have only its surrogate: a moment of ecstasy” (M. Kundera). Mezak excursively introduces elements of kitsch, juxtaposes profane and precious materials, and anachronic trivial and utilitarian objects (bed delimited/defined by brass spheres has a luminescent “frame” making it more “dynamic”: a string of ruby “clots” of festival light bulbs).
Confrontation of video installations inspires reflexion of the meaning of concepts “public” and “private”, relationship between conjugal sexuality and its use for the purpose of pornographic production, between ephermal and eternal, intimacy and exposure and (im)possibility of communication amid different semantic systems. In the interspace there is a living-room table, and on it a video monitor feigning “small screen” with a syndetic projection of few long televisual frames of two youngsters coming from different social contexts (the artist Frane Rogia and mutual French friend last October in Paris at the HDLU residency programme) trying to communicate ex libris, using a manual for learning language “with no effort”. They read words coming from the unknown vocabulary (therefore absurd semantically) exclaiming and laughing. “To speak means to fight, in terms of the game” (J.-F. Lyotard), and according to Huizinga “we play and we know that we play, consequently we are not just rational beings but more than that, because the play is irrational”. Adaptation and contact are considered to be the main regulators of a social and cultural development. In the contemporary world in which cultures are disappearing, replaced by markets and identities – treated with irony by Proust declaring that he would never be a member of a club everybody could join (or ingeniously by Groucho Marx who “would not want to be the member of a club accepting him as its member”), the concept of neighbourhood is utterly agreeable; mobility reduces in a high degree the importance of traditional social groups, tribes, clans, big families, sects… (according to F. Fukuyama).
In the society of spectacle, beneficial consumption and media mediated communication the contemporary art is exposed to the industry of entertainment and “art-reproductions”. As a simulacrum of details of quotidian life, decorative household inventory, attached to the wall above the two-seater settee there are three shining pictograms (a comic-like mental drawing of its virtual users?), scenographic properties from a national TV “spectacle” acquired by cut-and-paste action, establishing “the empire of symbol”. The supreme structure on the exhibition is a disco sphere, embodiment of hedonism and popular culture, kohinoor, ready-made simultaneously emitting kaleidoscopic light show and absorbing (as a super-mini “supernova”) light coming from an associated spotlight. Pascal Bruckner talks of a contemporary man as “perpetually immature” loomed over by the imperative of consumerism and leisure, cult of happiness and continuous enthusiasm. “You won’t deprive yourself of anything” is an imperative principle characterising that state of mind. The superficies of the sphere are covered with pieces of mirror. Immanent to postmodern idea is subordination of the Subject to a category of theOther as a looking glass (opposite to the Other). According to Baudrillard the social scene and the mirror are replaced by the screen and the net: the mirror as a model is passé, physically reflecting the figure and preparing it for transcendence, while the screen is a non-reflecting surface on which electronically generated operations are being proceeded. Discohome is an assemblage of Symbolical (verbalisation), Imaginary (pictorial presentation), Real (everyday objects); or rather intermedia and interhistorical objects of various grades of realities (including virtuality). The author converts analogue recording to a digital (and then throws it away as dispensable; that “change of technologies” he sometimes illustrates by placing heaps of used video tape in the exhibition space) and vice versa. Thereupon induces interaction of space and perception emphasising the light component of the exhibition, strategically arranged electronic devices and light fixtures. Despite Groucho Marx, welcome to Discohome!
Silva Kalčić
