Is Kristijan Kožul the most radical Croatian artist of the moment? His works and exhibitions forced both audience and critics to question their opinions about the whole range of categories that they use to judge the merit of somebody’s artistic work. Lets start from the liking. You like it or you don’t – these are the options you may apply on his work because his subtle frolicking with kitsch clashes any aesthetic codex. Even if the connoisseur’s discipline suppresses the reaction on the first sight, the classification problem is still inevitable. Kožul is definitely concentrated on the object and with the intensity that is unknown to the contemporary or modern local artistic practice. In distinction from his artistic peers, one could laconically think that he is way too traditional for so young an artist. However, Kožul’s obsessive pedantry and meticulousness of execution, not to mention the hidden morbidity of his works, are disturbing and strange for the admirers of traditional art. His feeling for measure within the intemperance, strained to the extreme, doesn’t help either. Paradoxically, in spite of the obvious ascendency of the concept, the avantgarde find Kožul’s aesthetics confusing for the same reasons only with a different sign. The orgy of forms and materials doesn’t fit into the dry narrow-mindedness of avantgarde principles. The division between traditional and avantgarde in Croatian artistic practice (that customary and conformably is never questioned) is finally shaken. One could object that planetary gurus of hypertrophied kitsch, as Jeff Koons once and Matthew Barney today, have already stirred the stale waters of stereotypical divisions, but one has also to bear in mind that here, this closed environment effectively reacts only to the stimuli created within itself.
In materialization of his visions Kristijan Kožul recycles the appropriated objects through the process of maximal addition of applied heterogeneous prefabricated materials. Silk haberdashery, dry meat, lace, bones, china, beads, mirrors, nails, ceramic flowers, feathers and razor blades (…) transform skulls, water tanks, gravestone photographs, flower pots, artificial limbs, high-heeled shoes, wheelchairs (…) into phantasmagoric objects of powerful symbolic.
Why this splendour of over-exuberant forms, this new age horror vacui that induces the ornamentation of everything up to the last point and the ultimate peak for one more, almost impossible step further? What frantic craftsman would lose so much time to complete the object of his vision?
Kožul’s approach has ritual charge. He produces votive objects that exorcize the demons of social reality. The principle is simple and seemingly naive. If the executed object is funky enough, the problem will disappear. If you add glamourous disco-mirrors to the crutches, the mine fields, wars and victims disappear. Has anybody else done more? Terrible is the spiritual and living space where social engagement meets decoration, where criticism of poverty takes form of adorned frivolity of the objects displayed at Cornucopia exhibition. The cornucopias of Kožul’s exhibition are tightly closed. The symbol of hospitality, happiness, hope and mercy offers us only the compact, decorated shell of its outward semblance that is measurable only by the thickness of the skin of local nouveau riche, underneath which there is no mercy or social consciousness.
The civilization code defines the levels of the grotesque of decoration, therefore this arbitrary measure varies from one place to another. Maybe even the obese women who hold cornucopia hastening the overflow of fruits and flowers on the accompanying graphics would be well accepted in India, whose artifacts are recalled by cornucopia. The motifs of graphics, stylized according to the art nouveau patterns, are forged into a unified mass that liquidly spills over the background. Here is most obvious that there is no fun at all. All this abundance is the emanation of frivolous social wantonness, un-differentiated material destined for decay and destruction.
During his studies and in first few years of his exhibiting activity Kristijan Kožul presented video works, as it beseemed to any progressive young artist of his generation. However, the combination of video and objects presented at Gast-art-beit, the exhibition held in Matica Hrvatska Gallery in 2001 in Zagreb, already showed the shift of his interests. The exhibition Feast, held in Vladimir Nazor Gallery in January of 2003, with its baroque flare and forms announced the victory of the object. In short time in 2003 Kožul exhibited two more works created almost simultaneously: the victorious Discoware at the 8th Triennial of Croatian Sculpture in July and erotic and glamourous sadomasochistic shoes and graphics at the exhibition Camp Craft in Rijeka in August. Only two months later in Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery we find ourselves in front of the new cycle that is characterized by the motif of cornucopia. In technical sense Kožul in Cornucopia shows another variation of the procedure that integrates all four cycles presented this year. The main characteristics are recycling of form and theme and quaint artistic supplementation of ready made objects. It has already been spoken about the recycling of the motif of cornucopia. The horns themselves, constructed of ceramic flower pots covered with rows of ceramic flower baskets, enameled white spheres and meters of golden beads, are executed with pronounced sculptural feeling for vital-phallic charge of the motif, tactile feeling for structures and relationship of disparate elements of decoration and subtle coupling their colorist values. The same decorative intensity and props are used for the fitting of graphics so Cornucopia reaches the ambiental charge of Feast.
Kristijan Kožul’s radicalism is manifested in the total design of his shows, but in its essence it finds the footing in spontaneous act of integration and annulment of many differences that we are used to consider immutable constitution of reality. Here commitment is delightfully combined with decoration, kitsch of craftsmanship and elaborate artificial objects fit into mental frame of conceptual art, mastership meets youthful nihilism, measure is reconciled to abundance… and so much more. The neologism baroque conceptualism that Sebastian Smee (*1) uses to designate Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycles, seems very useful to define the novelty that Kristijan Kožul brings onto Croatian scene. Within his works quantity has definitely developed into quality.
Branko Franceschi
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*1 Željko Kipke: “Five Heavy Cremaster Pieces by Matthew Barney”, text in progress for the magazine Oris #24
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Kristian Kožul
Born 22.05.1975. u Münchenu, Njemacka
Contact: kristiankozul@yahoo.com
