Fokus grupa: nature, nation and the economy of love
The smallest, most basic unit of the installation by Fokus grupa (art and life partners Iva Kovač and Elvis Krstulović) at the Gallery Miroslav Kraljević, which provides the common title to the entire exhibition, is the sculpture “A Proposal for the Monument to the New (Inter)Nationalism” – a faithful replica of an oak twig: a powerful tree that is at once a symbol of the numerous and diverse Indo-European identities, but also a historically marked economic resource and, historically, in some cases, a stronghold of national or regional economies.
Like its animal kingdom counterpart, the eagle, the oak is featured in numerous national emblems, and their strong mythological foothold among, for example, the Slavic nations, lies in the fact that both symbols allude to the supreme deity called Perun, an archetypal figure of patriarchal power. Similar attributes are ascribed to the Greek Zeus, “the father of gods and men,” as well as to his Roman counterpart, Jupiter, and these ancient pagan deities are replaced in the Christian version by the Old Testament saint Elias or the celestial warrior Saint Michael. In times of national revivals and awakenings as well as the creation of nation-states or at least mythologies on European soil, the pagan heritage and its atavisms are used as a foundation to the youthful nationalism, more often than not with a visual backdrop of the newfound beauty of the untouched, virgin and sometimes wild and cruel nature. But the frail twig appears in the exhibition as an emblem of resources, that is, the utilitarian application of symbols, functioning as a reminder of the former economic importance.
Seen symbolically, the frail twig, made out of polyester, is a tree substitute dedicated to the divine father, whose sanctuaries were often located on mountain tops or at least hills. A more contemporary version of such an altar is the Altar of the Homeland by Kuzma Kovačić, erected in 1994 during the questionable restoration and reconstruction of the medieval fortress which had roused the popular and literary imagination at the time of late Romanticism. Combining the location of the pagan sanctuary dedicated to an altitude deity with the aggressive royalist tradition of the Altar of the Homeland,[1] a monument was designed that stands apart from the formal lines of late minimalism thanks to a few descriptive details which locate it in a specific historical context. In the gallery appropriation of the purified altar form, Iva Kovač and Elvis Krstulović use a far more perishable and modest material than precious stone, utilizing recycled discarded chipboard furniture for creating the sculpture “Behavioral Furniture.” Kovačić’s altar’s neutral cubes recreated by Fokus grupa direct the motion through the Gallery Miroslav Kraljević, in a way almost becoming gallery furniture, a sculpture that not only can be touched but sat on, reduced to its basic form and some fundamental utilitarian uses, like sitting on it while watching the film projection.
According to the authors, the starting point of the film There Aren’t Words for What We Do or How We Feel so We Have to Make Them Up and of the entire project presented at the Gallery is their foray into nature which had begun precisely at Medvedgrad. Their trips to Medvednica were not escapist protests like the work Hallelujah the hills by the group Weekend art (Tomislav Gotovac, Ivana Keser Battista, Aleksandar Battista Ilić), but a pilgrimage to the place that has in recent media reveilles become one of the new iconic images that affirm the identity of the inhabitants of “Our Beautiful.” The authors’ forays have resulted from them, followed by a professional camera through national parks with the intention of being openly exposed to the celebrated landscape. Giving up the safety of the ironic tradition and distance, Fokus grupa embarks on a quest for the “genuine national identity” in a landscape devoid of immediate markers of civilization and historical sediment, even in the form of ruins so dear to Romanticism.
The film There Aren’t Words for What We Do or How We Feel so We Have to Make Them Up opens with an allusion to an anecdote that affirms the myth of “the most beautiful county in the world” – Alfred Hitchcock’s famous admiration for the sunset on the shores of Zadar, but the filmic quest for Arcadia and the authentic emotions it awakens becomes a meditation on the failed attempt to construct the image and vision that would directly, nonverbally, mediate concepts such as origin, unity, purity, timelessness. Language, another stronghold of national identity, is performed in the film by a male speaker, in international English seasoned with a Slavic accent.
Embarking on a trip outside the secure city street raster as well as beyond their usual media of artistic work, Iva Kovač and Elvis Krstulović commence their search for the “real places” that lie outside the media-mediated instruments of national self-identification and pay visits to all the more or less present mythical topoi, like the Velebit’s Holy Hill. Their characters are not recorded on camera, they are inscribed in the editing process, integrated only by the seemingly neutral suggestive baritone who confesses the search in the first person. The work’s procedural aspect, indicated only by the confessional form of the text, can be glimpsed through the dramaturgy of attempting and giving up which the spoken testimony is based on.
International English, but in written form, appears in the recently published art book “Perfect Lovers” (2002 – 2012). The very choice of language distances itself from the form of the private, and the confessional character of the real stories is blurred by the shifts and overlaps of the protagonists’ identities. The text, short love croquis, are followed by the authors’ private photographs, thus physically exposing their intimacy, hidden behind words in the language performance and displaced narration. The confession thereby takes refuge in the secure domain of sexual fantasy, and the documentary in fiction. The couple’s photographic exposure takes place with separate protagonists, in moments of relaxation and outside any roles, revealing them only in their physical presence. The internationalism introduced by the oak twig, a symbol of identity and the ancient basis of economy but also of the space created by man, is conveyed through a public display of confessions and intimate stories. Love is derived from the acceptance of the world through the division of difference, and that is the beginning of the universalist potential of each of these personal, intimate stories, as Alain Badiou would say in his book In Praise of Love.[2] But while discussing the comparison of love and politics, Badiou also touches on the subject of internationalism, this time through the somewhat anachronistic notion of “fraternity.” “There are two political, or philosophical-political, notions one can compare at a purely formal level to the dialectics present within love. Firstly, the word “communism” encompasses this idea that the collectivity is capable of integrating all extrapolitical differences… But what on earth is “fraternity”? No doubt it is related to the issue of differences, of their friendly co-presence within the political process, the essential boundary being the confrontation with the enemy. And that is a notion that can be covered by internationalism, because if the collective can really take equality on board, that means it can also integrate the most extensive divergences and greatly limit the power of identity.”[3]
“National landscapes use their nature, in whichimageand reality are intertwined, in order to naturalize the nation’s legitimacy. Like the altar, the image of the national landscape summarizes their complexity into visual clarity,” writes Paul Wilson in his text “Banality and critique: Contemporary photography and Finnish national landscape.”[4] Contemporary Finnish photography and the famous Helsinki School, which Wilson discusses in his essay, are often cited as an example of the coupling of art and nationalism which seeks to internalize the representation of nature into something called the national space and, consequently, through the process of self-legitimization, the national imaginary. As an opposition to such instrumentalization Wilson cites the aesthetics of banality, used by some artists to rebel against that kind of identification. In the case of the work of Iva Kovač and Elvis Krstulović, that is, Fokus grupa, it is precisely love speech, but also the risk of love, through the prism of emphatic emotion which they are unreservedly given over to, that is the origin of the liberation of language, of landscape, and finally the very medium of the safe cradle of national culture.
Jasna Jakšić
[1]Altar of the Homeland (Altare della Patria) was erected in Rome as a national monument to Victor Emmanuel III in 1885. The monument sparked some controversy, primarily due to its aggressive dominance in the historical center of Rome and the destruction of a medieval neighborhood on the Capitoline Hill.
[2] Alain Badiou, Nicholas Truong. Pohvala ljubavi (In Praise of Love), Zagreb, Drugi smjer, 2011, str. 41.
[3] Ibid., 60.
[4]Minna Henriksson and Sezgin Boynik (eds.). Contemporary art and nationalism: critical reader. Priština: Institute for contemporary art “EXIT”, 2007, 154-175.
