{"id":5414,"date":"2006-11-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-11-03T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gmk.esbe.com.hr\/news\/alen-ozbolt-rub\/"},"modified":"2006-11-04T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2006-11-03T23:00:00","slug":"alen-ozbolt-rub","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/g-mk.hr\/en\/news\/alen-ozbolt-rub\/","title":{"rendered":"Alen Ozbolt: EDGE"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Few Notes From The Edge <\/strong> <\/p>\n

Once upon .. Once upon a time .. Can such a beginning point to something “without time and without place”? Can anything be without time and without place; is this indeed possible in – this in is already a place – space, society, or living nature? Perhaps as a spoken, phonetic word, or a term? But this sounding vibration has its source or place, and it has its time, its end in time when it stops. Place and time, do they remain? The deletion is difficult, and thus there is neither a single place nor single time any more. <\/p>\n

A person, if only a consumer, is certainly a “place much larger” than its physical limitations to the biological or media body. Between the empirical, biological, imminently given, between the “self-evidence of everyday life” at the one hand, and the phantasm or “psychical reality” on the other – as Freud puts it -there is an unavoidable slit. All body layers stream into a place, called social phantasm in psychoanalysis. In the analytic theory, however, phantasm is always the phantasm of sexual relation, a failed or missed encounter. Therefore, the social body always reveals a certain fracture, fissure, and antagonism. Psychoanalysis claims that this other, symbolic, phantasmal body, and certainly also our wider social and linguistic body, is crucial for us and our “biological” bodies; at the same time, however, it cannot be limited only to body as place, although – as Lacan puts it – “anatomy is our fate”. <\/p>\n

Since ancient times, neither urban space nor architecture represented merely a hospitable safety, or “household”, or “home”. They are distances and structures in space and substance; we always experience them as imaginary and reflect upon them not only as physical presence in space, or material shape in space, but also as substance on its way to the light, to openness. The light is not necessarily a deception, or illusion, and therefore this is not religion. The inner space of architecture, for instance, is a skeleton or frame, opened to be filled alive (with flesh and blood). Only monuments of architecture are bare, void and dead, while others are filled up with the living matter that takes account of open and void orientation of the closed space. If a person enters it, the empty inner space – even if the interior is strictly functional – becomes inhabited, and as such it also represents imaginary space, which is bigger and wider than itself and which always exceeds its own intentions, laws, or physical dimensions. Notions are manifold. It no longer matters what is dominant and what subordinated. The entire world can be alive; since we are not hermits, however, it can easily happen that the most pleasant, literally the most wonderful view is the view of\/into the desert. <\/p>\n

City and architecture are the traditional&contemporary; besides protection and safekeeping of the naked body and life, they are a large, even giant bearer and frame of pleasure, enjoyment. The function of city is multifaceted and abundant life, production and consumption of delights by citizens, but also power and control of proprietors in the honour and glory of rulers and the misery of numerous homeless – who, however, can only live in cities, but not in nature. If architecture is functional, or a decorative excess (for various important owners, or media, financial and political big heads), city – if it deserves this name – is always a living and moving bearer of imagination gone wild. Thus city is not a roof over one\\’s head, protection for body and life; the form does not follow the function. The form of city “produces” life, or chaos, while the form of architecture must conform to a school, or tradition, and most of all to money, funding. Architecture stands, it is constructed, just like a dress that makes a person. City is on fire, it constantly moves and changes. When I speak about architecture, I would like you to imagine a miserable hole, a very limited space, or a closed room without windows and doors … A man expelled from the world: is it a total prison without surveillance, is it punishment or luck; can this make one happy? The fear of dying is also the fear of darkness, the loss of sight; even coffins are nicely decorated both from outside and inside. But what does a contemporary gallery remind of, if it differs from a creaking museum? A promenade, or a boring living room centred around the television set; a forlorn hotel room, or a hustle and bustle of a shopping mall; the heat of a sport stadium, or a bloody battlefield, darkened bedroom, or sweaty kitchen? Whence agitation, if the genitalia of visitors are hidden? <\/p>\n

I believe that the “performance” and role of art does not belong to the public or common sphere, nor was art always prone to simplifications, pamphlets, clarity, dailiness … The search and escape, escape out into the unknown, and then back again, looking into the defined and controlled visible world. It can find something, as well as loose it; it can both go away and come back. It is no longer certain whether art has “a human face”, whether it is made “by the measure of man”; it is merely of human origin, and thus placed where the subject is always in- scribed – visible. This is not an optical deception, but rather the difference between culture and art. Culture is for everybody, art is merely for one. Culture is food, art is hunger. Culture is a prison, art has no bonds. Culture is consumption, art is deficiency. Culture is functional, art does not function. Culture is a convention, art is a break of convention and culture. Culture is language, art is barking. Culture is a dress, art is a woman. Culture is old, art is beautiful. Culture is national, and art is not. <\/p>\n

In the framework of The Fall of the Angel of Light exhibition of black-and-white graphic works by VSSD in 1989 I created a work, entitled The Dark Room, in the back room of the gallery. It was a space in which the viewer did not see, where the look was missing. The walls were covered with very soft, fur-like tactile cotton fabric; there was no light. In this Dark Room the eye needed the hand, for the eye did not see, and it thus needed the hand to find its way, to “see”. When looking at something we certainly do not see only with our eyes; we can also discern, or “see”, with our hands. Eyes are a very swift and effective instrument; eyes know the difference between real and non-real, between truth and lie. But eyes can easily be lured, deceived, and when eyes are uncertain, we need hands to become assured, to find our way, to orient ourselves. <\/p>\n

The completely white sand floor paintings (Thou, Thine, Thee or To See Or Not To See), which came later, do not contradict the mentioned dark, dim room of the loss of sight, and certainly they are neither the “city box”, the urban illusion on the other side of the window. In their visual presence they are entirely white, white-whitened space; to put it metaphorically, they are the cleaned, washed, discoloured world, optically empty, devoid and invisible if viewed from the distance, but filled-up and densely “populated” if seen from the near. The white space hides boundaries, it is almost without visible limitations, and thus it approximates the infinite and open space without definable borders. This is only an appearance and illusion, of course; the white sandy landscape does not dissolve the space, but it does render it almost invisible, unspacious, immaterial for the eyes. <\/p>\n

Skin is a large outer surface of the body, it is between the environment, or outside space, and the physical volume. However, skin is not a boundary, or protective cover; it is actually the place of passage. A wall is a solid boundary and barrier; it is a difference, but also a place between two sides, the place of passage. And what is the edge that lies between two opposing surfaces, for example two walls? Technically speaking, the edge is the final, outermost part of the body, it is something between two sides, it is an aberration, or turn – it is where one side turns into another, where one surface hides, retracts, or “moves” to another side, or into another direction. Physically speaking, things and objects on\/at the edge are hardly possible, for the edge has a very specific identity of emergence. Politically speaking, the edge is a passage and a conflict between two opposing sides. Existentially speaking, to live on the edge of society means to live a marginal and cast-out life in misery. On the edge of consciousness there are dreams and memories. And if I move from here and now far backwards: at one of my beginnings, e.g. when faced with specific and dictated motives, I first carefully adopted – both head and hand – a motive, then distorted and deformed it, and soon pushed it to the edge, so that in the final consequence there was but an edge as fundamental and independent motive. Not over the edge, I did not go over the edge; the motive consisted of the edge. But the work\/image also contains what is missing, and here and now I do not speak about the edge of the painting, the familiar edge sketch, or a shot, sequence, frame, or the border between exterior and interior, or the visible and invisible of an image; I rather speak about the image on the edge itself, the image on the very edge as the place of crucial events; simply the place where a work exists. On the edge. <\/p>\n

Fold and turn the paper. You are where you are, at least partly. Also on the paper. A person in a place. Dig a hole and fill it up. Those who leave from here usually hold to their identities so firmly that they look more around their home town and less around the town in which they accidentally found themselves, and the images they have seen.

Alen Ozbolt <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Few Notes From The Edge  Once upon .. Once upon a time .. Can such a beginning point to something “without time and without place”? Can anything be without time and without place; is this indeed possible in – this in is already a place – space, society, or living nature? Perhaps as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4347,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/g-mk.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5414"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/g-mk.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/g-mk.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g-mk.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g-mk.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/g-mk.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g-mk.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/g-mk.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g-mk.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g-mk.hr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}