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ART HEALING OR THE ART OF HEALING?
At the current exhibition called Beauty Blender, Zdravko Joksimović exhibits formally and stylistically uniform sculptures, part of the Art Healing cycle, that he has been developing for a long time. Unlike the socially engaged works for which the artist is primarily known, this cycle consists of unpretentious works in this respect – at least at first glance. At a second glance, it turns out that these works deal exclusively with the pictorial language of overlapping, mutual negotiation and “gossip” of two epochal cultural idioms: modernist and contemporary art in general. Namely, modernist sculpture mostly denied its social conditioning, hiding behind its (abstract) formal qualities and the autonomy of art, ultimately turning its supposed independence from the context into an unquestionable value criterion. On the contrary, contemporary sculpture insists on heteronomy and guardianship of (engaged) narrative, turning its dependence on context into an unquestionable truism, often underestimating artistry.
Having said that, Joksimović here bypasses the mentioned antagonistic categorizations, presenting a kind of unstable synthesis. These are objects of an abstract, modernist orientation with “premeditated” (re)presentation. In this way, the artist avoids dogmatic classification and establishes his own contact with his time, which Agamben talks about:
“Contemporaneity is a singular relationship with its own time, such that it connects to it and at the same time distances itself from it; more precisely, it is that relationship with time that is attached to it through some inconsistency and some anachronism. Those who coincide too much with the epoch, who are perfectly attuned to it at every point, are not contemporary because, precisely because of this, they fail to see it, they cannot fix their eyes on it.”
The formal purity and austerity of Joksimović’s sculptures certainly evoke the aforementioned anachronism. However, if it is known that the artist used an empty package of tablets as a template, his self-sufficient and complacent formalist artifacts are automatically transformed into enigmatic “portraits” of those tablets (in other words, objects of a pseudo-religious cult of a pseudo-secular (Serbian) society). Armed with the “semantic unconscious”, Joksimović’s deceptively abstract works betray a disguised engagement: these anonymous wall reliefs allude to the omnipresence of tablets, anonymous proxies of both illness and health. Because today the disease and health are “healed” ie. treated in a similar way, conditionally speaking, with medicines or vitamins in capsules. As the anthropologist Ernest Becker once noted, pills and tablets are a form of fetish, a way to overcome the anxiety and horror of the physical in a soothing way; with them, a person hypnotizes himself, creating an aura of enchantment with which he transforms, transcends and controls the threatening reality. However, even though pills dampen and culturalize the body and psyche, they are at the same time a tool for the (meta)physical standardization of behavior and feelings. Thus, the cultural transcendence that the pills promise actually impoverishes human individuality, given that they offer (blissful) physiological, psychological and/or intellectual numbness as a social and political measure of suitability. Abuse of pills sends a subliminal message about the unacknowledged weakness of the modern individual – in all its hysterical and proverbially unreflective search for “healing” at any cost.
Thus, art, in the spirit of the times, often appears as another form of therapy. However, by prescribing the universal therapy of writing, painting, sculpting, playing… to everyone “on prescription”, art is trivialized and reduced to a collateral gain of “mental health.” This implies that the artistic expression itself is of secondary importance, assumed, or rather delivered to the mercy of the so-called positive psychological effects (on the other hand, our age simultaneously uses art as a virtual “quarantine” in to which aesthetic, anthropological, philosophical, political and other “socially unusable” truths are retained).
Listening and reacting to this obsessive need for the art of healing, Zdravko Joksimović uses discreet irony to raise the capsules to the rank of an indirect, universal “symbol” – of dumbness of contemporary individual.
Dušica Popović, art historian
