“Vernissage 42”, an exhibition by Milorad Mića Stajčić, will mark the conclusion of the exhibition season at Belgrade’s X Vitamin gallery as well as its seventh anniversary. Stajčić is one of the artists represented by the gallery as well as its co-founder, co-owner, and operations manager, who takes part in the implementation of the gallery’s activities and programmes and, with this exhibition, summarises his impressions about his multiple role of a “worker” in the production of cultural contents. Vernissage 42 accumulates the atmospheres from exhibition openings, which overlap, in the artist’s dislocated perspective at a moment of puzzlement, to yield an image that loses colours, an image that is distorted and inverted, emerging from the gallery space like a petrified representation. This “pre-activity” of the imagination whereby elements were installed in the gallery is a recognisable characteristic of Mića’s work – the atmosphere of an animated cartoon wherein reality is freed from every constraint. As an artist whose modus operandi is to destabilise social constructs, this time he addresses the feeling of pressure and unsustainability generated by an automated production of art and culture.
In line with his belief that an artist is a person who is able and willing to relay their own perception to others, Stajčić uses formal elements and selects references from popular culture to posit a topic that develops in interaction with the viewer. He acts like a human provocateur and artistic Robin Hood whose mission is to mobilise the ether of the artistic domain for a continuous liberation from social constraints, mental lethargies, and blind views of an ideologised reality. He destabilises, but does not imply answers or conclusions. Within the posited topic, perceptions may be mutually opposed and every reading is correct, because the very attempt at reading means that the provocation has achieved its goal.
The outline of a gallery audience in this work points to its in situ character. The focus is on the very location of the “activity of exhibiting”. The awkward position of the visitors, whose legs are protruding from the floor while their bodies are “wandering” outside of the image at first sight already destabilises the innocence of the situation. The predatory social context around art and creativity is doing its job – from social power and economic gain to hypocritical completions of floating identities. Pursuing that line, one could think far and wide… Do exhibitions that follow one another at exhibition venues present/treat creativity inappropriately, linearly, as though it were on an assembly line? The system of art as an assembly line that generates nothing well-founded, but rather accumulates simulacra of value, like sand dunes that are formally present and visible but unstable, moved around
by the stronger winds of individual interests, rearranged and erased. The flat line of social happenings that cannot highlight, spot, process, or valorise that which is special, exceptional, deep, exciting, provocative… Does that disable an adequate perception and engagement on the part of the audience? The repetition of self-implied, established celebratory ceremonies and encounters with new artistic production and the artist’s persona is suffocating the essential impulse of creativity and turning into a mannerism, piling up transient impressions and an empty effort that is tiring. Issues of life and art are retreating before the murmur of trivial, conformist chitchats and the fulfilment of irrelevant social and ego needs that subsist like lichens, feeding and multiplying on them. What emerges is a burdensome alternative web of involvement in relations that are no longer linked to art and that eventually lead into emptiness and fatigue.
That is not new but it is ubiquitous, while Mića’s personal striving to combine his roles as an artist, entrepreneur, and gallery worker into a functional system transfer this commonplace into an active state of re-examining one’s personal positions, will and ability to react and effect change. To remember the main thing and how to gear one’s activity in that direction. This lament over the essence takes its cue from the well-known humorous plotline of Douglas Adams’s novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the supercomputer Deep Thought, created in order to calculate the essence of life, the universe, and everything else, after millions of years of processing, delivers its final answer – “42” – an answer that no one is able to understand. The computer’s answer is a blow to the head that directs us back to ourselves, reminding us that, at the end of the day, we must nonetheless make our own personal efforts to grow and become ready for such answers about the essence. All those inverted leg figures are cut at 42 cm and the black shadows of the gallery audience pasted on the walls of a compact room whose centre is occupied by a white bunny impaled on its deathbed. The innocent toy white rabbit sums up the threatened identity and vitality of an artist surrounded by the oppressive expectations of shadows without identity that have to be resolved.
Mića Stajčić thinks and communicates through his creativity from the actuality of his own personal perspective, which is why his art implies active and engaged positions, on the part of the artist and viewer alike. Contributing to personal efforts as the only possibility for change, the musical theme of “My Way” sonically “seeps” from the ambiance of the exhibition installation of “Vernissage 42”.
Marija Radoš
