[:en]Shakespeare among us 14.11.2017. GMK

Shakespeare Among Us , Tuesday 08 pm / 11 pm at GMK

Nine artists from the Zagreb art scene present their works which reference the ideas of other artists, writers, philosophers, psychoanalysts, physicists, directors, musicians, film and video art theorists…The works have been created in the period from the 1960s to the present and they affirm the artists’ erudition and imagination, counting on the engagement of viewers, who are expected to be familiar with the other authors since they provide the context for new messages of individuals works.

Some of the artists negate or ironize the subject of their interest and polemicize with their source. Mangelos’s Manifests are grounded in various humanistic and scientific disciplines. With the self-awareness of a skeptic philosopher who questions art, Mangelos spars with a whole range of characters, reducing his thoughts to short and precise, or, as he himself put it, “super-Wittgensteinian” theses, inscribing them on wooden boards, globes and booklets.

Other works in the exhibition are not that prone to criticism. Media artist Dalibor Martinis often uses ludic elements. He hangs a turned-on TV from the ceiling and covers it with a black sheet so that it would “sing like a canary”, and dedicates it to John Cage. Sven Stilinović ironizes tautological conceptual works by Joseph Kosuth with the photograph Kosuth’s Teeth, while Mladen Stilinović uses quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein, which he inscribes on chopping blocks, in a game of naming and “political correctness” in My Sweet Little Lamb.

Gotovac’s self-portraits from the 1960s are a homage to Russian war and American detective films, the French poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, and others. They represent a kind of photographic essay about the film medium.

The video work Chanoyu by Sanja Iveković and Dalibor Martinis, through a “reading” of Okakura Kakuzō, who writes about the Japanese tea ceremony, reveals zen in scenes in everyday life. The aesthetic and meaningful interaction is produced within the work itself, showing how the artist reads history and how s/he engages with it.

Vlado Martek “translates” a series of poetic situations into the sphere of art. His “poetry has gone into action”: his poetic agitations invite people to read Mayakovsky, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and others; in the woods he erected a monument to André Breton made of snow; in his contours of European states in his pictures and graphics he developed complex narratives about the red Balkans – a melting pot of bloody kings and comical and romantic Shakespearean heroes – surrounded by countries named after their contributions to civilization: aesthetics, psychoanalysis, linguistics, anthropology, philosophy and ethics in Shakespeare Among Us.

The artists put the body in an interrelation with the text. Sven Stilinović juxtaposes the photograph of his restrained body with Karl Marx’s texts, thereby referring to the freedom-loving tradition of anarchism, while Mladen Stilinović in his Low Angle, offers his interpretation of the instructions provided by the film theorist Jerzy Plazewski in The Language of Film.

Referring to Marcel Duchamp, in his work Wow, Wow and Readymade Goran Trbuljak proclaims all the frames from his films readymades: “Godard said that the cinema is truth 24 times per second, Haneke said that it is lies 24 times per second, and for me it is 24 readymades per second.”

Finally, Igor Grubić, a middle generation artist, in his work Red Escadrille (the free flight of poetry) – Free Flight of Poetry brings the story back to the beginning by referring to Martek’s poetic agitations from the 1970s with his action involving throwing paper planes containing poems selected for him by the older artist.

The complexity of the works derives from the large range of these artists’ interests and their critical and analytic attitudes, quotations, allusions, evocations, reminiscences…

Branka Stipančić

Exhibition is supported by the Ministry of culture of Republic of Croatia and INA – Industrija nafte d.d. Work of Miroslav Kraljević Gallery is supported by Zaklada Kultura Nova.