The 49th October Salon
Artist-Citizen
Contextual Art Practices

The fifth international October Salon will present those artistic practices that have been called art-in-context for a number of decades. From the beginning of the 1990's to the present day, contextual art, has constituted an essential part of artistic production both on the international and on the Serbian art scene; therefore the exhibition will offer works dealing with various “contexts” will be placed on the same comparative platform. Art director’s curatorial task thus consists in additional “contextualisation” or strategic “framing” of visual representations dealing with context, and her curatorial move is based on a critical operation formulated back in the 1980’s by the theoretician Jonathan Culler, who is of the opinion that “what belongs to the context is determined by interpretive strategies”. The international exhibition in Belgrade and the accompanying events should be understood as an interpretive machine of sorts.

The exhibition Artist-Citizen does not intend to proclaim contextual art, which has been known since the 1970’s (one of its forms has been institutional criticism) a new trend; instead, it will try to map the artistic and theoretical positions that review the notion of the autonomy of art in today’s democratic societies, where, irrespective of whether those are Western democracies that have existed over a long historical period or new post-Communist democracies, the existence and the activities of civil society are not taken for granted, but constitute active, even everyday work-in-progress. Viewed historically, theory of art and visual culture has already implicitly and explicitly deconstructed the modernist notion of the “autonomy of art”: for example, in his text “Artist as Anthropologist” (1975), the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth writes about an artist who does not investigate foreign or other/different, non-European cultures, but deals with his/her own culture; in his essay “The Artist as Ethnographer” (1996), Hal Foster analyses “the ethnographic paradigm” in American art; finally, in his text “The Artist as Public Intellectual” (2004), the Danish critic Simon Sheikh, proceeding from Gramsci, reviews Western neoliberal constellations after 9/11, drawing attention to the presence of “velvet fascism”.

What today’s theory calls “the social turn” in contemporary art (Claire Bishop) concerns the activities of artists who practise their role of public intellectuals through art, like Pier Paolo Pasolini, “poet-citizen”, for example. The title of the exhibition, therefore, does not suggest the topic of the exhibition, for the works featured in it deal with a great number of topics; the title of the exhibition should suggest that we shall encounter artists who position themselves critically – politically – towards the “given reality”, the given context: these are artists who bring into question the politics of representation, the relations of power, re-examine artistic and political institutions, as well as their own artistic production, which is created today under the conditions of a “relative autonomy” of art (S. Sheikh): this autonomy is relative in view of the fact that contemporary art, on the one hand, is dependent, even today, on the politics of representation implemented by instances of the state (the best example here are national pavilions at the Venice Biennial, for example), and on the other, it is dependent on the art market and susceptible to commercialisation.

The exhibition Artist-Citizen does not place an emphasis on artistic poetics, inner worlds, individual mythologies; it is not a matter of “great narratives” or “small stories”; there are no laments/triumphs over failed social utopias: the works in this exhibition are based on (healthy) critical positions, views without sentiments, without “make-up”. Writing a leader for her exhibition where she presented artistic/political projects that problematise “context”, the curator Stella Rollig commented on the view often heard from a number of fine arts critics who are of the opinion that “good art is that art which points to real problems”. Rolling poses the key question: “Do we need art to tell us what we already know?”

Each exhibition, especially one prepared by a curator, tries to formulate a certain “message” that should channel the ways in which the exhibition will be read or interpreted by the professional and the general public. The meaning the author of an exhibition would like to broadcast through the media is not necessarily the meaning that foreign or domestic fine arts critics will accept: each exhibition has a life of its own and is open to interpretations that it is not possible (or necessary) to control. In other words, interpretations may coincide with the intentions of the curator “who wanted to say something by means of his/her exhibition”, but not necessarily so. For the 49th October Salon it was not formulated any “message”, but it was proposed a motto, moreover, a motto in the form of a question:

Do we need art to tell us what we do not want to know?

The exhibition Artist-Citizen will not offer answers or instant recipes concerning what an artist should do as a public intellectual: this project will, hopefully, give rise to a series of questions: How are we to define the notion of “context”? How are we to define the notion of “the political”? Do there exist boundaries between social activism and a work of art and if so, where are they? Should art dealing “with” context and oriented towards the social fulfil the classical or usual aesthetic expectations (or not) in order to be recognised as “high art”? Does the “ethical turn” (C. Bishop) in contemporary artistic production, criticism and art theory mean a deviation from or a negation of “the aesthetic”? Is the documentary approach, upon which most contextual art is based, the only possible method of deconstructing the social context? Is it possible to problematise trafficking in women and prostitution in the soap opera format? Is the format of the musical convenient for speaking critically about nationalism? In cynicism the most adequate way of maintaining a distance from “sordid” reality? Can feminist critique and critique of the artistic centre/periphery paradigm at the same time be witty art as well?

PhD Bojana Pejić