REVIEW: BULL. MILETIC AND MONIKA SOSNOWSKA, PUBLISHED IN NEUE REVIEW DECEMBER 2004, WRITTEN BY LEIF MAGNE TANGEN AND ØYSTEIN AASAN
and the Provos. As they refused to “work”, in a traditional sense, they found other means of making money. According to Lefebvre, when asked, Guy Debord used to say that he lived “off his wits”; while his partner said she made money from writing horoscopes for horses, specializing in racehorses. As it was obviously not understood as work in a proper sense, it was still a nicely put pun on a horserace-crazed Paris establishment.
Lefebvre himself held several teaching positions in the time of his involvement with the Situationists, and some of them happened to be his students before they indulged into their Situationists groupings. One of the techniques they developed, especially in Strasbourg and Amsterdam was the use of Walkie-Talkies in their drifting around the city. The idea was to bring spatial diverted areas together as they could communicate from one place in the city to the other. But it also brought along an idea of time and space as they, for instance in Paris, walked from the historical center over to newer parts of the town while they registered how the changes took place in front of their eyes. Out of these
spatial experiments came the theory of Unitary Urbanism, later followed by Lefebvre’s book “The Production of Space”.
This interview came to our minds again, on the occasion of two shows at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. The first gallery displays two video works by Bull.Miletic. The second shows a new installation by Monika Sosonowska.
Videokunst und Installation.
The main video in the show from Bull.Miletic is a large video projection. For those living in Berlin it depicts familiar scenery: buildings and graffiti rushing past the windows of the S-Bahn at high speed. The screen itself is divided into six parts that all shows different clips of imagery. Some parts are repeated, but mostly dealt with in a modus operandi where someone just pressed the “random” button. The video seems to register whatever that goes on outside the window. Or maybe whatever that goes on when one travels from one part of a city to another.
The last video follows a similar pattern, as it also makes use of a rather unstable camera work, zooming rapidly in and out of a “landscape” resembling old parts of the Berlin wall. Bushes, old wire and parts of walls flip over the projection at high speed. The projection itself is shown on a white pillow, with the beamer hung from the ceiling.
Postkoloniale Blicke und Urbanismus.
Richard Long once said that every good artist is a local artist. Bethanien is per definition not a place for local artists. It is more or less demanded of artists of today that they travel a lot – and they are expected to use their ethnographic abilities to produce works where they resides at any given time. Bull.Miletic have done this – and the feeling, as we all have come to learn, traveling with the subway when being in a new city is overwhelming. The movement of the near cityscape or landscape becoming a blur of photographic horizontal movement. It is tempting to give in to the feeling of movement, but one shouldn’t do that. One should be aware of the language of transcendental movement is much more divers than the simplistic camera-made movement. It’s impossible in the true meaning of the word photography according to Roland Barthes. A photo doesn’t preserve, but rather kills, the moment of time. Any film or video is a sequence of stills put together to fool the human perception to believe that it actually moves. This multiplies the feeling of dying. But Barthes is only right in the sense of photography, or as sign. The structuralists removed the reality of today and transformed it into sign, and text.
Kunst und Psychoanalyse
The pleasure of juxtapose different feelings is just as overwhelming in art. Pushing the abilities of the camera to the outermost limit for then creating an effect of estranged conditions. Then it’s projected onto one of the items that create a feeling of home and calmness (the pillow).
Another juxtapose could be between art and experience. Aristotle separated art, or _____ from just experience because it haves _____, that is speech or understanding. In the following maxim will not art then be what is possible to produce using a language, within the reach of everyday language? The difference lies in the language itself. His
(Aristotele’s) letters could at the very same time also be musical notes as they could produce numbers. Film and video will always be film and video – nothing more and nothing less.
It’s hard to figure out what the two videos is all about in the end. It’s glimmering across the room, huge and flashy, but it makes no point or offers no specific analysis or poetics to let the viewer enter the work. It forces you to stop, but not to involve.
Ortsspezifität und Partizipation
A similar interest for the city and its possible changes is also a part of Monika Sosnowska’s work. In her previous installations she deals the hard currency of the paranoia and claustrophobia that once (and maybe still) inhabited certain buildings and urban structures in her homeland Poland. Or so the story goes. Her structures are often painted delicately in colours we, as viewers would easily associate with power, repression and communist lack of colourful décor. The actual structures of her installation also underscores this feeling, where the viewer gets stuck in tight
corridors, or enters rooms with doors leading in all kinds of directions. There is an ongoing thread in the work that refers to specific colours, murals or buildings in Poland as a superficial structure and the before mentioned paranoia sneaking in both as a result and as a new trajectory.
At Bethanien she builds a large structure that operates similarly as before, but with simpler means. It clearly invites the viewer to climb in and follow the cave like room to a possible reward in the dark end. But who would? It seems scary even by approaching from a distance. When you stand on the outside of the structure it doesn’t really give away the inside form, but instead it appears as a brownish painted “Stealth” submarine.
What happens when one chooses not to enter to discover the cave-like thing? The clue could be not to enter; on the other hand maybe one is expected to enter. It is hard to tell. There is a conceptual imperialism in the thought of forcing the viewer to decide. There are no guidelines what so ever telling you what to do. This is often the case in this type of production, but still it does not make the choice easier.
Cultural studies
So, how can one tie together the rather easy made videos of Bull.Miletic and the installations of Monika Sosnowska? They take what is given to them and rework it in a rather emphasizing way. They do all understand culture as art. Or as text (if one is to trust Hal Foster). They reshape and analyze what is given and by this they create a zone of
interpretation, a room that didn’t exists beforehand. According to Hal Foster, Pierre Bourdieu questioned this version of making “social relations to communicative relations, and more precisely, to decoding operations”. This is all well and fine – but what drives it? What keeps the whole thing going in the end?
The notion of culture is redemptive – almost as redemptive as the violence in Fight Club. “The lower we fall the higher we fly” wrote Chuck Palahniuk in the novel (the sentence never reached the screen). And he is right. The contextual, often automatic demand for understanding of an art work can destroy everything – even the understanding of the world
itself – while the real kings (of pop) will never be an artist but rather an analyst of some sort telling us that this is where we are now, and this is where we are going – like it or not.
*Interview conducted by Kirsten Ross, printed in October 79, 1997