(art, mirror, chair, candidate, world, beautiful person)
No miracles occur, and life is a test.
Soren Kierkegaard
Art is a notion.
Art has exited since the dawn of mankind, but the notion “art or artistic” and its current semantic essence is a relatively modern conceptualization.[1]
Hello, dear…
When I opened the envelope I didn’t expect it to be empty…
I accidentally forgot to ask you in the second letter I sent you what your illness was…
I know that the MIRROR was covered with a white sheet when for the first time I couldn’t tell what time it was, and the weather outside was cloudy…
You were sitting on the CHAIR when for the first time you uttered your name, and I’m sorry I couldn’t hear it, the wind interrupted your voice, and I thought Van Gogh had cut his nose…
I thought I was delusional when I saw you on the poster next to a CANDIDATE from our party, I thought you were not of this WORLD, though your pale face was clearly obvious…
I’m sorry I was delusional it was not YOU.
I was very tense when in 1918 in Zurich they wrote in a manifest that they had to perform surgery on you; two years later in Berlin I heard you had died…
Nobody came to the funeral…
That is to say, there was no funeral, we all celebrated your death.
In your honor Malevich painted a black square, Marina cut herself with a razorblade, Van Gogh killed himself, Munch screamed, the owner of “Cabaret Voltaire” became an alcoholic, Warhol sold you, Beuys smeared you with honey, Duchamp was in the toilet and got a weird idea…
I don’t know why, but after Duchamp I think of you whenever I’m in the toilet.
You are a very BEAUTIFUL PERSON but you always came through other people, so I couldn’t convince you to hang out with me.
Now I put you in the television, now it is YOU of all the OTHERS.
I think it’s high time we went to the point.
I’ve arranged everything, and YOU…
And you: no, no, NO, NO, NO IT is not I – ART IS DEAD!
I’m sorry, my dear…
I never meant to kill you.
MIRROR
“The mirror is a surface that reflects light non-distortedly”[1]
The mirror is very commonly used as a metaphor for the creation of art. It is often said that art is a mirror held up to time, art is a mirror held up to society, art is a mirror held up to nature, art is a mirror held up to the artists, art is a mirror… The question of whether the mirror shows the truth about the physical world or it is all an illusion which the eye perceives as truth has been posed many times. The mirror shows a reverse picture of the original, therefore it might not be the proper word for it. In the history of art, and in the history of man in general, there are two concepts: one rational, and the other intuitive. What is common for both is the mutual negation of otherness. After the funeral in 1920, after all the electroshocks, resuscitations, we have been trying to resurrect her, even though we are not sure she is dead. Dead is Damien Hirst’s shark, but he will live eternally with the shark and Saatchi, eternally as death.
– History is a beautiful science, especially the history of art and art is beautiful, and 
whenever I have time I watch it on television. Mona Lisa is eternally modern, I read on the internet. The internet is nice, Google has everything nowadays, I saw an event of an artist who does art with dead flies. He’s really wicked. Art is everything, art can be anything, once told me a vet who specialized at the Institute for the Modeling of Hoofs. The picture of Dorian Gray remains unveiled opposite the mirror which must see itself through a mirror to reveal the truth about the death of the girl. The true girl.
What is common for both the mirror and the art is that they both work with light. If broken, both bring bad luck.
CHAIR
“A chair is a type of furniture used for sitting. Chairs have a back rest, some chairs
have arm rests. Chairs are supported most often by four legs. Without a back or arm rests it is called a stool.”[1]
After he made Pinocchio, the carpenter sat on the chair to rest and fell asleep. Picasso was still lying. Van Gogh painted a chair. Pollock’s paint bucket spilled. Koons had an erotic dream. Lenin was jumpy. Dali gave Gala an egg. Warhol got sick of eating soup, so he went with Basquiat to have some caviar. Einstein realized it was all relative. Pinocchio’s nose grew and grew, and when they chopped it off Beuys made himself a walking stick of it. Too bad the Good Fairy forgot to pay Pinocchio a visit; Cinderella had tired her way too much, and the wolf had already eaten Little Red Riding Hood. When the carpenter awoke, Pinocchio was already lost in Umberto Eco’s narrative woods. The carpenter lamented his work.
The work is lost in the woods and, according to Umberto Eco, it is the only way to find Pinocchio. Only if the work is open for reading can it communicate with the viewer. All the possibilities and all the ideas are in the woods, they just have to be found. On the other hand, Wittgenstein says:
– “7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”[1]
Aesthetics and philosophy should not deal with art and works of art, but should pay attention to the “proper use” of words, notions and “word plays”. To him, a work of art should be experienced directly through reading, listening, watching and through the process of creation.
CANDIDATE
“ (Latin candidatus)1. one that aspires to or is nominated or qualified for an office, membership, or award; 2. one likely or suited to undergo or be chosen for something specified; 3. a student in the process of meeting final requirements for a degree”.[2]
Somebody opened the door. The man was downright peculiar. The light was weak, so I couldn’t see his face. “You must accept”, – he said. I was confused and said nothing. Candide was an optimist… Candide did not know that Voltaire would disappoint Leibnitz. The Beauty was waiting for the Prince to show her the castle. It was beautiful, but the Prince was a Beast. The Beauty is a candidate for bride of the Beast. She is supposed to forget the Beast’s ugly face and accept the beauty of the castle. In front of the castle was the enormous park that contained a labyrinth. That was the challenge for which I said – “Yes”. I thought I’d find the rabbit in the labyrinth. The rabbit was supposed to understand Beuys.
Art is a candidate that must solve both local and global problems. She should cleanse and harmonize them. She should be implemented in every segment of human existence. Her mandate was long-awaited for and she finally got her freedom at the beginning of the 20th century. In the beginning she promised she would stick to her useless function. She is a beauty and serves nobody and nothing. Useless in the sense that she would not make decisions, but only statements, she would only fight between I and the World, the World that through her strives to justify its existence, the existence that kills the sense. When I speak of the world, I mean the world of the artist who constantly struggles against the consequences that have long ago forgotten the reasons for their stupidity.
Staring at the castle, we forgot the Beauty…
WORLD
“The entirety of the material reality, space, the earth with all who live on it. The world is endless.”[1]
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”
Jean Baudrillard
The Beauty’s castle is in Disneyland. That home is the simulacrum that deals with the truthfulness of the truth. In the history of mankind, the quest for the truth has always been equaled to the end of life, here the world ends for one being. All would be meaningless if merely one circumstance or one being cease to exist, so we reorganize everything and together try to kill the truth about our existence. Nietzsche is dead, God is dead, art is dead. The world of the art never ceases in its quest to find its basis and its essence. Art is present always and everywhere, continually searching for the sense of its function, finding it always in the end of an epoch of an existence. Its form and definition slips through at the mere thought of it. It is created from the desire to change the natural aesthetics and game. It’s very good, though it has one flaw – it is very corrupted. The existence of the world of art is built by art collectors. Art is being sold even when dead, even when nothing, even when garbage. It exists in museums, in the streets, on television, on the internet, it is consumed by both artists and drunkards, scientists, MPs, members, statesmen, traitors, programmers, garbage men, and even intellectuals, just to show they’re not idiots. Idiotism is a privilege in the world of the morons. So, what next?
-Art is wise even when it is dead, though it is busy at the moment, fixing football games. It has always been interested in the world of the money.
The Beauty is very beautiful, I saw her in a commercial, but I had no idea she was pregnant…
BEAUTIFUL PERSON
“Person is defined as the sum of characteristics that define human beings and their behavior, i.e. the integrated and consistent functioning of their specific particularities. The terms man and individual are also used”.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is a characteristic of the art and the artist, the artist being the beholder of the aesthetic nature of the nature. Art is a work of man and his hands. Art is that which someone consciously calls art. The artist is the man who creates the art. The man is the one who destroys nature. Nature and society is where man lives. It is cloudy, therefore the shadows do not appear. The shadows are a consequence of the sun. The sun is light and the art works with light and color, which is a consequence of the sun. The Earth is a ball illuminated by the sun. The ball is ever more often observed by UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects). The eye in the triangle sees everything as three-dimensional. The problems will be solved by experts in artology who can draw freely rectilinear contours of the world. The world of the artist is an isolated Van Gogh case that seeks its own psychiatrist in vain. The psychiatrist is a man who takes care of a person’s mental well-being. The person must decide whether to buy a Mercedes or a BMW for their needs to move from one point to another.
The studio is open!
It is white and grey, full and empty, cold and warm, real and false, it is waiting to get excited by the work of art.
Waiting, it died.
The studio is a space.
The studio is a room with an easel. On the easel – a canvas. A blank canvas. Next to it – a palette. Next to the palette – paintbrushes and colors. The color is diluted with oil. In the studio there’s a locker full of books. There’s a chair, as well. There’s light and there’s a mirror. There’s the TV, as well. The girl is inside the TV. Her dress is black, her scarf – red. The sound is melodious and nostalgic. Everything is ready for the miracle to occur… the sublime act, the creation of a work of art.
The studio is located in a gallery room and this time it functions as a work of art – an installation with video performance. It is composed of two separate rooms within the gallery. In the first room, the entrance, there is an inscription on the wall. The first room leads to the second, which is a ready-made room full of objects and tools necessary for the creation of a classical work of art. Next to the easel is a monitor which broadcasts a pre-recorded video – a performance of a girl singing an opera composed of one word only – NO. The performance is shot in a different room than the one installed in the gallery. The walls are white, the studio is eerily clean, there isn’t a single trace of the process of creation. The act has come to a halt, and the audience can see the tools that have remained. The audience can walk through the studio, but there are signs on each object: “do not touch”, “do not use”, “do not read”, “do not look”, etc.
“Persons” questions the identity of the author as opposed to that of the work of art. The identity of the work of art as opposed to that of the objects and the art. The freedom of choice as a limitation and the possibility to dissociate oneself from (YOU).
YOU versus I.
Man’s only problem is I. Freedom can be achieved only if human vanity disposes of I. The freedom of choice is granted to all of us, and our only limitation is the conceptualization of I. I create an idea – it sounds very limited.
Art
Although nowadays the term art usually means visual art, the concept of art has always changed throughout the centuries. Perhaps the most concise of all definition is at the same time the most general one – the term art encompasses all creative acts, with the exception of the acts directly related to survival and reproduction. From a wider perspective, art is a term applied to any product of a creative impulse, out of which all other human activities emerged, like science through alchemy, and religion through shamanism. The term art does not offer a definition dissociated from the cultural, historical and geographical context in which it has been applied.[1]
Art is an idea.
Art is man’s need for a perfect environment. A need to replicate Heaven on Earth, to insert the perfect into the degrading. Regardless of the form, whether it is a work of art, a house, a city or a state. Efforts have existed in all the eras of civilization, from the first organizations, to the peacemaking institutions, the creative programs for ecologically clean environment, the consumption of healthy organic food, preventive pharmacology, the fight against epidemics and superviruses, the strategies for handling global crises that exist nowadays, etc.
These utopic methodologies that obsess human consciousness are a quest to find paradise lost. This quest is extremely optimistic or extremely and pessimistically endless in its interpretation of the term apocalypse. Every epoch and every man sense that the apocalypse is a precognitive notion about the ultimate cognition. This world with all its culture is a preparation for the unification of the beginning and the end. The apocalypse is eternity. Eternity in the void or eternity in God. We are all waiting for the apocalypse. It will either bring us closer to the perfect environment or erase everything and create a perfect void.
Apocalypse now!
“We must say that at least we know that the Apocalypse began with Adam and Eve’s banishment from heaven. So, what is the question then? When will the Apocalypse end? It has ended a long time ago, only that it has not been publicly announced. Right? Every breaking news on CNN shows that what we’re dealing with is Apocalypse Now! The world is already gone. We are just the remnants of its diapers full of shit; we still think aided by that last formula: we suffer, therefore we exist!”[2]
Art is dead.
A dull phrase that some people love using. Personally I don’t like the word dead and I don’t believe in death. When I mentioned earlier that I had killed her, I confessed under pressure. Although when the axe fell she desperately cried NO. To tell you the truth, lately it looked awful anyways.
But I think she’s not dead.
Translated by: Igor Popovski
Literature:
[1]http://teon.blog.mk/category/%D1%83%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82/page//
[2]http://mk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B3%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%BE
[3]http://mk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B0
[4] Лудвиг Витгенштајн,”ЛОГИЧКО-ФИЛОЗОФСКИ ТРАКТАТ”Магор,Скопје,2002,стр128
[5] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/candidate
[6] http://www.makedonski.info/search/%D1%81%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82
[7]http://mk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A3%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82
[8] Љубиша Георгиевски,РЕЧНИК на предрасуди,Скопје,2001.стр.20
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