November 24, 2005
Penetration in EU – performance, lecture and action
Aleksandar Stankoski
This was a one-evening event with a political, socio-cultural and discursive logic, focusing on Macedonia’s aspiration to be part of the EU that was created in the frame of the New Project Production program. For Aleksandar Stankoski, one of the leading Macedonian artists working today, this was a first performance work since the late 1980s.
Statement by the artist:
The Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, is the most relevant, and often even the only phenomenological structure which the contemporary esthetic theory, starting from the establishing of the modernist ideology, accepts as a valid reference for the artwork. The current state is merely a sort of introspective inertness of the modernist idea. In fact, everything revolves around the point of view. The complete subjectivism in art cannot find shelter in neither of the modernist philosophies, and they are still the only platforms on which it might survive in the context of the style seen as “spirit of the age”.
As an articulation which has its own feedback and as a continuity of knowledge, Postmodernism desperately returns to the phenomenon of the Zeitgeist, in a slogan-like manner, avoiding the tautologies of the modernist form through which (its evolution) the ideology of progress and the new was realized. Here (in the postmodern state) the lack of style (of “progressively” generic forms) the “spirit of the age” plays the part of an “esthetic alibi”. Reaching for the great narrative of the political (as a metaphor for the lost mythological fixations that functioned until the beginning of Realism – the 19-century one, when the Industrial Revolution became an ideologically philosophical Zeitgeist) becomes an imperative in the “engagement” zones – another fabrication of modernism – where the assertion of the immutability of imbalance is the new domain for the understanding of ambivalence and unpredictability of the ethical throughout history. Perhaps a self-deprecatory cynicism, growing as an unfathomable populist philosophy of life, in the virtual community of human kind called culture.
In Paris in 1626 a mass of slogans written on the house façades in the central part of town appeared, and this is how they addressed the citizens: “Do not be absolutely modern, be contemporaries of the future.” |
