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SARITA VUJKOVIC - A radical turn in visual art (On the example of Mladen Miljanović’s artwork)

The contemporary art scene of the Republic of Srpska, as shaped in the last few years, is marked by the phenomenon of Mladen Miljanović, a very active artist (winner of the BELL Award for 2007 as the best young visual artist in Bosnia and Herzegovina), who has over just a few years of public presence in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s art managed to carve out a distinguished, almost enviable career, and so become an unavoidable figure in many exhibition events of new art, not only in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also in a broader regional context.

This fact can be explained by the revival of the Republic of Srpska’s inert art scene, initiated by a new generation of mainly young artists, who are unlike their older colleagues aware of the importance of new technologies and media in the context of contemporary art today. Fully understanding the limiting circumstances of the environment they live and work in, this new generation took a pro-active turn towards more up-to-date information sources, followed by more present-day forms of action, which allowed the formation of an art community nucleus. In the last years, their activities became visible for the general public through the work of several artist associations (Protok, Flow, and Tačka, Dot or Period), but also through individual solo projects, extremely courageous, radical and artistically mature, among which the art projects of Mladen Miljanović can be singled out for their initiative for issue-related engagement.

If we go back to the past, to the traumatic period of the war, sanctions and economic crisis a decade ago, we will notice a discontinuity, when in the 1990’s the contemporary art scene melted away, which left a deep trace in the fine and visual arts of the region. This local map, where paradigmatic processes of discontinuity are easily perceivable, shows visibly that communication with other environments was not very frequent, while living conditions under cultural and economic sanctions most certainly did not work in favour of art and creative work.

This makes it easy to understand why the radical turn in art, which overcame all stylistic, media and other divisions at the turn of the 20th century, went unnoticed for a long time by both the leading institutional and non-institutional art circles. Some authentic art phenomena went unnoticed because the existent curating resources and the art scene mechanisms were not sufficiently open to make them accessible or permanently visible. This unbridgeable discontinuity in the art practices in the region is perceivable primarily in its relation to the newly created social and political context, making it rather difficult for the young generation of artists to find their feet.

The opening of the Academy of Arts in Banja Luka in 1998 and the renaming of the former Art Gallery into the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Srpska in 2004 created the right institutional conditions, and partly also the production conditions, which became a kind of infrastructure in the system of art which was just being created.

 Only with the appearance of a group of self-aware and media-trained artists in the last few years did institutional art get its radical alter ego, recognised in a generation of young people who, although trained in the rather modest conditions of the Academy of Arts in Banja Luka, are familiar and keep up with the current trends. Aware of the issues troubling the region in which they developed as artists and the educational institution where they received their training, many of them continued studies in other different environments; however, unlike their older colleagues coming from this region, who in the previous decades left to receive education in various cities across the former Yugoslavia or abroad and remained there permanently, these young people return, realising their options are equally limited here as well as there. In view of the current options, we can see these common social circumstances primarily as an aggravating factor, which has been used and transformed by this new group of young artists into a driving force behind their individual artwork.

It is exactly this driving force of individual artistic creative work, seen as the mutual transformation of an individual and society, which is recognisable and embedded in Mladen Miljanović’s art projects. Basically, his work is founded on previously defined guidelines, which in most cases explore the identity of a place and personal past. Accentuating these significant aspects is visible in Miljanović’s earliest works, created during his senior year in university. What singles them out in comparison with the works of his peers is a certain contemplative dimension building the painting on the relation between artistic, social and individual contexts. These intertextual relations, observed in the first series of his paintings, or more precisely cartographic maps, which show imaginary plans of military attacks, reveal a new relation towards art, the experienced past, but also the current reality, i.e. the current situation in art. Beside this undeniable war connotation, in the map key, which goes with the painting and is the only guide for interpreting the meanings, Miljanović opens a new, jovial aspect of approach to art, resulting from a paradoxical case of mistaken concepts. Eventually, we realise we have been in delusion the whole time – it is not a plan of military attack we have before our eyes, but simply an invasion of colours against a canvas.

A few years later he would return to this topic in a similar way, painting a number of maps of different international museums and schematic presentations of the invasion of their art space. These works do not exhibit only a different painting approach, but also a changed relation towards museums as something institutional, historical and hierarchical. Certainly, the idea behind his interpretation is new, real and alive, and as such, it contradicts those deeply ingrained beliefs, whether they be a consequence of one’s reaction to museum collecting, the policies behind curating practices or the actual life around us.

 Linking the military with art as universal and permanent spheres, harmonised and lived through in the artist’s personal experience (first, he spent a period of time in the war, next he entered a military school and finally an art academy), is the single most important moment of Miljanović’s coming of age as an artist, but also as a person, accompanied by evident sublimation of experience.

The majority of his works are based on the project I Serve Art, a radical art action – a performance which he carried out from October 2006 to July 2007, during which he spent nine months living and working in isolation – “serving art”, an allusion to the conditions of national service and his own experience of doing national service.

After graduating from the Army Reserve Officers’ School, when he chose to join the army, the military school was disbanded, and the armed forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina radically reduced. These sudden new circumstances led the young man to change his choice of occupation and enrol in the Academy of Arts in Banja Luka, after which this educational institution moved to the premises of the former military barracks. The situation he faced created a positive charge and connections between the young artist’s personal history and the history of the space he was now spending time in, and this had a major impact on the course of his schooling, the forming of the ideas underlying his work, as well as the direction and manner of his artistic activities.

Inside the space previously signifying military power Miljanović literally restaged the ritual of full military control over an individual, in this case over himself, to the upper limits of his physical staying power. During this voluntary, complete isolation, a feat he succeeded in accomplishing, by analysing his own identity he created a new virtual world, drawing the attention of the media and general public, and he used his isolation space to create a new kind of public identity and public presence. His project assumed a certain form of a spectacle (in the sense of Baudrillard) and proceeded like a combination of the popular Big Ben, military service and a zoo – as he likes to put it, using all the media available (web, tv, e-mail, video links, newspapers).

During this nine-month performance, he daily carried out strategies conceived and created in advance, various previously set artistic actions which produced a series of photographs[1], centered around his persona standing “at attention”, with his back turned to the lens. The view of the lens and the view of the object photographed, in this case the artist himself, take the same direction and are in an absolutely hierarchically equal order, which semantically responds to this military space. At first glance, these identical black-and-white portraits of the artist, taken every day during his nine-month stay there, where the passing of time is measured only by the growing hair of the subject presented and his withdrawal into unlimited space and time, do not bear a tendentious message. With this apparently passive position, the artist expresses his awareness of the imperfections and complexity of the given social space and time, in the context of the current problems of transition, basing them on the momentary position of isolation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a social locus.

This socially engaging intitiative, followed by a specific presentational concept, raised the issues of some important aspects of how art scene in this environment operates. Month after month his work became more serious and deliberate, eventually growing into a serious artistic strategy and concept once he left the barracks.

Miljanović’s artistic-military reactions after he left the barracks grew into a sophisticated artistic strategy and became based more concretely on biopolitical reflections of the prevalent capitalistic trends of mass consumption. A series of his new projects has the aim to invade artistic, i.e. exhibition spaces.

Basically, the idea of invasion came from several fields of his work as an artist, but also as a human subject who survived the trauma of war in the region. Emphasising the fact that the whole body of the Serbian nation is viewed and identified by the world as an aggressor, Miljanović consciously assumed this constructed-imposed identity, and decided to invade art spaces and galleries by means of his artistic and personal engagement. Miljanović has presented these installations, whose dimensions make them adaptable and easy to change, several times in several exhibition projects, among which the first realisation of this idea, which took place during his one-month residential stay at Neue Gallerie in Graz in September 2007, is particularly worth a mention. On that occasion the whole gallery was filled with multiplied silhouettes of soldiers, creating a slightly irritating and overwhelming feeling of an actual invasion.

After the completion of the project I Serve Art, this sophisticated artistic strategy was more specifically based on biopolitical reflections of the dominant trends of mass consumption. The goal of the project selected for the exhibition Relations (held in the French city of Hegenheim and organised by the art organisation Apollonia, echanges artistiques europeens from Strasbourg in 2007) entitled Artwartaising was to draw attention to the aspirations of the global economy, which uses different kinds of monopolising and advertising to take over the markets, assets, but also individuals – consumers, as its basic and its final goal, who are also the victims of this global policy. In this project Miljanović plays with the slogans of well-known brands, such as Pepsi, Nike, NBA, Ballantine etc., in an ironic and critical way, seeing that the outdated model of military invasion has grown at the hands of the global economy into a new strategy, which virtually makes speedy headway.

At the base of Artwartaising we see the image of a soldier, a lonesome individual, a person without identity, susceptible to manipulation. This visual-semantic matrix with a stylised soldier figure, set in series in a permanent and persistent manner, appears as the basic reference in all the works. This segment of Miljanović’s work is in the visual sense presented using an absolutely simple black-and-white contrast, leading to various symbolic interpretations.

            In the period after the BELL Award and his prize trip to the U.S., Miljanović’s works increasingly strove towards discovering visual and theoretical models, as well as ways to convey those models into different contexts. In that light we should also observe the exhibition project which took long to prepare and whose title is instructive – Occupational Therapy, which under the umbrella of this interesting syntagma hides a very broad range of new visual activity.

It is interesting to note that a series of tautological works opens this new visual field of expression, and these works are essentially parallels of logical and conceptual thinking as opposed to the relation between language and the visual. Staying on the track of this idea, Miljanović’s work One and Three Uniforms is a clear reference to a range of Košut’s ideas – One and Three Chairs (1965), One and Five Clocks (1965), or One Colour and Five Adjectives (1966), according to which artworks are reduced to analytical propositions. Miljanović’s work, seen in this way, is not a description of physical properties or spirituality of the objects; it rather invokes formal definitions of art as well as the formal consequences of such definition. Three expressions of the proposition correspond to the propositions of “uniform” – visual, subject-related and linguistic. The established relation, which Miljanović insists on, is basically a tautological one, and it is consciously founded on Košut’s early works, which insist on the problem of differentiating the concept and the material used, that is, they strive after the difference between discursive and non-discursive manifestation. This very tautological parallel, which insists on Košut’s idea of annulment of differences between the concept and materials, or between discursive and non-discursive manifestation, has made it possible for Miljanović to determine the actual intention of his work, which fundamentally bases the idea on the intention, not on the installation we see in front of us. For Košut, the formal consequence of the definition of the notion of art is art itself, that is, an artwork does not say anything else except that it is an artwork, which is why art is tautological.

A series of homogeneous soldier figures in the work entitled Emptiness of Fulfilment is another tautological series which directly relates to the earlier monotonous series of black figures. In this new case, the installation was presented in the splendid concert hall of Banja Luka’s Banski Dvor, putting an accent of the dynamic and periodic rhythm, harmonised by means of the size and colour of the created figures. The choice of material, which is this time visually appealing and shiny, almost bordering kitsch, is articulated in a highly intentional manner with a complicated system of machines and the artist’s artistry.

In this textual course of chronological description, also worth mentioning is the series of photographs entitled Send-Off Party. It deals with the issues of the social status of men in our local surroundings, which is rather traditional. The produced series of photographs shows farewell scenes, which are a parallel equivalent to sending a young man away to do national service. The photographed scenes are dominated by a highly private relation between people at the moment of a farewell hug, and the moment captured provokes a truly touching emotion. According to traditional beliefs, a young man really becomes a man only after he returns from the army, while doing national service is considered a process after which he is fully mature; it is an inseparable segment in the forming of every man’s identity, not only in Bosnia, but also in the broader context of the Balkans. Addressing this new issue related to identity about the maturing of men poses the question, in the context of our time, when we no longer have the military or national service, of the way in which a man can be mature and capable these days, which also means being shaped in new (non-military) conditions. By addressing this issue, the artist has discovered a new domain and new possibilities, which open various orientations, and with this also the creation of directions for his visual work.

Miljanović’s virtual world is an area of order, work and responsibility, deeply imbued with his personal history and change of identity from a soldier to an artist. Almost all his works consider such issues as: can one’s personal history be used as a motif, topic, contents and sense of artwork, and how can personal experiences be inscribed in the artistic and public space of an environment, overcoming all global and geografical conditions? His art tells us of the way in which he is constituted and changes as an artist, but also of the very serious issues of the artist’s status in the society he lives and works in, as well as of all potential models of positioning artwork in the public domain.

  Mladen Miljanovic e- iserveart@gmail.com