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SONJA BRISKI UZELAC - More micro-narratives from the imaginary Balkans: Once a lieutenant, now an artist

The term “imaginary Balkans” was coined by Marija Todorova as discourse-related and as a metaphor which discloses an ideology of ghettoisation; it is conceptually appropriate in terms of how it envelops the contents of various aspects of social and ideological contextualisation in practically all cases of such artistic activity originating in this excessively ideologised region. This term, according to what Todorova says in her book Imagining the Balkans, “was attached derogatory connotations at the turn of the 20th century, even though it was a gradual process, proceded by events which followed the downfall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of small, weak, economically underdeveloped and dependent national states, which were yet to enter the process of modernisation”. Eventually, “due to difficulties of modernisation and the accompanying nationalist aberrations”, the Balkans increasingly turned into not just a symbol of something “underdeveloped”, but also of something “aggressive” and “intolerant”, therefore, of something irrational. So, the “Balkans as a metaphor”* even becomes a subject of postcolonial discourse analysis in an attempt to deconstruct, on the track of Edward W. Said and Gayatri Spivak, the ideological building of the ontology of the “imaginary Balkans”, based on “fear of the other”.

However, these Balkans, as an “imaginary pavilion” between Said’s macro-narration about “non-Western views” on the one hand and condescending “Western views” on the other, meaning a kind of enclosure levitating in mid-air, have become metaphysically convenient not only for the purpose of geopolitical ideologisation or postcolonial theory, but also for contextualising artistic activity, including many different micro-narratives. As flexible as it may be in the framework of the contemporary shift, this great authentic tale of the paradigm of the “East” and its “transition” is still turned towards the Western world; nontheless, as such, it is intertextual as well as culturally, anthropologically, analytically and semiotically oriented. The same goes for the art arriving from anyone of those “small” scenes: it is tormented between the process of globalisation and local fragmentation. But, it is specifically this kind of torment that provides it not only with inner strength and energy to designate, but also with the seductive intruiging quality of the authenticity of “small stories” in the great international “vanity fair”. Powerful micro-narratives coming from there are not merely a subject of new empirical insights into and experiences of this “interspace”, and certainly recognisible in their concepts is the energy of an intellectual project bringing about new possibilities originating in the local identity crisis and the need to present itself internationally, and eventually to the world of art. 

The energy of artistic immersion in the understanding of the specificity of time and space is most certainly important for the issues of identity building. It is capable of uncovering cognitive, perceptional, ideological and other misconceptions and illusions, which is in itself a way to revaluate the current situational context. For ethical purposes, for the purpose of “assuming responsibility”, relations are articulated, identity and altarity, identicalness and otherness accepted; such processes practically always eventuate and are encountered at boundaries, at the perimeter of the social sphere. Thus otherness, owing to the (self-)perception and creative energy of one’s personal empirical experience and its conceptual and media articulation, takes the form of a paradigm of identification of new experience of identity and diversity. This kind of energy unambiguously has as a result, irrespective of how the approach was generated or of the circumstances which led to the concept, the quality of historical and ethical aspirations for social engagement through art. But, at the turn of the 21st century, this is by means of one’s personal artistic micro-stories!

Thus, the “imaginary pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina” is where rare works have been created along the thin line of semantic contextualisation and recontextualisation, by young artists who have recently left or are close to graduating from the Banja Luka Academy of Arts; those works begin to reveal the connection between identity, power and space. Their “disruptive capacity” is born out of provoking a shift and a hiatus in a specific local context, like the artist associations Protok (Flow) or Točka (Period, Dot), along with various forms and projects of indvidual artistic activity. In presenting the personal decision and choice in terms of the inclusion, i.e. exclusion of certain elements from the referential framework of that context, nuclei are formed to expose new interpretations within one’s own environment. Although others are in it, they simultaneously open it for another one to see, something that has already put them on the topological map of the international art scene; nontheless, precisely for the reason of their micro-narratives in “identity positioning”.

Mladen Miljanović belongs to a group of young, media and conceptually trained artists on Banja Luka’s new art scene, who defines his artistic activity as a communication relay of the trauma of discontinuity in the local region. During his final years at the Academy, he formed a strategy of micro-narration based on biopolitical reflexes and reflections, on rethinking and scrutinising the identity of space as a place and the personal history of one’s identity. It was back in those days that he demonstrated the conceptual maturity of an active communicator of a specific project summarised in the title of his graduation work – Constructive Deconstruction of the Past of Space. The manner of juxtaposing notions such as construction-deconstruction and space-past evidence an early articulation of his awareness of the global postmodern condition of the world as well as of the world of art, but also of the condition of his own local situation. Within that range the artist defines his position as that of an anthropologist/researcher, which implies an intentional “identification” with genuine contextual micro-narrations, or as the South African artist and curator Kendeel Geers said with regards to Milica Tomić’s performance at the Venice Biennale in 2003, the “realism of a lived-through experience”, which in Mladen’s case makes the initial basis for any further recycling of the story.

In conceptualising his project, Miljanović gradually develops this broadest referential framework, and it slowly differentiates into separate thematic units, different media approaches or individual “cycles”, but the “lines of procedure” still stay.

They all result from his choice of concept, production decision and compact approach presentation, ever since his early solo works, such as The Balkans Happening, Clearance of a Military Memorial, Space and Past as Elements Reflecting on Work, Deconstruction of a Personal Past and the Past of Space Through an Installation, Art as a Tool for Subliming a Negative Past or I Serve Art. All those works commence a project which would be given its various formal, media, semiotic, semantic, contextual or other presentation plans, but their intertextual narratives are a symptom of the contemporary connection between art and existential loci. In Mladen Miljanović’s case, that locus is the “area of the barracks”, as a symbolic and factual matrix of construction of the personal story, whereby he reflects the correlation between his identity and the lived-through experience of the “past of a space”.

This correlation began after he graduated from the Army Reserve Officers’ School, and just as he was about to continue the training needed for him to join the military, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s postwar army was reorganised and the military school disbanded, as well as the military barracks in Banja Luka. The change of course took place at that moment and in those given circumstances – he entered the Academy of Arts, and the Academy moved to its new premises in the former barracks. This is how what was initially a personal story grew into the construction of his identity in the process of developing the project of deconstrution of identity of the past of this space and its dominant functions (military power, devastation, “neutralisation of human force”, manipulative supervision of individuals, doing national service etc.).

Deconstructing the actual and symbolic military power is a conceptual and intermedia project with a lived-through context, pieces of reality and fictions of the past, ideologies of social power, the language of visual symbols, images of signalisation taken from military schemes and assault plans, physical fragments of the military past (helmets, crutches, wheelchairs), simulacra of rituals of total control, and so on. This is how artistic action is fed constructive energy, which can fall back on art as “sublimation of a negative past”, naturally, on condition that boundaries are distinguishable, that is, “distinctions between art as occupation and art as therapy”. So, this is about encountering not just any fictitious or utopistic, i.e. abstract or universal spatial context, but a complex of specific historical and local circumstances resulting in a specific past, which certainly has a bearing on the present. Placing a focus on this particular aspect in localising the “restless past of a space” is an act of ethical response on the part of the young artist: “It is much easier to invent the past... than to remember it,” he quotes the words of Christe Wolf.

The project of deconstructing spatial memory is paradigmatic for understanding the genesis of his artistic work, which is now fairly extensive. This project took the form of a radical art action/performance I Serve Art, which took place during the academic year of 2006/2007, where the artist put himself in voluntary social isolation inside what was formerly an enclosed area of military power, now an open space of the Academy of Arts, during a period of exactly the same duration as that spent “serving the nation”, i.e. doing national service. However, Miljanović’s syntagma in the title of the project, which renders ironic the position of neutrality in terms of value, also speaks about the constructive power of art in the existential world which, eventually, claims to possess the meanings of works of art. Because meanings belong in various contexts of society, ideology, art, culture or nature, and no semiotic system is meaningful in itself – it only becomes such once it establishes a relation to other signs or systems of signs. In contextualising signs and meanings, transferring or removing them from one context to another (from one factual and symbolic plane to another), the process of resemantisation grows in importance – it turns into a process of space decontamination”, with “274 views of the world”. The artist’s views and messages, presented in an open web page and other electronic and analogue media, evolve from isolation to public communication, to virtual social living. Although socially isolated, the artist “organises” a communcation Artattack, simulating by means of a “terrorist act” the “mode of the Bosnian artist” to get a chance to exhibit in international galleries. Later, the mode of Artistic Terrrorism would become reality within the borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina as well, at the 4th Biennial of Miniature Art of Bosnia and Herzegovina, held in Tuzla in 2007.

The artist’s intermedia development of intercontextuality reflects in its own way a recent situation lacking any stable media systems used for artwork presentation, which is symptomatic of today’s connection between art and anthropological interpretation of context, with elusive boundaries between art and public space. This is also related to the systemic self-reflection of one’s strategy of action in art, which Miljanović would demonstrate with consistency in his new projects such as Purpose, Aggression and Occupation. Ensuing the strategy are occupation tactics, gradually increasing the exhibition space and invading both public space and the media. The predominant communication channel is the relationship between space and sign: like signalisation, one sign is multiplied into series in order to mark, inhabit, fulfill and finally occupy public space. The sign takes on the identity of an aggressor, because its visual representation refers to the surface impression of a soldier’s silhouette, an individual with no personal traits, no identity, consequently an individual susceptible to control and manipulation. As for the artist, with this kind of “seizure“ of exhibition and other spaces he identifies as an aggressor, conveying the trauma of existential confrontation of the subject with the (im)possibility to form a stable identity; certainly, in regions which have a long history of discontinuity, which eventually led to the very construct of “imaginariness” as its consequence.

Further on in his work Mladen Miljanović remains preoccupied with reexamining how identity is constructed, but the narrative matrix of trauma is always revived from the start. However, today’s subject is no longer defined permanently by trauma, because as we shed light on this position of artistic activity, it is hard to continue using the same discourse as in the “time of pretheoretical innocence”, say, using formal expressionist terms. In this age of self-reflection as postconceptuality, the artist explores his story in its contextual (semantic and value-related) relations; thereby he deprives art of its mythical modernist neutrality, while bestowing an aura of location upon his actions. For that reason, the artist’s actions are anthropological, that is, relativist, because they show history, mythology and art as social constructs. In his new project Occupational Therapy, Miljanović focuses on the social status of traumatised subjectivity; it is about yet another case of occupation of psycho-social space and a “therapeutic” reconstruction of its fractured fragments. His micro-narratives contain those semantic relations by which the literally presented stories are merely a base from which to derive metaphorical or allegorical meanings; therefore, Mladen’s “art clinic” does not work without external references.

It is curious, however, that this label appeared at yet another “Balkan” site (“By refusing to take part in destruction, killing, looting, bullying, we relocate ourselves from the traditional spaces”) as the micro-narrative of a radical local project of an activist social “shock therapy” since 2002: Novi Sad, the art group Art klinika (Art Clinic), “where the interrelation between art and society is set as a relation of two-way communication and impact”, with the explicit goal to “shift the focus from the aesthetic to the ethical”. However, Mladen Miljanović’s project Occupational Therapy is based on an ironic turn, not on the linearity of urban guerilla activism, which eventually takes over institutions resorting to the “chameleon strategy” (B. Pejić). Undoubtedly, in both these cases we are dealing with “felonious” attitudes, but with its paradoxical turn, Mladen’s concept endeavours to stir a new, unexpected experience in the narrative, connected to states of trauma, and so awaken critical conscience. Actually, the term “occupational therapy” is literally related to the specialist medical field of psychotherapy (a method of treatment using occupation), but in the context of the artist’s work, it is a show which means the opposite of what it says and shows.

Namely, the artist creates his referential context by borrowing from primarily the medical context, but also from a context which is somewhat broader nowadays, the meaning of a specialist term (ergo therapy, work therapy) as organised occupational therapy (a method best conducted in a group, where “each patient or traumatised person is treated using the method of meaningful occupation”, whose goal is to “arouse the ill person’s interest in his or her surroundings” and “enhance his or her individuality”, where “it is crucial that occupation be varied, useful and purposeful, not meaningless, as well as engrossing for every individual patient”, from a dictionary of psychiatry and psychology, Psihijatrijsko-psihološki rječnik). The well-known etymological potential of the Latin word occupare, with a broad range of meanings indicating aggressiveness, which are mostly used as military jargon (occupy, engage, invade, encompass, attract, reprocess, win, own, achieve, be obsessed, govern, master, outdo, remove, undertake, attack…), is decontextualised and relativised in the procedure of transfer into the context of art. Also, the medical meaning of “occupational therapy” is decentred in the field of intertextual encounter with the paradoxical effects of “media, mental, intellectual and physical occupation” (M. Miljanović). This approach was previously used in the works Occupo, an artistic “occupational” action in a gallery (Graz), but also in interventions in a nonartistic, exterior urban space (New York), in circumstances which are inseparable from reality, even if the (inter)spatial boundaries of this reality are uncertain and unstable (Belgrade).

The metamorphosis of occupational-therapeutical ambitions grew in Mladena Miljanović’s artistic practice, in an attempt to intensify the discourse about one’s confrontation with the imaginary body of identity. The complexity of the project Occupational Therapy, which is presented in parallel in several exhibition segments (in spaces which are at the same time Banja Luka’s only exhibition spaces used to present local and occasional regional art productions). So, this is a case of total occupation of the exhibition body in order to intensify the penetration into the “mass of those asleep with no identity”. In addition, the UDAS Gallery is also occupied, where Miljanović voluntarily runs a program of occupational therapy for real and where his project The Balkans Happening began, although this time he himself occupied the space with his photo documentation (Send-Off Party) about the “Balkan” ritual of having a send-off reception for a young man leaving to do his national service, whose paradoxicality he examines in the case of his own send-off party, which he reconstructs as an event which took place back in 2000, that is, he creates anew the simulacrum of the ritual. Also, there is a series of small works (Amulets) with the same silhouettes of “occupying” soldiers, this time presented as “sacred objects/amulets” in an ironic turn, which in the tradition of primitive cultures “cure diseases, protect families from accidents, safeguard children, bring good fortune, money, power... everything”. In a cynical, Flux-like manner of audience emancipation, the artist uses these words to seduce: “My amulets come in such a broad range that everyone can find something for themselves. They protect everything – states, entities, cities, institutions, communities, families and individuals. They were trained for it.”

However, the whole narrative, not only the “Balkan” one about the “meaninglessness of the aggressive act of invasion” is still summarised in the artist’s video Assuming Responsibility. It does not only reflect the contextual attitude that the meanings and values of an act of artistic action are related to the actual context of reality in which the act of art is made and operates. On the contrary, the artist is a social subject whose actions are critical in reality, and as such, he or she assumes responsibility for it, which means his or her direct participation in the (“therapeutic”) processes of its decontamination and (re)construction. Therefore, it is not a position of one’s relocation, the subject of discourse of all points of support of Miljanović’s strategy of micro-narrative. In the mentioned video we see the artist as a terrorist, with a gas mask on, and as he is increasingly troubled by the mask tightening, he constantly repeats one sentence in the manner of forced neurosis: My name is Mladen Miljanović, I produced this work in the former barracks Vrbas, I used to be a lieutenant, now I’m an artist.

The description of that work is even more suggestive in English:

I’m a terrorist in the field of art.

I was a lieutenant in the regular army, today I’m junk in the regular art!

Do you think it’s comfortable with this mask on?

Yes, I made mistakes in the past, but I promise you now, I will be good in the future.

Yesterday is history!

History pinches my soul just as tight sweaty shoes wound my feet.

I will love people with the mask off just as they hate me with the mask on.

In Zagreb, 11 November 2008                                                                  

Sonja Briski Uzelac

  Mladen Miljanovic e- iserveart@gmail.com