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the past few decades, we have become more and more dissatisfied
with the art world and have witnessed numerous attempts
to change it. People who think according to artistic principles
– about meaningful paintings and art history – have come
to the conclusion that the art world is too small, too
limited, too marginal, too weak, and too bohemian to have
any significant effect on the world. So, how can we go
from a limited art world to the real world in which the
messages are made in such a way as to reach serious discussion
on the existing power relations
of the capitalist system and representative democracies?
The struggle over the definition
of social services, scientific research, cultural production
and the natural and built environments either as private
commodities or as common goods under some form of collective
stewardship has become the central conflict of our time,
disputed on a territory that extends from intimate subjectivities
to the networked spaces of politics. Given the manipulability
of public opinion in the contemporary media democracies,
the destinies of this struggle will depend crucially on
people's ability to recognise and resist the new techniques
of social management. In this regard, some interesting
and optimistic news has arrived from the installation
"Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies",
a project by Oliver Ressler realised within several exhibitions
in Ljubljana, Geneve, Berlin, Gdansk and Vienna.
According to Boris
Buden, the world of art today is the only possible basis
for public actions and experimentation, which is not
imaginative within politics or theory any more. It cannot
be denied that modern societies have tried to adopt
some alternative principles, but just from the theoretical
point of view; unfortunately, the political field always
comes into contradiction with those concepts, regularly
marked them as devalued. Therefore, contemporary art
should be used as a field of an open network of people,
studying and working on alternative social and communication
network. Contemporary artistic practice could be understood
as an experiment in creating a social network of artists,
a gift economy, which can act as an alternative to traditional
forms of exhibition in commercial and institutional
contexts. Such a point of view within world of art could
become massive enough to correct specific lines of institutional
development, redefine
it’s identity and ethical orientation
and open up new spaces for social experimentation. Development
in this way needs network of more or less independent
exhibition spaces, which would make far more social
and economical experiments possible.
Within
that field, Oliver Ressler has his own pragmatic and
research oriented goals. His artistic projects are constructed
as a combination of different scientific, technological,
spatial and logical systems. In his work, the artist
makes use of scientific and technological tools, knowledge,
and systems, but he projects these into the social arena
of art. Author uses art as a system, as a means of both
shaping and presenting integrated, empirical, and creative
observations.
In Ljubljana, Ressler
used legendary spaces of the Skuc Gallery to
present his ongoing experimental
project on alternative economics and societies and to introduce some specific socio-economic approaches to a wider public.
During the eighties, under the parole "alternative
has no alternative", the SKUC (Student Cultural
Centre) Gallery was deeply involved in what, at that
time, was called the "alternative cultural scene"
- a heterogeneous and prolific confusion of social movements,
cultural practices, punk-rock activities, contestations,
manifestations, theoretisations and vulgarisations which,
towards the second half of the decade, created an esprit
de l'epoque which promised much better than what
later came to be true.
Ressler’s multidisciplinary
project is a work in progress designed by people with
different professional (economy, sociology, history,
feminism, anarchism, self-management) and geopolitical
backgrounds (USA, Great Britain, Spain, Serbia and Montenegro).
The project deals with the concepts, models, and utopias
for alternative economies and societies which all share
a rejection by the capitalist system of rule. For each
concept, the video was produced on the basis of interviews
with advocates of interesting and real utopian social
fantasies and historical models. In the exhibition,
each of these single-channel videos are shown on a separate
monitor thus forming the central element of the artistic
installation. Ressler
has not related to the monitor as merely an object,
but rather has treated it more as a complex system,
one that demands a reexamination of the relationship
between the sphere of art and that of life. Today we
know that video has become the primary technology of
image production, distribution, and consumption and
over time changes in television have significantly altered
the ways in which people perceive and use it as a medium;
phosphorescent electronic power has become a metaphor
for social power.
We
could say that for Ressler there are no differences
between social activities, regardless of whether they
occur in the field of art or in that of political economy,
and in his strategic actions he uses methods and materials
which directly interact with social and capitalist systems
while simultaneously confronting these same systems.
As an artist, Ressler wonders about the subject matter
of his work, about the values, beliefs, social philosophies,
and economic scenarios he is promoting. Rather than
producing advertisements for his own benefit, as one
would generally expected from an ordinary artist, Ressler
again in Ljubljana had the primary aim of promoting
a non-hierarchically arranged pool, which offers stimulus
and suggestions for contemplation of social alternatives
and possibilities for action. Beyond projects like this,
one can see the tactics of the emerging social movements
as attempts to deconstruct the neo-liberal program of
total social mobilization for the needs of flexible
economy.
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