Dear Melita!
Our last conversation in Večer we’ve entitled "How to assuage the eternal struggle between order and chaos". My work here and experience of another continent still echoes this theme. The relationship between the characteristics of the U.S. and Europe creates a polar opposite of black and white in my thoughts and feelings and it seems most reasonable to stand in the balancing shades of gray, the equilibrium between the two. The first sense of a new continent comes as a vast liberating lightness. On the road between the airport in Boston and a small New England town of Peterborough with driver Joe, we pay a slip to the employee who dances madly in the toll station from which Jimi Hendrix peals. This lightness and openness, perhaps boldness and madness may remain an overarching sense, refreshing mainly because I am used to heavy philosophy of Europe (for example, I read Foucoult) and theoretical bureaucratic superstructure of historical collective unconscious. Uncounted immigrants entered this country through the door and left all the past behind. But the old mare on the opposite side needs to be harnessed as well. Europe is deep in its mind, America much more shallow. I read an essay entitled "Jihad Vs. Macworld ", about the two destinations, which our world leads to, and none of them is encouraging. The first is the rigid clinging to the tradition and national identity, which turns into nationalism, its anti pole market globalization that unifies. Now, let's find the balance between them!
No, the question about the cultural ministry issue is not superfluous at all. I do think about it a lot. Public support of the arts is extremely important and its ideal version generates fruitful creative realm, from which astonishing surpluses grow and have a nourishing effect on the nation. John, who knows both art worlds, American and European, feels that public support of the arts spoils us Europeans, and that our governments bribe us so as to keep us quiet and not daring. In America the situation is such that almost all artists have daily jobs, at least temporarily. Which may limit the perfection. Some of them break through this yoke. In U.S. there is much more art that can be sold in the market, such as painting and sculpture, and much less new media or media art, which our Ministry supports in particular. However, the market is really strong here and has been around for centuries. When Miha Mazzini read the comments on the Internet relating to the protests at the recent merging of Ministry of culture with other sectors, he found there muddled comments from readers that artists should finally start working. And that we should live from the market. Shortly thereafter, he asked himself, what kind of art market in Slovenia would that be. Perhaps the artist may live from what he wrenches, apples in autumn, roots in winter and the like. [word game: od trga meaning from the market and odtrga meaning to wrench – from the tree for example]
Residential center where I live and work has a century long tradition and operates on private capital drive. It was formed by the initiative of a strong woman, Marian MacDowell, who built the first studio buildings, away from everyday disturbances, ideal for creating, with penetration and enthusiasm. Can you imagine that in our country wealthy would invest in construction and maintenance of thirty houses in the woods and in the production of exceptional works of art? Supposedly, our only compatriot here before me was Metka Krašovec and her subtle drawing of the unicorn and the woman was waiting for me on the lunch basket at the door in the early days.
I myself mainly work on video installation, which follows the ceremonial angles of the indigenous. I read the texts of Andrej Pleterski and Nikos Čausidis, who finally dare to reconstruct the Slavism from a mere scrap and the integration of various disciplines: architecture, costumes, surviving traditions and stories. I feel rage and aversion to Christianity, which is violently sweeping indigenous knowledge for centuries and places a god with the control and moral /ethical obligations above us. Slavic gods were not occupied with human commonness, they minded their own business. The art colony here follows this principle as well, they leave us alone to do what we want and this is essential.
However, willy-nilly it is needed to wade yet through this bipolarity, the idealization of indigenous people, their connectedness with nature, which echoes a remote Golden Age. Such mythologisation makes a similar injury to the Indians on this continent, as their extermination had made, because no one sees these tribes as real people with factual problems, which change over time.
Then New York with its heavy skyscrapers that grow in the glass landscape falls to the one side of the scales, on the other side there is the smell of pine trees, frogs, deer and coyotes, and the view of the rising sun, which has shifted north by a fascinating distance in these two months.
I would like so much to tell you at least a little about the exceptional artists who are here. They are perhaps the most important factors in the social and creative sense. Each of them is worth exploring on the internet, since their work came as a pure freshness, at least for me.
You know Jamalaadeen Takuma. First, he mentioned our favorite local destination Evil coffee, than he showed his clips of Maribor, colorful Merry autumn [circus], the view across the old bridge ... Aaron Johnson paints colorful images of acrylic layers with Jesus who takes the lady depicted in the statue of liberty from behind. We went to see one of his drawings at Moma. It hung next to Picasso’s. Sergio Lopez-Piñeiro is too big a freethinker, to approve the deployment of classical rectangular housing that dictate social relations and room function. He builds landscapes of snow piles in the middle of urban centers and light buildings without central gravities. Jerome Kitzke soon falls into an ecstatic madness, when reciting the intelligent texts, mocking the character’s arrogance. By this, he is raging on the piano, whistling, and neighing. Jean Rohe, oh Jean, with elegant confidence takes any instrument in her hands and throws us down with simply told stories from the attic of intimacy. John Jesurun, a genius with a distinct sense of humor and (self-) irony. .. Listen to this: he writes scripts himself, then directs them, he constructs an inventive spaces himself and fills them with best actors of the world, some present, some only on video, sometimes a whole orchestra with the editors are in a completely different room as the audience and they can not even be seen during the performance, only their footsteps can be heard every now and than as they walk through the labyrinth corridors. Sarah Hardesty makes delicate spatial sculptures of strained relations between the pieces of wood. And it is just my closest crew, how many artists there are missing. And how many seemed strange in the beginning and then I’ve met my own complexes, after being astonished with their creative work.
Mainly due to joint productions I have contacts with Kibla, and very active group of twelve artists from Slovenia and Croatia, which works under the umbrella of the European project. Otherwise, I have this good habit, that wherever I am I am there all present. There are no countrymen around, it was a Serbian violinist. We did not talk a lot in Serbo-Croatian, because this is not a proper way in front of others. But we had initiated a wild Balkan party for my birthday.
How much more I have to tell you. I can not wait to go for a tea with you and to share time with our readers again. About Maribor in Maribor. Otom potom [a common expression meanning: About that on the road].
Jamaal, Ana and Sergio jamming
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