FATHER & SON, Drawing a line through the clouds of myth

Foto © DK & Jaša

8 May 2013 at 8 p.m.
Moderna galerija / auditorium, Cankarjeva 15

Lecture 2
Gorazd V. Mrevlje & JAŠA

Curated by Michele Drascek

Drawing a line through the clouds of myth myth was an experience of resistance, observation and experimentation in the "methodical" context of a historical museum. Dressed in the pompous style of 18th-century costumes, Jaša walked through the city of Celje and occupied the rooms of the Regional Museum for five successive days. His strategy was not performative, at least is not in a classic sense, since audience just rarely witnessed his movements and activities at the Museum. Rather it was a dysfunctional, reluctant experience faced with the social and narrative functioning system represented by the institution. We were ignorant about what happened in the interior of the Museum although we imagined that Jaša established relations with the space, objects and mummified stories that were deposited there. His strategy had nothing to do with the conventional relationship that we establish as regulated visitors. On the contrary, with his experience, Jaša demanded a new kind of confrontation regardless of the standards from which we assume the history and value of its fetish from the present. As the protagonists of the famous film by Godard, Band à Part, the artist ran around the rooms of the Museum without looking for the exit but rather facing the heaviness of his motionless devices.

This fiction had a final psychoanalytic correlation. The artist's father, a prestigious psychiatrist born in Celje, retrospectively explained the dysfunctional personality of his son, exposing data about his childhood as well as his stubborn desire to become an artist. In front of this analysis, Jaša arised (now facing a real audience) as a statue, motionless, still dressed like in the previous days when he wandered the rooms of the Museum, seemingly oblivious of his father's discourse. The recent experience of the freedom developed in the museum was now confronted with the emotional and scientific rigor that was represented through the authority of the father.
Juan de Nieves