ARTBASE (1)
BIO
Belgrade artists Marija Vauda and Nikola Pilipovic have been
collaborating as MANIK since 1999.Their work reflects the
march of history, sometimes literally outside their studio, and a
dialogue with the international artistic community through
organisations and events such as Rhizome and Free Manifesta. Tiija is
their first weblog piece, their previous work has been in mediums as
diverse as video, performance, happenings, email, painting and
installation.
collaborating as MANIK since 1999.Their work reflects the
march of history, sometimes literally outside their studio, and a
dialogue with the international artistic community through
organisations and events such as Rhizome and Free Manifesta. Tiija is
their first weblog piece, their previous work has been in mediums as
diverse as video, performance, happenings, email, painting and
installation.
best friend
Fuck!Can I be your best friend?
MANIK
Crystalpunk is the big push of the dilettanti, a simpleton stampede, a
coxcomb carnival, a platitude-peddling potlatch, a romantic cargo cult, a
mountebank excursion into the VIP rooms of knowledge, a solidification of
the ignoramus's tantrum, a wild farrago of those who run before they can
walk to discover how non-trivial things become, an ABD of being Free from
the NOW. Crystalpunk is a self-invented movement for self-education that is
reaching for the high ground, from the antechambers of happy amateurism
below ground, remaining completely oblivious to the middle ground. We are
the jaywalkers of terra incognita! We are here to give a new name to the
Anarcho-Homunculi Jezebels who make something out of nothing. Crystalpunk is
a rallying cry for people to start making all sorts of weird things from
mind and matter. Things that are slightly out of kilter. Things that need a
Crystalpunk to appreciate their delights. Things that are radical but which
hurt no one. Things that a!
re big physically (even though that is often the easy way out) or things
that are big mentally. Things, in any case, that are mnemogenic in one way
or another. Things that slip past the filters of consciousness and stick in
the memory like a boot in the mud. Things that confabulate into perfect
shapes and synthesize unities from patterns previously distinct. Crystalpunk
is the alter ego of a head struggling to find meaning, a meandering,
discursive search into all the Gracelands of Uncertainty that are dotted
across the globe, incubating a thousand questions that all demand the Great
Work of Crystalpunk. With the true joy of the lunatic, giggling dangerously
like the mad fucks we are, we bum rush the show of the professional, we
whiten the map of knowledge with black paint. We might be crap, but at least
it's a kind of crap you won't find anywhere else.
http://socialfiction.org/crystalpunk
MANIK
Crystalpunk is the big push of the dilettanti, a simpleton stampede, a
coxcomb carnival, a platitude-peddling potlatch, a romantic cargo cult, a
mountebank excursion into the VIP rooms of knowledge, a solidification of
the ignoramus's tantrum, a wild farrago of those who run before they can
walk to discover how non-trivial things become, an ABD of being Free from
the NOW. Crystalpunk is a self-invented movement for self-education that is
reaching for the high ground, from the antechambers of happy amateurism
below ground, remaining completely oblivious to the middle ground. We are
the jaywalkers of terra incognita! We are here to give a new name to the
Anarcho-Homunculi Jezebels who make something out of nothing. Crystalpunk is
a rallying cry for people to start making all sorts of weird things from
mind and matter. Things that are slightly out of kilter. Things that need a
Crystalpunk to appreciate their delights. Things that are radical but which
hurt no one. Things that a!
re big physically (even though that is often the easy way out) or things
that are big mentally. Things, in any case, that are mnemogenic in one way
or another. Things that slip past the filters of consciousness and stick in
the memory like a boot in the mud. Things that confabulate into perfect
shapes and synthesize unities from patterns previously distinct. Crystalpunk
is the alter ego of a head struggling to find meaning, a meandering,
discursive search into all the Gracelands of Uncertainty that are dotted
across the globe, incubating a thousand questions that all demand the Great
Work of Crystalpunk. With the true joy of the lunatic, giggling dangerously
like the mad fucks we are, we bum rush the show of the professional, we
whiten the map of knowledge with black paint. We might be crap, but at least
it's a kind of crap you won't find anywhere else.
http://socialfiction.org/crystalpunk
MANIK EXHIBITION
MANIK,FULLSIZEIMAGE(2007)>>>>>>>http://seecult.org/v-web/gallery/album88
MANIK,THE MISSING PEOPLE(2005)>>>http://seecult.org/ipw-web/gallery/album03
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
MANIK.
------
MANIK is the name adopted by Belgrade artists Marija Vauda and Nikola
Pilipovic for their collaborative practice. This collaboration has led to
work in a wide range of media over the last decade from improvisations with
paint on gallery walls or on bare flesh through installations of painting
and sculpture to the virtual media of email and weblogs. This diversity is
the product of pursuing a realistic artistic practice in a changing world.
This realism is social,
artistic, and personal.
Faced with a wall of cardboard boxes each of which MANIK have printed the
word "verwerfung" on it might seem reasonable to ask what is being represent
at all, never mind whether it is realistic or not('The Secret of the Brain
and Girl,The Missing space').
Andy Warhol's grocery boxes represented only grocery boxes, and for Arthur
Danto this represented the end of art itself, but there is no such brand as
"verwerfung", and these are actual cardboard, not painted wood. Verwerfung
is a word used by Sigmund Freud and later Gilles Deleuze to describe a state
of mind beyond denial or repression. In this sense it means the repudiation
or complete
sealing away of unbearable thoughts or memories. It originally meant a
geological fissure or faultline, its psychological use indicates a similar
break.
The wall of boxes has a companion, a small low table of stone with
"verwerfung" carved into its top and a bright light shining onto the
floor from its underside('Verwerfung,the egg of a battle'). Both pieces are
allegories of verwerfung, or repudiation. But repudiation of what? The
unbearable is boxed
away, but there is a lot of it. The unbearable is sealed behind
thick stone, but the light of the truth shines out. On another wall,
in the same brown as the boxes, is a list of names. Whose names?
(Wood panel with 200 repetitions of words/terms/idioms: without
parents,withoud children,without ideology,without nation,without
state,without competition,without imitators,without human....)
Another painting shows a family at the beach in rich pinks and
blues('Invisible in the wind').
One of the children has his fists up to play fight with an unseen
figure. Or a missing figure, as if a totalitarian bureaucrat or a
mass media producer has taken his airbrush to a photograph. There is more.
The canvas painted with words in unfashionably rounded letters, this time in
English rather than German, "But... the cloud", in cloud white on sky blue.
There is a carpet rolled up (too tight to hold a body) and stuffed on the
shelf of another table, this time glass rather than stone. There are
paintings of numbers, but only the figure 1 in rough black on an
undifferentiated dull green ground.
Each of these works relates to the others. Sometimes they relate
directly, as with the two verwerfungs. Sometimes they relate to other
relations between works, like the beach scene. There is an interplay of
formal qualities and of references to places and things outside the gallery.
This animates those references, making the viewer party to a discussion, or
at least a set of reminiscences, between the pieces that build up and
combine to create an image (for an expanded sense of the word "image") of a
state of loss, perhaps of unbearable loss, and of the repudiation of this.
This is not a sealed world of hermetic meaning. It has internal
complexity, certainly, but it reaches out to the world of lived
experience of events that are already measurable as history. This is a
visual poetry of formal and historical references. The installation is an
allegory for a real psychological or social state in a historic moment. This
indirection allows it to bypass the viewer's psychic filters and impart the
full force of its message. This is realism because it is a presentation of
reality that could not be achieved so effectively any other way. The endless
detail of news reports overwhelm the senses. What is left is psychologically
unbearable.
Individuals and society as a whole must seal it away and call it
history. But to do so takes a lot of boxes, and the light of the
facts takes a lot of stone to bury.
Despite modern art's protests to the contrary history has a way of
contaminating everyday life. Aerial bombardment, economic collapse, social
unrest and regime change become personal when they are happening outside
your window, or breaking your window.
MANIK's
performances involving the allegorical figures of virtue and
unstoppable history, or their performances involving giving away
gifts are both responses to the events around them. They are also
artistic responses, part of another dialogue that MANIK hold, with
global contemporary art.
MANIK's work animates a set of relations betwen references to the artistic
and historical wider world. But as an artistic collaboration MANIK
themselves are a relationship that must be negotiated, a small social world.
The studio is a site of dialogue rather than solitude for them. This
dialogue is at the heart of the production of their work. MANIK produce work
from their creative synergy that would not happen otherwise. An art group is
no different from a rock music group in this respect. Some work is produced
by one or the other of them, some is produced together. The people in the
painting of the family in "The Missing People" were painted by one, and the
waves of
the sea by the other. The final image has a unity, as the show has a unity,
and this unity is built on a shared framework of concepts and a shared
artistic ability that is visible even in their earliest work.
MANIK's work represents international contemporary art practice with
unnering precision. The paintig such as '((()))((()))'an image of nested
brackets of various sizes in a generic typeface that ironises abstraction,
shows the depth of MANIK's engagement with contemporary art practice. It
contains many references in a single image. A Bridget Riley Op-Art painting.
A Cold War artificial intelligence program writen in the Lisp programming
language. A complex conversation with the content removed and only the
structural traces of digression remaining. But it did not start as a
painting, or even
a drawing.
The first version of the image was made using the web page language HTML and
sent in an email to the Rhizome net art community. MANIK have been active
participants in the Rhizome community for some years
now, and this has informed their practice on a number of occasions. Taking
part in the "Free Manifesta" organised via Rhizome informed their
perfromances around the idea of art as a form of gift (and in the case of
their performance piece of buying drinks for everyone in their local bar the
gift as a form of art).
The email was then recontextualised as an image in MANIK's weblog. Weblogs
are the public diaries of the internet. They often have an informal,
intimate or even confessional feel. They are a deflationary context for art,
paintings lose their detail, sculptures are rendered weightless, even
electronic work loses its focus. But when the medium is embraced as a medium
for artistic production rather than simple presentation, it can become a
kind of ironised studio or gallery, presenting without pretention. MANIK's
use of the weblog medium builds on the humour (or mischief, which is not to
say that the work not is deadly serious)of their email work and on the more
somber drawing and painting of the same period to produce a kind of
narrative that would not be possible in any other medium.
The weblog image was finally realised as a large scale painting in
the masked style that is so representative of curent painting
practice. As a painting the image keeps its roots in HTML, a medium that
does not precisely control the visual presentation of
information. It is an image created of the global conversation of the
internet that has related to an audience in a number of different contexts.
The painting has a story, it is an image of an abstraction not directly of
anything, real or unreal, but with many referents that relate to the context
of its production. The painting has a story, recoverable using google, and
this story is of what the painting is, the production of contemporary art.
That this story
begins with references to points outside its immediate context is a
fact that underlies contemporary art. Again the image functions as an
allegory.
The last few images on MANIK's weblog are of drawings and paintings of
teardrop-like forms in representional scenes('Violet violence in retro
landscape'). These images have
their own missing people. The dramatic monochrome scenes strongly imply
human drama. But in the place of human figures are human-sized teardrop-like
forms. The product of emotion is substituted for the producer of emotion. Or
the abstract for the figurative. The immediate effect is dissonant, and such
dissonance is the root of comedy. Or bathos. The abstract forms deflate
their representational context, and vice versa. But these teardrop shapes
persist in trying to do the representational and expressive work of human
figures. They become more complex, either as combinations or by gaining
internal structures.
The forms are substitutes, proxies, fetishes. A product of
displacement (a state of mind less extreme than repudiation), again a
transformation of strong emotion into symbolic form. If expressing something
directly would cause people to turn away or would not get through their
numbness, then it must be expressed indirectly. That way they will not
realise what they are being told until it is too late.
There remains something unknowable about these images. This gives them a
feel of nostalgia or a sense of loss or shattered dreams. What with human
figures would be melodrama becomes unresolvable to a single category. Which
allows it to do the work of tragedy in the form of bathos. This functions
again as a bypassing of emotional filters and as a solution to the endless
images of the mass media that art must now compete with. Compared to mass
media images the drawings and paintings are ungrammatical, or rather they
have their own grammar. Their difference marks them clearly as art and their
maker as an artist.
MANIK's position as artists has changed as the relation of the state to its
citizens has changed; as the relation of the state to its artists has
changed. It is a truism of art history that disruptive
change in social life will be reflected in art. This truism hides the
fact that art itself must continue in order to do the reflecting, and
this continuity offers the possibility of keeping some sense of self
as an artist. To keep some sense of self as an artist against such a
backdrop of change, through such displacement, is to exemplify the process
of keeping some sense of self generally in the chaos of contemporary life.
MANIK's realism can be seen in their artistic response to historical
events, in their engagement with the processes and practices of
global contemporary art and in the relationship that their shared
artistic practice creates between this and the work that they
produce.This work serves as models of the unseen facts of reality,
the "wiring under the board", as art of any worth always must. If
MANIK's work sometimes seems uncanny that is because it is a true
representation of an increasingly uncanny world.
Rob Myers
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?37992
http://www.tiija.blogspot.com
http://www.culturalaid.com/images%20serbia.htm
http://seecult.org/v-web/b2/index.php?cat=7
http://www.kcb.org.yu/v2/program/detail.php?id
MANIK,THE MISSING PEOPLE(2005)>>>http://seecult.org/ipw-web/gallery/album03
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
MANIK.
------
MANIK is the name adopted by Belgrade artists Marija Vauda and Nikola
Pilipovic for their collaborative practice. This collaboration has led to
work in a wide range of media over the last decade from improvisations with
paint on gallery walls or on bare flesh through installations of painting
and sculpture to the virtual media of email and weblogs. This diversity is
the product of pursuing a realistic artistic practice in a changing world.
This realism is social,
artistic, and personal.
Faced with a wall of cardboard boxes each of which MANIK have printed the
word "verwerfung" on it might seem reasonable to ask what is being represent
at all, never mind whether it is realistic or not('The Secret of the Brain
and Girl,The Missing space').
Andy Warhol's grocery boxes represented only grocery boxes, and for Arthur
Danto this represented the end of art itself, but there is no such brand as
"verwerfung", and these are actual cardboard, not painted wood. Verwerfung
is a word used by Sigmund Freud and later Gilles Deleuze to describe a state
of mind beyond denial or repression. In this sense it means the repudiation
or complete
sealing away of unbearable thoughts or memories. It originally meant a
geological fissure or faultline, its psychological use indicates a similar
break.
The wall of boxes has a companion, a small low table of stone with
"verwerfung" carved into its top and a bright light shining onto the
floor from its underside('Verwerfung,the egg of a battle'). Both pieces are
allegories of verwerfung, or repudiation. But repudiation of what? The
unbearable is boxed
away, but there is a lot of it. The unbearable is sealed behind
thick stone, but the light of the truth shines out. On another wall,
in the same brown as the boxes, is a list of names. Whose names?
(Wood panel with 200 repetitions of words/terms/idioms: without
parents,withoud children,without ideology,without nation,without
state,without competition,without imitators,without human....)
Another painting shows a family at the beach in rich pinks and
blues('Invisible in the wind').
One of the children has his fists up to play fight with an unseen
figure. Or a missing figure, as if a totalitarian bureaucrat or a
mass media producer has taken his airbrush to a photograph. There is more.
The canvas painted with words in unfashionably rounded letters, this time in
English rather than German, "But... the cloud", in cloud white on sky blue.
There is a carpet rolled up (too tight to hold a body) and stuffed on the
shelf of another table, this time glass rather than stone. There are
paintings of numbers, but only the figure 1 in rough black on an
undifferentiated dull green ground.
Each of these works relates to the others. Sometimes they relate
directly, as with the two verwerfungs. Sometimes they relate to other
relations between works, like the beach scene. There is an interplay of
formal qualities and of references to places and things outside the gallery.
This animates those references, making the viewer party to a discussion, or
at least a set of reminiscences, between the pieces that build up and
combine to create an image (for an expanded sense of the word "image") of a
state of loss, perhaps of unbearable loss, and of the repudiation of this.
This is not a sealed world of hermetic meaning. It has internal
complexity, certainly, but it reaches out to the world of lived
experience of events that are already measurable as history. This is a
visual poetry of formal and historical references. The installation is an
allegory for a real psychological or social state in a historic moment. This
indirection allows it to bypass the viewer's psychic filters and impart the
full force of its message. This is realism because it is a presentation of
reality that could not be achieved so effectively any other way. The endless
detail of news reports overwhelm the senses. What is left is psychologically
unbearable.
Individuals and society as a whole must seal it away and call it
history. But to do so takes a lot of boxes, and the light of the
facts takes a lot of stone to bury.
Despite modern art's protests to the contrary history has a way of
contaminating everyday life. Aerial bombardment, economic collapse, social
unrest and regime change become personal when they are happening outside
your window, or breaking your window.
MANIK's
performances involving the allegorical figures of virtue and
unstoppable history, or their performances involving giving away
gifts are both responses to the events around them. They are also
artistic responses, part of another dialogue that MANIK hold, with
global contemporary art.
MANIK's work animates a set of relations betwen references to the artistic
and historical wider world. But as an artistic collaboration MANIK
themselves are a relationship that must be negotiated, a small social world.
The studio is a site of dialogue rather than solitude for them. This
dialogue is at the heart of the production of their work. MANIK produce work
from their creative synergy that would not happen otherwise. An art group is
no different from a rock music group in this respect. Some work is produced
by one or the other of them, some is produced together. The people in the
painting of the family in "The Missing People" were painted by one, and the
waves of
the sea by the other. The final image has a unity, as the show has a unity,
and this unity is built on a shared framework of concepts and a shared
artistic ability that is visible even in their earliest work.
MANIK's work represents international contemporary art practice with
unnering precision. The paintig such as '((()))((()))'an image of nested
brackets of various sizes in a generic typeface that ironises abstraction,
shows the depth of MANIK's engagement with contemporary art practice. It
contains many references in a single image. A Bridget Riley Op-Art painting.
A Cold War artificial intelligence program writen in the Lisp programming
language. A complex conversation with the content removed and only the
structural traces of digression remaining. But it did not start as a
painting, or even
a drawing.
The first version of the image was made using the web page language HTML and
sent in an email to the Rhizome net art community. MANIK have been active
participants in the Rhizome community for some years
now, and this has informed their practice on a number of occasions. Taking
part in the "Free Manifesta" organised via Rhizome informed their
perfromances around the idea of art as a form of gift (and in the case of
their performance piece of buying drinks for everyone in their local bar the
gift as a form of art).
The email was then recontextualised as an image in MANIK's weblog. Weblogs
are the public diaries of the internet. They often have an informal,
intimate or even confessional feel. They are a deflationary context for art,
paintings lose their detail, sculptures are rendered weightless, even
electronic work loses its focus. But when the medium is embraced as a medium
for artistic production rather than simple presentation, it can become a
kind of ironised studio or gallery, presenting without pretention. MANIK's
use of the weblog medium builds on the humour (or mischief, which is not to
say that the work not is deadly serious)of their email work and on the more
somber drawing and painting of the same period to produce a kind of
narrative that would not be possible in any other medium.
The weblog image was finally realised as a large scale painting in
the masked style that is so representative of curent painting
practice. As a painting the image keeps its roots in HTML, a medium that
does not precisely control the visual presentation of
information. It is an image created of the global conversation of the
internet that has related to an audience in a number of different contexts.
The painting has a story, it is an image of an abstraction not directly of
anything, real or unreal, but with many referents that relate to the context
of its production. The painting has a story, recoverable using google, and
this story is of what the painting is, the production of contemporary art.
That this story
begins with references to points outside its immediate context is a
fact that underlies contemporary art. Again the image functions as an
allegory.
The last few images on MANIK's weblog are of drawings and paintings of
teardrop-like forms in representional scenes('Violet violence in retro
landscape'). These images have
their own missing people. The dramatic monochrome scenes strongly imply
human drama. But in the place of human figures are human-sized teardrop-like
forms. The product of emotion is substituted for the producer of emotion. Or
the abstract for the figurative. The immediate effect is dissonant, and such
dissonance is the root of comedy. Or bathos. The abstract forms deflate
their representational context, and vice versa. But these teardrop shapes
persist in trying to do the representational and expressive work of human
figures. They become more complex, either as combinations or by gaining
internal structures.
The forms are substitutes, proxies, fetishes. A product of
displacement (a state of mind less extreme than repudiation), again a
transformation of strong emotion into symbolic form. If expressing something
directly would cause people to turn away or would not get through their
numbness, then it must be expressed indirectly. That way they will not
realise what they are being told until it is too late.
There remains something unknowable about these images. This gives them a
feel of nostalgia or a sense of loss or shattered dreams. What with human
figures would be melodrama becomes unresolvable to a single category. Which
allows it to do the work of tragedy in the form of bathos. This functions
again as a bypassing of emotional filters and as a solution to the endless
images of the mass media that art must now compete with. Compared to mass
media images the drawings and paintings are ungrammatical, or rather they
have their own grammar. Their difference marks them clearly as art and their
maker as an artist.
MANIK's position as artists has changed as the relation of the state to its
citizens has changed; as the relation of the state to its artists has
changed. It is a truism of art history that disruptive
change in social life will be reflected in art. This truism hides the
fact that art itself must continue in order to do the reflecting, and
this continuity offers the possibility of keeping some sense of self
as an artist. To keep some sense of self as an artist against such a
backdrop of change, through such displacement, is to exemplify the process
of keeping some sense of self generally in the chaos of contemporary life.
MANIK's realism can be seen in their artistic response to historical
events, in their engagement with the processes and practices of
global contemporary art and in the relationship that their shared
artistic practice creates between this and the work that they
produce.This work serves as models of the unseen facts of reality,
the "wiring under the board", as art of any worth always must. If
MANIK's work sometimes seems uncanny that is because it is a true
representation of an increasingly uncanny world.
Rob Myers
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?37992
http://www.tiija.blogspot.com
http://www.culturalaid.com/images%20serbia.htm
http://seecult.org/v-web/b2/index.php?cat=7
http://www.kcb.org.yu/v2/program/detail.php?id