博扬沙尔切维奇的

source: art-ba-ba

博扬·沙尔切维奇（Bojan Sarcevic）个展“At Present”近日在柏林BQ画廊开幕。
“我们是否生活在现代历史中最墨守陈规的阶段？

为什么每种试图批判社会的行为最终都会被消除和不被信任？

为什么当下每一种社会抗议的可能性都会被吸收和同化？

如果资本主义能在‘多亏社会冲突’而非‘尽管有社会冲突’的情况下发挥作用和发展，那么为什么社会与政治冲突会从今天的西方社会中消失？

批判在一段经济繁荣的时期为什么会特别丰富和敏锐，并在1968年时达到了顶峰？而在当下这个充满了困难与问题的时代却又保持冷漠和无动于衷？

是否有理由相信当前仍然有可能形成一个社会渴望追求的变革项目？

假设文化及艺术的发展与刻画了当前这个世界的特征的惯性及被动性有关。那么它们生命力的恢复将离不开某一特定的驱动力，而这种驱动力将屈服于自治权某一新项目的形式与内容。
我们是否困扰于无法想象出这种创造力的内容？”
——博扬·沙尔切维奇
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source: csenno2blogspot

A strange presence seems to hover in Sarcevic’s series ‘1954’ (2004). One day the artist was looking around in the Karl Marx bookshop – which has since closed – and picked up a collection of the old West German architectural review Baumeister (Master Builder) from 1954. The fading black and white pages showed images of sleek interiors of buildings constructed across the country in that year, both domestic and public spaces, from living-rooms to lecture rooms. Every interior is devoid of people. Sarcevic took a penknife, carefully cut out a set of geometric shapes from each picture – diamonds, circles, triangles, squares – and then glued them back in new positions. In so doing, he made each paper image into a kind of jigsaw puzzle with the pieces assembled the wrong way. Once moved around, the modular pieces create kaleidoscopic configurations that both belong and do not belong to the interiors. The shapes cut out of the photograph come back to hover in a tight symmetry, like a whirling mass that moves according to its own logic. My favourites are the triangles propagating from apex to apex across the shelves of a living-room library and throwing all the books into disarray, like a little tornado. Or a poltergeist.
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source: frieze

‘Space is the remains, or corpse, of time; it has dimensions’, wrote Robert Smithson in 1969, a definition highly appropriate to the 76 small collages, arranged together in small groups, that made up this show by Bosnian artist Bojan Sarcevic. Each collage starts with a small black-and-white photograph of a 1950s Modernist interior (or occasionally exterior) of the type found in architectural journals of the time. But their calm, orderly surfaces are disrupted by a tumultuous play of geometric shapes that redistribute details of shade and form as if infected by an anti-Modernist poltergeist. A sweeping staircase dissolves into a froth of tumbling circles; an empty auditorium is invaded by a flock of swooping triangles; the whole façade of a country house spins in a kaleidoscope of interlocking hexagons until barely discernible. Sarcevic’s trick is simple – he has cut the shapes out of the photographs, rotated them or swapped them around and inserted them seamlessly back in. But even when you are aware of this painstaking and repetitious process the results are baffling, various and extremely seductive.

The collages’ vague sense of time and place is located somewhat more precisely by their title, 1954 (all works 2004), which refers to the 1954 edition of the German architectural journal Baumeister, from which the pictures are taken. Germany in 1954, after two lost decades and the horrors of war, was tentatively starting to rebuild its traumatized national morale (helped in no small measure by the country’s unexpected World Cup victory that same year.) And, despite the absence of the country’s greatest modern architects, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architecture flourished in the steady rebuilding of cities reduced to rubble by Allied bombing, and was characterized by a cautiously optimistic Modernism. This was the year that Mies began his monumental Seagram building in New York, but the pictures Sarcevic collects here are more modest examples of a socially oriented Modernism, felt at the time to be not only an expression of, but also a form of active participation in, the creation of Germany’s new democracy. There is, however, not a single person to be found here, in these static, polished rooms. Like Smithson’s corpse, the spaces are frozen memorials to a past time, fixed in a pristine state of endless anticipation. Who knows if they were ever inhabited, and what they look like now? In Sarcevic’s hands it is as if the wear and tear of human use have been replaced by the unruly spirit of a fermented formalism that rearranges particles at whim.

There is a strong relation to Russian Construct-ivism here. Some of the collages look as if space itself has been fanned out into a hanging Rodchenko spatial construction, while a group of three terribly fragile sculptures on the gallery floor, tiny spiralling structures of sandblasted glass plates held together with tape, could be miniature versions of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919). They also seem to point towards an integration of art into the everyday, as propounded by the Constructivists in Aleksander Rodchenko’s slogan: ‘Work in the midst of everything and with everybody.’

The structure Sarcevic invents here does not introduce any foreign elements. The geometric forms he chooses exist already in the architecture itself: the zigzags of a parquet floor are reflected in a criss-cross pattern that stands vertical like a sculpture, or two hanging globes inspire a pair of interlocking circular bands, switched over and rotated to dizzying effect. These interventions are not the alien presences they seem to be, but rather un-integrated misfits cut from the same fabric.

Sarcevic’s larger sculptural works, as well as his videos, are characterized by similar strategies of subtle intervention that concern themselves with social relations and space in general rather than the particular politics of the institutional art space. A quietness, persistence and exactitude defines investigations into the nature of existence in relation to time and place: ‘I don’t think existence is a structure; it rather needs an appropriate structure to appear and disclose its originality’, stated Sarcevic in a recent interview. ‘It’s inscribed somewhere, in a place, in a moment, in a relationship.’ The utopianism of post-revolutionary Constructivism, like that of the postwar Modernists, is seen here from a vantage point of 21st-century disillusionment. Now that these attempted social utopias have failed, it is best left to the individual, Sarcevic seems to imply, and to the power of creative thought to reorder experience. As the title of another recent exhibition, ‘Verticality Downwards’ at Kunstverein Munich, makes clear, a determined over-emphasis on the bare facts around us can draw out the poetry of existence from the most ordinary situations.

Kirsty Bell
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source: artforum

博杨•沙尔切维奇（Bojan Šarčević）曾经提过这样一个问题：“艺术家对于他/她的艺术发现所蕴含的意义，究竟能理解到什么程度呢？”这个问题是艺术家2006年面对一些艺术家、评论家和策展人提出来的，讨论会在他于爱尔兰举办的两地展览时举办的，场地分别在都柏林的项目艺术中心和Sligo的模范艺术和Niland画廊举办。许多作品是首次亮相，一些铜线形成的小几何图形从仿古墙纸上微妙地垂下来，这样的作品似乎和他针那种以调查研究为基础的创作所提出的问题不相干系。但这场在都柏林的讨论会，并非画蛇添足的跑题。如果说，沙尔切维奇提出了艺术意义上更广泛的问题（就如接下来延伸开来的开放性讨论一样，将艺术家动手创作的成果提出来，却没有给出什么容易归纳的“发现”），他其实就自行回答了这个问题。作为相对不受知识约束的一个动力，以一种特定的形式（在这里，是讨论会形势）给出了答案。也正是这种具有能动性的多维题目，将沙尔切维奇在过去十年里风格化的转变整合在一起，他的创作包括对建筑空间的直接干涉，电影和录像，美丽精巧的雕塑和一些摄影为起点的作品。