promo booklet whw, 2004
DESCRIPTION
Promotion booklet of the curatorial collective What, how & for Whom/WHW, Zagreb, 2004 with informations about exhibitions What, how & for whom, Project: Broadcasting, SIde-effects, Looking Awry, Repetition: Pride & Prejudice Collective Creativity and work of Gallery NovaTRANSCRIPT
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What, how & for whom - Zagreb/Vienna ................................................................. 5
Project: Broadcasting......................................................................................................... 12
Gallery Nova ............................................................................................................................... 21
SIde-effects, Looking Awry, Repetition: Pride & Prejudice ................. 24
Zagreb Cultural Kapital 3000 ....................................................................................... 26
Collective Creativity.......................................................................................................... 29
contents:
WHAT, HOW AND FOR WHOM
curators: Ana DEVIĆ | Ivet ĆURLIN | Nataša ILIĆ | Sabina SABOLOVIĆ
design: Dejan Kršić [arkzin]
fonts: Filosofi a [emigre], Eunuverse [Barry Deck], Bliss [Jeremy
Tankard]
Zagreb, 2004
What, How and for Whom/WHW
Baruna Trenka 4/IV
HR-10000 Zagreb | Croatia
contact:
IMPRESSUM
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The sense of time has been rather disturbed in
Croatia during the last decade. On the one hand, it was a
long decade that started in the processes deeply rooted
in the Eighties. But on the other hand, the war and
intellectual repression that had been following it had
shortened the decade to short periods of nightmarish
awakenings from the autistic and mute dream of
fulfillment of 1000 years of nation’s longings.�Sure
enough, the lines when things had started and ended
are especially hard to draw when one is dealing with a
war that was never officially announced or proclaimed
over. �The lack of any intellectual contextualization
has disabled the reflection on things that have been
happening to us, therefore hitting us like sleepwalkers.
Short acts of awakenings had barely left traces in the
self-assured, non-commu�ni�cative dream that the
nation had been dreaming out with brutal energy. Those
performing ‘the social function of intellectuals’ have
mobilized extreme right-wing ideologies that were to
strengthen the ‘big sleep’ from which history always
starts anew with sick optimism. �It is the decade in which
the Croatian version of the democratic revolution [or
better to say, contra-revolution] has been finalized with
the triumph of the capital and rediscovery of market
economy as the tool of resource distribution. �The
pathos of the human rights revolution reached “broader
society” through the filter of nationalistic ideologies,
maybe because the revolution in the Yugoslav version
was very ‘politically correct’ and decently enlightening.
The lack of revolutionary pathos on
which enjoyment-in-the-process
is based, enjoyment in the wasting of
revolutionary activity that necessarily
by far outreaches its instrumentality and
purpose1, has been compensated by
encompassing passionate nationalism.
The struggle for uniqueness of
national culture fought by right-wing
intellectuals has been realized as the
struggle against left cultural hegemony,
interpreted as the foreign, external
element that threatens the purity of
national culture/national identity.
�An important part of the project of
cleaning the national culture has been
removing the important part of the
history and producing silent collective
amnesia.
Background informa tion
1] Slavoj Žižek, Znak/označitelj/pismo [prilog materijalističkoj teoriji označiteljske prakse, NIP mladost, Beograd, 1976.
COM.MANIFESTO
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The Communist Manifesto is still alive,
perhaps more than ever, since the
predicament it describes is heightened
today to a new level of unbearable tension.[Slavoj ŽIŽEK, Spectre is Still Roaming Around]
w06
COM.MANIFESTO
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What, How and for Whomon the occasion of 150th anniversary of Com munist Manifesto
If it were a single, it would be Satisfaction
Mark SIMPSON
Independent on Sunday
Constant revolutionizing of productions,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,
everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish
the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed,
fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away,
all new-formed ones become antiquated before they
can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is
holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face
with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his
relations with his kind
Karl Marx & Frederick Engels: The Communist Manifesto
- A Modern Edition, london, verso 1998, pg 38-39.
COM.MANIFESTO
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Many years ago, in some other times,
Communist Manifesto used to be a
very dangerous book. The world was
at that time divided into those who
trusted the words of this book and
followed its revolutionary spirit, and
those who, equally fascinated by the
book, hated it and feared its rebellious
cry. But nobody dared to ignore
the significance of the Communist
Manifesto. Its historical impact was
obvious and its practical political
effects were changing the world. It
seemed for the moment that this book
could even decide the destiny of the
mankind. These were the times when
the world was still young and has not
only its history going on but also an
open future.
Everything has changed since than.
Today is the Manifesto nothing but
a small booklet among other books
of the world’s cultural heritage,
which provokes no political action
and of which nobody is afraid any
more. Once a wild political pamphlet,
the Manifesto seems to be finally
domesticated and turned into a
harmless cultural artifact. Not a
revolutionary politics, but culture is
today the only message of this medium.
Boris BUDENIt is about the society that mistook
culture for politics
COM.MANIFESTO
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�WHW as an independent curator’s collective
acts at the sliding area negotiated between
different models of a non-formal institution,
a creative group, an organizational team, an
‘institutionalised friendship’ and activism,
including in its activities different partners and
initiatives. Our actions are based on synergy that
appropriates and redefi nes different models of
representation and systems and simultaneously
is coexisting within them.
�WHW was initiated in Zagreb in late
90’s as the informal network between activist
orga�ni�za�tion/publishing house Arkzin,
net.cultural club Mama and the team of
independent curators [Ivet ∆urlin, Ana DeviÊ,
Nataπa IliÊ, Sabina SaboloviÊ] that started to work
on the international exhibition on the occasion of
150th anniversary of Communist Mani�festo. Since
this model of collaboration be�t�ween cultural
organizations of different back�grounds and know-
how proved very successful, at the beginning of
2001 we became a legal subject, registering as
non-for-profit non-governmental institution,
which is presently the only available legislative
model in Croatia that enables us to intervene in
cultural scene the way we do.
The three basic questions of every economic
organization - what, how and for whom - are
operative in almost all segments of life. What,
COM.MANIFESTO
the problem how many of every possible goods
and services will be produced with limited
resources and social input, how, the choice
of certain technology according to which each
good, chosen by answering the question what,
will be produced, and question for whom, that
concerns distribution of goods among members
of the society - these are the questions that also
concern the planning, concept and realization
of the exhibition, as well as the production and
distribution of artworks or artists’ position at the
labor market. The circumstances surrounding
development of What, How and for Whom project, which has been developing since 1998
when the republishing of Marx’s Communist Manifesto on the occasion of book’s 150th anni�versary served as the impetus, have been
imposing the concept whose logic developed
together with increased ambitions and wishes of
the organizers. The answer to the question how to
deal with anni�versary of the book of such powerful
ideological and political potential in the society
that has imposed collective mystification and
oblivion to the archive of politics, economy and
style of the failed project of socialist society, took
its shape in the area in which the considerations about possibilities of political and artistic engagement were interlocked with issues of local daily politics.
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Economy studies how societies utilize scarce
resources in order to produce valuable commodities
and distribute them among people. Therefore,
scarcity lies within the very essence of the economy.
Scarcity law says: resorces and goods are �limited,
while wishes seem to be unlimited. Economizing as
the leading motto of contemporary life implicates
optimization as the way of doing business - how
with smallest input the greatest economic results
are achieved. As What, How & for Whom project has
been planned within extremely limited production
resources, optimization pri�n�ciple has become the
COM.MANIFESTO
leit-motive of exhibition concept and method.
In other words, the basic ‘what’ and ‘how’ of the
project were getting closer and closer to each
other and finally have overlapped.�Instrumentality
of social capital in constituting the social post-
socialist reality becomes a scheme, a matrix for
the exhibition development and its internal and
external operations. ��By facing the recent production
of artists who emerged on the Croatian art scene
in the late 80’s, at the time of rapid deterioration
of socialist regime, with artists who have been
forming the strong current of socially engaged
art since the late 60’s, the exhi�bition had attempted to intervene in contemporary art scene stressing continuity rather than breaks.
On the other hand, the exhibition established international context for local art production,
greatly missing during the last decade. It is
important to stress that Communist Manifesto as
exhibitions �starting point does not operate as a
visual leit-motive of the exhibition, but as the
referential point in which different approaches,
opinions and visua�lizations are intersecting. The
exhibition does not aspire to shape the complete
image on the subject of communism as ideology,
political regime or utopian endeavor. Rather, by
encouraging individual approaches and personal
points of view, the exhibition has been attempting
to break down monolith, unified perception of
art scenes, “socialist praxis” or present “transitional” situation.
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The Manifesto has lost its political meaning
as a consequence of so-called democratic
revolutions of 1989. It felt down together with
the fall of Communism in the Eastern Europe
that has been celebrated as the final victory of the
modern democracy over its totalitarian enemies.
�According to the understanding of the communist
totalitarianism that has become dominant within the political mind of the liberal democratic West, the communist political movement was first
of all a conservative reaction against modernity,
particularly against the modern Western culture
as culture of human rights and freedoms, i.e., an
intrinsically anti-modern political phenomenon.
In that respect, the political process of transition
from communism to democracy, which has started
after 1989 in the East European post-communist
countries, is nothing but some sort of a cultural
reconquista, the re-westernization of Eastern
Europe. That is the reason why culture and civil society are so closely allied in the strategies of transition in today’s Eastern Europe, or in the
ongoing process of the so called enlargement of
the European Union. It is mainly culture, as the true content of civil society - and not politics!
- that has to do the job of democratization.�
Becoming ultimately a cultural artifact,
Communist Manifesto had been deprived of its last
critical capacity and of all its political meaning
and importance. Once an expression of the
deepest historical contradictions of the Western
industrial society, the book has finally become a
cultural symbol of the East. Anyone who still tries
to grasp its political meaning will find nothing but
an obscure, intrinsically non-European cultural
content in his hands. The Manifesto today is the
cultural Other of the West.
COM.MANIFESTO
�Vienna project What, How and for Whom,
dedicated to 153rd anniversary of Communist Manifesto
opposes the view that equals Eastern Europe with
communism or identifies cultural with political
identity. Today, the Manifesto is not an issue more
on the East, than it is on the West, and its message
is global, just as the functioning of the capital, as described by Marx, is global.
Focus on economy, capital and capitalism
seeks to return to the West its own message /on
transition from so called tota�litarism to so clled
democracy/ in its reversed, i.e. true meaning - as
the return into the real capitalism. ��
���
� �In its heroic period of 1970s and 1980s, the
alternative cultural movements in Yugo�slavia
acted against official institutions or at least apart
from them. Self-organizing and acti�vism were
politically engaged, but not as “battle against the
darkness of Communist tota�litarianism”, but,
paradoxically for the state whose official ide�ology
was “self-mana�ge�ment”, as the fight for complete
self-realization of individuals and culture, against
real bureaucratic limitations. Alternative cultural
movement was indeed taking socialist ideology more
seriously than the cynical political élite in power
did. Paradoxically, deeply politicized, alternative,
sub-cultural movements of 1970s and 1980s in
the East actually disintegrated at the moment of
their supposed triumph - with the introduction
of parliamentary democracy and the “return of capitalism”.�
���
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3] Autonomous Cultural Factory-Attack, Zagreb; Arkzin DTP & Pre-press studio, Zagreb; Močvara club, Zagreb; net.cultural klub MAMA, Zagreb; Art Workshop Lazareti, Dubrovnik…
2] Projects like Anti-war Campaign Croatia, pop-political magazine Arkzin, Zagreb Anarchistic movement, Autonomous Cultural Factory - Attack, festival of alternative street theater FAKI, and many other feminist, ecological, anti-war, anarchistic organizations, groups, initiatives and movements.
COM.MANIFESTO
In regard to cultural production, the term
‘alternative’ is usually linked to notions
such as anti-art, avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, contra-culture, to that
which is different in form and content,
progressive, radical, that which gets out of
the mainstream and opposes establishment,
traditional high culture that is generally
bourgeois. But in today’s circumstances of
culturalization of everything, in situation
when every ‘avant-garde’ or ‘subversive’
act is immediately absorbed as a fashion,
exclusively cultural and temporary
alter�native, there is no alternative culture.
Alternative culture existed when there
still were alternative ideas about order of society, ideas of alternative politics.
Or better to say, the alternative culture is
to be articulated only if there is a politics
that articulates the alternative to really existent capitalism. Cultural and artistic
production in current situation can still
be alternative not by virtues of its new,
different, unusual form or way of expression,
but exclusively in a political sense.
���
��Within independent Cro�atian civil scene
in the ‘90s, often called the alternative
scene2, the notion of alternative was used
differently in two broad periods.�
The first one, in accor�dance to general
regression, as characteristic of the period
of Croatian Democratic Unit party’s rule,
is actually a continuation of ‘70s ideology
that perceives alternative culture as the
low opposition to high, élite, institutional
culture. That scene, roughly identified with
eco/punk/hardcore/anarcho groups and
movements, really was marginal and
marginalized, completely out of funding
system, which it had slowly entered only
after the establishment of the Open Society
Institute [Soros] in Croatia in 1994.�
In that second period, the alternative
ceased to be synonymous with the marginal
and the sub-cultural and it developed
specific political meanings, regularly
strongly based in ethical demands for
non-violence, equality, multi-ethnicity,
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According to the old slogan, art is not a mirror, art
is a hammer! Present situation should not be merely
mirrored or represented. The aim is to create new conditions, not to act within the realm of possible,
but to actually change that what is possible. It is a
significant shift of the status of the intellectuals. It is
no longer enough to be critical intellectual [as were old communist dissidents or intellectual emigres during nationalist rule] now the most important are creative intellectuals, that would in the same time
keep critical mind and be activelly engaged in change of
existing situation.
…Everybody is an intellectual, but not all people in society perform the social function of the intellectual. [ Antonio GRAMSCI ]
COM.MANIFESTO
non-hierarchical structures etc. The
alternative in the culture was perceived
as a system of parallel institutions that
were not nationalistic or statehood-
oriented, but their activities were limited
to fill in the gaps left open by state and its
conservative institutions. As a result, the
real institutions of alternative and sub/
cultural scene, that should guarantee its
continuity and development, had been
formed only in the late ‘90s3. But in the
new “democratic” situation that followed
the last elections at the beginning of 2000 -
that resulted in withdrawal and downsizing
of foreign funds - their future is very
insecure indeed. There is a dominant
tendency to commercial, market-oriented
culture, state funding is still insufficient
and often dependent on personal whims,
conditions for cultural projects funding
have not been set [legislation of taxes],
nor the space open for non-commercial
culture and media production.
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BROADCASTING PROJECT,
dedicated to Nikola Tesla is
organized in cooperation of visual
arts NGO What, How and for Whom,
publishing house Arkzin, net-cultural
club MAMA and Technical Museum
in Zagreb. It is conceived as the series of cultural events that question the
social and artistic implications of broadcast media in relation to the concept of politics and specifi c political developments in Croatia, issues of information and technology accessibility as well as concepts of intellectual property and copyrights. �The project started
as series of lectures by curators
and art and cultural theorists in June
2001 and developed as international
contemporary exhibition in the
Technical museum in Zagreb,
scheduled for January/February 2002.
After the exhibition, the project will continue throughout the 2002 in different formats of contemporary art publishing edition, art inter�ven�tions, situations and researches, publications, radio, TV and internet interventions and broadcasts, public lectures, screenings, forums etc.
PROJECT: BROADCASTING
wenn wellen schwingen ferne stimmen singen... [kraftwerk: airways. radio-activity, 1975]
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13PROJECT: BROADCASTING
[dedicated to Nikola Tesla]
PROJECT: BROADCASTING
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participants:
Marina ABRAMOVI∆
Robert ADRIAN X & Norbert MATH
Joæe BAR©I & Apolonija ©U©TER©I»
Marianne BRAMSEN
Diedrich DIEDERICHSEN
Braco DIMITRIJEVI∆
Branislav DIMITRIJEVI∆
Tomislav GOTOVAC
Brian HOLMES
Aleksandar Battista ILI∆
Sanja IVEKOVI∆
Ivana KESER
Yuri LEIDERMAN
Dalibor MARTINIS
Viktor MISIANO
Hans ULRICH OBRIST
Marko PELJHAN
Bojana PEJI∆
Tomo SAVI∆-GECAN
SCANNER
Keiko SEI
STATION ROSE
Mladen STILINOVI∆
SUPERFLEX featuring:
Marijan CRTALI∆
Andreja KULUN»I∆
Ivan MARU©I∆ KLIF, Magdalena PEDERIN
& Lala RA©I∆
Kristina LEKO
David TOOP
Stephen WRIGHT
Igor ZABEL
ZVUK BRODA
The project deals with issues of broadcasting
in reference to Nikola Tesla’s biography
and inventions. The basic concept is close
to Brecht’s writing on radio “as two-sided
apparatus of communication” and the whole
project has strong “educational” emphasis. �
…Radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the fi nest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him.
Bertolt BRECHTThe Radio as an Apparatus of Communication, 1932
PROJECT: BROADCASTING
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The traditionally strong role of artists has been
in discovering new ways to use media, inventing
new and contradictory meanings for existing
organizations and systems, and in subverting
self-serving power-structures. Due to the specifi c
political and economic context [such as state
ownership of the still only one national TV] and
ruling structures’ inertia, the access of Croatian
artists to media has been extremely limited.
Croatian public discourse is ignorant of potentials
of electronic media as two-way communication
tools that are not necessarily just distributed and
based exclusively on commercial and ideological
grounds. The new digital technologies have
fundamentally changed methodologies and
strategies of documenting, producing and
displaying contemporary art, as well as social
circumstances of its creation and accessibility.
At the same time, educational institutions in
Croatia [Art History Studies, Philosophy Studies,
School of Fine Arts] almost completely failed in
following current international developments.
Museums stay noticeably unvisited, with virtually
no outreach aimed at increasing audiences.
This problem is perpetuated by the fact that in
Croatia, there is no formal or informal education
in curatorial practice. Additionally, one of the
side-effects of the transition period in the fi eld
of visual arts is ten years long hiatus in publishing
of contemporary art theory. ��
���
��BROADCASTING PROJECT moves in oppo�sition to the oppression of monologue and centralized patriarchal infotainment. Crucial questions are communication and mediation.
Brecht’s refl ection on the radio comes home today with not one but two
jolts of recognition. The fi rst has to do with the prescient glimpse it seems to
offer of the Internet, that inconceivably vast network of pipes which permits two-way communication, which receives just
as well as it transmits. But the second jolt comes from the realization that radio in the
1930s, particularly if used in combination with the telephone, could easily have
functioned in the two-way channels that Brecht describes—if the social and political will had not been lacking. The implication
for today is that the Internet, despite its evident technical advantages,
could easily cease functioning in a communicational mode, that it could
rapidly give way or regress to new forms of central-broadcast content
[masked by the push-button charms of “interactivity”]. /.../
If radio became predominantly a vehicle for state propaganda during the age
of total mobilization from the First to the Second World War, if television in its turn
became the indispensable device for training in the refl exes of mass consumerism,
what then will the emblematic medium of globalization become? What will be its
dominant uses, and above all, what kind of society will they articulate?
Brian HOLMESKosov@: Futures of the Transatlantic Carnival
PROJECT: BROADCASTING
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Success of mediated communication depends on the conditions under which the exchange takes place - those conditions are not primary techno�logical but also social, economical, cultural, political...
���
The project aims to continue discussion started
with What, How and For Whom exhibition
project about arts and economy, that is, to
explore issues of economical/political interests
that prevent full realization of the democratic
potentials of new technologies. Every advent
of new technology has been marked with great
enthusiasm about new democratic potentials
of new medium that will allow “everybody”
to communicate, be informed, creative and
participate in social dialogue or decision making,
and yet those potentials are always repressed for
the purely commercial form and content just
as for the creation of new passive audience.
�It is a pertinent for cultural activists/artists/
theoreticians to consider how new technologies
may significantly change what is meant by
“performance”, “art”, “live”, “broadcasting”,
“wide/mass public”... Yet, we believe that the
question of new and still developing digital media
replays narrative strain of anxiety very familiar to
the historic avant-garde [innovation, potential
revolution, incorporation, recuperation,
commodifi cation]. But the question is still open,
not predetermined or decided in advance, but
very much depends on our own action, work on
practical, artistic, media and theoretical work.
PROJECT: BROADCASTING
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17
The project aims to negotiate the intersection
between the realm of broadcast as a medium that disseminates via telecommunications, and
the metaphorical surpluses spreading from visions of universal energy transmission, left
over when broadcast is translated into Croatian.
Nikola Tesla [1856 - 1943] is a Serb from Croatia
who died as American citizen, eccentric, ascetic
with visions, claimed and disowned by Croats,
Serbs, Yugoslavs and Americans; who invented
more than 800 patents and laid theoretical
ground for deve�lopment of radio, radar, satellites, electronic microscope, microwave, fl uo�rescent tube etc. Today, the cultural image
of Nikola Tesla, the Man Who Invented Future, is
permeated with stories ranging from conspiracy
theory involving FBI and American government
to mystical worshipping of his exploration of
energy and origin of life. Exploration of his life
and inventions leads into broader questioning
of issues of broadcasting media, copyrights,
intellectual property, science and art funding,
distribution and utilization, politics of science
and descriptions of artistic and scientifi c working
process and outcomes. At the same time, Tesla’s
explorations in the realm of telecommunications
and defense systems seem ever more relevant
in relation to recent reactivation of Cold War
discourse by new American administration.
PROJECT: BROADCASTING
When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, as all things being particles of a real and dynamic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance, not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face.
Nikola TESLA, 1900
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... The world system makes
possible not only the instantaneous
and precise wireless transmission
of any kind of signals, messages or
characters, to all parts of the world,
but also the inter- connection of
the existing telegraph, telephone,
and other signal stations without
any change in their present
equipment.
By its means, for instance, a telephone subscriber here
may call up and talk to any other subscriber on the
Earth. An inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch,
will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a
speech delivered or music played in some other place,
however distant.” These examples are cited merely to
give an idea of the possibilities of this great scientifi c
advance, which annihilates distance and makes that
perfect natural conductor, the Earth, available for all
the innumerable purposes which human ingenuity has
found for a line-wire. One far-reaching result of this
is that any device capable of being operated through
PROJECT: BROADCASTING
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19
one or more wires [at a distance obviously restricted]
can likewise be actuated, without artifi cial conductors
and with the same facility and accuracy, at distances to
which there are no limits other than those imposed by
the physical dimensions of the earth. Thus, not only
will entirely new fi elds for commercial exploitation
be opened up by this ideal method of transmission,
but the old ones vastly extended. The World System is
based on the application of the following import and
inventions and discoveries:�
01]����� The Tesla Transformer: This apparatus is
in the production of electrical vibrations as
revolutionary as gunpowder was in warfare.
Currents many times stronger than any ever
generated in the usual ways and sparks over one
hundred feet long, have been produced by the
inventor with an instrument of this kind.�
02] The Magnifying Transmitter: This is Tesla’s
best invention, a peculiar transformer specially
adapted to excite the earth, which is in the
transmission of electrical energy when the
telescope is in astronomical observation. By the
use of this marvellous device, he has already set
up electrical movements of greater intensity than
those of lightening and passed a current, suffi cient
to light more than two hundred incandescent
lamps, around the Earth.
03] The Tesla Wireless System: This system comprises
a number of improvements and is the only means
known for transmitting economically electrical
energy to a distance without wires. Careful
tests and measurements in connection with an
experimental station of great activity, erected by
the inventor in Colorado, have demonstrated that
power in any desired amount can be conveyed,
clear across the Globe if necessary, with a loss not
exceeding a few per cent.�
04] The Art of Individualisation: This invention of
Tesla is to primitive Tuning, what refi ned language
is to unarticulated expression. It makes possible
the transmission of signals or messages absolutely
secret and exclusive both in the active and passive
aspect, that is, non-interfering as well as non-
interferable. Each signal is like an individual of
unmistakable identity and there is virtually no
limit to the number of stations or instruments
which can be simultaneously operated without
the slightest mutual disturbance.
05] The Terrestrial Stationary Waves: This
wonderful discovery, popularly explained,
means that the Earth is responsive to electrical
vibrations of defi nite pitch, just as a tuning fork to
certain waves of sound. These particular electrical
vibrations, capable of powerfully exciting the
Globe, lend themselves to innumerable uses of
great importance commercially and in many other
PROJECT: BROADCASTING
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20
respects. The “fi rst World System” power plant
can be put in operation in nine months. With
this power plant, it will be practicable to attain
electrical activities up to ten million horse-power
and it is designed to serve for as many technical
achievements as are possible without due expense.
Among these are the following: �
06] The inter-connection of existing telegraph
exchanges or offi ces all over the world;�
07] The establishment of a secret and non-
interferable government telegraph service;�
08] The inter-connection of all present telephone
exchanges or offi ces around the Globe;�
09] The universal distribution of general news by
telegraph or telephone, in conjunction with the
Press;�
10] The establishment of such a “World System” of
intelligence transmission for exclusive private
use; �
PROJECT: BROADCASTING
11] The inter-connection and operation of all stock
tickers of the world; �
12] The establishment of a World system — of musical
distribution, etc.; �
13] The universal registration of time by cheap clocks
indicating the hour with astronomical precision
and requiring no attention whatever; �
14] The world transmission of typed or hand-written
characters, letters, checks, etc.; �
15] The establishment of a universal marine service
enabling the navigators of all ships to steer
perfectly without compass, to determine the exact
location, hour and speak; to prevent collisions and
disasters, etc.; �
16] The inauguration of a system of world printing on
land and sea; �
17] The world reproduction of photographic pictures
and all kinds of drawings or records...”
NIKOLA TESLA, Autobiography, 1919
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21
G A L L E R Y � � � �
WHITE CUBE / BLACK BOX / SHOWROOM
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22
Until the summer of 2003 whw worked without permanent
exhibition space, and since
then, in collaboration with
publishing house AGM, it has
been running the program of
Gallery Nova.
The Nova Gallery is a non-
profi t city owned gallery in the
center of Zagreb and we try to
structure its program using
the strategies from whw projects,
conceiving it as a platform for
discussing relevant social issues
through art, theory and media, as
well as a model of collaboration
and exchange of know-how
between cultural organizations
of different backgrounds. The
Gallery Nova was one of the
most active spots of Zagreb
visual arts scene in the mid
Seventies, open towards radical,
avant-garde, unconventional and
often marginalized art practices
that were characteristic for the
young generation of artists,
whose protagonists still have
an important influence on
development of new Croatian
art scene. whw is referring to
precisely this period in the
Gallery Nova history, and the
new program concept brings
a vide array of new activities
into customary exhibition and
gallery practice.
Except producing and
presenting contemporary visual
arts, its focus is also establishing
links between visual culture and
other forms of cultural production
with civil, activist, NGO scene.
Besides exhibitions, the program
is characterized by a series of
events that are designed to turn
the gallery into a vivid cultural
centre, and includes concerts,
performances, fi lm screenings,
lectures and public discussions.
WHITE CUBE / BLACK BOX / SHOWROOM
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23
It tries to fi ll in the gaps in the
local cultural scene acting at
the intersections of popular,
high and alternative culture in
differentiated model that enables
investigation of representational
strategies, exhibiting forms and
actions in public space.
The Gallery Nova is a vivid
and active space targeting mostly
young audiences, using its non-
hierarchical structure and
organizational fl exibility towards
fostering different innovative
cultural collaboration practices
and promoting contemporary
media and socially conscious
and educationally involved
cultural production. Besides
the international exhibition
program, an important aspect of
work is continuous collaboration
with the youngest generation
of Croatian artists, which whw initiated with exhibition START
WHITE CUBE / BLACK BOX / SHOWROOM
[mestna galerija, ljubljana 2002; gallery karas, zagreb 2003]. The
artist of the youngest generation
still work without sufficient
institutional framework, with a
strong tendency of polarization
between the “capital” and
the “provinces,” mostly very
traditional educational mo dels,
non/existence of any regulated
art market, lack of professional
publications, critical acclaim,
systems of support and fi nancing.
In this respect, the signifi cant
part of the Gallery Nova pro-
gram is series of START solo
exhibitions, whose goal is to
establish professional standards
of work for young artists and at
the same time, through a series of
accompanying events, establish
a platform for critical evaluation
of their work. The program
establishes collaboration with
young generation of curators and
also trys to stress the continuity
of artistic endeavors and social
themes opened in the Seventies,
thus continuing the traditions
of local conceptual and socially
conscious art practices. In the
end, the question is if one
can radically change the basic
conditions of seeing/appreciating
the artwork corresponds to
examining of the political
potential of the art, and its
ability not only to identify new
and sensitive themes in wider
social context, but also to offer
new modalities of resistance and
collectivity. In this respect, the
Gallery Nova is perceived as a
public urban space of social
visibility, intensive circulation,
space for showing things,
passing through, spending
time, interacting, exposing
confl icts …
Book cb 23 18/11/04, 13:32:21
24
One of our recent exhibitions was Side-effects in
the Salon of the Museum of contemporary art
in Belgrade, with works by EGOBOO.bits, Felix
Gmelin, Igor GrubiÊ, Sharon Hayes, Vlatka
Horvat, Kristian Koæul, Andreja KulunËiÊ,
Aydan Murtezaoglu, Serkan Ozkaya, Kirsten
Pieroth, Bulent Sangar, Marko TadiÊ, and
VERSION. Side-effects took place in the context
of In the Cities of the Balkans, the 2nd part of
the Balkans trilogy, a project initiated by the
Kunsthalle Fridericianum. Side-effects are a
good and illustrative example of indirect links
that whw creates among projects that take place
outside the gallery, and the gallery ones.
The exhibition presented works that deal
with a broad spectrum of questions that can
be read in different contexts. But at the same
time, all of them dealt with certain unavoidable
confl icting knots of “transition” toward liberal
capitalism, whose “side-effects” are class
divisions, increase of unemployment and
crime, cultural and spiritual impoverishment,
lack of imagination, solidarity, safety,
indifference, and lethargy. Side-effects offers a
conceptual frame, a certain standpoint from
which the works presented can be understood
against a background of lost illusions in the
solutions offered by the “normalization”
process and its idea of a gradual approach of the
imagined ideal of a liberal democracy and a free
market, while at the same leaving the dialogue
between the artistic and curatorial position
open.
In a certain non-committed way, the
exhibition is the third in a series of recent
exhibitions of the whw curatorial collective. It
is not the same exhibition in three versions, but
THREE PROJECTS
Book cb 24 18/11/04, 13:32:25
25
rather a process in which the same traumatic
core is always questioned in different ways.
This series of exhibitions might be seen as a
kind of dialectical triad in which the thesis
is the exhibition Looking Awry [apexart, new york, 2003], with works by Igor GrubiÊ,
Aydan Murtezaoglu, Adrian Paci and Maja
BajeviÊ. Starting from Æiæek’s interpretation
of Shakespeare’s quote from Richard III, the
exhibition is based on the impossibility of
grasping the truth through a direct gaze. In that
sense also Marx’s demand to “look at the world
with sober eyes” asks exactly for that “awry”
look, which might also be understood as a look
from the social margins.
The exhibition Repetition: pride and prejudice
[gallery nova, zagreb, 2003/2004] with works by
Sharon Hayes, Pierre Huyghe, Sanja IvekoviÊ,
Aydan Murtezaoglu, Anri Sala and Andreas
Siekmann, functioned as an antithesis: we
cannot directly reach for the truth and that is
why we keep repeating the traumatic event.
That repetition is not the consequence of
some “objective necessity” independent of our
desires, but it functions as a political option, as a
paying of a symbolic debt, a gesture of repeated
inclusion and symbolic appropriation. “Pride
and prejudice” from the title are not separate
themes, a positive and a negative feature, but it
points toward their inter-relatedness - and just
like pride emerges only from the perspective
of certain prejudice, prejudice is a product of
the gaze of arrogant pride. If we wish to spare
ourselves the painful way around through much
false recognition, we will miss the whole truth.
In that dialectical triad Side-effects then is a kind
of synthesis, a negation of a negation.
THREE PROJECTS
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26
The most ambitious long-term project in which
WHW is currently involved is the Zagreb Cultural
Kapital of Europe 3000 which is a collaborative
platform initiated by four independent cultural
organizations in Croatia - Center for Drama
Art [performing arts], Multimedia Institute
[new media], Platforma 9,81 [architecture and
media] and What, How and for Whom [visual
culture]. Throughout a three year period [2004-
2006] the project will develop a manifold of
collaborative practices within the local and
the international cultural scene and thus
draw attention to the inadequacy of dominant
cultural models to meet the challenges in a
changed setting for cultural action. This new
setting comes as a consequence of acceleration
of globalized communication exchanges,
transversality of capital and attendant ubiquity
of economic globalization. Contrary to these
dynamic processes the cultural fi eld remains
largely limited to and within the confi nes of the
representative cultural models, its ineffi cient
institutional framework, without dynamic
strategies of collaboration and almost without
any [and increasingly smaller] social relevance.
CK3000 has set out as its goal to react, in the
local context of cultural production, to this
[primarily European] situation by offering to
the broader local and international cultural
public an action model which will both on the
level of methodology and on the level of issues
deal with the dynamics of transformation of the
cultural fi eld, which are signifi cantly marked
by the ambiguity of the notion of capital [as in
cultural capital city, socio-cultural capital and
economic capital]. Initial strategic partners
of the Cultural Kapital 3000 are Project
CULTURAL KAPITAL 3000
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27
Relations from Berlin -
a project initiated by the
German Federal Cultural
Foundation with an agenda
to promote the cultural
collaboration in Eastern
Europe, and Erste Bank
from Vienna which supports
creation of various cultural
platforms in the countries of
Central Europe where it does
business.
By choosing contemporary
agendas such as: the relation
between public and private,
status of public spaces,
capital in physical space,
intellectual property and
digital technologies, copyright
and alternative licensing
systems, hybrid information
in physical space, artist
groups and collective labor,
collective intelligences,
managing of labor and
immaterial labor, the Cultural
Kapital 3000 project will form a
complementary and coherent
set of cultural issues which
are of great social relevance
and thus promote the
importance of cultural action
as a signifi cant element in
the development of the public
and social capital in a neo-
liberal transitional context.
Cultural Kapital 3000 will
promote practices and actors
articulating cultural action
in terms of social agency
and social agency in terms of
critical culture.
Over the next two
years, Cultural Kapital 3000
will produce a number of
local and international
interdisciplinary
collaborations on projects
presenting and engaging
new group dynamics, new
collective strategies and new
forms of labor in cultural
production; counteracting
and hybridizing the control
of productivity through
intellectual property;
advocating the protection
of public domain in face
of privatization; and
producing policy proposals
for strengthening and
development of independent
cultural sector and
securing its presence in
the cultural capital. It will
create collaboration while
investigating and inducing
its conditions of possibility,
because cultural capital no
longer means infrastructures,
but rather collaborations,
for collaboration is its
infrastructure.
whw | 2004
CULTURAL KAPITAL 3000
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28
WHW published
several books:
Against Indifference
- Croatian translation
of selected essays
by Renata Salecl;
Hieroglyphs of the
Future, bilingual
edition of selected
essays by Brian
Holmes, Zagreb,
16/06/01 book of
interviews by Hans
Ulrich Obrist with
fi ve Croatian artists,
reader/catalogue for
the What, How and
for Whom exhibition
[with essays by Slavoj
Æiæek, Richard
Barbrook, Boris
Buden, Fredric
Jameson, Renata
Salecl, Charles
Esche...] and
regularly publishes
Gallery Nova
newspapers.
Books :
PRINTED MATTER
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29
COLLECTIVE CREATIVITYAn exhibition on collective practices • Dedicated to anonymous worker
Book cb 29 18/11/04, 13:33:07
30
One does not escape a bourgeois problematic of the subject simply by collectivizing that subject...[Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, p. 131]
WORKING MATERIAL
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31
Kunsthalle Fridericianum | Kassel | Germany
May 1 – July 15, 2005
The exhibition COLLECTIVE CREATIVITY is a cooperation between
the Kunsthalle Fridericianum and Siemens Arts Program
Artistic directors: René BLOCK and Angelika NOLLERT
Curated by What, How & for Whom / WHW | Zagreb | Croatia
COLLECTIVE CREATIVITYAn exhibition on collective practices & group enjoyment
The exhibition is dedicated to anonymous worker
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32
Individuality has been exaggerated in the 20th century. Everybody wants to be different, but individuality is just wishful thinking. It is a sales argument, designed to stimulate commerce... we want something more corporate. We cultivate annonimity. [Kraftwerk]
kraftwerk, the electric quartet, cca 1977gilbert and george: portrait by christopher felver, fournier street, 1989.gorgona: adoration, 1966laibach kunst: ausstellung laibach kunst, pm, 1983
RESEARCH IN PROGRESS
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33
The phenomenon of the artists’ group is both paradoxical and dynamic. On
the one hand it is a negation of the romantic idea of the individual genius, but
on the other hand, the art group is not simply the sum of its individual parts,
but draws its character from the creative possibilities of different interactions
and synergies. Numerous artists’ groups and collectives working in the field
of visual arts during the second half of the 20th century questioned the very
essence of artistic production, negating it or shifting it closer to other fields,
such as architecture, design, theatre, science or daily life.
The exhibition deals with different forms of collective artistic creativity
whose protagonists share common programs, ways of life, methodologies
or political standpoints. Although the work of collectives is in many ways
determined by certain historical, existential, intellectual or political contexts,
the exhibition is interested in specific kinds of social tensions that serve as a
common axis around which various group activities are being organized.
While conscious of collective artistic practices of previous centuries and
historical avant-gardes, the exhibition concentrates on developments after the
neo/post avant-garde movements in the 60’s until today. Exploring procedures,
standpoints, effects, strategies, and social possibilities of collective activity,
the exhibition attempts to define different forms of collectivity inevitably
generated by group work. In the focus are therefore different emancipatory
aspects of collective work [no matter if it is about formal groups, movements,
COLLECTIVE CREATIVITYAn exhibition on collective practices & group enjoyment
WORKING PAPERS
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34
Collaborative creativity is not only a form of resisting the capitalist call for specialization but also a form of hidden struggle with the ilusion of the “autonomous ego”...[Viktor Mazin, Dreaming museums,
Manifesta Journal No 3, Spring/
Summer 2004, p. 19]
oho: mount triglav, happening in zvezda park, ljubljana, december 30, 1968irwin: like to like, 2004.
škart: horkeskart [choir], 2000-
crveni peristil: red peristil, urban intervention, split, 1968
anonymous author: black peristil, urban intervention, split, 1998
RESEARCH DOCUMENT
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35
communities, scenes, communes, artists’ couples or individuals assuming
group identity]. Which strategies are taken by collectives in public space,
which alternative forms of »sociability« are generated, in which ways do
they occupy and change the system and the conditions of production and
representation, how do they affect the social order?
The exhibition does not see group activity solely in terms of the scope
and efficiency of tools used in attempts to change sociopolitical situation;
it also traces paradoxes of self-sufficient enjoyment in group work, which
inevitably overcomes and betrays its own instrumentality and use value.
GENERATING CONDITIONS FOR COLLECTIVE CREATIVITY
What, How & for Whom, the three basic questions of every economic analysis,
constantly define the work of our curatorial collective. Exploration of the
phenomena of collective creativity is positioned within the experience of our
own collective curatorial practice which is inevitably exposed to questioning
specific inner dynamics of the collective, its strategies and reach, as well as to
specific circumstances of “post-communist,” “Eastern European”, “transitional”
realities. In that regard the exhibition treats collective creativity from two
perspectives, in the sense that methods and models of collective work are
equal to the “theme” of the exhibition – the exhibition itself is trying to
generate the conditions for collective creativity. Although the context of the
exhibition is defined by complex intersections of contemporary and historical
perspectives, as well as by cultural and geo-political parallels and divergences
of different localities, the exhibition does not attempt at homogenous and
finished “history” of collective artistic creativity. Rather, it offers a certain
“collectively subjective” vision very much based in the cultural terrain which
renders the reading of modernity as the unique and homogenous cultural
capital of the West very problematic.
WORKING PROPOSAL
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36
...transnational situation of the world system in which genuinely trans-national classes, such as new international proletariat and a new density of global management, have not yet anywhere clearly emerged. These constellated and alegorical subject-positions are however, as likely to be collective as they are individual-schizophrenic...[Fredric Jameson: The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Indiana University Press/BFI,
Bloomington-London, 1992, p. 5]
maj 75, group of six authors, magazine, 1978
general idea: fi le magazine [no 25, 1986]
RESEARCH IN PROGRESS
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37
The question ‘what’ is an attempt to trace specific moments of collective
artistic creativity and the conditions in which it has been generated, the
question ‘how’ insists on the power of the traditional “white cube” exhibition
to articulate critical discourse, and in relation to that the question ‘for whom’
attempts to instigate creative interactions with the social environment, local
communities, public, and media, by triggering a number of artistic projects
tailored for local situation of the museum and city of Kassel and its cultural
and artistic institutions.
COLLECTIV-EAST DREAM
In many Eastern European countries there is a rich tradition of artists groups
and collectives whose work posed a strong critic of social institutions and
dominant cultural policy. Exploration of tradition of collective artistic work
seems to be especially interesting from the perspective of “New Europe”, as
well as in the context of other geographical points with similar “troubles with
modernism” and tradition of artists self-organizing such as Middle East or
South America.
The focus on Eastern Europe is not meant as support of the thesis of
cultural assimilation nor of “essential” differences simplified to consequences
of communist regimes, but as a more productive attempt at the re-
formulation of cultural identities. Mapping of various trans-generational and
international links and connections is based on the perspective of peripheral
cultural zone, effects of international emancipatory movements, popular
culture and lifestyles.
Although being aware of the limitations of our specific Zagreb-based
and generation-based perspective, the intention is to articulate it in order
to check the initial presumption that collective art production in Eastern
Europe generally aims at a different art system than in the West. We are
WORKING PAPERS
Book cb 37 18/11/04, 13:33:55
38
3nós3: arco 10, 1981tucuman arde, 1968
…the category of the individual character as such is also outmoded, as utmoded as that of the nation state [the comparison, meanwhile, very much including the fact that both these things still exist].[Fredric Jameson: The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Indiana
University Press/BFI, Bloomington-London, 1992, p.
176]
oda projesi: míne model, annex 2003.
RESEARCH DOCUMENT
Book cb 38 18/11/04, 13:33:55
39
especially interested in relating it to situations of South America, where there
are a number of groups, and like in Eastern Europe, also a strong tradition of
art collectives since early modernism. The reasons for this are, first of all, to
investigate whether in certain authoritarian and restrictive political regimes
art serves as a political realm, and whether this is also reflected in collective
work. The interest in a specific politicality of collective creativity would also
delineate the inclusion of collective art practice from the West, which is
clearly a reference for global contemporary art.
PRINTED MATTER
For the exhibition opening newspapers will be published, gathering all the
practical information and serving as easily distributed project info. That format
is also following tradition of many avant-garde groups that used newspapers
for propaganda and dissemination of ideas.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue edited by René
Block, Angelika Nollert, and WHW. During the research process for the
exhibition, material will be gathered for a book-catalogue, imagined as a
more comprehensive overview and also a place to discuss specific topics
or document works omitted in the show itself. The emphasis in the book-
catalogue will be on re-publishing as much as possible of original printed
material, such as group manifestos and texts.
The book will also include new texts by several artists/theoreticians.
What, how, for whom [WHW], 2004
WORKING PROPOSAL
Book cb 39 18/11/04, 13:34:05
APPROACHING DEADLINE:
page from chinese propaganda posters, 2005 taschen calendar
Book cb 40 18/11/04, 13:34:05