2nd BIENNIAL OF QUADRILATERAL   BQ_2
(Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Slovenia)

Let's be honest, the phrase culture hero sounds a bit forced; at least now I can confess that I found it a bit irritating right from the start. Besides that, one was obliged to explain it in great depth since anyone that you might have mentioned it to went in at the deep end with annoying questions: what kind of culture are you thinking of? What do you consider to be the difference between culture and art? Can anyone be a hero at all in this day and age? And, doesn't real cultural heroism belong to other times, to the past century?

I tried to get to grips with why the hero in connection with culture is actually so irritating. The first reason (if we ignore total disillusionment) is probably that searching for an idealised culture hero seems a hopeless thing to do. Because it’s actually obvious that heroism as such has today, and especially within the cultural context, been deconstructed to the end. To be exact, heroism makes an urgent association and foresees a kind of stable focus, since this is one of the central properties of consistent progress towards the noble ideal. It is precisely because of this that the heroic tale in relation to the hyper-complexity of contemporary life seems like an unbearable simplification. What has in fact subsided with the decline of grand narratives, is also the significance of great historical utopias, projects of revolutionary changes, great historical throws and overthrows, stories about the mythical meaning of reason, science and technology, stories about charismatic leaders, scientists and artists.

In my thoroughgoing consideration on what it means to be a culture hero, I tried to keep a direct connection to art among the numerous definitions relating to culture, and as a result arrived at a hypothesis that within the exhibition or art museum contexts and the ghastly dimensions of plural mega-culture that accumulates arbitrary masses of signifiers, the culture hero can solely and only be the artist. This, however, could be a very comfortable starting point, which in itself again ensnares one into repeating the myth of a heroic modernist artist who saves human souls in the face of the covetous mass market of cultural production, globalisation, trivial Americanisation, all by the means of his own originality, freedom and authenticity; we could therefore be supporting the putrid myth about art as the last refuge before the ruinous effects of the capitalist machine. Namely, contemporary culture believed for a long time in the idea of a unique, determined, focused individual … only an individual has thoughts, desires, fears …but also ideas, inspiration and the ability to create.

However, contemporary psychological theories indicate for some time now that contemporary societies are experiencing obvious shake ups in the structures of identity – now there is only talk of the decentred subject, plural selves, mixed-up identities. The same, of course, goes for the artist’s identity. The obviousness of the artist’s distinguishing characteristics – inspiration, vision, creative energy, creating something out of nothing – is deconstructed in the same way as the myth of the hero is deconstructed. Social saturation and hence overpopulation of the self, and vastly diverse identity potentials can occur because of the mass of contacts, communications, possibilities. Since saturation continues we are becoming a mix, are becoming multiplied, multiples.

This virtual cacophony of vastly diverse identity potentials is that great difference in the relationship towards romantic and modernist visions of the self and identity that enables us to take delight in debates on the horrific repercussions of the demolishment of high culture. In contemporary times artistic originality is being undermined by advertising and the mass media and the artist’s identity is also no longer fixed, but is transient and multiplied. The same goes for current culture, which is metaphorical and rhizomatic – it is a huge ball which transforms, expands and contracts in its incessant movement. Any randomly or deliberately chosen point in culture is its potential epicentre.

That there are no grand narratives anymore does not mean that there are no narratives at all. Contemporary society's media and culture are plying us every single second with media constructed movie stories, the fates of modern stars, stories of wondrous new products, styles and imaginations constructed by the business and marketing world. Such a multiphrenic situation in subject suits a multiphrenic narrative, which does not go towards a coherent meta story or a central story of an individual, but rather reveals itself as an undulation and rotation constituting various partial stories. The image of the culture hero is therefore revealed to us as a portrait without the person portrayed, a reflection without the object of reflection.

"The Untitled", work by Alenka Pirman, produced especially for this occasion, seems to be its absolutely ideal metaphor. This childishly simple ‘ready made’ with the effect of the Columbus’ egg is made up from a switched on hairdryer which turns a plastic ball without a break on a jet of hot air. Ungraspable, defocused, multiphrenic, surface of the ball – along with a supplied key with a list of binary values of opposition directs us towards deciphering its meaning, which actually proves to be an impossible task. Discourses that accompany art practices, as well as other forms of ideological formations, often like to make use of simple dichotomies – us/them, left/right, local/foreign, and in our case also hero/anti-hero. The spinning ping pong ball here has the role of the bearer of meaning and the meaning is meaningless. Alenka Pirman is an artist who surprises every time with her subtle subversive work and the way in which she reveals the background of seemingly obvious things and events. Her contribution on the subject of the culture hero is therefore the voice of reason, sober rationale, that assures an appropriate distance towards the issue discussed by using the strategy of overidentification.

The work of Tomaž Tomažin fittingly falls into the context of the contemporary phenomenon of multiplied identities. His project entitled "Hero" looks at identity through forms of multiplication and virtualisation. By using digital editing he has intervened into popular, cult or just bizarre genre films. In place of movie heroes he has generally repeatedly put in his own figure. The effect of his deliberately amateurish editing is mostly comical. With these procedures the artist actually illustrates his impotence in intervening into actual reality – what is possible is only a half private subversion of myths and demolition of dogmas. There are no ideals here, nor idols, that’s why nobody’s untouchable.

Absolutely everything can be deconstructed. The fact that he found himself in the same selection as Dunja Zupančič and Dragan Živadinov on this occasion probably lead to the production of his new work "Slovenian Artist in Space", which functions as a likeable travesty of the megalomaniac Noordung project. Here presented are two totally different projections of the effect of art – Tomažin as a representative of a generation raised by reality and ideology constructed and mediated by the media does most probably not believe in the artist’s ‘mission’. A subjective artistic standpoint against the dictates of time, culture and media is simply not possible, particularly if it is constructed within modernist categories of technological progress and conquering of new territories.

The heroic tale as constructed by Mark Požlep is totally different. Požlep also belongs to the generation that grew up with the mythology of mass culture but his expressive register doesn’t contain a mocking distance towards the heroic art myth. His superheroes are otherwise a staged masquerade, a last bow to the empty signs of a commodified mass culture, but his real point of departure is innocently romantic – since it is no longer possible to create a superhero, given that popular megaculture produces them in vast numbers, he made himself his own hero, his own alter ego named Crni Shesir. Crni Shesir is an ordinary hero, perhaps the only real hero of our times, that solves the daily problems of everyday man. In the end it is attested that Crni Shesir, too, is an easy pray to the clockwork of the commodification of culture, and it won’t be long before the romantic as well as the real Crni Shesir are merely an imprint on a Tshirt, a picture on a box of cereal, or at best just an artistic artefact among thousands of other artefacts in a museum depot.

That’s why his creator simply chooses to eliminate him. The Biennial of Quadrilateral therefore becomes a scene of the last battle of the artist – hero. Hero's defeat lies in the realisation that any kind of identity even, sub – or super – identity is not an achievement of the individual, but is a place within the structure of social constructions. Psychological investigations on the forming of identity reveal that only a small part of defining this area rests in the hands of an individual. Without the "Noordung" project the discourse on cultural heroism would have actually been incomplete, because we would have renounced the exhibition's significant dimension that compliments heroic modernism and its utopian projections which are, in the case of "Noordung", as all goes to show, gradually coming true exactly as they had been planned. In general this is a totally material rehabilitation of utopia and represents a distinctive contrast to the other parts, since it is all about a grand narrative, a megalomaniac constructed myth.

According to Inke Arns this is a reflection of utopian potentials in the art of the 20th century. In presenting the project’s fundamental starting points we could in fact choose any of the works from the production of Dunja Zupančič and Dragan Živadinov, since all works seem nonhierarchical, from the same pod, pars pro toto. In Planit:: Syntapiens (work in progress to be mounted this year in Vienna’s MAKU) a blueprint is presented for one of the satellites that will in the future replace one of the actors in the "Noordung project". The aim of the project is to create, by means of contemporary technology, genuine abstract (without gravity) art, thus supplementing the Suprematist project. Dunja Zupančič and Dragan Živadinov are fighting for abstraction that can really only function in weightlessness. The UMBOT Satellite – the so-called zero satellite whose job it is to advertise the performance, is therefore in the business of advertising and explaining the myth of post-gravitational art. The satellite will actually be launched into the orbit in 2008.

The principal fascination of the "Noordung" project is in its consistency, fanatic enchantment with avant-garde utopia and abstract representation models, as well as earlier utopian technological fantasies. The "Noordung" project, which will launch art as an autonomous practice into space, could be a culture hero per se, if a domain of imagining space was not oversaturated with SCI-FI iconography and promises of real holiday living in space, which may well be an everyday occurrence soon.

Let’s be honest, the phrase culture hero still sounds a bit forced, especially as we determine that the culture heroes as we would want them no longer exist in actual reality nor in art. We can try to replace them with randomly adopted and constructed private culture heroes (Do we actually have at our disposal the notions and words to describe them with?) but their impact and intention can merely be a question of individual cultural and political idealism.

Nevenka Šivavec
curator

• Božo Biskupić, Minister of Culture
• Branko Franceschi, MMSU director
• Vittorio Urbani, curator, Italia
• Rita Kálmán, curator, Hungary
• Nevenka Šivavec, curator, Slovenia
• Sabina Salamon, curator, Croatia