Ivana Mance / 2014
Zlatko Kopljar (born in 1962), artist and performer, author of video films, installations and performances, has been active on the Croatian arts scene since the early 1990s. Lately, he has mostly been exhibiting his works abroad. Despite the fact that in the past two decades of his work his artistic expression has profiled itself as being polyvalent in terms of media, it is still primarily based on performance. In short, this means that Kopljar participates in most of his works as a performer, whether one-off performances, staged photographs or directed movies.
His intensive personal charisma on the one hand, and the poetics of tightly structured, conceptually explicit, and aesthetically highly elaborated executions on the other, create a ‘killer’ hot and cold combination of arts that merges passion and style without any effort by the author. Thematically dedicated to the general rather than the individual, to the world rather than himself, Kopljar makes universally recognizable works that speak to anyone who thinks that art should not be understood literally. No matter in which media his expression ends up, Kopljar is a master of metaphors whose clarity breaks through barriers of time and culture: just remember the scene of him kneeling before global political institutions – his work for the São Paulo biennale in 2004 – to get a handy presentation of Kopljar’s Kafkaesque image of a revolted man, humiliated before an anonymous system. In recent years, Kopljar has focused on expression through films – films he stars in, performing a scripted action. This results in an art form that can conditionally be called a film or video performance, for lack of a more accurate term. Without trying to downplay the author’s charismatic presence, the medium of film allows a more developed narration and a visually lavish aestheticism, so Kopljar’s recent films very successfully merge two media dispositions – the disposition of a symbolical intervention into reality, which is understood by the artistic performance, and the illusion of the film narrative. Indeed, such duality allows him to bring close the individual existence and the reality of general society as two levels of life he always tries to highlight as his subject matter in a crucial correlation. His latest three films, made in 2012, named with ordinal numbers as is his custom (K15, K16, and K17) – a principle he has applied consistently in the past ten years – were exhibited in the past two years in Berlin, Milan, Zagreb, Cologne and Lublin. Although in terms of subject matter they can be observed in a sequence with his previous two films (K13 and K14) as well as some other works mentioned above, these three films can be treated as a relatively separate whole, which is confirmed by the circumstance that they were occasionally exhibited together. The first of them, K15, is a re-enactment of Willy Brandt’s historic kneeling in Warsaw. Reaching for documentary material, i.e. footage, Kopljar reconstructed all known elements of Brandt’s 1970 commemoration of the Nazis’ victims in the Warsaw ghetto. With the mise en scène transferred to the night ambience of modern-day Warsaw, we follow the action from the train arriving in Warsaw, Brandt stepping down from the train, the visit to the memorial, all the way to laying the wreath and the Chancellor kneeling in silence surrounded by masses, political dignitaries and reporters. The role of Brandt is played by Kopljar himself, of course, which gives a sense of performance to this film’s mise en scène: dressed in the luminescent suit he’s been using in his recent film ‘appearances’, with an unambiguous symbolical message of the artist as a torchbearer in the world of light, Kopljar repeats the gesture that was remembered in the world as a gesture of symbolical humility before the victims of a crime, responsibility for which, both political and moral, is borne collectively. The second film, K16, gives no time-space coordinates. The action takes place in the natural environment, again at night, as a place that could be anytime and anywhere. The story follows a man systematically digging a symmetrical square hole in the ground. The film lasts until the depth of the excavated terrain is higher than the digger standing in it. The character is portrayed by Kopljar, of course, the suit is the same, the work and gesturing minimal, all in the function of a task whose purpose remains unknown for the entire duration of the film. The last film, K17, was filmed in New York and combines day and night scenes: the anxiety-ridden environment of the subway and two versions of Manhattan – the busy streets during the day and during the night. Kopljar assumes the role, conditionally speaking, of a voyeur in an unspecified time of everyday life in New York, and the story follows his arrival, i.e. exit from the infernal atmosphere of the underground into the urban chaos. Standing on the overcrowded streets, the newcomer remains still in the river of people who go past him with more or less interest. The last scenes of the film again take place at night: the camera on the streets of Manhattan films a close-up of a surreal scene of torture of people forced to stand in line, holding a tight rope in their teeth, with the newcomer on the roof of a skyscraper, hiding his face, standing in a dark corner among the chimneys. Having in mind Kopljar’s two films mentioned before, it is clear that this is a cycle of consistent poetics and topics. Temporarily abandoning the form of performing in real space and time, Kopljar constructed a surrogate fictitious character that he personally embodies, of course – the character of a newcomer from another world, a radical stranger, who bears silent witness to the condition of spirit of an apocalyptic society. Blasphemously recalling Benjamin’s angel of history, and generally, from today’s perspective, modernistically obsolete understanding of the artist’s messianic role, the role of Kopljar’s alter ego is, of course, moralistic. Avoiding taking a viewpoint that would have any clear political connotation based on which he could be qualified as an activist artist, Kopljar firmly insists on the universalist position from which social phenomena are approached only on the basis of ethical difference between good and evil. Although such stubbornness in terms of his own artistic viewpoint can be considered defensive, it does not mean that what it implies is at the same time untrue: a society whose constitutive problems escape the reach of coherent political articulation this side of necessary moralizing, is exactly the society of absolute hopelessness that Kopljar shows in his films. Kopljar’s world is therefore on the right track to become absolutely evil; the appearance of a sad witness in an angel-like white suit, announces that there is not much we can hope for at the moment. In accordance with the main protagonist’s character, the story has no explicit references to the real world, so it can be qualified as surrealistic. Regardless of the fact that K15 repeats an actual historical event, its staging is far from documentary in nature. Willy Brandt’s astral double does not arrive in Warsaw from an actual country, nor does he belong to a recognizable political option, and the city he goes through could be any city in the western hemisphere, covered by a mythical darkness. Such generalization of a historical gesture that had a very determined political function in the Cold War era actually gives us no reason to be happy. Although it urges universal solidarity with the unknown victims of an unnamed order or ideology, the fact that Brandt’s place can be taken by anyone with an elementary sense of humanity, basically just points to the vacated ground of political responsibility. The content of K16 is on the other hand completely outside historical space and time. The absurd activity of digging a hole, of course, cannot be anything else but a literal realization of popular metaphors of the sense of shame (sinking through the floor, crawling into a hole in the ground, etc.) suggested by the end of the film K17, in which the uninvited witness also turns his back to the camera, i.e. hides his face in a dark corner. Unlike K16, the story of the last film still offers a certain foothold to be located on the historical map: this is one of the global centres of financial power in the present time. Regardless of the seemingly unclear motivation of individual elements of the story, their linear sequence that includes the newcomer’s arrival and stay, as well as the change from day to night, still makes a logical narrative whole. The unmotivated appearance of the scene of torture in the night can, of course, only be observed in relation to the daytime scenes: while the day is marked by an undefined mass of people, the night reveals anonymous individuals; while the day offers an illusion of a normal society, the night reveals a perversion of human dignity. The newcomer’s voyeur figure – an unknown witness to an unnamed crime, functions as the already mentioned sense of shame: no matter if he stands in the busy life of the day or hides his face and eyes from the camera, his mission is to represent the subjective feeling of shame. If we accept the philosophical understanding of shame as an elementary existential experience, an experience that arises from the circumstances of the subject’s passive exposure to his own existence for which he is not responsible, but can assume an active attitude towards, Kopljar’s insistence on that feeling has a two-way trajectory of meaning. The feeling of shame on the one hand understands that the existential, as well as historical reality are, in all their horror, completely unacceptable to the subject. On the other hand, that same feeling commands a need to overcome one’s own passiveness. But while facing the horror of reality that surrounds us belongs to the universal register of human existence, overcoming that state surely is not and cannot be universal: it belongs to the world of life, plurality of society and political struggle, culture and language. That is why Kopljar’s films are completely silent: no one speaks in them, because there are many languages, but only one sense of shame. They show the final point of silence, or political numbness, we are able to reach before we speak about our collective trauma. In the context of Kopljar’s body of work, that is, his poetics based on firm, clear metaphors, a poetics which excludes any excess chattiness, the films K15, K16 and K17 are a consistent continuation of performances – shooting a bullet, tearing down gallery walls, placing a stone block on the doors of the exhibition institution, kneeling before global institutions of power, etc. This poetics is manifested in the films in an abstract and lapidary gesture (kneeling, digging, motionless silence, back turning), but also in the visual and audio qualities of the performance itself and film-making in general. Clearly structured and aesthetically well-thought-out, Kopljar’s films create closed, autonomous forms in terms of meaning, that are held at a polite, civilized distance from the banality of everyday topics. As such, with restrained communication and accentuated formal aestheticism, the films have a high emotional charge. Despite the indisputable seriousness of approach, let us add playfully at the end, that it is compatible with the prototype of an artist that Kopljar consistently embodies in his film double – the character of Lucifer, the fallen angel, who arrogantly refuses to relinquish his own aura, but feels shame in front of the human world which he has become part of.