Miško Šuvaković / 2005
Rhetorical figures of the body by Zlatko Kopljar
Zlatko Kopljar’s works (performances, videos, photo-prints) were created in the 1990’s in a paradoxical confrontation between the current world’s micro- and macro-politics. Through the strategies and tactics of performance art, Kopljar problematized the relationship between the contemporary body and the contemporary world in the confrontation of the paradigmatic idealistic notions active-passive, aggressive-meditative, political-religious, materialistic-Christian, neoliberal-postsocialist, and local-global. His provocative mappings of the body/with the body comprise a wide span of presentations of bodily indexation ranging from behavioral expressiveness to rhetorical inexpressiveness. The symbolic knot of expressive lines of behavior and inexpressive positionings of the body presents a problem which he, as an artist responding to current events, places before the future and in relation to the past.
Body, World and the Tactics of performing in the History of performance art
The ideas of performance art have multiple meanings and cannot be determined within their numerous current or retrospective uses, applications, and performances throughout different theories and histories of the 20th century. The notion and the term performance art were conceived in the early 1960’s and late 1970’s using the neoavant-garde tactics, rarely strategies, of transforming and surpassing the closed framework of defining visual, above all highly modernistic, art work, and the visual art as art based on creating, making or producing authentic, self-explanatory, whole, and finished paintings and sculptures as “pieces”. Furthermore, during the late neoavant-garde period the idea of performance art was in a theoretically interpretative and historically retrospective manner applied to different open, experimental, process and action “works” of art which were conceived and performed as events. After that, the late neoavant-garde concept of performance art was in an interpretative, anticipatory, and programmed, i.e. hegemonic, manner applied to completely different postmodern “works” which were based and performed on the concept and realization of, above all, a behavioral “event”. This means that the idea of performance art was in an interpretative way applied to the concepts and phenomena of performing events in completely different institutions and disciplines of art and culture. The idea of performance art therefore finds its application in music, literature, broadcasting, film, theater, dance, opera, artistic practices oriented toward cultural work, and in electronic mass-media. In addition, it is necessary to emphasize that the notion of performance art was not created by synthesizing different procedures from different individual fields of art into a new, multidisciplinary, all-inclusive, higher-discipline of a new art. The notion and the concept of performance art find their application in often incomparable artistic practices from different diachronic and synchronic contexts which identify the “act” of realization of a work or the “event” of the presentation of a work as an event-as-an art work. Attention is moved from a finished/static object – – or piece– functioning as a final product to a performance acting as an intervening, interactive or relational process in the arts and culture. The history of performance art is constructed as a narrative on comparative strategy and tactic maps for identifying and interpreting different projected or accidental procedures of an author’s nomadic performance in which the work of art functions as an event. Most often performance art work is a heterogeneous event situated in a completely subjective, social, and historic moment of the late capitalism and its hegemonies over the second-postsocialist and the third-postcolonial world.
When the notion and the concept of performance art were established in the histories and theories of art, it became possible to apply the concept of performance in an interpretative, theoretic and poetic way to those works that are not an event in themselves. The idea of performance art is applied to the works that are a consequence of a creative or productive act of becoming which in some way represents or engagingly anticipates the process of performing. Objects, texts, paintings, photographs, screen pictures, posters, commercials, ambient/installations, media constructions, etc., are interpreted as traces representing and demonstrating already finished processes of performance. In this sense, abstract paintings by Jackson Pollock, Jasper Jones or Mark Devado; feminist films by Yvonne Rainer or gay films by Derek Jarman; video installations by Bill Viola; deconstructionist and pornographic prose by Kathy Acker; rock-pop concert-spectacles by Laurie Anderson; para-theoretical texts by John Cage; radical photographs by Joel-Peter Witkin, Cindy Sherman or William Wegman are interpreted as performance art works or as works with a certain/uncertain aspects of performance art. In addition, although these works are not always events taking place in front of an audience, their sensual appearance and their semantic function are interpreted as the traces of the painter’s, director’s, artist’s, writer’s, composer’s, sculptor’s, or photographer’s behavioral act of performing the work functioning either as an intervention on the work or an intervention with the work on the context of presentation, communication, reception, exchange or consumption. The intervening performance is what the work obviously shows and represents, and this is, for this point of view, more important than a story told, a scene shown or a symbolic sequence inscribed. In a political sense Zlatko Kopljar’s (1962) artistic practice is marked by the dramatic epoch which witnessed the collapse of socialism, the establishing of the new nationalist states in the South-Eastern Europe, neoliberal transitional politics, and, of course, the paradoxical relationships between globalization and antiglobalization, i.e. the coexisting subversion and reconstruction of universalities in Croatian culture during the 1990’s. Kopljar’s rhetorical figures of behaviorism stand in an interactive and engaging relationship with the current micro- or macro- politics in present day Croatia which is going through the processes of transition and globalization. Still, he does not employ the obvious brutal political discourses of Mladen Stilinovic, or the highly esthetic icons of public or private politics of Sanja Ivekovic, but his own rhetorical bodily behavior (rhetorical figures of behavior) which allows him to promise and then execute an open, unstable relationship which makes him an active participant in current events and a “probe” for testing the micro- or macro- social horizon of reality. In an artistic sense Kopljar’s work is guided by the establishment of a hybrid field of behavioral and media performance. In other words, an artist is no longer the creator, maker or producer of a “piece” which leads toward exchange, acquisition, consumption, enjoyment, contemplation of the esthetic, mystical, political or, merely, everyday excess of value. An artist is a performer who intervenes with his bodily behavior, i.e. by becoming somebody else, using the symbolic, imaginary, and real potentials of the culture and society. The artist’s intervention is behavioral, and this means that its existence breaks down into fragments of situations or events comprising rhetorical figures which show, express or become something under specific life conditions and circumstances. Kopljar’s artistic work is, in a religious and metaphysical sense, an inversion of the traditional scheme of depth as a moving force of the surface into an almost Deleuzean concept of surface becoming depth. Depth is but an illusion created by the surface. An artist’s body is a membrane (closed uninterrupted surface) which, using its rhetorical figures (fragmentary cuts and indexations of behavior), shows the moment of becoming depth. There is no depth. Depth is a moment in which the surface becomes an illusion of depth. However, the illusion is not a deception, disguise or transcendence; on the contrary, it is a material effect or a product of the artist’s work with its own surfaces (figures in the existential situations in time and space). For example, if Tomislav Gotovac’s performance work presents an individual transgressive, almost queer body slipping out of the paradigmatic representation of the “normal” late-socialist social body, and if Vlasta Delimar’s performance work can be seen as the exploration of potentiality of a female heterosexual body as a demonstrative body from the woman’s point of identification (desire, symbolization) within the transitional post-socialism, then Zlatko Kopljar’s performance work carries an exclusive male (macho, heroic, mythical, rhetorical) position within the critical points of neoliberal expansive globalization. Therefore, behavioral interventions within life itself (life’s non-utopian situations) which provoke the process of the constitution of the global world and its new integrative and, hence, universal history comprise the context of his work. Kopljar’s performances (installations, media performances) do not use ideal shapes but a thick cluster of experience belonging to an individual sensual body thrown into the cracks of the world in an attempt to become one.
Elaboration: One Machine is Defined as a System of Cuts (Cross Sections). And that is it
In machines everything functions simultaneously, but in cuts and interruptions, brakes and failures, discontinuities and short circuits, intervals and partitions, everything operates in totality unable to bring the pieces of the whole together. An artist can take on any kind of identity, any role, that is, any kind of appearance. We are talking about the acceleration of multiplicity that can at the same time potentially be a subject or an object or an impression or a moving force or a passive stepping aside. Here we will discuss a machine which allows Zlatko Kopljar to assume different roles in the process of positioning and repositioning of the body and the world.
Zlatko Kopljar’s work can be defined as a system of cuts (cross sections) whose effects are identified as performances, installations or media presentations (photographs, videos, texts, acoustic presentations, body poses, audio or visual media clips). This definition, which is closely related to negative dialects of Kopljar’s destructions as constructions, shows that his artistic work is actually the work of a machine seen as a system of cuts (cross sections) in the field of either real or fictional existence of the potential, hypothetical, performing, positioned or accidental subjects of current culture and society. The machine does not synthesize a round, compact organism; it organizes the organs into a temporary, variable order or merely into a cross section of the flow. On the other hand, the machine is what functions constructively even when it is destructive. Kopljar destroys and the destruction is a constructive work in the same way as the constructive work is the destruction and implosion of space or violation of another body.
The machine can be named “K,” because we are talking about a system of constructive or destructive momentary cuts (cross sections within the flow of existence), and not about a finished product (object) that can be named, possessed or contemplated. Potentiality of behaviorism instead of an anticipated finality of an object. Kopljar’s works can be titled “K,” and it can function as an index, and not a name. The index is a momentary designation in the process of existential flow. The name is a possession of existence in an illusion of a symbolic plan. Machine production leads toward production as a product: cuts, cross sections, processes, their cuts, cross sections, slashes, punctures, on the edge, in the abyss, on the border, in the middle, between, cross sections, etc.
Kopljar’s works are cross sections of existence which can be seen in the crude and painful description of the machine by Deleuze and Guattari:
“Connecticut, Connect –I– cut,” Little Joe shouts. Bettelheim paints that child who lives, eats, discharges feces or sleeps only when plugged into machines equipped with engines, wires, lamps, carburetors, propel-lers, and steering-wheels: electric nutritional machine, car-machine for breathing, glistening luminous anal machine. Very few examples describe the regime of the desired production and the way in which destruction represents a part of the very functioning, or a cut-portion of machine connections, as well as this one does. One will say that the mechanical, schizophrenic life expresses absence and destruction of desire, rather than desire itself, and that it assumes extreme negation on the side of a parent to which a child responds by turning into a machine.… How did the process turn into a goal? Or, on the other hand, how did it become a victim of a premature break-in (invasion), or a terrible intensification? Something is produced and/or counter-produced only in relation to the body without organs (closed eyes, stuffed nose, plugged ears), and it distracts or intensifies the entire production whose part it actually represents. But the machine remains a desire, a position of the desire, continuing its history through the primary repression and the return of the repressed, in a successive alternation of paranoid machines, miraculous machines, and marriageless machines through which Joe passes, as Bettelheim’s therapy progresses.
This allegorical picture of the production of the product as production promises a possibility of an interpretative reading of the potentiality of Kopljar’s open and unstable work. Cross sections, connections, destructions, constructions, posing, marking, inscribing, selecting, hitting, taking, not-acting, evading, crossing over… a limitless process referring to itself as a testing ground for exceptional existential potentials that need to be indexed with “K”.
His instinct is shaped during the performance and it influences an active or a passive viewer with brutality or gentleness. This is not the intellectual conception of art, but an instinctual effect of behavior as art. Here the instinct, indexed for example with ”K”, is a provocation or an evocation of the conceptualization of the body-machine within the cross sections which continually occur in constant rearrangements, i.e. assumptions of different roles: he communicates, secretes blood, he hits and receives blows, he shoots into the distance, he lies at the zero point of existence, he mediates or prays…. The artist is instinctively led through the complex fields of effects which disturb the expectations of our senses and our bodies. He loses his territories by moving borders. He shows himself in order to question the relationship between YOU and I or, even worse, between I and WE. His play with the individual challenges the universal. In the smooth phallic body of universality he finds a crack, wrinkle, or roughness which brings us back from YOU to I and from WE to I. This return to I hurts.
Re-Embody: it is Here
One of the demands the machine has to respond to is to point to a potential network or map for the indexation and interpretation of the engaging, fluctuating relationship between the conceptual (artist’s intention), phenomenal (artist’s bodily appearance), discursive (through what relationships he builds his meanings), and historical potentialities of the heterogeneous and hybrid performance art work. Kopljar’s works are heterogeneous: like a nomad he cuts through the potentialities of the media by either performing the event itself (performance) or the situation (installation). His works are also hybrid: he does not belong to the development field of one “style” of expression, but to the multiplicity of behaviors of a strong and/or weak body which takes on the incomparable roles in the world and toward the world. Heterogeneity and hybridity are the basis for the production of current subjectivity, i.e. subjectivity in the current world of multiple potentialities.
What follows are the basic problems, offers, and effects of Kopljar’s project performances indexed K1 through K10.
To communicate with the other. “K1”: to face a thin, invisible border of potentiality of an intersubjective exchange. Communication is nothing more than an attempt of exchange in possible or impossible conditions of existence. Focus on the phenomenon of resistance.
The description of the work: In a darkened auditorium the audience is waiting for the speaker. A deaf and blind girl is brought to a pay phone lit by a spotlight. The girl puts on surgical gloves and performs the text using sign language. When she indicates that she is going to read the text once again, a bright light flashes twice from behind her and blinds the audience. The girl repeats the speech. At the end she takes off the gloves, leaves them on the pay phone and is assisted out of the auditorium. In the lobby the audience finds the performed text written in Braille alphabet: “This ridiculously theatrical and pathetic situation is only a matter of necessity which you are drawn into. It is my privilege to tell you, in the least appropriate way, what continuously destroys and permanently burdens me. What I tell you will certainly not change a thing. It will only remind us of what we already know. The way I say it frees both me and you of the responsibility which at this moment is completely unnecessary. We do not have to think about what I am saying. The responsibility comes later. This is why everything looks like a fraud and any possibility of rational communication is removed, and with it our ego, i.e. the possibility to make immediate judgments. I disrupt any kind of communication on purpose because I expect you to feel with your body, eyes, skin, feet, and palms. I want you to feel. I want you to ask yourselves: What happened? What was said? You will find the answers yourselves when you approach someone you always thought needed your help and then you will realize that this person is the one, the only one, who can help you.”
A careful observer of this work will discover that the communication is explored through a model of construction, and then, performance of expression. The expression is not what comes out of the “communicative beings,” but the being emerges as an effect of the machine that constructs a behavioral expression directed toward another.
To destroy space and construct a work. “K2”: the artist and the audience destroy the gallery walls. Destruction of public space. The activation of the audience. The threshold of the social norm. Simulacrum of a revolution. Destruction as an invitation to creation. Dialectics on the scene.
The description of the work:
On the table in the middle of the gallery there are seven pieces of paper. Each word of the sentence “I AM AN ARTIST WHO WANTS TO CHANGE THE WORLD” is written on a separate piece of paper. I raise one piece after another above my head, show them to the audience, and then tear them apart. When the last word is shown and the last piece of paper torn, from under the table I pull out a hammer and forcefully hit the gallery walls. Two or three minutes later the audience receives small hammers and joins me in the destruction of the gallery.
Kopljar takes a philosophical, we could say intellectual, idea derived from Marx’s appeal to philosophers to stop interpreting and start changing the world. Kopljar assigns an artist the role of a revolutionary. This role does not exist on some kind of a general level, but is realized in the particularity of gestures of destruction which reconstructs “the world” in its indivisible and unique specific quality. The attention is not directed only toward the artist’s act (the destruction of the walls with the large hammer), but also toward social thresholds which the audience (gallery audience) needs to cross by taking over the role of the accomplice, that is the machine, that is the system of cuts. Kopljar describes that specific situation in the following way:
“I think that what I attempted to do with K2 was successful, so the work with the ‘gallery destruction’ was definitively constructive. In the Czech gallery 761 in Ostrava during the Malamut Performance Festival in 1977 the audience was given around twenty hammers, but the real mess was created in Jurij Krpan’s Chapel where we completely demolished the gallery. Jurij was delighted (laughter). Still, he had problems. At first the Slovenians were introverted. But once they hit it off, they made (I apologize) a fucking mess. They were great. This is a rough example of what the catch is with the mentioned constructions.”
Kopljar’s dialectic tension is hidden here. The destruction represents becoming which by being the becoming has the characteristics of construction.
To receive or deliver a blow. “K3”: two men are fighting. They hit each other with sticks. Presence of aggression, competition, accumulation and release of “force”. Manifestation of pain. Sensory presence of pain. Ritualization of unnecessary violence. Violence, at the same time, as a pornographic and sacred act. Tension. Expectation of a blow.
The description of the work: The audience walks into a dark gallery. Under a spotlight in the middle of the gallery there is a piece of white linen with two long, hard sticks placed parallel next to each other. Digitally processed sound of the whipping echoes through the gallery. Fast whipping rhythm and intense sound force grow slower and the modulation of sound becomes longer and deeper until it is completely unrecognizable. The sound and the silent pauses become longer. During one pause I come out of the audience with an assistant into the light. In silence we take our shirts off, take the sticks into our hands, and assume hitting positions. We strike simultaneously hitting one another over out backs as hard as we can. We get dressed and exit. This work coexists on several different levels at the same time: as a physical act of a blow, as an explicit masculine situation between fighters, as a ritualization of unnecessary violence, as a reduction of a ritual to a trivial painful relationship between rhetorical figures, and as a production of the system of cuts (whistles, pains, causes, responses, accumulations and de-accumulations).
To forbid passage, to block off the entrance/exit. Intervention in a public place. Disturbance of expected behavior. “K4”: intervention in public behaviorism.
During the exhibition I block the entrance to the Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb with a 12 ton concrete block cast to fit the doorframe.
An almost impossible act. To cancel the exhibition. To abolish an institu-tion. Is this an egomaniacal gesture or subversion? An act of manipulation within the system of power: museum and abolition of a museum. What is important is not the artist’s political or ethical position, but an absurd bodily/sensual effect of the concrete block in front of the museum. The impossible presence itself. Kopljar wants to emphasize his conceptual anticonceptualism, and he does so by performing a situation that creates a bodily/sensual effect within an institutional context. While the work functions on a sensual level, its conceptual potentialities are possible only on a metalevel of understanding of an already realized act.
Sound hitting the body. “K5”: the artist’s body is an object. Body as an object is exposed to acoustic blows. Bearable, unbearable. To bear the irritation. Body endures. Body as a ‘probe’ of endurance.
The description of the work: I lie on my stomach stretched out on a bed sheet. My palms cover my ears. Two large speakers are set up in front of my head emitting a sharp irritating sound at full volume. The audience enters and passes by me. I lie in this position for half an hour. The sound suddenly ceases, I get up and leave.
The point of this work lies in the particular positioning of the passive body within an irritably activated space. By being exposed to irritation, the passive body is transformed into an active probe that puts us face to face with meaningless violence which instead of being violence, seems like the state of the world itself. This passive body is a metaphysical sample revealing mechanisms of regression and cancellation of the body.
To mark the place of death. To develop the structure of the emotional response of the notion of public, and the private and the public on the relationship between the actual brutality of the death and the metaphysical reality of the death. “K6”: the horror of losing someone close, the intensification of the fear of death, putting an emphasis on the uniqueness of life, demonstrating the meaninglessness of war and the triviality of disappearing traces. The delicacy of human relationships. Break.
The description of the work: The work was performed at the place where, during the bombing of the city on September 23rd, 1992, my father got killed. I marked the spot with a white rectangle next to which I wrote the date of his death as a series of numbers: 23091992.
In this work the paradigms of the collapse of the real-socialism, horror of the war, military violence, ethnic conflicts, and the personal, individual, and tragic response stand in confrontation to any collective discourse. This work, in fact, speaks of the real split in any collective-, meta- or super-discourse in politics.
To be in a field of screams. The prayer is an individual, modern act of confrontation with the edges of life. “K7”: with Allen Ginsberg’s poem in the background, Kopljar situates his body at a zero position of existence. Individual mythologies are coded and developed into the rhetoric of a cursed artist. An attempt to place the existential index precisely onto the position from which one cannot go any further either in art or in life.
The description of the work: The audience watches a threefold video projection. Two side projectors show black and white video recordings, prerecorded for the occasion, of me wandering through the woods and acting crazy among the residue and garbage in my basement. The color projection in the middle shows the performance taking place in the real time in the room next door. During the performance I lie still in a pile of feathers and pills. The background sound is the recording of Allen Ginsberg reciting Howl.
The myth of a cursed artist is transferred from the narrative level (“I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterically naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, …” from Howl, by Allen Ginsberg) to the individual body of the artist who is placing himself into ‘becoming’ cursed here and now. Behavioral quality becomes a sign of existence against the mythical narrative which goes beyond or over existence. The subject of an artist exposed to the concrete quality of the space and time is shown as a name for the destruction of the building-Being.
To present the blood as a substance for a monument. “K8”: to confront an important substance without organs to a living body with organs. Fetishization and mythical construction of an exclusive sample.
The description of the work: a nurse draws blood from my vein and pours it into a crystal cube container. I place a glass cap on the container and seal it. The cube remains on display until the end of the exhibition. One simple everyday operation (millions of people give blood in health institutions on this planet every day) is transferred into an exclusive space of an art institution therefore transforming a “technocratic medical procedure” into a ritualized act in which becoming and being are confronted. The confrontation has symbolic parameters (every play with blood is symbolically situated), but for Kopljar those symbolic possibilities remain only potential signs. He directs the attention of the artist and the sensuality of the viewer to the sensual-bodily experience of the relationship with blood. To pose/pray in the center of the world. But what is the center of the world? “K9”: One rhetorically developed position of the body (the body in a kneeling position with a head bowed and arms relaxed against the body) is introduced into a complex phenomenal and semantic context of a mega-polis (the city of all cities).
Transitional relationship between the individual body and material institutions.
The description of the work: The projection on the wall is a video recording of a kneeling operation taking place on chosen locations in New York coded with an entry of my digitalized DNA formula. The projection is accompanied by a monologue from the movie “Nostalgia” (1983) by Andrei Tarkovsky performed by Erland Josephson. “The voice of my forefather speaks in me. I cannot live in my head and in my body at once. That is why I cannot be only one person. I feel myself in an endless number of things at the same time.”
True evil of our time is that there are no more great teachers. The path of our heart is covered with shadows. It is necessary to listen to the voices which seem useless. The buzzing of the insects needs to enter the heads filled with long, infected pipes, exhausting schools, swords, social habits. Our ears and eyes need to be filled with ideas that existed in the beginning of the great dream, someone needs to shout out loud that we will build the pyramids — it does not matter if we don’t.
The desire needs to be fed. We must spread our soul to all sides as if it is a sheet extended to eternity. If we want the world to progress we must hold hands. We must mix among ourselves, all of us, the so-called healthy and the so-called sick. Hey, you healthy ones, what does it mean to be healthy? All the eyes of the world are looking into the abyss while all of us are falling into it. We do not need the freedom if you do not have the courage to look us into eyes, to eat with us, to drink with us, and to sleep with us. The so-called ones are those who brought the world to the edge of disaster. Man, hear the water, fire, and the ashes within yourself! And the bones within the ashes. The bones and the ashes. Where am I when I am neither in reality nor in my imagination?
I propose a new agreement with the world, from now on the sun shines at night and it snows in August. The society must unite again, and not be shattered into pieces. It would be enough to look at nature and realize that the life is simple and that we should return to the old way of living. Return to that point where you took the wrong turn. We should return to the fundamental ways of living, without disturbing the water. What kind of a world this is when a nut tells you that you need to be ashamed of yourselves. Oh mother, oh mother! The air is that light thing circling around your head and becoming brighter when you laugh.”
This work is open to possibilities of facing it (the city of all cities) during this epoch (not Athens, not Alexandria, not Rome, but New York). The city as the center of modern art, the expression of domination of global neoliberalism, the city of material instrumentalities, the city as the victim of terrorism, the city as the source of the cultural, political and civilizational hegemonies, the city of intimate contacts with the city itself, self-effacement, the city of body transformations, the city of embodiment, the multicultural system of cities and worlds of actualities, the place of metaphysical questioning through materialistic gestures, the testing ground for operations toward the unreachable, the individual facing the collective.
Each of these potentialities is not presented conceptually (statement, attitude, interpretation, letter), but by putting the body-sample itself in the place of potentiality. By locating himself in the place of potentiality, the artist seems to be making an attempt of putting an end to the superiority of power by using the body as the only “cut” into the existing.
Repetition, monotony, repetition, evocation, removal of the sublime and centering of the trivial. “K10”: the body becomes the world through repetition of body movements.
The description of the work: Six chosen recordings represent my hours-long action of swinging on the back legs of the chair. The recordings are imprinted with a UV print onto a large format canvas. Wide, neutral, black edge is later added by hand.
A completely simple, trivial action with the body confronts us with the presence. The presence is not something secondary, but something that needs to be penetrated into in order to ask a question, for example, about God. The process of de-ontologization of God does not lie within the discourse, but within the repetitive body that wants to be ontologized here and now. To inscribe itself into a place. This desire to be ontologized becomes a problem, a border on which the appearing body and the inexpressible being meet, even though…
Inexpressible and Confrontation
What needs to be taken into account from the very beginning regarding Kopljar’s art is that the effect of the work (performance, installation) is not determined by a characteristic metaphysical opposition or by the opposition to what cannot be comprehended, uttered, or expressed. The effect of the work (K2 or K9 or K9 Compassion) comes out of the indicative or representational relationship between the art and the world through the body in entirely specific material-historic conditions and circumstances (institutions, apparatuses or, more abstractly, contexts of globalization, the new age, an after block-division of the world, multiculturality) of centralization or decentralization of some kind of public or private “power” or “sociability”. In other words, the incomprehensible, the unutterable or the inexpressible are not the effects of some kind of pre-human chaos or something generally-human presented as a natural existence the artist strives for or arises from. They are social-material constructs produced in specific historic and geographical conditions and circumstances of social struggle. They are the ways of regulating or deregulating the relationship between the society, the art, and the body. For this reason, the main question concerning his art is not the question of nature or un-nature of the incomprehensible, the unutterable or the inexpressible, but the question of what, under which conditions and circumstances, and, of course, under whose authority, is declared the incomprehensible, unutterable, and inexpressible in the rhetorical poses of the body (the body against another body in K1, or the body against city institutions in K9 Compassion, and in K9 Compassion+). The discourse of Kopljar’s work is not presented only as “the meaning” of speech or bodily behavior, but as a material regulation, prohibition, resistance or classification within society:
Here is the hypothesis I wish to present tonight in order to set up the arena — or perhaps the very temporary stage — for the work I will perform: I presume that the production of discourse in every society is controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role consists of reducing its powers and dangers, mastering over its accidental manifestations, avoiding its uneasy, frightening material quality.
The discourse, as shown by psychoanalysis, does not merely reveal or hide the desire, it is also the object of the desire: For the discourse — as the history repeatedly teaches us — is not merely an expression of struggles and systems of government, but it is also an instrument used in the struggle; it is the power worth possessing.
In Kopljar’s case, it is a struggle between the art and the body within a concrete historic and geographic society; it is a struggle to determine who will rule or control the relationship between the art and the body. However, this struggle lies in the material and important dimension of the discourse, in fact, in the dimension of becoming an event and a case. Therefore, we can present a thesis saying that the inexpressible, the unutterable, and the incomprehensible in Kopljar’s performances of the rhetorical figures of the body or the rhetorical figures for the body are not what stands outside or opposite to the discourse (discourse products, acts or institutions), but that they are simply through the performance of the body opposite, against or through the effects of the discourse in the field of sensory or experienced pain, enjoyment, cutting, flowing, exchanging, taking over, and confronting. He shows himself. He hits. He kneels and prays. He is here. He receives a blow. He bows. He gives blood. He lies in the middle of the sound. He crosses the border of the bearable. He stands opposite us. He destroys. He constructs. He stands against the representatives of power. This “he” is material, it is written into the flows or cuts of the flow which we will call the thickness of existence. How can we democratize atoms and molecules?
P.S: Artist in an Epoch of Globalism
In his most recent works (performance, video, photo installations: K9 Compassion, 2003 and K9 Compassion+, 2005) Zlatko Kopljar developed a key position of an artist intervention in the world of globalism. He is not an artist who globalizes the world by coming from an imperial culture, nor is he an artist who joins the globalizing wave, i.e. he is not an alternative media, web or leftist parainstitutional artist-terrorist. He presents himself as a non-expressive index and, therefore, an indicator of the totalizing wave of globalism, who transforms the planet (large world metropolises) into a testing ground for biopolitical indexation of the representatives of power. He uses “erased traces of Christianity” (in the title of the work K9 Compassion he refers to the Christian vocabulary: compassion, prayer, homage, also the position of his figure points to ideas of “dignified passivity”, “power of the powerless”, etc.). For example, in the work K9 he worked with punctuating points in New York. Kopljar paradoxically used an undefined potentiality of reading and coding the bodily ritual (rhetorical positioning of the body) in New York. He kneeled in front of important buildings/institutions, i.e. centers of power. His kneeling body functioned as an indicator in relation to New York as a center of political, economic, and even artistic power. He was perhaps pointing to New York as a global model of the world, or as an object of terrorism (change in perception of New York after September 11), or as a city of cities, or as… Kopljar uses his rhetorical body in a subtle and intelligent manner (a man wearing black suit, in a kneeling position, not expressing emotions) as a provocation in relation to a relevant there and a determining then. These there and then are the centers of located power of the new Empire (USA). In K9 Compassion Kopljar further elaborates the concept and enters into the system of presenting the global movement of an artist on a moving map of structuring and presenting the representatives of power. By employing a seemingly neutral but rhetorically indicative body he tests his audience’s complex symbolic-political reactions toward realistic, current, fictional historic, geopolitical or potential social powers. He performed bodily positionings against the Capitol Building in Washington, the United Kingdom Parliament in London, the European Parliament in Brussels, the Duma in Moscow, and the Chinese Parliament in Beijing. Kopljar works with a certain kind of two-fold “cognitive mapping”: (a) to map your body toward referential geopolitical (institutional, architectural) points and (b) to map the body or even an “aura” of institutions of geopolitical centers of power. Here the technique of cognitive mapping stands for the performance of the representation of individuality and subjectivity in relation to realistic and imaginary projections of “that” which is being tested, experienced and realized as human reality. In this sense, Kopljar’s work explicitly implies the position of an artist of the new-existentialism.