January 27, 2013.
MMC LED ART is informing the public that Euthanasia of Art Klinika was successfully carried out on January 27, 2013. After a forty-day incubation, the opening of the will is next.
Euthanasia, the voluntarily initiated process of the ceasement of the activities of Art Klinika, the last project of MMC LED ART, was accelarated and defined by two events: the appearance at the 52nd October Salon in 2011 in Belgrade, and the invitation for Nikola Džafo to participate in the competition of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia and proposal for the desing of the Serbian pavillion at the forthcoming 55th Biennale in Venice.
Since the 52nd October Salon coincided with the celebration of the ten-year anniversary of Art Klinika, “The Great Celebration” ended at the Salon. This distinguished international manifestation became a symbolic and factual frame for examining the past/history, present/found state and the future activist/critical/art practice that has marked the activity and public performance of Art Klinika.
EUTHANASIA
In 2011, Art Klinika celebrated ten years of work. Survival and functioning of Art Klinika was marked by a series of actions, reactions, performances, simulations and taking of a stance toward current events at the local social and political scene. In this not-so-short period, almost all the program segments of the Art Klinika were realised with more or less trouble: Shock Gallery, Evening Act, CineClinic, as well as the long-term projects such as Perspectives, Reconstruction of Crime, Memorial Actions, BioBridge, Additional Classes in Drawing and others.
How did Art Klinika celebrate its anniversary? At the crossroads, facing a series of external and internal problems. The great celebration was an occasion to pose the question whether or not it is possible to continue in the same manner, or is it necessary to establish a new paradigm of activity. For that reason, the celebration started from the found state, without make-up, making it into a privileged thematic focus. The found state was characterised by the lack: of money, engagement and interests in all segments that are supposed to enable an artistic, and wider, a cultural production. That was the beginning of euthanasia.
The invitation of the Ministry of Culture to participate at the competition for the Venetian Biennale project was the event that enabled the final euthanasia. The competition project clearly demonstrates what the reasons and needs for carrying out the euthanasia of Art Klinika are.
ONLY THE COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT CAN SAVE THE WORLD FROM CATASTROPHE
Contrary to the usual practice, moreover in spite of it, the invitation to create the idea for the participation at the Venetian Biennial is interpreted by Nikola Džafo not as an opportunity for self-promotion, but an occasion for a common performance of one segment of the Serbian art scene. A drift from the personal to the collective, the conviction that the subversive, ethical and political potential of contemporary art can be manifested only as a depersonalized collective act, is found in the postulates on which the twenty-year activity of Led Art/Art Klinika rests. The idea of fellowship, mutual support and complementation is the basis for the art cooperative movement as the new platform of activity. The cooperative becomes the model for conquering new, in the context of art not-yet articulated contents and spaces, and intervention within them.
Although always consciously on the edge of mainstream and outside of institutions, the advisers are this time purposefully entering the institution of the Biennial, coming out of the margins, from the subculture, and starting research, conquering and „curing“ right from the Center. In this light, the cooperatives of Art Klinika are opening in Giardini a place for isolation – a quarantine, with the purpose of „rehabilitating“ the cultural and art scene in Serbia. The Pavilion Yugoslavia becomes an assembly storehouse of the found state, a place of temporality, at the same time of potential doubt, a danger that captures/isolates a society and looks at it within a quarantine.
(From the proposal for the idea of representing the Republic of Serbia at the 55th International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Venice 2013)
The proposal was sent to the Ministry on January 27, the day of St. Sava, the school and gild feast. That was the occasion for the euthanasia of Art Klinikt to be officially verified and to record “the possessions.”
As a representative and supporter of art gild, MMC LED ART is contextually renaming Art Klinika into a Shock Cooperative. The Shock Cooperative is currently constructing three shock galleries (“Partizan” in Petrovaradin, Cultural/art Society “Petofi Sandor” in Telep, SOSO “Milan Petrovic”) and a movable gallery has also been finalized, ready to occupy new, still nameless “art places.” The Shock Cooperative has a detailed exhibition program for 2013 turned towards new concepts of art activity: demonstration of life processes and/or intervention in everyday processes, border areas of art, society, politics and/or culture, provocation as the starting point in the thematic and performative/demonstrational aspect.
Thus from a guerilla, subversive art group, through a critical collective of social and art practices (Art Klinika), following the accelarated puls of social and political changes, MMC LED ART has reached a formulation of the conceptional frame for future activity: cooperative and cooperative movement as the new articulation of fellowship. The Shock cooperative is redrawing the assigned institutional and disciplinary frames, formulating new, “wild,” unconventional models of cooperation, replacing the periphery with center, basement with public space.
Currently in the state of incubation, the Shock cooperative is waiting for the further development of events. After 40 days we will solemnly open the galleries and hand it over to disposal of the social community together with a formulated program. This is perhaps where the question whether or not cooperatives can save the world from catastrophe can be found.
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