Abstract

DOI

Introduction

From the beginning of my artistic practice, the upheavals of the 1990s in my region have interested me and challenged me to understand the role of art as that which can take over the function of light in times of social and political crises.

The subject discussed in the essay is my critique of the existing society of limited responsibilities through the lens of the spread of unrestrained neoliberalism in the territory of former Yugoslav state socialism and socialist modernism. But also discussed is a postulate, with a self-critical attitude, of a possible society of unlimited responsibilities. This kind of critical questioning of our constructed reality is based on the intention that the subject discussed hopefully fosters and renews the concepts of solidarity, togetherness, and compassion in the current, troubled times. Some of the guiding questions for my quest over the years were addressing the processes that make an unlimited responsibility society possible, and whether the artistic responsibility could also be unlimited? But in what kind of society? I understand artistic responsibility as a social and aesthetic practice that relates to the world in which it is created via its critical understanding and decoding of the structural centres of power. In other words, artistic responsibility works with the development of the culture of the capitalist system in a critical sense i.e. as the critical friend that every system needs. What can be accomplished in such a space? Can unlimited artistic responsibility answer the question of leading the world, giving priority to discursive and contextual knowledge over profit, equality over subjugation, criticism over suitability? These intertwined questions are positioned as a guiding principle to the following essay that is displays theoretical research along with the descriptions of several of my artworks in an attempt to amplify my research on unlimited responsibility.

The Society of Unlimited Responsibility and Ecce Mundi

Research on the concept of unlimited social responsibility comes from a process when, from 2005, namely during the transition from Yugoslav state socialism to capitalism, the Montenegrin government publicly declared to the people of Montenegro that they had an obligation to take the fiscal receipt after each of their purchase. It was a very long process to ‘educate the masses’ in that sense, as it also dealt with the obligation by the state to communicate regularly about the tax obligations of citizens. Often, I noticed those receipts flying everywhere throughout the town, the streets, as nobody actually took them. Could we say that nobody took the call to the awareness and responsibility for that simple act seriously? If we do not feel responsible to fulfil the smallest act that we are asked to, how are we to be able to respond to more complex issues? That is also why I started collecting fiscal receipts from other people, from the streets and pavements, including the dirty, torn and crumpled ones. I wondered if we could take responsibility for others. I noticed that their content, numbers, prices, goods purchased, all faded away with light and time, while exposed to the sun and wind. In essence, to develop my own artistic means, I intentionally collected what can be considered as a waste in real life, in order to critically address the program of modern art that starts when ‘modern art has cut the reference to the world of things’ and when ‘the modern painter limited himself to analysing the available painterly means of representation’,¹ namely the point, the line, the plane… Those were complex years of societal transition in the region. But the contrast between the lightness of the paper of the fiscal receipt that is easily taken by the wind, and the meaning of the economic concept written on each of the fiscal receipts – The Society of Limited Responsibility – moved me to imagine its inversion into a more generous and utopian concept, that of The Society of Unlimited Responsibility.²

This act of inversion, as another specific means in my artistic research, brought me to one more specific means – to the processes of translation. I realised how meanings slightly shift from language to language, country to country. But also, how those very slight shifts actually had crucial consequences in terms of understanding their meanings in the different contexts to which they are applied. The term society, used within the mentioned economic concept in countries with socialist background, shifts into the terms company and partnership in more western and countries with longer capitalist commitment. That has launched a series of artworks of mine that deal with the ever-growing questions about the stability of the coming common future on the planet if we continue the limitations of our accountabilities. They question the kind of presence, economy and culture that have lasted at least since modernity, i.e. since this economic term marked the beginnings and spread of capitalism.³

The artwork The Society of Unlimited Responsibility is a notebook which I produced in artistic residency at the Neue Galerie in Graz, during the winter of 2006. It was through the process of translation, that I witnessed as an active emancipatory and intellectual agency in socialist Yugoslavia, that I, facing my world, very early on in my artistic practice, became so interested in the forms of a book and a notebook. Also the relationship between text and drawing in dealing with societal issues conveys a sense of fusion between the arts, which I often refer to through the principle of Mallarmé that ‘the world exists to lead to a book’. The work The Society of Unlimited Responsibility contains pencil drawings on each page with a squared grid pattern, in which each of the humanoid pictograms inhabits individual squares. Each claims its own space; each is free to move within and through the boundaries of their space. Thus, flipping through the pages of this piece provides an optical illusion of their movement, free dialogue and expression. Their plurality creates the society. Their society creates individuals. As a collective, in their silent co-presence, they move without bounds, individually and reciprocally, because they are beings of the UN-limited responsibility society.

The Society of Unlimited Responsibility, foto Irena Lagator

The Society of Unlimited Responsibility, foto Irena Lagator

What kind of space can make such a peaceful co-existence possible? What manner of politics is practised in this society? Is peaceful co-existence possible? How and by what actions are we building the collectivity? How does communication contribute to the formation of society and inclusive living space? I drew the figures one by one, page by page. This kind of making visible of possible collectivity is based on reflecting about the potentials of shared space and equilibrium based upon political awareness of the multitude that constitutes it. I wondered if an artwork could instill wonder among the audiences about the processes that enable this kind of peaceful and social co-existence possible. ‘The relational co-constitutive spatiality between society and individual and vice versa is made visible, in their co-productive temporal evolution.’⁴ These ‘people’ provide an example of how space, divided amongst different cultures, peoples, nations, religions, languages, and epochs, becomes a boundless co-residence and lasting connectedness.

Since modernisation has demonstrated how human life is organised when the primacy is given to capital, in later years, I developed this piece in various different contexts, mediums and forms. In Ecce Mundi (2013),⁵ the humanoid shapes, reduced to pictograms, conquer the spaces of the ceiling, the floor and the walls of the constructed canvas-wrapped cube. The audience encounters a nearly monochromatic empty room, seemingly white, and can walk through that ‘image’ of the existence of worlds in peace and harmony. Only on looking closer are the rotating multitude of tiny humanoid pictograms perceivable.⁶ I was interested in the processes of artistic recycling of an idea, so I scanned each page of the The Society of Unlimited Responsibility, multiplied and printed them on room-sized canvases. Only after this mechanical process was completed, I wanted to exceed it, so I drew every second pictogram anew in ink. Ecce Mundi grew as a manifesto of a harmonious society where mutual actions are adjusted according to the needs of the many worlds that share the same planet.⁷

Ecce Mundi, 2013, foto Dario Lasagni

Ecce Mundi, 2013, foto Lazar Pejovic

This multitude in harmony speaks to us about how the processes of mutual co-existence and differences concern contemporary art. Because, namely, the discourse of contemporaneity is characterised by frequent social and environmental instabilities, precarious positions, both social and climatic, continuous socio-political conflicts. We are witnessing paradoxes due to which a creation becomes value extraction, and social crises receive unpredictable dimensions. Artists cannot remain indifferent within the growing awareness of continuous precarity, exploitation and efforts by the ruling hierarchical power structures to marginalise artistic production and the cultural sector as a whole. What can be achieved by artistic responsibility, as an open research forum, and its operation through the horizontal-network connection enabled by the digital age, is an artistic language intended for wider social layers, which recent theories call commOnism.⁸ In those theories, culture has a basic role in the development of a society precisely because it makes visible the meaning of common goods, social communities, ecology, economic and political solutions that do not primarily exist for the sake of individuals or private property, but for the sake of community and common survival.⁹

The Society of Peaceful Coexistence

The installation Society of Peaceful Coexistence consists of nine identical algraphy prints. They visualise a large number of rotating human pictograms, which are visible only upon a closer look. This multitude, which coexists peacefully, emanates the idea of a democratic horizon, connectedness, solidarity and sharing. The prints have been made using the technique of algraphy, a process similar to lithography, but using aluminum as the support, while at the same time questioning it. As applied here, the technique is particularly well-suited to the content, given that it allows for reproducibility, but on the other hand also for critical awareness of the extractive behaviour of humans toward living¹⁰ and natural¹¹ environment. Therefore, on the level of the formal solution and visual form, these three artworks (The Society of Unlimited Responsibility, Ecce Mundi and The Society of Peaceful Coexistence) shift between the meduim of a notebook, wall painting, spatial instalation, plane and surface in order to reflect my critical concern about the social, political, cultural and economic relations within a region of former socialist space of Yugoslavia in which I was growing up. They are also a comparative study via the painterly means of representation, namely the point, the line, the plane, out of which I composed the humanoid pictograms, in my quest about how to un-limit artistic responsibility to analyzing the world of real things. The humanoid pictograms of this work reside in the sphere of peaceful co-existence.¹² What is the kind of space that makes such co-existence possible? Is politics of peaceful coexistence achievable? By what means do we constitute collectivity? What shapes our common destiny on the planet? In search for the answers to these recurring questions, I find critical investigations by thinkers such as T. J. Demos, ¹³ Saskia Sassen, ¹⁴ Bruno Latour ¹⁵, Anna Tsing¹⁶, Franco Bifo Berardi¹⁷ relevant. Their efforts of making us aware about instability of the time we are living in and human impact on the planet are politically relevant and are my guiding source to the understanding of what unlimited artistic responsibility could be. We all know that art can make visible, but unlimited artistic responsibility asks for proactivity because it questions the visible and states that only through collaboration and mutual support we can create directions forward.¹⁸ That support can be intercultural, intersectional, interdisciplinary, but above all it must be among humans and among species. Only then, it is in support of peaceful co-existence.

The Society of Peaceful Coexistence, foto Ivan Petrovic

One of the questions that is neglected in the contemporary network of relationships is the question of what humanity objectively needs, primarily in terms of its own survival,¹⁹ but also of survival of other species.²⁰ Are we today longing for innovative biological, digital or nano technologies, for post-human, new currencies, more up-to-date information, the endless accumulation of capital, and thus the influence of the already influential? Or, perhaps do we need to redefine the ways through which we as a society might be able to create a more prosperous and peaceful future for more-than-human worlds?

The Knowledge of the Limited Responsibility Society

The answer to these inquiries leads us to the question: ‘Who rules the world?’ – which is posed by Chomsky. If we follow his division of the world into two, namely the plutonomy and the precariat, we see that a system of predatory capitalism is at work, governing the population, the territory and the environment.²¹ Such a division has enabled an uncompromising increase in the power of the already powerful, and the loss of the revolutionary and critical potential of the wider social masses who could be able to bring about changes.

Knowledge of the Limited Responsibility Society, foto Andrea Abati

I use photosensitive fiscal receipts as indexical traces of consumerist activities and as signs of a culture of limited responsibility. Experimenting in the socially constructed sphere means accepting it as a political symptom of contemporary society. My installation The Knowledge of the Limited Responsibility Society consists of a cityscape composed of books of different sizes that are hand-made out of globally collected fiscal receipts. They are also leftover facts about the condition of the lack of responsibility for our common world. That is why this work is conceived, from the position of a society that has undergone the transition from a socialist to a capitalist type of management and production. Here, the medium of installation becomes a collection – of survived fiscal receipts, of the visual trace of the call to responsibilities, of the visible trace of the limited responsibilities. Can we say that in a society with transitional consequences, where the ‘art sector is underdeveloped or not hand in hand with the capital’²² , the possibility of political and the corrective role of art, when it dares to take place in the middle of the system it criticises, is an art of unlimited responsibility?

The installation as a dispositive transcends the language of form because it is at continual disposal to an audience that can read the books’ contents and thus continually modifies its form. But the contents are hours of facts of consumerism, months and years of goods produced, each followed by a price and the according amount of tax paid. That is also why I arrange the receipts according to their lengths and widths, so that the books, like elements of a cityscape in this installation, are different in their size, but also different in the amounts evidenced. What connects those books is the rule of the sector of economy and commercial law that asks each of the owners of a company that issues the receipt to be registered as a Society of Limited Responsibility. And we are given time and space to read about that fact each time when we take the receipt home with us. How does this information resonate with us?

Knowledge of the Limited Responsibility Society, foto Andrea Abati

Evidently, we are all owners of the knowledge that responsibilities are limited around us.²³ If art reflects a society in which there is a continuous discussion about the concepts and policies that develop that society, every informed being is interested in the reflection of her/his actions in the eyes of others, both because of the intention of spreading her/his influence and because of the potential critical, and so developmental, effect on the observer. The dystopian knowledge we face every day is here made visible, and it is growing as a process and ongoing installation contemporarily with its plurality of societies.

Limited Responsibility Society Automatism

In my ephemeral interactive installation Limited Responsibility Society Automatism (2012), I further developed the use of the international economic term SaRL (Socitété à Responsabilité Limitée)²⁴, to create spatial forms reminiscent of ancient temples. I did not use receipts produced by citizens here, but blank thermal paper bill rolls, which in the everyday institutional chain of global consumerism are used for the production of fiscal receipts. I filled them with a textual content which is visually similar to the one we are familiar with, yet with an important conceptual difference. Namely, in addition to the original products and their prices²⁵, I programmed into the borrowed fiscal cash register certain intangible values ​​such as ‘feelings’, ‘love’, ‘memory’… in order to assign prices to them. These new items are inserted between those we need existentially, such as water, milk or bread, thus becoming intruders within the established system of the trading world. On the hanging paper strips that fade over time the audience can read that in societies of limited responsibilities one can also ‘buy’ knowledge, long-lasting love, experience, a job, a sunny morning, power, career, success, a future…

Limited Responsibility Society Automatism, 2012, foto by Ivan Petrovic

These textual compositions are typed using a fiscal cash register by combining the principles of automatic writing, of concrete and of visual poetry. By unwinding the rolls and reading them, the audience simultaneously deconstructs the installation – the column as an element of a whole – while being confronted with dramatic moments of current social conditions. But it also becomes informed and aware of the process of the growing trade, in known and unknown means, that becomes possible in times of orchestrated alienation, exploitative isolation and limited responsibilities.

Limited Responsibility Society Automatism, 2012, foto by Ivan Petrovic

One very important aspect of this textual composition and visualisation of dystopia in relation to automatic writing is nevertheless the critique of the contemporaneity through automatisation and mechanisation to which we testify. But as well, when repeated, words after words, notions after notions, what visually appears are the blocks of words, which are also reminiscences of apartment blocks, those of the brutalist architecture within which I grew up in socialist Yugoslavia. ²⁶
With this work it became obvious to me that the constant critical possibility of examination through translation²⁷ and language is necessary. This critical examination might prevent that we do not fall into the trap of excessive identity politics and to potentially unveil how the strict meanings would not cover up what can be implied by them (as is demonstrated by the economical term Limited Liability Company that I have discussed above).

Conclusion: Un-limiting artistic responsibility

In my practice as an artist, I understand the ethics of artistic responsibility in our current complex times as based on the possibilities of developing solidarity, sharing, commonality and compassion. As such, it is primarily a means for making visible what is not immediately apparent, but also exceeding the making visible and intervening with care in the societal realm. If the defense of critical thinking and imagination in the arts for its ability to be an active participant in the development of an ethical-political awareness, sense of urgency and shared citizenship in any given space, is taking place, then we might speak of the art of unlimited responsibility. In that way, it can be seen as a kind of practice that is in a constant state of relation, immersion and rehearsal of interconnectedness, of mutual respect between the subject and the environment, and that is questioning itself, its own formal as well as institutional structures.

To un-limit artistic responsibility is similar to conducting the research to a level when it becomes apparent, visible and understandable, but also political, in the sense of Rancière – dealing with the disagreement and the difficult. In Boris Groys’ words…’it is contemporary art alone that is able to demonstrate the materiality of the things of this world beyond their exchange value’.²⁸ Therefore, it can also be said that unlimited artistic responsibility that is free of the boundaries of the system in contemporary art lies in knowledge creation, a process that we can also understand as artistic research and relational ethics. Tied to others, our shared sense of the environmental and more-than-human worlds, it quotes from everyday social life and transforms those quotes in critical, poetical and ethical-aesthetical language.

In a society of unlimited responsibility, art is also unlimitedly responsible. This may also imply the development of the notion of the total work of art. The art of unlimited responsibility questions the visible, exceeds that questioning, and urges us not only to see and become aware but to understand the polyhedron of relationships between: the artwork and the audience, the representational and institutional tactics, the way in which we can find possibility through bio-culture to live in right reciprocal relationship to the soil and land. The art of unlimited responsibility participates in offering answers about our transient society via the discussion, description and recovery.

Irena Lagator Pejović