The world today is, well… in quite a mess, if you'll pardon the euphemism. We are not lagging behind at all, as we know. Things are serious, issues of vital importance are being resolved, which will determine the future of this society. And so, in the course of all that, maybe because of that, even in the middle of the summer, we decided to deal with the issues art and what's worse, some theoretical questions related to it. Some would say - where will your soul go, but we will try to somehow win them over until the end of the text.
Discussions about what is art or what is "real" art and what is not, have been going on for two centuries and quite expectedly, have not brought definitive answers. The discussion is stormy and often confused, the arguments are numerous and conflicting, and yet not everything is so unclear. We somehow intuitively feel when something - an object, a sound, an event, a movement, an action - becomes so filled with meaning, beauty and meaning, new and exciting, that we recognize it as art.
ART AND SKILL
For the Latins and the ancient Greeks, all these material and immaterial works were ars and techne - skill, skill, craft. Those terms applied to shipbuilding and medicine and chair manufacturing, as well as sculpture or music. Art, as we know, only acquired its current meaning and status from the 18th century. And as the artistic life became more fragmented and complex, the first but immediately sharp confrontations between the cultural establishment and the new forces came, as could be expected. Thus, new ideas in painting, literature, music were met with a knife, their artistic value, but also their artistic nature itself, was denied, in some cases and not entirely without justification.
Apart from the purely aesthetic ones, the question of skill was practically immediately raised as a key issue. New movements and artists were reproached for not creating their works with sufficient craftsmanship. Of course, life, with its impeccable, almost British sense of irony, has caused quite the opposite remarks to be heard in recent decades - that one's work is too skillful and therefore predictable, strangely denying the right of a work to be both skillful and imaginative at the same time. Josip Kulundžić, a great director and professor of dramaturgy, as his students say, welcomed each new generation with the message: "Dear young colleagues, never forget that the root of the word art is art". Even in everyday speech, we say that those beans are so good that they are art, that someone speaks so beautifully as if he were a poet, that someone drives a car so skillfully that he is a real virtuoso, an artist. For some reason, we still expect that art implies excellence, skill, knowledge, apart from the idea itself.
I have to emphasize right away, somewhat for personal safety, that it is not my intention to impose any kind of general court or even less judgment on this topic. It's a personal feeling and it's not at all impossible, although it's not very likely, that he's cheating on me. And so we arrived, almost imperceptibly, at a place where almost every conversation starts with controversies, raised voices, demonstratively getting up from the table and subsequent phone calls of apology. And in fact, there is no need for that. It seems that we are only wrong in that we have glorified the concept of art and, on the other hand, set it too broadly. A situation has been created in which every product of creative thinking must necessarily be considered art and that for some reason it is less valuable if it is not, which is an absurd idea.
TWO TELEVISIONS AND A ROOM
I remember one work in the Cultural Center of Belgrade in the early 96s, I apologize to the author for not remembering his/her name - there were two television sets next to each other, one of which showed footage of student demonstrations from 'XNUMX. and on the other there was only "snow". The author noted that at some point there was social energy and desire for change, but later it disappeared. Or he wanted to say that there were some media that reported freely, but they are no longer there. Or both. I found the work attractive, effective, with messages that are recognizable and close to me, except that, in my opinion, it was not a work of art, but something else. Which in no way made him less valuable and important, but simply fell into some long categories of human action. I didn't then, and I don't see now, what's wrong with something belonging to the domain of social action, statement or philosophical insight, why should it be a work of art if it's not a work but a kind of expression? Once again, works of art in the narrow, conventional sense, if I may say so, are in no way "better" or of greater weight, of course not. They are just different in nature and it is not necessary and not good to mix them and evaluate them with the same tools and criteria. It seems that this is rather a terminological question, whether we should call something art or some other term.
Does a product of the human spirit not necessarily include a work, made with a certain amount of skill and technique, but only an idea conveyed by a verbal or non-verbal expression or gesture? Can we take an existing object and declare it art, like Duchamp and many after him? Can the idea, context and decision of the artist have more importance than the object itself? Of course I can. Can we call it all art? Also, of course we can. If we want to. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Picasso Bull's head was, of course, made from bicycle parts, but he didn't just state that a steering wheel plus a saddle equals a bull, he sculpted using a steering wheel and a saddle.
Slavko Timotijević and his colleagues from the artistic group Ekipa A3 took a wooden plow sometime in the XNUMXs and set off across Terazije on Maršala Tita Street to symbolically plow the asphalt. A great idea, a multi-layered message, some young people at the time felt the need to shake up the battered, ossified reality and devised and performed a believable performance. Somewhere in those years, the director Dejan Mijač also came into his own By open sea in the Yugoslav Drama Theater brought completely new and fresh ideas to theater direction, plowing through Nušić's drama in terms of aesthetics and genre. Both events are seriously considered and successfully implemented ideas, but it would not be logical and probably fair to one or the other if we put them in the same context, compare them with each other and evaluate them with the same instruments.
THEATER
Which brings us to the question that, somewhat and for selfish reasons, we single out - that of the artistic nature of theater direction in this context. Is the director's role primarily exhausted by the staging of the dramatic text and more or less organizational issues of rehearsals and coordination of all participants, as has been believed for centuries, or is the director's work on a play an authentic, independent work of art, which is an opinion that is practically taken for granted today. The question of the artistic role of the director essentially came down to the question of the dominant role of the dramatic text in the theatrical performance. Our brave predecessors, however, at the end of the 19th century. century opposed such a situation and began to treat the dramatic template only as a starting point for the performance, as one of its many elements. Petar Marjanović is in his extraordinary studies on theatrology Theater or the fate of transience cited two opinions that sublimate these two views. One of Professor Ivan Medenica's: "The fate of the dramatic text in contemporary theater is such that its meanings are not revealed in the directing process, but rather created." And secondly, the proverbial sharp-witted professor Dimitrije Đurković: "I always ask a director where the text and the performance are at odds, why he chose that text. Let him take another text for his idea that he loves so much, and if there is no such text, let him write it himself."
And as is the case in many theater debates, both sides seem to be a little bit right. However, although there seems to be no controversy here, things are a little more complicated, as always when it comes to theater. Namely, although the artistic nature of directing is not (any longer) questionable, some very serious theater people, whose opinion I tend to agree with, question the dominant role of the artistic in the whole of the theatrical act. They see theater primarily as a social act and only then as art. And that company is really impressive. Brecht says: "The theater is a social event: people gather to observe and participate in a shared experience"; Piscator: "Theater is not art for art's sake. What happens on stage concerns the community"; Wagner perceives theater as a "social act" and Artaud sees theater as a "collective act", more like a social experience than a "work". So, with no small amount of pride, it can be stated that when it comes to this topic, theater people have gone the furthest. We have not only questioned the artistic status of certain approaches and individual works in our discipline like others, but we, at least many of us, are ready to challenge the dominantly artistic nature of the entire theater by insisting on its social component. No one else was willing to go that far.
Perhaps I will be accused of trying to artificially calm the debate here in fear of reactions from angry readers with opposing views or what could be even more dangerous, from colleagues, theater and other artists, but this is still only a theoretical consideration which, like many others so far, will not have an overly strong influence on artistic practice. Often the cause of such discussions is just our need to classify and sort things on our mental shelves, instead of accepting all the chaos of the artistic life and letting ourselves enjoy the messy, messy reality.
