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29.9. // 19,00 (action, installation on display until the end of the festival)
„Let's not be naïve and be against borders, for that could have value in the holy capitalist market. Resistances are turned into cash if their leaders are not aware. In that vein, let us recall one from the bible: “...all is allowed, but not all is for the good.” We could say that: only those who have gone beyond the border can (re)create one. Indeed, they could even create an Ante -BORDER. The border (from slippers and stars) between art and life is desirable. A supported border which prevents the automatism of freedom and its traps in the form of unconscious parts. The siren call of possibilities offered by technology and new media . For instance, the artist knows he needs to exercise caution. Sounds petty, doesn’t it? But it is also salutary, at least for the complete feeling of independent activity. Career and ego baggage have a certain weight and goal, but these do not have to be the artist’s favourite target. Respecting the useful border between art and life, and at the end of the adventure of their manifold intertwinings, one arrives at the kingdom of art also as an unimaginable dignity. Truth, rebellion, critical awareness, joy, responsibility and activism. What is within the border is strong because it is dense... We know that if it doesn’t happen, if there is no symbolism - there is no work of art. That can be explained on numerous levels...
Thoughtful insight will free us from the dilemma and the dichotomy of form and content. Now in the place of identity lies difference. The art of human rights, ecology and other more or less clear relational “aesthetics” shows the taking of the offered and the cultural. And so history unfolds with all the predictable “unpredictabilities.” Indeed, the offer includes development, democracy and the like. . But luckily, the awareness of art as an alchemy of flux, is alive too, as is the courage to sacrifice the selfish aims which implore us to sell out. (to capitalist culture).
The desirable border between art and life, no matter how much it imitates asceticism and self-sacrifice, still entails all the things that are easy and attractive at the beginning, and bitter and false in the end. The reverse step brings responsibility and knowledge of the gift and territory, the borders of which are known only to responsible anti-capitalist freedom. An overview of art from the second half of the 20th century to the present often brings to light the fatal inefficiency of mixing life and art, a series of dark alibis for the selfish powerlessness which in its core brings together the artist and the consumer citizen-egoist.” (excerpt from artist's text)
Vlado Martek, conceptual artist and poet (Zagreb, 1951). Graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in 1976. In the period from 1975-1978 he is active as part of the informal Croup of Six Authors, participating in their action-exhibitions and contributing to the start of a catalogue-magazine MA} 75. From 1978 to 1991 he exhibited in the alternative galleries Podrum and Prošireni mediji. Martek's art works include agitations, installations, ambiances, murals, various anonymous actions, drawings, graphics, paintings, collages aneJ poetic objects. He does land art and sculpture, writes poetry, essays anci graffiti. He also authorecl seventeen samizclats (self-publications) containing verse, drawingsl graphics and photographs. He is interested in the phenomenon of language, close to conceptualism, successfully synthesizing the originality of expression and the esthetics of sophistication. He publishes his texts in catalogues for exhibitions, monographs and magazines like Quorum, Problemi, Republika, Mars, Kolo, Život umjetnosti, Came Austrija, Preoccupations et.al. His publications are the following: Imajte me, 1995; Akcija pisanja: Bol u tekstu, 1997, Volim čitati poeziju, 2007; Pazi oštri tekstovi, 2005;Neprilagođeni, 2005; Prepoetry, 2006; Attention, sad works, 2007. The monograph Martek, fatalne figure umjetnika (Martek, Fatal Artist Figures), by the author Miško Šuvaković, was published in 2002.
