not any other, but the other that is part of the culture of actual global and digital reproduction 1 of life. Kopljar designed “K12” as a media installation i.e. articulation of a completely dark gallery space with two screens and a photograph. For the viewer the screens and the photograph are exactly that—screens-backgrounds with two different characters of manifestation: staticdynamic. The exhibition consisted of two large scale video-screen projections. Due to the screens’ closeness the sounds are in interference. The photograph is the ‘silent’ participant. ‘Video 1’: a scene from a garden/forest shot by static camera; in the left front corner there is a table covered with white sheet and littered with empty bottles after some kind of a ‘party’; in the middle plane to the left from the vertical axis of the screen there is the artist dressed in black suit, white shirt and no tie, he is hanging on a rope from a branch. The sounds of forest/garden: chirping of birds. The video is 5:47 minutes long. The first screen, ‘Video 1’, shows the genre scene of the artist’s suicide. Kopljar wrote in one of his letters, “Video 1 speaks of the artist’s suicide—with consequences. I was interested in a situation in which everyone came to the suicide scene, saw it, had something to eat and drink, and left. The video is the final account.”2 The scene shown on the screen is the ‘after’ scene—taken a moment later or the next day. It shows what happens after suicide, after the event was accounted for—the moment of recorded absence of the event, everything that was important had already taken place, the viewer sees only traces, erased traces of the very life. ‘Video 2’: camera is moving, it circles ‘irregularly’, approaching and distancing from the artist wearing his black suit and white shirt without a tie whom we see in the forest, kneeling before a huge ball of light. He watches the ball. The sounds of a forest/garden: chirping of birds. The video is 3:21 minutes long. The second screen, ‘Video 2’, pictures the moment of indeterminateness, perhaps the moment of potentiality of the transformation of life, perhaps metaphysical or simply illusionistic suggestion of coming face to face with the other, the light, the moment in which one ‘being’ transforms into something that cannot be explicated. Kopljar very skillfully connotates this scene as both exceptional and trivial. The mixture of exceptional and trivial is provocative. Still, a completely different explanation is possible: the artist is the one who by focusing the gaze and attention of viewing makes every effort to become the one who knows. In Freud’s sense he is a psychoanalyst-analyst, while in Steiner 3’s sense he is the one 1
W. J. T. Mitchell, Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction Zlatko Kopljar, email – Sent : Thursday, August 02, 2007 3:40 PM – Subject: K12-sent 3 Rudolf Steiner (1961 - 1925) – Austrian thinker, philosopher and the founder of anthroposophy 2