November 14h – December 16th 2022
Photo: Bojan Mrđenović
In search of meaning(s)
For me, the linear adventure of recording by means photography as a paper body, is behind me. After the exhibition Preparing for Photography at the Spot Gallery, a new deconstruction has followed. It palpates for the boundaries between photography and sculpture. The procedure of highlighting consists of cutting out the recorded context and foregrounding the figure. Often the figure is staged in its found volume. History knows this feature in the form of cut-out characters in mini-theatres; the similarities end there.
The very task of cutting out is a conservative one, but it opens up new vistas. I used to make clay figurines, their size suggesting a small world of disembodied emotions. Now a heavy layer of photographic memory-making is partly decoded, immersed in a new void and placed in spatial relation to the amplified meaning of the “rest”.
In a broader sense, this procedure of cutting out is a feng shui practice, preceded by mechanically cutting out and collaging photographs from an album. An alchemical transformation that in my case often serves to reduce a private compendium of photography.
Simply put, one form of memory has been supplanted by another, perhaps more lifelike one; an object. Thus, by focusing on the cut-out figure, the shot becomes ultimately expressive and vivid.
It is yet another way by which detaching from traditional aspects of the medium, one arrives at expanded photography, whereas the meaning of form or content is considerably amplified.
Amalgamation amplifies the story. A cut-out character can, for example, stand in front of a background, or, by means of cutting out, a character will draw on the forms from the rest of the original photo multiplying content and meanings.
The packaging of photographic material is included in the setting, which is an additional widening and provocation of meaning on a conceptual plane. A tautology of sorts, yet of unknown proportions.
Isn’t it somewhat absurd in photography, to look for new meanings in a photograph? Yes, that is a legitimate aspect of experimentation as well. It is as if in an actual poem, there was another, hidden or unhidden one.
In the framework of general (working) manipulation of photography (collages, assemblages, boxes), this exhibition brings an almost ultimately ludic aspect. In its intensity, the procedure is akin to retouching and erasing with which we are familiar in the world of politics.
However, the author believes that he has also avoided naïveté in the private spere (of photography).
In the Martek dossier, the magical world of civic photography will always fascinate the memory of experimentational art.
Vlado Martek, 2022
Vlado Martek is a poet, conceptual artist, painter, and essayist born in Zagreb on May 10, 1951. He graduated in literature and philosophy from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in 1976. Initially, he was involved in visual and concrete poetry (which he called “pre-poetry”) and from the mid-1970s in conceptualism and actionism (with the Group of Six Artists), art books, and self-publishing and self-distributing publications (samizdats, leaflets, posters, and postcards). From the early 1980s, he has been focusing on painting, sculpture, graphics, and land art. He writes texts on poetry, texts and reviews on visual art practices. Recently, he has returned to projects in the spirit of conceptualism and deals with photography as a conceptual form.
