IVA KOVAČ & ELVIS KRSTULOVIĆ
 

27 OCTOBER 2009

Interviewed by ANNABEL FENN & TRAVIS LEE STREET

    [^]LAND invites you to peel the layers off Croatian artists Iva Kovač and Elvis Krstulović, whose current works address issues of authorship, artist’s rights and relationships of gentrification and art.

Rhetoric bodies Elvis Krstulović               

Iva Kovač and Elvis Krstulović are two Croatians who not only possess the coolest names of any contemporary Balkan artists, they also have the most intriguing concepts and ideas that aim to question and approach critically both the art market/system and the culture at large. Their work embodies a strong emancipatory spirit and promotes a self-educating ethos and a challenge to establishments through performance, drawing, painting and lecturing. [^]LAND met up with them at their residency at Stone and Water gallery in a small Korean market based outside of Seoul, perhaps the least likely place you’d imagine such eloquent and thoughtful artists to be residing.

Could you tell us a little about the history of Croatia and how it affects Croatian artists?

Iva Kovač: After the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 and the division between Eastern and Western Europe no longer existed in the same sense, many became interested in how artist’s working conditions differed between the East and West. There were many exhibitions in the West about Balkan art, such as Blood and Honey – Futures in the Balkans, curated by Harald Szeemann, which fed the West’s interest for politically based works produced in the context of the variants of communism. Eastern European artists had a politicized image that was perpetuated in the West and is something still resonating now, even in our generation which is so influenced by the West. Since the Balkans are integrating (in a political sense) to the West via the EU, people are trying to understand what the new position is and working inside this new position. But our work is not always influenced by local situations; we approach art in various ways.

Re_creation Iva Kovač               

How did your work begin?

IK: I started in 2005 with explicit activist feminist work which was in contrary to the system of education in Croatia. The system of art education there is based on old modernist and pre-modernist literature and therefore we’re studying what it is to be an artist from the perspective of the, lets say, 1950s. The literature you read is genderally unequal and not inviting if you are a female artist, so I tried to do public works that would interfere with that notion. In one of my early works I used 6 different quotes from philosophers and authors who had made misogynist comments about females and I have printed them on posters with the author’s signature on the bottom. For instance one of the quotes was Schoppenhaur’s from his essay On Women where he wrote “When laws gave women equal rights, as to the humans (men), they should have given them the same reason”. Yet one of the things that I realised is that people don’t notice these statements and this was why I made public posters. If you make it public and explicit in that way people will see.

That was the first time I made art in the public domain. I did it anonymously by putting the posters in locations that were semi-legal to use, like windows of closed-down stores where people promote concerts and so on. I would come and put posters up and check for reactions through observations - posters got torn and people would write on them, there were internet forums discussing the project, I spoke to the people when putting the posters etc. This piece actually managed to do its activist side as it became discussed in the media after a show I have made and therefore publicly claimed the authorship.

Elvis Krstulović: This kind of literature which is used in the Croatian education system reflects the system itself and the way how many teachers position themselves. But the system within institutions of education is completely different to the one outside. The galleries show contemporary art and participate in the international art world, therefore the two systems collide often.

IK: Another piece I would like to mention is my thesis work. It is consisted of paintings depicting 3 different performances and a text. I have made paintings since I was studying painting at the Academy. Subject vise my thesis was discussing 3 different figures in performance art – Vannesa Beecroft, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni – who used other people as objects in their performances while at the same time they did not position themselves as the object of their own work, which was a liberating side effect (being at the same time the subject who is performing the piece and the object of the observers gaze) of what performance art in most of it’s paradigmatic works came to represent. Through the extensive text I have discussed theoretical and ethical positions of these three case studies.

Since my work is very much concerning the context I am presenting it to, the work was intended to produce a reaction of the thesis committee. The paintings themselves were not received as such a problem but the comparison of the 3 figures was. Firstly two of them, namely Manzoni and especially Klein are within the modernist discourse regarded as the genius while Beecroft is treated as merely a media star. Secondly the biggest problem was that I, as a student, dared to tackle with such inaccessible figures in the first place. In the text I was describing my frank opinions on the subject matter knowing this will produce a conflictual situation. In the Academy’s point of view I did not succeed to make a significant work, but fortunately an external committee was gathered to give a best thesis prize for that year and my work got awarded.

Citati plakate Iva Kovač               

That’s a telling illustration of the contrasting operations of the education and gallery systems. What about your work, Elvis?

EK: My art approaches how to address one’s own identity in relation to art. I work mostly with photographic material, using it as documentation and also material for final artworks. I’ve been working for 2 years on a four-part project called Rhetoric Bodies, which plays with the idea of deconstructing the notion of the whole self: the self as a self-sufficient entity, ownership of oneself… and trying to make works that would introduce a relational type of identity determined under different circumstances and situations. I was playing a lot with Lacan’s idea of how the subject is gradually introduced into society’s patterns, from the first stage of the formless self, to trying to get at self image with our first encounter with the mirror, and finally when you merge into society and the external images that these stages can be seen in.

What influences your work?

EK: It is like a dialogue with theories and the understanding of things - with the language.

After Rhetoric bodies I made an intervention in a gallery space to comment on the relation of artists to the art system and gallery system. In Croatia we have no contemporary art-market in the real sense, there are few collectors in the country so it determines your position; what an exhibition is for you, what is the life of the art work from creation to exhibition, and afterwards too. The choice which we take is not to play in this collector-arena at all; if you treat the exhibition as a way of promoting yourself you have to have certain kind of objects to sell… and is funny because the artist in Croatia is the only person in the system who is not paid.

In this piece i tried to make a small subversion of the system by making an art piece the gallery cannot get rid of – I wrote 4 short stories about the scars I have on my body and I was interested in these scars because they are like a photographic trace, you have this trace of this un-present event on your body in the form of a scar. So I wrote short stories of how these 4 scars came about and cut these texts into the walls of the gallery, deep enough to go through all the layers of the color , until I reached the concrete, 1 cm or so. In a way I was trying to make the walls of the gallery asume the atributes of my body in a symbolic way. After I cut into it, I used plaster to fill these holes, since plaster is a little grey and the walls were white you could see it, but only if you looked for it.

IK: Like it was a wound, but a healed one.

EK: The wound is now, I wanted to make something that had been. So you had a bridge from the gallery system that referred to myself. The most important part of the work was that even when the wall is painted over, it stays there anyway. Maybe one day if they put a nail in the place where there was one of my scars the wall pieces could fall off – they will always have it there, like a hidden monument of some sort.

Scars Elvis Krstulović               

How did your art market talks come about and your residency at Stone and Water in South Korea?

IK: We have to find a way to sustain ourselves and not lead a life we don’t want to lead. We cannot change the general art system but we can always work on specific locations that we know a lot about and try to improve the system through our work. I try to learn as much as possible through doing art to produce change.

EK: Each of the works we do together is also approached from different angles; it means something different for both of us. For me, I think, each brings another aspect to the artwork, and I approach it by dealing with identity as well and what the position of the artist is and how it is determined within the society. So it is also an economic notion - your artwork has its place within the system because it uses money from the country, the state - it has a position within the market.

Would you like to say what this is building up to in the future?

IK: We are here in Korea because we need time and place to work, and we are able to do that if we are in a residency, and it is, maybe, building towards making a work that uses the market system as a medium we could play with but at the moment we are gathering information to know more about it. Well see.

EK: It is using the system of art gallery, residency, whatever, and you use it as a venue to realize the work within. You need a certain network to be able to communicate your work trough and so far art institutions like galleries and residencies have been most accessible to us.

IK: It is some kind of negotiation and that is also interesting because if you had freedom to do exactly what you wanted you wouldn’t make some changes that you do make, which might be good. It is a negotiation between us and the organization, the residency and us.

Art & Market Elvis Krstulović & Iva Kovač              

Now you are conducting public lectures as a way to educate yourself and drawing analogies between the site specific of where you are and also the art market, non-commercial art…

IK: Public art projects are something that can have a good or bad impact on the site. Gentrification processes can use art as a tool, so that the land becomes more valuable, building an image of the land and increasing its price. People want a kind of art work that is a decorative entertaining and non-confrontational. Also there is a thing with saying that public art is for the people or that art placed in a public space is directly something for the people, yet it is contradictory because in order to understand it as art you have to have the knowledge to interpret it.

Art & Market Iva Kovač & Elvis Krstulović              

But there are also art practices that produce change in that sense, and can affect sites in a way that will not be gentrification - but how do you do that and what is your strategy? That is what we intend to work on for the last lecture – it is always within this idea of art and the market and how they relate to each other.

http://ivakovac.blogspot.com/
http://elviskrstulovic.blogspot.com/