Friday, May 23, 2008

DAT book - Preface by János Kurdy Fehér

Milorad Krstic: Das Anatomische Theater: Simultaneous Games of the Twentieth Century


“In this Anatomical Theatre of mine I have the 20th century placed on the dissection table; people, events and phenomena therefore wear no costumes or masks, even their skin is torn off, tissues are cut through, bones and muscles revealed, the nervous, blood and lymph systems are opened up for observing. The walls of the Theatre remind us of the walls of a biological lab surrounded by glass showcases filled with neatly arranged bottles in which, floating in a 40%-formaldehyde solution, the body parts of world history await their curious observer.”
Milorad Krstic

“To make seen what makes one see, and not what is visible.”
Jean-François Lyotard

Das Anatomische Theater (DAT) is a collection of sweeping, colourful drawings. It can be thought of as a visual encyclopaedia of the 20th century interpreted freely and artistically. It covers almost all important events, and attempts to broach all knowledge. Of course, this “all” is highly selected. The best way of fathoming the depths of DAT is to conceive of it as it defines itself – as a theatre. This theatre is made up, not of words, but of images, and thus its logic is also different. Through the metaphor of theatre, we can readily conceive and interpret its constitutive units, separate its parts, and put them back together in the course of the “performance”, which, in this case, means looking and, to a certain extent, reading. We can perform the operation the artist himself applies in DAT: dissection, investigation and separation of parts, placing them in new, yet unknown systems of relations, giving them new interpretations.
DAT, however, is also highly self-reflexive, and, by a necessity it affirms, it refers back to its own medium: the being and role of the work of art, drawing and seeing per se. It can thus be interpreted as a manifesto of visual art, too. However, it is also reflexive within the system of relations between artist and viewer – that is, DAT not only operates a massive stream of knowledge, in which one can immerse himself according to his or her abilities indulging in the experience of abandoned bathing or of resignation to the fear of vacuums and vortices, but also the visual guile whereby it can be pored through as though it were a “How Do Images Work” practice book and compilation of examples in the flood of images inundating our time. Much like the world book in Borges’ short story, it allows for an almost infinite number of viewpoints and readings.
Representing abstract ideas through pictures and visual-textual references is no novel invention; the procedure seems to have spanned the whole of European culture, indeed, all culture. We could mention prehistoric scripts, the hieratic and the demotic sign systems, the iconic panels enabling the understanding of the Latin liturgy and theology, the iconostases, mediaeval illuminations, the illustrations drawn in modern scientific works, or mediaeval maps (neither pictures nor texts, but alluring road signs) meant, in a third capacity, to represent miraculous and fabulous alien worlds. But we can also think of the aristocratic or middle-class portrait galleries, or the 19th-century custom of simply putting up scores of pictures, whereby the often aimless display enriched them with newer and newer meanings. Or we can bring up the sign posts or pictorial pamphlets used to quench the media-engendered thirst for images, or the graphic illustrations in the press of the pre-photo period by such masters as Goya.
Characteristic forerunners of DAT could be the curiosity cabinets, which began to spread in the 18th century, with their collections of attractions we often associate with a witty or scholarly-like extemporization by the owner. One such collection, the Cuming Museum, preserved intact in London, was accumulated by Richard Cuming (1777-1870) and his son, Henry (1807-1902). It holds some 100.000 objects – collectibles of a Victorian dream world. The 18th and 19th-century custom of keeping diaries can also be regarded as a precursor: the written text being illustrated by free-hand drawings, sketches or pictorial clippings. Regarding formal analogies, modern-day comics also come to mind, as do family photo albums with the family head’s instantaneous monologizing on private matters: romping about in space and time, dwelling on body parts, joys and sorrows. And last but not least, we can mention museums, these socially distinguished places of collection. The museum, as such, can be thought of as a collection of the various forms of aggression. Touching objects is no other than wielding power, the conduct of the proprietor. Taking possession of something operates through two procedures: dissection, i.e. annexation in a metaphorical sense of the word, and repetition. We cannot imagine power without dissection, while repetition ensures a sense of being in power, and establishes new context: all things belong together though all are divisible into parts. Were it motional, DAT could be a historical clip or a full-length animation film on the sinisterly swirling 20th century.
Formally, DAT could draw on many things – and so it did. In its final form, however, it is identical with itself because in both content and diversity, in having broader and braver processes of perception, intellectual and emotional associations, it is much more than all those listed.

Dramatis Personae
The story of DAT is the 20th century. Its dramatis personae includes: arts, philosophies, literatures, cinema, music, sciences, wars, consumer customs, and “micrologies” selected from “foreshortenings” or condensations of the major characteristics of the “dramatis personae”. The drawings of DAT capture the 20th century in minor units (the titles of films, the figures of novels, allusions to paintings and music), i.e. in its micro-worlds. The drawings are themselves micro-worlds, world constellations sketched in a few lines. Micrology, as Lyotard conceives it, inscribes the occurrence of a thought in the decline of great philosophical thought. There are therefore foreshortenings that influence the totality of great systems (science, philosophy, the arts), and even change or destroy them. These are the micrologies Krstic found in the 20th century, and, in his drawings, he put them on stage in his anatomical theatre. While the 20th century falls apart into micrologies in DAT, the minimal units conjured up are capable of rendering the great changes of the 20th century intelligible, while also calling attention to hidden relationships (cf. between sexuality and power, art and publicity). The characters of DAT appear not as expoundings of philosophical or scientific ideas; naturally, the medium of visual, freehand drawing could hardly be suitable for this. What comes into view is a reference, but the reference itself is imbedded in a visual texture. The visual texture with its figuralism is a domain belonging to the world, whose stocks the draughtsman has called up. Krstic breaks down the theories he summons into visual micrologies, and they remain so as long as the interpreter himself does not eke them out again, or does not explode the stock. What goes on seldom happens: theory is present but its description, its text, remains hidden, concealed in the cloud of connotation of the ideal viewer-reader. (This magic is facilitated by the ontological primacy of the eye and the process of seeing, to which we shall return to when discussing the “plot” of DAT). We ought to think not that there is some concord between the interpretation of the reader and the artist, but that there is a game the artist encodes as a kind of map into the world of his drawings, the discovery of which waits upon the viewer of the book. We thus have come to the next figure in the dramatis personae – “maps”.
The map as such appears in DAT not in the mundane sense of the word, but as a “granulate of fiction” capable of opening up internal ethnographic worlds. Like dreams and drugs, it makes us look into strange mirrors. Krstician maps facilitate wanderings and adventures beyond the borders of the usual. The maps in DAT are munitions for enhancing interpretation and reception. Particular figures are connected by map signs, such as male and female genitalia. These signs also define the points of interpretation of the events conjured; for instance, the relationship between the Russian Communist revolution and the lust for the world of the Tsar and his power elite. The maps encoded in DAT often call attention to the most absurd, nonetheless, actual political happenings in history. For instance, the year 1943 is represented by a drawing in which Adolf Hitler orders the publication of Winnetou by Karl May* in 300,000 copies and their distribution among German soldiers serving on the fronts. In certain cases, maps refer to hidden coincidences or effects of artistic form and theme coming through centuries. In 1961, David Hockney re-drew Hogarth’s famous eight-piece series of paintings A Rake’s Progress, later issued as etchings, and a decade earlier, in 1951, Stravinsky had composed an opera with the title A Rake’s Progress. In DAT, Krstic recreates the whole story with his own figures, making use of all the variations on the theme. Another example is Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths: Konstantin Stanislavski premièred it in Moscow in 1902; then in 1903, Max Reinhardt staged it again in the Berlin Kleines Theater; in 1936, Jean Renoir made a film bearing the same title; and, in 1957, Akira Kurosawa adapted it to film again. We leave the joys of tracing all further details to the readers of the book. The pseudo-maps of Krstic are thus road signs pointing to the new worlds (their contents and their forms) 20th-century thought created. In this second nature representing the first nature of man, we rely on maps for grasping culture and receiving individual works of art, just as early geographers in mapping the unknown areas of the world had done, or their cybernetic descendants do, who use 21st-century technology and abstract series of numbers to draw maps accurate to the metre.

Next in the dramatis personae is a couple: the “visible” and the “invisible”. They have significant roles in DAT from three respects. First, there is a whole array of texts both as inspiration and reference lying dormant behind 20th-century modern and post-modern art. In his essay, “Art in Search of its Text”, Beat Wyss argues that the works of the most successful artists always progressed parallel to the latest researches and discoveries in science. It is therefore some “non-art texts” that make up the invisible iconology of modern art. 20th-cenurty theoretical physics broke the world up into protons, electrons and quarks, and artists saw in these invisible streams of force their very own natural worldview, the relationship between mind and their creative selves and activities. Beat Wyss goes on to explain that the universe is constituted of invisible streams of force – or “arousals”, as Malevich has it – and, according to our conceptions, the emanations of world-will condense into material form. The physical state of affairs is based on the condensation of mind into matter, which Heidegger calls the “forgetting of being.” Impressionism was accompanied by theories of perception, Abstraction by atomic research, Pop Art by the discoveries and texts of communication theory. Second, the viewer – to refer to Beat Wyss again – responding to works of art, begins to revolve in a hermeneutical circle, and in order to be able to directly “sense” the message of an artwork, he has to interiorize its symbolically interpretable signs to such an extent that he forgets their contents by the time he encounters their forms again. Thus he can stand in front of an artwork in pious awe, and can, though without recognizing it, celebrate his very self in its mirror standing alone: a hermeneutical Narcissus falling in love with himself as the other in the still surface of the water. He listens to the water as though it were a shell, and the flux of his blood echoing in it becomes the sea for him. Third, it should be noted that the world as “body and flesh” lies on the dissection table of DAT, and it is in this state that it awaits the line of the scalpel cut, i.e., in our case, the drawing. In DAT, the body is equal to the world, and, as Merleau-Ponty reminds us, “the body belongs in the order things as the world is universal flesh… it is neither a thing seen only nor seer only, it is Visibility sometimes wandering and sometimes reassembled.” (Like a bee to the flower, or, should you wish, like a perpetrator to the scene of his crime, we shall return to the bewildering circles of the power of the artwork as this equivalence when discussing the plot of DAT.)
Our fourth character is the duality of “surface and depth”. In DAT, apparently, everything is on the surface, but this “is” has more to do with flowing and streaming than with being fixed. Waves carry pieces and wrecks of references and relationships on the surface of the drawing as though they were waste without any further use. DAT is a product of the global village of information. It dares ripple on surfaces; it will not get tangled up in trying to regulate its complicated channels or research its academic relationships. Audaciously, it has recourse to the world and fact-finding systems of our times in the senses of both the creative horizon of individual interest and the mundane looking-up on the Internet.
The fifth member in our list of persons is “the modern self”. In the first pages of DAT, representing the year 1900, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams appears as an overture of sorts. If we wish to find an easily perceptible dividing line between the 19th and the 20th centuries, the most obvious candidate will be conceptions regarding the “self”. Freud’s interpretations of dreams, his concepts of the “unconscious”, the “superego”, the “id”, “childhood sexuality”, “Oedipus complex”, and “guilt” were the uproarious symphony of a new era. With confidence and creative verbal formulations, the master brought to the surface issues that had lurked unsaid in the thought of the 19th-century intellectual elite as if they had been secret teachings of sorts or intuitions. This was just what had been on my mind, noted the French writer André Gide in his diaries. Many realized that they had always been Freudians without knowing it. A fundamental revolution took place in the outer world and, not in the least, the creative self. Freud’s ideas entrenched themselves almost everywhere. The new “self” formulated in Freudian theory but only hunched at elsewhere set, among others, the avant-garde movements in motion. There was hardly a manifestation of life, from the papers to fashion, that could remain aloof from Freud’s influence. Avant-garde magazines became the sources of types and images for the “new self” – DAT also makes use of these.
In My Life, the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka writes that, when he and Herwarth Walden, the publisher of the Der Sturm, and his wife, Elsa Lasker-Schüler, went to find subscribers for the magazine, passers-by in the streets of Bonn, seeing their looks and behaviour, ran together, children laughed at their outlandish figures, and some irritated university students nearly gave their eye-catching, undoubtedly exotic, provocatively dressed and behaving company a thorough thrashing. This self demanded the destruction of old values, and wanted to take in everything: the new psychology, physics, the sexual customs of the primitives, speed, and, most of all, boundlessness. Tornado-like, it swept along everywhere, and sucked up everything. The young Gottfried Benn, whom Brecht said wrote his poems with his surgeon’s scalpel, described the storm-likeness of this “new self” in his essay “The Modern Self”. In a colossal and sweeping image, the poet runs his eye over the Earth identifying the self with everything from the desert to the seas, from reefs to the gulls of Azores and wonderfully varied leaping fish, from the Gulf Current, the most dazzling woman in New York called the Statue of Liberty, the boundless prairie, the landscapes and fruits California and Canada, to the last poison molecule festered in the saliva of a dying person. Myth and science, fact and fiction wheel in the vortex of the modern self Benn encountered. The effect of the tornado is almost palpable. The imperative that everything is related to everything in the world is born. The Polish emigrant writer Witold Gombrowicz was to write a few decades later in Argentina far more simply, though no less cryptically, about the deep structure of the self: Monday: the self. Tuesday: the self. Wednesday: the self. Thursday: the self. Irony and pathos are thus juxtaposed in the bell-glass of the modern self.
The sixth figure in the dramatis personae is the machine. In the drawings of DAT, we repeatedly encounter compositions alluding to mechanical operation. Heads, limbs, genitals, arms work as machinery running the whole world through; clicking and clattering, they produce: ideas, wars, suppressions. It was no mere coincidence that certain Dadaist montage-makers, such as the Austrian Grosz and the German Heartfield, called themselves mechanics, masters of machinery.
The seventh person is sexuality, eroticism, or, with minor restrictions, pornography. A viewer of DAT may often have the itching or revolting impression that the principle of “everything relates to everything” can be swapped for the practice “everybody has sex with everybody.” This, however, has nothing to do with pornography in the mundane sense of the word. It is rather the sheer, un-principled physical superiority of power that automatically and always starts to operate – a machinery striking down relentlessly on all. Power feeds on pornography just as (to use a recurring topos in DAT) a steam engine feeds on coal.
Our eighth person in the DAT strolling company is the arch-phenomenon redesigned into an avant-garde dandy. The father of the arch-phenomenon was no other than the inventor and promoter of world literature – Johann Wolfgang Goethe. In Bauhaus, Kandinsky, prompted by Klee, gave new momentum to Goethe’s favoured creation, the “thought form”. According to the avant-garde version of the arch-phenomenon, the modern form signifies nothing, but exists as a mumbling manifestation of its existence. It holds true for all arch-phenomena that form is at once content; art is at once its own truth, too; thus the subject and truth of perception is one and the same. For art is what it says; its form is not an alphabet or a hieroglyph referring to something else, some intellectual – obviously putative – content or meaning, which is something. The artistic search for the arch-phenomenon is similar to the scientific concept that all physical or chemical theories can be traced back to a general grand theory. The arch-phenomenon is transposed by the vibrations of the artwork into the viewer so as to be able to exert its blissful influence in a new body. Its mission is to elicit an inner voice, and, if possible, to amplify it socially.

The Krstician method is to make agents of seeing, eyes, view, image and drawing. The plot is relative. DAT is no comic (though it does make use of some of its attractive elements), and it has no subject matter in the usual sense. The plot unfolds not according to the progress of the so-called events, but to the birth of the drawings. The dramatis personae (the micrologies, the modern self, the maps, the visible and the invisible, etc.) are summoned in the course of the plot, i.e. in the process of seeing and drawing.
The motor of the plot is the juxtaposition of freehand drawings based on simultaneous visual and intellectual experiences. The series thus arranged connotes the wholeness of 20th-century history. The pages of the book forge ahead year by year in the century while, as though in a muffled rumble, we hear the continuing interpretation of the artist, his associations and intellectual connections being brought to life by the process of drawing. Proust’s biscuit dipped in tea is Krstic’s line left by the pencil on the paper or the process of seeing itself as the artist opens up to the world: “A certain fire pretends to be alive; it awakens. Working its way along the hand as a conductor, it reaches the support and engulfs it; then a leaping spark closes the circle it was to trace, coming back to the eye and beyond,” wrote Paul Klee.
The year 1961 is represented by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind”. This drawing is one of the poetic pillars of DAT. Merleau-Ponty thought the enigma of artistic representation is in the fact that the body simultaneously sees and is seen. According to his exhortation, seeing should not be interpreted as some kind of procedure of thought, for the body, which is itself seeing, does not monopolize it, but, by looking, it comes close to seeing, and opens itself to the world. “Things have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence. Why shouldn’t these [correspondences] in their turn give rise to some external visible shape in which anyone else could recognize those motifs which support his own inspection of the world? Thus there appears ‘visible’ of the second power, carnal essence or icon of the first.” The eye is capable of opening up to the mind that which is not mind, and thus renders the domain of things understandable. Krstic represents Merleau-Ponty’s theory by turning its message into a medium. In DAT, the message is the medium itself.
Thus, the driving force of the plot of DAT is the image hidden in the depths or the logic of the pictures themselves. The most important issue in the 20th-century philosophy of art is how images used everywhere work and are understood. With regard to images, Freud talks of a stream of conceptions in comparison to which thought and judgment are merely secondary. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein goes as far as to say: “Don’t think, but look!” According to Austrian novelist Robert Musil, an image traces actual sense back to “possibility meaning”. For metaphorologies deriving from Nietzsche, concepts are no more than cooled metaphors. A whole series of mythological heroes have become and remained famous through their images: Narcissus, Pygmalion, Daedalus and Icarus, Veronica’s cloth, or the heroes of Chinese painter legends who, crossing the frames of their paintings, appear in or disappear from their planes. According to Merleau-Ponty, an image lends flesh to that which is absent. The power of images is that they open up our eyes to something invisible, to something that has no body or face, or to something thought or dreamed of. Pictures are declarations: “They stiffen life into matter, and bring it to new life through artistic means. With regard to creating sense, it is nevertheless decisively important that the act of seeing inherent in an image comes to new life.” The logic of the images (as the totality of the many simple lines and colourful spots) is capable of carrying the plot of DAT further, and thereby render history tangible. In whatever noise and murmuring of text, the pictures preserve the erudition of their expressive power.
The art of the 20th century is the art of a changed way of seeing. We might like to call this the Copernican revolution of sight. It has nothing to do with the artists’ so-called sharp-sightedness and sure hand. It was the sense of perception, the need to control the processes of seeing that changed in the course of the century. In the works of the artists, the image, so to speak, plays with its own existence. It demonstrates that it is a sort of machinery of the phenomena the viewer is concerned with. The visibility of reality is thus not manifested as fact but as desire entrusted to the activity of the eye. When Duchamp proclaimed the end of painting in 1913, he was reflecting on the fact that photography had left its mark on visual consciousness, thus the retinal fixedness of painting was incurably damaged and delimited. The revolution in sight points out that whatever art perceives is a phenomenon, a possible reality. The apparently smooth surface of the world is breached by jumps and clefts. Through them, it becomes clear that reality is no sure basis but an abyss of inestimable depth which may suddenly be disclosed here and there, and thus open new, untrodden ways for other, newer scenarios

The setting is partly the disused dissection table in the shed with all odds and ends covering it. The famous and fruitful adage by the French Comte de Lautréamont on the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella was multiply and scientifically proved in the 20th century. It has turned out that the encounter of seemingly remote things, their drifting close to one another and their interaction exert a productive effect on not only aesthetic beauty, but also the exploration of the secrets of nature. This was how the German Wilhelm Röntgen chanced upon his peculiar rays in 1895, and how the Frenchman Pierre and Pole Marie Curie chanced upon polonium and radium radioactivity. Chance and later experiments founded on ad hoc results had a fundamental role in the great discoveries of the period between 1895 and 1911. The image of the atom shaped as a consequence of accidental encounters pried the frame of old theories so far apart that the scientific, physical phenomena of the world could no longer be explained within their scope. Chance led to the outlining of a radically new and different world. There was no hope of drawing back into the pre-accidental condition.
On the other hand, the setting is a gigantic monstrosity: it rooms World War I, the Russian revolution and civil war, Hitler’s rule with World War II, the Holocaust, the communism of Joseph Stalin, the Cold War, Mao Zedong’s regime and cultural revolution, the Korean and Vietnam wars, South-American and African acts of terror, the Near East and the Balkans. A dissection table with room for over 200 million bodies bled to death, burned, starved, shot, hanged, beheaded, gassed.
Thirdly, the setting is a presentiment: the eye, as suggested by Merleau-Ponty, catching sight of the flesh of the world. The philosopher describes the flesh of the world (in relation to time, space and movement) as separation, dimensionality, continuity, dormancy, transgression and overlapping: “my body is made up of the same flesh as the world is …, and moreover this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world(…) they are in a relation of transgression or of overlapping” When the scalpel pencil opens up the chest of the 20th century on the dissection table of DAT the idios kosmos (the private world) meets the koinos kosmos (the shared world). The drawing is the outside of the inside, the inside of the outside. Without this duality, we would never sense the threatening closeness of visibility, which constitutes the whole problem of the imaginary.
Fourthly, the setting is made up of the masses of stories that have happened to individuals; it is the space opened up by micro-history, the events that interpreters’ knowledge can weave into the DAT fabric, which is open to such exercise – a space which can hold those moments of chance in which nothing extraordinary seems to take place, except that those who assured others that they had nothing in common are shown to be related, even sharing a common foundation. Here is an example: at the premier of Stravinsky’s Renard in Paris on 18 May, 1922, two of the greatest novelists of the early century, the Frenchman Marcel Proust and the Irishman James Joyce, met. It was at a reception that Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario of Ballets Russes, gave for the performing artists. The stage designer, who happened to be the Spaniard Pablo Picasso, was also present. Having offended Stravinsky at the reception, Proust took a merry James Joyce to his home by taxi. There Joyce declared that he had never and would never read a word by his host. Proust returned the compliment, kicked his guest out, and, at last alone, drove to the Ritz and had dinner in peace.
Fifthly, the setting is a travel memory of the artist. Milorad Krstic gave an account of it in the Slovenian Delo: “In 1995, I went to Uppsala, Sweden. The university of the city has a building called Gustavianum after King Gustav Adolf who had it built for the medical faculty in the 1620s. In 1662, a cupola was added to the building with a so-called Anatomiska Teater, Anatomical Theatre, an unbelievably narrow and high amphitheatre with an oval dissection table made of wood at the bottom. Over the entrance, there was the inscription: ‘Anatomiska Teatern’ and its German translation: ‘Das Anatomische Theater’. Ever since, this dissection table in Uppsala has, in my mind, been bound up with the adage by Comte de Lautréamont ‘the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.’ This was where I decided to call my project Das Anatomische Theater, and to symbolically put all 20th-century events and persons on this dissection table, carving up historical tissues of this tragic century dispassionately and coldly as though I were a pathological surgeon investigating the causes of a disease.”

Divina ex Machina
The epic accessory of Greek theatre (intervention into events by miraculous elements, supernatural beings) becomes a number of artistic, image-composing devices in DAT, namely: juxtaposition, simultaneity and automatic montage. The artificial world of DAT and the order of its plots are created by and through them. All three are based on the treatment of chance; in other words, the deus ex machina of DAT is comprised not of supernatural beings, gods and their messengers, but the sum of scientific procedures and artistic means of representing chance in the 20th century. Chance played the same role in the 20th century as the gods had in ancient Greece.
The epic accessory of the 20th century is thus chance. This is what so many have questioned from various points of view. First, artists and the intellectual elite agreed that chance did not exist , for “all in all, all is related to all”. While disorder and chance had had a liberating role at the beginning of the century, it aroused fear in many by the end. Currently, chance is seen differently, and looks different. In it, we now look for either the rational or the irrational feature. “Strictly speaking, the rational is improbable. Law, regulation, order, or whatever we designate as such, are so improbable that they stand on the verge of non-existence. The rational borders on the miraculous; it is so rare and unusual that it is almost identical with non-being, with nil, nothing. (…) What exists – and this is a tautology – is the most probable. And the most probable is disorder. Disorder is almost ever-present. In other words, there are clouds and sea, storms and rumbling, turmoil and mass, chaos, tumult. The real is not rational. Or merely as an absolute borderline case. There is only science of the exception, of the rare, and of the miracle,” wrote the French post-modernist philosopher Michel Serres. This duality of chance and order as subject matter and method clouds the pages of DAT to drop productive rain at any time in its pages.
This essay’s epigraph from Lautréamont, which both the Dadaists and the Surrealists embraced, is a textbook example of juxtaposition and simultaneity often employed by DAT. In one pair of open pages, we can, in a single glance, view the depictions of several simultaneous 20th-century events taking place in the same quasi real-time, which, due to their differences (e.g. political and sporting events), contribute to the making of unexpected overall impressions. Thus political, cultural or entertainment events are not distributed separately, but appear together in each page. By necessity, they acquire new qualities and meanings. Another example: in 1905, Freud publishes his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex in Vienna, at the same time Lenin picks up the copies of his piece called Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution at his Zurich publisher; the Dresden Surrealists establish the group Die Brücke; and the first Nickelodeon cinema opens in Pittsburgh – tickets are horrendously cheap, five cents each. The Freudian theory of sex, the action plan for the Russian communist revolution and profit-based film industry are born in the very same year.
Simultaneity has another distinguished task to complete. As shown by the subtitle, the work is about 20th-century simultaneous games. Simultaneity has a role not only as a method of composing images, but also in calling attention to the interpretive starting point of the viewer. Our cultural archives are simultaneously comprised of what has happened and what has been created and of how they have come to be interpreted later on. Simultaneity obliterates the causality of sequentiality, and creates the possibility of a new order offered by the Krstician work of art. In DAT, simultaneity is the virus of the 20th century set free.

The sources of the conflicts of DAT are the irresolvable conflicts of the 20th century; in other words, it is its dark side we know all too well that is the proclaimed subject matter of the book. For the year 1916, it refers to the British poet Wilfred Owen and the Battle of the Somme, in which, on a single day, 20,000 British soldiers perished.
Secondly, there is the conflict of art and society. In the DAT worldview, irony rages. Without recourse to any ideology, it questions all power and every idea, and deconstructs all values. This approach can be traced back to the Dada sense of life, which appears often and in many ways in DAT. Milorad Krstic deconstructed the 20th century from a re-created Dada point of view and attitude.
As is well known, artists running away from the First World War to Zurich in neutral Switzerland decided to conquer madness for the arts. The pan-European war propaganda took advantage of all former community values with widespread recognition (god, homeland, family), thus the Dadaists simply cut themselves free from all that. They rebelled against the social function of art, and blurred the borders between art and life. They suspended the relevance of art to life. An extreme “l’art pour l’art” art was born at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916: “If all existing words and images are corrupted, new words and new images have to be invented, which bear yet non-existent contents, or they relegate the responsibility of establishing all possible meanings to the receiver. The reality thus created is an alternative to reality, that is, art is raised to the rank of life. The procedure naturally passes judgment on reality (which will not do any longer) – herein lies the deep, transcendental realism Arp spoke about.”
In Berlin, a kind of guerrilla art came into existence. For the first time in the history of the world, an artistic trend sought to change the full spectrum of life. Again, the distinction between the revolution in art and in society was blurred; by definition, life became art. Their murderous irony not only attacked the social order needing change, but also mocked “realistic” efforts to change it. The New York Dadaists developed a sort of “anti-artistic” position, which became wholly amoral, or, should one please, totally free. “Duchamp experiments with the possibilities in art in the way a child tears out the limbs of an insect one by one – with unbelievable invention, systematism and freedom from all moral restraint. His most Dadaist works, the ready-mades, are indeed art-theoretical and sociological experiments concerning the relationship between artwork and viewer, artist and bourgeois.”
Through Dada provocation, art finally activated the defence mechanisms of the bourgeois: he began to collect and place Dada in his privileged, well-padded private archives. However hard Dada tried to show its most outrageous face, its scandals came into fashion. It was chic to go and throw tomatoes, and Dada no longer had the power to upset the confidence and consumer compulsion of the public. To no avail did Duchamp attempt to produce anti-kitsch, to install a pissoir or a bottle rack; it turned out that the bourgeois was willing accept anything. “Literally, he is ready to buy even nothing. This is his well-tried defence against the ‘épater le bourgeois.’ Out of sheer snobbery, he takes sides with the artist, declaring that he shares his freedom.” This then became the source of a whole series of other conflicts; the provocation proved to be far too successful, the devil conjured (the act of all-devouring consumption) actually did begin to walk the high streets, which Lyotard interprets as a threat to the very freedom of the artist.
This threat postulates a third conflict, the one between the art market and market economy. The masters of the early avant-garde were either solitary actors or grouped in small circles; the essence of their being was minority existence. After World War II, some of their leading figures deemed themselves artistic entrepreneurs and got boosted by an expanding consumer society. They cartelized through commerce, criticism and the media, and cultivated a post-feudal lifestyle. For there is a kind of collusion between art and capital. It is not simple corruption, but something far more poetic: the power of scepticism and destruction forces the artist to mistrust and reject accepted rules, and encourages him or her to play and experiment with ever-new means of expression, styles and materials. All markets are subject to the magic power of novelty. This implies experimental innovation: the capitalist thousand and one nights of ephemerality. As in the case of any commercial success, the secret of artistic success depends on the sustained supply of surprise and reputation, information and code. One can only trust artist irregulars, thinks Lyotard: “The avant-gardist task remains that of undoing the presumption of mind with respect to time.”
Fourthly, we mention the self-reflexive conflict concerning the work of art, in which the mental interaction and cooperation between art and recipient taken generally is put on the dissection table. Following Lyotard’s guidelines, there is an 18th-century aesthetic interpretation according to which the beautiful offers positive pleasure. However, there is another pleasure, one more intensive than a sense of satisfaction, namely: the pain of impending death. In pain, the body affects the soul. But the soul can also affect the body as though it were experiencing externally induced pain by the sole means of representations that are unconsciously associated with painful situations. This entirely mental suffering does not actually take place, it is “suspended”, and this non-happening leads to a kind of quasi-relief. This was what Edmund Burke called “delight”, or delectation, in 1757. The soul is thus appeased from its dazed, frightened condition as the horror does not after all take place. Thanks to art, the soul abandons itself to the disquiet of the movement between life and death, and thereby regains its health and vivacity. According to the 20th-century interpretation, the avant-garde experiments with artistic combinations that par excellence shock the recipient. In the case of the avant-garde, the suspension concerns an even more horrifying terror: nothingness. The relief arises from the fact that the world happens in the work of art, the “something happens, not nothing” (Heidegger) occurs; in other words, man’s existential deprivation is suspended. The art-lover possesses no mere delight. He expects artworks to intensify his emotional and conceptual capacities. The work of art tries to present the fact that there is an unpresentable; it no longer imitates nature, it is a fabrication, an artefact. “The social community,” says Lyotard, “no longer recognises itself in art-objects, but ignores them, rejects them as incomprehensible, and only later allows the intellectual avant-garde to preserve them in museums as traces of offensives that bear witness to the power, and the privation, of the spirit.”
The fifth conflict is that of silence and noise. On the one hand, DAT teems with musical allusions (Stravinsky, Eric Satie, Michael Nyman, U2). Operas, musical performances, marches, film hits, rock-and-roll songs blare forth. Sound poetry is recited, the compère at the Cabaret Voltaire is clearing his throat, and the loudspeakers of Soviet propaganda declare the gospel truth of the day. However, machines also keep roaring: sometimes a train rumbles and whistles past, a car buzzes and hoots. Or there are arms clattering, a lustful scream, a joyful shout, a terrified cry, a rattle to be heard. On the other hand, the work of art is actually noise. It is a powerful piece of information inversely proportional to meaning. The more noise it makes, the more provocative and stirring it is. But there is also silence in DAT. In the lines, the dots, the mould sots of paint. And in the hand-drawn letters. The texts behind them are like massive bays of silence, detours, caves, hollows. And, in between silence and noise, there is the soft abrasion of text and image, its osmosis, its hum. To use a more familiar simile, the liturgy of the omniscient storyteller, the head of the family is heard. This is none other than a prayer for understanding and interpretability.
Last but not least, we touch on the conflict between image and text. In our own current world, most of the messages come to us as emanations from plane surfaces. Here and now, as the philosopher and media-theoretician Vilém Flusser reminds us, the revolt of images against texts is taking place. For painters, the world is made up of a series of scenes. For writers, the world consists in a series of processes. “For the consciousness structured by images, reality is a statement of facts: the question being how things relate to one another. This is magic consciousness. For consciousness structured by texts, reality is becoming: the question being how things happened. This is historical consciousness.” Imagination as the ability to interpret images and conception as the ability to interpret texts have repeatedly succeeded one another in Western history. In this process, conception becomes increasingly imaginative, while imagination becomes increasingly conceptual. Originally, texts were directed against traditional images in order to transcend the craze inherent in fantasizing. Now, mechanically produced images are directed against texts in order to transcend the unimaginability inherent in them. However, the creators and recipients of new images are at a level of consciousness beyond history. Thus the conflict of image and text implies the opposition between the historical and the post-historical. We have not managed to return to the pre-historical where illiteracy facilitates the acceptance of man’s being thrown into the word. We have no magic image that can kill a buffalo. The magic of a world codified by technology is simple prescription, programme identification and the daily drudge on the conveyor belt.

As we get to know the details of the ever-expanding and ever-deepening anatomical theatre of Milorad Krstic, we realize that he simply kicked in the doors of the cultural archive the contemporary art theoreticians Boris Groys and Hans Belting have presumed – the archives we otherwise call the history of the arts. Krstic has rearranged, re-tailored and restructured the show cases and the catalogues. If one looks around in this possible world, it will strike him or her that everything has become 20th-century-like, Dada in the Krstician sense. Whatever national and international styles produced, and whatever the last century deemed old rubbish, useless junk or, worse, a stinking wound on the body of art, Krstic has cleaned up with his specially devised mental blotting paper, and sublimated and archived them all.
It is as though he had reinvented the eye seeing history, at least in the sense that Lyotard reinvented the operational principle of the “avant-garde telescope” in the “everlasting now” in the thought of the two 18th-century thinkers Burke and Kant. But also in the sense that Merleau-Ponty speaks of the “trace” left by the artist when one artist follows the other’s invention, and that “there appears ‘visible’ of the second power”. The storm-bird of spirit asking questions on the meaning and nature of art and providing different answers keeps hovering all over DAT. Krstic drew together the object collection and book firmament of the cultural archive. He short-circuited the wires of inflammatory ideas, melted their material, then conjugated this newly created artistic raw material, this amalgam of recycled kunstwollen, into a virus, and, with it, in good Dada spirit, injected the whole of the 20th century. He dares speak up in the languages of both emotion and intellect.
Milorad Krstic’s anatomical theatre cannot be mistaken for anything else, so much so that some of its most coarse and obscene images mellow, give a unified bourgeois impression, almost blending into the eyes of the viewer – only to detonate in the interpreter’s brain later: “Lord God, what is going on here?” The unintentional cry arises from the subject matter of DAT (the loathsome “flesh and mind” of the 20th century from intimate closeness) as much as it does from its method (simultaneity and juxtaposition). In the pages of DAT, we encounter art as a kind of bulimic Leviathian that has gobbled up philosophy, devoured the sciences, whiffed up all the quarks, lapped up all Fritz Lang together with Dr. Mabuse, Marinetti with his red sports car, Kurt Schwitters and his Merzbau, the spiritualist high priest Malevich with his white, black and red squares, Paul Klee and his theory of natural signs; then, it has happily washed down 18th-century noble Hogarth with cubism, lettrism, futurism, surrealism, constructivism, and sent after them, without giving them as much as a thought, Marxian, Leninist, Stalinist, Hitlerite ideas and dictatorships, not forgetting Mobutu Sese Seko and the Unabomber; so it stomachs all the 20th century, including all things to be proud of or to be rejected.
Essentially, the 20th century began as it ended: it terminated or eliminated, or, at least, questioned a whole series of elements of knowledge making up what had been considered the storehouse of accepted, universal values. Early in the century, interpreters already declared that Albert Einstein had done away with time and space and Sigmund Freud with the self-consciousness of the 19th-century “decent bourgeois”. As regards the concept of matter, a tangible atom became a mist-like node of energy, the theory and cosmic energy of which would immediately be put to use by pragmatism and war interest in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. There were a number of dark detours, where things not only seemed to be lost, but were lost forever and irrefutably. In the middle of the century, the century had to be re-begun. The “scientific-technological and marketing” spiral was set in motion and led to mass communication, the global village, consumption-based social values, and the Internet late in the century. And the early-century relativistic theories were eked out buy newer ones, such as: the incomparableness of scientific truths (Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyeraband), the death of art (Arthur C. Danto), the end of art history (Hans Belting) and history itself (Francis Fukuyama).
At the end of the millennium, we have thoroughly steeped ourselves in molecular biology, cloning, genetic mapping, in the sulphurous steam of the post-modern alchemy of reinstalling the brain, the psyche, the world, the project of mis-training and understanding ourselves. Beyond good and evil, we have got to the point at the beginning of the 21st century where we ought to figure out the 20th century, and the sense we make of it should lead to a new Enlightenment, one that could be developed into a global shield to protect ourselves from ourselves. The 20th century has seen an unbelievable number of facts, documents and theories often overwriting each other – the very weight of various “individual” theories, often newer misconceptions, overwhelms and subdues diverse reality, and attaches to it a misreality.
At the end of the 20th century, every new decade saw the birth of a new development and catastrophe scenario ranked varyingly by survival probability calculations. We know the warnings about chaos dynamism, that the future of complex systems cannot be foreseen. Statistics will not do. In the depths of chaos, however, creative forces are at work, and presentiments concerning the world can influence the future. The eternal quest thus remains: maintaining the world amidst conjectures. Vilém Flusser tells us that man knows about the abyss, the one which is there, and the one which ought to be there but is not. “Man is an initiate of a passage he does not see. He connects everything around him to a thread of concepts more or less outdated. Presence is an ever-irresolvable fullness, a sea. Only the past offers courses or processes that can be followed.”
In the meantime, everything has remained in flux: the pion, string theory, our information and consumer customs, Wall-Street trends. Things and perceptions wander into real and virtual worlds and compartments surrounded by limits and limitlessnesses. It is with this sense that we can pore the pages of DAT. A series of images awaits us. They were born of images in a deluge of images. The choice is not a coincidence. An image is a medium leading through to and opening up remoteness. In the course of the 20th century, the image together with the fine arts have radically and resolutely traversed the decades of the century, the avant-garde movements, the heights of modernity and post-modernity, and can thus most obviously model the cultural pyramid of the 20th century. We look back to its beginning from its end, and let us hope that the Krstician dissection table keeps us vigilant in the 20th-century nightmare that has so often made us be the manipulanda we had deemed ourselves to be. And let us decide only at the end of the book whether DAT is merely a work of art or an artistic manifesto, a message or the medium itself.

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