The world has long since become a fluid space in which the “uncertainty is value, and the instability is imperative”[1]. The questions of meaning and deeper existential thinking are increasingly dismissed ahead of everyday denial of reality. Such a social and cultural diversity has positioned the art today, which with most theorists, is a particular process of inquiry and (re) discovering all the mutable and accelerated contexts of reality. The changes happened on all socio-cultural levels, including art. This change in the structure and speech of the art, is reflected primarily in the aestheticization of everyday life, its multi-directional (not) visible topology.
In the series of works called “Quiet Places”, Ivan Arsenijevic presents the history of the now, reffering to, as he himself pointed out, the thesis of Zygmunt Bauman[2] about the fluid surface of the modern society:”fluid life, as well as the modern fluid society cannot keep the same shape, nor direction”. The author investigates everyday life in these photos, all of its variable registers, as a suspension of the tangible, real, ephemeral world. Those are silent places, intimate perceptions of space and time, of presence and absence. Seemingly cold frozen frames, a filigree clean in composition, almost idyllic in their simplicity and contemplation, they refer to the subject of identity in the context of omnipresent instability. If we look at his previous work, we would say that this is a logical continuation of his projects: Blow Up and People from the barracks, especially the series called Some Cities, where he is focused on the urban sites, (un)known sets of urban public scenes, created by elaboration of documentary and artistic recording.
Arsenijevic’s visual narrative was purified and determined, and in this latest series of his works it is conceived without people and certain hierarchy and / or centers. Those are general places, public and private spaces, temporally subversive, which with their non-narrative visual language sublime the ontological meaning of the moment and the now, that is drifting away before our eyes, reminding us of all that has irreversibly disappeared into the past. The realistic view of the ambiance serves to present the construction of individual and general spaces, incorporated into the totality of reality, which each of us carries deep inside.
Thus, behind Arsenijevic’s silence, a rather turbulent, rhizomatic nowness speaks out in a very suggestive and ambiguous manner. It is located in the selected fragment of space or detail, as if in quotes, outside the categories of the past and the future, in the way Sontag[3] defined it. The author, in one of his visual quotes, selects motives in a very thoughtful way and constructs the atmosphere of his photographs, because “fluid life gives to the outside world, and in fact to everything that is not part of the self, one dominant, prime value”[4].
On the one hand, his photographs are nostalgic, emotional reflections of “the lost” present moment, and yet on the other hand, these are critical artifacts, which refer to the topic of modern life context. In that game, of the visible and the utterable, the author gives to the ephemeral and unattractive places and objects the role of the bearers of the memories, duration and identity. These are recognizable motives, which Arsenijević redefines in a precisely specified anthropological context. Paradigmatic in this sense is the photograph with deck chairs, which are arranged symmetrically, in a row, or one over the other (not) neatly folded, as if having a break, from the everenthusiasctic tourists. It is interesting to notice that the artist does not only records reality, so as to distribute what we (do not) see, but also creates photos of strange, almost surreal atmosphere, focusing us on the detail of the ambience, which symbolically underlines some former, past life. These are images of the current situation in the now, in which we can contextualize the immediate and warm human presence, in a particular space and time. These photos have a sophisticated, imaginary framework of deliberate coincidence, a space for the escapism from the modern day. Thematically and with its meaning it suggests a kind of paradox happening on the relation of that which is concrete, visible and that which is hidden, conceptual. We would say that Arsenijevic, in his work, invests in this preliminary, semantic layer, giving us a kind of diagnosis of reality in modern, fast, consumer society. And in the end producing the meaning in his own life as well as his art discourse.
[1] Zigmunt Bauman, Fluidni život, Novi Sad, 2009.
[2] Ibid
[3] Suzan Sontag, O fotografiji, Kulturni centar Beograda, 2009.
[4] Zigmunt Bauman, Fluidni život, Novi Sad, 2009