#2 2. “In any case, of little importance is whether we are going to stay in literature or sculpture; before all, the matter of fact is to experience step by step the feeling of life on the earth, to express one understanding of the world and to assign the most encompassing, the subtlest relation between man spirit and chaosmos” – says Kennet White, Scottish by origin, settled in Bretagne, on the Atlantic shores, where he drinks from the sources of the primordial energy.
When, in his last book of essays he, aside from the writers-nomads, from the travel-recorders and from the explorers of the spirit, inspiratively speaks of the painters and composers, whose works additionally elevate the spirituality and sensibility of the geopoetics, Kennet White affirms the intermedial concern for the different registers of the creativity that the geopoetics nurteres as one of its essential characteristics.
The geopoetical method in the fine arts (where the land art is also included), according to the opinion of K. White, is close to and resembles the spirit of Zen– Buddhism, which inclines to the aesthetics of assigning, of alluding, to the liberating from the abundance of details, to the openness and to the whiteness of the space.
Hemish Foulton’s expression: “My kind of art – that is the walking through the landscape” – portrays the ritual-shamanic relation of the artist and geopoet, his intentional sprouting with the nature, elevated to the form of one “immediate religion”.
#4 The traveling, nomady, sailing are typical geopoetic topics (metaphors), through which exists the erotic myth itself of the pursuing and expelling, one of the fundamental myths of the European civilization and the cultic epistemological pattern of the geopoetics itself.
Taken, probably by that same, untamed, exploring spirit and fundamental challenge, the painters George Amar and Janik Francois, organized “A Workshop throughout the World”, during 1997 and 1998. Their virtual exhibition, in fact some of their work, are available today by the Internet.
Janik Fracois describes his creative process as a collecting (in this context let us remind that the collecting is the paradigmatic way of preserving and presenting of the folkloric, above all, literary heritage): “I collect what is forgotten, disposed, left behind – feathers, birds’ bones, insects, floating branches – and I place them together.
The geopoetic painting procedure is based on the harmonic relation, the shamanic collusion with the earth, the nature, the water as well as retaining the ceremonial approach to the creative experience. K White who highly appreciates and endeavors to reanimate the heritage of the “savage thought”, refers to the cult of the earth, characteristic to the Australian aborigines: contrary to the boastful exhibitionism of the contemporary quasi-art, they justify the creating of the signs only in two cases – hunger or ceremonial preparations – otherwise, the bones of the passed away suffer unnecessary pain.
Taking into consideration such “careful, nonviolent’ relation to the material and in that context to the earth, as a basic material, then the respect to the silence and calm as immanent elements of the creative ritual, the restoring of the Platonistic aesthetics of the absent and the ideal in the domain of the visual arts, the geopoetics shows itself close to the conceptualism – where the preferential role and importance
belong to: “ontology of the process itself” (Miško Šuvaković, 1996), dematerialization of the artwork as an object, the virtual dimension of the aesthetic act, (the potential, absent in their materiality and ineffable values), the bricolage, instead of the “ technological” violence upon the nature and the materials.
In its foundation, faithful to the “text of the nature” (Nietzsche), the geopoetics follows the conception of the “museum without walls” (Andre Malro), characteristic for the radical movements in the fine arts of the 20 century, for the attempts to quit with the limiting and conventional canon of the institutions.
#5 3. The installation “Geopoetic-water”, by the academic painter Predrag Urošević, adds to his cycle of graphics (monotypes) “Geopoetic-earth”, from 1998, exhibited in Skopje and Belgrade.
The geopoetic orientation can be traced and discovered on several levels: on the level of the motif, on the level of the procedure and on the level of the art material, used in the engineering the installation.
Just to mention that the installation as a genre belongs to so called autographic regime (Gerard Janet, 1996:185), actually to the group of art works that are characterized by their physical unity, one-shot, ephemerality, and singular identity. The works from the autographic regime in which domain belong also performances (fine art, theatrical and musical) are based upon procedure that in principle abolishes the possibilities the material endurance of the art object.
Such is the example of the installation “Geopoetic-water” – it by the motif itself invokes the erosive power of the element of the water. Presenting the iconographic symbols of a shipwreck in the deeps of the water by the inscription “Titanic” it conveys one of the bitter, paradigmatic failures of the contemporary civilization, in its bold attempt to conquer the forces of the nature.
The installation, obviously invokes some of the elements of the cultural memory of the 20 century and on first sight connotes the poetics of the ruins, the obsession of the modern man with the past, the mystical challenge of the underwater archeology… the temporal essence of the man and his creations, their implacable ephemerality and decomposition.
At the level of the artistic procedure we attest a procedure of bricolage or art of making the new from the old. This, basically, mithopoetic activity according to Levi Stross makes the core of the “savage thought”, and consists of the liberal borrowing from and manipulating with the “text of the tradition” (Derida). That is an adhesion, a patch, home mastery, where the process itself of creating has a bigger importance than an object of creation.
In the vocabulary of the postmodern theory this method is called factocitat (Dubravka Oraikj, 1990) that in the context of the movements of neodadaism and pop-art, results with the promotion of the
so called ready-made object in the legitimate object of art, to whom it attributes the intentionality and the symbolic character.
The installation by Urošević is built upon a such bricolage procedure of selection, adaptation and application of ready made objects, with some minimal interventions – the blue canvas spread up the walls around the imagined center of the installation suggests the wavy movements of the water; the dim blue light on the ceiling – opacity of the sea depths; the dispersed sand on the bottom and the hanging ropes – the structure of the sea vegetation; the slanting plank – the deck of the ship and so on.
In front of us is (Zenic?) poetic of the indetermination and the silence, the spiritualization of the every day things to the level of one universal metaphor and excitement of the unknown watery and humane depths…
Finnaly, the artistic material itself corresponds with the geopoetic sensibility: the natural materials like the wood, the stone, the sand with their “raw” appearance and presence actually strengthen the nonviolent, bricolage-ic, ecological orientation of the geopoetic as well as its basic excitement, because of the creation of the ephemeral sculptures and buildings.
To conclude, the geopoetics exists in the cohabitation that pulsates between the primordial calling of the nature and the untamable impulse of the man, when he measures his authorial yearn subtly and cautiously, with the interminable and magnificent silence of the chaosmos.
Translated by: Katarina Cipuševa
Literature:
1. Kenet Vajt (1995) Nomadskiot duh, Skopje
2. Kenet Vajt (1997) Umetnost zemlje, in:Visoravan albatrosa, Beograd
3. Douglas Crimp (1983) On the Museum’s Ruins, in: The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster, Seattle
4. Jacques Derida (1986) Struktura, znak I igra u obradi ljudskih znanosti, in: Suvremene knjizhevne teorije, ur. M. Beker, Zagreb
5. Fridrih Niche (1998) Putnik I njegova senka, Beograd
6. Dubravka Orajikj-Tolikj (1990) Teorija citatnosti, Zagreb
7. Boshko Tomashevikj (1994) Geopoetika, in: Bagdala, Krushevac, br. 412-413
8. Mishko Shuvakovikj (1996) Asimetrichni Drugi (eseji o umetnicima I konceptima), Novi Sad
9. Zherar Zhenet (1996) Umetnichko delo (imanentnost I transcendentnost), Novi Sad
Note: This text was presented on the “Geopoetic night” held on 22 of April 1999 in Skopje on the occasion of the international Day of the Earth. Participants on that night were the writer Aleksandar Prokopiev with “Anti Direction for personal use” and the painter Predrag Urošević with the installation “Geopoetic-water”. The war in Yugoslavia unfortunately made impossible the presence of the writer Vladislav Bajac, the founder of the “Center for geopoetics” in Belgrade.