Ismet Ramićević, “Info-Fabric” Installation, National Gallery of Macedonia
#1Millions and billions of people have never and nowhere on daily basis, and moreover, voluntarily and non-doctrinally performed multiple daily “rite” as they do before the “icons” of the various mass media. Both in terms of global, already vertical chain, and with respect to the local concentric flocks of mass media networks. Ismet Ramićević brings in the least spiritual mass propaganda seducer that ever appeared in the artistic field of his involved observations and messages. These are the mass media: first of all, the daily newspapers of the old printed technique, and the computer with the new digital tools. The first ones are used to make excellent “fabric” and open issues and the second one to design digital presentations.
#2 Ramićević has made a true procedure of fabrics out of newspapers. As if real carpets with exciting arabesques, true tapestries and covers, or a realistic imitation of ceramic relief of the old sacral architecture of different cultures. This folklore-classical work (live tradition) of the artists overcomes the primarily improvised and leisurely work of the installations that the artists “sacrifice” on behalf of the idea. As far as the idea is concerned, Ramićević has developed the concept and brought to a precise communication thought and message: the mass media as a technique for public manipulation.
#3 This involved concept is entered literarily stepping on the framed floor of dense concentrically and oval grouped circles of labyrinths made of newspapers, which vibrate as black holes or as live sand. This neatly made assemblage of newspapers made as a framed picture on the gallery wall, where the woven carpet of newspapers is made on the floor, as a ceremonial carpet, rounds this problem from the idea concept: among the simplified straight lines, easily penetrable and complex and subtle labyrinths of information. Besides these levels of involved polemics with the topic, teh artists makes a new esthetic control, or relativization to “humiliation” of this most powerful atheistic religion with purely esthetic criteria, thus bringing its physical material to a metaphor on the esthetic functionality in a warm cloth, in whose thin cylindrically wrapped forms the virtual, not purposeless and very powerful, but empty spirit is imprisoned. An effective and artistic full bloodedness that should be stored in a museum.
#4 Thousands of people were in a dialogue with this mainly meaningless pile of newspapers by its contents. This is packed here in some 50 square meters of “fabric”, while the interests of the public adequately progressively drop in its involved artistic idea. This message is imposed even if it is not part of the intention of the artist. This is the phenomenon of the mass media, which appear as a hurricane, and empty every day, in each “here and now”. Further on, it is all archives, whose analysis would look like a shrewd devil of the devils, in the complete human history. He non-violently rules the masses and shapes their reality in a voluntary way. The question of whether the public if informed or the mass it prepared for what, at a given moment, they should “accept” as their “own” comes from the reflections of this conceptually excellent installation. And finally, the reflections on the intelligent layer, who fills in the media as “propaganda legions”, whose function and whose “deeds” literarily have the reach to and inside the dust of the crowd.
Tranlsated by: Elizabeta Bakovska