Ring Gallery

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Antun Maračić: Inadvertent and similar works

5 - 28 May, 2009

Inadvertent Pictures and Films

Every time we turn a compact digital camera on, its screen shows what is in front of the lens at that very moment.  As a rule, the camera is then raised to the level of the motif that we intend to take. However, driven by his characteristic and innate instinct or reflex, which has been further developed over a decades-long artistic practice, and above all by his trust and interest in the spontaneity and unpredictability of the moment, Antun Maračić, in his photographic mission, has taken the viewpoint that this inadvertent initial scene needs preserving.

“These are shots”, says the artist, “that no will or intention will enable us to derive   from the visual offering of the milieu in which we happen to be. For usually in this first position of the camera and the view on the screen, there is an absence of any clear motif, these are just intersections and shards of different surfaces and objects, the area of an unprepossessing floor that includes bits of our body and clothing, in a word, anti-motifs. But if, among other things, you have the experience of art history, in these ad hoc registered scenes you can find important plastic values – textures, light, unexpected composition suitable for abstract paintings of the organic, geometric or combined type. The very fact of their ephemerality, their covertness, contains an additional attraction. In these pictures there is some kinship with the pictures of those marginal, neglected nooks of the world that would never have come into the focus of interest if some crime or accident had not occurred in their domain. Then photographers take them for the sake of the crime pages and show them to the public: the door and wall of some house, the soil on which blood has spilled, the bottle from which a delinquent has drunk alcohol,  the surface of a thigh of a woman who has had her skin ruined by depilation… I cut such pictures out of the papers and appropriate them, turning them into prints. There is then a connection between my inadvertent and my appropriated pictures. They are equally ephemeral, but under the unattractive surface they are psychologically and plastically interesting, and their characteristics and values can be picked out better by post-production enlargement and isolation”.

Wanting, then, to shoot some scene or situation with the compact digital camera that has the possibility of taking videos, Maračić will sometimes happen to turn on the video switch, quite often thus obtaining inadvertent movies, as he calls these accidental and unplanned works lasting just a second or two.

The first frame of the “short film” is actually what the artist wanted to take, but by chance, instead of a photograph, a video is obtained that, Maračić considers, motivated by the creative reflex and  by some belief in and respect for the accidental shot – it is a pity and even dishonest to delete. These are then “stolen bits of duration, framed and extracted bits of everyday life” (Boris Greiner). Sometimes in these accounts one will notice just the movement of the hand in front of the objective or some jape created by a part of the body, while sometimes the action is more complex and tells of human behaviour, of interactions with the persons caught in the clip.  In some cases, the reactions of people who were supposed to have been photographed in company with other people. These  clips were worth preserving because of the posture of the subjects in front of the camera, their putting themselves into position, posing, their expressions of boredom, but all these effects were quite beyond the intention, and not even when kept as film inserts do they wish to profit from some concrete psychological act of theft.  The most important fact is the capture of a profanely meaningless event, the purposeless existence of which is actually exciting and valuable to the artist.

The absurdity of these clips, these aborted photographs, is backed up by their presentation in a gallery. On special screens set up around the gallery space, they turn endlessly in a loop, which, with their interrelations of sight  and sound still more heightens the impression of bizarrerie and immanent comedy.

More ambitious and complex films, which the author derisively calls “feature films” are now not inadvertent but deliberate, and yet they are still almost always in one long uninterrupted frame, whether we are talking of a static or hand-held shot. These come into being when Maračić, realising he has pressed the wrong button, decides to continue shooting just the same, or in a given situation wants to capture a situation that his creative instinct tells him might be interesting.  They last at most a few minutes, according to an ad hoc decision, or simply as long as the given profiled event goes on.

We are witnesses of bizarre situations that have not been set up or directed but have an interesting sociology – for example of the interview of the joint organiser of the Dubrovnik Picasso prints exhibition who, not caring about the threshold of boredom of a newspaperwoman from one of the sensationalist media outlets, who has already actually done the job (found out how many visitors there were, how much the insurance cost), vehemently and fully into it, goes on talking at length about the artistic achievement and technological features of a single Picasso print. He does not register the reactions of his interlocutor to this less interesting story, which leads her to become uneasy and eventually discreetly to leave the scene of the talk.

On another occasion it is the rocking of the lights along the streets of Dubrovnik in the gusts of a strong winter wind at night that creates the Suprematist movement of Malevichian squares of white and dancing surfaces of light.

Equally attractive is a clip of alternative Dubrovnik night life that few will notice and fewer still will perceive as interesting or as a phenomenon worthy of registration. Maračić keeps up with the night situation around the Dubrovnik monument to Marin Držić, where the north wind, in a nook enclosed by two buildings, plays with municipal waste, the wind remorselessly and vehemently articulating the movement of discarded plastic bags and diverse pieces of waste paper into a witty and rhythmically structured if somewhat spectral nocturnal dance.

Maračić has divided some of the material into diptychs.  For example, that devoted to the fete of St Blaise, a more ambitious and directed video piece with ad hoc improvisations of Maračić and Evelina Turković referring to the day of St Blaise, patron saint of the throat, during the fete of whom, Maračić, coincidentally, has for years regularly gone down with laryngitis. While Evelina, in her emotional and womanly way, almost without any words, not showing her face, covered with a hood, manifests her frustration at having had the holiday ruined, Maračić in a spontaneous and amusing improvisation addresses the saint himself, shamming indignation.

There is an uncommonly charming video of a summer siesta in front of the cult café in Dubrovnik of Luci Carpus, where all know each other and get together, and the atmosphere on the paving in front of the café is cram-packed with familiarity.  Also noted is the detail of the familiar Luci attitude to the guests, and the cameraman himself, whom he treats to a roll, without wanting to spoil him with the accompanying paper napkin. The camera at the same time registers the unconcealed sensuality of relaxed and pretty Dubrovnik women, aware of their handsomeness, which gives the scene a certain Arcadian feel.

Early in the morning Maračić shows empathy in taking his wife, Evelina Turković, while she, clearly a night owl, is still sleeping.  Registering the fact that, half awake as she is, tiredness frustrates her in an attempt at a protest at or an intervention into the videoing.  Then in a circular pan the remainder of the interior appears, the details of northern European architecture of the blue grey morning city through the window, and the shot, closing the circle, finishes again with the initial scene of the bed.

Somewhere in Germany Maračić registers a group of Croatian fine artists in front of a postage stamp vending machine. No one knows the value of the stamp for letters and postcards addressed to Croatia. The group looks for help from a passing German woman who herself cannot cope and there is not a lot of help from her. Thus the action ends with the resigned casting of the letters into the post-box on the “whatever will be” principle.  A scene without any meaning at all, but Maračić manages to get out of it the comedy created by the familiar confusion of travellers with less well known foreign circumstances.

In his Dubrovnik flat, Maračić records the dance of a plastic teddy bear filled with helium and bought at the fete. The bear hovers in the dark room in which one can hear the sound of the fado, and the comedy is created by the fact that his movement is caused by the air conditioning fan below the ceiling, seeming like a dance in accord with the rhythmical features and mood of this mournful music.

The clip that documents his own explanation of his art project to a foreign woman curator is the consequence of a camera placed at random on the table in which the conversation is going on. In the fortuitously fixed frame – in the upper right hand corner of the screen – we observe the face of the professionally inquisitive curator lady, and Maračić’s hand, in full flow of gesticulation, elaborating at length on his own project.

This piece is a kind of a reworking of an earlier series by this author, At the Table, and one of the diptychs shown that vividly confirm the importance of chance in Maračić’s video and photographic productions. The first piece from this series was shot in a private flat in Sv. Nedjelja in 2006.  A few years later, with no prior plan, at the same place, from the same angle of vision, another social situation at table was taken; now the two pieces are reproduced at the same time in the same space on a monitor.

In general, the new Maračić photographic and video pieces are on the lines of his At the Table exhibition shown in November 2006 in the Novi Zagreb 01 Gallery.  On fourteen monitors we then looked at fourteen short video clips that the author had taken from January to August 2006 with the same digital movie camera. The monitors, seemingly chaotically, were turned in different directions, placed on the kind of small tables that we can find on the terraces of local cafés.   Consistently with the video motif, for the scenes are – as the title of the show suggests – taken only at the table, during dining, business meetings, family get-togethers for holidays, wakes, art colonies, visits to friends or their visits to him, these are situations in which the individual fulfils his needs for society.  What is common to these shots is the fact that Maračić is regularly present in every one of these gatherings at the table. The angle and frame are static and conditioned by the particular circumstances, the situation, setting and moment, and hence represent a desirable degree of necessity and spontaneity.  The moment the camera is set up is the moment of surrender to the unpredictability of the further course of the situation; Maračić no longer intervenes, nor does he endeavour to make what he takes any more spectacular. Although these are contents that are not channelled and not directed to any purpose, the organic complexity   of events that the videos put before us could hardly be produced by any director.  It is amazing how much action goes on in such a short time and in such a small space, how many interwoven relationships there are among those present, how many narrative courses and backwaters of stories cross, develop and branch off, particularly when there are more people around the table, how much they talk, telling of others, about themselves.

None of Maračić’s videos, including those from the At the Table cycle has any purpose apart from documenting life in its unadulterated reality, in the full flow of its complexity, discreetly, without being arranged, and hence there is no drastic action although some of the scenes, and the behaviour of the individual participants, are complex.  We never follow any deliberately shaped event, rather, simple, excerpts of real events, with all the accidental features, ephemera, unrepeatable events, trivialities and unpredictabilities.

We respond to this filmic part of Maračić’s oeuvre, the consequence of the sporadic and unambitious activity of simple representations in a single frame, because of the modest means used in the production, and the consequently restricted quality of audio and video tracks, as to a discreet declaration of opposition to more ambitiously planned work, a latent demonstration of the rejection of highly-projective creation, resistance to a high degree of artificiality, arrangement and premeditation , in order to privilege, by reaction, the favoured uncertainty, inarticulacy and the general raw everyday life with its own particular impulses.

This major exhibition is an occasion to read off the links of Maračić’s unpretentious filmic works with some of his earlier works – for example, with the photographs in which in sequences he records the arrangement of stuff on his desk over the course of time, with the Appropriate Pictures, and other works in which the life process goes on.  For in them we also meet with Maračić’s aspiration to endorse existence on automatic in various aspects, as expression of the organic, the living truth; to adopt some phenomenon in its grubby authenticity, to plump, to the detriment of cultivated artificiality, for neglected nooks and crannies of sheer naked life that has never been subject to tuning-up.

Ivica Župan

TO SEE = TO BE^*

In Zagreb’s main street, Ilica, whose irregular, winding course displays traces of historic connections between ancient quarters, a tree used to stand right across from where “my” street turns off. In the small front garden of a long forgotten inn, attempting in vain to protect it against traffic and noise, the tree fought for survival and grew into a column propping and partly embracing the garden fence. With time, the size of its trunk surpassed the allotted space and the tree commenced its long lasting battle with the rough, plainly crafted fence which it was forced to adopt. Apart from the fence, the tree also “devoured” some floor tiles, conduit pipes and a portion of concrete, in a brutal clash that most passers-by never noticed; on the other hand, the tree became a metaphor for the deformation of the human soul resulting from the many afflictions, tribulations and hardships it is exposed to in today’s world. It was this tree, an unusual combination of the organic and the generated, that Antun Maračić spotted and photographed in 1997.

Of course, the tree did not survive the urban renovation (or rather, the urban fraud). What remained of it were Maračić’s photos, documenting a special art action of appropriating images from the immediate environment – more precisely, a process of detecting, recognising and photographically capturing certain details which are not simply taken from their original context and transferred to the realm of art. For a special feature of Maračić’s artistic procedure consists in detecting and accentuating. It should be seen in correlation with the so-called “new”, “analytic” photography, which is close to conceptual art and primary painting. The author focuses on the process, the connection he establishes with the place that he shoots, the spot from which he departs recording the photos, thus – in his own words – providing proof of his existence. Maračić does not use photography as a “mere” means, as if it were only a representation or image – on the contrary, he is above all interested in the process of shooting, and the pictures captured are meant to emphasize the connection with the point of his departure. Like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, the photography confirms the process of detecting and recording facts, which in turn testifies to the author’s presence at a certain place in a real time.

Maračić made his public appearance as an artist in the mid-seventies, participating in the conceptual art tendencies of the time. From the period of his occupation with analytic painting until today, his works are characterised by processuality, demystification of the artistic act, seriality, absence of narrative content and an interest in the position of the individual. Another typical feature is the legitimation of the different phases in his artistic process, where the transfer of meaning is understood as part of this procedure, marked among other things by sensitive and witty, sometimes also ironic, comments about the perceived objects.

The elementary procedures employed by Croatian artists in the late seventies and early eighties resulted from an analysis of the language of painting, a scrutiny of the foundations of its existence and the process of its emergence. Research papers from that period were frequently dedicated to the problem of the artist’s relation to his medium. In his early works (the Layered Pictures), mostly paintings created after he graduated in painting from the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts, Maračić explored and emphasised the work’s material structure or the time spent on its creation, which was always accompanied by a characteristic, ironically-critical comment concerning the established criteria and the (ever present) demands put before the artist by society.

Pursuing this train of thought, Maračić began using photography in 1976, primarily in order to scrutinise fundamental existential postulates. Let us mention here the project Simultaneous View of the Face and the Back of the Head (photo sequence from 1978) and the sequence May ’78 – November ’79, comprising a period in which the artist recorded the growth of his hair and beard after he had shaved his head. This is a series of photographic digressions about “working and thinking as the basic forms of human behaviour”, about the ways of representing (in the author’s own words) “bare time”, the hair growth and the rotation of the body/head in 45° increments in each new sequence as indicators of the passage of time. The photo series Subject-Object Relation (Following a Point on the Mirror) from 1979 should be seen in the same context. It consists of nine photographs which record the process of the concentrated beholding of nine points fastened onto a mirror, their positions representing a pattern of “surface exhaustion”. The artist’s reflection results from his intention to simultaneously represent the gaze and its object, where the object is symbolised by each of the nine points. This series illustrates the process of the outer world’s passage into the author’s perceptive system, the time span of “the loading of the gaze” in which this transition occurs.

How can one represent spaces suggesting real time, how can one establish the existence of one and the same, the dualism of existence and non-existence, the burden of personal responsibility, perhaps even the fear resulting from an action (or from the uncertainty preceding its beginning)? The gradual spread of the artistic practice of photography lead to an emphasis of what has great importance in art anyway: the intellectual position of the individual, the sensitivity, the mental plan, as Maračić puts it.

He started the series Lokrum in 2002, when he was appointed Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Dubrovnik. Through his office window he saw a scene that today still inspires him to taking pictures almost daily. To photograph an island means to confront one’s own, personal solitude with the solitude of the island. It means to follow the time of a space and a form which are constantly changing, yet remaining the same, and to measure them with the time of one’s own life. Hundreds of shots show the same scene centred in the frame – the island of Lokrum near Dubrovnik, functioning as a focal point. Maračić does not change the viewing angle; the frame is determined by the coincidence of the viewer centred in the middle of the motif and it contains as much surrounding space as his wide angle lens allows it to. The author takes up the position of the spectator who, like Roland Barthes, has an emotional interest in photography.

It seems as if a camera was constantly mounted in Maračić’s office at the Dubrovnik Museum of Modern Art, reducing any photographic styling, i.e. possible interventions and gaze constructions, to a minimum. One could perhaps assume that such a procedure aims at drawing attention exclusively to the island, but then the process of the beholding itself and the joy of the anticipation of the scene’s viewing would be disregarded.

Maračić’s intervention only takes place at the second level – at the moment of the presentation. But even then he repeats the simple procedure of stringing together photographs accompanied by short notes (colour, light, atmosphere, date). At the same time, this data stimulates the reflection on the concepts of Here and Now in relation to the actual duration of the beholding and the shooting, which are not necessarily identical, as “chronology objectively has no particular meaning, any order can be legitimate, because transformation, the essential thing here, its incredible vastness, is always present”. Temporal sequences “grow thicker and become thinner, and what seems to occur is a deceleration and acceleration of real time”, whose rhythm is as accidental as the rhythm of the gaze and the choice of the motif’s daily characteristics. In these encounters with the vista, which determined his life in the course of a certain period, and which he beholds on a daily basis and regarded as an existential but not the ideal, idyllic picture that it may have seemed at first glance, Maračić accompanied each photo with a note (primarily in order to distinguish them later) containing data about the time when it was recorded (day and hour, camera aperture, exposure time) and a brief description of the scene: “Tuesday, 13 November 2001, 11:50, 22/60; heavy sea, all grey except a bright hole above the island with a shred of blue in a peeled-off, third layer below the clouds”; “14 January 2002, 13:14, 16/30; soft, blue sea, the island in subtle contrast, grey and black, pink to the left behind the island”; “12 April 2003, 12:04, 8-11/1000; everything covered in calm grey, blurred horizon line”; “11 February 2004, 16:13, 4/60; soothing, expressionless grey, rain”.

The island as the centre of a happening amounts in fact to the establishment of the existence of one and the same, the changes being visible under the meteorological and chronological aspects. The contents we associate with it are universal and understandable, they remind of ephemerality and of eternity at the same time. The neutral landscape of Lokrum became a personal diary of the artist’s existence, able to reflect anyone who chooses to take part in the process of beholding his own self-beholding.

In a photo something is shown. At the same time, according to Hubert Damisch, through it something is proven. The aforementioned processuality as a permanent artistic strategy employed by Antun Maračić and the absence of narrative content are characteristic of an authorial process in which not emptiness, but absence is recorded. It is precisely in the absence that the artist recognised the topic which allowed him to express his personal doubts in different periods of his life. The cycle Appropriated Pictures from 2000 is based on photos taken from the daily press – the artist appropriated pictures recorded by photojournalists which he found among accident and crime chronicles. He cut them out, scanned and enlarged them, printed them on heavier paper used for traditional graphics and framed them adequately. There were no subsequent alterations of the frame, the “works” were taken over in their entirety, together with their captions, the brief explanations of the “abstract” scenes whose meanings can only be guessed if one tries to imagine the contents of the original articles. The depictions of the crime scenes, mostly uninteresting, “ordinary” places, as well as of the objects appearing in the investigations – stolen goods and evidence of police efficiency (found jewellery, weapons, drugs) – escape the usual context of photography, its representativeness, its intent to record the world of appearances. The choice of objects in the scenes found and appropriated by Maračić shows how much he remained true to the first-person perspective as he spoke about his relation to the environment, or maybe rather about the consequences of this relation.

Maračić’s relation to his environment is oppositional, determined by a negative approach or by concepts invoking that “other” side, that empty, disappeared, annihilated, absent one. Contrary to the cycle Emptied Frames – Disappeared Contents (1991–94) – consisting of photos of empty spots or frames where plates with the names of liquidated companies and abolished institutions once used to be fastened, which he appropriated by adding an engraved plate with his signature and a date – the Appropriated Pictures were removed from their original context and thus found their way into the world of art. Maračić’s “revitalised susceptibility to the imperceptible” concentrates on anonymous places which the artist calls “carriers of meaning”, because these photos show places and objects that are linked to certain events. The way in which we picture these events depends on ourselves, on our powers of imagination and visualisation, which play a key role in the process of proving something – not of representing it. The author does not direct his attention to the aesthetic quality of the scenes he appropriates, but seeks to disturb the automatism of perception by insisting on a procedure in which he proves that what we see has a certain roughness to it, resisting the identification of the seen with the recognised.

“I did not invent this method of repetition, but I have often applied it since I started to engage in art consciously and with conceptual intent. In 1976, I made a series of self-portraits – every morning at eight o’clock, immediately after getting up, I took a picture of myself, down to waist level. It is interesting that those photos also had their parallels in my diary entries. Situations occurring in a sequence, displaying a fascination induced by the changes that living in time brings about, are characteristic of some other works of mine too. For example, in the late seventies I took pictures of my desk and the objects on it at irregular intervals. I am fascinated by all sediments of change in a given framework – by the fact of the existence that can be ascertained or whose automatism can be recorded, but without the category of a premeditated plan, which so often occurs in art. To a certain degree, such works have their origin in surrealism, in its affirmation of the subconscious”, Maračić remarked in a conversation we had some years ago.

photos from the cycle No-City and its Subrealism were captured in December of the war-stricken year of 1991 in Nova Gradiška, a small town in Croatia. The dark, misty, empty scenes are an expression of real fear, of existential nausea that seized the author after an attack on his home town. The dimension of nothingness is expressed in a relatively small series in which emptiness appears on two levels – in the pictures of the cityscape and in the obituaries “filling” the local noticeboard. In this case, the fear is tangible, free of the conceptual doubts present in the work Alea Iacta Est, which documented the fear preceding a decision (however banal it may seem from today’s point of view). The absurdity of assuming responsibility for taking or not taking a book from the shelf, for getting up or staying in bed, is a stylisation of the fear of possible consequences, of the danger that upon the completion of a concrete action life will no longer be the same.

Circumstances have already shown that human life and its immediate environment are subject to constant changes, just like the benches at Porporela, the promenade by the lighthouse in the harbour of Dubrovnik. Their destruction in a bombardment of the city in the early nineties took place simultaneously with far worse devastation, consequences of which are felt and remembered even today. These degraded, mutilated objects bear witness to Maračić’s visual and empirical work on the topic of breathing and lasting simultaneously with his environment, marked by a nearly automatic procedure of taking photographs – of transferring content. Similar is the Tornado (distant painting models, such as the one which might be connected with this series, are an abstract, though not necessary reference of his artistic identity), photographed on 19 September 2005 from the same office window in Dubrovnik. The beauty of this unusual scene has a timeless dimension. This may possibly be ascribed to a kind of resignation, to a demonstrative turning away from everything that determines the social environment and the ultimate turning towards the self and the appreciation of lasting at a given moment, in this time free of any commitment or comment, in which the artist, immersed in the beauty of colours and temporary forms, paused and rounded off his artistic development, in a way.

Sandra Križić Roban

^* First time published in Camera Austria, 99/2007, p. 33-44.

Translated from Croatian: Ivir & Karaman; proof-reading: Marina Vishmidt.

Witness of the Inadvertent

In a work concerning the possibilities of bearing witness to the holocaust by Giorgio Agamben, a key concept is shame. Referring to a series of authors, Agamben puts forward shame as the hidden structure of every subjectivity and consciousness.   Shame is the primary state of self-knowing of the subject. The subject is ashamed of its being, ashamed of what it is, it is powerless when confronted with the fact of its own existence. In shame the subject is “overstepped and ruled by its own passivity, its own most characteristic sensoriness; and yet, this disempowered and desubjectivised being is at the same time the ultimate and irreducible presentness of the I to itself.” To become a subject then means above all to be present at one’s own de-subjectivisation, inevitable surrender not only to the language that makes possible being for others and with others, but also one’s own sensoriness, sheer receptivity to everything that is submitted to the eye, the ear and the touch; and all these places in which the consciousness is made manifest are not property to the subject; nothing of all that, from the pronoun I via the smile addressed to the friend, the scene of a child at play or the softness of an embrace, nothing of all this belongs to the subject save for shame – shame as a result of the pure fortuitousness that in this response or statement, in front of this scene, in this embrace, it is it, and not someone else; shame because of the interval between the possibility of being subject of all the stated and the non-necessity for being there, the fortuity that it exists at the very place in which another is not or is not any more.

Perhaps it is just such a sense of shame that actuates Antun Maračić, representing, as well as humour, the basis of his artistic ethics.   This seems important to emphasize, particularly today, when the shame of the artistic subject has long since not referred to the angst-filled experience of the exposure of the creative individual, rather to the wider context of art and the autonomous activity within the social totality.  The shame of the artistic subject, then, relates to the simultaneous power and lack of power of the artistic collective that has the fortune or misfortune to be in a socially privileged place and accordingly also an obligation or responsibility to those who are not there, but come into the field of social visibility in much less attractive positions – as subject of discrimination, violence, exploitation, poverty. The history of modern art can perhaps be seen as a history of the overcoming of shame because of being in art, choosing on the whole between two extremes – a megalomaniac overemphasis on one’s own authorities, mission and tasks on the one hand and a sado-masochist slur on one’s own free will for the sake of avoiding responsibility on the other.

Antun Maračić bears his shame for being in art calmly and stoically; while the days of God’s patience last his art does not tend towards the end of history.   Between the two extremes, he chooses a third way – that which Agamben puts forward as a possibility that opens up the gap referred to between the living being and language, or the overall responses of subjective consciousness (speaking, seeing, touching); the possibility, that is, to be a witness.  In fact the lack of existence of any necessary connection or continuity between the live being and language, between the possibility of being represented in the world of signs and the fortuities of the individual existence, opens up a space that is free for the witness, for someone who speaks or acts on behalf of another. “The authority of the witness inheres in the subject’s being able to speak only in the name of someone who perhaps cannot speak”, who by chance happened to be in his place as subject, or “the point at which the possible makes the transition to existence”. And the creative subject is necessarily a witness, which is the point of the Latin auctor; the auctor, or witness is, then “that one who with its act only finishes off the act of the incapable, who gives the evidentiary power to that one that wants it and life to one that could not live alone; an authorial act pretending to validity in and of itself is pointless, as is the conviction of the survivor truthful and has the raison d’être only if it completes the testimony of someone who cannot bear witness.” Far from being a creator ex nihilo, an author is then only a witness of the possible. What the author makes real with his act does not exist, that is, it does not exist outside the reality of the artistic act, and in no way whatever can it compete with the real nor does it guarantee the real any existence; what comes into being with the artistic act is just a possibility that is not or is not any more; what is more, it does not exist, that it perhaps never existed, and perhaps cannot exist, except in the testimony of the survivor, of the one who has remained in his or her own shame, shame because he is, that he happened to be in a possibility that does not have to exist and accordingly, in the possibility of non-existing, a state of awareness that Maračić staged in the 1994 work Ambience, when in the empty space of the gallery he placed on the wall cobble stones, each of which bore one letter of the word in Glagolitic script for “non-existence”. With the tautological circumvention of the meaning of the word and its writing out a short circuit was created between existence and non-existence, that is, the possibility of existing in non-existence was opened up, with the compressed mass of the cobble stone summing up the feeling of subjective shame.

To be a witness of the disappearance of the existing in the possible, then, is in a sense a task that, without any special premeditation, but consistently, day after day, Maračić’s creative work as a whole carries out. The labels that he applied to emptied frames are the signature of a witness who testifies that the existing has become merely possibility. In the cycle Emptied Frames / Vanished Contents created during the war and post-war years (1991-1994), Maračić photographed empty frames by the entrances into city facades that once had a board with a sign relating to a public actor or service activity, which by the signing of the author’s name and the date of pure survival of the existing becomes a testimony of the possible.  As well as to the cycle of Emptied Frames, this also holds true for a run of other cycles created at the time of the Homeland War, since when in his work Maračić has resorted more and more vigorously to photography. Historical circumstances are perhaps characteristic of the medium by itself; at the moment when not just an objective but also a social reality vanishes in front of the eyes, when photography, which pretends to documentarity, progressively remains without a referent, risking thus that at the next moment it will have nothing else to photograph, Maračić switches this likely perspective of nothingness to the possibility of non-existence. Thus the cycle No City and its Subrealism, and other cycles in which it is in fact not existing that is the only content, like the photographs of the emptied shop windows or the ravaged municipal benches on the Dubrovnik promenade.  In the photographs of his native Nova Gradiška, every remainder of objective reality in the frame only indicates some vanishment: the yawning street, the absence of pedestrians; the fallen clock, suspension of time; public surface scattered with obituaries – the inability to grieve, and so on.  Far from any pretension to objectivise wounded reality into some incontestable fact of horror, Maračić to the maximum unburdens the field of the representation: the dysfunctional stumps do not come into the frame in the status of central motif; for this is reserved for the bench that no longer is that; respecting the format of the imaginary bench as if it were whole within it, in the field of the visible Maračić opens up a dimension of absence, a place for what is missing or what does not exist; while the broken stump of the bench talks of itself, what has no possibility of appearing seeks the assistance of a witness who will leave the space of emptiness for the manifestation of the invisible.

In fact, it is the same gesture that Maračić has been repeating in a string of versions since the beginnings of his work in art. Not only in the performance called Performance (1984), when tearing the red cloth hung on a black painted wall he revealed an empty white rectangular field, but in a whole number of other works that in their poetics belong to the historical genre of  primary painting and of analytical and conceptual deconstruction of the artistic act or the institution as a whole; in the context of works in which through the reiteration of some elementary visual element the process of the creation of painting or drawing is demonstrated; so was created, for example, the lithographic diptych on which Maračić filled the margin with the visual contents from the middle field on the second lithograph leaving the central format empty (1976); or, along the same lines, an exhibition at which instead of paintings, empty pieces of paper were shown, on which, along with the artist’s signature, there was only the printed inscription L’Art en passant, while the actual painterly act was represented by palettes on which paints were mixed (1986); or a performance in which the author stood with face covered by a mirror which returns to the visitor his or her own face (Standing among exhibits with a mirror on the face, 1982) and similar appearances.  However  characteristic of the historical discourse of conceptual and analytical artistic practice, these works of Maračić show the same inclination for having the author, the artist, shift from the position of creator to the position of witness, who bears testimony to his own artistic act. The procedure is always the same: dealing with the paraphernalia and by products of a potential artistic result, the artistic act is done away with as something existing and is set up in the register of the possible, always again confirming that are is not necessarily the outcome of a creative intention, rather the testimony of the surviving subject – of one who remains in his own existential shame after the throwing of the dice, according to the title of one of his early works in which he sets out photographically the moment of always potentially fatal decisions – taking a book down from the shelf, getting out of bed, breaking of a twig of a green branch and so on (Alea iacta est, 1980).

In the footsteps of the inadvertent consequences of this, in fact, incessant casting of the same dice in which the paraergon that remains always judges the intended ergon, at this exhibition Inadvertent Pictures are shown, encompassing, under the aegis of their concept, the exhibition as a whole. Once again, the shame of the artist (who is ashamed of his own shameful presence in the accidental, unitended result) was overcome by the courage of the witness. Maračić, then, determines to exhibit precisely what was created as waste material, the by product of his photographic activity. The unintended frames that are seen on the viewfinder when the camera is turned on, or when short films are created by mistake (by pressing the wrong button of a digital camera). The apparent banality of these photographs is the same as in the action in the work Alea iacta est: it is on the whole floors and corners of furniture that appear on the photos, the zones that slip out of the focus of homo erectus who, always aiming at the pith and marrow of things, looks straight in front of him, not paying attention to marginal details and the ground he stands on. Photographs then reveal the topology of the edge: nothing strange and unexpected is to be found in them, but simply what is shoved off to the edge of consciousness as unimportant and subsidiary, like coils of cables, the legs of chairs, the edges of tables, the grid of the parquet flooring or the tips of one’s own shoes.

The inadvertent films have the same kind of effect, but at the level of movement; on the whole lasting too short a time to be able to form some narrative cadence, they extract fragments of movement from the context, turning them into a superfluous, unconscious and inadvertent gesticulation.   Even when the situation is clearly posed and set up, this gestural surplus of communication discovers only the wish of the individual for an imaginary recognition in the still image of the camera, resulting in an effect that is bound to be comic: the frozen or perfunctory smile, the unnatural flicker of the eye, rigid postures and many other ways of overcoming the discomfort or shame because at the moment the subjective being of the individual is powerlessly dependent on the accidental pressing of the record button, that it surrenders its own being to the image in which it will never be immediately present, to what, about this person and for this person, in the name of the appearance of this person, someone else will be able to bear testimony.   Unlike those films where a person nevertheless necessarily appears as the central protagonist of some kind of minimal action, inadvertent films in which the human factor plays no rule whatsoever are still more telling; mainly directed at the empty space of interior or exterior, in them hardly anything can be described as an action; they have no centre, nothing is found in them strikingly to take the attention; what is at issue are some hardly perceptible differences that the static nature of the frame in time differentiates from non-moving images, i.e. stills (if one bears in mind that photographs are part today of the screen, these filmlets are really at the border of confusion, and precisely because of this their presentation at an exhibition requires they be shown in a loop); the undefined and scattered agitation of the contents in the image, the quiver of the frame; these are the micro-events at the border of consciousness in the absent gaping of the view; a time longer than the real duration of the film is necessary for the viewer to become aware that the picture is not motionless, since in it the rain is falling the whole time. Once again in Maračić’s work, absence is at work, or more accurately, the absence of being converted into the possibility of not-being.  For this very reason, these works are characteristic of the approach as a whole; because they are not particularly pretty, nor historically important, nor interesting and instructive, because in fact there is no reason why in themselves they should actually exist, Maračić is ready to bear witness for these scenes, wants to give them a chance in the register of the possible – the only register where art can be that has never been and never does exist of itself, but always and only for the witness who is willing to bet on it, cast the lot for it.

As well as in the inadvertent works, this bearing witness to the banality of the existing has perhaps most come out in the cycles of Appropriated Pictures, also one of the lasting preoccupations of Maračić, in which he appropriates news photos from the crime and disaster pages and prints them together with an accompanying explanation of the scene as an original print.  The attractivity factor of these news photos is certainly not the obscenity of death and violence, but, once again, the very want of content. Although they refer to a certain crime or criminal action, there is a standard absence of sensations in the newspaper crime story photos; on the whole they are depictions of the scenes of the crimes without any visible dramatic traces of the crimes, which bowl us over with the very commonness and triviality, or depictions of some evidentiary material such as weapons, impounded goods and so on.   In the context of the newspaper report, the function of these picture stories is not to show the crime referred to, but only to witness to it via some, whatever it may be, visible remnant; and in fact the non-existence of a necessary connection, the radical gap between the banal and the trivial survivor and the event committed or surmised, opens up an empty space for a witness. What Maračić usurps, then, is not just the picture itself, but this emptiness between possibility and credibility, between proof and what is being proved with this proof; entering into possession of this emptiness, Maračić carries off these remains of the crime, the waste packaging of everyday life dramas, and saves them as pure possibility – the possibility of meaning outside the denotation set by the accompanying text; the possibility that any kind of triviality flickers with a poetic, comic or simply artistic sense in the eye of the witness.

However much it might seem that this devotion of attention to the periphery of events of Maračić’s is a search for the bizarre detail, what is at issue is in fact something else – a sometimes completely abeyant, muted by melancholy, but through the whole of the oeuvre a palpable optimism; the basic Maračić disposition for the quodlibet of the existing to be opened up for the possibility of the beautiful, the funny  or the poetic; and however much everything that he follows or, as the artist himself says, stalks with the camera goes on without premeditation, inadvertently and en passant, the result is far from any kind of realism. Although he takes immediate everyday life, Maračić is not a witness of the individual.  That is perhaps why, so belatedly, people have at last arrived in his frame; and when they do come, they come to a place of some universalised identity – as people who are looking at the sea, people who are sleeping or people who are eating and talking.   For what Maračić does with the camera is actually a constant generalisation; Maračić’s photographic activity is hence necessarily structured in cycles, series and sequences; rarely, almost never, is the motif taken just once and never again, or more accurately, from the one off some universal iterability is always derived, even if it is located, as often happens, in some completely marginal detail. The intention of the recording is not to document the ephemerality of the existing, rather to open up the possibility of cyclical returning, of endless and infinite repetition of the possibility.   For the witness always comes to the site of events post festum; even when the event is going on, the witness is located at the edge of events and voyeur-like gleans the crumbs of the existing   Never starting with the assumption that he is taking something essential and crucial, showing the centre of some event or situation, Maračić includes the camera, still or cine, as a kind of marginal extension of the possible, but not of the necessarily existing, real and literally visible event.  This is how most of the other films that he takes with the help of the video option of his little digital camera are produced.  The equality of the recording that cannot achieve the level of the dedicated cine camera, leaving the impression that the medium is following the course of events somewhat languidly, only confirms this peripherality, the non-essentiality of the set view of the situation.   Although they come into being with the deliberate involvement of the camera, in most of the films it is impossible to determine the existence of any precise happening. At first view, most of the scenes filmed are extremely monotonous; the shot of people hanging out and helping themselves to the food offered; a shot of a talk held at a desk in an office where a woman is listening to an invisible interlocutor; a shot of Evelina, Maračić’s partner, lying in bed in the agony of morning awakening; a shot of a regular summer day in Libertina, a little café in the heart of Dubrovnik that the local clientele frequent; a panoramic shot of the bathing place called Banja in which swimmers run across the shallows after the waves from the south; the shot of a little pile of waste paper and packaging that the wind whirls round in some dark cranny of Dubrovnik; the shot of a group of people trying their best with a stamp vending machine, and so on. Although there is clearly some event, it does not have the status of central content, the purposeful cause of the shot, rather the event appears subsequently, breaks over the edges of the immediately visible or patent, invoking the imagination of the  witness, not seldom enjoining a wager on the border of likelihood: a shot of a conversation is perhaps testimony to a drop in concentration and weariness and an attempt to conceal this; the pastoral scene of three birdlike women’s figures from Banja is impossible to understand as a real event like the shot of the whirlwind of trash that raises the imagination of a covert choreography or the child’s balloon that jumps in the rhythm of a fado.

Although this kind of abolition of the existing in the possible is more doable on an inanimate and objective world than in the world of living beings, in Maračić’s work, after a long time, human beings have nevertheless started to appear with increasing vigour. The fact that the latent comedy of his films coincides with the appearance of human protagonists, is certainly not fortuitous; every making general is of necessity cruel, it wells up out of the shame at the gap between the living being and language, individual and his picture, the fortuity of existence and the possibility of appearing in the frame in which the very next instance he will no longer be.   This shamefacedness at one’s own presence in the remnants of someone else’s appearance urges Maračić to let man into his photography always at some general place, in a clearly defined and intersubjective role from which the individual can apparently freely walk off, unlike his own conditions, to which he remains shackled: the subject that looks at the sea, the subject that sleeps, or talks over dinner.  In the cycle of people who look at the sea, in the series of photographs that come into being in a common way of continued photographing of an ordinary everyday situation that one meets on the way from Museum to City and back again, once again it is to do with the vanishing of the existing in the possible; what Maračić photographs is only pure possibility; the possibility of stopping, sitting on a vacated bench, of observing, perhaps of enjoying the view. People who put this possibility into practice are the associates of the cameraman; instead of faces, they turn to him the backs of their heads, hiding the view, understanding the artist’s and hiding their own shame; shame for enjoying the view, the intimate surrender to beauty. For the moment in which one becomes receptive to beauty is always the moment of subjective disappearance in the possible, moment of desubjectivisation; and precisely for this reason, this moment cannot bear the face of a person, but can only be hidden behind a nape of a neck. And napes too of course reveal, but here begins the latent comedy. From the hairstyle and the properties it is possible to guess at vices and virtues, from the way in which someone sits, the relations of couples and so on, but this is part of some other story; in this story about the view, all of these comical people at one moment felt shame before what they were looking at.

In the same manner of generalising, for years Maračić has been photographing Evelina asleep, or for a somewhat shorter period, Ivo, one of the lads who carry goods within the Dubrovnik city walls. Although these are concrete persons from private life, Maračić photographs them caught in extremely general situations, without any striking and sure indications of particularity. The image of a personality lost in sleep, the state in which the individual existence is suspended, reveals only the possible position of the sleeper, the shows of covering and uncovering, the body surrendered to the bed; in the background of the absent consciousness of the sleeper the individuality of the interior is brought out, the character of room and furnishing, the inroads of light. In the Sisyphean figure of a middle aged man who pushes or pulls his little trolley, the presence of personality is also minimalised.  Repetition of the endlessly same or similar scene draws away attention from the person to the details of the mise-en-scene, the whole context in which one and the same action is repeated ad infinitum, and although this eternal returning of the same to an extent guards the unrepeatability of the individual existence that happens to be found within it, the moment in which he crops up is inevitably tragicomic; for although the performance of a job guarantees the individual survival and subsistence in the field of visibility for others, the passionate connection, the familiarity, the shameless dependence of subject on its own role or character is resolved only in the tender concern or piety of the witness.

And precisely this shame because of the dependence of a living person on an imaginary image of his own character, dependence on the mere possibility of clicking, is probably the reason that there is hardly a single portrait in Maračić’s oeuvre.  His reduction of the people and even the individuals of his closest surroundings to situations and roles is equally cruel and merciful; it is a manner in which the fellow man is kept at a distance from the fatal judgement of the camera on every individual existence. And yet, such a generalisation of the individual, the raw insistence on the common places of his appearance, is at the same time the only possible way of staging the irreducibility of a person.  In a cycle that he has called Little Women (the name, not at all derogatory or dismissive, is just another one of the author’s generalisations), Maračić discreetly but after all did come close to the portrait.  These are photos of women with whom he regularly comes into contact in his everyday life in public, mainly women employed in various services industries, shop assistants and waitresses.  Undoubtedly sincerely prompted by their personality that captures the amorous heart of the artist, Maračić can shyly approach them via their professional roles; photography becomes a kind of voluntary failure of generalisation, in which the author takes up on himself the obligation of witnessing for the person that avoids representability, or every representative generalisation.   Little Women is one of the few series that has come into being with a voluntary exchange between photographer and photographed, where the shooting is an act of communication. The smile that he gets in return breaks through not only the professional identity of the woman, but the image of her physis, taking away the detail of an existence totally outside the reach of the representable, to the same absence, suspension of existing in potential, which in all Maračić’s photographs makes mortality an acceptable possibility.

If that thought present from the beginning is radicalised ultimately, i.e. that the subject is present to itself, aware of itself, right at the moment of the drainage of all the attributes of affiliation, every distinctiveness to self, every independence of figure or work, even one’s own view – then perhaps a reason will be found why Maračić has photographed the island of Lokrum – the scene that is before him everyday from the office of the Museum of Modern Art in Dubrovnik.  Always from the same viewpoint, without changing a single parameter of the frame, carefully recording time, date and day of origin, with some possible comment on the weather situation, Maračić is in fact making his own self-portrait. Taking Lokrum, he witness to himself; not via his figure or work – which his personal and artistic shyness would never allow him – but by his own view, just as he did in work from the beginning of his artistic career in which he shot the movement of his own view marked with a spot in a mirror. This minimal sign for objectiveness of his own  view has turned into the image of the island; like the dot, the picture of the island tells of a moment of subjective suspension in non-characteristic possibility, the impersonal possibility of looking at the island instead of his own likeness in the mirror. Ultimately of course it is all the same, for the image of the face is no more or less characteristic than the image of the island; for Maračić, the image of Lokrum is a place of ideal recognition, having an effect of a mirror reflection in front of which he feels shame because of his happening to be in what he sees. And so he photographs the island; day after day translating the shame of existence into the possibility of beauty. Because of his dependence on this view, Maračić seldom goes to the island, certainly not primarily with the intention of photographing it; for to peer into what lies behind the image means the risk of breaking the illusion required for daily subsistence. Still, one rainy summer day Maračić, like Alice, went to peer behind the looking glass; and there he discovered that the picture, in his own phrase, had its own “inner volume”, something like a bag without a bottom. After several hours of the falling of the gaze through layers of greenery and a rashomon of trees, treetops and paths, during which a cycle of photographs called Lokrum Inside was created, Maračić returned again (at least as far as Lokrum is concerned) to his old position: Lokrum in a blizzard, Lokrum in fog, fog lifting on Lokrum, in sequences. And so on again, day by day, Maračić does not tell of the island, rather the opposite, the island witnesses to him.  Behind the image of Lokrum, Maračić conceals his own artistic shame; he switches the impossibility of being in art into the possibility of non existing. The island is the common place of Maračić’s subjective disappearance; what remains of the author, the remnant that completes the testimony of one who fatalistically surrenders himself to the view.

Ivana Mance

Antun Maracic was born in Nova Gradiska in 1950.

·       He took a degree in visual arts at the Educational College in 1971 and in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, 1976, class of Sime Peric.

·       From 1976-1979 he was an associate of the master class of Ljubo Ivancic and Nikola Reiser.

·       From 1978 to 1980 he was a member of the working community of artists called Podroom.

·       He was between 1981 and 1991, and has been since 1994, an active collaborator of the Extended Media Gallery in Zagreb.

·       He has written extensively about art - reviews, critical accounts, polemics, essays, published in the daily and periodical press, in specialised art and culture reviews, and has written many prefaces for the exhibition catalogues of other artists, as well as making a number of television programmes about individual Croatian artists.

·       He has authored a number of conceptual exhibitions.

·       From 1987 to 1990 he put a number of exhibitions in the AM-M14f/1-Z Gallery, in the informal space of his own flat.

·       In 1991, for a short time, he was director of the Student Centre Gallery, Zagreb.

·       From 1992-1993 he produced a large number of television stories about various Croatian contemporary artists.

·       From 1992 to 1997 he was director of the Zvonimir Gallery, Zagreb.

·       In 1995, as author of text and photographs, and together with art historian Evelina Turkovic, he published a book on the sculptor Ivan Kozaric entitled The Kozaric Studio.

·       In 1996 he published a book of photographs and texts of his own under the title Emptied Frames - Vanished Contents 1991-1994.

·       In 1998 he published the book Pavo Urban - Last Pictures.

·       From 1998 he was manager of the Extended Media Gallery, Zagreb.

·       Since 2000, he has been director of the Art Gallery, Dubrovnik.

·       A multimedia artist, he has put on more than 30 independent shows and taken part in a hundred or so collective exhibitions at home and abroad, and [rpdiced a large number of his own actions and performances. His works are held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, the Modern Gallery Zagreb, the History Museum, Zagreb, the Print Collection of the National and University Library  in Zagreb, the Filip Trade and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary collections.

·       He lives in Zagreb and in Dubrovnik.

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