Vesna Bukovec: Is Art Necessary? Why?, Contemporary Art for Parents
Author: Vesna Bukovec
Title: Is Art Necessary? Why?
Year of creation: 2002-2005
Owner: Podlaskie Association of Promotion of Fine Art, Białystok
Work info: Computer graphic (prints) (A4 – 21 x 29,7 cm), 19 pcs.
Description of work:
I put forth in the project the communication of contemporary art with wider audiences. When contemporary art is confronted with negative audience reactions, what is often heard as an excuse is the audience’s conservatism. Perhaps my approaches are also at times inaccessible or opaque. The title question is one of the questions in a survey, which I conducted among friends and acquaintances. I also asked people in the survey to what extent they followed the trends in contemporary visual arts and what they thought of it. The answers I have used were the answers of the people who did not follow the trends in art yet have an opinion on it and its mission as a kind of common opinion.
I used the works of renowned world contemporary artists as illustrations of the statements (the interviewees i.e. the authors of statements have not seen those works – their statements do not refer directly to selected works). The humorous undertone is mostly understandable to that segment of the audience acquainted more in-depth with art, which is familiar with quoted works and their context.
The work was created for the exhibition Start in the Mestna Gallery in Ljubljana in June 2002. It consists of 11 prints of A4 size (reproduction of a well-known work, below to the left the author and title, further below the quotation, sex and age in brackets), previously filled-in survey forms and empty survey forms that are available to exhibition visitors if they wish to fill them in. In 2005 the gallery Arsenal from Białystok (Poland) has invited me to take part in the exhibition How to speak of contemporary art?. I decided to make the work anew yet this time in the Polish context. The survey was translated in Polish and dispatched among the people of different profiles. The answers to the question above were then translated into English. I used photographs of famous works of contemporary Polish authors for illustrations.
Author: Vesna Bukovec
Title: Contemporary Art for Parents
Year of creation: 2002
Owner: Vesna Bukovec
Work info: text, computer graphic (prints) (21 x 29,7 cm), video 7’ 36’’ (screening version DVD)
Description of work:
How to explain art to a layman? I prepared a “lecture” in which I was explaining key moments in the history of art to my parents – the moments that, in my opinion, have brought us to where we are today. We were commenting on market, institutions, evaluation system… Then we browsed together through the collection book on contemporary art (Art at the Turn of the Millenium, Taschen, 1999) and talked about the featured works. They both have their hobbies: mom is involved with bio-dynamic agriculture and dad is constructing various practical objects for households. I presented their hobbies on prints. I brought them books on contemporary art that deal with similar subjects to those of their liking; I asked them to choose some works that they like the most and to corroborate their choice in one sentence. I also asked them to write two texts each: one on their hobbies (why they do what they do…) and the other one on our collaboration (do they have the impression that now they have a better understanding of art…) We created this work together. A tighter communication between the “artist” and the audience. Collective activity instead of individual practice.
Vesna Bukovec (1977)
She deals in her projects with issues on art, identity and media (mostly television) using research and communication as tools. She is active both as individual artist and as member of art collective KOLEKTIVA (Vesna Bukovec, Lada Cerar, Metka Zupanič).
She received her M.A. in 2006 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. She was participating in student exchange programmes, workshops and has had artistic residencies in the Netherlands, Italy and the UK. She was exhibiting her work individually in P74 Gallery in Ljubljana (2003, 2005), in the Art Salon in Celje and in Nova Gallery in Zagreb (together with Lada Cerar and Metka Zupanič, 2004). Her collective appearances include Modern Gallery Ljubljana (2005), festival Outvideo in Ekaterinburg, Russia (2004, 2005, 2006), the 11th Biennale of young artists from Europe and the Mediterranean in Athens, Greece (2003) and the 25th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana (2003).
More at: www.vesna-bukovec.net, www.kolektiva.org