ON - OF FORMS (SMALL, SHORT AND SCATTERED FORMS OF WORDS)
On the hiddenness of time. We could say-on that yesterday is gone, the past is something that has gone by, and the current moment is what we are destined for and what we have to live. Today we are forced to live 'the annihilation of time', 'the erasure of distance and space'. The rule of today is the amnesia of the present and the reign of the actual moment, the actual and immediate pleasure. Contemporaneity effectively erases the past, memories, or it easily manipulates, transforms and exploits them in order to gain its new victory, a new victory of the current moment. So let us now say-on something about the past, let us look-on back without running into nostalgia or utopia. Let us step-on backward rather than forward. We are dealing with another kind of time, not with the adoration of relics and antiquity. With a new form of time; actually we have to rediscover-on the time, we have to think-on time, feel-on the standstill of time, the omnipresent form of time. To in-form time, we speak-on about the process; so let us compose a long and slow, actually standstill form stuck somewhere between the hand, the mouth and the ideal image of the form; a form in the standstill time before and after the current moment; not swift, momentary and effective but, rather, a long, slow, heavy material-spatial-time form. A person rushes, but time stands still.
Conceptual art should not be the art of forms and material but, rather, the art of ideas and meaning. Ideas, however, are immaterial forms, and forms are also ideas that have found their own material form. Here I would like to say some words on material. The world is material, technology is digital; the world is old, technology is up to date. The world is not only very unstable, flexible, fluid, unbalanced, virtual, multi-directional and so on, but also direct, physical and material; it is also where it stops, where it is motionless, where it stands still, where it is STOP and not GO. Shapeless, madly flowing and murky smelling crude oil certainly have a much higher value in our world than the beautiful form of a peach, for example, and information has much greater power and value than the stroke of a hand or a blow with a hammer. But the forms I wish to speak about are physical and material, they stand still and in one place and are not mobile. These forms are not distributional, that is, topical, marketable, dominant and politically-correct projections or interpretations of the living environment, information, apologies and metamorphoses of social reality, explorations of the local and the global, the public and the private, or a search of the existent or adopted form of identity…. In fact, the said points to the contemporaneous, increasingly profane and uniform repression of everydayness, usefulness, telling us once again that there is no space of freedom and no free space. And forms are in front of us, but we do not see or feel them – and that is why I speak about them here.
Matter. Material is of the world, there is continuity between the world and materials. Material, matter passes through the hand, by the hand, from the hand. But also from the body, the mouth, the head, the shovel, the concrete mixer, the foundry furnace, and also from the spoon, the refrigerator. It seems that in this very narrow space one could still fight out the impression of uniqueness and unrepeatability. Form as an event.
The victory of man over nature. With technology we do not master nature, however, but instead regulate a new relationship between man and nature. And nature is still as if in a dynamic and complex correlation between order and disorder. Even biogeometry is still as if proper to nature, and nature plays amazingly, but also horrifically, infinite formative games: 'All miracles of forms', all miracles of the changing of forms. But matter in its core is really not persistent. Nature is a form that changes, passes away and incessantly grows again… – this obsolete and reiterated statement is boring, almost silly, but once and again basically true.
Stone can turn pure and transparent, stone can weep, stone disappears as sand washed out by the waves of civilisation. What remains are brittle leavings, records of numerous forms irrevocably erased by the wave of time and the wave of civilisation. The sand NON Western, the sand YES premodern, non-traversable. Sand is a pure regression. It gives an impression as if we would witness leftovers that are ancient, but at the same time so much present, contemporary. Forms of sand are unrepeatable and infinite in their variations. Brittle and vulnerable, unapproachable.
The encounter, turnabout, conversion, interruption, rupture, transformation of form. But also the void and divergence of form. Let us try-on with ABC… 123… The first grade, the second grade, the third grade … The categorisation of material forms and the categorisation of races/growths. The more we organise, the more formative changes we perceive, more growth and living, as well as more decays, passings, demises of forms. Archaeology of the formative chain is a chain that has found its form and oncoming forms and new forms.
The earth under ten fingers is forced to sing. Primordial clay – that is, the earth – gently sings, the fingers trigger an endless game of games, 'mouldings', becomings, encounters and erasures, variations, transformations, the search for something that lies behind the surface outlook and also represents the inherent driving force of these ungraspable possible changes of one and the same thing.
Of self-sufficiency of the living form, the form of restlessness. Restless forms. Searching for, or actually escaping from, moving, melting, liquefying, dissolving, softening of hard material. Forming from within. The past forms. The roots of forms. Food is a form. The forms of heart and the forms of bread. The forms of energy. The form passes through the stomach in a different way than through the hands. The future existential forms for the stomach and of the stomach.
The light. A flower bomb. A bomb-like flower. Open forms. Shadow. War cracks, war forms. Why are flowers so incredibly beautiful. A flower blossoms like a bomb explodes. The atomic mushroom is hypnotic, even attractive. Sharp and hostile forms. Once a scalpel in profound anatomy, discovering the multiple layers of subcutaneous, internal sub-forms; nowadays, computer has become the principal instrument. Apple is a machine. Apple like instrument.
Sub-forms: an pre/behind/by form. An after/at/near/up-to form. Wild forms and almost natural forms. Artificial forms of the multiple layers of past and future forms, images, contents, sub-forms and formative formations.
To live on air; the forms of air. Air-brush. To form from air. Even the living forms of organic substances. Elementary formative operations. Hidden forms, hidden life. Microbes, 'extremophiles', cellular forms, uttermost forms – they need almost nothing for their existence, a little more than nothing. They do not harm anybody or anything. Hidden Forms, Invisible Edges, Borderline Forms, Corner Forms. And Double Forms of surpassing the difference. These forms need very VERY little, extremely tiny living space and matter; humans do not belong here.
We consume high-budget mass masturbations, and new and old new technologies keep inventing new, entertaining and quick collective forms in our name. Now personal forms are supposed to be personal whims or even ephemera, but nevertheless every person has his/her own form. A contemporary artist – just like a contemporary scientist – hysterically hunts after new forms because of the appalling recognition that traditional forms (of sculptures, paintings, situations and installations) no longer allow for attention or sale, that is, participation in the market; furthermore, old forms supposedly no longer offer new recognitions, nor give possibilities and space for genuine creation, emigration into vision or seeing, new imagination and experience and for new reality, another reality, which is – whatever we might believe – the essence of art, art as the truth.
There are open holes, and other holes are closed. Some holes are seductive and HYPNOTIC forms, contemporary forms of capital. The winners are technically perfected, sneaky, obscene and distanced forms of proficiently designed cellular phones and cars; these are objects of craving and desire, very costly and alienated forms, objects owned by obvious winners. Today the imperial, very extensive production, total mega-kilo epidemics – but also funeral, robotic, time and again created out of ashes and consumption – constantly marches, parades and demonstrates. Always new miracles, such as bio-mediations, or new sexuality in which reproduction no longer depends on sex and sex is not a precondition for reproduction. Alienated alien bodies, artificial monsters from the Silicon Valley. Beauties from under the scalpel and out of beauty parlours. Bodies wearing various shapes. A human and his/her body has become everything, both and all three of them, a loving, financial and painful setting. Cannibalistic nostalgia – scattered bones, muscles in cramps; our soft-ware soul does not fit in here properly.
Suppressed forms, as hardly seen grey stains. Black Flags. Black is the colour of the flag. Ruins are the most characteristic forms of civilisation, human stains. In the time when industry has appropriated the notion of beauty through designers' inventions, and when design by means of genetics already reached into the domain of the previously sacred body created after God's image in ex-God's form, the notion of beauty has also been torn out of the hands of art.
Indefinable, uncertain pleasure. Love can be the ultimate form of violence. Love is a human conflict form.
Alen Ožbolt
