My name is V.S.S.D. I can’t see well and clear anymore. Which were the first words, paintings and first things. And sounds. First I would like to apologise for even speaking. Why would a fallen artist even speak after a 12-year silence? Perhaps – despite having sand in his mouth – he can say a thing or two – his tongue is made of sand – perhaps not so much of the past and not at all about his present, because the latter does not, in fact, exist. He can tell – as much as it may seem a paradox – a thing or two about what it’s like here and now, of course from a certain distance of time and space, from an other, side perspective. A one‑sided perspective, as well. “Humans have always wanted to know where we are or even where we’re going. Keeping to a plan: we are here every day, always.”[1] Not where we were, where we’re going, but only where we are. Being here. Here.

But here and now I feel like a stranger, and I actually am one, as if I were visiting. That “being here and being now” is my point of view through a rather thick pair of glasses, through optics. What and how was before, which has already happened, what and how I see today, that is, the present moment from the viewpoint and through the optics of the past. For explorations and observations of the past always depend on the positions in the present. Nevertheless, no telephoto lens, no telescope or microscope can truly zoom in on a thing, it can only show and prove how infinitely far we are from infinitely small or infinitely large things. How far we really are. I, for one, will attempt to look at the present from the past. This regression–optics from the past–can, if nothing else, open questions and our or your eyes about the position of art in the past and now, and about the past and present world and its reflections, representations, considerations and images. If I speak from the other side and from the other perspective, from a temporal distance, I can see a strong supremacy, domination of the present and the supremacy of the passing moment. Pleasure is now.

Of course, much has happened since then. And much more has disappeared. Much has been said and much more will be. And then some. But I wouldn’t like to repeat myself too much. I will attempt to – for the most part – say something new. “For what has passed has passed irrevocably.”

Briefly on the exhibition, because my words wouldn’t exist without it. That’s how it has always been. Different levels, contents and intentions of this exhibition that I/we attempt to – economically – present, thematise and achieve are as follows:

The viewpoint that the exhibition V.S.S.D. – 20 Years Before and this text attempt to present or show is the today’s view of the past, how we see the past today, today over and above the past. How the present frames the past. Like having a look into some kind of a chest, which actually reminds me of a hole and is almost empty, since it is like presence, materiality – because of the transient nature of V.S.S.D. exhibitions – i.e. it is lost as indirectness. It displays and it is sensed only through documents as leading figures, representatives of the past. Photography, interestingly enough, here speaks exclusively of the past.

Needless to say, the documents are more or less illustrative, revealing, descriptive and also real or fake, and even though a document can replace a thing, material object, person etc., it is simultaneously its disappearance. In this case, however, documents are not used to resurrect, but describe, display, shed light on some past object, albeit with a rather limited, dimmed light. Nevertheless, “the presentational documentary material” will not be used solely to present its missing art object, but is also independent. I’ve already touched upon this subject in 1989 in the exhibition “Memory Images of the Future”, where “only” photographs, documents of works, tools and the materials from which works were made were exhibited.

Alongside what could conditionally be called a “subjective”, “internal” and therefore biased “historical view”, the presentation is divided into the lost past and the necessary limitation of “dead” photography, “dead” documents, and the liveliness of the actual view or reading of this past. This divided view nevertheless attempts to connect, seam together at least two starting points: to merge the ever uncertain subjective layer of memory, that is, its selectiveness, forgetfulness, censorship, selection, and formally as well as technically real but distant and dusty visual reproductions, photographs, documents and remnants. We therefore have an at least “two-fold” approach to the past: individually as, let’s say – what I/we hope for – curious spectators, readers, researchers, and collectively through the established author’s perspective.

I am not interested in reviving the past, still less do I intend to historicise. No reconstruction of history, no new history, no research, no bones! This is not a historical exhibition, or a presentation of history, or a historical project. Some see history of art as a game of chess, for instance: as having various pieces at their disposal, that is, a king and a queen, two rooks, bishops and knights, and a host of pawns. However, there is no such thing as history of art, it only exists as a science and scientific construct, or mapping, and within it we have scrutiny, close-ups, artwork analyses, recontextualisations and new interpretations, re-spellings or transcriptions. And of course critical selections, hidden censorship, silent eliminations. In the exhibition on V.S.S.D., which is an exhibition on the bygone, the inanimate, the past and art history as forms are framed critically. I find that drawing maps or writing history is not fun at all.

And it is, of course, here that we also necessarily encounter the question of time, how this form or, rather, the so-called history or, rather, the so-called past even continues to exist today, when the world is – quite straightforwardly – increasingly transient and is changing at an accelerated pace. And at the same time as it is re-constituted again and again, the old world is eradicated. How are we supposed to organise memories when on a growing number of levels, this world is increasingly momentary and increasingly fast, orientated towards the now, today, towards the briefness of the current moment? There’s a certain division and antagonism in this. Between now and before. It is absolutely clear that “colour does not exist in the same cultural reality as it did before. Those colours are gone, because our eyes have also changed experientially.” But this is not nostalgia for what was before; well, to be honest, there is a little bit of it.

I repeat what I’ve always said, “that my motive and main sympathy is the past”. “But not the past as some sort of a treasure trove, a memorial or museum … tool shed.” Rather, the past that I have always worked for – “I work for the past, not the future” – was my only reality, albeit imaginary. However, I have never claimed that the past is present in my works or that the future is absent from them.

Does the past even have a form, and are these forms captured in paintings, sculptures, objects, and are these located exclusively in museums? Or elsewhere as well? And can past forms be found anywhere else? V.S.S.D.’s form had always been very diverse yet transient – fundamentally bygone – at all times. An occurrence against the long-lasting still object. And not only exhibitions and installations, which were occurrences of limited duration. My end was inscribed at my very beginning. I’m not alive after my own death as a walking dead, as the present past, because I am not a vampire. As many other artists are.

“With every work there is less of me,” I’ve said and written on numerous occasions. “I’m disappearing while I’m painting.” V.S.S.D., while it/I still existed, it/I was like a savage, a hot‑tempered, expressive subject. And a suicidal subject, as well. For with every work there was less of me. And not more and more, I wasn’t expanding, growing larger, I kept growing smaller until the last white flag. I was dreaming for 10 years. I died in 1995. And at the very beginning, and somewhere in between as well, there was liquidation, destruction, burning of an artwork in protest. Twice: “Destruction of a Painting” in 1986 and “Burning Painting – Anamorphosis” in 1990. A painter-arsonist? I myself used to burn as a flame and transposed myself into “Fiery Paintings” or the “From Flesh and Blood” paintings.

Nevertheless, V.S.S.D. does not and never has felt like a winner, even if it is an arsonist. Neither is it one of the survivors. What is present, then? It is the moment that is present, here and now. The dominance of the present, these words come from the blabbering mouth of every journalist on air, who reports and echoes when something happens. The present echoes, it talks, takes photos of itself, records and describes time and time again. In this very moment, day in, day out. My personal standpoint “to flee from time, to flee from the world, to reach something that is not of this world, that even this world is not” is understandable if we can understand that “matter is also where it is not”. And “art is” also “something that does not a priori have its context, cause, or real time or real place”. But this is not a caution to mind the gap, watch out for the emptiness, void, rupture, hole in time and space, in the present. I do not wish to fill that hole. As a matter of fact, I would like to show that hole, that emptiness. Look, here’s emptiness, an absent place, an absent past, not a history, but emptiness, a hole, and I will not fill it. I wouldn’t even like to fill the hole. (Perhaps, as they say, every whole really has a certain hole, around which it – the whole – really becomes a whole.) Nor do I wish to open the eyes of the uninitiated with this exhibition. Not – look, fool! – what I was, but – look, fool – where and how I am not. How many times have I said that “where there is nothing, it can be marked with black or white”. And I’ve never been there. Because I left after titanium white.

It is this absence that I wish to highlight with the exhibition. An exhibition as absence? Revived absence? An exhibition for absence? And can something even have no time and no place, or is this something then only nothing or commonplace metaphysics? I mean to say that an object, the past can never be reduced to a sign, to res gestae, a part of the imaginary cannot be eliminated. I’ve dreamt of a hundred exhibitions. Applications of paint, heaps of paper, layers of material, iron, sand, pigmentation, dust. How far and how deeply into all of this will we delve is not known, not at the end nor at the beginning – of the exhibition; “the view moves from darkness to light, from spikes to a gentle touch. From beginning to end. From beginning to beginning.” Or as has been said many times: “I am not interested in the future, in the scientific or futurist projects of the future; what I genuinely care about is the past as something that is never finished and always open. The future is redundant.”

Is it really absence? Because the early V.S.S.D. exhibitions were places of fullness, over‑fullness, over-layering, places of excessive amounts of paintings, sculptures, forms, various materials. Like a warehouse, not a store, like a landfill. A dance of emotions, wild scenes, theatre of cruelty, scenes of beauty, peace and crime. The exhibition was an occupation of the gallery. “From the street into the gallery.” “A thick network of paintings and a network of their images prevent the dominance of one image, one form,” and “the exhibition is shattered into pieces, into numerous elements.” Disunity, difference. A spatial painting with many elements. With too many elements, as well. The artist doesn’t always know and fully realise what it is he’s doing and what’s going on under his fingers. But fragmentation is necessary for changes and movement. The first V.S.S.D. exhibitions took place in the dark and twilight, so the works did not exhibit, uncover themselves, but remained veiled and hidden in the light of fire or the shadow of lights. In no case was this a demand to remove veils, or for analysis, surgery or anatomic depth.

Despite all their beauty, the 1980s were nevertheless a dark, dark period, not a bright one. But we all wished for and expected only the good. When the moderna movement begins – and when V.S.S.D. begins – there is a scream. Beauty in its deep agony, distortion. A talking, screaming head whose words we do not understand. Distortion, expressionism. Expressively, however, it stands in opposition to value production. Sand, of course, is most definitely not marble or stainless steel. Sand is not progress, it is regression, and regression is anti-moderna.

“The exhibition’s many directions.” A year or two of reflection have not changed the standpoint and approach to this exhibition, which is aware of the underlying issue and its own division: it can think, but it cannot truly mean, represent its object, neither does it present, replace its lost object (in this case the art of V.S.S.D.), because it is less and, paradoxically, more than this object, since it – V.S.S.D. – has died. I/it will not attempt to prove my/its actual, living presence, but my/its absence. I am not here. Death (even the greatest of sceptics can agree to at least symbolic death!). The best – and most revered – artist are dead artist, are they not?!

“A conscious separation (away) from the world.” Art shows us something we cannot see or couldn’t see before. Art is the discovery, the invention of a new world and it is only art, in fact, that makes the world, the world. The world presented at the exhibition was different from the outside world. “It is important to be outside the cycle and recycling, the world is not a single space, my spaces are deviations from this world.” But each and every exhibition needs light and eyes. Internal or external light. “The eye is shaped like a ball” and eyes are the aforementioned hole, emptiness, if we want to see, we need a hole, emptiness. The eyes are our window, the hole between us, between our inner world and the outside world. And through our senses, this outside world softly sails or roughly plows into our inner world. That’s why we have such defensive and no­‑no‑words as “I don’t express myself in my paintings … These aren’t paintings of the soul, but paintings without a soul … These are paintings of dead souls … I feel nothing inside me … Nothing more exists within”.

As a matter of fact, what is needed is a deviation from oneself: “This primitive narcissism that is epitomized by the complete egoism of today where the subject sees and observes others according to himself: personal views, personal appearances, personal visions, personal notes … And yet with all of this the famous I does not even see itself, because we’re dealing with a collective spirit.” And: “In the world of narcissism we constantly come face to face with oneself. And claustrophobic turning in upon, into oneself does not bring to the surface what has disappeared.” “More lights!” At the exhibition of prints entitled “The Fall of the Angel of Light”, my first exhibition with bright white gallery walls, I stood up to myself and looked into my own face without any shadows. I had made the gallery even whiter and the lights as bright as possible and I had even added extra lights, so many lights that the fuse blew. “The last room of the aforementioned exhibition was the truth of all these attempts. The space was plunged into absolute darkness, with a white spark in the centre and ‘live’ walls at the edges. This was a space where sight was lost, a space of tactile view, where hands saw better than the eyes.”

Contents and forms that are exhibited at this last – I hope it’s really going to be the very last – V.S.S.D. exhibition of mine are literally already the past, they are bygone. What is left when colours are removed, the canvas is taken apart and the palette and brushes are cleaned, what is left of art? Some remnant? A corpse? Nothing? What?! Is it here that contemporary art is what remains or comes into existence?! Can we therefore nowadays say – and be very trendy – that the content and form of the exhibition are OFF, OFF-LINE and not ON, ON-LINE, that it is no longer here and now? We only have traces, notes. And the exhibition is – well, at least it attempts to be – rich nevertheless; even though it is, in fact, poor – informative and visually illustrative: documents and photographs, working visual materials of the group, sketches, drawings, posters, texts, statements, word compositions, audio materials. (For which I don’t yet know whether they will really echo.)

Even though it is intentionally poor, narrow – and even though the Škuc Gallery is small – the exhibition is spacious and broad. Alongside a host of traces and remnants – which is much larger than the gallery – a broad spectrum of people were invited (philosophers, critics, art historians, artists, even art aficionados, collectors, spectators and so on and so forth, approx. 80–100 of them) to answer a questionnaire and comment on how they see or don’t see (don’t know) the creations of V.S.S.D. The questionnaire is now part of this publication. Unfortunately, those who do not know what the acronym V.S.S.D. stands for haven’t filled it out and have nothing to say on the matter, even though this was the hidden intention, manipulation – which has now been uncovered – behind the questionnaire.

The exhibition is – as all words are – also communication. An encounter. Not necessarily a festivity. (“An encounter is not necessarily a cultural project or collective sex.”) Or not necessarily an accident, a misunderstanding, an overlook. All of this is possible. But I don’t want to talk only to myself and about myself. I hope that I’m talking to you as well. Because my only subject and nourishment is not myself – despite all the paintings and the host of drawings from the series “Cannibalistic Nostalgia” – and my own history, my glamour and my misery. “I’ve attempted to continuously preserve and protect the outside position, to stick to the field outside definitions, classifications … It is necessary to flee from all of this in some way, to distance yourself from it. But you also distance yourself from yourself and you always find you’re not identical with yourself, just as in the special relation to painting you distance yourself from (well-known) painting.”

“As a painter, I cannot focus only on colours or on one single colour.” We also like to talk about the other and of others and to others. Particularly inappropriate, bad, uncomfortable things. But this at least has a certain taste, otherwise words – appropriate and diplomatic words – are dry like paper and are tasteless like nicotine-free cigarettes, decaffeinated coffee or alcohol-free beer. For instance, as an artist, I am happy and allowed to say something juicy about another artist and, as a matter of fact, something must necessarily be said about the irreversibility of historical processes. About the unsuccessful revival and imitation of formal processes of the historical avant-gardes. Because of the exhibition in the Mala galerija gallery by my former colleagues from IRWIN, who didn’t reach their kin at all, they didn’t even get close to OHO. They look ridiculous in the water, in the wheat, in the stars, in the rows of rods and in the fields, and they aren’t Triglav at all, they’re a five-headed dragon. But haven’t dragons gone extinct in the 17^th century?! That is intercourse with history, (mis)understanding of history, communication, mediation of history? That is public relations, horseshit, it’s actually consumption. Nowadays it’s called a blog.

Above all, contemporary media supposedly mostly consists of sitting and watching and clicking and not too much movement and even less thinking. Internet is supposed to be a symbol of communication, of providing information, and it represents closeness, bridging space. I’m in front of a monitor, yet so close to you. The brave new world! Never and nowhere are we alone anymore. There are always messages between and with us. As a matter of fact, something else is also true, namely that the closer we get, the further away we are. In some way or another everything is mediated by some interface, medium. In reality, the seeming closeness to one another is actually distance between us. We are close and we are far. And yet the more the public is discussed in the media – which it constantly is – the more this very public remains hidden the most, it is – as what is public, what is seen, a voice – actually non-existent. It is invisible. It only has eyes and ears. Nowadays the only ones talking to you/us, the only ones with a voice and a body – the ones boasting – are the owners, the authority, the select few, the privileged, those that own the media or have access to it through filters and selections and windows. In the system of the past, which some choose to call a “regime”, we were – equally – uniform recipients, mostly hidden, invisible. I saw (myself) only in art.

“Responsibility, insofar as it is included, falls entirely on the artist … Here, however, it is not the artist who is important, but art.” Words can also kill. As can verbal art. Reading can seriously harm you and the people around you, so the box says. And it harms me, above all. After all, who are the – media-environment-friendly – winners, who is under the spotlight and who is eliminated? Sportsmen and politicians are the winners, as are the commercial brands that did not go bankrupt, but are selling well. The winners are on the market, in stores, on bulletin boards and in commercials. And they’re laughing at us. Are the winners those who survived their time, Milan Kučan, Janez Janša, Nova revija, Mladina, Danilo Slivnik, RTV Slovenia, Slavoj Žižek, Marcel Štefančič, Aleš Debenjak, the Avsenik Ensemble, Laibach, Festival Ljubljana, Cankarjev dom, the Ljubljana Philharmonic, Marina Gržinič, Jurij Krpan, Jure Mikuž, Zdenka Badovinac, Tadej Pogačar, Marko Pogačnik, Marko Peljhan, IRWIN, Marjetica Potrč, Alen Ožbolt etc.? And the losers? Are they Jože Pučnik, Rastko Močnik, the poet Seliškar, Aina Šmid, Tribuna, RTV Ljubljana, Radio Študent, Pankrti, Termiti, Miladojka, UBR, OHO, Marko Košnik, V.S.S.D. etc., and, in fact, all those (many) whose names we no longer remember?

“What is the dialectic of the past, then? That which is lost must be lost.” Who can then claim that we’re dealing with changes, with movement? Today, revolution exists only as an image of Che Guevara on a T-shirt. So, is this not, in fact, a standstill, defence, repetition? The only permanent thing is the fight for positions, resources. The social space is, as a matter of fact, an abstraction; even though from the social, common point of view it’s about what could be called horizontal relations, from the individual viewpoint it’s about vertical positions.

I do not own anything. V.S.S.D. always insisted on “isolation of art from the world, from ideology, from politics, from economy”; a position that was a “negation of the profit mentality (the logic of pragmatism and practicality) that must endlessly prove its functionality and reproduce the existing”. This aspiration to survive is nothing new, but it is a problem if art becomes nothing more than a commercial strategy that exclusively serves material goals. Markets, trade, commercial activity and commodification of art are all booming in the 1990s. Corporative design and corporative aesthetics are the most obvious two. The art of advertising. Before, it was Slana, Dora Plestenjak; today, you can put the names down yourselves.

Or incorporated new contributions and new works; just look at these young talented people and young artist, what are they talking about, in fact? About public, social and urban space, about the so-called personal, interactive contacts, networking, career-building, the labour and art market, about international cooperation in schools, assemblies, biennials, exhibitions, about everything else but art. Prostitution and adaptation to the established and ruling forms of cooperation and exhibition. “Is this not the very truth about art in this moment, when all layers of society are swiftly and radically commercialised,” was written in 1989, when one system was crumbling and the transition to a different one was underway.

And of course, V.S.S.D. (I) did not always stick to its firm principles and positions on isolation from the world, politics, economy etc. – it seems that hard-line statements of protest have short and fragile principles?! Unpaid bills go a long way. Designer derivations and orders, designer editions, or even art projects, “The Last Painting Exhibition”, fortunately an unrealised concept from 1989, where a painter was to glorify the logos of 15 successful Slovenian companies by painting them on a canvas with a brush and oil paint. And V.S.S.D. also expressed sensitivity, compassion to politics, for instance with the 1993 exhibition “Red Sea (Red Planet)” and the 1994 exhibition “(On)Soul”, where numerous paintings and countless sketches, collected in 42 volumes, thematised the war and destruction in former Yugoslavia.

The iron “curtain – the question What’s behind it? always pops up, of course. It can be a discovery, but it can also be a misunderstanding, mistake, misconception.” And yet I still have the feeling that there are even more walls, not less. Nowadays the walls are private walls and billboards. They limit and determine our view. And we got the famously perverse mobile connections because we were looking for them. I’m here and you’re thousands of kilometres away and yet we’re together over the network! If before we were living in a drought, in the emergency situation of blocked and inaccessible information, we’re now living in a thunderstorm, a war of information. Communication and information, which were sorely missed and sought after in the past, have become a commandment, a command. And they – contemporary communication media – increasingly transform and fragment our world into information, into pieces of information. What was communication, interactivity like twenty years ago, when personal computers and the Internet did not exist? Twenty years ago, interactivity meant a random encounter in a grey alley or sitting around a filthy bar full of smoke. Interactivity meant love, reading, seeing an exhibition, a concert. One could interactively wander the empty grey alleys of Ljubljana and only meet the shadow of a cat or a street lamp that went out.

Nobody, not even me, sees the world as they once did. Can you still imagine life without mobile phones? That is what commercials that we know as advertisements are asking – which is, in fact, a fundamental and existential question or predicament. Nowadays, the fateful questions of to be or not to be, of meaning and being come from commercials. There’s only one answer and it has already been given. The answer, of course, is: No. There are some differences, however. And not everything is the same. Can you imagine an artist without a mobile phone, an immobile artist? No? It’s just that we no longer even remember how they/we used to live (art) without computers and mobile phones.

“It’s no longer necessary to break down or uncover or reconstruct conceptions, phantasms, ideologies, discourses, mythologies etc. The imitation of life is just as real as life itself. Everything is fake and real at the same time, everything is unnecessary.” That – no mobile phones, contemporary media, computers etc. – truly is something we can barely imagine anymore, because we are addicted. What’s real is not the world, but its media image. The media and information are like air, water, light, life no longer exists without them. In the 1980s we didn’t have information, it was hidden, inaccessible, we didn’t have any media, we didn’t watch television, television was out of fashion, it was lame, we didn’t look at computers because there were none, the only thing we looked at was at the movie theatre or on bootleg VHS tapes of very poor quality, and we listened to five, six, seven, maximum eight LP records, everything else were live broadcasts from Radio Študent recorded on audio tapes.

The present – not history – is like a nightmare. We should turn things upside down. A turn in linearity. But not thinking in reverse. Let’s turn away from the screen. Let’s sit on a chair the wrong way. We cannot go back, but now we’re supposed to do it nevertheless. At least a bit. At least with our thoughts, so let’s close our eyes, not in the sense of “there was a time” or “a long, long time ago, in a country far, far away”. Let’s go back. With our eyes closed. A long, very long time ago everything was just copied into everything else. Everything just existed. And humans, had they not aged and died, wouldn’t have even noticed the passage of time, the changing world. Those are somebody else’s words, but V.S.S.D. also never experienced that time. Even then, time was intensively breaking down and decomposing. We lived through discordant changes. Loud changes. Boycott, however, is always only voiceless, colourless.

And yet “the question of future will not be who owns the land, but who owns the body. We won’t defend our land, we’ll defend our body.” For me, it was never a question of scanning, mapping – more so a question of shredding a map to pieces – and massaging, not even a question of the East vs. the West, periphery vs. centre. To be in, to be present everywhere and have a view and overview of everything actually means to be nowhere and see nothing. For me, Berlin, London, Paris, Zürich or New York were never the centre. For me, whose name is V.S.S.D., the centre was Ljubljana. What is more, “me and my body are the centre of the world. My body is also the gravitational centre.” Of course I enjoyed visiting large cities. But I wasn’t exploring their details, looking for friends, building a network. I found differences. No city on my path was ever similar to my own city.

I mean to say that I did not pass through, conquer other cities, but I did, however, constantly pass into other and very different creative moods, forms and fields. I did not travel the map of the world, but an unknown world with my art. I never wanted to pass from art into life, into reality. When in 1986 I once and for all passed from the street into the gallery, I felt and, indeed, had more freedom than out on the streets. No revival or imitation. Processes ran in the opposite, reverse direction, reality was passing into art. Not reality, not mere life itself, but an always new invention of artistic language. Needless to say, “an artist is not merely an actor that watches (into) the world and reflects, interprets it.” I did not work along what is urban or along the lines of life or along the lines of nature; instead, I attempted “to ‘think’ certain processes as nature … To work as Nature … It is no longer about an image that simulates the image of nature. I’m moving the image into nature and nature to the place of the image.”

This is where my big mouth stops.

Translated by Miha Šuštar

The text was first published in exhibition catalogue V.S.S.D., 20 let pred tem, by Galerija Škuc in 2007.

[1] All quotes and citations are taken from the book “VSSD – Beseda slike, 1984–1995”, Zbirka Analecta, 1997.