The Ready-Made And The Question Of The Fabrication Of Objects And Subjects - Critical Essay

Afterimage, Jan, 2001 by Suzana Milevska

In March 1997, Tosevski opened his large exhibition at the Museum of the City of Skopje, displaying faulty textiles, granite blocks and porcelain from the three previous exhibitions and adding a fourth--irregular bottles from a glass factory in Skopje. In addition to the rejected factory material he projected slides of words taken from an economics dictionary, defining terms such as "transition," "transformation," "privatization," "solvency" and "bankruptcy." The paradoxes that Tosevski dealt with may be interpreted by applying a theory of linguistic discourse to the given aesthetic context. To be sure, the polemics surrounding the issue of whether performative artistic acts still fall within the realm of the aesthetic can reach radical extremes, from Duchamp's assertion that art is separate from aesthetics to Greenberg's claim that the aesthetic is identical with the artistic. Regardless of one's critical stance, it is obvious that the performative work of art re-examines the relationship between the artist ic, the aesthetic and the real.

The approach underlying the entire "Dossier '96" project can be called a performative act, since it exemplifies J. L. Austin's definition that performative exhibits produce meaning even when they are themselves rhetorically empty. [12] That is, the very demonstration, articulation and proclamation of the performative utterance carries out the act. The separation of rejected objects from their original real context and their transposition into gallery spaces is in fact similar to Duchamp's first performative artistic act: the displaying of the urinal with the signature "R. Mutt," in conjunction with its proclamation as a work of art. [13] If a work of art is a work of art because the artist designates and proclaims it to be such, then what becomes of the original manufacturer of the object that has now become art? In this case, Tosevski takes heaps of rejects from bankrupt factories and exhibits them as works of art; are not the producers of these objects--the workers and the managers--deprived of their origi nal function? Do they now become artists themselves?

According to the theory of speech acts, there are certain criteria by which to judge the success of a performative act. These utterances/acts are outside the consideration of truth or falsehood; they are semantically empty--they can produce only meanings. These are, above all, the intention, and the awareness of the intention of the performance, the competence and legitimacy of the performer and the institutional setting in which the act is performed. According to these criteria, the "producers," whose "products" have been proclaimed as works of art, can by no means be considered the artists. However, because of their metaphorical association with unusable objects, once they are labeled "technological surplus"--the term used in Macedonia for workers dismissed from their work--their status approaches that of the art objects in question, and not subjects with control over their products. [14]