Here And There/Love Will Tear us Apart Again, 1997. An intervention where the staircase leading downstairs to the gallery space was moved to the opposite side of the gallery. |
 "Soba, go stand in the corner, and shame on you." Nebojsa Seric, nicknamed Soba, is not obeying his teachers. He is still studying at the art academy of Sarajevo because of three years of mobilization in the defence of the city. The rotund Bosnian's approach to art, and life and stuff, is that of an encyclopedic temperament-one that doesn't bow down to sedentary genre imperatives. Sporting a soft hat and knife, a huge earring and slim, quivering ponytail, Soba, 28 years old, is a sauntering auteur and man-about-town in Sarajevo. by LARS BANG LARSEN, Siksi Nr 4/97  |
Soba does not bestow privilege on the art object as being a locus of attention, but uses it in a performative displacement from its site of display. In his performances and videos, also, space is provided for a more acute realization of psychological states. Here And There/Love Will Tear us Apart Again (1997), was an intervention where the staircase leading downstairs to the gallery space was moved to the opposite side of the gallery. This deprived the gallery of its function inasmuch as it became impossible to enter it. At the same time, the inverted picture, or condition, of the space was obscuring a marker for orientation in space: all the spotlights inside the Obala Art Centre were turned up to maximum wattage and the floor was covered by white paper. It was the (glaring) white cube rearranged as a conflict between a real space and an imaginary space. During the opening of the show, the screws taken from the disassembed staircase were handed out among the public-so that they could fix their own spaces the way they desired.
Nebojsa Seric-Soba with Bono in Sarajevo, New Year's Eve 1996 The famous rocksinger wears Soba's badge for his band Z.O.CH. (Ziatom Optocene Chune/Gold Wrapped Dicks'). The Kiss (1996), a juxtaposition of two Bic-lighters and, of course, a reference to Rodin and Brancusi, was created for The Biennial for Young Artists in Rijeka, Croatia (where, by the way, the minuscule work was awarded First Prize). The piece constitutes a link in the artist's ongoing series of experiments with the interaction between green and red-investigations of what can be found between two colours of different emotions, and ordinary things. In these formal and narrative experiments, Soba manipulates everyday objects such as scissors, pencils, toothbrushes and clothes clips so that their original, specific functions are made to articulate general conditions. In Soba's artistic practice, it is clearly not an orientation away from the perceptual which constitutes the essential property in the conceptual enterprise. As Soba himself explains about The Kiss, in its connection with the premises where it was to be presented: "There was art everywhere!". In much the same way that Felix Gonzales-Torres began placing his works on the ßoor, because in the New York of the late eighties one had to win a fist fight in order to get a place on the wall among the paintings, The Kiss is contextual almost by virtue of negation. You could say that The Kiss is a form of narrative which is acted out with the lighters as finger puppets on the hands of the artist, and thereby evades the possibility of the readymade principle's extension into pure artistic consecration. Discretely placed in the window sill, the lighters simply animate two lovers in the sunset. The Kiss assumes a position with regard to a banal image of love, but indicates conflict as much as it thematizes symbiosis. A duality in which the two elements cling to one another like cannibals trying to devour the other, the same; and where the impoverished idiom seems to be the result of a forced minimization. At the same time, The Kiss speaks of the coexistence of two art-historical traditions. It is as if the lighters' Ying-Yang body is embodying the hybridization between a Western tradition (sculpture, pop, the readymade), and an interpolation of the legacy from Russian constructivism. It is the melancholy of the readymade which meets geometric rationalization and transformation, and which is blended so commonly that the work ends up approximating joke or an anecdote. 
The Kiss, 1996, readymade The event of going to Sarajevo is more an excursion into the memories of a demented reality than a case of putting a geographical distance behind you. The state of mind in Sarajevo during the siege has been recounted in this way: "A Sarajevo psychiatrist, called Ljiljana Oruc, kept her sense of humour throughout the siege. In the summer of 1993 she described the Bosnian capital as one vast psychiatric laboratory. Sarajevans had suffered, she said, from a collective psychotic delusion-the delusion that the world would, eventually, rescue them and their country. This delusion persisted, she continued, despite all the objective evidence to the contrary. It was, therefore, a kind of inverse paranoia: a persistent belief that everything is going to turn out all right in the end even though by all rational judgement, it clearly is not." (In Silber/Little: The Death of Yugoslavia, Penguin 1996). The main occupation of the younger generations during the siege was Rock'n Roll, as a form of resistance to the besiegers' attempts to destroy the social body of the city. Playing music kept you going, it was something to do. And when you attended a concert for a couple of hours in a basement, the Marshall amps would drown out the gunshots and shelling. When you make a visit to Sarajevo now, you do not hear the sound of explosions, but you do see that the city's streets are pockmarked everywhere with the distinctive splatter of the mortar impact point. Being physically in the city also means crossing a threshold of alienation between one's visual preconsciousness of Sarajevo as a media spectacle (war and suffering in an absolute sense), and the exteriority of the very real testimonies of the war, which characterize the city as well as its inhabitants. The global information culture as gaze and condition makes itself felt in an importunate way. When I heard Miss Sarajevo with The Passengers and Luciano Pavarotti on Danish radio, I did not believe in it as a genuine declaration of sympathy for the besieged city. When U2 played the song in Sarajevo, everybody wept. An authentication of pop, a sudden bringing into existence of the media because the message is received? 
No Lyrics, No Music, No Country, Nothing..., 1997, performance The artist as a street singer with a sign bearing no inscription, a guitar without strings, and 'singing' without sound. In No Lyrics, No Music, No Country, Nothing... (1997), Soba specifically does not make any use of his experience as a musician. As a specter on the streets of Ljubljana and Sarajevo, the artist makes his appearance as a street singer wearing a sign around his neck bearing no inscription, holding a guitar without strings, and 'sings' without giving forth as much as one sound. A bus stops where Soba is standing and the passengers look at him curiously through the windows, because they think that something is being sung without their being able to hear the sound. Presumably because they believe that Soba must be a psychiatric casualty of the war, people passing by throw money into the American emergency relief fund's can labeled: "Not to be sold or exchanged". "Not to be sold or exchanged" is clear to the people of ex-Yugoslavia. It is a paradoxical assertion, almost a psychological concept of isolation and loss, in the context of the divergent economic and political interests in the Yugoslavian war, where human life as well as the Bosnian state were both bought and sold. A mute and unannounced occurrence, No Lyrics, No Music, No Country, Nothing... describes the reality of human action, and of ideological fantasies and their effect on the individual: what is inherently autistic in the notion of 'the nation' as a collective projection. After the war has died out, memory as gaze and sound are disconnected with the present, where the experience of war constitutes an indistinctly outlined object for experience-the traumatic, or that which cannot be redeemed into any form of dignity. In the post-Cold-War world there is no collective security, no international will to protect the weak against the strong; the great lesson of the Yugoslavian wars was that to win freedom and security for one's people requires neither a sound argument nor a good cause but a big army. In Soba's art, an awry gaze rests on what tradition has left us, and on the determinant symbols of power's mythologised images. On the ambivalence and desperation in Western identification and desire, and the difference between those who have all kinds of stuff and those who haven't. The fact that we want to have more and more, more power, more freedom. Taller kids, longer lives, everything. Bigger houses. Slaves. Whoa!~ |