The ready-made as an artistic medium and phenomenon is examined by the curator and art critic Suzana Milevska. Here she confronts the Western conception of the perfect ready-made with the imperfection of the tools of production in Eastern Europe. She focuses on a project by the Macedonian artist Igor Tosevskinew, Dossier'96, which communicates this ambiguity. by SUZANA MILEVSKA, Index 2.98 Editorial assistance by Richard Gaughran

This text does not provide a panoramic view of the possible applications of the ready-made by artists in the "poor" countries going through transition but, rather, examines the ready-made itself as a medium. Is it adequate to the context of art in Eastern Europe? What is its difference in meaning between the Eastern and Western art societies? Such questions are called to mind by one particular project, Dossier'96, by the artist Igor Tosevski from the Republic of Macedonia.     Not pretending to present an overview of the history of the phenomenon in general, this text does, however, argue with the term "perfection" as used in technological contexts. In short, is the perfect ready-made art possible, or needed, in Eastern Europe, where the tools of production (and reproduction) themselves are not perfect? And what does it mean when factories that produce the ready-mades produce faulty ready-mades? While tons of material are decaying on the premises of the factories that await privatization, some managers decline to assist in the export and use of this material because they hope instead that they will be able to purchase firms more cheaply if these firms appear to be less productive. What does the recent proliferation of the electronic arts mean in this context, where the level of new technology is far behind its level in Western countries? What are the choices for Eastern European artists? To make imperfect electronic works of art that will always look interesting but not well-done, or to make a perfect resemblance of the ready-made produced in the West, or to make totemic artworks that look as primitive as Westerners expect art in Eastern Europe to look? This dilemma inevitably leads to the reinforcement of the stereotypes: the Other is always technologically inferior and therefore primitive, yet it is a fresh example that will appear interesting in an exhibition. From the very beginning of the phenomenon of the ready-made, the use of the term implied a desire for perfection. Marcel Duchamp's exposing of the urinal was an act that expressed a similar admiration for both objects-to give to their installations a look of unification and repetition, with no difference among the repeated objects, an effect possible only if the objects in question are made industrially.    As mentioned, what happens when the ready-made is originally faulty when produced? The context within which Eastern European artists work makes it difficult to realize perfect works in general, not only in finding perfect objects but also in creating a perfect montage from them.     After several years of the trend towards multiculturalism within art circles, wherein so-called marginal cultures were provided an opportunity to peep into the keyhole of the Western art scene, and the luckiest even allowed to enter the door and present themselves, today the situation has changed dramatically in the opposite direction when it comes to participation in large international exhibitions. The extended use of new technologies has placed new obstacles in front of an artist coming from the East. The use of high technologies for art purposes poses a question about development which is, in the opinion of Paul Faycraberd, an insoluble problem that creates many paradoxes, and not only in countries with low technological abilities. Could we ever assume that art which uses more developed technology is more developed conceptually? Of course not. That is one of the most obvious aporias within the problem.    According to Adorno's aesthetic theory there is a relationship between the level of development in a given society and the art produced in that society. If we accept this point of view, then there must be a difference between the art products of societies that differ in terms of production development. Only the process of globalization and the will to stimulate something else can explain the nature of the situation today. During the transition from one to another way of production, and from one to another way of ownership, a whole range of reactions have changed. The invisible patterns that rule Western society, suppressed for a long time in the East, have started to function as "desiring machines," as unconscious mechanisms latent in the individual but also in the social and historical structures.    Still, given the privileged position of the Western artist, with the means of using new technologies as artists' tools and mediums, how can the contemporary artist from the East follow this trend? Or, how can such an artist find a way to answer or negate it?    Again returning to art history, questions of technicality, materiality, tools and media have always been an important, though not the only important, consideration. The discovery of certain rules was always connected with certain technical means. Therefore, an artist today who avoids the latest high-tech wonders must still confront the question of means.    Taking into account institutional theoreticians such as Arthur Danto and George Dicky, the reign of institutions dictates the conditions that decide what is and what is not art. We return again to the same problem of institutions making the rules, knowing also that institutions differ in their criteria. Even in the case of independent projects (for example, "Interpol" in Stockholm) the independent curators differ from each other in their strategies. The case of the Macedonian artist Igor Tosevski and his project Dossier'96 presents an example of an artist who refuses to follow established rules. And he has developed his ideas in an original and specific manner not seen before in the contemporary Macedonian art scene.    Dossier'96 resulted from a one-year research effort by the artist and from four exhibitions that placed the artist in a new role, as though he were a data-gathering scientist, but in a new scientific discipline that we might call "paradoxology"-day after day he was discovering new paradoxes of which he was unaware before starting the project. Tosevski re-examined the problem of the extensive "production" of faulty objects by bankrupt factories and the process of privatizing in various stages. First, he visited factories that were declared insolvent, and with permission (not always easy to obtain) he would take photos of the buildings and the piles of rejected objects.    It is worth noting again the "desiring machines" concept, in which there is no distinction between product and production because the desiring production is a continuum of machines connected to other machines in an endless chain, and in such a context this project could be treated in a way similar to that in which desiring machines work with ruptures, cracks and fissures, with distances and fragmentations that function best when they produce nothing at all, except art itself. And in Merleau-Ponty's terms, the invisible power of capital that forced the system of managers and politicians to abuse their positions could be taken to be "wild Being."     The conversations with the workers and managers presented real adventures. Tosevski needed to explain ready-made and conceptual art to them, a challenge in itself, especially when the workers were reluctant to talk out of fear of losing their jobs and the managers were reticent because they suspected that their work was being investigated for purposes besides art. Finally, exhibiting the rejects in the galleries, and thereby turning the ready-made into art and proclaiming it as art, he encountered a multitude of paradoxes inherent in the relationship between art and life.     During 1996 the artist did three exhibitions in different cities where he found similar factories and where he had received permission to relocate a certain amount of this wasted material. Some of it he had to purchase, even though it was totally unusable. Galleries that usually displayed local artists, if anything at all, were now being used to expose local factory installations. For example, in Titov Veles he exhibited broken plates from the local ceramics and porcelain factory, projecting a slide showing the actual pile of material in the factory yard over the display. (The gallery itself was closed until this exhibition, and even most of the time during it). In Prilep, Tosevski exhibited broken granite blocks with photos of a chimney from a non-operational factory, and in Kumanovo he exhibited little heaps of poorly cut textile pieces.    Finally, in March 1997, he opened his large exhibition in the Museum of the City of Skopje, displaying pieces from the three previous exhibitions and adding a fourth; irregular bottles from the glass factory in Skopje. In addition to this rejected factory material, he showed slides of words taken from an economics dictionary, defining terms such as "transition," "transformation," "privatization," "solvency," "bankruptcy," etc. Employing the theory of performative speech acts as articulated in John L. Austin's How to do Things with Words and reinterpreted by John R. Searle and Shoshana Felman, these paradoxes 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, In any event, it is obvious that the performative work of art re-examines the relationship between the artistic, the aesthetic, and the real.    The approach underlying the entire Dossier'96 project can be called a performative act, as it exemplifies Austin's very definition that performative acts produce meaning even when they are in themselves rhetorically empty-that is to say, the very demonstration, articulation, and proclamation of the performative utterance is carried out in the act. So the separation of rejects from their original real context (factory floors and yards, scrap yards) and their transposition into gallery spaces is in fact similar to Duchamp's first performative artistic act, the displaying of a urinal with the signature "R. Mutt" in and declaring it to be a work of art, as interpreted by Thierry de Duve. The gesture also recalls a previous Tosevski project, Dislocations, in which the artist exhibited a kind of photo-diary of his actions in transferring an object from one container to another on the street where he lives. This project brings into question a crucial paradox, as it involves a direct delving by the artist into a new, social sphere and thereby resembles a syllogistic balancing act. Namely, if X is a work of art because the artist designates and proclaims it to be such. If Tosevski takes heaps of rejects from bankrupt factories and exhibits them as works of art then are not the "producers" of these objects, the workers and managers of the firm in question, deprived of their original function as 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 versus falsehood, as they are semantically empty; they can only produce meanings). These criteria are, above all, the intention, the awareness of the intention in 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 artists (subjects). However, because of their metaphorical association with unusable objects, they are labeled "technological surplus" (the term in Macedonia for workers dismissed from their work) and their status approaches the status of the art objects in question. If we pursue the analysis of this paradox further, starting from the same premise, we can pose a question about the status of the insolvency official who rather than trying to use discarded material by recycling or modifying it, proclaims this material unusable and discards it for no obvious reason. Has the official become an artist? Is not this act similar to that of an artist carrying out a performative act? Of course, the answer is no, if we take into account the circumstances of this official's involvement with the institution in question. That is, the manager's motivation is not artistic, as he is concerned with rendering the factory insolvent so that it can be purchased more cheaply. The important distinction in the project Dossier'96 is the artist's awareness throughout the process. The relocation of the rejects in the gallery, the organization of the exhibitions, the preparation of a catalogue, and the intention itself, have met the necessary preconditions for the illusionary power and success of the performative act. He has thereby fully exercised his right to judge and confirm the validity of his act, a judgment that is ultimately subjective. In this way, according to institutional theory, theories of taste and aesthetics are surmounted, and the skeptical observer who believes that something has been deemed artistic merely because it has been placed in a museum cannot develop alternative criteria, as even the act of naming is validation.    The logic behind exhibiting ready-made objects indicates (though does not prove) that the utterance "this is art" can be applied to any object. In linguistics there has always been a dichotomy between speech and action, language and body, and hence their association has been in place since the appearance of the first ready-made in the case of Duchamp, through the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, to postconceptualism and the most recent media; installation, electronic art and the re-emergence of body and performance art.    The current practice of exhibiting accumulations of ready-made objects and material leads us to another paradox arising from the Dossier'96 project; its ambivalence on the plane of visual perception. Sometimes the appearance and form of Tosevski's installations are highly reminiscent of some works by Man Ray (the hangers in Kumanovo), Tony Cragg or Richard Wentworth (the installation with broken plates in Titov Veles), Richard Long (the granite blocks in Prilep), or other internationally known artists. Yet, precisely because of their performative character and their production of meaning, this artist's works are utterly different in content, even though the material, being ready-made, is identical. (This is not surprising, simply because they are ready-made and therefore can be produced in Macedonia or anywhere else, with the same quality.) The effect is not accidental. Tosevski uses a medium much in vogue in Western art today (installation and ready-made) but manages to create a project originating from his everyday life, from the present moment, re-examining his own medium of expression and asking himself whether our culture is not closer to the imperfection of the reject than it is to the perfection of the ready-made. His project does not offer information or knowledge of reality, yet it touches upon that reality, carrying out its performative act within it, so that the very act itself becomes a part of the reality within which it is performed. And so we come to the most sensitive and most delicate question that this artist and project pose: the question of the possibilities of engagement in art and whether art can change reality with its commitment. According to Adorno, art is always both inside and outside of reality, and its status and autonomy are dependent on the level of social freedom in a given society. Tosevski questions precisely the problem of the appropriate position of the artist in the relationship to his own context and the resultant choice of an adequate medium in these circumstances. For this purpose he has deemed it necessary to re-examine also the social, economic and political context within which he creates. As a result, his personal engagement occurs on two planes simultaneously; it is a study of reality itself, and it changes the artistic process in its creation of a work of art that accords with reality, yet this fact would not be sufficient for designating his project as engaged, if the relationship between reality and art is understood hierarchically, with reality in the dominant role, and if one expects the engaged artist to pursue his battles on the barricades. Pointing to the marginal role assigned to art and artistic institutions in a society preoccupied with a myriad of more important problems has been yet another purpose of this project. The first three exhibitions in particular, which were held in galleries or cultural centers in provincial Macedonian cities, emphasized the similarity of the spaces to the factories themselves; the spaces were dirty, almost abandoned, having been turned into storage rooms. The contextual power of this project results from the disparity between two societies. The main issues in art theory, within the framework of Western societies, are concerned with the consumption and the commodity of the object, the usage of any technology in the production of art works, and the choice made as to how to exhibit ready-made objects as installations. In Macedonia, as in other countries at a similar level of production quality, these issues take on a different meaning, simply because the commodities proliferate at a slower rate and within more difficult circumstances. Thus the artist's desire to realize a project that involves accumulation of material becomes an enterprise itself, losing its critical tone. So, Igor Tosevski, instead of bringing in large piles of rejected material, filled up the gallery space with immaterial images and words, emphasizing the power of the act of naming, and the language itself.~