Glass bell (again). Self-portrait plays with numerous references, examples. Those are objects with clear connotations of a
bourgeois life in some time. Without a precise chronology, but easily
recognisable: a little home (portable?) fountain, a plate, a figurine (a
toy), a stand, a glass bell (this time identical to the pastry makers’).
But the list of examples does end here. All objects are aligned, situated and as such they play with the history of the artistic genre (selfportrait) and beyond. Naturally.
Stand. The history of self-portrait as a particular artistic genre
is a history of privileged form of art that marked the history of modern Western art. Self-portrait clearly pointed towards new, modern,
individual (self) consciousness of the artist and the overall point of
view of the modern Western world. That is why, with the crisis of art
in the 20th century, the self-portrait became the first victim. The
place where from clearly the end of the genre becomes a sort of the
rhetorical end of modernism. Complying with the end of humanism.
When self-portrait, after all, returns, it does so with a new twist, as
a particular parody of the performance of self-reflexion.
Figurine. Since this Caranovic’s work juggles with the series
of representations linked with his work, his personality. That where
apparently this esoteric description could come from “This work can
be read in several ways. One is the language of water that I worked
on in the mid ‘90s or, more appropriate, we worked on in an informal group called Henosfera (the mistake is wilful)..” But that’s not
all. “Also it is not without the sarcasm towards the petite bourgeois
ideal of a warm cosy home complete by such thing as a miniature
fountain.[…] As I say this and you pay closer attention to this work
and look at in from a certain angle you will see the figurine that resembles young me in a fantastic way.”
Fountain. Twine, or more precisely, the relocation of the
personal and status where the figurine (figurine, as object, example
of objet trouvé), but as a figure of speech is a rhetorical carrier, the
performance of identity. But “from the adverse side”.
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