so much yappy as much a bureaucrat of a kind of somebody that obtained for himself, though this shirt, a combination of authority and
power. A counter, a bank, a municipality, etc. That is why it was important to me that this shirt I was working on had to have iconic
essence and that is why I made it of wood.”
Icon. This statement utterly complicates the “revealing” of
the message, but contemporarily offers a precious information of
Caranović’s art strategy. Semantic overflow of the use of term
“iconic”. “Iconic” that can be studied in two different contexts. Semantic, where the iconic is a sign identical to its reference, likewise
in a long mimetic tradition, or in the context of religious tradition of
making of icons. In both cases, this relief refers to a statement as an
already-seen (déjà vù). It is not an identical replica (semantic icon),
nor it is a religious object (an encaustic painting on a wood surface).
The work is a parody. It doubles the definitions of an iconic
representations. It is not the ambiguity of pop-art (critique and/or
apology), and not even of neo-pop (simulation of critique or critique
of simulation), but, as it appears to be, simply an opportunity to once
again critically observe representation, history. History written in
different ways.
POLITICS
C1. Politics of Everydayness
Shirt, 1995.
40
The work exposes two examples, a figure and a painted background in a very specific system of references. This one is also not an
assemblage, but a kind of ambient. It is what is called, since the ‘80s
on, an “installation”. It is about a male figure in a clearly recognisable, soc-realist style. In the background there is a flag, also clearly
recognisable proletariat flag with a clearly recognisable slogan. The
flag is covered also by a clearly recognisable leakage, idiomatic sprinkles of paint, that in the history of art of the 20th century is identified
as the American Abstract Expressionism (of the painter Jackson Pollock). Apparently (historically, ideologically) two opposite art styles
are edited together in a single work. Two art languages that stopped
being such at a given time, only in order to become a government
tool in an ideological (cold) war are facing each other in a mutated