tance is the disposition of the chosen objects. Bottles seem to be
made out of the papier-mashé mixture, or something similar, of
everyday use. But their perfect shape betrays “the real ones”, reveals that the newspapers are just the shell. A covering. The view is
dominated by graphicity, graphicism of the letters, shattered, glued
lines of letters from the newspapers. Graphicity is underlining the
spirit of montage and collage characteristic of Caranovic’s work. As
author explains, “I used exclusively letters not to relate the object in
any way with the actuality (read history) or help any estheticisation
of the form trough illustrations.” But it is certainly true that to glue
on newpapers, an extraordinary ordinary material, it is, by paradox
to annul the ordinary of the chosen mass-product (bottle). Which
bring the question of the choice of the material.
Newspapers. This work is a part of a series from the late
1970’s, the moment when Caranovic, in his own words, was occupied
by the “most ordinary objects of the most nearby surroundings”. That
is by a fragile matter of the status of aesthetics in a mass-production
(industrial) of objects contest of a socialist economy. Let us remember
that in those days the use of newspapers appeared in Belgrade sculpture and was considered (not without some pride to it) as an “antisculptural” material. The material considered to be produced in a
process of dematerialisation of Belgrade conceptual arts and the cocalled extended media arts. Still, in Caranovic’s work, newspapers thematize and are examples of mystified contemporaneity. Disposable,
ordinary objects in an unexpected disposition that extracts them from
the contest of Belgrade production. It makes it extraordinary, peculiar
in several ways. On one behalf, it approaches in a critical way the
premises of this work as the “most ordinary object of the most nearby
surroundings” (it becomes obvious that it is not). More importantly,
it questions the expected status of sculpture, “this monochromatic
black and white situation was to me very […] sculptural”. Plastering,
covering of the bottle with the cut, thorn newspapers, places the work
somewhere in between cynism, pop-art parody and orthodoxy of minimal art, those two post-war tendencies that probably had mostly
questioned about the object (sculpture, aesthetics and anti-aesthetics)
in the mass-consuming societies.
It appears as if the work is playing with the fundamental
premise of the 20th century art.
Bottles, 1979-80
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