THE CITY (Belgrade)
B1. The City in Communism
“The basic idea was that the two Lenins that are just slightly
not identical both in height and in their body position, they are so [two
identical representations]. That is also the basic idea beyond
“Gilbert&George”, that opera of Tate [Gallery], if I am not mistaken,
where they are both the spectators and the exhibited. They are in
front of an oversized tie that is distinctive of both Western and Eastern
art. In the West it was pop-art, in the East soc-realism. I would just
like to add, what is important for the USSR [is] that the revolution was
led by a bourgeois (Lenin) that respected the Western dress code.”
B2. The City After.
This work plays with the examples of mass media communications and thematizes city histories and mythologies of everyday
in an expected unexpected way that we already spoke of. This time
by a series of very obvious object easy recognisable consumer references and histories.
Gilbert and George on an
exposition of the monuments
of the great October,
2000
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Sky-scraper. The title of this work was “borrowed” from the
(in)famous American sitcom, an obvious (hard) parody of feminist
ideals. By showing the life of working women in a big city (New York)
this fiction dealt with all those ideals that feminism fought for.
Above all, the liberation of women from the inborn constraints of
patriarchal (puritan) society. This American fiction, before it came
to the Serbian (and world global, exclusively third world) market,
“played” on American cable TV for six seasons, from 1998 till 2004.
The show “follows” four “typical” characters: the gallerist, the
lawyer, the journalist and the business woman. According to the
show, their “liberation” cuts down exclusively to their “liberated”
spending power. So the principal characters enjoy their role of the
perfect lady consumer without restraint. Lots of shoes, but also lots
of persons of opposite sex, without distinction (and restraint). All
represented as enormously funny, but more importantly natural,
necessary and essential to the life in the big city.
Shoes. Caranović’s work explores how did this show appeared
on the Serbian market at all at a given historical moment. Also to what