Caranovic’s work it is maybe not even important that the “original”
figures are in Japan, as part of the entrance to a monastery, as a permanent visual reminder of the moral vow of all those that visit the
monastery. Still, they became popular widely though a series of commercial works, Block-buster movies, fictions and mostly as a tourist
souvenir of large consume. Large consume where the significance
is lost, becomes unclear, and reaches its opposite. Finally, it is no
wonder that sometimes the sense of the three figurines is considered in opposite way; there the three wise monkeys represent materialised desires to escape the real world, to inactivity.
Photography of the Moon is “a rather early photography of
the Moon […] stereoscopic therefore it imitates sculpture, that is it
tries to recreate a three-dimensional object […] when it was made
in 1900 it was the ultimate shot of the Moon or the newest one. At
the same time, we know that the primary photo that we perceive is
some few hundreds of years old when it reaches us…” Photography
as a base of figures underlines the instability of the representation.
Photography, a semantic index (the imprint of reality) in this work
utterly questions the effect of the three wise monkeys (that sometimes are actually four).
C3. Politics of Politicization
Without title, 1975
Sleep-Walkers, 2002.
42
The work thematizes contemporarily the work fo the Russian
futurist, or more precisely, world comfut (communist futurist), or
soviet avant-garde artist Vladimir Mayakovski. As it appears to be a
great very unorthodox parachute, the sculpture ends in an odd, almost anthropomorphic form (trouser legs?) . It recalls oversized, soft
consumer goods objects of iconic pop-art like of Claes Oldenburg,
like the well known and greatly discussed Soft WC Bowl . Every coincidental of intentional similarity ends there. Caranović’s work both
creates and erases memories of similar attempts in the history of
sculpture. It juggles (parody) with metaphysics of common original
pop-art. Therefore here it is not the common object that is “softened”, but the icon of the avant-garde and its tradition.
Airplanes. The work explores one of the most famous (the
most controversial) poetic experiments, but also the personality of
the artist. Like Beuys, but in a different manner, personality impos-