Jee-sook Beck, “Vladimir Nikolic”

a New Past, 2004 International Exhibition of Marronnier Art Center, South Korea, Seoul

“Vladimir Nikolic’s works have been drawing much international attention with its particular combination of brilliant humor and sharp concept. The artist selects the best traditional dirge singer in a rural village and motivates her to compose and sing a mourning song for Marcel Duchamp. They finally visit Duchamp’s grave at Rouen, and while the singer performs, the artist expresses his honor to the late great conceptual artist. Nikolic states that he wanted to juxtapose rural tradition of dirge in his country with modernistic heritage of art and play with common misconceptions rising in the West about local art community, its place and role on the international art scene. Rhythm clearly demonstrates a tension and struggle between innate organic human instinct and ideological constraint of behaviors.”

“Vladimir Nikolic is a young artist who grabbed the public's attention through satirical and humorous art works that used various socio-cultural semiotics of Belgrade in a number of international exhibitions. Autoportrait (2001) personifies abandoned vehicles through photography, and How to Become a Great Artist (2001) - joint-work with Vera Vecanski - offers the audience a cynical yet comical manual that lists traits of an artist necessary to succeed in Europe. Both works touches the topic that young Korean artists tackle frequently. In Trabant Residency Project (Vera Vecanski, Zolt Kovac) the artist confines his living quarter for 24 hours inside a Trabant, a common vehicle in East Germany prior to unification, before he enters an art gallery. This project questions the audience on the significance of the institution of art that runs across the two fields of culture and economy.

Nikolic's new work Death Anniversary aims to address the problems of tradition and artistic heritage in modern art. The artist studies the rural area in the Montenegro to find a traditional dirge singer: professional mourner in order to recruit 3 local Montenegrin woman prepared to sing a dirge for a noted conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp on his grave site in Rouen, France.

He first selects dirge singers from three Montenegrin villages of great reputation, then he explains the significance of Duchamp's work in order to choose the one that can compose a dirge that will reflect the artist's opinion on Duchamp's role in the 20th century art history. The chosen singer makes a trip to France with the artist to sing a mourning song, which was composed through a joint-effort of the singer and the artist, while Nikolic pays his respect for the dead. The project is also an experiment that attempts to break down the division between the rural area and cities, regional and international communities, local tradition and contemporary arts, and ordinary life and arts. It is true that the artist puts the spotlight on a local tradition at the verge of abandonment, yet he also shed the light on an ironic process of modem arts, which once declared independence from history and tradition, becoming a part of tradition themselves.

The artist's keen sight on the relationship between the tradition and contemporary arts and that between regional and global cultures is also expressed through Rhythm (2001). Five people are filmed standing on a stage while making the Christian Orthodox sign of the cross to the techno music beat. The film focuses on how the people's movements change with time. It clearly demonstrates the rhythmic tension of modern days that strives to break away from the ideological frame of religious behaviors. It also explains how ideology is made to remain in a person's body and conscience through physical practices.”

Branko Dimitrijevic, “Attentive observations, situated motivations and displaced inquiries”

Situated Self: Confused, Compassionate and Conflictual, Art Museum Tennis Palace, Helsinki, Finland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, SCG, 2004

“…Firstly, let us take an example of the new video Death Anniversary by Vladimir Nikolic. His basic proposition for this work seems quite simple. He travels to mountainous areas of Montenegro, finds there one of those old women called "narikace" ("weepers"), who has retained the "profession" of mourning some deceased person by emotionally and dramatically chanting a dirge song about the tragedy of his death, about his troubled yet heroic life, celebrating his achievements yet pitying his destiny...

After finding her, he travels with her to a graveyard in Rouen, France, to the grave of Marcel Duchamp, the giant of 20th century art, the person who influenced many generation of neo-avantgarde, conceptual and post-conceptual artists. There she performs her chant with "lyrics" dedicated to this great man, with words which "came to her" or "possessed her" on the site. The work may be seen as "tongue in cheek", hence very duchampian. It is about respect, but it is also funny, it celebrates Duchamp, but it is also ironic. Clearly, it is about how one artist pays his tribute, and it is about a relationship fostered through art.

Yet, it may be inescapable that we expect interpretations which see in this work yet another funny tale about the infamous "clash of civilization": on the one hand, the most sophisticated of the modern artist-philosophers, on the other, the atavistic cultural symptom from the "Balkans". But in artistic terms it may be a new manifestation of a surrealist gesture, no longer a Bretonian encounter between unrelated objects, but a piece of "ethnographic surrealism", in Clifford's terms. It is about an experience of synthesis of diverse aspects of one's own specific cultural circumstances, approached with both cynicism and naïveté. Both of these words are disliked, yet are usually seen as opposites. The question is why should they be opposites when they appear simultaneously in contemporary culture? Cynicism is part of our cultural upbringing: it is very often the way we communicate without attempting to offend or to mock: being naive or being cynical, once presented as a cultural choice, become almost undifferentiated. Both open up empathetic desire for a proximate relation to some cultural situated ness.

The notion of empathy comes from our romantic legacy, but its is also generally confused with an act of altruism, it has become almost synonymous with offering condolences, i.e. with an act of ritualized empathy in which there is no room for the inner self.

It is like the Zizekian emblem of the Tibetan prayer wheel, which is praying on behalf of someone, or instead of someone: intimate beliefs and feelings, including compassion, may be transferred or delegated even to a "machine". Arranging the pre-modern ritual at the grave of Duchamp (with the famous inscription that "it is always the others who die"), the man who did not believe in life after death, in God, and who thought about death "as little as possible", is equally about transferring compassion to a very duchampian weeping-machine as it is about the sense of duchampian laughter-in-art that has become as ritualized as the performed mourning of the deceased.”

Viana Conti, “Art. Mediterranean”

Medesign_forme del Mediterraneo, Palazzo Borsa, Genoa, 2004

“…The subliminal power of a ritual religious gesture, from the intimacy of the subjective dimension passes to the body through a sequence of repeated gestures, as displayed in the video installation Rhythm (2001) by Vladimir Nikolic (1974, Belgrade), where the Christian-orthodox sign of the cross, rhythmically repeated by five youths with a contrasting techno music background, activates in the viewers such an unexpected mystic power, intense emotion and enthusiasm that forces us to think how strong are our religious roots, even if unconsciously. Nikolic participated also in the exhibition curated by Harald Szeeman: The Balkans. A Crossroad to the Future. “

Jelena Vesic, “Art does not tolerate sentimentality”

Praesens, Central European contemporary art review

"Art does not tolerate sentimentality. An artist must always take an active attitude towards his own an, confront it, analyze it and be heartless towards it. The gravitational centre of the human body is located 10 cm below the navel. By concentrating the art in that point, the artist becomes steadfast and immovable. Nobody can move him from the art scene anymore."

These sentences, statements, advice or absurd attitudes belong to the video, How to Become a Great Artist, a joint project by Vera Vecanski and Vladimir Nikolic. As protagonists of this video sketch, they parody the profile of a great (internationally famous) artist, taking into consideration a number of attributes that the public and the art system perceive under this construct. The storyline follows the meeting between a student of fine arts (Vera Vecanski), and a person who poses as a "great artist" (Vladimir Nikolic). She is naive, sentimental and draws; he is undoubtedly successful, self-confident, speaks English well, and is ultimately convinced that his teaching of the mystical skills of "great art" must be successful.

It is obvious that she will become a great artist only if she abandons the role of lonely painter or academy student as such, and when she finally realizes that documentation, media coverage and a good relationship with the critics are the formula for success. But, as in every good sketch or bad drama, this one too has an open ending, and the viewer does not get the outcome of the story, especially the viewer who missed "the new episode", or the new exhibition of this artist.