The Author as Producer in the Post-socialist Period

By Vesna Vuković

Through her works, Andrea Kulunčić investigates social relations, with one of her key tactics, besides the seizing of advertising and media spaces, being the special use of the new media. The artist chooses the media "pragmatically", aiming to get close to as wide an audience as possible, thus broadening the boundaries of art, or its spaces and possibilities of exhibition, but also to free art from the limits of unrestrained creativity in the direction of creating new communicational circumstances and new forms of sociability (changing positions of the author, multidisciplinarity, the audience as co-creator in a collective creative process).

The study will first focus on two interdisciplinary Internet works: Closed Reality – Embryo (1999) and Distributive Justice (2001-2005), in its interpretation largely leaning on a renewed reading, in our post-socialist society, of Benjamin's text The Author as Producer (1934), investigating the emancipatory dimension of these works, which is reflected in the changing production apparatus (insisting on the organizational function and the continuous upgrading of the apparatus which leads the user/audience to production) and – most importantly – in the relentless questioning of new forms of sociability in a time in which "from the illusion of a classless society we fall into a societyless reality" (Buden).

Finally, I will analyse the work I am sorry, I am not sorry… (2008), in which the artist appropriates an "old medium" in order to, at least briefly, change its exclusively distributive role into a communicational one, a role that, with the domination of commercial spheres, has been forgotten or "neutralized" of any political potential, and to once more raise the question of society in the post-socialist age.

Research Summaries

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