THE READY-MADE AND THE QUESTION OF THE FABRICATION OF OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS.

Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it.

Marcel Duchamp [1]

I want to be a machine.

Andy Warhol [2]

The phenomenon of the ready-made and its usage as an art object (and possibly later as an installation) is proximal to the abandonment of the art craft. If painting signifies art, skill and craftsmanship, then, with the onset of industrialism, craftsmanship was rendered useless, and thereby, so was painting. Nevertheless, new technical achievements have continued to emerge from within the realm of painting.

Today, the international art scene is moving dramatically in a new direction. When it comes to participation in large international exhibitions, the growing tendency has been to rely on the use of new technologies and new and serious obstacles have been placed in front of artists coming from the East. The possible frustration of such artists is derived from the usage of objects that are completely industrially produced or even ordered to be produced. In the case of exhibiting ready-made objects, the painter has been replaced by a machine. This proves that the motivation for ready-made objects was closely related to production and fabrication, [3] although, Marcel Duchamp, for one, did not have in mind any obsession or glorification of the perfection and beauty of the ready-made "When I discovered the ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics." [4]

Differing visual and conceptual results are a consequence of the acceptance and presentation of the readymade object as part of artistic activity, specifically in the context of the Balkan region--a region in which industrial production, following World War II, has never been applied in a complete capitalist free market economy. [5] In fact, in all socialist countries, there existed a kind of "simulation of production" in which ideological emphasis was put on the fulfillment of a social policy of full employment and on the quantity of production, while the quality of the manufactured objects were of secondary importance. Of course, this was possible only under special circumstances wherein industrialization and the market functioned under state supervision and control--a system that survived until the period of transition following the break-up of the Yugoslav federation and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. From this point a series of complex political and economic transitions began that continue to evol ve today.

According to Adorno's aesthetic theory, there is a relationship between the level of development in a given society and the art produced in that society. [6] If we accept this, then there must be a difference between the art produced by these societies and their production development. The nature of the situation today can only be explained by the ongoing process of globalization and the will to simulate that they are equal participants in it. During the transition from one mode of production to another, and from one model of ownership to another, a whole range of relationships have changed. The invisible patterns that rule western society (long suppressed in the East), have started emerging as "desiring machines," [7]--unconscious mechanisms latent in the individual but also in social and historical structures.

The usage of high technology for art purposes poses a question about development in the arts--an unsolvable problem that creates many paradoxes, not only in countries with underdeveloped technological capacities. Although this article aims to give an overview of some of the different applications of ready-made objects by artists living in unstable political and economic regions in times of transition, another aim is to examine the limits of the ready-made object as a medium. Artists using ready-made objects usually exhibit perfectly produced and iterated forms in order to give installations a look of unification and repetition, with no difference among the repeated objects--an effect possible only if the objects in question are industrially produced. As mentioned before, the problem here is that different visual effects and meanings are produced when the ready-made object is faulty in its original production or montage. Furthermore, the term "perfection," as used in its high-technological context, is problem atic when used in the context of art. Issues of technicality, materiality, tools and media have always been important, although not the only consideration in art-making; the discovery of certain rules has always been connected with certain technical means. Therefore, an artist today who avoids the latest high-tech wonders must still confront the question of means.

What, then, makes the ready-made different when it is made and represented as artwork in the region of the Balkans--a region where socialism has been intermixed with inefficient productive means? It never looks as perfect as the objects made in western countries since the tools and means of production are not perfect themselves (similarly, this argument can also be taken into account when it comes to the installations presented in the wider Eastern European context). How the management context, the free market economy or strong competition effects the perfection of products is not more important than ready-made objects being beautiful or imperfect. Should the form of the readymade object not be essential to its own existence as a way of revolting against the act of skillful artmaking?

The examination of the ready-made object in the context of Eastern European art, and the question of its difference in meaning between eastern and western art communities, are particularly called to mind by one very unique project, "Dossier '96" (1996) by the artist Igor Tosevski from Macedonia, one of the former Yugoslav republics. [8] The project refers to one of the most talked-about issues in the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe. It specifically questions the necessity of the perfect ready-made object in the context of the widespread bankruptcy of non-competitive factories and their subsequent privatization.

"Dossier '96" derived from a one-year research project by the artist, along with four exhibitions, that placed the artist in a new role as he discovered new paradoxes. Tosevski re-examined the problem of the extensive "production" of faulty objects by bankrupt factories as well as the process of privatization in various stages. First, he visited the factories that were declared insolvent, and with permission (not always easily obtained) he took photos of the buildings and the piles of rejected objects. He observed tons of decaying material on the premises of factories awaiting privatization. Some managers declined to assist in the export and use of this material because they hoped instead that they would be able to purchase the firms more cheaply if these firms appeared to be less productive. [9]

It is worth noting the "desiring machines" concept, in which there is no distinction between the product and the production--the desiring production has become the continuum. Machines are connected to other machines in an endless chain, and in such a context, "Dossier '96" could be treated in a way similar to that in which desiring machines function--with ruptures, cracks and fissures. Distances and fragmentations, in this schema, function best when they produce nothing at all except the art itself. [10] To adopt the terms of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the invisible power of capital is that it forces the system of managers and politicians to abuse their positions and act as "wild beings?" [11]

The conversations with the workers and managers presented real adventures. Tosevski needed to explain readymade and conceptual art to them, a challenge in itself, especially when the workers were reluctant to talk for fear of losing their jobs and the managers were reticent because they suspected their work was being investigated for purposes beyond art. During 1996 the artist realized three exhibitions in different cities where he found similar factories and received permission to relocate a certain amount of waste material, although he was obliged to pay for some of it. Galleries that usually display local artists were now being used to expose local factory installations. For example, in Titov Veles, while Tosevski was exhibiting broken plates from the local ceramics and porcelain factory, he projected a slide made of the original enormous pile of abandoned material over the small pile of objects in the gallery and thus simulated the actual situation in the factory yard. In addition, the destiny of the gal lery itself furthered the concept since it was otherwise vacant.

In March 1997, Tosevski opened his large exhibition at the Museum of the City of Skopje, displaying faulty textiles, granite blocks and porcelain from the three previous exhibitions and adding a fourth--irregular bottles from a glass factory in Skopje. In addition to the rejected factory material he projected slides of words taken from an economics dictionary, defining terms such as "transition," "transformation," "privatization," "solvency" and "bankruptcy." The paradoxes that Tosevski dealt with may be interpreted by applying a theory of linguistic discourse to the given aesthetic context. To be sure, the polemics surrounding the issue of whether performative artistic acts still fall within the realm of the aesthetic can reach radical extremes, from Duchamp's assertion that art is separate from aesthetics to Greenberg's claim that the aesthetic is identical with the artistic. Regardless of one's critical stance, it is obvious that the performative work of art re-examines the relationship between the artist ic, the aesthetic and the real.

The approach underlying the entire "Dossier '96" project can be called a performative act, since it exemplifies J. L. Austin's definition that performative exhibits produce meaning even when they are themselves rhetorically empty. [12] That is, the very demonstration, articulation and proclamation of the performative utterance carries out the act. The separation of rejected objects from their original real context and their transposition into gallery spaces is in fact similar to Duchamp's first performative artistic act: the displaying of the urinal with the signature "R. Mutt," in conjunction with its proclamation as a work of art. [13] If a work of art is a work of art because the artist designates and proclaims it to be such, then what becomes of the original manufacturer of the object that has now become art? In this case, Tosevski takes heaps of rejects from bankrupt factories and exhibits them as works of art; are not the producers of these objects--the workers and the managers--deprived of their origi nal function? Do they now become artists themselves?

According to the theory of speech acts, there are certain criteria by which to judge the success of a performative act. These utterances/acts are outside the consideration of truth or falsehood; they are semantically empty--they can produce only meanings. These are, above all, the intention, and the awareness of the intention of the performance, the competence and legitimacy of the performer and the institutional setting in which the act is performed. According to these criteria, the "producers," whose "products" have been proclaimed as works of art, can by no means be considered the artists. However, because of their metaphorical association with unusable objects, once they are labeled "technological surplus"--the term used in Macedonia for workers dismissed from their work--their status approaches that of the art objects in question, and not subjects with control over their products. [14]

If we pursue the analysis of this paradox further, starting from the same premise, we can pose a question as to the status of the insolvency official. If the manager, rather then trying to use discarded material by recycling or modifying, proclaims the material unusable for no obvious reason, has the official become an artist? Is not this act similar to that of an artist carrying out a performative act? Of course, the answer is no. If we take into account the circumstances of this official's involvement then the criteria of the institutional theory prevents us from regarding these two acts as identical. That is, the manager's motivation is not artistic. He is concerned more with rendering production sites insolvent so that they can be purchased more cheaply.

In contrast, the artist's awareness throughout the process--the relocation of the rejects to the gallery, the organization of exhibitions, the preparation of a catalog, and the intention itself--has met the necessary preconditions for the illocutionary power and success of the performative act. By fully exercising his right to judge and confirm the universal validity of his act, he remains subjective. In this way, according to institutional theory, theories of taste and aesthetic views are surmounted and the skeptical observer who believes that something has been deemed artistic merely because it has been placed in a museum cannot develop alternative criteria, as even the act of naming is validation.

In linguistics there has always been a dichotomy between speech and action, language and body, and their association has been in place since the appearance of the first ready-made in the case of Duchamp, through the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, to postconceptualism and the most recent media: installation, electronic art and the reemergence of body and performance art. The current practice of exhibiting accumulations of ready-made objects and material leads us to another paradox arising from the "Dossier '96" project--its ambivalence on the plane of visual perception. Sometimes the appearance and form of Tosevski's installations are highly reminiscent of some works by Man Ray (e.g., the hangers displayed in Kumanovo, the third of four exhibitions that complete the series of the "Dossier '96" project), Tony Craig or Richard Wentworth (e.g., the installation with broken plates in Titov Veles, the first exhibition in the series) or Richard Long (e.g., the granite blocks in Prilep, the second exhibition) or other internationally known artists. Even though the material--being readymade--is identical (this is not surprising, simply because they are ready-made objects and therefore can be produced anywhere with the same quality) Tosevski's works are utterly different in content, precisely due to their performative character and production of meaning. [15]

Tosevski uses a medium much in vogue in western art today (installation and ready-made) but manages to create a project originating from his everyday life. Not only does it offer information or knowledge of reality; it also touches upon that reality, carrying out its performative act within it, so that the very act itself becomes a part of the reality within which it is performed. And so we come to the most sensitive question posed by Tosevski: the possibilities of engagement in art and whether art can change reality. According to Adorno, art is always both inside and outside reality, and its status and autonomy are dependent on the level of social freedom in a given society. Taking into account institutional theoreticians such as Arthur Danto and George Dickie, the institution dictates the conditions and decides what art is and what it is not. [16] Tosevski questions the problem of the appropriate position of the artist in relation to art institutions and the adequate medium in these circumstances. For this purpose he has also deemed it necessary to re-examine the social, economic and political context within which he creates. The marginal role assigned to art and artistic institutions, in a society preoccupied with a myriad of more important problems, is another significant point illustrated in this project. The first three exhibitions in particular, which were held in galleries or cultural centers in provincial Macedonian cities, emphasized the similarity of these spaces to the factories themselves: the spaces were dirty, almost abandoned, turned into storage rooms.

Therefore, the artist's personal engagement takes place in the realms of reality and its portrayal as art. The art is a study of reality itself, as well as a part of everyday life, thereby blurring the lines of an artistic act and a real life case study. The relationship between reality and art is usually set up in a hierarchical sense--reality having the dominant role, one expecting an engaged artist to pursue his baffles on the barricades instead of through artistic and conceptual means.

The latest project that Tosevski exhibited was during the group exhibition "Words, Objects, Acts" in 2000 at the Museum of the City of Skopje. In this piece, titled Perfect Balance or 23 Kilos Human Rights, Tosevski used 23 kilos of original documents from the UNO (United Nations Organization) Committee for Human Rights. [17] Many old files full of typed or printed declarations, conference resumes and letters were placed on seven scales suspended from the ceiling. Tosevski was targeting the bureaucracy and hypocrisy of the international institution for human rights, questioning its efficacy and commitment. By turning these official human rights documents into art, the artist created art out of human tragedies depicting ironies even in the highest political establishments and art institutions, while declaring these documents of numbers and names "art."

The usage of ready-made art by Zaneta Vangeli, another young artist from Macedonia, relates the problem of the ready-made to the problems of subjectivization and national identity and other unresolved political problems in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In particular, her project "Social Plastic of Macedonia" (1996)--created for the group exhibition "Liquor Amnii I" that was held in a fifteenth-century Turkish Bath in Skopje--exemplifies the metaphorical way in which the artist juxtaposes objects that are either industrial ready-mades or objects found in nature. Although the exhibition itself was imagined and based on the theme of amniotic fluid as the border between the body of the mother and child, Vangeli focused on the problems of national identity in Macedonia.

The project consisted of three installations in different rooms of the main venue. In the first room, Vangeli placed six black and white photographs; three on one wall and three identical, blurred ones on the opposing wall. These were life-sized photographs of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Archbishop of the Macedonian Orthodox Church and Baskim Ademi, a well-known local underground figure. The composition of the three standing, blurred figures in the photographs was an ironic reference to the Holy Trinity and was meant to emphasize a major problem of the government, namely its alleged involvement in illegal drug activity. While one would have expected to see the Archbishop at the center of the composition, as it is the usual position reserved for the omnipotent figure of God, it was in fact the drug addict, Ademi, who was placed in that position, alluding to a more contemporary "religion."

The exhibit in the second room displayed an even greater reference to the connection between the local government and the drug underworld. This part of the installation titled "Spiritual Macedonia, or Anything Goes," included 10 Macedonian flags, two plates of gold and lead and framed objects with poppies, the source of most drug use in Macedonia, an obvious reference to the chaotic situation in the country where neither the state nor the church are recognized in the wider international context. The well-known problem with the recognition of the constitutional name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia--it was replaced by the acronym FYROM--went so far that even the design of the flag was changed due to the intervention of the Greek Government. Thus, the placement of the new flags opposite the opium poppies was a deliberate metaphor referencing the state and government not being organized and completely legitimate (another kind of imperfect ready-made) and its blurred, uncertain future. The third part of the project included a video installation showing a drugged Ademi watching the Fluxus artist Al Hanson recite a poem so that the whole scene signified a hallucination, even though each of the two video scenes were documentary and realistic--ordinary ready-made images from everyday life.

In "Culturalism or About the Ontological Failure of Tragedy" (1999), Vangeli deepens her interest for the relationship between local and global cultural problems with national and religious identity. Vangeli's exhibit was part of the group project, "Always Already Apocalypse" which was held in both Skopje and Istanbul. The work itself consisted of a large ink-jet printout of a photograph of the interior of the Hagia Sofia Church in Istanbul, the title of the work inscribed over it while a slide projection of the inverted image acted as its own reflection; the Byzantine frescoes and the Islamic calligraphy written over them were seen both as real and ghostly transparent hallucination--false presence of the religious object with lost function as either a church or a mosque. There were also four separate glass cases that contained small objects (Macedonian bank notes of 1000 and 500 denars and four neckties put in the shape of a cross), and photographs of the small models of objects tested for seismological resi stance found in the venue of the exhibition in Skopje--The Institute for Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology.

The investing of the Hagia Sofia's Christian interior with frescoes and Islamic writings became a metaphor for cultural misunderstanding in this piece. A similar unexpected conclusion about the absurd relationship between the important institutions of the state and church can be seen in the display of denar notes. While the government tries to simulate historic continuation with the cultural and religious heritage, it insists on using the religious symbols. On the surface of the 1000 denars note there is a reproduction of an icon of the Mother of God. From the religious point of view this is an act of blasphemy. Inscribing the most sacred symbol on something profane and worldly, such as money, works against the religious canons. The icon is taken as an object symbolizing the presence of God; the money thus gains the significance of a sacral object as well. On the other hand, the engraving of a poppy flower on the surface of the 500 denar note was intended to be a symbol of the natural resources of the country , although its association with opium is inevitable.

Such clashes of meaning place strong emphasis on the many absurdities in social, cultural and political life in Macedonia. According to Vangeli, the only way to find meaning is through the mystical belief in redemption that does not depend on ephemeral or profane concepts of tragedy. While criticizing the social and cultural conflicts (the example of turning the church first into a mosque and then into a tourist attraction), Vangeli negates the relevance of tragedy even when caused by postcolonial cultural domination. In this context, Vangeli's artistic concepts are influenced by Orthodox Christian theology. Tragedy and suffering in earthly life are not recognized as relevant due to the sacral concepts of redemption and salvation obtained only through the Apocalypse.

The money fetish is embraced as strongly as the image of the Mother of God, an icon that is a phantasm--immaterial and powerful although still as vulnerable as any other material object. [18] On the other hand, the fetish of the poppy is also a very old and strong phantasmatic image that can serve for manipulation with the fragile national consciousness, and by taking into account Lenin's famous quote that "religion is the opium of the masses," religion and drugs are already closing the vicious circle.

Vangeli's usage of Macedonian flags and money should be understood metaphorically. Instead of questioning the possibility of a perfect ready-made within the Balkan context, Vangeli has posed the question of fabricating. In establishing legitimate state, church, money and subject-identities as widely recognizable symbols, she posed questions of identity rather than fabricating perfect objects.

Interestingly enough, for the second phase of the "Liquor Amnii 2" (a project that took place during the 1997 Convergence X Summer Festival in Providence, Rhode Island) Vangeli created another site-specific installation also dealing with issues of identity, this time using the latest model of life vests--produced in the United States--as ready-made objects. She floated the bright orange objects on the dark surface of the Providence River in order to represent the optimistic concept proclaimed by the title of the work itself: "The Constant Desire for Eternity." Thus, she also avoided any kind of possible national exoticism that could be taken as an argument against the imperfect ready-made. They can be replaced with perfect ready-mades that can be ordered and found even in the Balkans under special conditions, however, then the question arises of context and content becoming underestimated and neglected in favor of formal appearance.

In terms of the proliferation and consumption of images and the continuous flourishing of new media, one project by Yugoslav artist Zoran Naskovski gives a strange and tragic example. His project "War Frames" (1999) is a radical example of using TV programming as ready-made images in extraordinary circumstances. After he was selected as a participant in "Always Already Apocalypse," he found himself imprisoned in his home during the NATO bombardment over Belgrade. Not having access to any other materials, nor the freedom to produce any other work, he made the only possible choice--he recorded the images from the local TV stations including the strong media campaign of Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of the ruling government at that time.

The question of the perfection of the medium and the living standard became unexpectedly intertwined; the barest life styles were followed by a perfect political and blinding usage of the medium of television. By using this medium, the everyday suspense of the sirens announcing the war mingled with the suspense of Hollywood movies. The TV programs recorded for the project included everything from the local news to music entertainment to religious documentaries to cockfights. In the top left of the screen the words "war danger" were written, reminding us of the absurdity of the animal and human fights appearing in miniature on the television. The presentation of the work, with an interactive CD-ROM, can be interpreted as a simulation of what an average TV viewer was watching during the bombardment. The viewer in the exhibition space could also represent the experience by clicking the mouse in order to change the channel.

The consequential outcome of the war, the tide of about 200,000 refugees who emigrated to Macedonia during the NATO intervention, provoked the artist Ismet Ramicevic to create the work "Pain + Food = Souvenir" (1999). Ramicevic's work was shown in the context of the group exhibition "Artists and Refugees," that was organized by the Center for Contemporary Arts (appearing at the Museum of the City of Skopje). Ramicevic displayed the plates of several refugee families that he had previously photographed. These objects were their only belongings after they left the refugee camps--signifying their short, yet tragic, experience. The destiny of those subjects was strongly connected with the simple aluminum plates--the only remaining evidence of the harshness of life during that period. On each empty plate's inner surface the artist had placed a photograph of some of the refugees just before they left the camps.

The ready-made might be not the most appropriate medium for the art activities in the Balkans in the technological sense, but it is appropriate in terms of the content. It can express the specific reality of countries affected by continuous economic and political instability; especially if the industrial shapes and their difference from perfection are used within profoundly conceptualized artistic projects. Focusing on the ready-made as an artistic mode of expression was expressed in Tosevski's "Dossier '96." Its method of investigating the possibilities for a perfect mode of production, along with other problems initiated by the switch to a market economy implies there are other ways of using and interpreting the ready-made: e.g., the treating of state symbols as "unready" ready-made products. Or, in the conditions of establishing a new state with unclear strategies, as in the case of Vangeli's projects. Naskovski used theses images as a strong critical context of the bombardment of Serbia, emphasizing the possibilities for manipulation via television--the most powerful ready-made of all--during a time when the whole population was forced into a "home TV prison." The absurdities and paradoxes of life and art in the Balkans are emphasized by the medium of ready-made. The tendency toward a society of high-tech objects and the not-so-perfect everyday life of their consumers are inevitably in conflict so that partial information about globalization and its technological advantages often sounds unconvincing and hollow in such social, economical and political conditions.

SUZANA MILEVSKA, art theorist and curator, lives in Skopje, Macedonia and works for the Museum of the City of Skopje.

NOTES

(1.) Marcel Duchamp, "The Richard Mutt Case," in The Blind Man (No. 1), April 10, 1917. (The Blind Man was a magazine published on the occasion of the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, Inc. at the Grand Central Palace in New York City.)

(2.) Gene Swenson, "What is Pop Art," in Art News 62 (November 1963), p. 26, quoted according to Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1996), p. 130.

(3.) Thierry De Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p.413.

(4.) Ibid., p. 295. The statement," I threw a bottle rack and urinal in their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their beauty" once attributed to Duchamp, now, according to De Duve, is re-attributed to Hans Richter.

(5.) Trajko Slavevski, Makedonska ekonomija vs tranzicija (Eko Press: Skopje, 1955), pp. 83.87. In this book, a professor from the Faculty of Economics at Skopje University investigates different models of privatization in western and eastern countries, arguing with the local government and solvency officials that the fast model of privatization employed in the Czech Republic would be more appropriate than the slower approach already employed in Macedonia.

(6.) Of course, Adorno's thesis should be applied from the appropriate distance, taking into account his theory of negative dialectics and eternal tension between art and society.

(7.) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus (New York: Viking, 1977), p. 19.

(8.) The last presentation of a new version of this project took place within the "After the Wall" exhibition in 1999 that Bojana Pejic, curated for Moderna Museet in Stockholm. (It also traveled to Budapest and Berlin.)

(9.) This situation inevitably reminds us of the desiring machine concept from Brian Massumi, trans., Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 161.

(10.) Ibid., pp. 100 and 501-514.

(11.) Wilhelm S. Wurzer, "wild being/ecart/capital" in M. C. Dillon, ed., Ecart & Differance: Merlcau-Ponty and Derrida on Seeing and Writing (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), p. 235.

(12.) J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 106-108.

(13.) De Duve, pp. 89-142.

(14.) This relationship calls to mind the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer: "the single relation between the subject who bestows meaning and the meaningless object."

(15.) Argument given during a round table discussion at the European Biennial Manifests 2 in Luxembourg in 1998 as an answer to Joseph Bakhstein, art theorist from Moskow.

(16.) George Dickie, Art and Aesthetic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p.34.

(17.) The documents belong to the personal collection of Ivan Tosevski, the artist's father, who was employed for many years as an expert in the UNO Committee for Human Rights.

(18.) Slavoj Zizek. "How Did Marx Invented the Symptom," in Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1999), p,314.