L’ART POUR L’ART EX-SUPERSTAR

9/11/2019

Note -Introducing the artist Milena Boskovic Badnjar. She is a fellow artist who resides in Belrade, Serbia. Milena and I are working on a collaborative series that will be shown in Serbia.
Below is her artist statement and selected works by Milena.

Milena Boskovic Badnjar

Painting performed and still performs a logical breakthrough. Against the laws of reason, taste, hierarchy, order, discipline... At the beginning of the 20thcentury, the revolutionary turn constantly shifting the focus got the name Dada, a cradle of modern art, or as the Dadaists used to say - an agglomeration of currents without conclusion and existential standpoints... A concept of life force in itself - creating in the world...

We are all witnesses of that world. I am a witness of that world and of this ’new world’. The historical turbulence around little me, new media of comunication and global estetic changes have in several turns affected my work. What surrounds us forces us to transform ourselves. If you are a visual artist out of all those influences comes socially engaged art.

In a complete commotion a person has to take a stand and put it on the market.
Based on dadaist principles, this production  bares a title ”L’ART POUR L’ART EX-SUPERSTAR, IT IS TIME TO SHINE”
Techniques of classical painting,  became too heavy for a present-day consumer with weary concentration, ripped apart from the amount of demands he has to fulfill on a daily basis.  Now is the time for more direct, stronger and purer step towards the observer. He needs to be splashed, slapped, refreshed, coloured, overjoyed.

All polished, shiny, untouchable, mighty, puffed,  unscratchable, with stretched and overstrung surface, the 21stcentury calls for perfection, maybe too external, too formal, loathing old age and decay.
I wanted to give my contribution by harmonizing the relation between the exterior and the interior and reviving the spirituality on several levels.

I often work with elements which represent the minds of the machines. Pulled out of their usual context and detached from their function, they are still filled with urban symbolic, logic, beauty and intense colours.
It is not my goal to promote the idea of recycling although I support it wholeheartedly out of respect for this tormented planet. I am more impressed by the beauty of those pieces of old gadgets. Furthermore, the materials I use are documents of time and changes, of expensive and complex manufacturing processes, facts of the magnificent human thought.
Used as elements of artwork they are in an upcycle process different from recycle in which the objects are degraded to feedstock. The artistic upcycle process glorifies those chosen objects as aesthetic symbols.

I call for a new breakthrough in the face of a new collapse of western civilization which as the Dadaists said is “a dangerous mystification giving false stability and illusion of an anthropocentric universe.”

Old things in new clothes. For Dadaists The First World War signified a great comeback of western man’s egoism and megalomania. Wars are still around us, aren’t they?

An entire century passed without any essential change. I enjoy the changes in aesthetics; any other change has to be an act of personal effort. With my exhibition I wish to give hope in the belief that every individual refinement is worthwhile.
My paintings are ‘rap’ and ‘dread’, ‘parkour’ and ‘comics’, ‘graffiti’ and ‘pseudo Esperanto’ with lots of joy and urban defiance toward the expected and the linear, with the idea of desirability of shine, Шајn, with capital Cyrillic Ш. Shhh...shhh... A calming sound. Shine is an achievable feeling. We all have it and we can bring it to the surface.

Milena Bošković Badnjar