Sodobna umetnost (Aljoša Abrahamsberg),
22. avgust 2016
― Tanja Lažetić: What’s Art Got to Do with It? “What has art to do with the indifferent everyday?” asks Tanja Lažetić. Although it could be examined through the issues of gender in art, the body or the collapse of political utopias, her work is driven by the everyday, always returning to this question. Lažetić locates the depth of superficiality in phenomena that escape the coherence of knowledge and renounce structure. This is noticeable in the work Mushrooms, graphic prints with bold, vivid colours that hyperrealistically emphasise the “anatomy” of mushrooms, while repetition presents stationary movement of the everyday, of what has always already been seen. Although we are fully immersed into it, it seems unattainable, impenetrable. Through the everyday, Tanja Lažetić examines the issues of gender, “the anatomy as destiny”. Strawberry is a journal on unsent postcards recording banal information from everyday nutrition, satisfying physiological needs as par excellence example of mundane existence. The menus introduce an exception, a moment of tragedy, the loss of a child, which, however, seems to escape exceptionality, as the description quickly returns it to the common register. Similarly, Olympia in Almost like Olympia, a unique homage to Victorine Meurent, a model for Manet’s painting, features a woman who sought to be exceptional, but is remembered only through an ordinary moment of being one in a series of odalisques, the one who looked back at the viewer. The everyday is the movement by which the individual is held in anonymity, which is nicely presented in Presence/Absence, a collaborative work with (oh, how mundane) the artist’s live-in partner Dejan Habicht during their stay as artists-in-residence in New York. The artist appeared on live surveillance cam every Sunday at the same time in the anonymous crowd, so their friends, who had been notified in advance, and all other visitors of the web site streaming live could see them. The street is the privileged
