INTERVIEW

Artistic strategy of offering antidepressants

 

Željko Kipke, one of the most famous Croatian conceptual artist, is one of the authors that will be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, whose opening on December 11th will be the cultural event of the year in Croatia.

 

Painter, writer, filmmaker, a participant of the Venice biennale in 1993, Kipke is the author of works which are in museums and private collections in Vienna, Amsterdam, Marseille, Toulouse, Paris and Rome. Allegedly, Bill Gates bought his entire five-year production for EUR 5 million, but Kipke himself has never wanted to comment on this, considering it a private matter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"I prefer cats to dogs because there are no police cats"

 

 

 

 

He has exhibited in more than 70 individual and group exhibitions in Zagreb, Belgrade, Rijeka, Ljubljana, Dubrovnik, Mainz, Torino, Sarajevo, Sao Paulo, Paris, Lisbon, Graz, Seoul, New York, Budapest, Cairo, Copenhagen, Buenos Aires and Mallorca. Kipke's paintings are socially engaged, with the intention, and their content draws attention to the social reality. He is known for his statements that there is no art without the bizarre and surreal elements and that the art is a form of deviant behavior.

 

Your project  was presented also in the old building of Museum of Contemporary Art before moving. 

The complex project consists of two series of images (‘Invisible Galleries' and ‘Galleries of Zagreb go to heaven') and a twenty minute film. On these paintings and in the film I referred to Zagreb locations where the history of contemporary art in Croatia was minted, and that are slowly disappearing from the map of the city of Zagreb. These properties have either been abandoned, such as Salon Schira in Preradovićeva Street at number 13, or converted for other purposes, such as Podroom in Mesnička Street number 12, which is now occupied by the Lady Shram restaurant, or they have moved to another location, such as the already mentioned Museum of Contemporary Art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Inivisible galleries", video

 

 

 

 

 

These six locations, in my opinion, are important for the figuration of conceptual practices in Croatia. The first series of paintings (Invisible Galleries) focuses on the labels - street numbers - next to the gateways or the entrance doors of the building where the artistic activity used to take place. I painted them in the "exploding perspective". The second series (‘Zagreb galleries flying in the sky') is far more illustrative and funny to a certain extent. The properties in which the former galleries were situated, I launched them into the cosmos, into the orbit around the sun, carefully choosing their path. For example, I placed the former picture frames workshop, where the members of the Zagreb conceptual Gorgon group once gathered, on the Mercury trajectory.

You are known by several collections of paintings that refer to the social context, and in the last decade you reached for the multimedia in processing of this theme. Why?

In 1998 I created a collection of paintings entitled ‘The past is full of poisons and  opiats', and one year later a series of six paintings unified under the name of ‘Curses'. Both are significant because, in a broader sense, they marked my artistic strategy to the end of the first decade of the new XXI century. Most importantly, this refers to the recycling of the content from the past and the reflection of the social context, for which up to then, with the occasional exception, I did not reach for.

You might say that, during the eighties, I used the advantages of metaphysical language in my paintings. I primarily used it to emphasize the surrealist, or irrational, and even the ritual side of artistic activity. In other words, I closed myself in the context of art more than I opened its potential to the everyday routine and ongoing problems. Of course, dealing with the social context requires from the artist extra effort and engagement outside the four walls of his atelier. Such action implies different models of behavior so it has, without doubt, reflected on my art case.

 

 

 

"Draw a tree - Digit number"

 

 

Therefore, during the last decades the media framework that I operate within has spread an in some of my statements I used a film, a book, objects and the like. However, regardless the popular and trendy appeal of the social dimension in contemporary art practice that has not bypassed my program either - I haven't given up painting. I believe that social frameworks can efficiently be provoked in this medium. A good example is the series from the 1999 (Curses) where I used humorously - through curses - tried to provoke the inefficiency of cultural institutions.

Some of them, like the French pavilion in the courtyard of the Student Center, were left to the ravages of time, even though they were, historically speaking reference sites of Zagreb's architecture. Today this painting is in the holdings of the Modern Gallery Zagreb. At a time when the series was created, there were numerous writings in the press about how I use curses, kind of inadequate and outdated tools, and I answered that the role of artists is to use provocation and to provoke the attention of the society.

I was explaining thereat how the paintings-curses were actually in the function of acupuncture aid - needles - that should boost circulation of indolent facilities of the domestic cultural scene. Institutions such as the Croatian National Theater, Museum of Contemporary Art and University Libraries have found themselves under fire from... I made the paintings from this series, mostly obscure palette (purple-gray) with Chinese oil paints and it seemed like I had planned it all in advance. But it was not so, on contrary, I claim that casual coincidences increase the final impact of the program.

What are your experiences in the artistic expression through film?

As for the film, a series ‘Invisible Galleries' is the first experience of working in the media in professional terms. I would briefly describe it as a leisurely, understated walk through former galleries. At the same time I was more interested in the recent state of these premises than a thorough analysis of the former activities in them. With the use of archives a film was a good opportunity for historical stories and anecdotes from a completely subjective angle.

This, of course, was not my first encounter with the medium of film. In the early eighties I have already record some of my actions in public spaces with the super eight. It was either the ‘Summoning the rain' at the lake Jarun during the dry 1983, or ‘The Tonsure of the Cross', or I have performed the ritual of building in different geometrical figures (square, rhomb) and in that way I grew and developed the magical activity in the arts through this media.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Un treno contro un camion"

 

 

 

 

In 2003 the Croatian Film Association decided to transfer the material to a 16mm tape, and it was a challenge for me to give sound to the soundless materials. Five years later the same Association will publish a DVD format of a compilation of six of my early films entitled ‘Six Easy Pieces'. ‘Some Girls' (1980) ‘The Great White Spiral' (1982), ‘Summoning the rain' (1983), ‘The Tonsure of the Cross' (1983/84), ‘The Black Square' (1984), ‘Black Blacker than Black' (1985), are the film titles from the time when me and my colleagues shared one camera, send materials in the Kodak laboratories in Vienna and receive them back by mail, and sometimes projected them with a great delay, up to two years after the film had been developed, because our projectors were not at hand. I edited the material in the camera, and the results were stunning - as if the shots were connected as if done at the editing table.

During the late 1970s, my painting adventure started with a series of mono-color paintings that the domestic criticism places in the area of primary painting. A limited series is partially in the holdings of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and the rest is in private collections. Mostly on hard surfaces - cardboard or plywood - I built formal relationships between the graphite and oil paint, dry or wet substrates, and black and white color. Visually, as I said, these were the areas of limited range. However, despite this, their freshness and casual performance doesn't leave me indifferent, even today.

In one of your works, during the eighties, you present hardly imaginable spaces, beyond all logic and sense.

During the live period of the eighties, when everything was marked by the return to the painting I was interested in compiling all possible metaphysical symbols. I used the experience of irrational mathematics and usurped old models of spatial perception, such as reverse or exploding perspective. I tailored over all recipes from the ‘occult sciences' that were available to me. At one point I even ambitiously called himself the painter of the New Eon. However, it was an overture or a preparation for the end of the nineties, when I begun with the discrete social engagement and the recycling of illustrations and photographs from the area of, more or less popular culture - comics, newspaper advertising, kitsch postcards, photographs of different content and the like.

In ‘The past is full of poisons and opiats ' collection, you are socially engaged, pointing to the other side of advertising, and related work 'Antidepresive' was presented and the group exhibition on the occasion of accession of new members into the EU in St. Etienne in 2004.

In this collection, I used advertising illustrations from the thirties of the last century, if memory does not deceive me - I used a peculiar material from Zagreb illustrated monthly magazine World. They were all advertisements for body and face care, that is the beauty and happiness of life. On my pictures they are rearranged in a negative sense, in terms of discrete promotion of toxins and life-threatening chemicals. You should know that at the time of depression in Croatia (in the late nineties) the leaders of political parties invoked the thirties and promoted political slogans from the dramatic period prior to the World War II. With a dozen canvases I extended the program with alluminum plates. In an art-deco style, I also offered life-threatening chemical compounds on them, as very effective antidepressants.

"Galleries of Zagreb go to heaven"

 

 

I mention the program of the 1998 for two important reasons. The first concerns my artistic strategy which from that year on went towards recycling old and forgotten content. Whether used for the reconstruction of my dreams or to provoke social reality. Another reason is the current depression in Croatian society which brought antidepressants back in ‘style'. Regardless of the seriousness of the current situation, my offer is funny and ironic. Every few years I renew their story. For the group exhibitions in St. Etienne in 2004, on the occasion of new countries becoming members of the European society, I recycled the original series, with somewhat bigger aluminium plates and in English. Originally it was in Croatian. I am currently not planning a third variant, although the reasons for something similar.