Pointe à l’oeil – De dans une Baisse l’horizon is a project from 2012 which was presented at Vetrinje castle at Maribor. I’m glad that now it is presented in the Gallery of Faculty of Economics in Ljubljana and will be opened through September.
In the artistic project with a title Pointe à l’oeil and subtitled as De dans une Baisse l’horizon (A drop into the horizon) the artists Jiri Kočica and Zoran Srdić Janežič are dealing with the connections and interactions between science, art and society in the broad meaning of the word. The conceptual starting point of the project is a historical overview of the connections between philosophical ideas and their influence on society. Ideas were used and are still today as a starting point for impacts on mental horizons of both individuals and the masses. We can read these impacts as the indirect impact of cultural policies and the relationship between financial, political and military power – ordering the use of certain views in society through media or as direct impact through institutions of education and visual art projects – as well as direct effects of political ideologies.
The outlined artistic direction of the project lies on the axis: nature – culture – ideology. While nature binds to the biological state of things (the issue of human nature), culture on the relationship of the cult (religion), while ideology is based on questioning of philosophical concepts, religious foundations and ideological connections of an active policy on the basis of ideological models. They are not based on the transition from the current society or its traditional status, but as the ideological construct. They want to address the state of things in society that is not necessarily discursive or even as compromise solutions. You could say that ideology, in essence, does not recognize dialogue and indirectly shows the perverse effect of exploitation of certain conditions in the social structure, marked by such deviations from the intention of changing the name of progress – even at the expense of existing social rights.
As an integral part of Western society in an art project in Pointe à l’oeil are represented two projects: one of the Enlightenment in the early parts of the philosophers Francis Bacon (1521-1626) and René Descartes (1596-1650) and their impact on epistemology and in a more comprehensive impact on the philosophy of John Locke (1632-1704); and other of the anti-Enlightenment, the central figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and its impact on the development of modern political, sociological and educational thought as well as in the French Revolution. Tracking postmodernism from its origins in Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau (ie. in periods prior to the Enlightenment) all over Immanuel Kant (1924-1804), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), Richard M. Rorty (1931-2007), etc. It reflects the changed paradigm of intellectual property guidelines leading up to the point of narrowing philosophical-political and artistic view in a single point, which represents the end-point of perspective (vanishing point).
The project Pointe à l’oeil as the end point of this perspective is presents one of the last alive postmodern philosophers Slavoj Žižek (1949). Žižek in this symbolic position occupies the end of diagrams of historical links between philosophers and the content of the pipette to Žižkov portraits. These are literally the smallest possible portraits, we can create from the viral DNA technology, called DNA origami. The final image of DNA origami is big of some 10 nanometers, as low relief visible with the atomic force microscope (AFM). At the end of the symbolic point of constriction of philosophical-political and artistic view of the project Žižek’s portrait is almost the last place, which is visible only through the (science) medium and not with the naked eye.
