Accumulated over the centuries, portrait conventions are now available to creators as a communication repertoire that fills our space and time. In a series of portraits of contemporary Slovenian creators, Uros AbRam presents their images as collective Creations, whose production is subordinated to a well-defined dialogical method. They reveal to us the new ethos of the contemporary “artist”, who left his sacred space of creation in order to return social responsibility to creative practice and its lost aura to art. AbRam's dialogue portraits are a kind of portraits parlants, talking portraits that go beyond the usual portrait genres with a peculiar form of cooperation between the portraitist and the model. The latter must be taken into account by the author in order to capture and convey the essence of the portraitist's existence in an individual and public sense.
The portraits tell us about who and what artists are today, since postmodernity so radically devalued the concept of high art and the creators themselves gave up the established image of the artist as a social subject – a Spiritualized benefactor of humanity, who, regardless of sacrifices, gives himself away for something that goes beyond him and with a literary existence; the image of the creator, which is separated from the other world within the walls of his studio, where he explores and devises images of Supra-temporal truths. The conditions of neoliberal capitalism force the artist to cope with life itself, ensuring existence in overheated conditions of exploitation, social marginalization, material and intellectual deprivation. With the loss of the position of art as a privileged social activity and its slipping on the scale of social values, it remains only for artists to fight for complete social transformation. Then art and life are more closely intertwined, as they are motivated by similar goals. In the images of contemporary creators, Uros Abram documents the chaotic process of transformation of the basic provisions of artistic creation and cultural politics in the present moment.
Text: Dr. Andrej Smrekar
Photo: Marusa Lapuh, GBJ archive
V stoletjih nakopičene portretne konvencije so danes ustvarjalcem na voljo kot komunikacijski repertoar, ki napolnjuje naš prostor in čas. V seriji portretov sodobnih slovenskih ustvarjalcev Uroš Abram predstavlja njihove podobe kot kolektivne stvaritve, katerih produkcija je podrejena natančno opredeljeni dialoški metodi. V njih se nam razodene nov etos sodobnega “umetnika”, ki je zapustil svoj posvečeni prostor ustvarjanja, da bi ustvarjalni praksi vrnil družbeno odgovornost in umetnosti njeno izgubljeno avro. Abramovi dialoški portreti so nekakšni portraits parlants, govoreči portreti, ki s svojstveno obliko sodelovanja portretista in modela presegajo običajne portretne žanre. Slednje mora avtor upoštevati zato, da bi s podobo zajel in posredoval bistvo portretirančevega bivanja v individualnem in javnem smislu.
Portreti nam spregovorijo o tem, kdo in kaj so danes umetniki, odkar je postmoderna tako radikalno razvrednotila pojem visoke umetnosti in so se ustvarjalci sami odrekli vzpostavljeni podobi umetnika kot družbenega subjekta – poduhovljenega dobrotnika človeštva, ki se ne glede na žrtve razdaja za nekaj, kar presega njega in sámo eksistenco; podobi ustvarjalca, ki je ločena od siceršnjega sveta med stenami njegovega ateljeja, kjer raziskuje in snuje podobe nadčasovnih resnic. Pogoji neoliberalnega kapitalizma umetnika silijo, da se spopada z življenjem samim, z zagotavljanjem eksistence v pregretih razmerah izkoriščanja, družbene marginalizacije, materialne in intelektualne prikrajšanosti. Ob izgubi položaja umetnosti kot privilegirane družbene dejavnosti in ob njenem zdrsu na lestvici družbenih vrednot umetnikom ostaja samo boj za popolno družbeno preobrazbo. Tedaj se umetnost in življenje tesneje prepleteta, saj ju motivirajo podobni cilji. Uroš Abram v podobah sodobnih ustvarjalcev dokumentira kaotični proces preobrazbe osnovnih določil umetniškega ustvarjanja in kulturne politike v današnjem trenutku.
Besedilo: dr. Andrej Smrekar
Foto: Maruša Lapuh, arhiv GBJ
