Maska - Volume 29, Issue 165-168, 2014

This issue of the journal is, exceptionally, quadruple and, as a consequence, heftier and more comprehensive. This editorial gesture, which, in itself, is not particularly unusual, is (unfortunately) also an announcement that, in the transition from 2014 to 2015, the international journal Maska is changing from a quarterly into a triannual publication. In 2015, (only) three double issues of Maska will be published. The theme of the central section is, in fact, in tune with these topical circumstances. It is titled "Art and Life: Productions of temporality in art" and has been conceived and prepared by a guest editor, Dr Lev Kreft.

The year 2013 in Poland was marked by a series of unrest-inspiring events that curtailed the liberty of artists and frequently verged on censorship. It may seem as though we are witnessing culture wars between the so-called right-wing, conservative, catholic representatives and the so-called left-wing, more liberal, progressive segment of Polish society. In fact, what creates the real division in contemporary Poland is not a series of ideological issues but the direct consensus-defying consequences of the post-1989 transition and the yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots in Poland. Ideological squabble is thus actually more of a smoke screen, a type of pressure valve in these times of accelerating socioeconomic and symbolic inequality.

Already back in the 1960s, Dušan Moravec was planning the functioning of the Slovenian National Theatre Museum [Slovenski gledališki muzej] as a museological and, more broadly, research-based activity; yet, his vision of an institute did not take off while he was in charge of the museum. In February 2014, upon the initiative of the museum, its director and experts in the field, the Government of the Republic of Slovenia ratified the decision to restructure SGM and to establish the Slovenian Theatre Institute; however, this is supposed to transpire at the time of funding cuts in all areas with no financial and personnel consolidation. We are right to ask then: what does the establishment of the institute mean in the given circumstances, especially if we take into account the fact that SGM has been working in disorganised circumstances ever since its inception?.

The notion of life has shaped various relations of art to politics for decades; with its convergence with life, art used to subvert and shift its institutional boundaries and question its own autonomy, while, at the same time, the belief in its emancipatory power was closely related to possible new ways of life. However, the ability to neutralise each and every artistic protest is infinitely greater in contemporary systems than it was in the totalitarian systems of the past, which dealt with their critics and opponents with repression. Nowadays, it seems that to call a spade a spade is a waste of breath. Precisely for this reason, it is necessary to rethink the relations between art and life, particularly the question of how this relationship is defined nowadays through a special form of production of temporality that transpires in contemporary modes of work, in the disappearance of the dividing line between private time and working hours, in the investment of subjectivity, the role of debt in imagining the future, in the disappearance of the commons, in the duration of an artwork and/or experience, etc. Art must rethink its temporal constitution, which was so important at the beginning of the resistance to industrialisation and the exploitation of work, for the autonomous creative and aesthetic experience now represents an important source of production value.

Contemporary global corporations control abstracts networks of management and executive boards; the majority of present-day workers' protests is doomed to fail, for there is no concrete person that they could address. In postmodernity, politics as a formalised technique of governance is carried over into cultural and artistic action. Thus, politics and the political are created with the regimes of aestheticisation in art and culture; as a result, politics is becoming depoliticised, while art is increasingly politicised. Contemporary art thus represent a ladder that leads from a depoliticised abstract space into the space of politicized social reality. The article considers a series of critical artistic practices from the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries.

By paraphrasing the title of Samuel Beckett's key dramatic text in the title of this article, we indicate the capacity of art to define time. To what extent its influence extends to reality is a question inscribed in the very foundations of its social meanings, which, at the same time, also stimulates the emergence of artistic events. Starting from the introductory layout of concepts in the relationship between art and politics in Miško Šuvakovi?'s book Art and Politics [Umetnost i politika], we are interested in the concept of event developed (non)definitively by Alain Badiou. The politics of art is an epistemological problem rather than an aesthetic one. At numerous intersections of social, power- and production-related practices, art and politics serve one another as the medium of waiting for the event. Speaking of various definitions of the relationship between art and life, the Dadaist movement proves relevant for subsequent times in a paradigmatic sense.

Courbet's 'The Painter's Studio' opens the whole field of modernist art's mission. After an introductory explanation of the painting, we enter its immediate context: the year 1855, when it was exhibited on the opposite side of the entrance to the Universal Exposition. There is another context, that of the atelier as such: the atelier was a common name for artisans' workshops and studios. But during this period, it became more than that. It was Louis Blanc's proposal for a solution to society's disorders: without ateliers as free associations of workers, the free market deteriorates into crisis. He had strong opponents. Their ideologue was Michel Chevalier, who claimed that only a free market without associationism could save modern society from its instabilities. Courbet's painting is an allegory of capitalist society and an image of the artist's atelier as a place from which a critical political economy of the world is revealed.

The starting point for the article is a thesis by Bojana Kunst, saying that the work of a contemporary artist is, on the one hand, bound to the 'bizarre fantasies about creativity', on the other, it is 'becoming more and more labour and less and less creativity'. The relation between labour and creativity is examined in a historical perspective: through phenomena of autonomous artistic work, philosophical idealisation of creative 'genius' and emergence of copyright. The relation between productive and unproductive labour and growing tendencies toward 'productivisation' in culture and art are also considered. The article concludes that what is at work in (creative) work is a struggle against (creative) work.

In order to oppose (hyper)production of art in late capitalism, such an opposition within the art field has precisely to be - produced. This paradox at the heart of strategies of 'refusal of labour' in contemporary art can be viewed as the basis for a critical articulation of possible understandings of the relation between art and work - and as the starting point for an attempt at overcoming the existent understandings of these relations.

The pauperised 'field of art' reminds one of the desert of impotent creativity, which spreads from galleries/museums/ biennials into the common space and gentrifies it under the brand name of public art. In light of these circumstances, this article points to the need to reject the dictate of legitimacy in art, which is established through evaluation of artists and their works. The distinctly hierarchical mechanisms of the art system, founded upon the logic of counting, reproduce inequality, which is aestheticised, masked and packaged as seemingly emancipatory, participatory and collaborative. In all this, the economics of art/culture is merely a method for a systematic modification of strategically disobedient creativity. Therefore, the rejection of the logic of counting at the cost of rejecting art as such is one of the greatest fears of capitalism and the power of the politics of resistance.

Ninety-nine years after its scandalous premiere, Igor Stravinsky's 'Le Sacre du Printemps' has become a cultural monument with an important position in the collective memory. A new interpretation of the work by French choreographer Laurent Chétouane aims at putting the great myth into question. 'Sacrificing' the sacrifice itself, his choreography tries to rehabilitate the original strangeness of the piece. The dance is conceived as a tribute to the figure of the Other, which undermines the traditional regime of logos, reason and representation. By calling on affective techniques and a thinking of pathos and response, Chétouane continues his research of a theatre beyond images and concepts.

If we translate the questions beauty poses into the field of choreography and performance, we have to start from zero again and again. A truly judging choreography would be one that constructs its own scope step by step and brings forth its own rules and the always difficult probings of unforeseeable processes. To consider choreography along the lines of aesthetical judgments would mean to make a generic concept out of it. Choreography would then no longer be a poetics prescribing what belongs to it and what does not. It would no longer determine which activities are dance and which are not, and would enter the genesis of its own self-grounding.

Uferstudios is a monumental space for contemporary dance in Berlin consisting of 14 bright studios that range from 85m2 to 415m2. An old electrical trolley depot built in 1920s was rebuilt in 2010 and now hosts the Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin HZT, Tanzfabrik Berlin, ada Studio, Tanzbu?ro Berlin and the freelance dance community. Uferstudios is run without an artistic director or an artistic board, and coexistence is based on a constant dialogue and sharing the vision and the paying of the rent. The nonhierarchical way of governing the space offers a new model for a dance house - which is both intriguing and very different from other dance houses in Europe that I had a chance to experience. I invited Barbara Friedrich, the managing director of Uferstudios, and Gisela Mu?ller, a board member and artistic director of the Tanzfabrik school, to speak about the protocols of coexistence, the con_icts, the vision and the costs of running the space. Both of them are founding members and driving forces of Uferstudios.

The author skims through the development of dance from the Renaissance to today and explains the gradual emancipation of dance from natural movement, movement of gender and from the state. In the twentieth-century, called by the author the anti-century because of the many revolutionary leaps associated with it, modern art appears, which frees dance of the ideology of dance. Modern dance is founded on anti-movement and thus stands up to ballet, which is under the thumb of the state and grounded in discipline. The dancer is becoming an individualist, while the state has moved its control mechanisms to the television, with which it tries to shape the collective body by way of popular dance on MTV. After WW II, when the influences of American abstract dance start entering Europe, contact dance and conceptual dance appear to finally emancipate dance from music by turning away from ballet.

Around 1800, parallel to heavy changes on the political stage in general and the replacement of taxonomical thought by the idea of life as living within life sciences - an observation by Michel Foucault, which he, after The Order of Things, deepens in his lectures on The History of Governmentality between 1977 and 1979 - choreography also changes fundamentally. This change manifests very obviously in the Letters on Dancing and Ballets by Jean Georges Noverre from 1760, published as a manifesto in their first edition approximately 20 years before the closing of the Académie Royale de Danse in Paris. In Noverre, there can be found a lot of hints pointing toward the complex problem of biopolitics, although nowadays many scholars mainly refer to him solely as the inventor of ballet d'action and in this context as an early precursor of romantic ballet in the nineteenth-century.

The article 'An Experiment With Beginnings: Iztok Kova? and En-Knap' ['Poskus z za?etki: Iztok Kova? in En-Knap'] explores chance as the central method of the dance group En-Knap, or EnKnapGroup, and it attempts to grasp the impact of the En-Knapian collective's dance on the spectator via diverse events and various theories. At the same time, it also takes into account the combinatorics of the group's dance organon, in order to get as close as possible to the principles that evade everyday logic. The attempt is reminiscent of the entrapment in paradox, which best defines the (movement) relations of the group or the insoluble conflicts, in which they are caught and which persist unrelentingly in their movement poetics. At the same time, in the topical again spirit of chance in contemporary performing arts and of contingency in political theory, they tell us a lot about our current situation.

A (dance) performance is always associated with the experience of passing. Although caught in the moment, there are attempts to eternalise it by way of different postproduction responses and records and turn it into a 'sellable good'. In his performance Fest, Ivo Dimchev metaphorically and literally depicts phallic-vaginal relations between the artist, programme head, technician and critic, thus revealing the vulgarity of the process of buying performances. Selling and researching performances is based on our memories. In Frankfurt, a symposium was organised to the theme of digitalisation of the dancing body, entitled Motion Bank. An accurate record of movement leads to democratisation, which supports a relaxed dialogue between different artistic practices, but at the same time uniforms the dancer's body and obscures his individual dimension, though it also contributes to direct learning of known repertoires.

The Desiré Central Station festival is created by director Andraš Urban in Subotica, a small secession town on the border of Vojvodina and Hungary. The interview (up)on the occasion of the festival's fifth edition under the motto 'I am desiré' was focused on the future of the festival and contemporary theatre. The objective of this festival, which ignores ceremonies, is the education of an already very educated audience, the addressing of boundaries - both personal and social - the questioning of what the purpose of performing arts is, and questioning especially the relationship between an audience and a performer, as well as the relationship between theatre and the community in which it is created - to address these connections as organic while being constantly aware of the inevitability of change.

The Berlin festival Theatertreffen - the German-speaking equivalent of the Maribor Theatre Festival (Borštnikovo srecanje) featuring ten 'most noteworthy' performances selected by jury - takes place every year at the beginning of May. 'Courage to Audaciousness' was the motto of the latest edition of the festival, which presented several long performances with very diverse but distinct authorial signatures: from the archaic Gotscheff and the hysterical Castorf to the emptied Borgmann, the poignant Final Witnesses of the Holocaust, the apparently cold petit- bourgeois horror by Susanne Kennedy, the global implication in the arms trade by Rimini Protokoll, the entertaining Fritsch, Karin Henkel's play with identities, Hermanis' integration of an uncivilized foundling, and Platel's choreography on the theme of social exclusion.

This article discusses the piece Salves, a performance choreographed by Maguy Marin in collaboration with Denis Mariotte that premiered at the Biennale de la Danse de Lyon in 2010. With regard to the choreographer's statement that Salves - an attempt to stage a catastrophic past and apocalyptic visions - would be an invitation for resistance, the text questions whether the performance raises any urge for resistance. With reference to Jacques Rancière's thoughts in The Future of the Image, the review scrutinizes efforts of representing catastrophic events with theatrical means and reflects on the pleasurable experience of watching Marin's visual poetry, which stands in vast contradiction to the proclaimed horror of the performance.

The compendium of texts Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity takes as its starting point the fact that today's mixed and augmented reality, essentially defined by smart technologies, offers new challenges for both artistic practices and theoretical reflection. The central questions posed by the authors in the book are: what is the position and role of the body in these mixed, technology-supported worlds and which new possibilities for the performing arts have been opened up in consequence? The texts concentrate mainly on the simultaneous presence of physical and virtual bodies (or avatars) in the process of performing and their mutual relations, interaction, cooperation and synthesis.

In the first part of his contribution, the author speaks about the publication of the second (revised) edition of Art and Alternative, published for the first time in 1992 - during a time of fierce repression of the cultural and artistic alternative, or to be more precise, of the remains of the once strong and respected Serbian (especially Belgrade) alternative scene, by the then ultranationalist state authorities in Serbia. This very alternative culture, discussed by Milena D. Šešic in the mentioned book, was one of the most intractable 'pockets of resistance' against the aggressive nationalist politics of the time. The second part of the text presents the new book by Milena D. Šešic, Indian Theatre: Tradition and Activism, which is framed as a 'journal' of a field research carried out on contemporary Indian theatre. In the course of her 'action research', Milena D. Šešic visited several important centres of contemporary Indian theatre and met with many charismatic makers on this diverse scene of which we know so little about in Slovenia.