Maska - Volume 35, Issue 200s1, 2020

The aim of this contribution is to archive and document a part of the process of the Abonma project. In 2018/2019, the temporary collective Abonma, as we ended up calling it, included Eva Nina Lampič, Nika Bezeljak, Miha Horvat, Minca Lorenci, Luka Martin Škof, and Aleš Zorec. Since 2019/2020, the part of the programme entitled Abonma Festival (Moment) has been run by Nika Švab.

The author writes a literary tribute to Cirkulacija 2, the only space, where ‘production = habitation = creativity = event’ is true to every letter. A large hall embraces with its physical characteristics as well as intersubjective ones and is a sort of a ‘fractal structure that this original circular plastic production platform is actualized by every time.’ Sonic performance Angstblüten II/Timor Flores II (R. Gönka and Danje Schilling) was one of the last events in Cirkulacija 2, as it had to move out of its premises in Tobačna because the tenants were not profitable enough for the owner.

The author seeks his mind thread in the gap between the dance film Vertigo Bird of Sašo Podgoršek and Iztok Kovač from 1997 and Kovač’s own recent premiered performance Vertigo Birds. This leads Lukan to think about the problems of reenactment and is led to consider the conscious and the unconscious memory of creators as well as spectators.

The author interviews the renowned Danish choreographer and performer Mette Ingvartsen on occasion of her visit to Ljubljana, where she performed her pieces 69 Positions and 21 Pornographies by invitation of the program Forms of performing initiated by the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova and Mladinsko theatre. The conversation tackles topics such as sexuality and nudity in relation to the public sphere; affects and desire, hijacked by capitalism; rehearsing revolt in safe artistic situations and other themes.

On the occasion of Radio Študent’s 50th anniversary, the article focuses on its place in modern society – the conditions and manner of enunciation in the situation in which it has found itself and from which it is coming from. It does that by comparing Balibar’s analysis of the current state of democracy and conceptualization of the principle of democracy with its situation and mode of operation. The aim is to highlight the specificity of Radio Študent and its immanent criteria of operation: fearless speech beyond guaranteed enunciation positions in which anyone can find themselves in the times that we live in and the situation in which we have found ourselves.

Drawing from a selection of texts close to the conceptualization of post-contemporaneity and, to some extent, post-contemporary art, the article highlights certain characteristics of contemporary art, particularly as expressed through criticism. Contemporary art analyses from the perspective of conceptualizations of post-contemporaneity are supplemented with an attempt to contextualise the similar process of formation of the idea of contemporary art that takes place through criticism of the pre-established conception of art, especially modernism. A parallel reading of the formation of the idea of contemporary art and something that could be understood as a process of formation of post-contemporary art is further supplemented with texts from the history of ideas related to art from the formative context of the modern conception of art, i.e. from the late 18th century onwards.

The piece is a review of the Slovenian edition of the book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by British economist Guy Standing. In addition to the standard review process – the presentation of the topic and evaluation – the text encompasses a broader interpretation of theses in the local political context and attempts to develop them and engage in a dialogue with them. Particular emphasis is placed on the issue of invisibility and establishing ‘the voice of the precariat’ with regard to cultural criticism. The situation of the precariat in Great Britain is compared to that in Slovenia, which has undergone a rather benevolent transition, and the difficulty of the search for solutions to the described state of affairs is pointed out.

New Wave of Playwriting is a compilation of two editions of the theatre segment Teritorij teatra (The Territory of Theatre) that were broadcast on Radio Študent. In the play of the introductory drama-radio form of the dialogue between the young female playwright and the young male director, it enters the field of exploring the contemporary playwriting of the youngest generation and its current position. For the starting point of the topical-structural analysis of concrete plays, the author takes the call for the Slavko Grum Award for Young Playwright and dedicates her attention to its recipients up to the year 2018. As a counterpoint, she presents various educational, staging or publication initiatives that open the doors for young playwrights. Through a short review of playwrights and their texts, the contribution offers an insight into the new generation of contemporary playwriting; by treating the topics, styles and forms that are popular among playwrights, the article aims to close the gap in the area of reflective analysis.

The article deals with questions of contemporary film theory by explaining and reflecting on the theses as proposed by the American film and literary critic Nico Baumbach in his work Cinema/Politics/Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2018). Baumbach is able to analyse the questions of what status film has in relation to politics, philosophy and art in a contemporarily relevant way, approaching film studies through reading authors such as Rancière, Badiou and Agamben in dialogue with Althusser, Deleuze and Benjamin. The article focuses on the positioning and meaning of Baumbach’s thought in the contemporary field of film theory. We position the author’s thought as necessarily dependent on historical context and emphasise its potential for further contemplation, especially as regards the fruitful connection of the dominant branches of film theory that understand film in other ways than merely as the ‘seventh art’.

The article was first published in 2016 and uses philosophical conceptual tools (referring mostly to Gilles Deleuze and Friedrich Nietzsche) to analyse the phenomenon of trap music. The text does not discuss the questions of genre and music classifications but tries to capture the prevailing spirit and effect of trap music: trap is trap, pure tautology, pure reality, materiality and banality at the same time. Trap affirms what is, here and now. In this context, the author discerns the amoral and materialist philosophy in the background of the trap phenomenon. Even though trap seems an apolitical and conformist music, it can also carry implicit rebellious and anti-capitalistic potentials.

The article deals with Afro-American literary author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and her place in the Harlem Renaissance. It focuses on the reasons why she was not recognized during her lifetime. Analysing her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, it establishes what was it that made the Afro-American authors from the 1970s and 1980s adopt her as their literary predecessor and inscribe her in the literary canon. The article states that her literature is written from a feminist perspective and deals with the lives of Afro-American women without constantly positioning them in the context of racial difficulties of the period, as was done by her predominately male literary contemporaries.

By analysing an example of self-published (some would call it amateur) poetry, this article attempts to position the concept of joy in the conceptual apparatus of literary criticism. In the polemical debate, it stands on the side of materialism, idiotism and silliness as opposed to certain unreflected criteria – idealism, intellectualism, seriousness – that define which works of poetry are considered artworks worthy of discussion even before they have actually been critically discussed. Being polemic, the article does not develop joy as a fully-fledged tool of literary criticism, but tries to serve as an introduction to the possibility of including the usually overlooked elements of poetic language into the field of artistic work and expression.

The subject of the article, which is a revised version of the radio segment Object of the Month at Radio Študent, is the Solar Anus, short early text of the French sociologist and writer George Bataille. Solar Anus is also the object, concept and title of the masochistic performance of the US artist Ron Athey. If this serves as an opening question of the actualization of Bataille’s text in the specific cultural context and a parallel interpretation, the article departs from the understanding of the Solar Anus as a more radical and ineradicable form of currently topical ecological, systemic and elemental thinking. In this, the concept of general economy and non-productive consumption is a crucial part along with the materialistic understanding of transgression and excess and the links between the fact of cosmic annihilation and the political-economic order.

The article, first published on historical Radio Študent show Repetitio, deals with three distinctive historical ideal types (the New York intellectual, the honnête homme and the dandy), focusing on two of them (the honnête homme and the dandy). As their common ideological core, it identifies a distinct, in two cases even explicitly contradictory relationship with the social mechanisms of self-promotion. Despite the great geographical and temporal distance between these three ideal types, it seeks in their self-presentation manoeuvres the common ground between the opposing imperatives of modesty and the need for communicating personal virtues and achievements to the wider public.