WHAT, HOW AND FOR WHOM

contents:

What, how & for whom - Zagreb/Vienna ................................................................. 5 Project: Broadcasting......................................................................................................... 12 Gallery Nova ............................................................................................................................... 21 SIde-effects, Looking Awry, Repetition: Pride & Prejudice ................. 24 Zagreb Cultural Kapital 3000 ....................................................................................... 26 Collective Creativity .......................................................................................................... 29

contact:
What, How and for Whom/WHW Baruna Trenka 4/IV HR-10000 Zagreb | Croatia whw@mi2.hr
curators: Ana DEVI | Ivet URLIN | Nataa ILI | Sabina SABOLOVI design: Dejan Kri [arkzin] fonts: Filosoa [emigre], Eunuverse [Barry Deck], Bliss [Jeremy Tankard] Zagreb, 2004

IMPRESSUM

Background information
The sense of time has been rather disturbed in Croatia during the last decade. On the one hand, it was a long decade that started in the processes deeply rooted in the Eighties. But on the other hand, the war and intellectual repression that had been following it had shortened the decade to short periods of nightmarish awakenings from the autistic and mute dream of fulllment of 1000 years of nations longings.Sure enough, the lines when things had started and ended are especially hard to draw when one is dealing with a war that was never ofcially announced or proclaimed over. The lack of any intellectual contextualization has disabled the reection on things that have been happening to us, therefore hitting us like sleepwalkers. Short acts of awakenings had barely left traces in the self-assured, non-communicative dream that the nation had been dreaming out with brutal energy. Those performing the social function of intellectuals have mobilized extreme right-wing ideologies that were to strengthen the big sleep from which history always starts anew with sick optimism. It is the decade in which the Croatian version of the democratic revolution [or better to say, contra-revolution] has been nalized with the triumph of the capital and rediscovery of market economy as the tool of resource distribution. The pathos of the human rights revolution reached broader society through the lter of nationalistic ideologies, maybe because the revolution in the Yugoslav version was very politically correct and decently enlightening. The lack of revolutionary pathos on which enjoyment-in-the-process is based, enjoyment in the wasting of revolutionary activity that necessarily by far outreaches its instrumentality and purpose1, has been compensated by encompassing passionate nationalism. The struggle for uniqueness of national culture fought by right-wing intellectuals has been realized as the struggle against left cultural hegemony, interpreted as the foreign, external element that threatens the purity of national culture/national identity. An important part of the project of cleaning the national culture has been removing the important part of the history and producing silent collective amnesia.

1] Slavoj iek, Znak/oznaitelj/pismo [prilog materijalistikoj teoriji oznaiteljske prakse, NIP mladost, Beograd, 1976.

COM.MANIFESTO

w
The Communist Manifesto is still alive, perhaps more than ever, since the predicament it describes is heightened today to a new level of unbearable tension.
[Slavoj IEK, Spectre is Still Roaming Around]

COM.MANIFESTO

What, How and for Whom

on the occasion of 150th anniversary of Communist Manifesto
Constant revolutionizing of productions, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All xed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind Karl Marx & Frederick Engels: The Communist Manifesto - A Modern Edition, london, verso 1998, pg 38-39.

If it were a single, it would be Satisfaction

Mark SIMPSON Independent on Sunday

COM.MANIFESTO

Many years ago, in some other times, Communist Manifesto used to be a very dangerous book. The world was at that time divided into those who trusted the words of this book and followed its revolutionary spirit, and those who, equally fascinated by the book, hated it and feared its rebellious cry. But nobody dared to ignore the signicance of the Communist Manifesto. Its historical impact was obvious and its practical political effects were changing the world. It seemed for the moment that this book could even decide the destiny of the mankind. These were the times when the world was still young and has not only its history going on but also an open future. Everything has changed since than. Today is the Manifesto nothing but a small booklet among other books of the worlds cultural heritage, which provokes no political action and of which nobody is afraid any more. Once a wild political pamphlet, the Manifesto seems to be nally domesticated and turned into a harmless cultural artifact. Not a revolutionary politics, but culture is today the only message of this medium.

Boris BUDEN It is about the society that mistook culture for politics

COM.MANIFESTO

WHW as an independent curators collective acts at the sliding area negotiated between different models of a non-formal institution, a creative group, an organizational team, an institutionalised friendship and activism, including in its activities different partners and initiatives. Our actions are based on synergy that appropriates and redenes different models of representation and systems and simultaneously is coexisting within them. WHW was initiated in Zagreb in late 90s as the informal network between activist organization/publishing house Arkzin, net.cultural club Mama and the team of independent curators [Ivet urlin, Ana Devi, Nataa Ili, Sabina Sabolovi] that started to work on the international exhibition on the occasion of 150th anniversary of Communist Manifesto. Since this model of collaboration between cultural organizations of different backgrounds and knowhow proved very successful, at the beginning of 2001 we became a legal subject, registering as non-for-prot non-governmental institution, which is presently the only available legislative model in Croatia that enables us to intervene in cultural scene the way we do. The three basic questions of every economic organization - what, how and for whom - are operative in almost all segments of life. What,

the problem how many of every possible goods and services will be produced with limited resources and social input, how, the choice of certain technology according to which each good, chosen by answering the question what, will be produced, and question for whom, that concerns distribution of goods among members of the society - these are the questions that also concern the planning, concept and realization of the exhibition, as well as the production and distribution of artworks or artists position at the labor market. The circumstances surrounding development of What, How and for Whom project, which has been developing since 1998 when the republishing of Marxs Communist

Manifesto on the occasion of books 150th anniversary served as the impetus, have been
imposing the concept whose logic developed together with increased ambitions and wishes of the organizers. The answer to the question how to deal with anniversary of the book of such powerful ideological and political potential in the society that has imposed collective mystication and oblivion to the archive of politics, economy and style of the failed project of socialist society, took its shape in the area in which the considerations

about possibilities of political and artistic engagement were interlocked with issues of local daily politics.
COM.MANIFESTO

Economy studies how societies utilize scarce resources in order to produce valuable commodities and distribute them among people. Therefore, scarcity lies within the very essence of the economy. Scarcity law says: resorces and goods are limited, while wishes seem to be unlimited. Economizing as the leading motto of contemporary life implicates optimization as the way of doing business - how with smallest input the greatest economic results are achieved. As What, How & for Whom project has been planned within extremely limited production resources, optimization principle has become the

art since the late 60s, the exhibition had

attempted to intervene in contemporary art scene stressing continuity rather than breaks. On the other hand, the exhibition established international context for local art production,
greatly missing during the last decade. It is important to stress that Communist Manifesto as exhibitions starting point does not operate as a visual leit-motive of the exhibition, but as the referential point in which different approaches, opinions and visualizations are intersecting. The exhibition does not aspire to shape the complete

leit-motive of exhibition concept and method. In other words, the basic what and how of the project were getting closer and closer to each other and nally have overlapped.Instrumentality of social capital in constituting the social postsocialist reality becomes a scheme, a matrix for the exhibition development and its internal and external operations. By facing the recent production of artists who emerged on the Croatian art scene in the late 80s, at the time of rapid deterioration of socialist regime, with artists who have been forming the strong current of socially engaged

image on the subject of communism as ideology, political regime or utopian endeavor. Rather, by encouraging individual approaches and personal points of view, the exhibition has been attempting to break down monolith, unied perception of

art scenes, socialist praxis or present transitional situation.

COM.MANIFESTO

The Manifesto has lost its political meaning as a consequence of so-called democratic revolutions of 1989. It felt down together with the fall of Communism in the Eastern Europe that has been celebrated as the nal victory of the modern democracy over its totalitarian enemies. According to the understanding of the communist totalitarianism that has become dominant within

Vienna project What, How and for Whom, dedicated to 153rd anniversary of Communist Manifesto opposes the view that equals Eastern Europe with communism or identies cultural with political identity. Today, the Manifesto is not an issue more on the East, than it is on the West, and its message is global, just as the functioning of the capital,

as described by Marx, is global.

Focus on economy, capital and capitalism seeks to return to the West its own message /on transition from so called totalitarism to so clled democracy/ in its reversed, i.e. true meaning - as the return into the real capitalism. ### In its heroic period of 1970s and 1980s, the alternative cultural movements in Yugoslavia acted against ofcial institutions or at least apart from them. Self-organizing and activism were politically engaged, but not as battle against the darkness of Communist totalitarianism, but, paradoxically for the state whose ofcial ideology was self-management, as the ght for complete self-realization of individuals and culture, against real bureaucratic limitations. Alternative cultural movement was indeed taking socialist ideology more seriously than the cynical political lite in power did. Paradoxically, deeply politicized, alternative, sub-cultural movements of 1970s and 1980s in the East actually disintegrated at the moment of their supposed triumph - with the introduction of parliamentary democracy and the return of

the political mind of the liberal democratic West, the communist political movement was rst
of all a conservative reaction against modernity, particularly against the modern Western culture as culture of human rights and freedoms, i.e., an intrinsically anti-modern political phenomenon. In that respect, the political process of transition from communism to democracy, which has started after 1989 in the East European post-communist countries, is nothing but some sort of a cultural reconquista, the re-westernization of Eastern Europe. That is the reason why culture and civil

society are so closely allied in the strategies of transition in todays Eastern Europe, or in the
ongoing process of the so called enlargement of the European Union. It is mainly culture, as the true content of civil society - and not politics! - that has to do the job of democratization. Becoming ultimately a cultural artifact, Communist Manifesto had been deprived of its last critical capacity and of all its political meaning and importance. Once an expression of the deepest historical contradictions of the Western industrial society, the book has nally become a cultural symbol of the East. Anyone who still tries to grasp its political meaning will nd nothing but an obscure, intrinsically non-European cultural content in his hands. The Manifesto today is the cultural Other of the West.

capitalism.
###

COM.MANIFESTO

In regard to cultural production, the term alternative is usually linked to notions such as anti-art, avant-garde, neoavant-garde, contra-culture, to that which is different in form and content, progressive, radical, that which gets out of themainstreamandopposesestablishment, traditional high culture that is generally bourgeois. But in todays circumstances of culturalization of everything, in situation when every avant-garde or subversive act is immediately absorbed as a fashion, exclusively cultural and temporary alternative, there is no alternative culture.

still were alternative ideas about order of society, ideas of alternative politics.
Or better to say, the alternative culture is to be articulated only if there is a politics that articulates the alternative to really existent capitalism. Cultural and artistic production in current situation can still be alternative not by virtues of its new, different, unusual form or way of expression, but exclusively in a political sense. ### Within independent Croatian civil scene in the 90s, often called the alternative scene2, the notion of alternative was used differently in two broad periods. The rst one, in accordance to general regression, as characteristic of the period of Croatian Democratic Unit partys rule, is actually a continuation of 70s ideology that perceives alternative culture as the low opposition to high, lite, institutional culture. That scene, roughly identied with eco/punk/hardcore/anarcho groups and movements, really was marginal and marginalized, completely out of funding system, which it had slowly entered only after the establishment of the Open Society Institute [Soros] in Croatia in 1994. In that second period, the alternative ceased to be synonymous with the marginal and the sub-cultural and it developed specic political meanings, regularly strongly based in ethical demands for non-violence, equality, multi-ethnicity,

Alternative culture existed when there

2] Projects like Anti-war Campaign Croatia, pop-political magazine Arkzin, Zagreb Anarchistic movement, Autonomous Cultural Factory - Attack, festival of alternative street theater FAKI, and many other feminist, ecological, antiwar, anarchistic organizations, groups, initiatives and movements.

3] Autonomous Cultural FactoryAttack, Zagreb; Arkzin DTP & Pre-press studio, Zagreb; Movara club, Zagreb; net.cultural klub MAMA, Zagreb; Art Workshop Lazareti, Dubrovnik

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COM.MANIFESTO

non-hierarchical structures etc. The alternative in the culture was perceived as a system of parallel institutions that were not nationalistic or statehoodoriented, but their activities were limited to ll in the gaps left open by state and its conservative institutions. As a result, the real institutions of alternative and sub/ cultural scene, that should guarantee its continuity and development, had been formed only in the late 90s3. But in the new democratic situation that followed the last elections at the beginning of 2000 that resulted in withdrawal and downsizing of foreign funds - their future is very insecure indeed. There is a dominant tendency to commercial, market-oriented culture, state funding is still insufcient and often dependent on personal whims, conditions for cultural projects funding have not been set [legislation of taxes], nor the space open for non-commercial culture and media production.

According to the old slogan, art is not a mirror, art is a hammer! Present situation should not be merely mirrored or represented. The aim is to create new conditions, not to act within the realm of possible, but to actually change that what is possible. It is a signicant shift of the status of the intellectuals. It is no longer enough to be critical intellectual [as were

old communist dissidents or intellectual emigres during nationalist rule] now the most important are

creative intellectuals, that would in the same time keep critical mind and be activelly engaged in change of existing situation.
Everybody is an intellectual, but not all people in society perform the social function of the intellectual. [ Antonio GRAMSCI ]
COM.MANIFESTO

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wenn wellen schwingen ferne stimmen singen...

[kraftwerk: airways. radio-activity, 1975]

BROADCASTING PROJECT, dedicated to Nikola Tesla is organized in cooperation of visual arts NGO What, How and for Whom, publishing house Arkzin, net-cultural club MAMA and Technical Museum in Zagreb. It is conceived as the series of cultural events that question the

social and artistic implications of broadcast media in relation to the concept of politics and specic political developments in Croatia, issues of information and technology accessibility as well as concepts of intellectual property and copyrights. The project started as series of lectures by curators
and art and cultural theorists in June 2001 and developed as international contemporary exhibition in the Technical museum in Zagreb, scheduled for January/February 2002. After the exhibition, the project will

continue throughout the 2002 in different formats of contemporary art publishing edition, art interventions, situations and researches, publications, radio, TV and internet interventions and broadcasts, public lectures, screenings, forums etc.

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PROJECT: BROADCASTING

PROJECT: BROADCASTING [dedicated to Nikola Tesla]

PROJECT: BROADCASTING

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The project deals with issues of broadcasting in reference to Nikola Teslas biography and inventions. The basic concept is close to Brechts writing on radio as two-sided apparatus of communication and the whole project has strong educational emphasis.

participants:
Marina ABRAMOVI Robert ADRIAN X & Norbert MATH Joe BARI & Apolonija UTERI Marianne BRAMSEN Diedrich DIEDERICHSEN Braco DIMITRIJEVI Branislav DIMITRIJEVI Tomislav GOTOVAC Brian HOLMES Aleksandar Battista ILI Sanja IVEKOVI Ivana KESER Yuri LEIDERMAN Dalibor MARTINIS

Viktor MISIANO Hans ULRICH OBRIST Marko PELJHAN Bojana PEJI Tomo SAVI-GECAN SCANNER Keiko SEI STATION ROSE Mladen STILINOVI SUPERFLEX featuring:
Marijan CRTALI Andreja KULUNI Ivan MARUI KLIF, Magdalena PEDERIN & Lala RAI Kristina LEKO

David TOOP Stephen WRIGHT Igor ZABEL ZVUK BRODA

Radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the nest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. Bertolt BRECHT The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication, 1932

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PROJECT: BROADCASTING

Brechts reection on the radio

comes home today with not one but two jolts of recognition. The rst has to do with the prescient glimpse it seems to offer of the Internet, that inconceivably vast network of pipes which permits twoway communication, which receives just as well as it transmits. But the second jolt comes from the realization that radio in the 1930s, particularly if used in combination with the telephone, could easily have functioned in the two-way channels that Brecht describesif the social and political will had not been lacking. The implication

for today is that the Internet, despite its evident technical advantages, could easily cease functioning in a communicational mode, that it could rapidly give way or regress to new forms of central-broadcast content [masked by the push-button charms of interactivity]. /.../
If radio became predominantly a vehicle for state propaganda during the age of total mobilization from the First to the Second World War, if television in its turn became the indispensable device for training in the reexes of mass consumerism, what then will the emblematic medium of globalization become? What will be its dominant uses, and above all, what kind of society will they articulate?

The traditionally strong role of artists has been in discovering new ways to use media, inventing new and contradictory meanings for existing organizations and systems, and in subverting self-serving power-structures. Due to the specic political and economic context [such as state ownership of the still only one national TV] and ruling structures inertia, the access of Croatian artists to media has been extremely limited. Croatian public discourse is ignorant of potentials of electronic media as two-way communication tools that are not necessarily just distributed and based exclusively on commercial and ideological grounds. The new digital technologies have fundamentally changed methodologies and strategies of documenting, producing and displaying contemporary art, as well as social circumstances of its creation and accessibility. At the same time, educational institutions in Croatia [Art History Studies, Philosophy Studies, School of Fine Arts] almost completely failed in following current international developments. Museums stay noticeably unvisited, with virtually no outreach aimed at increasing audiences. This problem is perpetuated by the fact that in Croatia, there is no formal or informal education in curatorial practice. Additionally, one of the side-effects of the transition period in the eld of visual arts is ten years long hiatus in publishing of contemporary art theory. ### BROADCASTING PROJECT moves in opposition

Brian HOLMES Kosov@: Futures of the Transatlantic Carnival

to the oppression of monologue and centralized patriarchal infotainment. Crucial questions are communication and mediation.
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Success of mediated communication depends on the conditions under which the exchange takes place - those conditions are not primary technological but also social, economical, cultural, political...
### The project aims to continue discussion started with What, How and For Whom exhibition project about arts and economy, that is, to explore issues of economical/political interests that prevent full realization of the democratic potentials of new technologies. Every advent of new technology has been marked with great enthusiasm about new democratic potentials of new medium that will allow everybody to communicate, be informed, creative and participate in social dialogue or decision making, and yet those potentials are always repressed for the purely commercial form and content just as for the creation of new passive audience. It is a pertinent for cultural activists/artists/ theoreticians to consider how new technologies may significantly change what is meant by performance, art, live, broadcasting, wide/mass public... Yet, we believe that the question of new and still developing digital media replays narrative strain of anxiety very familiar to the historic avant-garde [innovation, potential revolution, incorporation, recuperation, commodication]. But the question is still open, not predetermined or decided in advance, but very much depends on our own action, work on practical, artistic, media and theoretical work.

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When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, as all things being particles of a real and dynamic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance, not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face.
Nikola TESLA, 1900

The project aims to negotiate the intersection between the realm of broadcast as a medium that disseminates via telecommunications, and the metaphorical surpluses spreading from visions of universal energy transmission, left over when broadcast is translated into Croatian. Nikola Tesla [1856 - 1943] is a Serb from Croatia who died as American citizen, eccentric, ascetic with visions, claimed and disowned by Croats, Serbs, Yugoslavs and Americans; who invented more than 800 patents and laid theoretical ground for development of radio, radar,

satellites, electronic microscope, microwave, uorescent tube etc. Today, the cultural image of Nikola Tesla, the Man Who Invented Future, is
permeated with stories ranging from conspiracy theory involving FBI and American government to mystical worshipping of his exploration of energy and origin of life. Exploration of his life and inventions leads into broader questioning of issues of broadcasting media, copyrights, intellectual property, science and art funding, distribution and utilization, politics of science and descriptions of artistic and scientic working process and outcomes. At the same time, Teslas explorations in the realm of telecommunications and defense systems seem ever more relevant in relation to recent reactivation of Cold War discourse by new American administration.
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... The world system makes

possible not only the instantaneous and precise wireless transmission of any kind of signals, messages or characters, to all parts of the world, but also the inter- connection of the existing telegraph, telephone, and other signal stations without any change in their present equipment.

By its means, for instance, a telephone subscriber here may call up and talk to any other subscriber on the Earth. An inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch, will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a speech delivered or music played in some other place, however distant. These examples are cited merely to give an idea of the possibilities of this great scientic advance, which annihilates distance and makes that perfect natural conductor, the Earth, available for all the innumerable purposes which human ingenuity has found for a line-wire. One far-reaching result of this is that any device capable of being operated through

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PROJECT: BROADCASTING

one or more wires [at a distance obviously restricted] can likewise be actuated, without articial conductors and with the same facility and accuracy, at distances to which there are no limits other than those imposed by the physical dimensions of the earth. Thus, not only will entirely new elds for commercial exploitation be opened up by this ideal method of transmission, but the old ones vastly extended. The World System is based on the application of the following import and inventions and discoveries: 01] The Tesla Transformer: This apparatus is in the production of electrical vibrations as revolutionary as gunpowder was in warfare. Currents many times stronger than any ever generated in the usual ways and sparks over one hundred feet long, have been produced by the inventor with an instrument of this kind. 02] The Magnifying Transmitter: This is Teslas best invention, a peculiar transformer specially adapted to excite the earth, which is in the transmission of electrical energy when the telescope is in astronomical observation. By the use of this marvellous device, he has already set up electrical movements of greater intensity than those of lightening and passed a current, sufcient to light more than two hundred incandescent lamps, around the Earth. 03] The Tesla Wireless System: This system comprises

a number of improvements and is the only means known for transmitting economically electrical energy to a distance without wires. Careful tests and measurements in connection with an experimental station of great activity, erected by the inventor in Colorado, have demonstrated that power in any desired amount can be conveyed, clear across the Globe if necessary, with a loss not exceeding a few per cent. 04] The Art of Individualisation: This invention of Tesla is to primitive Tuning, what rened language is to unarticulated expression. It makes possible the transmission of signals or messages absolutely secret and exclusive both in the active and passive aspect, that is, non-interfering as well as noninterferable. Each signal is like an individual of unmistakable identity and there is virtually no limit to the number of stations or instruments which can be simultaneously operated without the slightest mutual disturbance. 05] The Terrestrial Stationary Waves: This wonderful discovery, popularly explained, means that the Earth is responsive to electrical vibrations of denite pitch, just as a tuning fork to certain waves of sound. These particular electrical vibrations, capable of powerfully exciting the Globe, lend themselves to innumerable uses of great importance commercially and in many other
PROJECT: BROADCASTING

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respects. The rst World System power plant can be put in operation in nine months. With this power plant, it will be practicable to attain electrical activities up to ten million horse-power and it is designed to serve for as many technical achievements as are possible without due expense. Among these are the following: 06] The inter-connection of existing telegraph exchanges or ofces all over the world; 07] The establishment of a secret and noninterferable government telegraph service; 08] The inter-connection of all present telephone exchanges or ofces around the Globe; 09] The universal distribution of general news by telegraph or telephone, in conjunction with the Press; 10] The establishment of such a World System of intelligence transmission for exclusive private use;

11] The inter-connection and operation of all stock tickers of the world; 12] The establishment of a World system of musical distribution, etc.; 13] The universal registration of time by cheap clocks indicating the hour with astronomical precision and requiring no attention whatever; 14] The world transmission of typed or hand-written characters, letters, checks, etc.; 15] The establishment of a universal marine service enabling the navigators of all ships to steer perfectly without compass, to determine the exact location, hour and speak; to prevent collisions and disasters, etc.; 16] The inauguration of a system of world printing on land and sea; 17] The world reproduction of photographic pictures and all kinds of drawings or records... NIKOLA TESLA, Autobiography, 1919

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GALLERY I GML

WHITE CUBE / BLACK BOX / SHOWROOM

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Until the summer of 2003 whw worked without permanent exhibition space, and since then, in collaboration with publishing house AGM, it has been running the program of Gallery Nova. The Nova Gallery is a nonprot city owned gallery in the center of Zagreb and we try to structure its program using the strategies from whw projects, conceiving it as a platform for discussing relevant social issues through art, theory and media, as well as a model of collaboration and exchange of know-how between cultural organizations of different backgrounds. The Gallery Nova was one of the most active spots of Zagreb visual arts scene in the mid Seventies, open towards radical, avant-garde, unconventional and often marginalized art practices

that were characteristic for the young generation of artists, whose protagonists still have an important influence on development of new Croatian art scene. whw is referring to precisely this period in the Gallery Nova history, and the new program concept brings a vide array of new activities into customary exhibition and gallery practice. Except producing and presenting contemporary visual arts, its focus is also establishing links between visual culture and otherformsofculturalproduction with civil, activist, NGO scene. Besides exhibitions, the program is characterized by a series of events that are designed to turn the gallery into a vivid cultural centre, and includes concerts, performances, lm screenings, lectures and public discussions.

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WHITE CUBE / BLACK BOX / SHOWROOM

[mestna galerija, ljubljana 2002; gallery karas, zagreb 2003]. The artist of the youngest generation still work without sufficient institutional framework, with a strong tendency of polarization between the capital and the provinces, mostly very traditional educational models, non/existence of any regulated art market, lack of professional It tries to ll in the gaps in the local cultural scene acting at the intersections of popular, high and alternative culture in differentiated model that enables investigation of representational strategies, exhibiting forms and actions in public space. The Gallery Nova is a vivid and active space targeting mostly young audiences, using its nonhierarchical structure and organizationalexibilitytowards fostering different innovative cultural collaboration practices and promoting contemporary media and socially conscious and educationally involved cultural production. Besides the international exhibition program, an important aspect of work is continuous collaboration with the youngest generation of Croatian artists, which whw initiated with exhibition START

publications, critical acclaim, systemsofsupportandnancing. In this respect, the signicant part of the Gallery Nova program is series of START solo exhibitions, whose goal is to establish professional standards of work for young artists and at the same time, through a series of

accompanying events, establish a platform for critical evaluation of their work. The program establishes collaboration with young generation of curators and also trys to stress the continuity of artistic endeavors and social themes opened in the Seventies, thus continuing the traditions of local conceptual and socially conscious art practices. In the end, the question is if one can radically change the basic conditionsofseeing/appreciating the artwork corresponds to examining of the political potential of the art, and its ability not only to identify new and sensitive themes in wider social context, but also to offer new modalities of resistance and collectivity. In this respect, the Gallery Nova is perceived as a public urban space of social visibility, intensive circulation, space for showing things, passing through, spending time, interacting, exposing conicts

WHITE CUBE / BLACK BOX / SHOWROOM

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One of our recent exhibitions was Side-effects in the Salon of the Museum of contemporary art in Belgrade, with works by EGOBOO.bits, Felix Gmelin, Igor Grubi, Sharon Hayes, Vlatka Horvat, Kristian Koul, Andreja Kuluni, Aydan Murtezaoglu, Serkan Ozkaya, Kirsten Pieroth, Bulent Sangar, Marko Tadi, and VERSION. Side-effects took place in the context of In the Cities of the Balkans, the 2nd part of the Balkans trilogy, a project initiated by the Kunsthalle Fridericianum. Side-effects are a good and illustrative example of indirect links that whw creates among projects that take place outside the gallery, and the gallery ones. The exhibition presented works that deal with a broad spectrum of questions that can be read in different contexts. But at the same time, all of them dealt with certain unavoidable conicting knots of transition toward liberal capitalism, whose side-effects are class divisions, increase of unemployment and crime, cultural and spiritual impoverishment, lack of imagination, solidarity, safety, indifference, and lethargy. Side-effects offers a conceptual frame, a certain standpoint from which the works presented can be understood against a background of lost illusions in the solutions offered by the normalization process and its idea of a gradual approach of the imagined ideal of a liberal democracy and a free market, while at the same leaving the dialogue between the artistic and curatorial position open. In a certain non-committed way, the exhibition is the third in a series of recent exhibitions of the whw curatorial collective. It is not the same exhibition in three versions, but

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rather a process in which the same traumatic core is always questioned in different ways. This series of exhibitions might be seen as a kind of dialectical triad in which the thesis is the exhibition Looking Awry [apexart, new york, 2003], with works by Igor Grubi, Aydan Murtezaoglu, Adrian Paci and Maja Bajevi. Starting from ieks interpretation of Shakespeares quote from Richard III, the exhibition is based on the impossibility of grasping the truth through a direct gaze. In that sense also Marxs demand to look at the world with sober eyes asks exactly for that awry look, which might also be understood as a look from the social margins. The exhibition Repetition: pride and prejudice [gallery nova, zagreb, 2003/2004] with works by Sharon Hayes, Pierre Huyghe, Sanja Ivekovi, Aydan Murtezaoglu, Anri Sala and Andreas Siekmann, functioned as an antithesis: we cannot directly reach for the truth and that is why we keep repeating the traumatic event. That repetition is not the consequence of some objective necessity independent of our desires, but it functions as a political option, as a paying of a symbolic debt, a gesture of repeated inclusion and symbolic appropriation. Pride and prejudice from the title are not separate themes, a positive and a negative feature, but it points toward their inter-relatedness - and just like pride emerges only from the perspective of certain prejudice, prejudice is a product of the gaze of arrogant pride. If we wish to spare ourselves the painful way around through much false recognition, we will miss the whole truth. In that dialectical triad Side-effects then is a kind of synthesis, a negation of a negation.
THREE PROJECTS

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The most ambitious long-term project in which WHW is currently involved is the Zagreb Cultural Kapital of Europe 3000 which is a collaborative platform initiated by four independent cultural organizations in Croatia - Center for Drama Art [performing arts], Multimedia Institute [new media], Platforma 9,81 [architecture and media] and What, How and for Whom [visual culture]. Throughout a three year period [20042006] the project will develop a manifold of collaborative practices within the local and the international cultural scene and thus draw attention to the inadequacy of dominant cultural models to meet the challenges in a changed setting for cultural action. This new setting comes as a consequence of acceleration of globalized communication exchanges, transversality of capital and attendant ubiquity of economic globalization. Contrary to these dynamic processes the cultural eld remains largely limited to and within the connes of the representative cultural models, its inefcient institutional framework, without dynamic strategies of collaboration and almost without any [and increasingly smaller] social relevance. CK3000 has set out as its goal to react, in the local context of cultural production, to this [primarily European] situation by offering to the broader local and international cultural public an action model which will both on the level of methodology and on the level of issues deal with the dynamics of transformation of the cultural eld, which are signicantly marked by the ambiguity of the notion of capital [as in cultural capital city, socio-cultural capital and economic capital]. Initial strategic partners of the Cultural Kapital 3000 are Project

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CULTURAL KAPITAL 3000

Relations from Berlin a project initiated by the German Federal Cultural Foundation with an agenda to promote the cultural collaboration in Eastern Europe, and Erste Bank from Vienna which supports creation of various cultural platforms in the countries of Central Europe where it does business. By choosing contemporary agendas such as: the relation between public and private, status of public spaces, capital in physical space, intellectual property and digital technologies, copyright and alternative licensing systems, hybrid information in physical space, artist groups and collective labor, collective intelligences, managing of labor and immaterial labor, the Cultural Kapital 3000 project will form a complementary and coherent set of cultural issues which are of great social relevance and thus promote the importance of cultural action as a signicant element in the development of the public and social capital in a neoliberal transitional context. Cultural Kapital 3000 will

promote practices and actors articulating cultural action in terms of social agency and social agency in terms of critical culture. Over the next two years, Cultural Kapital 3000 will produce a number of local and international interdisciplinary collaborations on projects presenting and engaging new group dynamics, new collective strategies and new forms of labor in cultural production; counteracting and hybridizing the control of productivity through intellectual property; advocating the protection of public domain in face of privatization; and producing policy proposals for strengthening and development of independent cultural sector and securing its presence in the cultural capital. It will create collaboration while investigating and inducing its conditions of possibility, because cultural capital no longer means infrastructures, but rather collaborations, for collaboration is its infrastructure. whw | 2004
CULTURAL KAPITAL 3000

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Books :

WHW published several books: Against Indifference - Croatian translation of selected essays by Renata Salecl; Hieroglyphs of the Future, bilingual edition of selected essays by Brian Holmes, Zagreb, 16/06/01 book of interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist with ve Croatian artists, reader/catalogue for the What, How and for Whom exhibition [with essays by Slavoj iek, Richard Barbrook, Boris Buden, Fredric Jameson, Renata Salecl, Charles Esche...] and regularly publishes Gallery Nova newspapers.

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PRINTED MATTER

COLLECTIVE CREATIVITY
An exhibition on collective practices Dedicated to anonymous worker

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One does not escape a bourgeois problematic of the subject simply by collectivizing that subject...
[Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, p. 131]

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WORKING MATERIAL

COLLECTIVE CREATIVITY
An exhibition on collective practices & group enjoyment

The exhibition is dedicated to anonymous worker

Kunsthalle Fridericianum | Kassel | Germany May 1 July 15, 2005 The exhibition COLLECTIVE CREATIVITY is a cooperation between the Kunsthalle Fridericianum and Siemens Arts Program Artistic directors: Ren BLOCK and Angelika NOLLERT Curated by What, How & for Whom / WHW | Zagreb | Croatia

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Individuality has been exaggerated in the 20th century. Everybody wants to be different, but individuality is just wishful thinking. It is a sales argument, designed to stimulate commerce... we want something more corporate. We cultivate annonimity. [Kraftwerk]

kraftwerk, the electric quartet, cca 1977 gilbert and george: portrait by christopher felver, fournier street, 1989. gorgona: adoration, 1966 laibach kunst: ausstellung laibach kunst, pm, 1983

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RESEARCH IN PROGRESS

COLLECTIVE CREATIVITY
An exhibition on collective practices & group enjoyment
The phenomenon of the artists group is both paradoxical and dynamic. On the one hand it is a negation of the romantic idea of the individual genius, but on the other hand, the art group is not simply the sum of its individual parts, but draws its character from the creative possibilities of different interactions and synergies. Numerous artists groups and collectives working in the eld of visual arts during the second half of the 20th century questioned the very essence of artistic production, negating it or shifting it closer to other elds, such as architecture, design, theatre, science or daily life. The exhibition deals with different forms of collective artistic creativity whose protagonists share common programs, ways of life, methodologies or political standpoints. Although the work of collectives is in many ways determined by certain historical, existential, intellectual or political contexts, the exhibition is interested in specic kinds of social tensions that serve as a common axis around which various group activities are being organized. While conscious of collective artistic practices of previous centuries and historical avant-gardes, the exhibition concentrates on developments after the neo/post avant-garde movements in the 60s until today. Exploring procedures, standpoints, effects, strategies, and social possibilities of collective activity, the exhibition attempts to dene different forms of collectivity inevitably generated by group work. In the focus are therefore different emancipatory aspects of collective work [no matter if it is about formal groups, movements,
WORKING PAPERS

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oho: mount triglav, happening in zvezda park, ljubljana, december 30, 1968 irwin: like to like, 2004. kart: horkeskart [choir], 2000-

Collaborative creativity is not only a form of resisting the capitalist call for specialization but also a form of hidden struggle with the ilusion of the autonomous ego...
[Viktor Mazin, Dreaming museums, Manifesta Journal No 3, Spring/ Summer 2004, p. 19]
crveni peristil: red peristil, urban intervention, split, 1968 anonymous author: black peristil, urban intervention, split, 1998

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RESEARCH DOCUMENT

communities, scenes, communes, artists couples or individuals assuming group identity]. Which strategies are taken by collectives in public space, which alternative forms of sociability are generated, in which ways do they occupy and change the system and the conditions of production and representation, how do they affect the social order? The exhibition does not see group activity solely in terms of the scope and efciency of tools used in attempts to change sociopolitical situation; it also traces paradoxes of self-sufcient enjoyment in group work, which inevitably overcomes and betrays its own instrumentality and use value. GENERATING CONDITIONS FOR COLLECTIVE CREATIVITY What, How & for Whom, the three basic questions of every economic analysis, constantly dene the work of our curatorial collective. Exploration of the phenomena of collective creativity is positioned within the experience of our own collective curatorial practice which is inevitably exposed to questioning specic inner dynamics of the collective, its strategies and reach, as well as to specic circumstances of post-communist, Eastern European, transitional realities. In that regard the exhibition treats collective creativity from two perspectives, in the sense that methods and models of collective work are equal to the theme of the exhibition the exhibition itself is trying to generate the conditions for collective creativity. Although the context of the exhibition is dened by complex intersections of contemporary and historical perspectives, as well as by cultural and geo-political parallels and divergences of different localities, the exhibition does not attempt at homogenous and nished history of collective artistic creativity. Rather, it offers a certain collectively subjective vision very much based in the cultural terrain which renders the reading of modernity as the unique and homogenous cultural capital of the West very problematic.
WORKING PROPOSAL

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maj 75, group of six authors, magazine, 1978 general idea: le magazine [no 25, 1986]

...transnational situation of the world system in which genuinely trans-national classes, such as new international proletariat and a new density of global management, have not yet anywhere clearly emerged. These constellated and alegorical subjectpositions are however, as likely to be collective as they are individual-schizophrenic...
[Fredric Jameson: The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Indiana University Press/BFI, Bloomington-London, 1992, p. 5]

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RESEARCH IN PROGRESS

The question what is an attempt to trace specic moments of collective artistic creativity and the conditions in which it has been generated, the question how insists on the power of the traditional white cube exhibition to articulate critical discourse, and in relation to that the question for whom attempts to instigate creative interactions with the social environment, local communities, public, and media, by triggering a number of artistic projects tailored for local situation of the museum and city of Kassel and its cultural and artistic institutions. COLLECTIV-EAST DREAM In many Eastern European countries there is a rich tradition of artists groups and collectives whose work posed a strong critic of social institutions and dominant cultural policy. Exploration of tradition of collective artistic work seems to be especially interesting from the perspective of New Europe, as well as in the context of other geographical points with similar troubles with modernism and tradition of artists self-organizing such as Middle East or South America. The focus on Eastern Europe is not meant as support of the thesis of cultural assimilation nor of essential differences simplied to consequences of communist regimes, but as a more productive attempt at the reformulation of cultural identities. Mapping of various trans-generational and international links and connections is based on the perspective of peripheral cultural zone, effects of international emancipatory movements, popular culture and lifestyles. Although being aware of the limitations of our specic Zagreb-based and generation-based perspective, the intention is to articulate it in order to check the initial presumption that collective art production in Eastern Europe generally aims at a different art system than in the West. We are
WORKING PAPERS

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3ns3: arco 10, 1981 tucuman arde, 1968

oda projesi: mne model, annex 2003.

the category of the individual character as such is also outmoded, as utmoded as that of the nation state [the comparison, meanwhile, very much including the fact that both these things still exist].
[Fredric Jameson: The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Indiana University Press/BFI, Bloomington-London, 1992, p. 176]

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RESEARCH DOCUMENT

especially interested in relating it to situations of South America, where there are a number of groups, and like in Eastern Europe, also a strong tradition of art collectives since early modernism. The reasons for this are, rst of all, to investigate whether in certain authoritarian and restrictive political regimes art serves as a political realm, and whether this is also reflected in collective work. The interest in a specic politicality of collective creativity would also delineate the inclusion of collective art practice from the West, which is clearly a reference for global contemporary art. PRINTED MATTER For the exhibition opening newspapers will be published, gathering all the practical information and serving as easily distributed project info. That format is also following tradition of many avant-garde groups that used newspapers for propaganda and dissemination of ideas. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue edited by Ren Block, Angelika Nollert, and WHW. During the research process for the exhibition, material will be gathered for a book-catalogue, imagined as a more comprehensive overview and also a place to discuss specic topics or document works omitted in the show itself. The emphasis in the bookcatalogue will be on re-publishing as much as possible of original printed material, such as group manifestos and texts. The book will also include new texts by several artists/theoreticians.

What, how, for whom [WHW], 2004

WORKING PROPOSAL

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APPROACHING DEADLINE:

page from chinese propaganda posters, 2005 taschen calendar