Alexi Kukuljevic
Cuckoo
EPS, metal, glass, bird seed, spray foam, construction glue, spray paint, 61 x 46 cm, 2017
The human being is, after all, just an animal. “After all,” “just” – this linguistic filler, which is the stuff of art, signifies precisely nothing. But in signifying nothing it betrays an uneasiness with this proposition. Just an animal, nothing but an animal, an animal indeed, an animal perhaps. After all, it is an animal that speaks and speaks such non-sense: words like “after all” and “just,” making it an animal that needs to stress its animality just as a bird preens its feathers. This stress leaves the animal with stress marks, stretching it out of shape, making it an animal uncomfortable in its own form, in its own animal body. Then the artist stumbles along, tripping over the form of its appearance just as the reading eye might fumble over all of these “justs” and “after alls”, and just makes matters worse. Isn’t the artist after all just a human being? If a human being is an animal, and the artist is a human being, then the artist is just an animal. A logical syllogism that leaves open the issue of just what kind of animal the human might be. An animal that needs non-sense no doubt, making the artist a rather queer bird. Only a birdbrain, a dodo, a dada, a twit, a Kukuljevic, a type of cuckoo, no doubt, would say such a thing, would suggest that such linguistic drivel adds something by adding nothing. A creature of the void, the artist assumes its perch, building its nest of signifiers that draw the eye perilously into the hole where it lays its eggs.
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Alexi Kukuljevic is an artist and a philosopher based in Vienna. He is the author of Liquidation World: On the Art of Living Absently, published by MIT Press. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Palais de Tokyo, Paris and the ICA, Philadelphia. He is a teaching assistant in the Department for Art Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. His most recent solo exhibition was entitled BIRDWAR, at Åplus in Berlin.
