Opening: Thursday, 4 September at 8 p.m., Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM)
Dominik Štibernik’s work revolves around the ontological instability at the heart of the experience we call art. In a gallery space – whose protocols he is thoroughly familiar with – the artist broaches the fundamental lack of an art object in its expected place or manifestation. What we encounter instead in Šibernik’s exhibitions is delegation, the expectation being pushed to the side, into the sphere of the ephemeral, marginal, or excess.
In this respect, Selfie brings about a situation that is both expected and unexpected. While the artist’s previous projects have addressed the barely perceptible materiality of an artwork, its paradoxical value and fragile dependence on the coordinate system of gallery conditions, Selfie underscores the opposite: the indisputable materiality (of the work), an emphatic presence (of the artist), and evident intentionality (of contact). The tightrope running between the expected and unexpected on which Štibernik otherwise walks here seems to be upgraded with a third element of the too-expected, which is what the economy of desire slips into in Selfie. With this turn, however, the artist in a way manages to trick both himself and his ephemeral idiom on the one hand, and the institution which typically informs its language in a restrained conceptual gesture on the other.
Selfie is anything but restrained. It is quite direct. In its excessive artistic idiom, in the excess of situation and address, it speaks of art, the artist, and the museum. It is surprising in its immediacy, in the directness of the hyperrealist (self-)portrait that awaits in the anteroom of the museum, already half-packed and optimized for handling, the next stage in its consecration. Highly inappropriate in the purity of MSUM’s conceptual engagement and in exactly the right spot – because what is more museal than an artist’s self-portrait? – Selfie seems like a meta-reflection on Štibernik’s favorite theme – the artwork. The artist = the work? The work > the artist? The artist ≤ the work? The work = the artist’s investment in eternity? Vita brevis, ars longa?
The difficulty of trying to arrive at a clearer formula to sum up the dynamic of this work half-way between being a piece of museum furniture and a tomb effigy speaks of the trouble a contemporary artwork has in trying to find its foothold (and fate) in the labyrinth of contemporary art and its system. It reflects not (only) its institutional consecration, but the struggle for legibility in infinite intertextuality, the endless combinations of possible moves and the double-edged sword of recognizability, of market success versus tediousness. The memento mori suggested by Štibernik in his irreverent gesture is thus read as an exhausted artist’s welcome repose.
Such a figure of the artist leads to what has been staring us in the face all along: the fact that the work is very explicitly Štibernik’s double. Significantly, Mladen Dolar opens his reflection on Being and its double with the figure of mimesis. Although “beingness cannot be comprehended otherwise than through its duplication,” already Plato is concerned about the double turning against the original and undermining it. The ontological instability of the work here thus shows in the instability of the relation between the original and the double. The problem of this (non)relation between Being and its double is what is enacted by Selfie, which in its title wittily addresses the other self and the short-circuit between the two, which is a source of such pleasure for art lovers.
