IRREFUTABLE RIGHTS NOT TO BE UNDERSTOOD
Alise Tīfentāle
Art in any form is not merely an innocent exercise in communication or materialization of a conceptual idea, but in its wider sense a manifestation of power: confrontation with a work of art is passive submission to its influence, either it would be a collection of dark brown paintings by the old masters in a museum or a contemporary art project with projections in the city and a commentary based on parapsychology. Yoseph Brodsky in his "Watermark" writes: "Perhaps nothing proves this better than modern art, whose poverty alone makes it prophetic. A poor man always speaks for the present, and perhaps the sole function of collections like Peggy Guggenheim's and the similar accretions of this century's stuff habitually mounted here is to show what a cheap, self-assertive, ungenerous, one-dimensional lot we have become, to instill humility in us." Humility brought from outside provokes a protest, rebellion, mutiny, either as a conscious of neglect or a protesting activity. City environment is one of the major public forms of manifestation of contemporary art, beginning with a gallery and finishing with clubs, streets and personal dwelling spaces, and it is exactly where one can feel a lack of communication between the work of art and the viewer because of the different wavelength of the transmitter/receiver, a certain influence is also exerted by density of information, the densely populated area of entertainment and several other aspects characteristic of contemporary city life.
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