compactspace

Janez Janša, Janez Janša & Janez Janša

NAME Readymade

lecture performance

with

Wu Ingrid Tsang & Juliana Snapper

“Burrow awhile and build”

a detrivore’s motet by Juliana Snapper

Can you imagine a few years ago 3 established American artists joining the Republican Party and then legally changing their names to George W. Bush? And since then bringing the name of the US President to museums, and festivals, exhibiting next to Robert Gober or Barbara Kruger, showing work next to Meg Stuart and Nature Theater of Oklahoma, presenting video alongside Bruce Nauman?
compactspace gallery invites you to NAME Readymade, the presentation of the “Name changing” gesture perpetrated by three Slovenian artists who, in 2007 officially changed their names to the Slovenia’s economic-liberal, conservative prime minister at the time, Janez Janša.
All three of the Janez Janšas’ private and public affairs, their performances, writiings and exhibitions – in a word, their entire lives – have been conducted under this name ever since. As an extension of their current exhibition at Location One in New York, Janez Janša will take you through a series of artistic, political, administrative and mediatic actions performed by himself together with Janez Jansa and Janez Jansa. Works exhibited in this show (valid ID cards, passports, credit and bank cards, driving licences, birth and marriage certificates, and so on) are generated by the reality itself

“When the three artists changed their names to Janez Jansa, they in fact adopted a critical stand to the state… in which until recently all posts seemed occupied as it were by a single person - Janez Jansa. […] Through the multiplication of Janez Jansa’s name, the function of the prime minister has assumed, within this specific artistic action, a similar position as the Campbell soup cans in Andy Warhol’s works.” (Zdenka Badovinac, Name Readymade, October 2008)

“Now what? …Here we reach a contradiction – the very contradiction of the world of art. A readymade as a work of art is something inauthentic; it is the very proof of inauthenticity: with a readymade, the “aura” disappears. In your case, however, the precondition for this readymade is its authenticity in everyday life – its credibility and authenticity. If somebody bought this work of art, they would be buying it as an authentic piece, together with its functional ‘readymade’ value.” (Lev Kreft, Name as Readymade, An interview with Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša, NAME Readymade, October 2008)

Janez Jansa, Janez Jansa and Janez Jansa cut right in the midst of their own realities and the reality of the space and time, in which they work. For this purpose they used procedures typical for art - transformation, translation, representation and mimicry. They turned around the classical relational scheme between art and life as it was developed in the 20th century. Art in the previous century was redefined by way of reality entering into artistic contexts without mediation (so that Badiou can define the 20th century as the passion for the real), while Jansa, Jansa and Jansa want to achieve the opposite so that their methods cut deeply into their material lives and the lives of those around them.
Produced by Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art
Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.

MORE ABOUT THE PROJECT:

NAME Readymade - THE EXHIBITION
Curator: Zdenka Badovinac
http://www.aksioma.org/name
Name as Readymade
An interview with Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša by Lev Kreft
www.aksioma.org/interview_kreft.html
NAME Readymade - THE BOOK
Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, Oct. 2008
www.aksioma.org/name_book

BIOGRAPHY OF THE LECTURER

Janez Janša (b. 1970, Bergamo, Italy) is a conceptual artist, performer, and producer who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Milan, Italy. His work has strong social connotations and is characterized by an intermedia approach. He is co-founder and director of Aksioma, Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana. His first public artistic project was the urban installation I Need Money to Be an Artist, which was presented first in Ljubljana, Slovenia (1996) and then in Venice, Italy (1997). In 2001, he established (with I. Štromajer) Problemarket.com – the Problem Stock Exchange, a virtual platform on which shares of companies dealing with problems are floated. The following year, Janša produced machinaZOIS, an electro-mechanical patron that financially supports contemporary artists and artistic productions. He then started development of DemoKino – Virtual Biopolitical Agora, a virtual parliament that, through topical filmic parables, provides the voters with the opportunity to decide on issues that are becoming the essence of modern politics – the questions of life. In 2005, Janša established the platform RE:akt!, which examines the media’s role in manipulating perceptions and creating (post)modern historical myths and contemporary mythology. A part of this platform is the project Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav by Janez Janša, Janez Janša, and Janez
Janša. Parallel to these socio-political projects, Janša investigated the field of virtual reality and neurofeedback technologies, and from 2000 to 2002, he developed and performed (with Darij Kreuh) Brainscore – Incorporeal Communication, a performance for two operators acting in a virtual reality environment through their avatars. Between 2004 and 2007, he lead the project Brainloop, an interactive performance platform that allows the subject to navigate a virtual space merely by imagining specific motor commands. Janez Janša is also co-editor (with Ivana Ivkovic) of the textual and pictorial reader DemoKino – Virtual Biopolitical Agora, published by Maska and Aksioma in 2005.

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Wu Ingrid Tsang & Juliana Snapper
“Burrow awhile and build”
detrivore motet for 1 or more voices by Juliana Snapper

Imagine for a moment that a symphonic work is a block of wood; a thing of many layers woven together into a beefy whole. Now imagine holding one in your hands and finding snakey tunnels that push through one end of the wood to the other, occasionally crossing one another. They are the pathways of termites — which represent our voices in this piece. Now that you see them, these lines are all you see (are all you will hear). They undermine the very matter of the whole, consigning the wood itself to the background, while exposing hidden aspects of its tone and texture.

“Burrow awhile and build” is a parasitic musical operation that feeds on densely layered instrumental compositions, titan symphonic masterworks. Each new vocal melody is pieced together by advancing note-by-note through the bulky, part-stacked orchestral scores while disregarding the integrity of any single part from one musical moment to the next (as in Violin I or piano or tuba III). The temporal flow, pitch and rhythm are all sung as marked but the melodic pathway each voice draws is erratic because it is bitten from many different instrumental lines as it progresses. Something of the nature of the composition stays animated, while the rest of it frowns in silence.