Institute for Contemporary Art, Zagreb
"All data, if require more space, can be printed as additional text" is an exhibition of documentation that the author sends each year to the annual contest for the most prestigious award of contemporary art in Croatia. The contest and award is being organized by the Museum of Contemporary Arts and sector of the corporate communications of the largest national telecom company T-HT. It is proposed by the artist to carry out a group performance with the sacked workers of the T-HT company at the grand gala opening of the award. Every year, the proposal is rejected by the jury.
Janka Vukmir, curator and director of the Institute for Contemporary Art, Croatia:
Exhibition of Antonio Grgić "all data, if you require more space, can be printed as additional text" is an exhibition about so far unexposed and unrealized work, with which the author has several times applied to the annual T-HT @ MSU competition, and that probably due to its content never has been accepted for presentation.
It is a proposal which in the case of being realized includes participation of forcefully fired workers of T-HT (Croatian Telecom, owned by Deutsche Telekom) a company that is a partner of the Museum of Contemporary Art and financier of the abovementioned competition and the associated (acquisitions) awards.
“In cooperation with the Croatian Telecommunications Trade Union therwouldl be elected 50 forcibly retired former workers of T-HT. They would greet visitors at the entrance ceremony of the T-HT award in front of the Museum. They would talk to every single visitor about theirs work in a company which is now called T-Croatian telecom, on theirs retirement and life after retirement. The aim is to establish further dialogue with interested visitors in relation to different social roles in different social systems.”, writes Grgić in the application form of the rejected project.
Antonio's thinking isn't unexpected nor lonely. On the Croatian contemporary art scene we know of a row of projects dealing with position of workers of many buncrupt firms, such as “Nama” of AndrejaKulunčić or a series of more recent works such as those of Marko Marković related to the position of workers of Split firms „Dalmacijavino“, „Uzor“ or „Jadrankamen“, to name only those which have explicitly and actively involved workers of the abovementioned firms and factories.
T-HT is building its image of supporter of culture for a long time, more or less successfully. Recognisability of their cultural strategy is simple and comes down to connection solely with projects of major public organizations or institutions, in order to be profitable (accounted as operating expenses) in advertising and putting up posters.The share of funds that at the end really belong to this culture remains unknown to the public, and MSU even claimed at one time that the amounts of those operations are secret. The public gets to know only what are the amounts of the awards (acquisitions) to the artists, and those have significantly decrease during the course of time, for cca 30%, and who sometimes do not even cover the production costs of the works acquired. Thus, some artists have declined the invitation of the MSU to take part in the award competition even withoutcompeting.
At the same time, dissatisfaction of some artists with the competition is also not unknown. Željko Badurina was commenting on corruption in the society and have indirectly commented corruption in culture in the work with which he has twice applied the work of "Whiskey and Bajadere" (Bajadera is locally the most famous nougat) , which was accepted to the competition only when has apparently excluded culture from the context of the work. This year, since to the artists who are not residing in Zagreb, if selected to the show MSU does not offer transportation or travel expenses, and they themselves are not able to pay these costs, the artist Tomislav Brajnović, after a public correspondence with MSUhas declined his right to apply to the competition, in solidarity with colleagues.
The work of Antonio Grgić focuses on the role of T-HT as a corporation that continuously funds always one single exhibition of contemporary art, not a contemporary art itself, and the Museum as the organization that, thanks to T-HT's assets, may limit the amount of criticism that reaches out to the public. It is believed that a multimember jury of this award has all the freedom of choice when selecting artists, within limited conditions.
"... While in advanced capitalism, criticism grows out of the marginal position and is integrated with time in the mainstream apparently still being separated from the system, here, in transition who plays capitalism although it is not, is a different case. Here the corporate organizational and media promote an acceptable form of art criticism does not even trying to maintain the illusion of distance. So corporations create an image of art that criticizes consumerism and corporations to sell it as a media product and acceptable criticism of themselves, packed in a high aesthetic form. Because only corporations have, as EPH or T-HT, the power to provide sufficient attention economy that will emerge a product that will wear the halo exquisite art and whose exposure in the gallery paid sum of corporate scale. This is the danger of contemporary art which also talks about Baudrillard: that is no different from the technical, advertising, media, numerical activities. No more transcendent, becomes a mirror game with the modern world as it was happening. "Antonio Grgić
In this exhibition, Grgić exhibits only the application forms from the last two years of the competition for the T-HT @ MSU award. The title of the exhibition is the text from the footnote on the application form. He choses the space of the Institute for Contemporary Art, considering it topographic and content mirror opposite to that of the MSU. The exhibition is financed by own funds.
