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The
Archeology of Privacy
By
Sava Stepanov
Since the beginning of the seventies, Andrej Tisma has been a part of
the Vojvodinian art scene in a distinct, alternative and nonexclusive
way. This artist has expressed his engaged relationship towards everyday
life by means that are, themselves, a product of the world and time
which he lives and creates in. Photographs are the main artifacts in
his mail-art works, his Xeroxes and electro graphics, his video and
computer web-art achievements. In keeping with the desired type of statement,
Tisma utilizes photographs as documentary proof of a completed piece
of work (actions, performances, records), as a creative gesture by which
he expresses his own privacy and artistic personality (a series of Polaroids
from the eighties), or he actualizes meaningful, engaging, at all times
sarcastic and metaphorically rich conclusions about the current moment
of humans of our time, by using found or scanned photographs.
In his works with photographs Andrej Tisma does not deal with issues
of media authenticity. His approach towards the themes and functions
of a photograph is modernistic due to the fact that everything is based
on the elementary peculiarities of a photograph - it is the eternal
segment of actuality and the personification of reality. Very often,
Tisma intensifies this attitude to the ultimate consequences, especially
in those works where a photograph is the document of the author's own
privacy and the reflection of an honest and sincere confession.
In his series of photographs taken during the eighties (cycles and art-shows
titled "Death Around the Eyes", 1985; "Danger", 1986-87;
"Temptations", 1987-92), Tisma has insisted on rigid confrontations
between Eros and Tanathos, on clashes between vitalist and catastrophic
symptoms in order to accurately diagnose an individual's state of mind
in social surroundings… During the art period of the nineties he
holds on to similar principles, however, he no longer portrays the erotic
and pornography solely as a personal act of confession, but as a sociological
occurrence whose treatment in the encompassing mass-media system is equated
with the inevitability of the daily news which - simultaneously - have
the dignity of representative manifestations of the modern world's impulses
but also the trivial meaning of expendable information goods… During
the nineties of the now already previous century, Tisma's art is markedly
critical towards the new world order, the USA and all the spiritual products
of that social system, towards perverted events held in the completely
advanced contemporary civilization (Natural Resorts, Collateral Art, American
Art School, American Millennial Chocolates…). Not without reason,
a while back, Daniel Stringer concluded in "Digital Arts" magazine
(2001) that "anyone interested in understanding the political, artistic
and ethical situation in the world today could start by looking at the
Web.Art of Serbian artist Andrej Tisma", the art that, by utilizing
photographs (as well as informational and communicational experiences
of mail art and internet art) reaches witty, ironic, engaging and critically
defined artistic conclusions about the very essence of the sensibility
of the turning-point age for centuries and millennia.
In his series of prints from the suite "In my Room", Andrej
Tisma sublimates his past authorial experiences and establishes a balance
between his own intimate mood and the aggressive public eye. In his
series of large photographs taken "in my room" privacy is
merely an environment reached by the impulses of everyday life. At the
beginning of this century, Tisma is a mature artist, a creative personality,
who, in his own specific way, "chooses" and accepts the echoes
of worldly events. In the plastic whole of his large photographs these
"echoes" are defined by an inserted press shot as specific
"evidence" of the existence of all those things which slip
into our life, our soul, and our consciousness of the ruthlessness of
everyday life and of miraculous human fate… The critical view of
the artist with a new perspective on things is defined with precision
in these photograph-computer creations. The whole of artist Andrej Tisma's
engagement in "exploring his own surroundings, the archeology of
privacy and the simultaneous registration of the world's impulses"
seems like the artist's attempt, possibly even a desperate one, to assume
the correct attitude towards the feeling of an epochal crisis, an attempt
to find a measure for all things, to achieve spiritual harmony and balance,
to reach his own being, himself.
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