THE
NEW CALL OF UTOPIA
Žarko Paić
With the theme
simply entitled UTOPIA, Art-e-fact
wishes to provoke an interaction between theoreticians and visual
artists by posing a set of questions related to contemporary
society/art. A self-confident artist in the age of conceptual-performative
"upheavals" of the boundaries of social perversions
of power (globalization, symbolic and real violence of capital
on living labour as a subjugated substance-subject of history,
bio-power of technology, terrorism and war as "transformational
logic" of the new cartographies of the world) that no longer
has a WALL of monolith ideology in front of them.
Can the utopian "being" and "thinking"
from a deficiency of utopian perspectives of all our transitional,
post-industrial, postmodern societies of general apathy not
end up in the uncritical blindness of one ideology for the
creation of "real" hope for the success of one's
own utopia? How much longer can art as the new image of sub-version
of social and cultural boundaries be outside the clear form
of ideological discourse? Who are the relevant contemporary
thinkers of utopia at all? Why does every form of opposition
to the governing neoliberal system of imperial globalization
have no real utopian perspective? How to oppose the international
movement of "cosmopolitan internationalism of capital"
more than the abstract non-power of the resurrection of the
icons of the student revolution of '68 (NGO, civil society,
zones of cosmopolitan culture of non-violence and peace)?
The new call of utopia no longer has a reason for escaping
to a deserted island. There is no reason for the late discovery
of any kind of eastern exoticism. In the global world of the
one and same ideology - neoliberal fundamentalism of capital,
power, new religions of pleasure - which now assumes the contours
of the eternal, universal and "natural" civilization
-
the last escape has already been carried out. This is the
escapism of spirit of unbearably shallow hybridity of culture
and the so-called individual salvation in New Age ideology
of the Age of Aquarius. Utopia today? Is that not real ground
for live criticism, the irreducibility of anything previously
utopian issued in the name of the future as the history of
salvation (communism, anarchism, libertinism and last but
not least - utopian socialism) which in the 20th century unavoidably
transformed itself into its opposite?
How to envision utopia, and not run away from society's real
repression/depression into a ghetto or exile for fantastic
outsiders?
Žarko Paić,
Guest Editor
Theorist and Publicist based in Ivanić Grad and Zagreb, Croatia
The editorial board of art-e-fact
is not closed in terms of either
generations or disciplines, nor does it stem from sectarian
or commercial interests. It has been conceived as a dynamic
body, which is continuously re-formed and changed, involving
various authorial personalities and experiences, while the
central theme is given shape by an invited guest editor.
editorial board
(alphabetic order): Nada Beroš (editor-in-chief), Markita
Franulić, Marina Gržinić, Susan Jakopec (English language
editor), Trudy Lane, Silva Kalčić, Dalibor Martinis (AIM,
for the publisher), Tihomir Milovac, Žarko Paić (guest editor),
Ružica Šimunović, Leila Topić (executive editor)
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