ART Habens Art Review ART Habens Art Review - Special Issue #97 | Page 63

Ante Kustre asking why. When I read the foto-news from the world, I learned the answer: some American artist exhibited mirrors of various sizes in some Los Angeles gallery ( or it was San Francisco? ) and achieved a great success. The last sentence I read:”All mirrors were sold out for enormous prices” almost killed me. I came back to the very curator and showed him this news. He explained stammering, “I know if I had approved your idea for exhibition, I would have been called cunt, and you’d be labelled crazy”. This guy was never crazy courageous for such move, and I was and I am still – as an artist – bravely crazy ( which I proved right many times in years to come later, trying to communicate my world ideas to creation provincial audience ). ART Habens somebody’s excellence. But we were more East than West in that time. At the end of the day, I can say that my artistic production and style was the mostly influenced by inner and outer Split experience. I became fully aware of that since 2003 when I moved to my atelier, located in the heart of Split, in Diocletian palace, in other words since I literally live in the split of Split. I actually and factually became a central split-artist then. Therefore, Split as such is actually my central artistic idea, following by few others: eroticisme, lonelyness, identity, roots, shadow... Split is the city of extremely intense, even painful contrasts of too intensive light and strong darkness, as in physical as well as metaphysical dimensions. The life of artist in (irregular) square of Diocletian palace (that is actually the stone womb of Split ) is constant drama. So the artist always needs “to solve the mystery of squaring the circle”. This is eventually the mission impossible, but with assistance of some supernatural power, it's possible. I experienced Montpellier like “French Split”, but of course on higher level. My french experience helped me to step out from the film critique to the role of film director, in similar manner to French New wave authors, who were initially film critics in Cahiers du Cinema. After my return in Split, I co-directed my first short feature film, based on my own screenplay, “Da capo al fine”, 16 minutes long. This film fully had a documentary approach, and spectators realized in the ending credits that it was actually fictional movie construction. If I remember correctly according to my knowledge and memory being a film lover, that quasi documentarist approach was the first in Ex-Yugoslavia, and even wider. In my case, to be the first one in something meant to be the last in my own professional niche. There is a custom in the Balkans to punish all those who lead or protrude. The colleague of mine, the film critic, who worked in the same newspaper as I did, intentionally cut down my debut in his entire article, except in the first sentence (unintentionally) where he said: “In the crowded cinema Golden Gate the film projection was held….”. Objectively observing it was the big compliment to my artistic charisma: to fill up fully the Split cult cinem” to the last seat, with my de-facto experimental film: in the eyes of every western headhunter it would be the evidence of I’ve been living my personal inner split, which was necessarily manifested under the pressure of outer one, in form of the conflict of my name and surname, of spiritual and biological, upper and lower, heavens and earth: either Ante or Kustre!! That’s why I put two exclamation marks. Alternate victories of one and the other were Pyrrhic victories: neither of these two was strong enough to defeat fully the other one. That exhausting state of inne