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