ART Habens Art Review ART Habens Art Review - Special Issue #97 | Page 71

Ante Kustre artists are obliged to consciously dismantle their society: to bring all this suppressed and traumatic into the light . Playing to be an alive mirror I risk the aggressive social reaction. Sometimes it causes boycott of the social institutions and media but also more heavy reactions: refusal of the financial support to my works. One graphite was on the wall of one Split's monastery: „Art has no alternative“. Like D.J.Toumin says: „ If you are looking for hell, ask an artist where it is. If there is no artist, you are already in hell.„ In contemporary society art has the lead minor role: to say all that leading actors (politics, ideology, religion, science, business) can't, won't or doesn't know. „Art is always something else" , says Croatian artist Josip Kozaric. Its spiritual mobility makes her look like God's spark. Sometimes it is invisible, although before our eyes; and sometimes it is absent where said to be in. „Time is more than money“, as I stated on one T-shirt from „AK-55“ colection (which is a label composed of my initials and my birth year), and time will show what art is and what we only thought it were. It knows to be the guardian of truth and beauty, critical thinking and expression, anticipation and warning, but also a whore ( saint one?). Siren's call for money and business is very seductive, and many artists do not resist it and start dancing on the dictatorship of the market. Gloria Moure, a renowned art historian from Barcelona ​ (who recently visited Split, where she was to exhibit Jannis Kounelis), says: "I think the art market is completely crazy and harms art, but worse, and culture as a whole. Culture and art are values ​ in their own right and they should not be reduced to cash equivalents. " Split had impressed her, as she said, "with specific beauty, specific story and specific history". The fourth specificity derives from these three; this is the specific art of Split artists, and I see it as the fourth dimension of this 4D city (small but very thick, condensed). Because of treatment from the capital Zagreb ( in which all political, financial and cultural power is centralized ) and its geographical eccentricity, Split never represented Croatia on some important international exhibition, except for one; at the Venice Biennale in 2005 ( when Mr. Zlatan 21 4 06 ART Habens Dumanic was but one of six of the team of Croatian artists ). He lived near me in the Ghetto and died last year. It’ s Split's artists experience: the authorities reveal and acknowledge us and society accepts us after our death. In the meantime they help us to die as soon as possible. Just as this is written, the war for the living space of the art association " Adria Art Annale ", which the owner of a hotel recently constructed, who took away a whole room (of course, unlawfully, as usual here), and the entrance to it was blocked by a concrete wall of 50 cm. Members of the association tried to return their room by demolishing that wall (in the form of collective performance), notifying all local media and video documentation development regularly on Youtube, inluding the recent conflict with the hotel owner. In the force of their legal arguments he was backed by the arguments of force, ie two steel rods in his hands. So some blood is spilled. In a society of spectacles and global overdose of informations and sensations art is sometimes the oasis of calmness, contemplation, healthy asceticism and deeper consciousness. In every case it is all that for me; sometimes more this, sometimes more then. But as you see, this position is endangered by greed and aggression from the social environment. They are particularly pronounced here on the eve of the tourist season; when they scent the smell of easy money and the normal ones turn into predators. My atellier I feel as not only the shelter from the too noisy and agressive world of , but also as a spiritual womb, from which I am constantly born from. During Split salon 2016. atellier was exhibited as the work of art, as 4D instalation ( in 4 rooms, with around 400 exposed artefacts), in which you shold spend 4 days and nights to really see in whole, in all it's four dimensions. Still there hasn't been an artist or a custodian or the art-lover that would dare to experience that, but my call is still on. To me life is unimaganable without art, and I also believe that without it human life cannot be what it is. It just wouldn't be called human. Lets remember