27.10. – 15.11.2021, DUM Project space, Kolodvorska 6, Ljubljana

Curator: Vladimir Vidmar
Production: DUM Association of Artists
The project is supported by: City of Ljubljana – Department for Culture
Special Thanks to: Vadim Fishkin, Jaka Babnik, Goran Petrov, Isidora Tomin

Over the last year, DUM has been reflecting intensely on its mission, which is becoming increasingly more articulated as a need for a more direct engagement with the artwork itself. It is the work that often, under the pressure of pompous umbrella themes, concepts and more or less dominant discourses, rapidly fades to nothing or, in a reduced plastic form, supports a certain argument. This happens quite easily. A work of art is a fragile and often uncertain phenomenon, sensitive to circumstances and contexts. Often, by its very nature, a work of art is that which radically questions and undermines its own foundations, denying itself both solid support and ontological reliability. How, then, can one approach this paradoxical entity, which is most often present when it also is not, and which is most often “this”, when it is at the same time something else?

The work of art is at the centre of Nataša Berk’s exhibition in DUM’s Project Space – and we cannot imagine a more banal sentence within a text accompanying an exhibit. What else should be at the centre of an exhibition, if not a work of art? This time, however, the work is primarily focused on the work of art and, in a humorous, tautological gesture, it is the work itself that speaks about its own conditions of possibility. At the heart of the exhibition is therefore something that is completely self-evident, yet, something that becomes elusive every time we try to grasp it.

The exhibition’s (self-)ironic title Before the Concept There‘s Absolutely No Point, which is some kind of summary of the dramaturgy of the artwork, where things are not as they appear, reminds us of that. The set up plays the same game. In a way it is perfectly “in place”, very “gallery like” and almost unexcitedly expected – a white shelf with artefacts – only to show, through its obviousness, that nothing is “in place” when it comes to art. Things get complicated in the exhibition at the first stage of reading, when trained readers of contemporary art want to read the exhibition as the subversion of classical exhibition protocol, with irreverent placement of vulgar, chewed-up pieces of chewing gum on the podium. However, it soon becomes clear that this interpretation does not take us far, because Nataša Berk is perfectly serious in her intent when she renders the accidental products of the artist’s primal “work” with the dignity of an artistic piece.As is often the case in Nataša Berk’s work, a certain ludic gesture also has an authentic interest in provoking deeper reflection on the nature of the artistic experience. Before the Concept There‘s Absolutely No Point, in its extreme modesty as an artistic intervention, sets in front of us two centuries worth of questioning – what a work of art really is. They are beautiful shapes that are the product of the artist’s physical work (chewing), but they are also the results of reflection on the meaning of the transference of a particular object/action into the context of the ready-made art system. They are the objects of primary processing, primordial, subconscious automatism, at the same time part of an elaborate strategy of coping with what excites us in art in the first place. They are a by-product of mass-culture rituals, but at the same time, each piece is undeniably individual and unique.

What makes the pieces of chewing gum in Before the Concept There‘s Absolutely No Point exceptional is that they manage to be, at the same time, all of the above, and thus stand as a “proxy” for the ontological instability of the artwork. They represent work about work. They postulate avoidance of any reduction to simplicity and fixed meanings as a fundamental condition, as it is ambivalence that pulls the work, at least for a moment, out of ideological dominance. The present exhibition presents the artwork as a series of brief encounters, through which the solution is always postponed onto something else, in a constant rhythm that is dictated by the serialism of the exhibited “work”… Through Nataša Berk’s characteristic directness, liveliness and genuine humour, she again succeeds in imprinting the enthusiasm and affirmative gesture of the fluid creation of the artwork and the reading of it, unrestrained by forms and formulas. Nataša Berk does not claim to be immune to them, as she constantly deals, plays and flirts with them, but never fully gives into them. She takes them seriously in a completely frivolous way.

The vital energy of an artwork, as Nataša Berk’s gesture reminds us, is in not allowing the concepts, approaches and procedures to be “set in stone”. Chewing gum is, after all, a soft thing, even in its chewed-up form. The infectious enthusiasm of art, no matter from which angle we approach it – artist, collector, admirer – they all represent Nataša Berk’s artistic alter egos, is in the instability of her experience, in which the “material” always somewhat surprises and forces us to say more than we intended or to say it differently. Through Before the Concept There‘s Absolutely No Point, Nataša Berk confronts us with the fact that although it is impossible to escape ideology even in art, it does not mean we should not play with it, manipulate it or even make fun of it. The pleasure that derives from that is a constitutive moment of art.
Vladimir Vidmar