23.10. 2018 – 30.10.2018 DUM Project Space

It all began just before eight in the morning. His partner and both kids had left, so Mladen was alone in his studio. The studio is opposite the children’s room, a few steps from the master bedroom and right next to the kitchen, where he was preparing breakfast at that very moment and looking out at the garden. At first, there was not much talk about art, but about everyday things such as family, holidays, sex, work, a railway station, walks, proscuitto and jam. When we did discuss art, it seems that we hovered between what was stated by Vladimir Vidmar and Barbara Sterle Vurnik in the catalogue accompanying the night train (who’s there?) exhibition in Škuc Gallery, which related to the philosophical and art-historical aspects of Mladen’s work recognised in invididual series – a contemporary examination of everday materials, the use of outdated technology or the thematic opening of the world of the subconscious, which Vidmar defines with the words of Gerard Wajcman: how to touch with the aid of material, with an object – not the invisible, but what escapes the visible. Perhaps this ‘continuous departing’ is the main element of the fade into the night exhibition, which focuses on a selection of videos, drawings and objects from the last three years, but what the exhibition, as a medium, seeks to highlight, is the things that ‘escape’ if the viewer is too focused on the formal, theoretical or philosophical ‘hypernyms’ of exhibition concepts.
The referential circle of thought leads us back to talking about family, holidays, sex, work, a railway station, prosciutto and jam, which never really eneded, but spilled into the studio. Or, as it were, the kitchen became the studio at a certain point, when Mladen, having done the dishes and tidied the counter, presented a large part of his works from the last three years. In them, it always seems like there is a tension between direct aesthetic experience and free association, and it was no different listening to him talking about his works, as they are not limited to a single idea and can be read only in relation to the viewer’s associative range. Although all Stropnik’s works are intimate confessions reflecting his relationship with the mundane and society, the moment they are made public, they become only a ‘material’ reminder of what can be completed in the ‘Platonic’ world of ideas.
Therefore, perhaps the crucial moment of that morning was when Mladen said he wanted the exhibition to be called Sonic Youth. Naturally, this led to a new set of referential associations, as one of the descriptions of Stropnik’s work was that he developed his visual language under the influence of punk, new wave and underground culture in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly linked to the activities of the Res Nullius punk rock group. Although this description is correct, as it precisely describes the formal and aesthetic experience of Stropnik’s work, through this prism that experience is again ‘levelled’ to a particular experience of visual language. So, again, something ‘escapes’ when we try to understand Stropnik’s associations: the condition of the mind, body and spirit, which music as an experience brings to the artist, as it exceeds its particular elements and definitions. Stropnik’s experience of the everyday and the world, which is reflected through his art, is always very emotionally direct. Therefore, even, the everyday act of listening to music, for example, is not formal perception of information, but a complex process that occupies the mind, body and experience of time and space. Above all, the exhibition is a feeling that does not exclusively reflect Stropnik’s visual identification with noise, new wave and underground culture, but something that David Heetderks writes about when he thinks about listening to the music of Sonic Youth: it is an intimate examination of society through words, vector subsets, gestures played on instruments, whose inner logic defies any authority, while they create inner conflicts, both in the lyrical and musical sense. It seems that Stropnik does this in his visual ‘rebellions’, as he speaks to viewers about their environment and everyday life by talking about his own. In almost Brechtian manner, he unnoticeably turns the viewer into an accomplice, who becomes a co-conspirator at the moment of confrontation with the work of art.
fade into the night or the ‘Sonic Youth’ exhibition also feels like a paraphrase of Igor Zabel’s thoughts about exhibition strategies. In his text Exhibition Strategies in the Nineties: A Few Examples from Slovenia, Zabel writes how artists, work, surroundings, audience and institutions are not abstract entities, but are defined by ideological, political, class, gender, linguistic and other factors. The same perspective applies to this exhibition, which seeks to show that Stropnik’s work cannot be understood through its complex and diverse philosophical, conceptual and formal ideas, no matter how well we understand them, if we do not think about family, holidays, sex, work, a railway station, walks, prosciutto and jam at the same time.

Curator: Tevž Logar
Production and organisation: Hana Ostan Ožbolt
Acknowledgements: Katja and Nataša, Jaka Babnik, Mateja Bučar, Silvo Dolinar, Vadim Fishkin, Alenka Gregorič, Sanja Kuveljić, Goran Petrov, Jani Pirnat, Maša Radišić, Tina Škoberne.
Supported by: Ministry of Culture of Slovenia, Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana