Siniša Labrović:
Leisure (The Communist Manifesto)

Maybe because he joined the contemporary Croatian art scene rather late, as a 35-year-old, and a kind of an outsider at the beginning, Siniša Labrović's artwork has the immediacy and flair for communication with the broadest audience that is entirely uncharacteristic for that very milieu. The position that Labrović takes is direct, brutally ironic, at the same time humorous and tragic, bold and compassionate, wild and sensible, anti-elitist as well as quick-witted and intelligent. If someone dislikes Labrović’s work, the most common objections are that he is too simple, that he counts on the initial shock and attracting media attention. But, if some other performance artists are disliked, the criticism is contrary, i.e. they are ambiguous, hermetic and irrelevant. The truth is that Labrović is the master of his artistic genre; he is completely aware of the fragility of his own position as an artist exposed to the public. At the same time, he is quite agile in his intention to communicate with the current social reality and his own position within that reality, which is neither heroic nor privileged in any way.

However, over the past fifteen years, Siniša Labrović bandaged the wounded at a demolished monument to antifascism (Bandaging the Wounded, Sinj, 2000), organized a reality show with real sheep (Stado.org, Touch Me Festival, Zagreb, 2005), sang and fiddled the texts he found in the Croatian tabloids (Gloria, 2007), held a workshop and published a textbook for future criminals following the style of self-help literature (Undergraduate Education, 2008; Postgraduate Education, 2009), went on a pilgrimage with bloody knees to visit the most powerful man of the Croatian capital, while praying to his authority to answer to the needs of the independent cultural scene (A Pilgrimage to St. Milan, 2012), and literary provoked the minister of culture at the time to turn up for a box match to win the minister “title”. He eventually won, because his contender never showed up (The Fight for the Title of the Minister of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, 2010).

In the atmosphere of omnipresent apathy many of those performances were cheered and supported by the audience as if they were a sports or political event, which is rather unusual for the local contemporary art scene. In parallel with those actions, a series of much more intimate performances emerged. In most cases, Labrović calls them The Phrases, and they are based on literary interpretation of more or less well-known metaphors, such as: An Artist Dances Barefoot over Thorns (2004); An Artist Licks Heels of the Audience, (2005), An Artist Eats Grass (2007); An Artist Swims on a Dry Surface (2008), An Artist Selling His Skin for Cheap (2010). At this point, Labrović shows irony both towards his audience and himself, which is also in line with the ever presumed idea that art posses of some kind of symbolic usefulness as such because The Phrases are characterized by coldblooded absence of any deeper or universal meaning hidden behind all inconvenience that an artist has to face in order to justify the attention vested in him/her by the audience.

I believe that both above mentioned collections of artwork, performances and actions are at least to some extent motivated by Labrović’s awareness of the implications and consequences of an artistic act, or the structure of subtle collaborative relations between an artist, the audience and social and institutional context of the art that the artist unavoidably makes visible. Moreover, this kind of interrelatedness presents the very centre of the two performances, i.e. Punishing (performed for the first time in 2002) and Leisure (The Communist Manifesto) (Trouble Performance Festival, Les Halles, Brussels, Belgium, 2013).

Punishing opens with a scene hinting some kind of masochist act in the tradition of body art: after the gallery doors shut, the artist stands in front of the audience with naked upper body and holding a whip. For certain time nothing happens and the first person from the audience decides to leave the gallery. The moment the doors shut behind that person, the performer hits his back the first time. At that very moment everyone in the audience becomes aware that the interior has turned into a venue of an event from which no one is to leave innocent and without his/her share of responsibility for what is about to happen on stage. The boundary separating the space of an exhibition/stage, which is neutral, uncommitted and ethically benign until that moment, becomes a line that cannot be crossed without some consequences. The conventional borderline between the audience and the performer, art and the spectator, reality and stage, an artistic act and its ethical consequences suddenly gets annulled. With every new appearance on stage, Labrović repeats the same act of punishing - one spectator less in the audience, one strike with the whip, two spectators less, two strikes of the whip. Even those who are reluctant to leave, aware of the prolonged agony, are not less responsible because this performance ends only after everyone took his/her part of the blame, and, finally, redemption by the act of accepting it. The only real way to stop this process and thus restrict the imaginary space created in Labrović’s scenario is to in a way try to stop the ‘performance’ itself but since leaving the audience actually implies a form of participation, it is apparently so “real” that no one in the audience in none of the occasions when the performance act took place never came up with the idea*.

Punishing as well as hereby-presented performance titled Leisure (The Communist Manifesto) from 2012, are two complex artworks sharing almost identical structure in the background. However, in case of the latter the audience really is offered with a legitimate way out. This time the artist seems to be more talkative and relaxed: he briefly explains to the audience that he needs volunteers for the performance and that they will not have to do anything too uncomfortable, that no special skills are required for their participation, that they will even have an opportunity to rest and that they will even get rewarded for their ‘work’ by participating in a cultural act. Volunteers are then asked to lie on the floor and the performer lies on them and while another person from the audience holds his head, he starts reading out loud from Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto from the title on the covers onward. Dumbed by their role of playing “props” in a participatory performance, the participants are at first reluctant to do anything even while reads one of the most influential political texts in history. This continues until the moment when at least one of participants gets tired of the absurd situation and the overall contradiction between the state he is in and the text the reading of which he supports, and finally decides to realize his or her „revolutionary potential“. In those conditions and always with a similar result, this performance, according to Labrović, usually lasted for half an hour. Just like the manifesto, Labrović’s performance presupposes that the system (or the performance and the position of participants in iti) cannot be simply corrected from within; it requires an upheaval, and this superbly reflects in the very act of performing this 'participatory performance', which, after having established its imaginary space and its imaginary rules in line with the conventions that apply to an artistic event, also establishes the conditions for its revocation.

Marko Golub

Art and design critic, editor and curator

* Punishing was actually stopped once. It happened in 2012 at the Interaction-International Art Action Festival in Piotrkow Trybunalski in Poland. On that occasion, Julia Kurek, Polish performer, hugged me from behind my back and prevented me from whipping. We were blocked for quite some time; I’d already hit myself at least 50 times and from the moment she hugged me, some 30 people left. I counted them so that I can whip myself at the end. By the end maybe some 4-5 people stayed with her and I, they approached us, hugged us and pushed us outside from the stage so I was saved from at least 30 hits – Siniša Labrović explained in subsequent e-mail correspondence with the author of this text.

On the occasion of the "Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space" in 2015, when Labrović was part of "Intangible" – Croatian Exhibition at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, Prague (curated by Marko Golub, Nikola Radeljković and Igor Ružić)