18 – 30. VI. 2021 / Curators: Božo Kesić, Tino Vuković, Jasna Damjanović / Set up: Anabel Zanze, Tino Vuković, Jasna Damjanović / Photo: Žaklina Antonijević
(…) Anselm Kiefer’s picture Karfunkel Fee from 1990 (together with the template for the leaflet for his Montreal exhibition, which gave Zanze the inspiration for the tiny aeroplane which was to become an integral part of her current artistic production) is linked to the German culture of remorse and apology for the horrors of the Second World War, and acts as a kind of counterbalance. Despite the fact that the derelict warplane in the picture is in no way dangerous, in the collective memory (for mediating knowledge and recollection in a relatively homogenized community) which it tried to destroy, it represents, even in the shape of a non-functioning picture, an ominous apparition. For the majority of others it is a warning (‘never again’) and a reminder (‘remember’).
The artist’s decision to choose the aeroplane from Kiefer’s picture as the leading motif in Air Show perhaps arose from the fact that his work had already been in a way ‘translated’ for the purposes of the leaflet from a three-dimensional object to two-dimensional. The picture in question is informalistic, almost like a relief, and has a definite characteristic: it goes beyond its space by 38 centimetres! Because of this it is simultaneously an artistic artefact and an iconic sign (in line with Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiological concept) and serves as the visual identity of the exhibition. Thus there are two manifestations from the same source, but with differing functions. Zanze goes a step further by copying part of a copy (in her collages we can recognize the outline contour of the plane from the picture / leaflet), making the copy ‘hers’ and leaving the auraticity of the original far behind, even though the reproduction method for the presentations was manual rather than mechanical, about which Walter Benjamin had certain reservations. Put more simply, Zanze manipulates the sign so that the original motif, by passing through a succession of transfers, finally becomes an artefact devoid of any fixed meaning or it is a floating signifier.
On the other hand, we might find the roots of the adoption of Kiefer’s aeroplane for the purposes of Air Show in Zanze’s fascination with the theme of movement and machines in general, which is evidenced in her periodic citing of Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, or in her own work Perpetuum Mobile in 2008, which indisputably reminds one of Francis Picabia’s ‘machines’, and the mesmerizing rise of the motorized and industrialized world at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Air Show is certainly based on the same approaches as those used by Picabia and some other European artists from among the Cubists, Dadaists, Constructivists and Surrealists in the first half of the twentieth century in their collages (they combined art with life in avant-garde style, imbued with textual and pictorial links from the mass culture of that time), but this is just a happy coincidence. Air Show is not so much dedicated to or in imitation of the historic aesthetic avant-gardists (even though it contains some of their characteristics), as it is a post-modern approach reaching into the rich treasury of (modern) art and its re-interpretation for personal use. Thus Zanze has been able to turn Kiefer’s aeroplane from a notorious killing machine almost into a toy. (…)