Parallel Life; Work for Everybody and for Nobody

Work for Everybody and for Nobody – On One Art Experiment in the Field of Media

Article from Djurić’s catalogue: Strategies of excess or: if you’re in a hurry, Djurić will slip you one.

The imperative of presence in the media, at any cost, and as often as possible, has turned the society of the spectacle of today into a society devoid of any, even media, meaning. The terror of the public, the tyranny of generic information on everything, and global media voyeurism as material for Djurić’s art reached its peak in 2005, when, for the requirements of a work for the October Salon in Belgrade he resorted to a construction of a case study – i.e. the strategy of exposure of his own life. Aware that there exists a secret relationship between the manipulator and manipulated, a reliable alliance that brings them together, making one directly conditioned by the other – the existence of the one toying with us very much becomes a prerequisite of our own (public) existence. Thus we are entering a pathological situation of a perverted relationship in which the perpetrator and the victim complement and help each other on the same (media) task. With the thematization of the symptom of derailment from social normality, Djurić, in cooperation with the artist and former model from Sarajevo, Šejla Kamerić, and the journalist of Svet, Beba Dragić, constructs Slučaj Djurić (Case Djurić), in such a way, that in four installments, from issue to issue of the Novi Sad-based tabloid, articles are published on a secret love affair between Kamerić and Djurić. Under the watchful eye of the paparazzi of Svet, the two artists were followed for weeks on route Belgrade – Sarajevo – Dubrovnik – Herceg Novi, as regular readers of Svet were continually supplied new details of their socially (un)acceptable relationship. The story of a married Serbian artist, father of a minor, and the Bosnian artist, a former model (taking into account the fact that this tabloid is distributed throughout the region of ex-Yugoslavia) had quickly become a top Balkan (art) piece of a gossip. The resolution of the love story came in the fifth installment, whenit became clear to the fans of the tabloid, as well as to the art scene, itself, equally intrigued and entertained by this media scandal, that the (alleged) love affair was actually Kamerić’s and Djurić’s joint art work, for which they received the Special Jury Prize at the Salon the same year. Noting that in his work Djurić had used the format of the tabloid page in the manner in which he used the format of the canvas in his early works, StevanVuković concludes that the work in question requires specific media literacy in order to be understood, causing the situation in which this Kamerić’s and Djurić’s media manipulation was at the same time comprehensible to a very broad population and quite incomprehensible even to professionals in the field of art.

Stevan Vuković