Everything Is Precisely The Way It Should Be
What one can perceive immediately in the latest series of sculptures by Zdravko
Joksimović is that he is becoming increasingly attached to the specific dualisms of his
own sculptural phenomenology. First of all, it is the already customary division into
“serious” works, which are the product of an almost classical modelling skill, but also of
a constructivist impulse; and into “flippant” works, that is, Joksimović’s characteristic
“gags” in the form of quick and witty collages/assemblages and constructions made
using ready-made elements. In the case of the above-mentioned “serious” works, there is
a pronounced grafting, which may appear to be “discordant”, of two elements, one of
which originates from constructivism, but also from Duchamp-type Dadaism and pop-art,
whereas the other reminds us of a perverted re-invention of classical modelling in that
aspect of Dadaist-surrealist art represented most of all by Arp’s morphology. Joksimović
also deals with another characteristic dualism in the phenomenology of sculpture, the
division into figure/statue and pedestal. In the case of Joksimović’s new works, what, to
another artist, would be a finished, harmonious, freely standing sculpture, takes on the
“function” of the pedestal. Such is the case, for example, with the construction that
resembles an enlarged tool, a plane, in the work entitled Delicacy, or the huge circularly
folded saws in the work Once a Year, which “serve” as the pedestals for modelled
sculptures made of terracotta, pointing to fragments of some bodily form.
In relation to the “pedestals”, the appearance of forms resembling bodily fragments
effects a specific kind of impact on the expected harmony that both the pedestal and the
figure possess irrespective of each other. Let us remember that the sculpture of the era of
antiquity, after its rediscovery in the era of Renaissance, was most often perceived as a
partialised, or to put it literally, mutilated body. In the classical tradition, such a fragment
appears as the “essence” of a form from which the extremities have dropped, and our
evaluation of the antique form is based on a schizoid-paranoid acceptance of a mutilated
and dismembered body, whereas in its original form the antique sculpture was precisely a
celebration of the idealised wholeness and perfection of the bodily. Joksimović does not
approach the issue of partial objects through a macabrist grotesque or the repugnance of
an ignominious object: there is no horror of mutilation, but first of all a critical attitude
towards institutionalisation (a body subjected to control) and an exploratory attitude
towards the objectivisation of a passive body.
On the other hand, Joksimović has always been interested in the “utilitarian” rather than
the “symbolic” value of an object. Hence tools (in the case of the two above-mentioned
sculptures, a saw and a plane) appear to a greater extent, for a tool is at the same time an
object as a “dead thing” and an object as a “performative potential”. The constativity (the
image of the object) and the performativity (function) of the object are synthesised within
a single act. If, as Wittgenstein said, “the meaning of a word is its use in language”, then
the meaning of objects in Joksimović is precisely their use in his sculptural system, which
constantly explores the paradoxes of visual, tactile and verbal communication, that is to
say, the paradoxes of their juncture in some semantic context. As opposed to using visual
arts as the illustrative correlate of verbal symbolism, Joksimović’s art uses language, its
paradoxes, as well as its poetics, in order to establish a specific model of reading
sculpture, always based on materiality itself as the basic means of expression.
Joksimović’s materialism is no return of “truth in the material”, but a revelation of
“untruth”, deception in the material, that is, deception lying precisely in language and our
capacity for reading. Joksimović used the dualism of words and objects for the purpose of
revealing various functions of objects, searching for meaning through the use of an object
in its contexts: “Dingspiel” as Wittgensteinian “Sprachspiel”.
The meaning of these works does not lie in conventional symbolism (which would be
knocking at the door if, for example, we were to describe his sculpture Delicacy as a
“deformed fragment of a body stuck onto a sharp metal plane”), nor is it to be found in
any self-sufficient formalisation of sculptural issues, but in life itself, which constitutes
both the inspiration and the context of the use of objects in Joksimović’s art. They appear
based on the experiences of hospital waiting-rooms, carpenter’s workshops, barber’s
shops, or simply out of that creative leisure that replaces “real” cheese in a mousetrap
with a game dice containing holes, as in the work I Know How! The internal typology of
his sculptural opus, which one may describe with increasing certainty as the most
coherent and original opus in contemporary Serbian sculpture, shows that Joksimović is
self-conscious in the same measure as self-ironic, a craftsman as much as a conceptualist,
reconciled with the world around him to the extent that makes him one of the most
creative artists today.
Branislav Dimitrijević