Until Now and From Now On, Boredom!

I am deeply convinced that anybody who has had the chance to meet, to know and to speak with Aleksandar Macasev, was at least pleasantly surprised. You already know the very strong and unusually vivid reputation of the visual-culture worker that follows this man. When I started to walk through that cultural table of contents, I realized that it is a great life of an architect, artist, graphic and web designer, lecturer, of a boy who is naïve and who is a conqueror, someone who is in love with boredom and sun, who quotes Marcel Duchamp, Corto Maltese, who smiles at the mention of the “Balthazar” animated shorts and nostalgically frowns at the Pink Floyd lyrics “no navigator to find my way home”… and so much more. But making lists is not the point. You cannot do that with a man like this. You have to meet him and hear him.

It was a very hot Friday and I expected to have fun, but to be quite honest, you can have too much of a good thing. One moment I would talk to a merry boy like the one from the “Lolek and Bolek” cartoon along with rolling his eyes and saying “zdeng” (you know the comic-strip sound effect of being hit with a shovel?), while a little later he would turn into an incredibly serious man who defends his stand, fierce and colorful, but also shy.
“You know, people are very strong. Somehow very strong. I am not that strong.”
The more I directed our conversation towards the “urban interview with a renowned artist”, the less I had control of it. The conversation departed from a linear path and turned into branched loops made of words, sentences, metaphors and laughs while we were sipping red wine.

“Very often I don’t have any intention, nor a particular client, and I am deeply convinced that there is no distinct commercial and non-commercial art. For me, art is communication. And often I have that urge ‘aww, I would like to do this!’. One of the favorite latest books that I read was Philosophy of Boredom, by Lars Fr. H. Svendsen. I do things out of boredom. And I abandon them out of boredom too. Seems like boredom is the strongest creative impulse I have. Sounds maybe a bit too romantic, but boredom makes me do things.”
That was the answer to my question about creation and the primary creative impulse. Soon I started to laugh and enjoy his wit, imagination and spontaneity.

“’Architecture? That’s for girls’, my dad used to say. I used to think like this: Art Academy? Maybe. Applied Arts School? But, you know, I like math very much. Mathematics is a form of philosophy for me. It was interesting and sort of useless, just like philosophy. But it is fun. Tautologies, for instance. Man, what fun it was just to prove things with the thing itself. I was seeking a discipline that merges art and science. So the decision was architectural design. In the end I was never interested in the architecture itself, it’s so slow. So I decided to deal with architecture through visual concepts and I slipped into graphic design.”

Hang on a second; you really don’t care about architecture?
“You mean engineering, buildings and concrete? No. No, because I don’t do something that I cannot see in its entirety. And it is very slow discipline, as I already said. My friend Andrej Dolinka wanted to make an exhibition of architects who don’t do architecture. There are so many of us.”

What do you mean?
“It’s simple. I don’t do things that I cannot see the end of. On top of that, I’m not a very good team player, though I have trained myself over time to be one because my work demands it. There’s one architect that really captures my attention and worth mentioning, Rem Koolhaas. His architecture is analytical, asymmetrical, fluid, free and it grows out of analysis of the physical environment. Like his design for Chinese national television. That’s not a building that grew out of a piece of land; it grew from the analysis of people, history, culture, economics and politics. The land is the people. Fantastic!

OK, you told me that you slipped into graphic design out of architecture. Define design.
“Design is a state of mind or even a state of mind, culture and society. The Netherlands, Finland, Denmark are designers’ empires. The famous Dutch design is not just design, it’s a designer’s way of thinking. Everything over there is designed. You can feel the presence of insight in every single detail, everything. Everything is thought through.”

How do you see the Serbian scene as it relates to design?
“Serbia has top level sports, and beautiful men and women, but we need more professional discipline for the designer’s race.”

Define discipline.
“Discipline could be equated with the Serbian idea of spite-- ‘OK, I’ll do my best to make this great or even better.’ But people here just give up half way through. The famous Serbian spite is apparently being used somewhere else. But, I need to tell you something else. I like identities that are elusive. People tend to define themselves by trying to fit into existing frameworks, or they are forced to do so by circumstance. I write, teach, design, paint, speak… but all of this is coming from the same source. People often ask me to define myself. And I usually answer that I am a visual-culture worker. That covers almost everything I do. “

You seem very restless, don’t you? Do you ever sleep?
Oh, yes. I sleep well and I sleep a lot, thank you for asking.

Do you enjoy life? How do you cope with it? Do you suffer sometimes?
“Well, we all suffer sometimes. But I don’t have any heroic ‘suffering artist’ story. There were no spectacular moments. I’m a nice kid, from a nice family, that grew up without drama.” (laugh)

You know Hugo Pratt and his comic book hero Corto Maltese. He doesn’t like heroes either. It was in the ‘Celts’ episode.
“Oh, Corto. He’s a great character. I like some other episodes better. Maybe, The Ballad of the Salt Sea or Under the Pirate Banner. I like that dialogue when Goldmouth asks him ‘Why don’t you stay?’ and he replies ‘I have to go’. ‘The thing that you are looking for doesn’t exist,’ she says. I always imagine that Corto replies, ‘I know’.
I also like the beginning of The Ballad of the Salt Sea when the Pacific Ocean says, ‘I am the Pacific Ocean and I am the greatest’. It’s very sentimental but beautiful.

What do you think, why do people run away when they recognize themselves in other people, beings or things?
“Maybe they get scared. I don’t know, sometimes I want to get away. I don’t know what from, or what am I looking for. As Corto would have said, ‘the movement is the only thing that matters.'”

Communication with people means a lot to you. I am referring to communication in a real, physical space. But you also willingly swim in abstraction and a sphere of intelligent space. I am referring here to your work in the domain of the web, your web design and your web art. Is the web an illusion?
“I’ll say it again: art is a form of communication, like any other form of communication. My favorite artist, Marcel Duchamp once said that the creative act consists of three parts: artist, artwork and consumer. You can’t have art without any one of those three. The discussion about reality and illusion is becoming obsolete. Everything is real, that’s the main point. There’s no real difference between web space, illusion, simulation, ‘Matrix’ reality… everything is reality. Originality? That’s a typical modernist urge for constant progress. Fortunately, we have gotten rid of that. Although you can always hear griping about who’s stealing from who and why and how. There’s a simple truth about originality that I tell my students: ‘The only unique thing is YOU. Do things that drive YOU, because they don’t drive anybody else in this world. Period.’”

You told me that you are taking a trip to the United States? Running away?
“Or searching for something? America is an interesting place because they don’t ask where you graduated from, but instead, what is it that you can actually do? The East Coast reminds me of Europe. New York City is like Amsterdam with skyscrapers. The beauty of that city is that you can blend in. Everybody’s a stranger; nobody’s looking at you. Beautiful. For me, the South looks more like “real” America, like all these road images of Wim Wenders’ America. Now, let me paint you a little picture from Florida. A movie-like picture: ramshackle old gas station in the middle of nowhere, inland Florida. Everything is kind of dusty, yellow and sunny. The woman at the cash register of an adjacent shop is looking at us with half closed eyes. Her head slightly tilted back. A guy with a cowboy hat enters the shop. He noticed that we are total strangers, but share with us his views of the potato chip flavors. Quite spontaneously, like we have known each other for years. That’s the America that I love. Or another picture with ibises by the lake where we were staying, and the moss hanging form the trees, a swamp. Or the old “black” cemetery that I visited. A white guy passes by on his bike; he stops and asks us what are we doing there because there were only black people buried there. That was the perfect time and place to listen to “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday. Terribly sad. And there is also a part of America in the South where everything is simulated and copied to look real. Because everything is real.”

What animated movie would you like to see right now to cheer you up?
“Definitely the ‘Pink Elephants on Parade’ scene from ‘Dumbo’.”

Is there a book that is weaved into your life?
“Stranger by Albert Camus. When you are 17 you enjoy all that existentialist angst. Somehow I remember the comment of my literature professor who said that the main character may have killed the Arab because of the sun! What a weird thing. But I love the sun, and I like the light. Everything looks clean and nice under the sun. Lord of the Rings, maybe for the reason that we already mentioned, it’s so big, you just cannot see it as a whole. That book always offers me an adventure and it always seems a bit different. And I can read it once a year. Maybe another title, Autumn in Beijing by Boris Vian. So, let there be three books, because I always carry around three books for emergency reading. I may die of boredom if I don’t have any books on me. “

Finally, tell me, do you have a secret?
“I don’t have any secrets. I tend not to hide things. It sounds so lame. The spies who have bugged my apartment must be bored to death.”



Slavica Todorović