Press
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Danas, daily newspaper, No. 3997, 8 September 2008

ALEKSANDAR MAĆAŠEV
”I don’t want to be loved, I just want to be adored”

Aleksandar Maćašev, an artist and designer, known to the audience for his “Joseph Goebbels TM” project is presently visiting New York City where he is cooperating with an architect Maja Vidakovic on founding the “reMiks NYC” design studio. By the end of the year he plans to publish his book, "PRINTSCREENSOLIDWETWORK" that will be promoted in Belgrade. He will present his new art project “Margins” as a part of the visual program of the poetry festival “Trgni se!”, at 7 o clock this evening.

How do you treat relations between public and private in online communication?
- I have been following the RATEL affair in Belgrade relating to email surveillance in Serbia. It is a very interesting symptom. My opinion is that I have nothing to hide. If someone wants to read my emails, let them read. From that point of view “Margins” is pushing the line even more. I will show you everything, just watch. Just as Chuck Palahniuk said in his novel “Haunted”: Public is the new private. The best way to hide something is to put it in the most obvious place.

How honest it is?
I mean, how can anything you call “art” be honest? When you put an “art” label on something you already have put the fence around it and that dulls the direct communication. I have put a poll on the blog asking people how honest this work is. I would vote for number 2: honest, but slightly modified. Like when you are naked in front of the camera, but you control of the way the picture is taken. There is a great line in Alan Moore’s graphic novel “V for Vendetta”: “The artist uses lies to tell the truth, and politicians tell the truth to cover up lies”. I know for myself when I look at some work of art whether it is honest or not. It is something on an emotional level of communication. You can find a lot of funny and painfully sad things. There is personal and political.

How do you decide what to say?
Well, I don’t think too much. I mean, something crosses your mind that you would like to say. The less you plan it as art the more honest it will be. Personal is political just as public is private. And everything is political. Everything we say. It doesn’t matter if it is a hole in the cupboard that watches me while I sleep, burning a “country” flag in a glass of martini, statement that I want to be adored or Jesus’ face at the bottom of an ashtray full of cigarette butts.

You like to communicate with the wider audience and you deal with very intimate and family matters in your work. Isn’t that a cry for communication?
The typical art audience is already trained to look at things in a certain way. Web, especially the popular form of blog, is very convenient for addressing the public out of the usual circle of the art system. (We)blog is conceived as a diary, the only difference is that I used it for art purposes. Maybe it is a cry for communication, but it is more a need to control the communication. You answer before you have been asked.

What is the future plan for “Margins”?
There will be an exhibition in Ljubljana, Slovenia in March 2009. I will try to promote it in the US too. The audience is generally very interested in “Margins both as a design product and an art object. It’s a very pleasant feeling when you strip naked and say: “Take it or leave it, but this is what you’ll get.”

Margins
visual diary in the form of blog art

Aleksandar Macasev’s new art project “Margins” will be presented as a part of the visual program of the poetry festival “Trgni se!” this evening at 7 o’clock in the Kontekst gallery as well as at screens of the public transportation in Belgrade. It is a visual diary in the form of a blog art that basically can be seen at www.macasev-margins.blogspot.com.

Living in various cities and homes this artist and designer has made a very interesting collection of improvised installations, ephemeral graffiti and ready-made objects. Because of his, as he states, agoraphobic fears of the outside world, he finds himself safe, albeit trapped within the margins of his own home. Within those margins he sometimes makes art just for himself.

Photo documentation that is a result of this process really intrudes into the privacy of the artist as much as he allows us to intrude. You can check out if he succeeded by choosing one of four options in his “honesty” poll on the blog itself.

Themes range from highly intimate and family confessions to his engagement in social issues and agitation. Thus “Margins” are transmitters of witty, bizarre, romantic, intelligent, painfully honest and sometimes obscene contents packed into an artistic product.

“Margins set the boundaries for us when attempting to encounter intimate confessions, so the exhibitionism of those personal and family stories becomes an artificial product based upon personal experience (Desiring Machine). This rather risky play with honesty questions the true nature of these margins: how much do they protect, is all this really true, what degree of trespass is actually allowed?” says Anica Tucakov in the introduction text on this project. She also stresses the artist’s ignoring of the usual social norms when she adds: “He doesn't accept already made margins so he creates his own, in order to maintain some kind of stability in the alienation that he has chosen. And alienation creates either eccentrics or revolutionaries.”

Aleksandra Cuk