Low Maintenance

Low Maintenance

Milan Aleksić photographs

15 June - 15 July 2006

Salon of the Museum of Applied Art

Programme coordinators:
Jelena Đurić, art historian

,,Most of the photographs from the Low Maintenance series carry out gloomy, eating through feeling of transience and loneness, while only a few carry humoristic half comfort.

In a holographic manner, each of the photographs includes in itself the whole “big picture” of the exhibition – the picture of an abandoned world, no man’s land, and post civilization wasteland. Although each of the pictures is independent and worthy piece of photographic art, only a view of the complete installation reveals “full” holographic picture and allows the search for a meaning. The abandoned world, although in the process of falling apart, is self-contained and stable, susceptible to interpretation of various writers of travel books and yet never opens for a complete description.

Contaminated with gloomy traces of senseless human existence, low maintained world testifies about winning accident, nonsense and transience. While looking at photographs, which are definitely not suffering from being over narrative, it is difficult to resist the reconstruction of events preceding the desertion of the low maintained world.

It can be said that prior to their disappearance, the people gave up to the accidental. They gave faith to the incidental and surrendered to it. In such a way, they naively, gave up to the senselessness. They have been desperately trying to leave whichever trace of their existence. Ugliness appeared to be more suitable for such a task than the idealized faceless beauty.

Exploring the lost people, the author was industriously and persistently recording what’s left: from the torn children’s toboggan, scribbles on the gloomy hallway walls, orchards with particularly good harvest of plastic bags to enigmatic traces of car crashes on the highway banks.

Milan Aleksic’s photographs communicate with the public similar to the films by David Lynch: in a gloomy and decadent world left without God there is only a silent cry for the meaning and eternal beauty”

 (text by Deacon Nenad Ilić from the exhibition catalogue for Low Maintenance)

Brickyard chimney, Dolovo, Serbia

Danube, Zemun, Serbia

Backyard, Golobok, Serbia

Hotel bathroom, Sokobanja, Serbia

Oak tree stricken by lighting, Rača, Serbia

INRI, Zemun, Serbia

Advertising poster, London, UK

Sculpture garden, Aranđelovac, Serbia

Milan Aleksić (1954)

EDUCATION

1987-1989       MFA (photography), Cornell University, Ithaca, USA
1980-1983       History of Art, University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia
1972-1980       Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia

Aleksić’s initial interest in photography began in the 1970s, at the time when conceptual art was still very influential, but fading out. He described his own activity not as a compulsory engagement in art as a conceptual artist, but as a photographer who takes into account the experiences of conceptual photography. He learned much in America in the 1980s, with significant shifting happening in New York environment. Photographs from the cycle Low Maintenance shown at the exhibition, have effectiveness of a political statement, they speak of the society that does not care and transform public unrest into personal sorrow

 

Programme coordinators:
Jelena Đurić, art historian
Tel: +381 26 26 494 / 106, +381 64 18 48 212

Public Relations Department, tel: +381 11 32 85 019
Public Relations Manager Milica Cukić, MA, Senior Curator, Head of Department of Arts (+381 63 33 81 60)
Assistant: Lidija Seničar, art historian (+381 64 254 55 89)