Andrej
Tišma is regarded as the forebearer of new art in the region, who
has turned away from painting towards modern digital techniques, also
to photography, video and mail-art, art stamps. This is why his art
is structurally stratified through different forms, such as web-art,
mail-art, video-art, sound works, visual poetry, electrographics, art
stamps and performance art or (spi)rituals (see link: http://www.atisma.com/
). In his artistic expression, he uses electronic and internet sources,
various documentary and archive materials and joins together several
means of expression - image, sound, video and words - showing how the
fragments of the existing reality live through art. In a certain sense,
Tišma's art can partly be named the art of the documentary because
it resembles documentary films, which are directed towards a sphere
of implied problems; from the laws of economy to cultural and existential
uncertainties.
Tišma's art makes inroads into reality as it is, and does not want
to make it more attractive or to hide it. It even examines phenomena
which the world of information media does not wish to show and expose
truthfully. In this sense, art for Tišma is not a way to change
the world directly, but before all a way to awaken the awareness of
the audience. At the same time, his art is an expression of a moral
judgement of the world social reality from the viewpoint of humanism,
starting from which the author warns us of a general erosion of values
powered by the globalist systems, but also anti-peace intentions of
certain states. He also cannot help seeing aggression everywhere: the
aggression of advertisments, aggression in people's behaviour and the
most direct form of aggression in the wars: World War II, the war in
Iraq, the bombardment of Serbia. The pervasive dissipation of values
in the contemporary world is seen as a process happening not in relation
to the artist's own nation, but also in a broader sense, in relation
to culture, civilization and humankind in its movement, influenced by
the negative effects of globalization and unification of the world.
Tišma goes beyond the contemporary world events and studies the
development of mankind throughout history, shedding light on the crucial
breaking points and changes as critical points in the historical development
of humankind.
On the subject of war and peace, to revert to Tolstoy, or in a Heraclean
view of the opposites, Tišma, in his position of an active artist,
gives answers in an indirect but often a direct way, argues and condemns
various aspects of reality. However, it comes with a price, because
after his condemnation of the bombardment of Serbia in 1999, his video
and audio works depicting the scenes of destroyed bridges, buildings
and human victims in Serbia were taken off American internet servers.
The artistic experience of the Novi Sadian artist Tišma is special
just because of the topics he deals with, as there are few artists in
Serbia who are fully engaged in studying the issues of war (not counting
the other areas of artistic expression such as literature and film).
According to the art historian Nina Mihaljinac, besides Andrej Tišma,
Mirjana ?or?evi? and Mr?an Baji? dealt with the problem of NATO bombardment
in a specific way within modern art. She points out that, in the domain
of visual arts, it was these artists who contributed to the intepretation
of that event and thus became direct participants in the preservation
of the collective memory and the collective identity. Tišma himself
deepens that experience through his art, searching for the sources of
war as a phenomenon. In this way, his art also exudes a moral testimonial,
as noted by Mihaljinac, because the "subject of the banality of
the evil, emphasized in his works, poses a great cognitive challenge
for a viewer, before it invites him to pass a moral judgement".
(Nina Mihaljinac, Artistic Testimony, "Patriots" and "Quislings":
Narratives of NATO Bombing of Serbia, p. 11).
The experience of the war phenomenon in Tišma's works appears in
a number of series - be it through criticism, irony, direct denunciation
or in scenarios which expose the consequences of this phenomenon in
the contemporary world. One can say that he "documents" the
history of wars and their dialectic movements in a visual way, and,
starting from them, proceeds to show a certain creation of history as
it is actually being enacted today, because wars are often followed
by a new era in world history, as Goethe's astute genius noted. Out
of the (spi)rituals or art performances, which Tišma made during
the wars in former Yugoslavia with an aim to invoke peace through spiritual
activity (calming down aggression, hate and destruction), he created
graphics dedicated to the above mentioned activities. One of the performances
in 1992 which he presented as a graphic (in his work: Invocation of
Peace), refers to his meditation dedicated to peace in former Yugoslavia,
done in front of one of the oldest Serbian monasteries - Studenica,
while in another performance, in 1993, he spent an hour closed in a
cage in a Belgrade street, marking the first anniversary of the embargo
imposed against Serbia and Montenegro. He also made performances at
Prijepolje and in Milan, which were inspired by his desire to expand
peace to Bosnia and Croatia, always aimed at halting the wars. This
form of immaterial art named spi(ritual) - the name was forged by Tišma
himself in 1990 - is a form of ritual, the goal of which is spiritual
exchange and raising peace-loving aspirations among people.
Tišma's art queries various forms of militarism and - behind rosy
pictures made by advertizing agencies and world peace mottos and other
slogans, in "humanitarian" intentions of the world powers
- discovers a black hole of human suffering in historical cycles. This
is why in his works we encounter cruelty which is sometimes difficult
to follow. But this cruelty is no less an area of human reality than
the set-up of human society or the world order.
Andrej Tišma exposes multilayered dimensions of the destructive
nature of war - economic, psychological (with the deep traces war leaves
on human consciousness), health, ecological. His series ironically titled
"Civilized beheading" actually lays bare the fact that what
happens in contemporary reality in Kosovo and Metohija is the beheading/dislocation/destruction/minorization
of a nation, in a civilized and perfiduous way. Moreover, the Serbian
part of the population is compared with American Indians, who were put
away, as a species, to live in reservations, and a warning is sounded
as to what possible scenarios are looming over a small nation, in an
era of frictions between globalistic interest of the powers.
The destructive nature of mankind is exhibited to the maximum in the
logic of a forceful annihilation of life, from material devastation
and prevention of development of certain countries or taking people's
lives, as Tišma showed in his works devoted to the war in Iraq,
his criticism of German Nazi interventions in different parts of the
world during World War II and their anti-semitism, to NATO bombardment
of Serbia (see: video works Ode to Barbarism, Loss of Inocence) and
the criticism of American "patriotism" and in other works.
In his works, he exhibits the destructive power of war through various
techniques (see his video work: Get Those Bastards) and methods of warfare
(punishment, torture, harrassment) in different historical periods,
including the cold war, and uncovers messages with ideological roots
of wars, i.e. points to the political, religious and economic background
of wars.
Tišma throws light on all kinds of war phenomena and their forms,
among them on the information and media wars in the era of the developed
information technologies all over the world. He himself uses media collages
and information in order to bring closer the essence of a possible "media
manipulation", to show the way certain events are presented and
to point to the other side of the media which unmask the real state
of the affairs (see his work: Advertising Mental Survival). In this
way, he endeavors to bring the recipient's consciousness close to the
truth itself.
Tišma realized the unethical nature of war through the economic
intentions of the USA which powerfully rocks the rest of the world (as
the Roman Empire once did) - either through their search for raw materials,
by creating consummer societies, purposeful empoverishment of certain
countries or by spreading militaristic zeal for invasion, led by the
logic of "divide and conquer". This also confirms a Marxist
thesis that "war is an extension of politics", where the growth
of profit and capital, acquisition of raw material sources and other
causes are actually the prime movers in the breaking out of wars. Carl
von Clausewitz in his work On War wrote: "War is merely the continuation
of (state) policy by other means.", as an act of violence by which
the enemy is subjugated to one's will. This attitude should be opposed
by all politics, because the essential mission of politics is to bring
about peace in the country, on the one hand, and peace among all nations
on the planet, on the other. However, if we look upon its present role
from the angle of the game theory as one of the most comprehensive anthropological
political analyses (developed by F.G. Bailey in his work Treasons, Stratagems,
and Spoil, politics looks like a competition game with accepted rules
of the game (normative and pragmatic), joined by a conflict with the
rules of the game of another rival, who wants to win and obtain the
right to rule, making the direct use of power easier.
In his works, Tišma openly criticizes the utilitarian aspect of
American politics, depicting it through various forms of terroristic
use of power over other parts of the world, emphasizing also its efforts
aimed at bringing down the identities and cultures of certain countries.
The aftereffects of the non-humanist side of politics were realistically
shown in Tišma's scenes of suffering, tortures, deaths as well
as in scenes of already dead innocent victims (see video work: Herzlich
Totenkopf Kantate). In his works, one can hear human screams, sound
of detonations, one can see man's reconciliation with death and the
affliction of war, but in some works there is even a glimpse of hope
for life and, on the other hand, a spiteful superiority of those who
control the execution of crimes. In his video work History of War, through
the pictures of camps, war and explosions of bombs thrown on Hiroshima,
he portrays attrocities committed on the victims, he inserts sounds
of hot line conversations carried on by some German girls, suggesting
a similarity of wars to a form of prostitution or immoral trade.
Tišma also draws analogies and parallels between certain events
in history pointing to the principle of feedback effect, which is well
supported by his work in which pictures of the events of September 11,
2001 when the USA, more precisely New York, suffered the feedback effect
of their own politics, through the attack by Al-Qaeda (see video work:
Fire Alarm).
In one of the aspects of his web art we encounter photographs which
illustrate similar events in different time periods, in different parts
of the world, such as the photos of the bridges in Novi Sad destroyed
in 1999 and almost identical photos of the destroyed bridge in Minneappolis
in 2007, the reason why the artist calls these two cities "twin"
cities.
Under the everyday seemingly trivial events in social reality, Tišma
also creates a new picture, disclosing a hidden message of ostensible
humanism, indicating the ways used to degrade man's dignity, to divest
him of spirituality, to destroy him and even to break up the harmony
of the processes in nature, which are indispensable for man's health
and survival as a species. As an artist, he bears witness to the contemporary
reality, but also to past times, thus contributing to a general social
activism. Even though he often bears witness to the world as shown on
TV and in other means of information, he perceives it as his own reality
into which he has been thrown (see video work: In my room) and which
does not leave him detached.
As a pacifist, Tišma counterposes the philosophy of war to the
philosophy of peace, understanding peace as something more than an absence
of war. Peace, among other things, is for him a spiritual category the
power of which he tried to express in one of his performances, namely
in his art (spi)ritual called Tower of Angels. The tower is shown not
as a real structure of brick and mortar, but rather as a structure of
spirit designed to accept and unify all good beings who strive for peace,
well-being, harmony, love and the victory of good over evil, which would
make it a bastion against everything that ravages the integrity of a
state, stability and freedom, i.e. stands as a symbol of peace which
will transform war, any form of aggression and intolerance into a desired
state of peace.
What Andrej Tišma testifies to in his works may become clearer
from the work of the linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky "What
Uncle Sam Really Wants", which in a fierce criticism describes
American military interventions in the third world countries, especially
directed at Latin American countries, but these analyses of the background
of the interventions may be applied to all the other countries tackled
by the US foreign policy. Thus in an interview included in his book
"9 -11" Chomsky noted that America often failed to use the
term "war" and goes to such extremes as to talk about a "humanitarian
intervention" in Kosovo, for example, in order to remove the obviousness
of those intentions as far as possible from any association with terrorism,
arguing that such interventions were "forms of coercive diplomacy".
Essentially, Tišma is well aware of what Chomsky pointed out many
times, as well as in his interview "The Ideological Campaign"
referring to the American government, which endeavors to impose on the
world its plans such as: "the militarization of space; undermining
social democratic programs; also undermining concerns over the harsh
effects of corporate "globalization," or environmental issues,
or health insurance, (...); "instituting measures that will intensify
the transfer of wealth to the very few" (Noam Chomsky, 9 -11, 2001,
p. 10)
Fully aware of the diverse aspects of war issues, Andrej Tišma
enables each recipient and consummer of his art to directly feel and
experience this thread of tragedy and human destiny. In consonance with
the aspects he illuminates in his visual art, related to the "documentation"
of war issues, this artist can be called "the Serbian Chomsky",
who reveals artistic intentions towards an all-encompassing philosophy
of peace in the whole world. In his art criticism directed against homogenization
and forceful acts committed by the great powers, while driven by a concern
over the consequences of the inhumane forms of foreign policies in his
home region, Tišma occupies a notable place in dealing with war
issues within the contemporary art in Serbia.
"Dometi"
No. 160-161, Sombor, 2015.