One Person - Various Thoughts: Comments, Opinions, Explanations

The purpose of this section is to develop an attitude for understanding the One Person project. Set up in a location with many contradictory historical layers and in a time of sharp social conflicts, One Person is used as a new point of opposition. Verbal attacks, harsh epithets, interpretations and manipulations are part of the public and media space. Along with them there are miscellaneous questions, comments, opinions, positions, which are an important manifestation of our diverse society. I could not encapsulate myself - as far as I can, I will consider them, try to understand them, accept them as an important right to evaluate and answer them.

 

Question / opinion: Why was the implementation of the project so delayed?

Answer / position: It is important to mention that the deadlines for the implementation of the project One Person should be divided into two parts: preparation and implementation. In terms of preparation, I often have to say that the reasons for the delay are not obstacles, but procedures. I took the responsibility to publish the whole schedule and all of the documentation on the coordination process, issuing permits, meetings and presentations to committees, expert councils and all other administrative procedures of the One Person project. Detailed information can be found by following this link.

Regarding the second part, the actual realization followed the agreed period of 4 months (July-October 2020). Indeed, the process of creating the installation One Person took the last one and a half months of intensive work. Quite the achievement for such a complex project in a health, economic and political crisis. Amazing team, congratulations to all who contributed to the successful realization.

Question / Opinion: Aesthetics, if not self-evident, may not be exactly aesthetics.

Answer / position: Yes, this is not "exactly aesthetics", decoration, urban decoration. One Person does not beautify, does not caress the eye, does not flirt with people's ideas of beautiful and ugly.

Question / Opinion: The meaning will probably be encoded in the work (* installation, excuse me) but we do not want to have to decode it, because your project bears all the hallmarks of a post-modern muddle, which will look extremely bad against the beautiful (in the strictly classical sense of the word) historic buildings around it.

Answer / position: That's right, the meaning is encoded in the work / installation (* neither one nor the other definition offends me). This is my idea and approach in art: a game of encoding and decoding. My project bears the marks of the period after Postmodernism, which is called Technoculture. This is a topic for a long theoretical discussion. How it will stand against the background of beautiful buildings is related to the previous question of aesthetics, but One Person will stand against this background, just as each of us stands: according to some - ridiculous, but as it is -contemporary, modern, result from decades of development, changes, fashions, trends, irreversibly different from the "classical background" and "classical meanings".

Question / Opinion: Should this temporary sculpture be placed opposite of the National Gallery?

Answer / position: This question impresses with its manipulativeness for several reasons. The questioner causes the possibility of negation, where there are clearly defined rules and reasons leading to the irrevocable process of project implementation. In doing so, he tries to discredit the contracting authority, the expert assessments that confirm it, and ultimately the author's idea. The questioner has used as an illustration of his question one of the visualizations of the project, which is situational, ie. marks a volume in the location. The conclusions drawn from this image and the definition of "sculpture" are the result of ignorance of the project, and the question arises why do we dispute the existence of something we are not familiar with? The other aspect of the opposition has a national flavour. As much as it is opposite the National Gallery, so is the figure of One Person east of the BNB, northwest of Bulgaria Hall, north of the National Theater and especially above the remnants of our totalitarian past. The thin lines between the national and the nationalistic, the democratic and the restrictive, the civil and the authoritarian, the free and the censored, the permitted and the forbidden, are increasingly thinning from such questions and the passionate reactions they provoke. I hope more people realize this.

Question / Opinion: I would really define the work as architectural. Not simply because of the scale, but above all - because of its ability to accommodate man - to give him a free space between heaven and earth, between inside and outside, between before and after. I think that a good tradition is being formed at this location and this work exactly will give it the necessary resolution.

Answer / position: An interesting point of view is the observation that One Person, as an architectural form, shelters the man. Probably for this reason, and its resemblance rather to the character of the brutalist architecture, the visual connection with the extreme districts of Sofia would be curious.

Question / opinion: OK. When the work of contemporary art obviously has no tendency to be defined by aesthetic categories, then it carries an important message. The criterion of readability of the work appears, which displaces the last remnants of aesthetic pleasure, and according to Adorno, the more one understands, the less one enjoys the works of art.

Well, let's just say I agree with that point of view (if it's not the only one, of course), because I look at art as a free expression of ideas. And what does the great, say, anthropomorphic figure opposite the Palace tell us?

This is how I personally read the message: we have lived to a high-tech civilization, technical progress has covered the whole system; the individual is manipulated rationally with the help of a global network of mass control; the individual is allowed to appear on the screen in certain modes. Thanks to these technological advances, individuality is controlled by the general public, and I can say that this is how I imagine the one-dimensional Marcuse man. According to Marcuse, one-dimensionality has a universal character, it is homogeneity, unification, one-direction, it means lack of opposition, lack of criticism.

Totalitarianism again. It's not OK.

Answer / position: One Person is a living organism and symbolizes the liberal. Thanks for the insightful references to Adorno and Marcuse. One Person is a multidimensional environment (namely an environment), which can be a refuge for the One-dimensional person. He is the space that Marcuse speaks of, beyond the compulsions of work, family and consumption, which "eats" all available hours of our day, so that we can not spend more time on introspection, creativity, diversification of our way of life or "non-functional" socialization. One Person is closer to Hakim Bay's idea of ​​a Temporary Autonomous Zone, in which a group of people (or a series of individuals) resists by the very act of being together without having to work or consume. The right to appear on the screen is a right of importance that does not need criteria. The right to criticize the various presences and any available instant composition is irrevocable and encouraged. One Person is the real opposition to the current repressive tolerance (according to Marcuse), according to which everyone has the right to an opinion, as long as he keeps it to himself. One Person is also the real opposition to the conservative belief that someone must at all costs impose the appropriate criteria and refute the absolutization of one's own taste. One Person overexposes the capacity for individual responsibility that underlies everything.

Question / opinion: In short, I passed by last night and checked again:

This is the most interesting, exciting, all-encompassing, multi-layered, multi-powerful, all-seeing, sensitive and unbiased, frightening and beautiful, sociable and lonely, calculating and crazy, bright and profound, ... the most remarkable, and in its invisibility, Bulgarian phenomenon. in the field of visual arts for 2020

"One Person"

Let him be alive and healthy in 2021!

Answer / position: I don't have a "most" on my keyboard, but this opinion is the greatest New Year's gift for One Person.