"Klime_air conditioners" are drawings on a wood boards. Pencil is combined with acrylic and sperm.
Levels of meaning that initiate Matić`s masturbatory expressions applied in the drawings of white walls with monotonous motif of air-conditioning devices, apart from being associative and provocative, incorporate even a dose of exhibitionism which can be understood as a strategy for making distance from profane colonizing media aesthetics and spending body in spiritual climate within which intimacy is public and sexuality is depersonalized.
By means of bareness and uniformity of whiteness within which the invisible event of a hidden sexual act is packed, with the artist`s sperm as a stamp of happenings, in factual layer sensory information has been transferred and privacy becomes a ``product``. Hypothetically, in the eye of the beholder it induces reflections on personal sexual experience and provokes desire (for possessing authentic handwriting on the faktura of the drawing).
Aesthetic, emptied, black and white ambiences within which Marko Matić positions air-conditioning devices, as an ultimate technical solution to regulating thermic circumstances, with their simplicity and repetitiveness, remind of uniform, corporative ambiences, devoid of emotions. The white wall, the only decoration of which is an air-conditioner, does not remind one of a particular place (perhaps a non-place), at which the act of masturbation over personal artistic object (a drawing/a painting of an emptied place) ``took place``. These gestures trace in faktura of artistic work reveal organic presence of the author who, it could be said, gave exterior in an animistic way and gave life to his creations leaving traces of sperm instead of a signature.
Ambivalence of an untold confession of the artist and tactile facts of bodily record by means of the sperm, a perverted form of a diary of sexual experiences and/or sexual activities have actually been unsaid although they are universal experiences of almost every individual. On the surface of Matić`s pieces there are inscriptions of air-conditioner brands framed from different angles; this indicates the change of the angle in repetitive intimate action and time and space determination achieved by dating and recording the location at which the act of masturbation took place.
By means of tactile gesture record on faktura of the board on which drawings have been made and framed, Marko Matić in fact begins a dialogue with the audience offering his sperm drawing as a product. The artist periodically speculates on logic of capital and neo-liberal environment treating a piece of art like goods, like a fetish, like a product of personal masturbation of lonely individuals (artists) who tend to connect with the world (artistic or commercial) climate.
Modernism mystifies a piece of art as lofty goods, in which out of commercial reasons ``auras`` of authors are imperatively embedded by means of authenticity of artistic handwriting, originality and inventiveness in expression as well as with uniqueness of aesthetics and poetics. With that commercial trick, pieces of art are given the status of prestigious objects and the status of lucrative goods and art is treated like a ``special form of human creating that dignifies the man himself and his environment``. Opposing that, in Matić`s project ``Klime`` or ``Air-conditioners`` this paradigm of authenticity is banalized and bare. Interfacing repetitive motifs of monotonous corporative ambience with original corporal sperm sediment within the visual layer of his drawing Matić has become one of actual representatives of new intimism in visual art of Serbia at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
United, the drawing and personal body secretion, in a technological environment, create a theme out of the body like a device in the function of creativity. As creative sector and culture production acheived financial growth over the last twenty years, greater than up to then leading industries such as military industry, plane and car industry, exploitation of human creativity in the function of profit can, through Matić`s work, be treated as a diagnosis. The man is an embodied machine whose creations (secretions) are what matters in the economy of creativity of developed countries, just the same as in the transitional culture climate of Serbia where they advocate that visual culture should be led by the logic of the market since there is neither a developed audience nor artistic scene. In such non-stimulating circumstances the artist is in cleavage due to pressure to create either an authentic but communicative piece of art or to reproduce themselves by means of commercially attractive products of mainstream. Hence, culture climate that does both heating and cooling is actually a theater on which the artist is treated as a significant culture capital and, in fact, the artist is not integrated enough and used creative resource is ultimately left to itself and its artistic masturbation.
Gabriela Vasić, January 2012.
