▓ Make Your Dreams Come Backyard

The topic of my master's thesis is the alternative future of contemporary art and the figure of contemporary artist; a method of thinking about such things and, in general, of how it is possible to speak of complex phenomena without reduction.

I have explored most alternatives to what we might call the dominant conception of contemporary art in the form of a fictional text. The creation of these short stories was based on the collected research material and its complexity preserving – non-hierarchical – application in the text.

One alternative future I decided to explore through the means of an installation – a practical part of my thesis. What if contemporary art consisted of: the artist choosing a specific (narrow) audience in advance, which he knew had absolute access to the content of the work (eg shared memories, knowledge, etc.) and then carried out the work intended only for that narrow audience. Imagine all galleries of contemporary art hosting such exhibitions aimed at the artist's several „acquaintances", while others would practically never come even close to the actual content of the work. The public's interpretation of such a work would be based purely on chance or, in relation to the content of the work, on completely irrelevant reasoning.

In my case, it was an audience of three: my childhood friend Dan, my brother and mother. I told Dan and my brother that I would like to build a 1:1 model of the backyard, where we often played together as children.

We decided to build an entrance to that backyard. Dan brought just the ladder we used to climb up in to the backyard. Upstairs there was a large tree and bushes. The material we used was based on what I already owned or I could borrow / get from my friends.

This approach largely reflects the emphasis on the non-hierarchical meaning of the material I worked with when working on alternative futures in fiction writing. Because it is the interplay of coincidences, not the planning that decides what the future will look like.