Vuk Ćosić

Personal Front

We are in this world to contribute and our main artistic relevance is in social relevance. Fine. But also, as artists, we are creatures motivated by the impossibility NOT to create. Therefore, along the more outgoing regime-change art practice I have developed a parallel line of work that is not burdened by the requirements of public action. I am finding that the split screen between the public and private work creates a warm and very useful blur that I am eager to explore in mutual training settings.

This private arena turned out to be equally potent in establishing actionable ethical clarity and is sometimes incisive exactly because it is not planned as public. I would like to share some of these private works that serve as meditation devices (about nation states) and sometimes look like artists books but are really personal liberation machines.

BUT! Treating the personal front as a last stop for artistic ideas also stinks of hippy self-help crap and also of corporations delegating responsability to the end consumer. No. I am talking about developing muscular resistance fighters here. We really have to talk.

Biography

Vuk is a canonized classic of net.art and a co-founder of the nettime and Syndicate mailing lists as well as the Ljubljana Digital Media Lab. He has exhibited in many well-known galleries and museums, and has lectured in several dozen art academies while, apparently, withstanding the test of time. 

He refuses to run his life like a business, but his work is being written about, quoted, imitated, and even collected. His basic education as an archaeologist combined with an avant-gardist ethos has provided him with both the long view and rapid bursts of passion necessary for working in the critical media arts. 

He sometimes writes about himself in the third person.