Marko Pogačnik: Gaia Culture

Even though from today’s standpoint, the artistic and ecological practice of Marko Pogačnik can seem esoteric, it has been marked by a continued tendency to escape the anthropocentric assumptions of art production, ever since his purposeful pursuit of the 1960s concept of programmed art. Since the 1960s, programmed art has been drawing extensively from the semiotics of fine arts or the theory of signs as a basis for a new type of aesthetics, which gained prominence in the works of conceptual art, neo-constructivism and early computer art. For Pogačar’s and OHO’s practice at the time, it is crucial in this context that the “new aesthetics” tried to eliminate any unnecessary semantic mediation of the artistic means of expression, which may be most clearly evidenced in Pogačar’s early reistic drawings. Reism was not only about choosing almost banal everyday objects and motifs to eliminate any possibility of the viewer’s (over)layering of meaning and the author’s projection of his or her state of mind, it was also a certain ethical attitude to the reality or singularity of anything that crosses the artist’s path. The drawing is here, as Tomaž Brejc put it, “in and of itself the perfect mediation between a thing and its appearance.” (2012: 96)

A more direct representation of the concept of envisioning a different civilisation, which was featured in Pogačnik’s proposal for the Maska 2023 project from 2006, started appearing in his work and the works of other OHO members between 1965 and 1968. At the core of this vision was an attempt at eliminating the anthropocentric attitude to humanity’s environment and establishing a different view of the world and things through wonder, disengagement from existing mental schemes and alienation of one’s attitude to everyday objects based on the purpose they serve, broadly speaking an attempt at returning to a perception of and being in an unspoilt “child-like” state, which is a relatively common aspiration of various artistic avant-garde movements from the 1850s onwards. The programme aspect of Pogačnik’s work since the 1960s thus follows an overall elimination of established art media and professional bases, the restriction of the performance of art to art spaces, the author’s function and a clearly identifiable and delineated work of art: the artwork is expanded to actions seeking to change relationships, the culture (of life) and, last but not least, civilisation, thereby also engaging metaphysical, spiritual and vital energy content.

The shift towards a comprehensive ecology, which is central to Pogačar’s later independent practice, developed further within the OHO group with the foundation of the Šempas Family in the early 1970s. While OHO’s early works in nature can be described as close to land art and defined as dealing with forms and materials in dialogue with nature, whose primary purpose should be communication between people, Pogačnik’s works from the late 1970s onwards start focusing mainly on matter and energies in space or the energy dimensions of planet Earth. In this context, the creation of art signs – kinesiograms and cosmograms – focuses mostly on establishing a point of communication between humans and beings of non-material dimensions, the artist’s body in the creative process acting much like a medium or a measuring apparatus. From today’s perspective, Pogačnik’s original proposal for the Maska 2023 project, entitled Sociogram: A Project for a New Civilisation, could easily be incorporated into a more frequently represented futuristic fiction, which rose to prominence after decades of contemporary art presentism and focus on the social space. However, Pogačar’s programmed art, in its strict sense, does not attempt to inspire affective responses that are to awake the human ability of conceptualisation (“hyperstition”), as it consistently moves on the field of a cosmological or even eschatological time of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As he writes in his 2006 proposal: “The realisation of a sociogram cannot be avoided, even if it takes places in a culture that does not take it seriously.”