The Grand Painting Exhibition with a Pile of Paintings

On the occasion of the Grand painting exhibition
of Jelena Mijić, with a pile of paintings
A city is text. Every text survives thanks to repetition
of stereotypes and their breaking, to trivialities
and their avoiding. By writing a short footnote to
this city, I’m just stamping the words spoken countless
times. Of course, it’s not me that is important,
it’s the footnote.
(Dubravka Ugrešić, Fox)
““Really,” – Dubravka Ugrešić wonders at the beginning of her latest novel
Fox – “How are stories conceived?” Many writers would welcome such
a question as a cue for a diatribe of their unfathomable creative endeavour,
and for that reason people respect such writers. But some others,
Ugrešić writes, “prefer to shrug their shoulders and allow the readers to
believe that stories grow like weed...” When it comes to exhibitions of
paintings, such an assumption is quite conventional – exhibitions exist
because paintings are, simply, already there, they have somehow grown,
sprung up. After all, one assumes that the production precedes the consumption,
that without the production of art, there is no consumption,
for without art production, you are the roots without a gourd, you are
the meme of a conceptual artist whom a famous comic hero slaps, trying
to get through her head that she is conceptual precisely because she can
neither draw nor paint. But the exhibition in front of us is turning things
and claims that the only way to be “conceptual” in art today is to draw and
paint many pictures, piles and heaps of them.
The grand painting exhibition with a pile of paintings, inasmuch as every
artistic act along the line of administrative conceptualism, was conceived