<nettime> [ 0100101110101101.ORG ] THE DEATH AND DEATH OF DARKO MAVER

[PROPAGANDA@0100101110101101.ORG]

>From "Mute", n. 17, May 2000

THE DEATH AND DEATH OF DARKO MAVER
In paying tribute to the short-lived career of performance artist
Darko Maver, the artworld got more than it bargained for.

Ada Veen reports

Last May, news started trickling through the European artworld that
the Serbo-Slovenian artist Darko Maver had died in enigmatic
circumstances in a prison near Kosovan border. Maver's brand of
nomadic performance art, which consisted of placing gruesomely
realistic models of murder victims in a series of hotel rooms and
empty houses dotted around the former Yugoslavia, had been attracting
press attention since the previous years. The Bologna-based webzine
Entartete Kunst ('Degenerate Art') had spotted him first, and profiles
had followed in Tema Celeste and Flesh Out. His arrest, for
distributing 'anti-patriotic propaganda', had prompted the 'Free Art
Campaign', with hundreds of Italian artists calling for his release.
Shortly after his death, Ljubljana's Kapelica Gallery exhibited Tanz
der Spinne ('Dance of the Spider') project, and published his texts
Disappearance of the Body and Anaphoragenetica. In September, he was
included in the 48th Venice Biennale and a comprehensive retrospective
was mounted by Rome's Forte Prenestino, complete with biographical
films and theatrical tributes. His habilitation, so it seemed, was
signed, sealed and delivered.
Then, this February, the whole cosy-if-sad official history was blown
wide open by the revelation that Darko Maver had never, in fact,
existed. He was the creation, it transpired, of the art collective
0100101110101101.ORG - who also (sound of a thousand red-faced people
kicking themselves here) edit Entartete Kunst. But a further
revelation turned red faces sickly pale: the horrifically maimed,
bleeding and decapitated waxwork figures Maver had made his name with
- photos of which had been widely circulated - weren't models at all,
but rather photographic documents of actual atrocities, several of
which had taken place in Maver's 'home' patch of the former
Yugoslavia.
0100101110101101.ORG have stressed in interviews that their creation -
perpetration - of Maver was intended to do more than simply highlight
the inadequacies of the artworld, in the manner of the recent Nat Tate
retrospective in New York (at which critics queued up to declare how
long they'd been fans of a painter Bowie an his friends had invented
the month before). Maver, they claim, does exist - in hybrid form,
skulking the network from which he's been teased and wired (the
photos, for example, are imported from the stomach-churning rotten
site; the name Darko Maver itself was found in a bibliography). But
Maver's reality is more than semiotic: it's mythopoetic too. With the
revelation of his inactuality, a real death and a hundred simulated
ones were suddenly transformed into a portal opening to our age's own
grotesque political - and ontological - Unconscious. Pan, it turns
out, lives.

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