Interview: Goran Petercol

author Goran Petercol
interviewed by Ivana Sajko

 

A text on an artist’s work may most appropriately start with the words of the artist himself: “I do not accept the illusion that I am starting from zero, nor that I shall remain at whatever I am starting with. There must be something that precedes a new work, and I want to encompass that”, says Goran Petercol in an interview in his “Working Monograph” published to coincide with the opening of the exhibition Flashes. “Working in a known, accepted system is monotonous. What makes it monotonous is the predictability of the result, but if I take a known system as one of the possible forms, then a new area opens up for further work. Of course, every system has meanings issuing from the historical reason for its emergence, but at the same time it also carries suppressed layers of other meanings. ’Suppressed’ so as to ensure the functioning of the basic meaning at the level of the convention; in other words, they are suppressed because we do not notice them, since everything is subordinated to some dominant idea. Redirecting one’s interest from the dominant towards one of those ’suppressed’ meanings actually means transferring oneself to a new position from which a new process begins. What I am trying to say is that every system contains within itself such positions, positions from which the system itself is challenged”.