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Editorial
In Vienna, holding neatly packed photographs on aluminium plates, and none too light either, I change from bus to underground. All of a sudden, a lady, a total stranger, turns to me and asks where I had got the green knapsack on my back. Well, I just hadn't expected that, people usually enquire from fellow-travellers about the way to some destination. But readers of magazines and commercials are wont to obtain exhaustive information as to where to buy a skirt, shoes, how much that necklace costs... Do they perhaps miss it "live" on pedestrians hurrying along streets? If I had then been sufficiently press-marked and had carried labels on me, then, caught off guard as I was, I would not have had to pick up my bruised photographs from the train floor. Hence, I wish to at least partly repay my information debt to those interested: on two pages of this issue you will find my own tips for fashion sources.
But this second issue of the SADO project, with the subtitle Places With Lowered Immunity, is primarily about what troubles us in life under our clothes, about our body and corporeality: Parasites, Corporalities, Slough, Messages to the Mirror, Portraits... All that brought closer through the optics of the authors’ texts, and always from a different angle of vision.
Everyone carries questions in his head, to which he ever and anon seeks answers (especially if he ceases to be satisfied with those that sufficed him until now). I sent my own on contemporary art to directors of progressive galleries, art centres and institutions in the form of a questionnaire. I retrieved their addresses on the internet and avidly waited for their replies. How many of them will open the questionnaire and how many will delete without reading? My server revealed this to me only about some of them. Nonetheless, it proved worth it to wait for the interesting replies, which I publish with relish. And the bonus? It may be that some of you will be amused by the evaluation that reached me from a certain server to a mail with my questions: 8 per cent spam.
And what about the questions themselves? Were they simple, difficult? Yes! – they were simply difficult. For instance: what about the question on the essence of art? A reply can evidently be found more easily at art schools. After all, when something is unclear, a student can verbally clarify what his work is about and the judges compare the artistic reality with its description. Later, the issue is not so simple. Less than a score of years ago – hence, the life-span of one generation – politics in art was compulsory in our part of the world. Even now we keep cautious. You will read about the connection between politics and art in the questionnaire. In the preceding – the first – issue of SADO with the subtitle Skin Seeks Cream, you could find my paintings and installations on the topic Saints. Such a subject has until now been a corn on the foot which should not be trodden on. And a further ticklish situation is that of religious versus sexual taboo.
If anything in our mini-survey caught your interest and you feel you could contribute with your view to the replies in hand, I shall be happy to read your mail, too. As there are plenty of further attractive topics, some of them might appear in the next issue of SADO. I am already beginning to muse over it now – under the heading Celebration of Everydayness.
Dorota Sadovská