NEW WORKS

Nikola Suic

VLADAN RADOVANOVIC: CONSTELLATIONS

Scenes and harmonies of the stellar pattern of cosmic space flowing, being
formed, invoked and combined in the synthetic work Constellations 1 by Vladan
Radovanovic, are transmitted and awakened by a complex articulation. According
to the author's note, the idea about composing the work occurred in the form of a
message from the subconscious - like the part of a remembered dream in which
human figures, carrying light-balls and changing places, as it is realized in moving
pictures - intricately approach and withdraw from each other. The synthetic nature
of blending various structural levels and media lines implies the framework of a
common time. In the tendencies of mid-fifties, when the creative adventure of
Vladan Radovanovic began and developed, it was already expressed, showing,
besides the mentioned directions of its own articulation, multiple possibilities of
interpretation. Following the integrity of media in interaction, the principle of inter-
action which also flows within the work Constellations is interwoven with cosmic
intricacy which does not only imply the intensity of the sequence of tones and
movements for each particular constellation, but also the difference between non-
representation or non-presentation and the performance itself, i.e. the formation of
a certain relationship. The twelve electronic light-and-sound balls within 23 con-
stellations are a mobile matrix of the author's notions, of theoretical standpoints and
experiential sensibility at the same time. It is thus possible to relate the adapted
parameters of the work Constellations to several examples from the author's earlier

1 The work was completed in 1997, and first performed at BEMUS on October 4 the same year
at the CVijeta Zuzoric Pavillion. Its performance included the Belgrade Chamber Choir conducted by
Vladimir MarkoviC. electronic sounds, light-and-sound balls, movement and slide projection. A television
video version of Constellations was produced by the Music Department of RTS (Radio and Television of
Serbia) edited by Snezana Nikolajevic. according to the author's script, and directed by the author and
Misko Milojevic. At the International Review of Composers in 1998, Vladan Radovanovic was awarded
the f rst prize for this work.

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creative repertory, which exemplified their expressivity and the schematic nature of
being grounded in the specificity of their layers. It concerns the division of activities,
which Vladan Radovanovic had advocated, precisely for the vestibule of the syn-
thetic method at that time, equally in the definition of his own ideas and the com-
menced realizations. The former kind consists of the works conceived in the field of
polymedia, the latter in the vocovisual. Whereas, according to the author, the poly-
media, like polyphony, integrates diverse media qualities without the semantic, the
vocovisual is a multimedia field of semantic- visual and sound forms.
The first example of polymedia is the realized but no longer existing model of
a Great Sound Tactizone, presented at the exhibition of the group Mediala in 1958,
as a proposal for a sound ambience expanded by a special media domain - the sen-
sation of the sense of touch through tactile art. This, as a synthetic approach, is joined
by the work Mock Mirror, in which, in the movement of participants in front of the
object in space, music plays an important part, which is shown by the vocovisual
work Variations for TV, where the articulation of layers of the photographed picture
of the music performer and their distribution in relation to the degrees of the sound
of the composition precisely by its division into variations underlines co-structurality.
Constellations, a work for twelve performers, light-and-sound balls, electron-
ic sounds, video and slide projection and movement, reveals a mythological back-
ground, becoming an abstract construction according to the precise instructions of
the score. Therefore, following the work reveals, quite certainly, the structured logic
of the mechanism of the necessity of the cosmological order of the performers with
luminokinetic objects - light-balls. In one aspect of his research in visual arts Vladan
Radovanovic had previously used a sphere, which as a geometric figure, with the
polyhedron, proved to be a suitable physical object for the conveyance of the chain
continuity of created pictures and words, syntax and scene. What was created were
vocovisual, i.e. suggested synthetic objects. To take a look back, iconographically, at
the sense of the sphere in Vladan Radovanovic's poetics would mean to embark on
the road of a possible comparative research of existential reasons and the general
definition of the sphere as a kinetic object.
In his object-book already, and definitely in his cosmological tonal poem, the
work Pustolina, the indication towards real three-dimensionality and the fourth
dimension was given by crossing the directions of the sentences carrying semantic
rises and falls, spirals and condensations like nebulae, generally by sentences with an
emphasized visual potential. Within the planimetric, two-dimensional groupings of
sentences, in strettos resembling sound clusters, a multiple direction of viewing and
possibility of understanding are formed. This is similar to the work Polyhedron, which
is a simultaneous blending of image and sentence, which means that the text on the
Sphere (1971-74) represents a blending of drawn and painted visible situations and
phonic-semantic flows, tied in the order of synthetic turns, and the ringed continu-
ity of words. They were analyzed by Dr. Mirjana Veselinovic Hofman as a situation
which by a media blending of the vocovisual work points to a 'powerful meditative
impulse, chiselled thinking, inventiveness, the enigmaticalness and poeticalness of

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 Nikola SUica: Vladan Redovenovi: Constellations

expression.' It is by this that, through a word flow, communicational life is realized,

and synthesis reaches a creative integrity of active thinking on a sensitivized tempo-
ral path. The basic traits of the order of constellations are given in the author's selec-
tion of views, from the circumpolar, winter, spring, summer and autumn observa-
tion, so that the Big Dipper, Hercules, Leo, Orion, Gemini, Taurus, Perseus,
Cassiopea or Andromeda occur in various cast divisions into male performers (with
pictures of stars underneath) and female performers (with the stars above), to the
final, mutual mixture which activates another significational layer of the work. A
strict definition is visible, whereby the twelve electronic light-balls, within the seen
23 constellations, form a direction for confirming the breadth and unrepeatability of
insight and living. The kinaesthetic directions of the voices behind the balls, incor-
porated in the phon of electronic sounds and noises, are in the function of reflect-
ing the sonorous and pictorial space-time which incomparably classifies Vladan
RadovanoviC's method under the research conception of an approach to totality
and structure of synthesis such as is rarely found in the poetics of modern art.
It is therefore interesting to regard the author's position in such endeavours, at
the same time systematic and with lucid imagination, in respect to the dominant
stream of the artistic poetics of contemporary production during the last twenty years,
when theoretical preoccupations were confronted with the existentialist thought and
phenomenological approach. In the appearances of a work in the web of historical
and geographical conditions - which characterize poststructuralist explanations,
equally adopted by the practice appearing in the wide range of postmodernism or
retrotendencies of contemporary art - it is precisely the communicational virtue of
the nucleus of the artist's self that is exposed and often questioned. This involves a
distinction between a true and a false selfness. Thus not unusually, and unfoundedly,
many selfnesses demonstrated in works of art prove to be dependent and tractable in
relation to others, pointing only to a surface of their own. True selfnessabides in spon-
taneity, and spontaneity is organized and schematically condensed by Constellationsl
manifesting itself in the communication of consonance of the communicating exper-
iment, equally with the chosen direction and the subject of observer-listener. A fea-
ture possessed by the work in its sequences and programmed durations, its docu-
mentation of the cosmos by using slides and through the lens of transmitted distances,
possesses the refinement of strong intimate dedication. Events in the various media
in the course of the work are shaped while arriving from one creative centre.
There are many possibilities of this shaping which, by means of mythological
excerpts, points to a cosmic and civilizational identity of a sacral Ptolemaean drama
of cosmic movement. This, in turn, automatically shapes the mode of circumstances,
consonance of thinking and thin evocativity contained and stimulated by
Constellations l in the form of an existential question mark, visible in various intensi-
ties throughout the author's poetics. By their sonorous rhythmical language, but also
by the language from their visual side, the directions of the appearance of the cho-
rus, its promenade and constitution, i.e. metamorphosis into clusters of stars, show

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us the beauty of searching which is extremely rare - at least in such adjustment and
control of parameters - in the contemporary creative conveyance of different or com-
bined artistic disciplines. In the interweaving of the moving pictures of constellations
reflected by the performers with the balls, pulsating like a torrent, there are also sev-
eral close-ups such as the conductor's hands from which emerges a scene of a cos-
mic Nova, or when the conductor's body becomes a reservoir for the constellations.
It is precisely such symbolic primal causality, which defines different examples
of the artist's realizations during over four decades, that originated from the times of
the author's earliest research involvements. By Vladan Radovanovic's synthetic work
Constellations, a formally principled process of all the data contributes both to the
interpretation of the creation and duration of an individual and his imaginings and the
cosmos. Since the author had anticipated in his works and research of musical expres-
sion the foundations of performing art and minimalist music on the one hand and a
step out towards tactile sensations as sense sensations for art, there also existed a dec-
laration, in his advocacy for a synthesis of the arts, through polymedia and projects in
ambiences and spaces of organized semantic atmosphere, of creating a ritual or rite de
passage. To observe and truly consider art means to be prepared in any given moment
to approach someone's independent universe and work which is manifested by its
autochtony and clearly exposes the simultaneity of the generative potential of its lan-
guage. Rite de passage as a principle, almost a genre of various poetics or individual
realizations, aroused various authors, from Joseph Beuys to Bill Viola. It harmonizes
solitary creative experience into the separate existential situations of a creator abosrbed
in the problem of totality of effect of his/her work, in the questioning and alterations of
the language of contemporary visual arts. On the one hand, the creation of such tran-
sitory states is even determined by a theological reversal, but in the sense of a special
accumulation of data, movements, scenes and sound in the creative experience of
offered metamorphosis. By the synthetic work Constellations a transmission into such
experience is underlined by the creation of a language of mythological ceremony in the
wondrous beauty of syntactic, sound, musical and visual programmes.
The sense ofthe gigantic crisis into which modern societies, systems and their
culture are ever more obviously falling - crisis which, according to Julia Kristeva, is
'deeper now at the threshold of the third millenium than the crisis from the beginning
of our era' - shows that life activity and creative practice are far from the religious side
of salvation advocated by Heidegger. According to some artistic preoccupations, as it
is discreetly but intensively shown by the ingredients of the work Constellations, cer-
tain salvation abides in this kind of artistic experience, manifested in the imagination,
concentration, structural organization and sensual balance of Vladan Radovanovic,
It is a way of awakening a series of scenes, music and sound, which subdue
entities and conceptions to the creative, divine first cause. By the clear effects of lan-
guage consonance in sensual forms we reach the primordial time and the multiplic-
ity of our cosmological recognitions.

(Translated by Branka Nikolic)

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