The awareness of existence, acquired through the everyday practice of living, establishes a sense of time as an endless repetition of the absurdity of daily routine. Each day contributes to a general increase of this absurdity. The seeming certainty acquired merely through endurance within the uniform habit of living creates an atmosphere in which the sense of time gradually dissolves. If every day is equally empty, what difference remains between yesterday, today, and tomorrow?
Within everyday routine there is a lack of clear means for distinguishing between the Real and the Conceived. Through the monotonous repetition of life for death’s sake, a veil of opacity spreads over the entire field of existence. To see means to comprehend; yet how can one comprehend the time that fully envelops one’s own existence? Because of the weakening of the distinction between subject and object, everyday routine gradually slips into a state of invisibility.
The hardly perceptible boundary between everyday life and death becomes faintly visible only through the fragile pulsation of life itself. The mathematics of blood refers to the property of continuity as the smallest common factor of the Real and the Conceived. In this way the notion of time becomes comparable to the discernible course of thought — an act of attention imposed by the order of things and comparable only to counting.
As the denominator of everyday life we may take the sequence of natural numbers:
1, 2, 3, …
The algorithm of this sequence corresponds to the monotonous course of everyday time. The parallel between daily routine and the sequence of natural numbers makes it possible for the counting of time to begin at an arbitrary moment, which may be defined as the Starting Event. From this point of origin, everyday routine extends into an arbitrary depth of time. At the distant boundary of perspective — where repetition of empty days gradually fades — we encounter the Final Event, the presumed beginning of subsequent counting.
The transformation into time may therefore be understood as the plunging of consciousness into an organized line of unavoidable possibilities, expressed through counting. Between the Starting and the Final Event stretches an empty space of nonsensical everyday routine, suspended between the two infinities called past and future. The magnitude of this space is determined by timed everyday routine, in which number functions as the signifier of time.
A vast sequence of numbers — increasing endlessly, moment by moment — becomes sufficiently long to encompass vast quantities of time. In this transformation everyday routine passes under the control of number, which functions as a measure preserving the sense of existence. Yet even this structure remains covered by the overarching vault of meaninglessness.
The principle of numerical sequence does not itself raise the question of meaning. It merely organizes resistance against the pressure of emptiness, placing practical adaptation to everyday routine in the foreground and enabling orientation under conditions of poor visibility. What, then, do we actually see when we glance at a watch? What do the numbers on its face truly signify?
In accordance with the numerical scale, the sequence of individual days is signified, yet this sequence remains impersonal. Numbers alone do not generate content. Through timing, everyday routine is determined only externally as a quantitative relation between numerator and measured space. Such a quotient merely establishes the formal construction of time. In quantitative terms, number functions only as a scientific instrument imposing calculation and excluding any arithmosophy.
Yet number is not merely a sign. First and foremost, it is the fundamental and original form of awareness of existence itself. It is both the meaning of Totality and its sign. As a sign, number operates through quantities — through the organized multiplicity of impersonal units forming the algebraic architecture of abstraction.
The quality of number, however, manifests itself through natural rhythms — as an inner emanation of individually personified numbers — thereby materializing itself in a literally arithmetic manner. While numbers quantitatively describe the structure of time, through their rhythmic properties they generate the content of reality itself.
Everyday routine is differentiated by the quantity of number, yet the numerical grid itself remains indiscrete. The discreteness of numbers as signifiers of empty days produces what may be called dis-discretion, or distiming.
If timing represents an arithmetic depersonalization of existence, distiming signifies the understanding of the organization of the established atmosphere that ultimately leads consciousness back to itself.
In everyday conditions the emergence of consciousness constitutes an Event, defined as the self-awareness of immediate presence. In this sense, timed space is discontinuous — an elaborate dynamic staccato marked by natural numbers, where every point contains an unrealized possibility of occurrence.
At any point within this timed space one may establish one’s own standpoint through counting. Once this occurs, everyday routine appears as a geometric distribution of points, each equally devoid of meaning relative to the standpoint called the present.
Through this shift, dis-discretion takes place, and the open sky of temporal emptiness suddenly appears strange and radically different from established consciousness. At the newly gained point of presence — the center of everyday routine — particularized consciousness reveals its newly born reality.
Outside pure presence, the notion of the real loses its clarity. By overcoming the tyranny of the present, everyday routine dissolves as a world without measure. It becomes instead a domain to be ruled — the domain of timing, within whose center the tension of presence gives rise to the manifestation of materialized consciousness.
In its original state, presence exhibits the deeper quality of unity within pre-original time, indicating the timeless constancy of the Pythagorean “motionless movement” as the ultimate meaning of distiming.
The measure of distiming, expressed through the rhythm of dis-discretion, follows from the fact that events within everyday routine cannot occur too frequently. If events were infinitely frequent, a permanent state of awakened self-consciousness would arise within timeless eternity. Yet because the certainty of existence in everyday life is established through pulsation, such a condition is impossible.
The smallest interval between two events is therefore determined by the transformation between two successive natural numbers. Distiming thus reveals the arithmosophic and metaphysical act of the continual recreation of the world, through which the original feeling of wholeness is tested and the eternal pattern of events established.
Numbers are not arbitrary creations of reason; they are natural phenomena. They lie at the foundations of existence: the principle of unity (1), polarity (2), function (3), symmetry (4), and center (5), capable of expressing what is otherwise inexpressible. The meaning of number establishes the most general inner description of all phenomena.
Another immersion in the phenomenal world renders time invisible once again — further evidence of the deep isomorphism between number and time. Distiming therefore becomes the most efficient means of extracting the subject from the blindness of immediacy.
It begins with the penetration of the closed circuit of everyday timing. Within this newly conquered territory of consciousness, the development of the sense of everyday time becomes visible. Through distiming, within the numerical rhythm of creation and dissolution of everydayness, the overarching rhythm of Totality emerges.
Distiming thus expands the field of visible presence to the entire domain of numerically defined Totality. Reduced to their fundamental rhythmic patterns, numbers become visibly pronounced through the images of their meaning — images that simultaneously embody their meanings.
The order of existence, illuminated by consciousness, thereby assumes the form of eternally present time. Time does not move; it occurs all at once, everywhere.
Dragan Mojović
It is not easy to write about the painting of Dragan Mojović. However strongly one may wish to reject the “Procrustean bed” as a form of repression against the freedom of non-conventional attitudes, every interpretation inevitably implies systematization and classification as the foundation of critical thinking. Mojović’s work constantly eludes us, and just when it seems that we have grasped it through a firm and precise definition, its contours begin to fade.
This freely — that is, non-academically — formed painter, an engineer of technology by profession, entered the world of art through side streets that eventually led to its front door. Art critics noticed him already at the time of his first solo exhibition at the Kolarac University gallery, and he was soon accepted by those whose influence proved decisive for the development of art in the 1970s.
Mojović’s rise has been unprecedented in Serbian postwar art. Over the course of only a decade he received a remarkable number of prestigious awards, usually reserved for artists of his generation: the painting prize at the XI Biennial of Young Artists in Rijeka; the X Memorial Nadežda Petrović in Čačak; the Vjesnik Josip Račić Prize; and the Politika Vladislav Ribnikar Prize. Only a year after his first solo exhibition, he was already included in a highly selective presentation of Yugoslav art at an international exhibition organized on the occasion of the ESCC at the Museum of Contemporary Art near Ušće in Belgrade.
Even more than the prizes themselves, Mojović’s appearance on the art scene compels us to reconsider our own criteria and attitudes toward art in general. Such a privilege has always been reserved for a very narrow circle of creators.
Mojović’s early canvases belong to the aesthetics of New Figuration, particularly if structure and visual material are taken as primary elements of definition. Yet the initial verism and illusionism of his work already contained a degree of intellectual penetration into existential questions. Through its persistent search for meaning and sense, his painting went beyond the cool, impersonal, and desemanticized practice characteristic of many of its major international models and local counterparts.
This tendency gradually revealed the embryo of a mental approach to artistic creation — one that incorporates philosophy, astronomy, physics, ecology, and other fields. In this way Mojović expanded the boundaries of artistic practice in a spirit close to postmodernism, supplementing the illusion of easel painting with a peculiar form of “reism.” His work therefore employs not only traditional painterly means but also installations, interventions in nature and urban space, performative actions, and language.
At a time marked by spiritual fatigue and the fashionable proclamation of the “death of art,” Mojović insisted on its total renewal. Any attempt to simply associate his work with conceptual art — or to identify it with that movement — would represent a contradictio in adjecto. Mojović operates through artefacts, which remain incompatible with the strict principles of post-object art and certain conceptual poetics.
Nevertheless, because of its pronounced intellectual character, his work implicitly includes conceptual elements — at least within those reflexive spheres in which the idea precedes the final artistic form.
As a typical representative of the artistic climate of the 1970s, Mojović avoided belonging to any specific group or eclectic trend. Instead, by assimilating and transforming a wide spectrum of ideas characteristic of the postmodern era, he developed his own artistic language — powerful enough to stand alongside, or even replace, the originality of the phenomena that preceded or accompanied it.
It is difficult to separate Mojović’s painting from the verbal articulation of his artistic practice. This may represent another reason why his work is often associated with conceptual art. Just as diagrams, texts, photographs, and similar materials serve conceptual art in defining its syntax and communication, Mojović’s own theoretical writings complement the representational dimension of his work.
Their apparent solipsism functions in service of the artwork itself. Mojović’s scientism is elementary and almost Pre-Socratic in its philosophical orientation — at once utopian and magical — while his dreamlike poetics remain rationally structured.
The entire oeuvre is built upon a productive contradiction. In my opinion, it marks one of the ultimate achievements of Serbian postmodernism.
Zoran Markuš