Sezgin Boynik, the editor of the diverse and comprehensive magazine Rab-Rab (a journal for political and formal issues in art) is an author with many interests, which encompass the experimental cinematography of former Yugoslavia, Turkish punk, free jazz, conceptual art, art theory and political philosophy. He is an example of a passionate devotee, who is at the same time a precise academic thinker.
The starting point of my presentation is an argument that the radical political engagement and experimental forms in art do not exclude each other. My thesis is that the convergences between politics and formalism in art practices are based on contradictory and complex relationship. In order to show these lines of intersections, I will talk about two projects that I am involved in.
First, is editing and publishing of /Rab-Rab: journal for political and formal inquiries in art /(www.rabrab.fi ). Since 2014 we have published three issues, focusing on the questions of language, noise, and artistic subjectivity, including divergent contributions such as on deconstruction of the theory of slogans of Lenin, artists writerliness, rhetorics of no wave punk, tautologies and ideologies of artistic research, history of swastika in Finland, materialist film, theory of Shklovsky, critique of Luigi Rusolo, violence and music, visual language of Communist Manifesto, Hegel and conceptual art, swearwords in Marx, mathemes of cinema, and many others.
Most of these contributions are either by artists or theoreticians and scholars involved in an art project.
Second line of my presentation will be about a particular moment in the history of conceptual art of Yugoslavia when some of the members of Art & Language group has visited Yugoslavia in 1975 with the plan to realize an index on art collectives and bureaucracy in the context of self-management socialism (http://glossary.mg-lj.si/related/commons-boynik/347?ref=commons). By talking about this work-in-progress, I will discuss the political and formal aspect of the project and as well the question of actualization of an artwork from the seventies.
