Aldo Milohnić
Performing arts and the fictional structure of the law
Opening lecture – contemporary performance & dance festival Locomotion
Skopje, 27th October, 2014
In contemporary art practices there is a growing group of artists whose key methodological guiding line is the relation between art and the law. This orientation, in Slovenia characteristic especially of the work of Janez Janša, carries on the ideas of the historical avant-garde, which renounced the ghetto of bourgeois art and argued that art cannot be separated from everyday practice. What is characteristic of Janša’s work in performing and visual arts is a very special form of facing the law that is no longer oriented towards a direct confrontation with the law, a dissident activity outside the law, but, on the contrary, towards creating with the law. Precisely by working with the law, Janša discloses the legal fiction of a rational subject acting according to the rules. The key message of Life [in Progress] and Janša’s otraher projects is that law is merely a technological fiction that ever so efficiently impacts our lives – it is a virtual reality that overdetermines reality.
Aldo Milohnić is an assistant professor of the history of theatre at the University of Ljubljana, Academy for Theatre, Radio, Film and Television. He is editor-in-chief of the Politike book series and editor or co-editor of numerous anthologies of texts and special issues of cultural journals and author of the book Theories of Contemporary Theatre and Performance (2009). In the last twenty years he has been involved in many research projects dealing with history and theory of performing arts, sociology of culture, and cultural policy issues.
