MIHAEL MILUNOVIĆ
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MIHAEL MILUNOVIĆ
Joy Ride Revelations In our Western Euro-Atlantic civilization of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the car is usually seen as a symbol of power, autonomy and economic well-being, of social status, class-membership and conspicuous consumption, of prestige, pride, success and an adventurous lifestyle, of freedom, maturity, masculinity, self-contained optimism and belief in progressive technology, of mobility, independence, ability to be self-directed in life, and of the unhindered self, allowing for escape, privacy, speed and flexibility. The libidinal undercurrents of these symbolical streams have turned it into one of the sublime objects of mass desires, one of the ultimate modern fetishes. Scenes in Cronenbergs "Crash", showing sperm all over the steering wheel, blood-soaked instrument panels, seatbelts smeared with excrement, and sun visors lined with brain tissue, are the ultimate apocalyptic visions of catastrophic modes of fulfillment of the desire for full, highly sexualized, bodily possession of those fetishes. The apocalypse is here and now, and its riders are taking a joy ride on our death drive impulses related to the worship of cars. Milunović ’s project deals precisely with the ways an apocalyptic fiction gets materialized in the frame of a visual representation of everyday sites. It transforms them from profane to sacral, and turns the objects used in the course of transformation into power objects, mediators between the two realms, messengers of the future to come. Milunović reveals and documents the apocalyptic ride, using the symbolic power of shapes and colors of some cars fitting into the category of fetish objects, stressing it with textual signifiers (such as: death, greed, plague, pest…) additionally printed on the license plates. Stevan Vuković |