Лъчезар Бояджиев е художник и теоретик, който обича да се самоиронизира със самоопределението “нещо като художник”. Работи с почти всички съвременни медии и понякога прави кураторски изложби. Артистичната му кариера започва веднага след промените от края на1989 година. Днес той е едно от важните имена на българското съвременно изкуство. Автор на самостоятелни изложби в България и по света, участва в групови международни изложби и биеналета. Повече в сайта на ИСИ-София.

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 Visual Protocols

Luchezar Boyadjiev

In the modern era (20-21 c.), when they finally happen, things appear to look exactly the way we had imagined they would look at the time we had them in our “sights” only as products of somebody’s imagination and power of visualization but had neither the technical nor the human resources to realize them at their moment of inception. For instance, the black and white video footage of the moon landing of Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong looks (in general, in rhythm, in aura, on July 21, 1969) surprisingly similar to the look of the Moon landing sequence from the Georges Méliès film “A Trip to the Moon” (1902); the most wildly imaginative paintings in the history of 20th c. art – the paintings by Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte in fact look the most realistic, more real than real and than any other art works from the heroic era of Modernism; the drawings of Leonardo of machines of war and engineering gadgets look surprising alike the actual machines and gadgets produced centuries later.

Why is that? My proposition is that what we can see and what we can imagine are instruments for each other; the “seen” and the “imagined” instrumentalize each other; there are “protocols” for instrumentalization – these are the ways for visualization and materialization of the “imagined” into the “seen” and vice versa; they are easiest to detect and analyze when engaging with either the future or the enemy. This is when they are most radical, political, functional and efficient. My proposition is that as far as the visual imagination is concerned – the unimaginable is that zone in the human consciousness where the visual ZERO is inscribed.

The paper will explore examples for visualization of either the future or the enemy such as the mentioned trips to the Moon; the Gothic Cathedral’s architecture vs. the Galleon and the 17^th c. ship building; the Albanian bunkers (1970-80ies) vs. the Christo/Jeanne-Claude Umbrellas (1991); as well as the two platforms for being political in contemporary art produced in 2010-2012 by the two (related but vastly different) Russian artist groups Voina and Pussy Riot.

The motivation for research is to explore how visual art is positioned within or without visual culture, how the two interact or intersect at the point where the future is imagined but cannot yet be visualized, where the politics of the unimaginable are conceivable but not yet doable. The expected outcome is a multimedia installation and a book.

November 10th, 2012
Sofia, Bulgaria

DOWNLOAD _pdf.   Visual Protocols, 2012 (50 mb)

 PART I

PART II

PART III