Adam’s Zine

Miro by Adam Mundzic is a short photography series that looks at accidental art.

It’s a load of lines and marks that appear unassumingly on the street.

“By looking closely at our environment we can create a dialogue of meaning and curiosity behind the mundane marks we see everyday, questioning the idea of what it is to create art and how context and space play a major role in what is considered valuable versus what is considered vandalism.” [Miro Publicity]

The work is simple documentation of marks left on pavements and street corners. It’s a collection of images of graffiti at its smallest, nature that is shyly lingering through marks they leave behind and other unobvious things. Some marks are contextualised as vandalism, some not, but in this collection, all mark making is under microscopic questioning, simply through arranging them into a Zine and holding it up as ‘ART’.

The zine asks, what’s the point of excellent art that plays by the rules, if all mark making by us, accidental or purposefully destructive, shares something about the experience of being human?

Let’s take this work and see it as something that questions the Canon.

If “the true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist’s own spiritual nature” then perhaps this zine documents the greatest art we can know. This Zine is art that traces humanness in the wild. It shows the human desire to make a mark, and shows that each human will make a mark in a slightly different way. It shows humans will break rules to make their marks. And some marks are left to pass through time, documented or preserved. That feels like an explanation of all art and the why behind people making it and viewing it and archiving it.

If art is meant to “wash away from the soul the dust of everyday life”, then Adam’s work perhaps falls short. Because it is the everyday, with no dust removed.

Or.. has Adam’s collecting of these images, of accidental art work, now lifted them and shined a light on what could have been forgotten, washing away the dust of everyday life through the act of celebrating it, but keeping it raw, too.

If the artist is to say “I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality”, then Adam’s work here is reality in a very bare way. In fact, even the act of documenting it and putting it into a zine shields the most ‘real’ versions of the artworks themselves that live on the streets. They’ve been squashed into a book and captured.

Why might these slightly pretentious and wanky thoughts be relevant to my choreographic practice? Because it sheds a light on how accidental movement, pedestrian movement, through its organisation and inclusion in performance can become celebrated and elevated. And that how, by doing this, it gets to the heart of what I think I’m trying to achieve -

The acknowledgement of how bodies make marks on their own. The archiving of what bodies want to say (through dance). Not marks that remain on streets, in my case, but marks that are fleeting, marks for the moment it lives in space and marks that might be forgotten.

If my reasoning behind making choreography is on the unique marks that each human makes, then to assemble, practice and use just a few codified ways of moving (ballet, jazz, hip-hop) means that the importance of the mark making made on stage feels… meh. It is not reflective of the many movement marks humankind makes, but rather the celebration of a few and the ego’s behind them that have decided ‘this is the way’. Adam’s work gets to the heart of this, this mark making of humans as enough for art, without the need for it to hold up in ‘the court of art’ but rather allowing passers by to come to their own judgement of what happened, why they formed, why the mark is there.

Adam’s work also helps me look at how dancers take on board material. Within a codified technique, the mark making that appears on top of the learned movement technique from an individual is what is interesting to me, not the pristine, power-washed-street perfection. I’m keen to see dialogue between techniques and the person doing it. So I suppose I’m interested in the ‘vandalism’ of codified techniques, and the repurposing of this vandalism as new art. What is sad is that I feel this vandalism is often trained out of people, so much that it can be lost.

At the moment I feel quite interested in art untouched by learned concepts of artforms and the marks made by individuals with their ‘mundane’ and ‘everyday’ vitality, because that’s when I feel like dance is actually communicating something. Perhaps more so, I’m interested in where these two things, the what that is considered valuable by the canon and the what that is considered vandalised meet. How can they co-exist in one performance, in one structure.