2018-19 / “Poet‑Entrepreneur Cycle” /
HAIKU*O*MAT or HAIKUMACHINE /

 

Poetic installation as hommage to Japanese culture of Haiku poetry, cherry blossom, Fukuoka's "seed bombs," and fans of the vending machines. Hommage to Marco Polo; the first European to write about Japan and a man who inspired Columbus to make his famous exploit, to the French philosopher Roland Barthes; who described Japan in the "Empire of Signs", Vladimir Devide; mathematician, writer, and Croatian leading Japaneseologist who wrote about Japan in many books, and Kakuza Okakura and his "The Book of Tea". “ Unusualness / Man With Tea Inside of Him, / Cyclops Battle. “ This is a tiny "Le Petit" greeting to Japan from Dubrovnik, Omiš.. It is an interactive installation, a mechanical vending machine, an incubator; which offers a "product of Japanese culture" in "instant" variant of contemporary folklore. “To plant/ Haiku. To watch, / How it Grows.” A symbolic poetic gesture that plays with Japanese symbols and poetics, still in a concrete and practical way, indirectly paraphrases the clichés of the motives of Japanese culture - haiku, cherry, and rising sun. A part of newly established cycle "poet-entrepreneur" which, through the symbolic exchange of artist's work for the coin, tries to give the material "benefit" and thus "value" and "purpose" to his work in the context of modern society. Raises the question of (art) work "usefulness", and the method of payment in (Croatian) society, and of the subsistence of the artist / poet. In response, a poet-entrepreneur takes the step towards using vending machines (so popular in Japan) as the agent of mechanical transformation of coin into substance. Vending machine like the alchemist transforms "Art" into nature and into goods, and vice versa, nature into "art" and goods, and goods into "art" and nature.