Shammers
We have always had enormous problems with “reality”. This is, in effect, the history of modern philosophy, if not philosophy as such. It seems almost amusing that history, after all this voluminous theoretical reflection, has brought us back to a point of such radical gnosiological doubt. Yet Šum’s 2025 open call identifies novelty in the notion that, this time around, fictions are not something we produce ourselves but rather an effect of the virtual spaces we inhabit. It asks “what new languages or interfaces to reality might [art] help construct—as a way to mend our damaged relationship with both language and reality itself”.[1] What kind of philosophy and art does such a world need? Attempts to answer how this—let us call it—shift in ontological perspective can be conceived within art, particularly within the contemporary paradigm, can easily fall into the trap of conforming to trends that appear to satisfy momentary demands for something new and more marketable. For this reason, the text will focus on an artistic practice that at first glance does not seem particularly new or groundbreaking, one that may even look anachronistic, modernist, and—as the artist himself admits—mannerist, in order to show why a world which is “already becoming other to itself”[2]—a world that can no longer believe in its own reality—needs precisely such art. Moreover, that the world needs such art even when it believes in its own truth (or at least pretends to).
Reflection on our disbelief in this world, on the fact that the world does not believe in itself, that it is dominated more by affective intensities than by truths, operates, in a general sense, like a faith-driven denigration of earthliness. It accordingly seems that the configuration of this problem requires from us a certain religious yet paradoxical stance. Jon Derganc’s practice can help us illuminate this paradox, serving as a framework for a broader consideration of the initial problem.
Lightroom
Jon Derganc is a researcher of the limits of the representational capacities of the photographic medium. His work consciously utilizes photographic mechanisms and their effects to deconstruct photographic conventions and footholds, which inform the viewer’s entry into and understanding of photography. At the same time, his practice is motivated by an interest in the materiality of photography, as well as the subversion of the identity of this materiality. This tactic can legitimately be read as an explicit rejection of the documentary function of photography and the premise that photography/art can represent the world—which also constitutes a minimal definition of Derganc’s fundamental position, one that can be read in the context of a relation to a world that is no longer based on facts. Photography in Derganc’s work thus regularly runs up against the limits of its representational capacities: Derganc persistently tests the boundaries of (photographic) representation and instrumentalizes these limits, as in his early work Brezna (Sinkholes).[3] This series of analogue black and white photographs, an unpoliticized image of historical trauma—of post-World War II killings on Slovenian territory—emerges through the confrontation between the materiality of the abyss of a massacre site, such as those in the Kras region, and the materiality of analogue photography. That which is missing—a void that, in analogue photography, manifests as an absence of light, the blackness of a hole (a sinkhole)— culminates in its opposite: what was previously a void now appears as a black, saturated density on the surface of the photograph. At the core of the images, where one would wish to look the deepest, and also in relation to the historical event itself, photography encounters a peculiar kind of limit. This limit becomes the material of photographic representation and the place where the historical event is represented—not as it happened then, but as it exists now, in its absence. The materiality of photography comes to the forefront precisely when the representational power of the photographic medium is undermined.
Similar strategies are used in the exhibition Lightroom,[4] which brings into the traditional white cube of the gallery—a space that declaratively empties itself of exteriority—its own distinct exteriority: a series of eight photographs of a faintly cloudy sky. Here, the fact that the images are of the sky is mostly unintelligible, as from a distance the photographs appear to be gray monochromes, while up close they reveal the rastered granularity of printed photography. The photographs follow one another in a uniform rhythm, placed at approximately equal intervals, surrounding the viewer on three of the gallery’s four walls. The space is illuminated with similar uniformity, using 5,000 Kelvin white light, the standard for graphics and printing, considered the most “neutral” variant for recreating daylight.
Jon Derganc, in relation to his photographic practice, speaks of a cinematographic logic. I would like, however, to speak of a certain religious logic in relation to the recognizable topoi of his work: the exploration of the monochrome in photography and the phenomenon of emptied space—a space that is artificial and, at the same time, more real than real space.
Rather than descend into a scholarly discussion on the monochrome, I would rather start with a more common-sense, art-historical reading of Lightroom. What, then, is a monochrome? A certain extreme point in the experiment with abstraction, which on the one hand radically announces the end of all illusionism in painting—the monochrome is only what it is—and on the other, through this negation of illusionism, opens up certain dimensions beyond it. Hence the immediate parallels between the monochrome and the (religious) icon, which, through a radical denial of the illusion of space, with its monochrome gold background, open a space beyond space, a space of eternity. We can note another seemingly banal parallel: the icon, in the context of a linear view of art’s development, represents an example of “immutability”, as it is difficult even for skilled art historians to recognize the differences between icons across certain periods. It is similar here; the differences between the images in Lightroom are barely perceptible. Just as for icon painters there is no importance in establishing a visible difference between the works on display, the same is clearly the case for Derganc—even though the images are distinct works, he insists on a specific proximity, an indistinguishability that, rather than suggesting temporal movement, creates a sense of stasis. In Lightroom, there is no ambition to create a sequence. As with a monotheistic god, here there is neither beginning nor end. The exhibition resists the logic of narrative, of following a succession of images; on the contrary, it rests on the idealized hypothesis that we can perceive everything at once. We are therefore confronted with a freezing of temporalization, a certain inability for us to temporalize, against which Lightroom, in the language of theory-fiction, creates a space of non-human temporality.
The second dimension of the work that encapsulates a religious logic is the space itself. We are in the immediate vicinity of emptiness, which is further emphasized by the fact that, in a certain manner, the photographs and the lighting neutralize one another, erasing themselves as separate units within an experience of the void of the whole. In this respect, the Lightroom exhibition seems to approach yet another artistic tradition: if we were initially confronted with the monochrome as a radical, enigmatic, speculative apex of modernist painting, here we are situated in the tradition of exhibiting empty spaces as a radical, enigmatic, speculative apex of conceptual art. Once again, the same formula applies: empty spaces, at first glance, show only themselves, that is, only what is directly before us, what they make present; at the same time, they open the artistic experience to a certain other aspect of “reality”. This is, in fact, a shared undertone in the exhibitions of empty spaces: they are always emptied with the purpose of allowing a particular truth to speak—a truth that, due to the focus on the exhibited works, is usually in the background, hidden or silenced: such as the truth of the space’s institutional embedding, the truth of its architecture, or the truth of its economic context. In short, the space is emptied so that a higher truth could speak.
The monochrome and the empty space appear as art’s response in the form of a post-Enlightenment, secularized religion, with a soteriological and eschatological mission. Here too, the truth is supposed to set us free, and the emptied place of the Absolute as the guarantor of truth is now occupied by the Institution, although perhaps only as a retroactive illusion. This is to say that even in the case of the most radical iconoclastic practices, we often cannot avoid the impression, as Marko Jenko has observed, that “in a lot of this postwar art, in all its contrarian spirit, that behind its bold gestures hides a quieter one: namely, the secret wish that institutions would actually work, as they once supposedly did, that they still can be some sort of a guarantee of that magical fiat lux or fiat ars by patting an object on its back and bestowing upon it a certain status”.
Capitalism has shaken everything, including this power of bestowing status. Such a time-after-truth leaves us not only without a transcendent pole, not only without any guarantor, but even without any illusion of a guarantor. We are faced with the situation described by the editors of Šum, where we must define ourselves in relation to this irreversibly damaged relationship with the world. Let us return to the initial question: “What new languages or interfaces to reality might [art] help construct—as a way to mend our damaged relationship with both language and reality itself?” The entire configuration of this problem acts as if it demanded from us a certain paradoxical religious stance—a religion without transcendence. This is also the thesis of this text. But a religious stance in the moment of post-truth will have to ground itself on foundations entirely different from those of the Enlightenment faith in the worldly. Thinking about our disbelief in this world, about the fact that the world does not believe in itself, that it is dominated more by affective intensities than by truths, acts in general like an old, pre-Enlightenment religious denigration of earthliness—but this time without pinning any hopes on salvation in the afterlife or at least in any particular meaningfully superior immanence which would be capable of guaranteeing a certain level of truth. How, then, to reconcile such a world without the mediation of a big Other? What kind of relationship can we even rely on? And how does art invest itself in it?
Derganc’s Mannerisms: Post-Production as Enacting a “Non-Relation” to Reality
Derganc’s practice appears within the deliberate tension between artistic tradition and these (to a certain extent) new circumstances of an “algorithmically fuelled psychotic break with reality”, as described by Šum. We can approach this practice through its aforementioned interest in the material transformations of the photographic object, as well as the photograph as an object within the very process of photographic production and post-production. What is crucial here is precisely the establishment of an analogy between the material processes involved in the creation of a photograph and the material aspects of the formation of the object being photographed.
Equally important is the fact that Derganc’s works do not refrain from post-production. On the contrary, post-production is often not only immanent to the work but constitutive of it, a process that retroactively reconstructs the artwork itself. Considering that artificial intelligence is today—and by all indications, will be in the future—inseparably built into the mechanisms of modern post-production tools, any digitally processed photograph is increasingly immanently “fabricated” toward the virtual (which at this level acts as a symbol of human cognitive capacity). Derganc’s work thus constitutes a moment of enacting a non-relation (or de-relation, the dissolution of the relation) of the artwork to reality. This is evident in his piece Portrait, presented at the recent Manirizmi (Mannerisms) exhibition, where Derganc uses a digital blurring tool—originally intended for retouching unwanted parts of a photograph—to blur entire semantically rich areas of the image, such as the human face. Portrait accordingly becomes “visible” only through the negation of the representational relation to reality, via the act of blurring. Through this kind of transference of photography into the domain of painting, Derganc emphasizes and maps the fictional orientation of every artwork as an immanent dimension of the work itself. Yet art does not wager solely on fiction but on the “artificial” in general; it thus enacts the fate of our relationship to reality.
The task of art is to artificialize. Derganc’s disbelief in reality is not one of critical provenance, just as his interrogation of the medium of photography and its representational capabilities is not “critical” in the sense of privileging one truth over another. It is therefore not a matter of enacting understanding, but rather of enacting a certain impossibility of grasping—an impossibility of a symmetrical relationship—which necessarily positions artificialization as the basis of any relationship to reality. Lightroom thus creates an outside inside. It does this through explicit non-mimesis, that is, precisely by emphasizing the artificiality of this activity. It feigns; it pretends to recapitulate a natural ambience, while it actually recapitulates a photographic one. The Lightroom project is at its core about establishing a parallel between both registers: the relation of exteriority and interiority within photography, and the relation between outside and inside in the context of the exhibition space—and perhaps even of art in general. Just as fluffy clouds and the granulation of the photographic print simultaneously cross-fertilize and destabilize each other, so too do the light of a sunny day at 12 PM and the D50 standard studio lights confront and undermine each other. I would even venture a further step and read in this a statement about a certain parallel—or even interchangeability—between the practices of art and life. Yet, unlike conceptualism, here the dynamic moves in the opposite direction: instead of art dissolving into life, it is life that proves to be art(ificial).
Art appears here as a unique ritual prop through which Derganc stages a relation to reality. His more recent work Ko poskušaš biti nekaj, kar nisi (When You Try to Be Something You Are Not) depicts a frog situated in the corner of a pale yellow ceiling. Although the shades of the frog and the wall are highly similar, we can still perceive the frog, no matter how thoroughly it attempts to merge with the wall via its natural camouflage. The work encapsulates what has been discussed so far: it functions as a commentary on documentary photography’s futile attempt to embody reality, highlighting instead a certain interchangeability of perspectives—we can perceive the frog as it is resting on the floor, facing a corner, or sitting on the outward-facing corner of a box-like object. The placement of the work within the aforementioned Manirizmi exhibition is particularly explicit: the photograph is installed like an Orthodox icon, high on the wall and angled toward the viewer below. As such, it effectively functions as a cultic symbol of Derganc’s denomination without an Absolute. Height and depth, flattening and perspective coexist within it, merging into a veneration of the ability to sustain contradiction and opposition, in a delicate yet steady balance.
If we return, then, to the initial thesis of a religion without transcendence, it seems that this is the truth of the post-truth era, as testified by Derganc’s work. A religion without soteriological promises, an end without eschatological constructs. An end that we are already living through, in which the task of art is a kind of affirmative pessimism—thinking and enacting the loss of any “symmetrical” relation to “reality” while simultaneously questioning whether we have ever truly had it. In this sense, we can also understand the telling title of Manirizmi, which functions as a kind of personal artistic manifesto. In relation to the Mannerist movement that marked the end of a particular “harmonious” relation to the world, Derganc consciously positions himself on the side of the “artificialized”.
Whereas analogue photography maintained a concrete material connection to the (physical) world—through light, chemical processes, and material fixation, and even through the negative as a direct link between the world and the photograph—this connection is lost with the transition to digital. At the moment a digital photograph is created, it may reflect what was photographed, but without any material bonds. Through a sustained engagement with the shift from the analogue to the digital—where the digital represents a further step away from the original photographic ambition of recording reality—Derganc’s work pursues the experience of the impossibility of fully systematizing reality, an impossibility intensified by the proliferation of virtual spaces. For this reason, the digital image appears to Derganc as highly painterly—and this is a dimension he richly exploits in his work—in that it allows any form of manipulation, completely freeing the photograph from the demands of objectivity. This reflection on art as a ritual of the world’s falsification is already embedded in the etymology of old-fashioned terms for the artist, particularly the painter: in Slovene context, Künstler, in some local folk argots, for example in Prlekija, has retained the connotation of the artist/painter as a charlatan, a shammer, a trickster, a glorifier of a murky vision of the world, a performer of the world’s untruth. Art, then, has long been recognized as a platform and framework for a ritual of the world, in which the lack of truth is taken as a design principle, both conceptually and formally. And it seems that it is precisely this dimension which confers art, even in a post-truth world, a privileged channel for establishing relations with reality. As mentioned, artificial intelligence further amplifies this virtuality—images emerge without any grounding in material reality. In a time of unbridled flows of images that overwhelm us, mannerism becomes our paradoxical truth—the fact that every guarantor has disappeared—and our new creed: not only to endure the duality of extremes (real/virtual, truth/fiction, symmetrical/falsifying relation to the world), but to embrace this as a productive principle.
This, then, is also the “religious teaching” of Derganc’s practice: the more we move away from factuality, the more we question this material bind, and the more we allow ourselves to actively and creatively intervene in our relationship with reality, the closer we get to “revelation”. The transition from the analogue, through the digital, to the painterly represents Derganc’s own version of Platonism—a Platonism in reverse: we approach the real by moving away from the factual world, not toward ideas but rather toward Plato’s “images of images”. We may call this fiction; Derganc would call it art.