193 Ars Adriatica 5/2015. (193-202) Miško Šuvaković: Te Power of the Void, Speculative Realism... 1. Philosophical Remarks: Direct Experience Te foundation of my argument is the following: Tomo Savić Gecan’s artworks are based on the idea that the spectator mind is oriented 1 towards external objects. If such objects are empty, then they become indexing structures for mental constructions. Minimal changes in the outside 2 state of things. Trans- parent situations set up in the outside world of corporeal, sensuous existence. Minimal displacements between the visible and invisible events in the world of objects and spatial relationships invoke efects, intensities and conse- quences of disturbance. Disturbance is a means to a situ- ation. Uncertainty regarding the stability of relationships between objects, spaces, time intervals and social func- tions. Creation of a sense of uncertainty and instability in the situations claimed by public institutions, mostly institutions of everyday life of culture: a gallery, a park, a museum, a shopping mall. Instabilities cause contingent motion in undeter- mined directions. Te relationship between motion and non-motion, the visible and the invisible acquire signif- cance: invisible motion, conspicuous non-motion and a hint of a potential change. A change may cause a catas- trophe, yet the catastrophe never happens, merely the minimal, almost neutral diversions, displacements and lapses from the ordinary experienced reality of normal life and standard perception. Te ordinary experienced reality is, in fact, a nor- mal reality which consists of relationships between the incidental and perpetual with regard to as opposed to the visible and the invisible. Te incidental is expected while the perpetual does not follow a pattern or a law. Rather, it comes from the mystery of the miraculous. 3 Everything happens at zero level which suggests that nothing ever happened. However, although nothing is ever the same, it is as if everything remained the same. Contradictions lie in one’s experience and contrasts in The Power of the Void Speculative Realism and Artworks of Tomo Savić Gecan Miško Šuvaković Certain artists have entered the adventure of search for emptiness preceding and following every act of life: human productive reproduction the society. In diferent historical periods, those artists – Savić Gecan included – have obsessively, persistently and dramatically confronted the powers of emptiness within social and cultural institutions, apparatuses and situations. Tomo Savić Gecan started investigating the empty at the time of artistic refections following the eclectic postmodernism of the 1980s or, more precisely, at the time of the so-called art in the ‘of culture.’ Tomo Savić Gecan’s works, installations and performances brought forth in this context even though they were with standard art production of that time. His production difers from practices based on media representations and performances referring to or rooted in and cultural conditions and circumstances. Gecan’s work is diferent through displacement, absence, totalizing minimalism and exception from fctional contexts of ordinary life featuring unexpected instruments of intervention. This paper argues that Tomo Savić Gecan’s artworks are based on the idea that the spectator’s mind is oriented towards external objects. If such objects are empty, then they become indexing structures for mental constructions. Keywords: Tomo Savić Gecan, power of emptiness, object-mind, index, installation, event, outside Miško Šuvaković Fakultet muzičke umetnosti Kralja Milana 50 RS - 11 000 Beograd Izvorni znanstveni rad Original scientifc paper Primljen / Received: 14. 4. 2015. Prihvaćen / Accepted: 1. 6. 2015. UDK: 7Savić Gecan, T. 7.038(497.5)