Epics, popular culture and politics in a modern work of art

Abstract

“Death in Dallas” is a video-installation by Zoran Naskovski comprised of a) visual documentary material connected to the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the president of the USA and materials about his public and private life; b) a soundtrack comprised of a poem accompanied by gusle by Jozo Karamatić with decasyllabic lyrics “Death in Dallas” by Božo Lasić. The unexpected and strange combo birthed a work of art which contains different layers of meaning and one of the most complete postmodern works of art in Serbian modern art. Naskovski had combined the seemingly incompatible codes of popular culture into a specific artistic method of its own genre – “Balkan noise”. Using the method of “noise” music, in which every noise, soundscape or voice has equal meaning and value; he included epics, tradition, politics, popular and folk culture. Finally, by doing so he had completely shifted the paradigm from modern to postmodern, from the substance of myth to a demystification of this type of representation.

Keywords

• modern art
• ethnomusicology
• cultural history
• popular culture
• noise