The exhibition Before the Beginning and After the End of Dinner, has been opened at the Student Centre Gallery, at the peak of the COVID pandemic crises. Yet, all of its constituent parts are imbued with a sense of gradual and slow, yet unavoidable anti-climax. Concept-wise, it consists of two distinct wholes, which is helpful to know. Namely, once we have embraced this approach, we can confidently interpret it as two states of affairs referred to in the title - before dinner, and after dinner has concluded. The first situation meets the visitor’s eye immediately upon his arrival at the gallery, in the form of a large Polyester cloud, lined with a thick layer of cotton wool. The cloud is suspended from the ceiling and carries a double-sided metal ladder, with a BIB (meaning ‘bag-in-box’ packaging) on its top step. The BIB seems an inexhaustible source of red wine, as it never - or rather, throughout the whole period of exhibition - stopped falling from it to the cloud. It took some technical knowledge to make the perpetuum mobile mechanism capable of pumping wine back into BIB, making it flow again from the ‘faucet’, and so ad infinitum. This eternal recurrence, with its inherent symbolism of Sisyphus job, is underpinned by the letters modelled by the artist himself and arranged on the floor, in close vicinity to the cloud, to make the sentence, reading: „Ich werde meine zeit nicht mehr verschwenden“. The inscription should be understood as a vociferous art statement, expressing the artist’s resolute determination to stop wasting his time. Since we are not offered an unequivocal clue as to how to understand it, we are free to interpret it as we wish. The installation emanates a subtle sense of resignation, and we have at our disposal a binary interpretation. Based on what we know about Hraste’s artistic views, he may mean that art is a complete waste of his time, while, parallelly, being perfectly well aware that idleness, is prima materia of any artistic act. Translated into the language of alchemy, it means that, earlier or later, the artist will - unless he gives up on his profession and even before he ‘sits at the table’ – transmute idleness, through the creative process, into a work of art. The importance of idleness, or the absence of necessity of work done to obtain life necessities, was first emphasized by the Grecians who considered it quintessence and condition of all art, and all humanistic activities, as well as the premise of man’s progress in general. Such idleness brings about eudaimonia – the highest degree of happiness and perfection, which only a human being can attain. It is a state in which one comes closest to Gods – creators of all that exists. If we continue along the same line, we can say that Hraste’s installation - with the cloud, ladder and ever flowing wine, is the symbol of plenty which is good to have in sufficient amounts if we are to transmute idleness and contemplation – in an effective and quick way - into an art product, i.e., to achieve eudaimonia. By putting stress on the circular mechanism that ‘robs Peter to pay Paul’, the artist also questions the purpose, sense and meaning of artistic activity today, which - it is my impression - he sees as inevitable recycling of the already existing narratives and discourses. Announcing his exhibition, Hraste wrote: “This exhibition consists of sculpture installations that put me on stage as an ‘integral being’, in my relatedness to evocations and objects that have influenced the shaping of my artistic language.” These influences are present here in the form of an assortment of elements/figures picked up from the gallery of familiar and easily accessible ‘icons’, reshuffled to make a new art imaginarium. Their choice is founded on contemporary ‘myths’, which, in this experiment of ‘self-defining’, call for critical reassessment. One of them is, unquestionably, the Monument to the Uprising of the People of Kordun and Banija at Petrovac, the highest peak of Petrove Gore by his namesake and college sculptor Vojin Bakić. Hraste made a scale model of the monument, which, in the second part of the exhibition, he will use as a dining table The very act of dining has not been recorded here and can only be imagined with the help of the objects that witness to its taking place, i.e., which show the current, ‘after dinner’ situation. We imagine that we are in the artist’s working space, since the couple of chairs by Slovenian architect designer Niko Kralj which are on display, on a wood platform, together with the turned-into-table model of Bakić’s monument, have actually been brought over from Hraste’s studio. On the otherwise empty table top, there is an ashtray, and on the platform floor, there is an emptied pizza box, with leftovers and an olive stone, which – unexpected for the viewer, yet hardly noticeably – spins around its axis on the pizza delivery box, challenging him to reassess the credibility of his own perception and common sense. At the foot of the monument turned into table, there are two crashed beer cans, the relics of former consummation. By placing the whole installation on a platform, Hraste suggests that what we are looking at is a stage, the impression supported by the illumination, which is an impartment element of the show in its own right. Playing with reflectors - perceived here as metafictional tools - the artist breaks the very illusion of art. He does it in an explicit way, using a technique that resembles Brecht’s V-effect (Verfremdungseffekt), which, in the viewer’s mind, causes distancing, i.e., absence of empathy, and the switch of attention to artificiality and ludism of the very process of artistic creation. By doing so, the artist denies the transcedentality and mystification of art making, which was outlived long ago and yet is deeply embedder in the art public’s sub-conscience and expectations. However, this exhibition is not about elevating the mundane into art. What is immanent to it are self-irony and the lowering of ‘high art’. The act of placing an ashtray on top of the model of Bakić’s monument, used as table at which pizza was served, is the ultimate act of abatement of the ‘holiness’ of works of art, doomed to perish anyway, or, if they are lucky enough, to wind up as a hindrance in the corner of the artist’s studio. Resignation and the ultimate anti-climax are most dominantly felt in the background music, which humorously imitates the sounds from cartoons, used when characters lose their last hope and reconcile to the disappointing unravelling of the situation, for which Hraste makes glowing polyester notes that are alternately going on and off, following the lowering of notes and indicating general resignation. Yet perhaps all is not lost and there is still some hope. For, in the meantime, just before the opening of the exhibition, the artist changed his decision about not wanting to waste his time, and set up the inscription reading “Ich verde meine zeit mehr verschwenden”, banishing the word “nicht” . By doing so, he gave idleness the elevated status which, after all, idleness deserves. Mirna Rul about Before the Beginning and After the End of Dinner installation by Vojin Hraste held at The SC Gallery, Zagreb, December 4 – December 18, 2020. HRT 3, The Triptih Culture Show, aired on December 22, 2020