Ivan Meštrović and kairos: A stirring of events The intertwining of aesthetic and conceptual persona

Ivan Meštrović (1883 – 1962), a sculptor whose works circulated for fifty years in the main halls of the major cities across the globe, has been pushed out of the center of art historical discourse towards the margins. If cultural memory is articulated in art, in literature, in cultural practices, and in institutions (all of which Meštrović was instrumental in establishing, creating, and inaugurating), then my inter-disciplinary approach seeks to combat the crisis of amnesia by occupying an intermediary space, between art and philosophy, between combating histories and the present, between events and their representations in art and literature. The theoretical trajectory that my research proposes is to treat art less as the historical instance of a particular work or style within a closed chronology defined by a discipline, and more as an event that has the potential to break with the repetition of the same, and all determinations of a work, in order to let in something different and unforeseen. In order to examine the premise guiding my thesis, that there is an event astir in the work, I have structured this study around three movements. These movements can briefly be described in Nietzschean terms as (1) the affirmation of carrying the burden of inherited values from the tradition (the camel); (2) the negation and destruction of established values, the re-valuation of meaning (the lion, Zarathustra); and (3) the hetermorphic affirmation of a repetition that selects and repeats differently to release a new event (not just carrying), the joyful affirmation of multiplicity and becoming (Dionysus, the child). Along with the name Ivan Meštrović, several formulations of a fluid conception of kairos will be developed to inform the respective methodological approaches. The point will not be to define kairos as a concept, or to produce the definitive monograph on Ivan Meštrović, but to trace the modes of existence that these names produce, to elaborate on how the proper name functions, and to outline some trajectories and spaces (political, religious, and social) that can be effected by reactivating the event in these names