/erotic meets the political in tanja ostojić\'s work/
Ever since Walter Benjamin recognised the relation between politics and aesthetics by blaming Fascism for introducing aesthetics into political life and Communism for politicizing art, the link between the artistic and the political has become an inevitable point of the discussion in troubled periods and regions. In addition the connection between beauty and the eroticism of destruction, violence and politics was established (by both Benjamin and Susan Sontag) in order to try to explain the excitement of images of violence and aggression. My question in this text in contrary is whether the works of Tanja Ostojić and the images of her body could be considered as entanglements of the erotic and the political and how this relationship can be disentangled without referring to excitement.The political implications of a certain cultural space and its representational order are usually hidden and it is the role of the artist to reveal them. It was not an accident that Ostojić\'s project Untitled/After Courbet, 2004 (photo, 46 X 55 cm), provoked a scandal in Austria and ultimately was censored. The work was presented in a form of a “rolling” billboard in the context of the group exhibition 25 Peaces (on Reflections about Austria in the Nazi-Era) curated by Walter Seidl & Ursula Maria Probst in Vienna and Salzburg, followed up by the project titled PEACE gerollt and the exhibition euroPart that hosted 400 rolled art billboards. Ostojić\'s billboard showed her widely spread legs with the EU “logo”: blue knickers and a circle of yellow stars as a kind of target, obviously referring both to the European Union\'s enlargement and to Gustave Courbet\'s renowned painting. The porn-scandal campaign against the project was generated by the December 29 issue of the newspaper Kronen Zeitung, a right wing tabloid that itself publishes topless photographs with soft porn content.
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