Misko Suvakovic
ART IN TIME OF CULTURE
Back to real - to subject: questions on
According
to Hal Foster, contemporary art, which means the art that makes relative relations
between high and pop art (Zoe Leonard, Mike Kelley, Andres Serano, Kiki Smith,
Robert Gober, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, but Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter
too), turns to the real. That shift, which takes place from pop-art to neo
conceptual art, is not founded on evolution of art form but on conceptual
move from the real as an effect of representation (traditional mimetical art
of the West) towards the real as traumatical thing (actual art in the end
of 20th century). This conceptual shift from real as an effect of representation
to the real as traumatical thing is performed in contemporary art practice
by similar means as in the theory of art and culture, postmodern literature
and on the film.
Contemporary art is no a “new humanism” in the meaning of reconstruction
of the subject as the source or the fullness of meaning, understanding and
interpreting, it is rather a traumatical facing the traumatical systems of
representation in high art and pop culture. That is in the moment when those
two parallel worlds face each other without …. Subject is not a primordial
I (ontological source of being, preceding society, culture and art), it is
representation and …..Therefore, it is more proper to speak on contemporary
individual than on contemporary subject. Contemporary individual is: floating
space, without adds, references, it is pure availability, adopted to the acceleration
of combination, fluidity of our systems… This new “I” after
“the end of will” corresponds with “more and more incidental
individualities…combinations of activity and passivity impossible up
to now” whose “personal identity becomes problematical.”
Through their work, artists, for example, oppose to sedate and puritanical
critic based on differentiated and autonomous sensual taste or axiological
(normative) positioning through dramatical tensions of private and public,
conceptual and pleasurable, narrational and theoretical. It is the word on
“textual production” theorized ……..
In autobiographical texts
Jovan Cekic
DISAPPEARING OF BODY
Disappearing
Disappearing is not just an absence of body, when something shows itself (in
one moment) and disappears from our sight area (the visible horizon) in the
other.
Disappearing as a moment of the appearing strategy is the final phase of representation.
Disappearing is absence (like an easy extinction – absence from…)
of signs which represent body as a machine, or more precisely, as an idealized
picture of machine.
In this picture body is re-presented like a machine capable for further connections
with the other bodies – machines (conditions for arising of the big
mass of bodies), as well as connections with other machines and tools (the
beginning of the industrial production).
The disappearing is not a violent and uninterruptible cut (of events) in historical
time, but a process of the compensation of (meaning of) particular elements
constituting the picture of body – machine or the complete lost of the
meaning of some of elements.
In that way the disappearing participated in creating plurality within the
presents.
The disappearing of body with creating of “the parallel worlds”,
different registers or layers within the reality is shown like a transfer
from representation of the body (like a machine) to the body (sensitive) like
the event.
Strategies of
re - presentation
The Renaissance created the body – machine: the anatomy and perspective
became constitutional moments in the calculation ability of re-presenting.
The body appears as a perfect anatomy machine, capable to serve to the souls
of believers and unbelievers. This “political” neutrality of the
body led to forgetting the body as an event. From perfection to forgetfulness,
that is the way which body is passing through.
The representation is mediated by Direr’s net within the body is comprehended
like calculated entity, regardless of anatomy and perspective anomaly. (Direr’s
etching published in 1538 year, in which artist, looking through net (frame
on which is in same distance arrange strings), has drawn human body, which
lay down behind this string net, on the paper with same drawn net).
This net is appearing later in movie “Blade Runner” but in a different
way, like possibility of moving through picture.
Leonardo’s studies of the anatomy, weapons, and other machines calculate
with this point of view in order to describe functioning of more complex,
bigger machines (mostly war), whose elements connect body-machines and other
machines. In case of complex machines every part is exchangeable.
From Vermeer to
the blade Runner
With Vermeer begins the disappearing of the body like an object and begins
creating a body in a way of an event. The Vermeer universe is possible to
understand like a dynamic net of interactive events.
Renaissance fanaticism about privileged body being a perfect machine is just
one of the possible intensities of a body, like perceptive events. Vermeer
is choosing different intensity of the body events, that much less privilege,
as a way to show all complexity of relations between different events, reality,
like a net between different intensities events.
Vermeer’s question about the body is sublimated on sharpness related
to other surrounding objects and it disappearing, losing of the privilege
place in registrar of representation is paid price for irruption into the
event.
The light is interpreted through the camera not through eye of anatomy painter.
Therefore the pictures of Vermeer paintings are less sharp or hardly visible.
But camera view is rather conditional than mechanical or automatic, more like
some program which works on logical base and through which is structured the
unshown - events.
The sharpness like intensity of an event.
The every picture participates in creating of the other pictures, and they
again create the parent picture. In this case, picture like expression note
a structural cross point of pictures, their interactions. It supposes a certain
mapping of the visible and the invisible, because those geography maps on
the Vermeer’s paintings have the same function as well as paintings,
but in a way of unusual interaction of the events.
Ridli Scott is almost completely bares Renaissance phantasm of the events.
On one side is a body, body of a replicant, perfect anatomy machine and, on
the other side, are pictures of memory, whole cosmos of pictures which have
a function of the simulacrum which confirm that body is take a part in a chain
of events, that it has own personal history. When one of the replicants find
out that her memory pictures are false, she realizes that her body is just
an object in some other event and that her body itself is not event. Faced
with Potemkin’s effect she experiences dividing between the representation
and the event. But thanks to this dividing she is already into the event.
The whole story of the “Blade Runner” is founded on dividing between
representation and event. The mutiny of the replicants who came on the Earth
from distance colony in the space, it is not enough to sublimate as demand
for prolongation of the expiring date, four years programmed, their mutiny
is much more, demand to participate in event in which their bodies have a
role as perceptive event, not object in some other event.
Thesis of “Blade Runner”: in the future, not so far from now,
human kind will not have the privileged place in structure of some event.
The XXI century art is moving in the way of disappearing of the privilege
place, turning-point between representation and event.
In autobiographical texts
Milica Lapcevic
MISSION OF BODY
from totaliarianism to freedom
As a pretext of a story
about the body and its meaning in history of art, which is a topic of these
series of lectures, we can analyze some examples from the history of XX century,
in the form they have appeared in the press and media coverage.
Following random selection, we can remind on case of recently deceased, former
president of U.S., Ronald Regan.
During his mandate, ever since his first election for the governor of California,
up to his presidential election and mandate, Ronald Regan was a subject of
special attention .All debates about his political significance and strategy,
led either by his admirers or opposition, couldn’t reach the importance
of other sort of public discussions – about his body.
Regan’s nose (plastic surgery operations) his fall from the horse, brain
drainage were center of the overall public attention.
Regan’s body-body of the president was identified as the body representing
whole American nation.
In what follows, in few last decades, public attention will continue to critically
observe political personalities of interest, reflecting on their “public”
body related to identity, globalization, terrorism and social issues.
Was this interest of public in its own reflection of a state-body as the body
of the state so great also in the past?
In his piece John of Salisbury, mentions a definition of republic as a sort
of body:
“The position of the head in the republic is occupied…by a prince
subject only to God and those who act in his place on Earth…The place
of heart is occupied by Senate…The duties of eyes, ears and mouth are
claimed by the judges and governors of provinces. The hands coincide with
officials and soldiers. Treasurers and record keepers…resemble the shape
od stomach and intestines. Furthermore, the feet coincide with peasants perpetually
bound to the soil.”
Such a comparison was so common in centuries that followed that all political
thinkers used it in some form or another, not hesitating to compare monarchies
with parts of animals or embryo.
In times of ancient Egypt, with body of Gods cut in pieces and placed together
again to form a state, and ancient Greece obsessed by myths glorifying beauty
and strength against any structural comparison there is no trace of these
“constitutional” visions.
It was Christianity which brought first visions of mystical universal union
of human kind, a vision of one mystical body governed by its creator, God.
On earth, the only possible remaining governing body was Church.
Later in history, in explosion of interests between the Pope and political
leaders for domination and through transfer of political power to princes
and kings, church will enable existence of a real model of political body,
besides eclectic, which will be either religious or secular.
Hence mystical body of
a nation was replaced by political, losing its transcendence, and in the history
ahead, the very idea of political body will remain as a symbol denoting unity
and identity, and order.
The image of the body of the state emerging as order amidst crises influenced
a related theme concerning perpetual nature of a sovereign power.
For example, French royal funeral ceremonies were organized around idea of
two bodies: while wax effigy in funerary clothes was, in seventeenth century,
exposed and than buried with all the glory, king’s own mortal body came
to be buried either naked or in a winding sheet, apart from public attention.
Through this procedure, a supposedly immortal sovereign power was preserved,
through the symbol of the king, wax, immortal power sign that can never die.
Where the prince once stepped in a place of a Pope, during next historical
change a state stepped in a place of king, leaving him executed. The modern
concept of the state thus inherited “the body” of monarchic state
and reinvented it a new form.
State doesn’t change, it is always there. Despite a comparison with
a body it is not mortal, but will affect our view on relations between power
and mortality. All mighty mechanical body of the state when it is finally
created is made by people, but also to develop “technology of power”.
Instead of King, above all people, and made of all people is a system of laws
.Personalized sovereignty is replaced by powerful bureaucracy.
Once corpus mysticism, after being politicized, becomes also a society “socialized”
therefore terms connected with this meaning will come more often in use.
In totalitarian regimes, attempts will be made to “reconstruct”
or “reincarnate” this body politic, opposing mechanical concepts
of the society. It was during the “age of enlightenment ”that
the term ”society” gradually expanded to include all social units,
and that the term “social” came to designate relations which were
somehow more fundamental than political or legal, although the set of relations
was still imagined in terms of body...
A text from XVIII century says:
“Act of association creates corporate and collective body, composed
of as many members as the assembly contains voters, and receiving from this
act its unity, its common identity, its life and its will.”
Some writers in XVIII and XIX century will in their sociopolitical theories
freely compare social body with natural, proposing healing procedures for
“sick” parts.
In “Declaration of Rights” from 1789 it is also written:
”There is a pressure over political body even if one of its members
is under the pressure...”
In opposing mechanical concepts of the society, fascism will adapt wholesale
idea of a body politic. For example, Filipo Marineti will describe Italian
nation as “a body of excellent wrestler” while Alfred Baeumler
will believe a collective body of German Volk as a good political team.
Gain almost two centuries after the French Revolution, obsession with the
body of leader will grow. Fascist campaigns of terror reveal an image of the
body politic in which the enemy of the people is regarded as a parasite or
waste product to be eliminated, and it utilizes, employing medical and biological
terms, problematic or opposition elements.
Comparisons of political philosophers about bourgeois class*being a horrible
disease which eats living flash from the body of some unfortunate man) are
too naive comparing to Nazi portraits of communists, gypsies and Jews, that
are told to be malignant, tuberculosis infected, a form of syphilis, cancer
in other words cancer growth on healthy body of German state.
Communism in word of Goebels was a “tumor that must be burnt out”.
The result was the medicalism of Nazism enemies, formalized by Nuremberg laws
of 1935 which put erman radical legalization on biological basis. The idea
of “diseased race” oscillated so widely between political and
medical discourse-hence appeared a term “hygienic necessity”.
Conversely, while medical imaginary was used to dehumanize politically undesirable,
and cancer cell described as Bolshevists, anarchists and so on, nascent tumors
in actual body were described as a “new race of cells, distinct from
the other cell races of the body”.
The fascist project aimed defending every part of the fatherlands by amputating
all other ideologies.
Yet, rethinking the emergence of bourgeois democracy as a new form of sovereign,
enables us to note a remarkable consistency between the fascist and non-fascist
political imaginations concerning the social body, its “diseases”
and “waste products”. The idea of hygiene will be used to describe
state of working class, potential withholder of social changes and reforms.
In developed capitalism, misery and poverty are symbols of social dirt, as
an obligatory reference to contagious, so that the poor were seen as spreading
dirt and disease throughout the social body.
Therefore, Sir Winston Churchill referred to communism as “pestilence”,
saying”
“Bolshevism is not a policy, it is a disease. It is not a creed .It
is a pestilence. It breaks out it great suddenness, it is vigorously contagious,
it throws people into frenzy of excitement, it spreads with extraordinary
rapidity, mortality is terrible, so that after a while- it tends to wear itself
out”.
Finally Mikhail Bahtin concludes:
“While physical body of a man is enclosed, completed precisely defined
entity, grotesque social body tends to outgrow its limits and is not completed
ever. In these constantly changing” borders” the greatest differentiation
processes take place…And it is where the social
Body is also the most sensitive…”
For the body of politics, social body, based on the notion of natural body,
disease also always comes from the outside.
In 1524, during great epidemic, syphilis had over 200 different names. In
England, it was called “French illness”, in Holland ”Spanish”,
in France and Poland it was “German illness” in Portugal this
illness came from Castilla and in Japan it was called “Chinese illness”…..
Theoretical discourse as shown through these texts was often explored by many
authors in art, literature, theatre, fine arts to more contemporary forms
of performance and installations.
For Rastko Petrovic, famous Serbian writer and artist, body “retold”
through his novels and dramas, written at the beginning of XX century, was
the most important metaphor.
His sense of boiling and uncontrolled world in turmoil, view on modern Europe,
went further than the style of modernism, researching into deepest and the
most significant transformations of the “Old continent”. Rastko
Petrovic compared old, tired, melting “body” of Europe with harmonious,
new and fresh body of Africa, which symbolized preserved integrity and natural
Existence.
Some years later than Rastko, similar ideas guided famous German film director
Leni Riefensthal to find energy, absolute health, strength and beauty and
record it in photographs of Masai tribes…
Looking into the future, are we to face, through globalization, digital media
and other processes, even new transitions of body political and social, fusion
of destiny of races, becoming one overall body of Earth, with even more open,
more sensitive borders?
Or will mutations, taking millions of victims continue as a great biochemical
and political process?
It is time to remind on words of Al-Ghazali, Sufi mystic from XI century who
wrote in one of his books the following:
“Human body is a small reflection of the whole world, because every
part of world has its match in it. Bones are like mountains, sweat is like
a rain, hair resembles to woods, skull to the skies, sense organs are like
stars….And every sort of beings on Earth has its picture in Man- pig,
wolf, calves, devil, spirits and angels, even every skill on Earth has a resembling
process in human body. And we could talk about resemblances on and on...”
Another philosopher Wang
Jang Ming, writer from XVI century from China says:
“Big man thinks of Skies and Earth and countless numbers of beings on
it, as of one Body.
He thinks of people like of families and of countries as of persons.
When he sees a child in danger he feels compassion and excited, rushes to
help.
If he hears sad cry of a bird or animal before execution, he can’t stand
their suffering.
When a plant is destroyed he is in grief...
Even when stones or rocks are crushed, he feels that…Human kind is really
one body with plants, animals, birds, stones and rocks…”
In the light of this quotation, let us ask ourselves if and did we felt like
one body and one family with
30.000 of Jews executed in times of Spanish Inquisition,
or with
40.000 victims of French Revolution?
Do we feel complete compassion for dying trees of the Rain Forest and all
other trees on Earth that perish away?
Did we felt as one body with 17.000.000 of victims of the Second Worlds War?
Or 7.500.000 Chinese who died during Revolution in China?
Or with 4.000 elephants who are illegally killed each year, for the sake of
ivory?
To conclude this lecture, I have selected a sample of contemporary dance practice
in Serbia, which as a country, in entire last decade suffers from a blurred
focus of social and ideological meanings of the body of individual.
Aleksandra Bjelajac, a member of Erg Status Dance Troup is an active dancer
in 10 years, on workshops, in theatres leaving her individual note about sense
of the world, and sense of freedom through her dance.
She has no limits of nationality, religion, politics or trends in her expression,
making a personal research of identity, deeply and warmly communicating with
audience, and entering a completely new perception for body of dancer in our
art scene.
A dancer’s body is a sign, in her practice, rich in symbolism, natural,
energized, sensual, and constantly adapting to new.
A view on contemporary dance has its place, I am sure, in story about the
body, pointing one more utopian idea- to learn how to work with what we always
loved and never completely possessed- integrity of our own body and its existence,
out of all systems.
In autobiographical texts
Davor Dzalto
BODY IN- BETWEEN INDIVIDUALITY AND PERSONALITY
The global and local perspectives
To speak about human body,
in contemporary (art) context, causes the previous determination of what that
the notion really means? What is the body?
Identifying body with the human itself is not exception today. In contemporary
dictionaries of the English language, it is possible to find the word body
as a synonym for human, being, essence, man…
That is not a coincidence. Physical presence of someone (a person) was always
identified with his/her existence. One exists if one is present, and someone’s
absence is the proof of the lack of his/her existence (life). The postmodern
context abandons this physical presence as a sign of “existence,”
but not the presence as a frequency of signifying even (possibly) complete
inexistent being. The presence of function not of the substance, as one could
say, shows “existence,” or the existence that is relevant in contemporary
context. (…)
…Cult of materiality of Western ideologies, led to identifying the person,
which means the way of existence of human being, with body – a biological,
physical and physiological entity. It became possible to reduce a man on what
makes his body material (physical) present. The body art dealt with residing
of artist in art as art work, through, primary, physical presence, suggesting
that way that artist’s “I” became same with his body which
is used in performing the shows, action and so forth. Belief in corporal as
the totality of human existence is justified by the absence of belief in possibility
of life even when body is completely destroyed (death).
Ancient Greece, Aristotle above all, saw the possibility of “eternal
life” only in surviving of the collective, of some abstract “human
nature,” because the individual existence is irrevocably lost by corporal
death.
Far East, taken very generally, does not see in body more than just a vessel
in which is possible to put immaterial component, the component that could
be outpoured in some other vessel as well, by endless or very long periods
of reincarnations.
How things stand with Judeo-Christian tradition?
Specificity of this tradition is in the absence of duality body-spirit for
concrete personal (it could be said artistic-creative) way of existence. A
person is not only a body, but body is energy of person, therefore the resurrection
of body is necessary for re-establishing the personal way of existence. The
soul is not just add to body, the second component, but represents the life
itself, the person itself. Soul (Nefesh in Hebrew) refers not only “to
a part of human being – the spiritual in contrast to the material –
but encloses the whole man as a life hypostasis (person). It is not only that
the soul simply resides the body, it appears through body which is, as well
as flesh and hart, in connection to our “I”, to the way of realization
of life. One soul, it is a man, it is someone, because the soul gives the
character to the life” observes Hristos Janaras…
In autobiographical texts