4. Apr - 20. Apr 2008.




TO DEINOTATON
Video installation by Dragana Žarevac:

“Ephemeral Memorial”

“Many things are horrible, and yet there is nothing more

horrible moving that towers above man…”

Sophocles (Antigone, first stasimon)

The video installation by Dragana Žarevac entitled “Ephemeral Memorial” is made up of two separate projections of the author’s limbs [the lower ones (the legs in the act of walking), recorded by the author herself, and the upper ones (the arms), also recorded by the author herself at the execution grounds in Jajinci >, objects hung from the ceiling of the gallery, forming a regular geometric arrangement:

5 x 13 (“Abuse of Enjoyment”) and a video recording entitled “Document of a Visit (projected in the other part of the gallery area). The partition wall separating the two rooms is used to project a moving picture of a hand gently touching one of the tombstones at the execution grounds in Jajinci (near Belgrade), to the accompaniment of the author’s utterances (“Come on, get up, come on, get up”), whereas the floor of that part of the gallery area is used to project a moving picture of the author’s legs walking. The objects (brassières and panties) contain printed photographs depicting a group of naked concentration camp inmates taking a bath in a lake near Usen in Norway. “Document of a Visit” encompasses the author’s drive in a Trabant car, together with a friend, from the studio to the Museum of the Banjica Concentration Camp, their running aground while attempting to enter the Museum and her attempt to record the permanent display. The conversation that the author pursues with her friend all the time focuses on the topic of “concentration camp”; within the framework of the conversation, she introduces the topos of guilt. The conversation reaches its peak at the moment when a female voice interferes, reciting to the would-be visitors standing at the entrance a succession of things that are forbidden, starting with the stern warning that it is forbidden to take any photographs and ending with a reminder that it is forbidden to enter the Museum at all. Thus the would-be visitors are taken into the area of guilt at a time and in a space whose determinants, by definition, should not have anything to do with what M. Heidegger called “encounter between the planetarily determined technology and the new-age man”, namely, as the inner truth and greatness of movements: communism and national socialism, to which he added Americanism.

The running aground of the author, who is trying to make a recording of a recording of one of the tragedies of the new-age man, turns out to be falling into the trap of spirits of the past. For, those printed photographs (frozen images of a time irrevocably gone by) should function as a statement on time as nunc stans, while the moving pictures should have the function of time as nunc fluens. Introducing us to Brentan’s “law of original association, which adds images of current memory to current observations”, interpreting it in such a way that it “obviously refers to the psychological law of forming new psychic experiences on the basis of those already given”, and interpreting those experiences as psychological, objectified, which “have their own time, so that one may speak of their creation and circulation”, E. Husserl in his further analysis leaves aside whatever falls into the province of psychology, for it is not of interest, of course, for his phenomenological research. What might be of interest to us here, however, are these relations between temporal predicates and psychological predicates, inasmuch as the video installation before us is precisely about “forming new psychic experiences on the basis of those already given”. The act of speaking within the framework of the projection on the wall actually turns out to be the body (the arm) and the spirit (speaking as an expression of a psychic experience on the basis of the already given) addressing the spirit of the destroyed.

The topos of guilt, as is well known, takes an important place in the structure of tragedy. For example, Aristotle, according to the interpretation of F. W. Schelling, viewed tragedy from the point of view of reason rather than the mind, adding that, from the point of view of the former, the highest case, marked as such by Aristotle himself, possesses another even higher aspect, namely, “that the tragic character is necessarily guilty of some crime (the higher that guilt is, as was the case with Oedipus, the more tragic or complex it is). That is the greatest possible misfortune – becoming guilty, without any true guilt, on the basis of fate.” “The inner truth and greatness” of those three planetary movements mentioned above, of course, cannot have anything to do with the original meaning of tragedy, as understood by the ancient Greeks. The original meaning is that the resolution of the turnabout and recognition, as the first two parts of the tragic story, occurs only in the third part, pathos – action that brings ruin and pain in the following way: the one who is necessarily guilty of a crime also undertakes to punish him/herself as well. The new-age man of those three planetary movements, who has been acquainted only with the cases “of which none is terrible of worthy of pity but only heinous”, had the opportunity of subsequent spiritual elevation, of rising to the level of awareness that the concentration camp phenomenon is one wherein the victim has necessarily won against the villain, whereas the villain is the subject of thwarted sexuality without Eros. No matter how much bereft of spirit, reduced to the relationship of a body with another body, within the framework of that phenomenon that subject acted based on the principle of “abuse of enjoyment”. No shepherd comes to the new-age Oedipus to make him glad and free him of fear, what he gets is an “Angel of Mercy”, whose airplanes (the products of planetarily determined technology) have been boarded by both John and Fritz, convinced that flying so high means flying with angels. The video installation before us, we might say, proceeds from the guilt that dwells in one above whom nothing terrible towers, perhaps to pose Shakespeare’s question “Man, only that!?”

Zoran Gavric, text in the catalogue

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BELGRADE CULTURAL CENTRE
The Art Gallery
Knez Mihailova 6
11000 Belgrade, Serbia
tel 3282 609
www.kcb.org.yu