Читать книгу Karaoke Culture - Dubravka Ugrešić - Страница 12

6.

The Fantastic

Feeling of

Overcoming

Emptiness

Gobelins

I remember my distant relative Žana as a short delicate girl with a nacreous complexion and big grey-green eyes. I remember how she would lower her head to avoid direct eye contact with the person she was speaking to. Her body movements gave her away as a person who sought out the shadows in the hope of making herself invisible. If it hadn’t been for her smile, one would have said she was a beauty. But when she smiled her mouth would contort into an awkward toothy grimace, more the imitation of a smile than an actual smile.

I met Žana again after about thirty years. She had graduated as an engineer and gotten married. She and her husband weren’t able to have children, so they had adopted a boy. At the time I met him he must have been about thirteen. Žana had packed on the pounds since I last saw her. She looked like a monk seal. But the whiteness and glow of her complexion were unchanged. I noticed that she no longer lowered her gaze, but bored it right into you like a drawing pin. At first her husband seemed like a nice guy, but his voice made me uneasy, soft and arrogant when speaking to his wife and son, condescending when speaking to me.

Žana never worked in the profession for which she trained; the home was obviously her kingdom. The dining room table was heaving with food. The way she had set out the dishes, different cheeses, and ham decorated with vegetables, was sadly magnificent. She is our artist, said her husband. Mom is a real artist, the boy repeated after his father.

Before we sat down at the table, Žana gave me a tour of the house. Apart from the bathroom and kitchen, every room in the house was covered, almost wall-to-wall, in Wiehler Gobelin tapestries.[1] The entire catalogue was there: the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, Our Lady of Kazan, Constable’s landscapes, works by Francois Boucher, Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie, roses, autumnal landscapes, winter landscapes, motifs of German cities, birds, children with goats, children with cats . . .

“How many years did it take you to embroider all these?”

“It’s not hard once you get going . . .” she replied noncommittally.

My visit was briefer than that demanded by courtesy. All of a sudden I had an attack of tachycardia and a dizzy spell. I don’t know why, but it seemed that a terrifying emptiness gaped from every corner of the house. My host, Žana’s husband, suggested that he drop me back to my hotel, an offer I accepted with relief.

Armed with needle and thread, Žana has fought her own battle down through the years: what kind of battle, I can’t say. Whether those millions of stitches have meant victory or defeat . . . I don’t know that either, but the bitterness that used to gather in her lips, the awkward toothy grimace where a smile should have been, has disappeared. The truth is, the bitterness has been replaced by a doll-like stare, and it’s enough to make you shiver.

Later I checked out the whole Gobelin thing on a Croatian “recreational forum for creative people.”[2] Half-heartedly I read the advice given to a woman who had decided to embroider a picture of her daughter based on a photograph, but hadn’t been able to find a suitable fabric and was thinking about using mosquito netting. Forum users suggested the woman buy the fabric in Italy, or at the Unitas shop in Croatia. Some suggested she go to Slovenia, and someone else suggested Zweigart’s Hardanger 100. Others warned that the Unitas cotton wouldn’t capture the natural nuances of the face, and that Anchor or DMC would be better. Someone else suggested Cross Stitch Professional 2003 as the best computer program for printing her daughter’s photo on the fabric, because it was used by the Austrian artist Ellen Maurer-Stroh, a noted reproducer of Berlin School works. The “thread” was joined by a Montenegrin who had been doing cross-stitch all his life, because he loved the fantastic feeling of seeing a picture coming to life before my eyes, the feeling of creating something. The Montenegrin explained a heavy stitch known as the “Gobelin stitch”: You do two diagonal stitches across two counts until you get a life-size image, just like the old master painted it, but the motifs look a bit rough, like when RTCG[3] has problems broadcasting and those big squares show up on the screen, that’s what a Gobelin stitch picture looks like when you get a bit closer.

Cross-stitch is a mute song, a kind of “empty orchestra” or karaoke. (In the Balkans there is also a mute kolo or ring dance, which is danced in silence, unaccompanied by music.) The anonymous cross-stitcher who completes a pattern with needle and thread is filled with the “fantastic feeling of seeing a picture born before one’s eyes, of creating something,” or simply, the fantastic feeling of having overcome the emptiness.

Jelena Radić doesn’t go in for classic works of art; she uses Gobelin techniques to copy motifs from hardcore pornography. Embroidered using traditional women’s needlework and mounted in kitschy frames, hardcore pornography is an unusual thing. Like some kind of anti-Wiehler, Radić also designs and sells Gobelin patterns. Žana, were she so inclined, could easily do a Gobelin picture with a fellatio motif. Jelena Radić is a professional artist and member of the Dez org collective. The collective promotes open source software and works for the popularization and democratization of art, the goal being that “all people, irrespective of financial status, religious, ethnic, or other designations, have the opportunity to display their creativity.” As stated in one of the collective’s manifesto type documents, “In ever increasing numbers people from different walks of life, who have nothing to do with the IT-world, are taking advantage of the freedom that reigns in the computer world. More and more people are making their books, music, and images available in open license and free formats. Liberation from the repressive mechanisms of the corporate world is an inevitable phenomenon, which has its origins in the IT-world and has as its goal the creation of a free society in which the individual will take center stage.”[4]

Edek

At the time when my own emigrant experience was still raw, and meeting my countrymen was like looking in a mirror, I had a chance encounter with a woman from Zagreb. The woman had married a Zagreb somebody (I should have known who he was, but I didn’t), divorced, and, having followed the children abroad, had ended up stuck in Los Angeles, not really wanting to be there, but with little resolve to pack up and try her luck elsewhere. In the evenings she worked at a restaurant that was owned by one of our countrymen (who apparently I also should have known, but didn’t) as an administrator or something to that effect. She shortened the daylight hours by painting. In a neat and tidy corner of her neat and tidy apartment sat an easel-mounted canvas and a box of paints.

“It reminds me of someone . . .” I said uncertainly, pointing at the canvas.

“It’s our Edek . . .” said the woman, opening a coffee table book featuring the work of another of our countrymen. She pointed to the painting she had just started copying. The woman was copying the work of the most significant Croatian abstractionist, Edek, two of whose signed prints hung on the wall.

My first thought was that this woman’s life must be catastrophically empty. And then a sadness crept up on me, not because of the woman, but because of the catastrophically dull automatism of my own reaction. What gave me the right to judge the richness or emptiness of someone else’s life?! Was my own life that much richer just because I didn’t copy other people’s pictures?

“I adore our Edek . . .” said the woman somewhat melodramatically, putting the accent on the wrong syllable, a Zagreb girl born and bred. And it was only then that I understood the real reason for my irritation. It was Edek. Had she been copying someone else, I’d have had greater sympathy for her depressing hobby. But Edek, whether he liked or not, had become a poster boy for Zagreb’s chattering classes. Just as every Croatian redneck proudly packs his little ethnic bundle with a Croatian flag, a Dinamo or Hajduk t-shirt, a picture of the Virgin Mary, and a prosciutto ham or paprika-flavoured salami, this woman had packed hers with the requisites of Zagreb bourgeois life. These requisites (and I’m guessing now) included the repertoire of the Croatian National Theatre, a concert at the Vatroslav Lisinski Theatre, buying a hat at Kobali’s, haircuts at Kincl’s, shopping in Graz or Vienna, skiing on Mt. Pohorje. And Edek.

I remembered the woman many years later. At Zagreb’s Mirogoj cemetery I passed the gigantic headstone Edek had built in his own honor. Bordered with white ceramic tiles with colorful abstract motifs, the monument looked like a wall that been lifted out of a trendy wellness center and placed on the grave. It was an exemplar of artistic karaoke. The artist had copied himself.

Darger

The American and international cultural public only discovered Henry Darger posthumously. In his lifetime no one suspected that the “oddball” (he is thought to have been autistic), the collector of “trash,” the recluse who talked to himself, was actually an artist and autodidact, the meticulous creator of an autonomous world. Darger became a sensation in the art world when the American Folk Art Museum in New York opened the Henry Darger Study Center in 2001. In 2008 the Chicago room he rented from Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, where he spent his solitary years, was re-created as a permanent exhibition at The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago. Over the past ten years Darger has inspired a radio drama, a play, a multimedia production, a number of songs, and a poem. In 2004 Jessica Yu released the Darger documentary In the Realms of the Unreal. I saw Darger’s New York exhibition in 2002. My attendance isn’t worth noting. In an episode entitled “Lisa the Drama Queen,” Lisa Simpson also visited the exhibition.

The results of Darger’s decades of oddball “activity” have been neatly tucked in the niche marked “Outsider Art.” Darger didn’t know how to draw, he was, as Michael Thevoz put it, “a thief of images,”[5] stealing from children’s coloring and picture books, newspapers, advertisements, comics, caricatures, photographs, stamps, whatever he could lay his hands on. From this “trash” he selected his “little pictures,” tracing them in pencil and coloring them in watercolors. Certain images (stamps, for example) he would have photographically enlarged.

Darger’s personal world is shaped by a number of factors, including the trauma of growing up in an orphanage (which he later fled), a childlike interest in the American Civil War (which they say he inherited from his father), Catholicism, mental illness, solitude, poverty, repressed sexuality, monomania, and a childlike fear of adults.

He would often glue his drawing paper into a long roll, painting it on both sides. Most of Darger’s pictures feature little girls, nymphettes, the prototypes for which he copied from newspaper advertisements and children’s fashion magazines. The soldiers in his pictures (largely inspired by American Civil War comics) represent the world of evil grown-ups. His nymphettes are located in rich phantasmagorical landscapes, in spaces that are part paradise and part war-zone.

Darger’s sprawling composition In the Realms of the Unreal tells the story of the seven Vivian girls and their struggle against the evil Glandelinians who keep children as slaves. The Vivian girls free the children and defeat the evil Glandelinians. The child-slaves are naked and, were it not for their penises, would also appear as young girls. Nakedness points to innocence and sacrifice, with crucified children frequent motifs. The Blengins are giant mythical beings—naked young girls again, with penises. Their heads bear heavy rams’ horns, their backs enormous wings and dragons’ tails.

Darger’s compositions provoke a conflicted feeling, somewhere between attraction and rejection, wonderment and unease. His visual world overflows with details, bodies, faces, and colors. His images of young girls are identical, one little clone next to another. It seems that Darger crammed his pictures with everything he saw, and everything he saw he “stole” from the surrounding “cardboard” everyday. His world is one in which giant frogs and horsemen, flying childlike beings, giant ducks, flowers of different colors and types, distorted Mickey Mouse heads, and sunflowers that dwarf clouds all simultaneously co-exist. A child’s utopia and a kingdom of evil.

Identifying the original sources for the details copied in Darger’s pictures is a treat for those familiar with the American everyday. The fantastic anthropomorphic beings with butterfly wings, for example, are stolen from advertisements for “Karo” syrup. “Darger steals his images, lifts them from conventional narratives, common everyday journals, and sentimental stories. He takes them out of context, disorients them, and re-enchants them. Indeed, he uses these images to reconstruct another narrative ensemble, but in the process, the images do not reject their origin but persist like foreign bodies, bodies with disquieting strangeness . . . Thus, Darger does not control anything: he is not the master of painting, nor is he even the master’s assistant . . . he is a sorcerer’s apprentice.”[6]

Darger was proclaimed a great artist when his world, finally in tune with the Zeitgeist, could be understood as art. There is an inadvertent correspondence between Darger’s world and contemporary cultural practice. His way of thinking can be compared to that of a child who spends day and night on the Internet. Cut and paste is Darger’s primary artistic technique, and today, with Photoshop and programs such as Illustrator and Brushes, he would get the job done much quicker. Teenagers use different computer programs in this same way, the practice of vidding, making video clips and posting them on YouTube, is a good example. Teenagers trawl the alluring chaos of popular culture, selecting, combining, parodying, ridiculing, retouching, and beautifying, turning hierarchical relationships on their heads, making the incompatible compatible.

The second respect in which Darger’s art corresponds with contemporary cultural practice is that his imagination, fired by popular culture, is perfectly in tune with the contemporary hunger for parallel fantasy worlds. In the world of Harry Potter children also create their own communities, fly, inhabit magical worlds, struggle against the forces of evil (most frequently embodied by adults), perform miracles, befriend mythical beings, and take control. In all of this the borders between worlds are soft. Darger’s visual poetics likewise overlap with the aesthetics of popular mass media products, from comics to computer games. In this respect his poetics can be understood as a harbinger of manga and anime aesthetics.

Although canonized, Darger remains within the niche of outsider art. At least statistically, however, contemporary art practice is in the hands of amateurs, outsiders, autodidacts, the intuitive and anonymous, individual and collective authors.[7] Although “canonized outsider art” sounds paradoxical, it is a part of the cultural practice of our time.[8] At least for a moment, one can also put things the other way around. Using the iPhone Brushes program, David Hockney recently began sending his friends little sketches instead of SMS messages. On a symbolic level, the artist’s self-amusement can be interpreted as a voluntary self-dethroning, an abdication of authorship and descent into the vast ocean of anonymous digital gestures. The artist no longer exists—there are only gestures that others can, but by no means must, declare as art. Symbolically becoming one with his predecessor, the anonymous author of prehistoric cave drawings, Hockney himself declared: “Him scratching away on his cave wall, me dragging my thumb over this iPhone’s screen. All part of the same passion.”[9]

[1]Translator’s Note: In 1893 Jakob Wiehler founded a company selling Gobelin embroidery patterns and yarns via catalog. Although no longer owned by the Wiehler family, the company that bears their name continues to flourish in Germany and many parts of Eastern Europe, not least Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria.

[2]www.stvaram.com

[3]Translator’s Note: RTCG refers to the Montenegrin state broadcaster, Radio Televizija Crna Gora. Crna Gora literally means “Black Mountain”—or Montenegro.

[4]www.draganrajsic.org/10.html

[5]Michel Thevoz, “The Strange Hell of Beauty,” in Darger, The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum 2001.

[6]Ibid.

[7]Responding to a critic who had dared suggest that contemporary visual art was illiterate, Tracy Emin—an established and canonized contemporary artist—replied, “So what if I’m illiterate! I still have the right to a voice!” Although she herself belongs to the art world’s elite, Tracy Emin spat out a sentence that sounds like the revolutionary slogan of a new artistic epoch.

[8]The canonization of outsider art today occurs within traditional institutions such as museums (the Museum of Everything recently opened in London, providing a roof for outsider artists), but also in non-traditional spaces such as fandoms, blogs, virtual communities, and associations. Groups brought together out of a shared interest in popular culture are, however, often anything but “popular.” A member of the virtual union of World of Warcraft gamers claims that joining the union is “as tough as getting into Harvard.”

[9]Lawrence Weschler, “David Hockney’s iPhone Passion,” The New York Review of Books, October 22–November 4, 2009.