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ABSTRACT
Focusing on the artists Ivan Ladislav Galeta (1947–2014) and Željko Jerman (1946–2006), the text examines two performative strategies of manipulation with the materiality of the photographic medium. This manipulation resulted in the reconfiguration of the mimetic relation with reality, usually associated with photography. While Galeta experiments with the expanded notion of photography and creates works in which visual identities of people are being destabilized through a meticulous process of dissolving and juxtaposing layers of different images in the photo-lab, Željko Jerman is using photo-chemicals to produce texts and traces on the sensitive photo paper. In an attempt to decipher how this type of performative approach to photography questions and subverts not only the medium and materiality but how it addresses socialist society, especially its aesthetic regime (and its subsequent political ideal), the text outlines a possible anti-mimetic notion of photography. In other words, the deconstruction of mimetic and imitative qualities of photography is reflected in relation to its political and social consequences.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The research for this text was done during my stay at the Centre Interweaving Performance Cultures (Freie Universität Berlin) in the academic year 2017/2018.
2. The concept of mimesis signifies here issues of representation and imitation, as they have been circulating with regard to realism and the idea that art is a truthful copy of reality. Being one of the central terms of philosophy and aesthetic theory already since Plato and Aristotle, mimesis is a highly disputed and contested term. In the context of this paper, the mimetic notion of photography aims to underscore the medium’s imitative nature, as one that mechanically reproduces, copies and re-stages reality.
3. The notion of photography to be the pencil of nature is actually the title of the book written by Henry Fox Talbot, one of the early inventors of the medium.
4. Under the term socialist realism, I understand: “the dominant style on official Soviet literature and art from 1934 onwards, characterized by heroic depiction of labour and glorification of the ruling Communist party.“ (Macey Citation2000, 357) Besides the truthful representation of reality, another important feature of socialist realism is the orientation towards optimism, a belief in the better future.
5. While the most famous example is the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade, there have been other centres in Zagreb, Ljubljana and Novi Sad, in which a new generation of artists had the possibility to explore media such as performance, installation or video, creating a complex artistic language, which is parallel to the development of art in the West.
6. Coming from a working-class background, Jerman was born in 1949 in Zagreb. After finishing high school, he began learning about photography. Later on, he was running a photoshop and started exhibiting in 1972. As one of the members of the Group of six artists, Jerman actively participated in numerous exhibitions and events the group has created in the period of 1975–1979. Together with his wife, the performance artist Vlasta Delimar, he created performances such as Attempts at Identification (1979), Wedding (1982) and Male and Female (1983). Jerman’s best-known artwork is the installation, which had been installed in front of the Cultural Centre in Belgrade (1976). It consisted of a sentence This is not my world written with photo chemicals on photosensitive paper. In the late 90s, he lived in Split, where he was running a gallery called Ghetto. Under tragic circumstances and being almost completely deaf, he drowned at the island of Korcula in 2006. Besides performance, photography, collages and experimental film, Jerman wrote theoretical and critical essays, which were published in prominent Croatian journals.
7. In her attempt to grasp what she formulates to be the senses of the subject, Judith Butler observes “The term ‘tactility’ refers to the condition of possibility of touching and being touched, a condition that actively structures that it also makes possible.” (Butler Citation2015, 37).
8. All translations from Croatian and German are done by the author.
9. In an interview from 1975, Jerman had explained that he did not want to fix the traces left on the paper because he was interested in the process of alteration, which will occur over time, see: (Jerman Citation1975, unpaginated).
10. To decipher the meaning of one of the sentences, scribbled on the surface, I contacted Jerman’s partner and former wife, the Croatian performance artist Vlasta Delimar. After she confirmed that Jerman wrote “when it is time to fast”, Delimar gave a short interpretation of the text: “Concerning death (not the photograph), that on this day a good woman had died, for him death had always been a reminder about transience, his urge to leave trace behind. With his visits to cemeteries, he affirmed exactly this consciousness about existence and transience. The “clash” with photography is the clash with himself because at that time Jerman already began talking about the road to suicide. He was always talking about his “end” (so that he got already bored with talking about suicide) (e-mail correspondence with Vlasta Delimar, 29.11.2017).
11. Beredekamp formulates his theses distinguishing between: the schematic image act, the substitutive and the intrinsic image act of every visual form. In that way, his intention is to show the potentiality of images not only to represent the world but also to set in motion different types of action.
12. Galeta was born in 1947, in Vinkovci. He graduated from the School of Applied Arts in Zagreb and finished the Pedagogic Academy and the Philosophical Faculty in 1981. From 1977 to 1985 he was head of the Centre for Multimedia at the Student Centre in Zagreb. Being one of the most relevant venues for showing and producing experimental films, the Centre attracted notable film workers from all over the world. As a distinguished pedagogue, Galeta had been involved in the organization of the Department for Animation and Multimedia, at the Academy of Visual Arts in Zagreb, where he was teaching from 1995 to his death in 2014. In his artistic work, Galeta experimented with the medium of film, expanded photography, ready-mades, installations and performance. His films Metanoia, Piramidas, Ping-Pong, Water Pulu challenge human perception confronting the viewer with the unseen and the limits of perception. In the last phase of his artistic work, Galeta developed a concept of a sustainable, land art project called End-art, in which he treated his farming actions and food growing activities as a genuine artistic process. His mayor retrospective show took place in 2013.
13. As a passionate reader of hermetic and occult literature (Kabbalah, Alchemy, Rudolf Steiner, Béla Hamvas, The Tibetan and Egypten Book of Dead, etc.), Galeta’s works are often conceived as riddles and enigmas that require an interpretation familiar with gnostic and magical symbolism.
14. Silverman takes this differentiation from the photographer and artist Jeff Wall, who in 1989 published a short essay called “Photography and Liquid Intelligence.” In that text, Wall argues that “by immobilizing the movement whose properties it renders visible, photography demonstrates that its intelligence is ‘ocular’, not ‘liquid’.” (Citation2015, 69) However, if this may be true for digital photography, in the case of analogue photography, which depends on chemical processes, one is faced with a material instability due to which photographs will bleach, dissolve and transform over time. Interpreting, furthermore, history of photography as a process of “ocularization of chemical photography”, Silverman notes that “soon there will be no more darkrooms or developing labs, and photography will be completely dry.” (Citation2015, 70) In this respect, the example of both Galeta’s dissolving image and Jerman's traces can be seen as examples resisting the pure ocularization of the medium by enhancing its liquid features.
15. In this context one is again reminded of Kaja Silverman’s thesis: “an analogue photograph is the umbilical cord connecting us to what we have loved and lost, to what is gone because we have failed to save it, or to what might have been, but now will never be.” (Silverman Citation2015, 4).
16. On the occasion of Tito’s birthday from 1957 until 8 years after his 1980 death, the socialist state organized a well-choreographed mass gathering of youth, whose aim was to represent and thereby perform ideals of brotherhood, solidarity, communism, etc. With a specific focus on well-trained, strong and healthy bodies, the singular body of any individual seemed to become obsolete in the mass. Taking The Day of Youth as an illustration of social choreography, which through bodily practices served the function to rehearse, “internalise and socially realise” state ideology, the performance scholar Ana Vujanović argues that it can be read “as the model of the social body (…) a dynamic system of gesture that embody that model”. (Citation2013, 22) If we juxtapose this image and performance of the collective body to the unstable traces of the ephemeral corporeality encountered in the work of Jerman and Galeta, the difference and contrast cannot be bigger.
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Andrej Mircev
Andrej Mircev is a scholar of performance studies, visual artist and dramaturge. He graduated philosophy, history and theatre studies in Zagreb and received his Ph.D. at the FU Berlin. In his theoretical and artistic work, he experiments with constellations between different media (photography, video, performance, installation) and he participated in several group and solo exhibitions. His research has been presented on various conferences and published extensively in different publications. With a special interest in dance dramaturgy, Mircev has collaborated with many choreographers. In the academic year 2017/2018 he is researcher at the Center Interweaving Performance Cultures, Freie Universität Berlin.