And there is no one,
and should not be sad.
In infinity –
towards non-existence –
Only two or three atoms of sadness will float
absurd love –
of the few surviving dogs,
as the last,
an undeserved requiem.
82 g.
Konstantin Pavlov
Ilian M. Shehada
Lately I have been thinking more and more about death. Depression has found me, like a huge insect that has penetrated Kafka's psyche. There is a magnificent book with which I suppress the heavy episodes and psychotic regrets about my existence. I am talking about Pontalis's "Windows". He describes depression as a "slump", "slowdown", "fall", even "devaluation". All the bad features of this all-pervading state. Depression has always been my eyepiece through which I look and think about the world around me. Some tragic embodiment of my world and my manners. However, it is also the available thing through which I strengthen my own strength and turn this fellow diner from the valley of the shadow of death, as it says in Psalm 23, into a pretext for my aesthetic pleas.
By which I mean that thanks to her I reach for the risky occupation of writing about art, when I live in everyday life, mediated by a desire for survival. It is in the midst of this psychic predicament, in the midst of the shamelessness of the day, that I reach for the exhibition arranged by Vera Mlechevska and Desislava Dimova, dictated by the interest of the French Center for Contemporary Art “Pompidou” in contemporary Bulgarian art.
I have been to the Pompidou. It is possible that this place, and Paris in general, can be experienced as a parallel universe. A phantasmatic world in which beauty, finesse and the sublime write a magical letter to one's self. Depression can also be interpreted as a mystical path through which we acquire a healthy view of the world – the glare of the sun, the agony of the sea waves, the starry mysteries in the sky. In this key of thinking, the idea of "ours" in the spaces of a Parisian museum fills me with pleasure and a desire to share.
My point is that the experience of the depressed, as Yulia Krasteva calls it, can begin with the simplest tool we have – the eye. This organ of passion demonstrates its own route to art. And more specifically, to the collection of creative acts gathered under the title “Several Ways to Win the World”.
In his famous essay “What is a creative act?” the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, relying on the lecture of the same name by Gilles Deleuze, defines it as an “act of resistance”. Against death above all, as Agamben rightly notes. Resistance against what, we also ask ourselves when we look at the collection of contemporary Bulgarian art from the mid-1980s to the present day. The play between possibility and impossibility, between what is hidden in the artist and his encounter with reality, is the pleura of this famous text, without which I would not have attempted to write these notes.
The very first work“A Fool Makes a Fool” by Martina Vacheva provokes us to think of the creative process as a difficult task, wrapping various meanings, materials and experiences around the neck of the idea. This work demonstratively reflects on the image of the Other, on its place in our surrounding world. As if the Other is an enemy of our expanding sensibility. The very materials from which this creative act is made – ceramics, slag, lichens, grass, carry the feeling of nativeness. According to Anthony Smith, national identity is based on “a specific language, specific feelings and symbolism” (Smith 2001: 5). Collective identity is the “land” of common origin, the shared living space, common memories and myths, the universal mass culture. This collection of consolidation practices shows the imaginary nature of “national identity”. The presence of traditions, myths and symbolic meanings of certain places, dates, names is the ensemble of attributes necessary for the mobilization of a collective in a community. “Dramatic stories about the past” according to Smith (2001:37) are the glue that holds life together, it is an organizing center, following the logics of national constitution (for significance). Smith also claims that “traumatic events” play an essential role in the construction of national identity and memory (Smith 2001: 41). By “memory” one could mean the ability of a given community to remember certain historical segments that attribute to it a heroic or traumatic origin. In the concept of “memory” I see the reconstructed past, its expansion into fictional plots, as well as the possibility through memory to reside permanently in a “tradition”, which in turn has the potential to continuously produce identity. Memory in this case should be understood as equivalent to a narrative that gives rise to the community. I also draw attention to the fact that the memory of ourselves, instead of leading to the “wearing out” of national identity, makes it more malleable, enlivens it, and strengthens the feeling of belonging to the given community. This is exactly how it behaves in Vacheva’s other creative acts –“Samodives” and “Plague”. Inspired by Bulgarian folklore and the collective unconscious, these acts are places of memory, but also traumatic peaks that indicate directions for understanding our national identity and our place in the contemporary world.
Another work that plays on our geopolitical identity is“Rhodopsian Beyonce” (2013) by Geri Georgieva . The dancing woman in folk costume looks tragically ridiculous. As if she has gathered together our desire to live by European standards, but certainly bearers of our national identity. The body movements are in unison with the contemporary pedagogical project, according to which Bulgaria is part of the European cultural heritage mainly through its folk art. This regime of “narrating” the Bulgarian maintains the logic of the presence of a great Other who observes and evaluates us. This is precisely what gives rise to trauma. The Other (gaze) is necessary for there to be a nation. This dance in the middle of the snow holds and “systematizes” the nation as imperishable, combative and mythical.
Somehow the central place in the exhibition space is occupied by the impressive work of one of the most erudite Bulgarian artists – Krasimir Terziev. His two-meter canvas“Base and Superstructure (Twilight)” explores the relationship between theism and atheism, regionally and globally. A Tower of Babel according to Derrida, which asks first of all in what language was it built? First of all, who falls under one or another influence, who interrupts the language in which we speak about ourselves? A serious creative gesture, which with tragic determination becomes a mediator in interpersonal communication. Terziev’s gesture is somehow an anthropological interpretation of how to think of ourselves between the panel, religion and the sky.
The work of Lachezar Boyadzhiev with nails in his mouth is a cult trace in the new Bulgarian art. It is a gesture of silence, but also a performative problematization of the historical time in which the act was created. The 12-centimeter nails in Boyadzhiev's mouth "open" Bulgarian art and its ability to "speak". The living, personal, oral memory of the time is pierced by the nails of institutional narratives that produce another mode of reality. In this sense, it is a radical political gesture that outlines the descriptive system of memory. Also important in this line of thinking is the photograph of Ana Todorcheva, which brought together Boyadzhiev, Christo and Jean-Claude. This photograph is a "symbolic wound", as Paul Ricoeur says, which gives rise to a memory of the symbolic friendship between Bulgarian artists and Western "masters". This is contact with memory, and therefore with the attempt of Bulgarian artistic acts to produce the power of their potential.
The Renaissance of contemporary Bulgarian art, the local and contemporary Leonardo and Mirandola in one – Nedko Solakov, the work“Looking West”. It is a rebellion in the socialist publicity of irresponsibility, of hidden answers, of inexpressible mirages. An extremely exciting creative act that questions the world of visibility towards the West and acts as a prophecy towards the brewing political explosions. Solakov makes us look towards the West to see the angels of discord…, but we come across the pentagram depicted in his work. It is important to look through the eyepiece, because we will win an entire universe.
The problem of memory traces and the impossible institution can be traced in Ivan Mudov's "Fragments 2002-2007". For a year and a half (2003-2004), Ivan Mudov "collected" parts of various works of art from museums and galleries across Europe. Each piece is inscribed with the artist's name and proudly arranged in a suitcase, an ersatz Duchamp. Thus, his collection travels everywhere with him and can be shown to anyone. The movement achieves routes that we would otherwise not have access to. This is his portable museum, but also a parallel life as an artist-curator. His fragments bring harmony to the shelves of our art.
“Trouble is always Double” by Pravdolyub Ivanov shows two flags that have no end. The holders are two, but the flag overflows. This reterritorialization a la Deleuze shows Ivanov’s ability to transform a state insignia into a political reference sign. In the perspective of the polemics around memory and the effort to recreate our national identity, this creative act by Ivanov is a suggestion of political brotherhood as a coexistence of some excesses. The red “exaggeration” in the flag is a criticism and therefore a step towards a new utopia.
In the exhibition "Several Ways to Win the World" there are clear creative acts that make sense of the body and corporeality, sexual identity, gender and femininity. Such is the work of Kalin Serapionov "The Wanted Category" from 1996. A huge black and white canvas with Serapionov's delicate face and his protruding Adam's apple. With unobtrusive makeup. In the era of post-human bodies, playing with the gender binary is a moldy cliché. But in the 90s, the appearance of a man with women's accessories and makeup was in a sense an event. Defying the "homosexual panic" (Sedgwick), Serapionov combined opportunities to play up his own sexual ethos. With this gesture, he opposes the medical-psychological requirement that a man not take over the aesthetics and ethics of a woman. His image is too ephemeral to call it transvestite. The baroque ornamentation of the transvestite terminator of that time in mass culture – Azis, contains a shallowness of the image. “The Wanted Category” sells flesh to the idea of the body and sexuality as a political idea.
"Corrections" by Krasimir Krastev RASSIM is a creative act that follows the transformations that occur in the artist's body over the course of a year and a half. For me, this is one of the strongest creative acts in the time of patriarchal order. It takes us into the depths of humanism in order to dehumanize human identity, to turn it into a product, a commodity. This act exposes male identity and shows us the gender category "man" as subject to change and speculation. The body itself is a machine subject to reconstruction, the body itself is suitable as if for industrial production. A genius artist who multiplies universes.
Boriana Rossa and “ULTRAFUTURO” also raise the issue of the body and corporeality. In their performance“SZ ZS” the body is a reproductive mechanism through which the characters produce themselves. Posthumanism has been seen as a double of humanity since the time of its creation. Man and machine are seen in their duality. Man is recognized not as the “end of man”, in the sense announced by Foucault, nor as the inactive machine of Agamben; man and machine are born in the figure of the cyborg. “The cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality, but also a creature of fiction,” writes Donna Haraway in her cult essay “The Cyborg Manifesto”. Opposing all essentialist claims about the creature “woman”, Rossa falls into the center of the essential searches of world art and humanities regarding what is the place of women in art and what it means to exist.
An important creative act is Mariela Gemisheva's collection "Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter 2000". The small color sketches explore the figure of the mother through various fashion incarnations. The works dissect the maternal image into multiple similarities that explore the search for freedom and the ability of fashion to stand beyond the cultural metabolism of fast images. Placed among other creative acts in the gallery space, these small photographs reveal both the secret of some of the curatorial decisions and ideas about the place of the mother in this symbolic community. The canvases describe an invisible connection between mother and daughter, the connection of generations with fashion, the spirit of the good life, which negotiates between them various aesthetic revelations. The free radicals of taste multiply and layer on your own image. At the opening of the exhibition of the same name in the Kazanlak gallery, among the small sketches there was a large mirror, as if demanding to stare at your own image and put a stigma on yourself, for example, because you are not well dressed enough for this event. The title of the exhibition lists all the seasons of the year, shows the inexorable seriousness of clothing as a kind of social code between generations. A cunning and elegant critical gesture, part of the brilliant biography of Mariela Gemisheva.
A similar connection is explored in Alla Georgieva’s creative act“Home”, sewn from the dresses of her deceased mother. “Home” is a place of memory that explores the connections between mother and daughter, between deceased and living daughters. A huge uterus attracts our gaze and tactility. We want to touch the uterus, to squeeze it, to feel it. With analytical precision, Georgieva paints the image of an (impossible) motherhood, which shows a special type of dreaminess, but also despair. Alla Georgieva is also the author of the cover of a contemporary poet – Marianna Georgieva. Alla’s painting “Knitted Roses” greets the reader from the cover of “Exodus”. Two artists – a poet and a painter, who believe not in repression, but in liberation through creative acts. The connection between illness and life is an important theme in the work of both authors. The line between which style is more powerful is thin and indecipherable: the power of Alla's feminine nature and the effects of the mowing and illness, or the open existence of Marianna's characters, stripped to the bone. Together they create the sweetness of a special communication, of a specific female union.
Is Bulgarian contemporary art contemporary?
In his essay “What is Contemporary?” Agamben deals with a specific crystallization of this concept. Referring to Nietzsche, he sees modernity as a kind of interruption and discord with the present, calling this a “rupture” and an “anachronism.” For Agamben, being contemporary would mean having a specific attitude towards the time in which you live, being capable of standing at a distance from it, and therefore of criticism. His insightful analysis includes a commentary on a text by Osip Mandelstam, in which he sees the core of the clash between man and time. Speaking of the 20th century, Mandelstam’s text claims that the backbone of this century is broken and that is precisely what prevents time from returning to itself. Agamben goes on to claim that it is precisely the ability to be contemporary that is “the work of the individual.”
All the authors and their creative acts examined seem to answer the question posed above ambiguously. Yes! Radical political gestures, criticism of man and his attempt to negotiate with the world in which he finds himself. Scientific and technical progress against the romantic dream of shelter in nature. Everything in "Several Ways to Win the World" shows that our artists are contemporary in the sense of Agamben. And it makes us capable of taking on the "sheaf of darkness" that comes in waves from the time in which we live.
At the end of these notes I will return to their beginning – my depression. Its name does not scare me in the least, it is the silence, due to which I can say nothing and that will be enough, it is my adhesion of the century, which Mandelstam and Agamben talk about. At the point of breaking the spine is also the ability to be contemporary. And the encounter with the darkness, behind which light shines, is ahead.
Cited literature:
Agamben, D., What is ? Translated by Valentin Kalinov. S. KH
Pontalis, J.-B. Windows Translated by Lyubov Savova. S. Stigmati
Ricoeur, P. 2006: Memory , History, Forgetting. Translated by Todorka Mineva. S .: Sonm .
Smith, A. 2000: The National Identity. Translated by Nikolay Aretov. S.: Queen Mab.
Haraway, D. Manifesto for a Cyborg. Translated by Petya Abrasheva, written by Piron.