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Looking
for a Husband with an EU Passport
Tanja Ostojić
http://www.cac.org.mk/capital/ostojic
Personal Space —
Public Body
Zoran Erić
Spiritual square
Personal space was the first significant project with which
Tanja Ostojic reflected the legacy of the avant-garde, radical
performance and body art, focusing at the same time on the artist's
inner being, the space that it occupies and its psychological
dynamics. It came after a series of classical objects modeled
in regular geometrical shapes with the accent on the formal
qualities of materials such as bronze and especially stone.
The process of work on marble sculptures comprised contemplative,
dedicated shaping and polishing to get to the perfect surfaces
emphasizing the textures, veins of the material. Nevertheless,
more important than an aesthetical perception of the objet
d'art was the need of the artist to channel her energy and
express her mood and inner processes in the material form. The
further necessary step in this development for Ostojic was to
start using her body as a medium of expression and it almost
seemed that in her performance she absorbed the firmness and
motionless of the marble. Standing on the square of white marble
dust, her body emanated a solemn space of inner calmness reserved
for the artist, evoking at once the 'auratic' space of Malevich's
Suprematism. Her work was at the same time one of introversion
and extroversion - while trying to mark a private, even intimate
space, she was exposing herself, her naked, shaven body to the
eyes of the viewers. To claim the right to the impenetrable
personal space which determines an artist's identity, she needed
to enter into a silent communication and dialogue with the audience.
Once established, this ambivalent shifting between the dichotomies
of inside/outside, introvert/extrovert, and private/public will
keep appearing in her further projects and in this case is best
articulated in this statement by the artist:
When
I deal with stone, I start from its inner structure moving along
towards its surface texture. When I work on my own head I move
from the outside to the inside. I fall deeply into the space
of my own spirit. So what is physical remains only the texture
of my surface. [1]
The performance Personal Space was first presented at
the Biennial of Young Artists held in Vrsac, in 1996 [2] , at a time when Serbian society had just undergone
a period of most severe isolation due to the sanctions by the
UN. The circumstances under which the artist worked were underlined
as the paradigm of art in closed society where the most frequent
strategy was the withdrawal from the social sphere and dedication
to the introspective work and reflection of the aesthetic issues
in art. The mid-nineties were a crucial phase when some of the
most prominent Serbian artists started to shift the emphasis
of their work towards a more critical and engaged reaction to
the socio-political framework that was so strongly determining
the conditions in which they worked. In this context, Ostojic's
project was one of the rare ones to make a more radical statement,
though still within the framework of artistic problems that
had strong heirs within the circle of conceptual artists formed
in the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade in the 70s, with
Marina Abramovic being one of the globally most acknowledged
artists of this circle. Without any doubt the need of the artist
working in a country economically collapsed and torn by wars
was to define her own position, her own identity and her own
attitude towards the social reality. However, as the artist
claimed, the dynamic of this work was, above all, internal.
With the standpoint of always making a strong statement
with her work, one small step was needed to get from the realm
of the introverted meditative treatment of her body into its
more engaged placing in the social and political sphere. The
work of Ostojic from this point started to be engaged more actively
with the issue of blurring and crossing of the social, political,
economic boundaries.
Social square
Another segment of the project Personal
Space was the photo album done with Saša Gajin. It
recorded the different inscriptions of the square onto Ostojic's
body, from white positive and black negative on her shaved head
to the shaved square on her mons veneris. The same black
Malevich square reappeared again in the projects Black
Square on White and I'll
Be Your Angel conceptualized for the Biennale of Venice
in 2001. Taking up the role of an escort, a "guardian angel"
of the curator of the Venice Biennale - Harald Szemann, Ostojic
again used a twofold strategy. She was exposed the whole time
to the audience, and actually received all the public attention
by being constantly en par with the "most wanted and
desired" person of the Biennale but another part of her project,
the Malevich square on her mons veneris, was reserved
only for the eyes of Mr. Szeemann.
Through the lens of feminist theorizing on women in urban settings,
the exposure of the feminine body to the male gaze was one of
the key issues for criticism. For Susana Torre, the construction
of bourgeois femininity in the cities of nineteenth-century
Europe was based exactly on the fact that women are seen
as extensions of the male gaze and as instruments of the emerging
consumer society and its transformative powers at the dawn of
modernity. [3]
The correct spot to problematize this context in the art
world would be at the Venice Biennial whose constitution coincided
with the growth of the Modern bourgeois societies.
Ostojic deliberately uses her body to position herself exactly
in the place reserved for women in the way social hierarchy
is expressed in the public space. If she was not bound to the
premises of secret privacy of the home, she should be in the
shadow of the dominant powerful male figure, finally as his
accompanying person or escort. When playing her role, she used
all the prerogatives of women's seductiveness, wearing haute
couture dresses by Lacroix, high-heeled shoes, and assuming
lovely and charming attitudes in addressing the public. With
this role, Ostojic became present at ceremonies, press conferences,
cocktails and parties, and was even the subject of gossip by
the untouchable elite that gravitates around the art world and
witness of its power games. One aspect of this artistic position
was that it offered her the possibility to transgress the pyramidal
disposed strata of social status within the art world, and put
herself right at the top, a place hardly reserved for an artist,
especially from her region. She appropriated the position that
symbolized the prerogative of power, and which was always marked
by exclusion and restriction. In this situation, to paraphrase
Torre, she took the most effective standpoint to construct herself
as a transformative subject, altering the perception
of all participants of the world of art with regards to the
"space of public appearance" (a term by Hanna Arendt) and placing
her own persona and finally her artwork into the glamorous elite
circles, and even more so, making them all part of her performance.
In order to assume and construct an identity of this kind it
is essential to define your own space and experience it. An
interesting problem here is that while in modernism the universal
subject excluded women, in the poststructuralist underlying
of otherness, women are often given the role of the means of
constructing the identity of the men.
[4] In taking up this problem it can be said that Ostojic
managed to reverse this situation and to use a man, and indeed,
the person in charge - the curator of the Biennial - Mr. Szeemann
- to construct her own (artistic) identity.
A
further aspect was that she problematizes the place of the artwork
and the role of the artist in such a manifestation, the phantasm
of his/her success and power games of artist/curator relationships.
A new extreme dual situation was that while hiding one part
of her artwork from the eyes of the audience through the second
part - the performance - she made it more "visible" and her
concept and message more loud in the turmoil of the vernissage
when the rules of the highly commercialised art market prevail.
Gendered square
The same situation from the performance Personal Space,
with the artist's naked body, shaven in the still, static position,
offered a new reading of the project Looking for a Husband
With a EU Passport. This ongoing work started as an interactive
web project with an online advertisement by Tanja Ostojic where
she declared her quest for a husband with a EU passport. With
the act that made public Ostojic's idea to transgress the given
political constraints to the individual having a non-EU passport,
the former 'physical' body inscribed in the personal space gained
the connotation of a social body communicating to the broad
audience on the web. She used her body as a mediator, a tool
for questioning and for raising issues in the public sphere
in a different manner than in the project I'll Be Your Angel.
Her naked body made public was deliberately presented without
seductiveness and sensuality in the bare physicality of her
flesh, taking a position of written invitation, but visual repulsion [5] , and was thus performing the role of the political message.
The constant shifting between the dichotomies of private
and public that was noted as one of the main characteristics
from the beginning of Ostojic's work, finally appeared in the
performance Crossing which took place on the lawn in
front of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. This was
the site of her meeting with German artist Klemens Golf, who
was the chosen one from the many 'candidates' to respond to
her advertisement, and with whom she had a six-month long correspondence.
This first encounter of Tanja Ostojic and Klemens Golf was public
and it lead to a secret and private wedding. With this act the
project entered another and more challenging phase where all
possible problems appear: from the bureaucratic and administrative
regulations of the German country regarding a non-EU wife of
a German citizen, to the interpersonal relations between the
two artists, two projects that crossed their paths, and finally
the interpersonal relations of the legally bound "married couple".
The official witnesses - artists, but also a married couple,
Jelica Radovanovic and Dejan Andjelkovic - offered an interesting
document of this ceremony, and of the project itself.
They introduced a Lacanian psychoanalytical reading of Ostojic's
(women in general) position in marriage where the man takes
on the role of the active factor in the public sphere and the
woman is prevented from speaking directly but through the man,
allocating herself the role of the object of men's desire and
of the phantasm of men's lack. Their crucial argument is that
with her project Tanja Ostojic publicly presented her photo
as an object of desire but a non-stereotypical one, and by making
a selection of the offers by men she is subverting man's domination
in the relationship and his violent position of public speech,
and gaining the signifying position, i.e. in psychoanalytical
terms threatening by castration.
[6]
I would consider taking into account another perspective, i.e.
a certain body of feminist theory that set as its target the
questioning of the classical distinction between private
and public and which tried to disrupt the idea of a centered
subject. The strategies of those feminist theories, often highlighted
in the famous feminist slogan the personal is political.
[7] , were to critique the limited definitions of gendered
space and to deconstruct the separate spheres of the polarized
binary term male/female.
They elaborate on the idea of Jacques Derrida to expose the
ways in which binary systems function only through positive
and negative reference to the dominant category. The first step
in this process of deconstruction would be to reverse the binary
terms so that the one occupying the negative position in a pair
replaced the one in the positive, which could be seen here in
the project that criticizes and deconstructs the mechanisms
which marginalize and exclude women from public life.
[8] Implying that this line of theoretical argumentation
could be used to support the artistic strategy of Tanja Ostojic,
it would be possible to finally emphasize that her work consists
of continuing alterations from the disposed 'negative' to the
'positive' position with the aim of deconstructing and transgressing
the given gender, social, political constraints.
Zoran Erić
Curator and Art Critic based in Belgrade, Yugoslavia
Kustos i kritičar, živi i radi u Beogradu, Jugoslavija
zoraneric@lycos.com
Tanja
Ostojić (YU)
Artist based in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and Düsseldorf, Germany
Umjetnica, živi i radi u Beogradu, Jugoslavija i Düsseldorfu,
Njemačka
tostojic@yubc.net
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Thnking
in Exile
Suzana Milevska
I live, I dwell means the same as I am... Philosophical
ideas connecting ourselves and our living spaces.
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