Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
in Contemporary Art,
Theory and Culture
Marina Gržinić • Aneta Stojnić • Miško Šuvaković
Editors
Regimes of Invisibility
in Contemporary Art,
Theory and Culture
Image, Racialization, History
Contributions by
Marina Gržinić, Adla Isanović, Alanna Lockward, Federica Martini, Aleksa Milanović,
Andrea Pócsik, Aneta Stojnić, Miško Šuvaković, Šefik Tatlić, Jelena Todorović
Editors
Marina Gržinić Aneta Stojnić
Institute of Fine Arts (IBK) Faculty of Media and Communications
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Singidunum University
Vienna, Austria Belgrade, Serbia
Miško Šuvaković
Faculty of Media and Communications
Singidunum University
Belgrade, Serbia
v
vi CONTENTS
6 Radical Contemporaneity 77
Aneta Stojnić
Index 169
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
vii
CHAPTER 1
Adla Isanović and Šefik Tatlić draw upon Gržinić’s development of the
concept of necropolitics. While Achille Mbembe articulated the concept of
necropolitics to explain a process of total exploitation in Africa and in the
context of the Middle East, Marina Gržinić was the first to use necropo-
litics for explaining and understanding the processes in Europe and parti-
cularly in the former Yugoslavia. Secondly, as stated, authors as Miško
Šuvaković and Aneta Stojnić delve into analyses of the artistic critical
video-film practice by Gržinić and Šmid.
The book is divided in three sections that resonate with one-another,
each focuses on specific set of questions related to the regimes of invisi-
bility in contemporary art, theory and culture.
Marina Gržinić analyses the work of Gilles Deleuze, Jonathan Beller
and Suvendrini Perera, elaborating on the status of images in the capitalist
mode of production. Jonathan Beller, with his cinematic mode of produc-
tion, calls for the possibility of re-reading the proposed line of concatena-
tion of selected films of the twentieth century, which Gilles Deleuze
conceived in the 1980s. Deleuze recuperates a selected history of the
twentieth century Western auteur film through two images, two notions
of body-mental relations to/within film: the movement-image and the
time-image. Beller’s cinematic mode of production gave these images the
missing frames of labour, of capitalist production relations and of the
capitalist means of production. With the digital (financial) mode of pro-
duction we can go further and ask what the film images of the twenty-first
century are. The list is long, though some images can possibly be enlisted
as brands: the event-image, the militant-image, the commodity-image. At
this point we have to radicalize the status of these images of the digital
(financial) mode of production even more and ask: (1) What is the
racialized unconscious of these images? (2) What is their status in relation
to the imperial, colonial, necropolitical and racial line that cuts global
neoliberal capitalism from within and heavily conditions the contemporary
production of its financial-images?
Adla Isanović opens a discussion on the politics and aesthetics of
databases. The database is becoming one of the dominant means of
knowledge production and circulation and one of the widespread methods
of cultural expression. Actually, database logic and aesthetics appear to be
something that is imposed as a norm. Its inclusion is visible in science,
media, social networking, state-governing, policy making, juridical pro-
cesses and military interventions. Furthermore, the database is recognized
as a dominant genre in (new) media art, but its influence is visible in a
4 M. ŠUVAKOVIĆ ET AL.
Marina Gržinić (PhD) is a philosopher and artist who lives in Ljubljana and works
in Ljubljana and Vienna. She is researcher at the FI SRC SASA (Research Center of
the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts) Ljubljana and professor at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She has published ten books (monographs and
translations). In 2014, in collaboration with Šefik Tatlić, she co-authored the book
Necropolitics, Racialization and Global Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics
and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life (Lexington Books, USA, 2014). Gržinić has
been active as a video artist since 1982 and in the last thirty-five years has also been
making installations and performative exhibitions in collaboration with the artist
and art historian Aina Šmid from Ljubljana. http://grzinic-smid.si/
PART I
Theoretical-Political Interventions
CHAPTER 2
Marina Gržinić
INTRODUCTION
I elaborate on a new type of image that I claim to be exemplary for
financial capital and its mode of digital production. I name it, following
Suvendrini Perera, the ‘trophy’ image1 that is emblematic not only for the
time will live in but also carries a process of desubjectivation in itself that is
in fact a brutal racialization that is a systematic procedure of discrimina-
tion, differentiation, seizure, and closure by capital. When I speak about
subjectivation I think about a political subjectivity that is not essentialist,
as we know the subject is only a name for a form of agency. The processes
M. Gržinić (*)
Institute of Fine Arts (IBK), Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vienna, Austria
e-mail: m.grzinic@akbild.ac.at
Millions of them are around and they also diminish the possibility of
apprehension, of agency. This provokes a new logic of distribution, circu-
lation of images, etc.
upon the American silent cinema, the Soviet school of montage, and the
French impressionist cinema, whereas the time-image originates in the
modern European and New American cinemas, for example, the films of
Alain Resnais. I can state that these cinematic images are two Deleuzian
models of time (Deleuze’s interest was precisely the relation of time and
space). What is even more necessary to expose is their respective spatial
rendering of time (i.e., time through space) which divides the movement-
image from the time-image. Reading them, I proposed the following
temporal, spatial, and compositional characteristics:9
Before I explain them I can state that these cinematic images are two
Deleuzian models of time. What is even more necessary to expose is their
respective spatial rendering of time (i.e., time through space) which divides
the movement-image from the time-image. The main platform of this
unusual idea derives from Deleuze’s re-thinking of the interval—the space
or division between photograms, shots, sequences—and how the organiza-
tion of intervals informs the spatial representation of time in cinema.
through time; even more in the virtual-image, the interval disappears; real-
time is no longer (in)direct time but a time without intervals, where space
has the value of zero (non-space). Moreover, the non-space, which may be
defined as a cyberspace index, produces a meaning in which the distribu-
tion of information is the result of a complete process of computer
calculation. This is not the movement-image’s differentiation and integra-
tion of neither meaning, nor the time-image’s relinking of irrational divi-
sions, but rather a simulation process. Instead of the organic form of
composition that belongs to the movement-image and the serial form of
composition that belongs to the time-image, the virtual-image produces
artificial and simulated (synthetic) forms.
If for the two Deleuzian forms of images we can still find some natural
elements, some psychological dimension of the sense of reality of time, in
the virtual-image the real-time interval covers exactly this traumatic experi-
ence of having forever lost (the organic dimension of) time; the real-time
interval is the pure sign of the artificiality of time. In these virtual time-space
relations the determinant factor is no longer the speed of information
transfer but rather the speed of data calculation time. It is as if that invisible
barrier (the speed of light at which television and radio information circu-
lates) were at the point of being overtaken by the immobile speed of
calculation. Now, again, I have to ask what is the form of subjectivity or
desubjectivation in the virtual-image? The answer is the multitude as a
swarm, the fleeting nomadic bodies of apparition and dispersal.
notion, but with a division inside the notion itself that is always a process
of its enhancement, of its fragmentation as multiplication. That also means
that the processes of necropolitics that insist on racialization touch the
core of the unconscious itself.
What is the emblematic image of the digital mode of production? It
is not the cinematic image, nor the virtual-image, nor the militant
image, not even the commodity-image. I argue that the emblematic
image of the time we live in is the trophy-image. It implies that the
historical formats of global capitalism base their regime of affect, vison,
and perception not through the space-time paradigm but via violent
and direct modes of governmentality and dispossession. The outcome is
the following display:
NOTES
1. Suvendrini Perera, “Dead Exposures: Trophy Bodies and Violent Visibilities
of the Nonhuman,” in borderlands 13, no.1, 2014.
2. David Joselit, Against Representation. In conversation with David Andrew
Tasman, 2015, http://dismagazine.com/discussion/75654/david-joselit-
against-representation/
3. Marina Gržinić, Šefik Tatlić, Necropolitics, Racialization and Global
Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and
Life, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014.
4. World War Z is a 2013 American apocalyptic action horror film directed by
Marc Forster. The screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew
Goddard, and Damon Lindelof is from a screen story by Carnahan and J.
Michael Straczynski, based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Max
Brooks. The film stars Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane, a former United Nations
investigator who must travel the world to find a way to stop a zombie
pandemic.
5. Beatriz Preciado, Testo junkie. Sexe, drogue et biopolitique, translated in
French from Spanish by Preciado, Paris: Edition Grasset, 2008.
6. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1 edition, 1986.
7. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Caleta, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1 edition,
1989.
8. D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Durham: Duke University
Press, 1997.
9. Cf. Marina Gržinić, “Deleuze’s time-image models and the virtual-image,”
in Polygraph, no. 14, Durham: Duke University, 2002, 101–114.
10. Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and
the Society of the Spectacle, Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006.
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Year_at_Marienbad
13. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” in October, Vol. 59,
winter 1992, 3–7. The text was first published in French in 1990.
14. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith,
Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Originally published in 1974.
15. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, New York: Routledge,
1996.
16. A woman, accidentally caught in a dark deal, turns the tables on her captors
and transforms into a merciless warrior evolved beyond human logic.
17. See Preciado, Testo junkie. Sexe, drogue et biopolitique.
28 M. GRŽINIĆ
18. Dan Thu Nguyen and Jon Alexander, “The Coming of Cyberspacetime and
the End of the Polity,” in Cultures of Internet, 1996, 102.
19. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx, Paris: Galilée, 1993.
20. See Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, 146.
21. Catherine Malabou, and N. Vahanian, “A Conversation with Catherine
Malabou,” in Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 9, 2008, 1–13.
22. Suvendrini Perera, “Dead Exposures: Trophy Bodies and Violent Visibilities
of the Nonhuman,” in borderlands 13, no.1, 2014.
23. Joseph Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitcal
Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones, New York: Routledge, 2013, 33.
24. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, New
York: Grove Press, 1963.
Marina Gržinić (PhD) is a philosopher and artist who lives in Ljubljana and works
in Ljubljana and Vienna. She is researcher at the FI SRC SASA (Research Center of
the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts) Ljubljana and professor at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She has published ten books (monographs and
translations). In 2014, in collaboration with Šefik Tatlić, she co-authored the book
Necropolitics, Racialization and Global Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics
and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life (Lexington Books, USA, 2014). Gržinić has
been active as a video artist since 1982 and in the last 34 years has also been making
installations and performative exhibitions in collaboration with the artist and art
historian Aina Šmid from Ljubljana. http://grzinic-smid.si/
CHAPTER 3
Adla Isanović
A. Isanović (*)
The Academy of Fine Arts, University of Sarajevo, Sarajevo,
Bosnia and Herzegovina
e-mail: adla_isanovic@yahoo.co.uk
neoliberal governance that inherit, extend and naturalize its power today.
Moreover, these have been the key sites for the execution of its power, for
trying to establish the universality of so-called Western law and exception
to it at global level—or, more precisely, for the constitution of “Western
law” by the state of exception (Agamben4).
Giorgio Agamben rearticulated biopolitics of the state precisely as its
effect. Elaborating on the biopolitical setting of an “extra-legal sphere,” he
argues that camp,5 as “the space that is opened when the state of exception
begins to become the rule,”6 is “inaugural site of modernity”7 and “the
fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.” 8 According to Agamben,
a tendency of diversification and separation has been existent since the
category of sovereignty was conceived as a power which decides what or
who can represent the political body and what or who is an exception. Such
power is decisive over life and diversifies it from bios (the qualified life;
political being; citizen) to zoe (the bare life; body; homo sacer).
The condition of abandonment, in which law is “in force without
significance,”9 has become a ruling condition, and camp is no more an
exception of the political space we are living in but rather its constitutive
part in which “we are all virtually hominis sacri”10 (Agamben).
However, to fully understand how conditions were set we must theo-
rize colonialism and include the coloniality of biopower, not only as an
issue of the past but also as an active element in governmentality and the
present. There is a missing link since, as Ann Laura Stoler argues, modern
biopower is the product and process of colonial settings.11 If colonialism is
not theorized its power remains naturalized within the theory we use to
explain it.
Achille Mbembe makes the necessary link by adding the concept of
necropolitics to conceptualize the “contemporary forms of subjugation of
life to the power of death”12 that are related to the state of exception,
technologies of destruction and war machinery of the global capitalist
neoliberal world. Marina Gržinić elaborates further that the current logic
is that of “let live and make die,” and that racialization, exploitation,
abandonment and the creation of “deathscapes” for the production of
capital’s surplus value are implemented not only in the Third and Second
but in the First capitalist world as well.13
It is important to stress that all debates about and interventions into
human rights, justice, law (and their exceptions) are today observed
through the prism of humanitarianism. This intensification of the rhetoric
of humanitarianism is linked to shifts in international politics after 1989
32 A. ISANOVIĆ
and especially 2001. Several authors wrote about this shift, including
Gržinić, who elaborated on the transformation of the imperial nation-
state into war-state and on the entrance of the concept of global justice
shaped by the war-state which, in her words, brings “an Agambenian
state-of-exception in which international justice becomes an act of
perverted benevolence, an exception of the law, yet guaranteed by
the law.”14
Discussions on tactics and ethics of humanitarianism intensify with the
necropolitical shift, when governing death becomes one of the main
activities. Humanitarianism enters the discussion to maintain an illusion
of social care. Through its narrative it neutralizes critique, justifies the
state-of-exception and legitimizes use of violence.
In the context of ex-Yugoslav countries these tendencies, together with
the brutal and systematic de-historicization (Gržinić, Buden, Močnik15)
and fantasies of /“ideology of transitology” presented as a process of
“normalization” (Buden16), are in the function of neo-colonialism (that
occurs under the mask of democratization). They are engaged in keeping
us between a delated past and unachievable goals (future).
It must be stressed that on a global scale this is also a period of
the digitalization and development of “communicative capitalism”
(Dean), a form of late capitalism in which, as Jodi Dean elaborates,
values that are central to democracy (e.g. ideals of access, inclusion,
discussion and participation) take material form in network commu-
nication technologies.17
These new conditions request efficient instruments, and this is where
the database enters.
age: in the last few decades we have recorded and also lost more data than
ever before. Although we are aware of the limitations of archival knowledge,
as Derrida points out, we are burning with a passion for the archive.29 The
drive to collect, organize and store human records (to archive) is closely
related to governmentality and life politics. As both Benjamin and Derrida
recognize, the archive—as much as and more than being a question of the
past (the order of memory)—is a question of the present and the promise of
the future, and this is where political power is situated.
This is particularly visible today, when data-mining techniques and
database practices, predictive analytics and other methods to extract
value from data are used to calculate, predict and shape the future based
on produced and collected data.
As Chun notes, the database (based on memory) encapsulates the
logic of programmability (new media “proliferates ‘programmed
visions,’ which seek to shape and to predict—indeed to embody—a
future based on past data”30), and belief in it feeds the current organiza-
tion of the modern liberal state.
Fantasies of communicative capitalism (i.e. fantasies of abundance,
participation, unity, wholeness31), as Dean recognizes, continue to pro-
duce ambivalent experiences—threats of total control and promises of
emancipation, or, to use Rancière’s terminology, the logic of police and
the logic of politics.
Thus, following Foucault’s, Deleuze’s and Agamben’s definition of
apparatuses32 (dispositifs), I define the database as the major technology
of power of global neoliberal governmentality with the capacity to strate-
gically capture, model, control and secure the gestures, behaviours and
discourses of living beings, determining what we have been, what we are
no longer and what we are becoming,33 thus operating at the intersections
of power relations and relations of knowledge.
The tribunal provided a digital replica and was willing to enable access
to the local community. It does not “smell bad” anymore, it is indexed,
standardized, flexible and it can be reused for various purposes. So where
is the problem? Objects were processed by the court, so why are locals not
able to close this chapter of transitional justice and move on?
First, the digital return is not really the return. Second, the right to
make such a decision over the destiny of these remains, this act of violence
and its justification (for “hygienic reasons”), is problematic in many ways.
Experts described this act as scandalous. Preservation would not impose
serious threats to human health, and this act was in opposition to the
principles of professional forensic practices, because the goal is always to
preserve evidence as much as possible.47 Keeping in mind the executor’s
strategic erasure of traces, this destruction might be perceived as an
accessory to the crime—as “killing the witness.”
Moreover, the ICTY prevented the local community, which had pro-
vided the material, to decide if the remains had some kind of value (e.g.
personal, or community, historical, memorial, educational, juridical).
Instead, through this operation, the tribunal produced a “non-value”—
it identified what cannot have a voice and what is not worth preserving.
The source community, due to racial divisions, did not fit the image of the
“author” or “judge,” and in that way it lost control over its own
representation.
The coloniality of power is highlighted by appropriating the right to
ownership and control, in relation to victims, family members and the
state from which objects were taken.48 This act reveals the renewal of the
colonial right to intervene into some states that are now dubbed “failed”
(as infantile, unsuccessful, weak, unable to exercise self-care and control),
without the possibility or the right to decide on its own citizens.
The act highlights the sovereign power behind it which reserves the
sole right to decide what can represent the political body or an excep-
tion to it, the sole right to include or remove files from the order of the
visible.
Archival destruction, as the site of colonization (and exposure to
sovereign violence), also indicates that the archive is not only a biopo-
litical (Foucault) but also, and rather, a necropolitical technology
(Mbembe).
By digitizing dematerializing remains they disappear from the realm of
the physical and their status changes. Also, due to their digital form they
can easily be transformed, mobilized, modified and reused elsewhere.
38 A. ISANOVIĆ
Where do these traces re-appear, where are they mobilized today? The
answer is in the (safe) field of contemporary art, which brings us to our
second case: public exhibition as a “forum.”
What place does that file occupy in the art-field? What does it “do,” or
what is expected from it? Does it open a new forum for discussion? Does it
mean politics in Ranciere’s sense, “that you speak at the time and in a place
you’re not expected to speak.”52 What is its capacity for subverting the
existing order and master/slave relations?
It certainly has that disruptive potential, but not by default. In many
cases such practices do not go beyond normalizing aesthetics, or they simply
place a sign of equation between artistic and political inclusion, forgetting
that in such cases it is often about participation in a limited space that was
designed for it. However, the promise remains since there are some other
artistic and theoretical strategies that are engaged in resisting and subverting
norms and mastery in de-normalization, de-classification and critical analysis
of the performativity of epistemological practices.
NOTES
1. Governmentality as a notion, formulated by Michel Foucault, comes from
his lectures held in 1978–1979. Those include a lecture entitled
‘‘Governmentality” [1979], in which Foucault gives a threefold definition
of governmentality:
“1. The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and
reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very
specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as
its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential
technical means apparatuses of security.
2. The tendency which, over a long period and throughout the West, has
steadily led towards the pre-eminence over all other forms (sovereignty, disci-
pline, etc) of this type of power which may be termed government, resulting, on
the one hand, in formation of a whole series of specific governmental appara-
tuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of savoirs.
3. The process, or rather the result of the process, through which the state of
justice of the Middle Ages, transformed into the administrative state during
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, gradually becomes ‘governmentalized’.”
Michel Foucault, “Governmentality” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality, (eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller),
1991, 102–103.
2. Jonathan Xavier Inda, “Analytics of the Modern: An Introduction,” in
Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics,
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 2.
3. Biopolitics—referring to a way of organizing, managing and regulating the
“population” considered as a biological entity, species-being; biopower—
referring to a range of techniques for the subjugation of bodies and control
of populations.
4. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005.
5. Evoking the concentration camps, the refugee camp, the detention camp.
6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998, 96.
7. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 122.
8. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 102.
9. Ibid., 35.
10. Ibid., 68.
11. See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History
of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham: Duke University
Press, 1995.
POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF DATABASES AND FORENSICS 41
Adla Isanović lives and works in Sarajevo. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from
the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana, where she finished her thesis on
the theme of databases and art in the function of knowledge production in the
digital age. She completed an MA in New Media (HEAA—School of Applied Arts)
and an MA in the Research-Based Postgraduate Program “Critical, Curatorial,
Cybermedia Studies” (ESBA—School of Fine Arts), Geneva University of Arts and
Design, Switzerland. Currently, she is Associate Professor at The Academy of Fine
Arts in Sarajevo.
CHAPTER 4
Šefik Tatlić
DEPOLITICIZATION OF IDEOLOGY
An analysis of the mainstreaming of liberalism in the First World’s dominant
ideological discursivity requires a brief historicization of the progression of
alignment of capitalism’s requirements and paradigmatic Western humanist
projects. Since capitalism does not have any teleology but the one it can
derive from Western, Eurocentric humanist projects, it is important to
thematize the progression of liberalism into the ideological mainstream of
the First World in this context. If we take into account that the mainstream-
ing of older humanist projects (such was the Enlightenment) was organized
on the basis of the First World’s requirements that needed the particular
notion of progress to be univerzalized, then it could be said that the main-
streaming of modern liberalism that started in parallel with the development
of modernity in the late nineteenth century all the way to the mid-twentieth
century, was organized on the same basis. The parallel historical develop-
ment of liberally prefixed discursivities and capitalist modernity should be
seen as a development subjected to the requirements of capitalism.
Š. Tatlić (*)
Unaffiliated/freelance, Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina
e-mail: tatlic.s@gmail.com
Berlin argued that positive liberty implied that a higher amount of control
over the individual inevitably led to such a structuring-subjectification that
produced subjectivity as a direct extension of wish-fulfillment of some
power that created it. However, as structuralist theory uncovered, sub-
jectification (the ideological weaving by itself), operates on the basis of an
already coopted individuality. As Louis Althusser argued:
[ . . . ] ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects, which
amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already interpellated
by ideology as subjects, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition:
individuals are always-already subjects.3
blueprints that would have instituted liberty as explicit political and ideolo-
gical program. He postulated that both conceptualizations had merit but in
that sense in which he saw that positive conceptualization, supra-personal
order (positive liberty), could or would function as the infrastructure for the
exercise of negative liberty. This was pluralism in its ideological infancy.
Berlin argued that:
So, the First World’s revered concept of pluralism, that contains a “mea-
sure of negative liberty” and that recognizes the fact that “human goals are
many” operates under the supra-personal socio-political order based on
tenets of positive liberty (liberty for something), within which principles of
negative liberty are all subdued not only to logics of capital but also to
epistemological logics of the cosmopolitan center of capitalism (the First
World). As Colombian decolonial theoretician Santiago Castro-Gómez
argued:
The First World’s pluralism is deemed by the same world, that is, its
capitalist supra-personal order, as the format under which other (in
terms of diversified) opinions or goals would be exercised only under the
presumption that the ultimate goal of diversified opinions is attaining the
“scientific-technical rationality of the Occident.” Although this rationality
poses as if it has nothing to do with the categories of race, ethnicity and
religion, capitalism and the First World utilizes these very categories as
organizational principles of society upon which ideological potency and
48 Š. TATLIĆ
The First World therefore emphasizes the pluralist format in the produc-
tion of society only because it allows it to sustain and perpetuate the
internal racialist mechanism for deriving (and sustaining) privileges.
This pluralist format is therefore only a supra-personal dimension of the
order in which invidual-centric privileges are being derived on racial basis
which are themselves rationalized by and/or through humanistically pre-
fixed narratives (human rights) that postulate that some are or should be
inherently more privileged than others. Capitalist pluralism is therefore
endowed with a humanistic aureole that masks pure racism into an “ini-
visible hand” that governs, from the inside, a paradigmatic democratic
pluralist society. This is the same “hand” that filters those more optimal
for adopting pluralism as modernist legacy from those not optimal enough
for this and who should (allegedly) be led by the First World toward this
goal.
If we analyze Berlin’s thought in the context of the development of
liberalism from an individual-centric regime (negative liberty), that
attacked certain aspects of the state in the 1970s, 1980s and the 1990s,
to a supra-personal (positive liberty) regime that retained the shape of
racist imperialism that was redeployed explicitly after 9/11, it is obvious
that liberalism at first was never in a dichotomic relation with the reac-
tionary, Eurocentric, epistemological program of the First World.
Therefore in the aftermath of the Second World War, after the fall of the
Wall, or in the aftermath of 9/11, that same world did not coopt liberally
prefixed rhetorics (freedom of speech, “civilizational” rhetorics, etc.), it
rediscovered liberally prefixed discursivities as what they always were—a
modernized format of perpetuating old colonial, racial and imperial ten-
dencies embedded in the First World’s mainstream epistemological logic.
THE EMANCIPATION OF NECROCAPITALISM: TELEOLOGICAL FUNCTION . . . 49
As Gržinić argues:
from dominant power discourses (and it could be said that it did), then now
the function of the ISA is not to pose as a mask of the alleged lack of
structural connection between power and economy, but to equal the infra-
structure of exploitation with the infrastructure of liberation on an ideolo-
gical and epistemological level. In general, now it is possible to notice that
postmodern capitalism successively and gradually, after the fall of the Wall,
after the 9/11 and after the 2008, crisis of capital, allowed itself to disclose,
to openly admit that the unmitigated transfer and inherent cooperation
between the infrastructural and superstructural domains existed. Hence,
this allowed capitalism to openly pronounce that it indeed is a system of
exploitation, although capitalism continued to conceal that its hierarchies of
exploitation are racially, ethnically and religiously segregated.
So, if structural theory deemed that the economy constitutes the infra-
structure and that the state, state apparatuses, law, culture, etc., constitute
the superstructure, today we witness that it is vice versa. In necrocapitalism,
the state, its apparatuses, the law, oppressive machinery, etc. constitute the
infrastructure, while the economy, structurally organized as purely ideolo-
gical discurse, is actually the superstructure. In other words, this paradig-
matic twist allowed capitalism to format the economy as the mere and direct,
ideological, cultural and epistemological, extension of infrastructural power.
Amidst these optimizations of hegemony it could be said that the economy,
not in terms of production, distribution/exchange and consumption, but in
terms of utilizing production, distribution and consumption for aims that
evade maximizing of profit, actually ceased to exist, if it ever existed in its
fundamentally nominal capacity. Since economy was, within the necrocapi-
talist system, reduced to such a transfer of values between the power and
society that is unarticulated by any kind of politically ideological discursivity,
it could be said that the economy simply does not exist. All that was left was a
pure oppressive power and a society commodified, mobilized and/or turned
into such a commodifiable category, into a necropolitical category open to
imposition of death and organized as proto-necro contingency.
Society always was and is, not only in capitalist discursive formations of
power, an extension of power, but, in necrocapitalism, the main mode of
relation between power and society is organized as the mode of appease-
ment and/or cooperation which made society into a direct, unmitigated
extension of power. This is a precondition that allowed necrocapitalism to
deploy necropolitics against society in the form of mass enslavement
deployed in the First World and in the form of mass killings deployed in
the non-Occidental (Third) World. This paradigmatic twist, that placed
54 Š. TATLIĆ
the oppressive power in the infrastructural domain and that placed the
economy in the superstructural domain, constitutes an inner architec-
tonics of capitalism whose dynamics operates on the basis of the gradual
merger of these two structural domains that constitute necrocapitalism. In
this way necrocapitalism became unleashed, emancipated and ultimately
gained sovereignty.
At the same time, this hegemonic homogenization of the order was
ideologically represented as its strict opposite, as alleged ephemerization
of capitalism as a power structure, which is a stunt that only ephemerizes
and/or erases non-Occidental histories, knowledges, epistemologies and
subjectivities in the name of geopolitical and temporal dominance of the
First World. As Gržinić argued:
While the East is excluded more and more from the materiality of its history,
knowledge, memory, etc., the West is just performing it. It plays with a
speculative format of itself; it wants us to think that its roots of power and
capital are fictional!13
name of propelling of the old, the same in the form of the stretching of
immediate relations of dominance and epistemological logics that sustain
it. The only non-axiomatical eschatological and teleological trajectory
necrocapitalism operates with is that trajectory that conditions the possi-
bility of possibilities by its own logics, by the imperative that states that it is
only necrocapitalism that can propel history forward.
The struggle against capitalism should be perceived as an anti-
imperialist struggle, which also means that the left’s struggle should
be more Copernican and decolonial than reduced to criticism of eco-
nomic logics. When we say Copernican and decolonial, we refer to a
need for dismantling the centrality of the First World in metapolitical
register. This dismantling is at the same time a political gesture that
epistemologically connects immediate relations of power and humanis-
tically prefixed discourses that pose as detached from that power. This
means that the struggle of the left must be politically-ideologically
organized, not primarily as the struggle for social justice, but as the
struggle for politically ideological order—a socialist state that would
tackle the current and produce another institutions and another epis-
temological normative. To say it in the spirit of this text, it is the
infrastructure that matters.
NOTES
1. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958) in Isaiah Berlin, Four
Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969, 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Louis Althusser, On Ideology—Radical Thinkers, Book 26. New York,
London: Verso, 2008, 49–50.
4. See Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 31.
5. Santiago Castro-Gómez, “The Missing Chapter of Empire,” in Cultural
Studies, 21:2, 2007, 428.
6. Marina Gržinić, “A Refugee Protest Camp in Vienna And the European
Union’s Processes of Racialization, Seclusion, and Discrimination”, in e-flux
journal #43/03, New York, 2013.
7. Marina Gržinić, “Subjectivisation, Biopolitics and Necropolitics: Where do
we Stand?,” in Reartikulacija journal #6, Ljubljana, 2009, 23.
8. Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, “Live and Let Die: Colonial Sovereignties and
the Death Worlds of Necrocapitalism,” in borderlands ejournal, 5:1, 2006.
9. Marina Gržinić, “The State of Things,” in Reartikulacija journal #5,
Ljubljana, 2008, 9.
60 Š. TATLIĆ
Aleksa Milanović
GLOBAL QUEERING
A. Milanović (*)
Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia
e-mail: aleksa.milanovic@fmk.edu.rs
something pure and fixed and it is not lost in the encounter with global
culture—it is just inscribing itself in it.
What is concretely stressed by the critics of the global queering thesis is the
fact that although the conditions for spreading Western models of sexual
and gender identities had been established at the site of non-Western
cultural spaces, local identities connected to sexuality and gender did not
vanish or disappear in Western models—once influenced by them, they
had been modified.4
Western models of (homo)sexual and (trans)gender identities had some
influence on the local concepts and understanding of sexuality and gender,
not only because of mass (global) media and (gay) tourism but also
because of the global phenomenon of actualizing the issue of human
rights, which became “the ‘pervasive criteria’ by which nations approach
a universal standard of civilization, progress, and modernity.”5 During the
nineties, sexuality began to be an important question involving a focus in
the discourses of international human rights movements. The Australian
THE IMPACT OF WESTERN SOCIETY ONTO THE IDENTITY POLITICS OF SEXUAL . . . 63
The koti “family” has at least five members, or identities, that I know of:
hijra, zenana, jogin, siva-sati, kada-catla koti—differentiated on the basis of
idealized asexuality, dress, kinship patterns, religion, respectability, and the
centrality of the body to their understanding of self.15
related to movements for rights of sexual and gender minorities and AIDS
prevention contributed greatly to the development of NGOs. As such they
are indirectly responsible for the specific development and hybridization of
identity politics in India.
It is pretty much clear that globalization took an important part in
changes in identity politics and movements for the rights of sexual and
gender minorities. But here the influence of the West started much earlier
than recent globalization processes. Indigenous gender and sexual iden-
tities were redefined much before the global gay culture phenomenon and
its impact on changes in regards to identity politics and movements for the
rights of sexual and gender minorities. Today in India both of these
models are present—local and global (Western), which are both constantly
redefined and hybridized through this post-colonial space and under the
influence of both local culture and global processes.
The goal of this study, which is itself aiming at analysis of the gender
and sexual minority identities in India today, is not only to identify the
ways in which globalization processes and Western influences change
identity politics in the non-Western world but also to point to a
strength of the elements that lead to those changes. In the other
words, this example clearly illustrates the power of Western culture,
which is in the first place through medical and legal discourse, influen-
cing forms and inducing redefinings of gender and sexual identity
categories. Bending to fulfill a binary gender model and normatives
dictated by Western society is a process that started a long-time ago
and was so entrenched that stopping it or doing anything in order for it
to be slowed down or neutralized would be practically impossible. A
conclusion that stems from this points to a possible solution to the
problem—redirecting the notion of the Western way of seeing gender
and sexual identities.
NOTES
1. Jelena Đorđević, Postkultura: uvod u studije kulture, Beograd: Clio, 2009, 388.
2. Dennis Altman, “Global gaze/global gays,” in Sexual identities: queer politics,
edited by Mark Blasius, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001, 96–117.
Katie King, “There are no lesbians here: lesbianism, feminism and global gay
formations,” in Queer Globalizations: citizenship and the Afterlife of
Colonialism, edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malave and Martin F. Manalansan IV,
New York and London: New York University Press, 2002, 33–45.
72 A. MILANOVIĆ
Radical Contemporaneity
Politics of the Image in the Video-Films
by Gržinić and Šmid
Aneta Stojnić
INTRODUCTION
This essay is intended as one possible reading of the politics of the image in
the video-films of Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid. Covering the span of
over 30 years (since the 1980s until today), the video works by Gržinić
and Šimd deal with a historical account of the events in the transition from
socialism to post-socialism and ultimately neoliberal capitalism. They often
deal with the time and space of the former Yugoslavia in which the process
of this transition was executed in the most violent way, employing the war
machine and the necropolitical and necrocapitalist mechanisms of subju-
gation and expropriation. However, the artists’ position is not geopolitical
but critical/theoretical, meaning that their artistic analyses include other
parts of Europe and the world. Their recent works precisely expose the
condition of contemporary global necrocapitalism, leveling a harsh cri-
tique of discrimination, racism, and fascism in Europe today. In this regard
the oeuvre of Gržinić and Šmid takes a historical position in terms of
artistic, cultural, and political questioning and critiquing the construction
A. Stojnić (*)
Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia
e-mail: aneta.s7@gmail.com
Fig. 6.1 Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid, Digital montage no. 7, (1 m per 70 cm),
2015, Copyright by Gržinić/Šmid
Fig. 6.2 Marina Gržinić, Aina Šmid, Digital montage no. 3, (1 m per 70 cm),
2015, Copyright by Gržinić/Šmid
CASE 1: LABYRINTH
The video work “Labyrinth” (1993) was developed as a video dance
project that attempted to deal with and comprehend the schizophrenic
conditions of the war-torn (former) Yugoslav space. I put former in
brackets here because former-Yugoslavia, ex-Yugoslavia, or post-
Yugoslav space/time are all terms which imply that a certain historiciza-
tion of Yugoslavia had already happened. In 1993, however, the war
80 A. STOJNIĆ
was at its peak and there was not yet the time-space created for such a
historical distance. In art as well as theory “post-conflict spaces” are
usually approached with a certain historical distance that enables us to
deal with traumatic pasts or collective trauma. It is crucial to understand
that trauma is not simply a record of a past experience like a memory, but
that it “registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned.”2
According to Cathy Caruth:
While the traumatized are called upon to see and to relive the insistent
reality of the past, they recover a past that encounters consciousness only
through the very denial of active recollection. The ability to recover the past
is thus closely and paradoxically tied up, trauma, with the inability to have
access to it.3
The crucial moment of the video work is the “installation” of the body in
the traumatic places of the outer and inner world. The architecture of misery
and deprivation: refuges camps, zoological gardens, rooms with odds and
found images etc., forms a specific territory that forces the body, the psyche
and memory (of dancers) to final solutions.4
(1) Exploring the possibility of art and cultural practices for generating
the communities, agencies, and relations that could lead to social
change.
(2) Unfolding the links between hetero-normative and nationalistic
violence, which is a backdrop of the link between nationalism and
capitalism, particularly in the conditions of transitional turbo-
capitalism.7
(3) Precise analyses of the changed conditions for Africa as well as
African non-European Union (EU) residents in Europe after the
fall of the Berlin Wall.
The work was created through a collective process which involved the
embodiment of theoretical, social, political, and performative discourses.
As stated by the artists, the video:
This precise and provocative statement is there to make us think how can
we (then) make relevant art in the conditions of financial capitalism. The
approach to video-making in “Naked Freedom” offers one possible
answer: it is necessary to have a clear political and theoretical position
that has to be precisely expressed as such. In other words the “artist
statement” is no longer a description tangential to the work but its very
backbone and an integral part of the piece.
The second layer which connects all the others in this video consists of
performative drawings and animation by Siniša Ilić, an artist and performer
from Belgrade. He employs this technique in order to deconstruct the
various forms of violence (from heteronormative to nationalistic) and to
connect different spaces within the realm of culture, art, and activism,
struggling to survive in the conditions of turbo capitalism and turbo
nationalism/fascism in a society devastated in transition.
The third part of “Naked Freedom” consists of footage of a conversa-
tion between Gržinić and Kwame Nimako, a theoretician from Ghana
who lives in Amsterdam where he is in charge of NiNsee (National
Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and its Legacy). Their debate
focuses on the status of Africa and non-EU citizens in Europe from a
decolonial position and in the light of (post)colonial relations of sub-
jugation, exploitation, and appropriation of labour and life. In this con-
versation it is indicated that after the re-discovery of the former Eastern
RADICAL CONTEMPORANEITY 83
CASE 3: RELATIONS
“Relations” (2012) is a documentary made on the occasion of the 25th
anniversary of the lesbian group ŠKUC-LL (1987–2012). This documen-
tary provided a much-needed historicization of the lesbian movement in
the former Yugoslavia and as such presents an invaluable and empowering
testimony of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning,
and Intersex (LGBTQI) practices, struggles, and genealogies in the
region. The film testifies to a diversity of marginalization processes and
follows the struggles of lesbian and LGBTQI communities in Slovenia and
the former Yugoslavia through the decay of late socialism into the turbo-
nationalism of the 1990s which prepared the terrain for the normalization
of global neoliberal capitalism in the twenty-first century. This is not
simply a struggle for any kind of visibility of lesbian and LGBTQI move-
ments but is rather a militant demand for historical visibility. At the same
time, it is a quest for dismantling the hegemonic, heteronormative, homo-
phobic and clerofascist history that excludes it. In this way this project
stands as a struggle for the field of knowledge and delinking from a
colonial matrix of power that regulates gender relations and dynamics.
The film is developed in a classical documentary format that relies on
conversations with key actors in the movements combined with footage
of historically significant events as well as spaces around which the com-
munity was generated. The critical discourse of the movement and
historical events around it is visualized through interviews, documenta-
tion of art projects, subcultures, nightlife, and political action. However,
by speaking about the historical account of the events in the post-
socialist space it also exposes the condition of contemporary global
capitalism and gives a harsh critique of discrimination, racism, and fas-
cism in Europe today. The violent processes are traced through the story
84 A. STOJNIĆ
CASE 4: SEIZURE
“Seizure” is a very specific experimental documentary that combines an
artistic and curatorial approach in one format—a kind of curated video-
film. As a starting point it takes three film programs curated by Gržinić
between 2014 and 2015 in Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Vienna, where she
presented four women artists: Adela Jušić (“The Sniper,” 2007), Anja
Salomonowitz (“The 727 Days without Karamo,” 2013), Heiny Srour
(“Leila and the Wolves,” 1984), and Nevline Nnaji (“Reflections
RADICAL CONTEMPORANEITY 85
Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights,” 2013). All four women express
strong political positions in their work.
Jušić challenges the war machine which regulated the gaze, affects and life
from the 1990s on in the Balkans, dealing with the topic of the sniper told
through personal history with the Sarajevo siege. As noticed by Gržinić: “it is
a premonitory work that announces a topic (the sniper) of mainstream
Hollywood films and counter positions in the art world (Rabih Mroué in
his works from 2012).” Salomonowitz’s documentary deals with the violent
administration of asylum and migration laws in Austria. She focuses on the
influence of these laws on intimate relations, particularly how these laws
incapacitate bi-national couples and children from bi-national families that
are seen as racially different in Austria and the EU. Srour examines the often-
neglected role of Arab women in contemporary Palestine and Lebanon. She
expresses the quest for emancipation from ideas of film narration based on
the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel and seeks for a structure that would
reflect the existing consequences of colonialism. Nnaji offers an overview on
the Black women’s movement in the United States with a focus on double
subjugation and discrimination related to access to the labour market in the
capitalist regime of whiteness. She shows how black women are discrimi-
nated against both by gender bias and a racialized labour division.
“Seizure” brings together these positions in a simple yet precise way,
tracing connections and genealogies between only seemingly disparate
histories and positions. It consists of conversations between Gržinić and
the artists, footage of their public talks as well as inserts from their works.
The video is made in a minimalist way in a very literal sense of the word.
The format of the image is exceptionally small—in the middle of a black
regular-format screen there is a small vertical rectangle which contains the
video-film. It creates the feeling that it could have been shot with a mobile
phone, or that you are watching the work on an interactive multipurpose
screen (as most of the screens we normally encounter are) rather than a
“proper” cinema setting. This peep show has a twofold effect: it states a
demand for a precise focus, and it questions the regimes of visibility in the
conditions of video art production. As stated by Gržinić:
selected film directors and their work. It is not simply about oppositions, but
about suspicious, implicated, agencies and film instruments.
CONCLUSION
In the three decades of artistic production by Gržinić and Šmid it is possible
to notice a certain genealogy of the shifts in relation between image and
text, and consequently the poetics and aesthetics (or ethico-aesthetics in
Deleuzian terms), in their works. The relation between image and text in
their video-films is always conceptual and conditioned by the topic in
question. However, we can notice that with the change of historical periods
a different language is needed. We have traced this from an uncanny poetic
dance video that functions on the pre-verbal level (“Labyrinth”) through a
theoretical discourse exposed in the video essay (“Naked Freedom”) to
classical documentary (“Relations”) and finally dismantling the video
form, re-constructing it and seizing it anew in a format where the language
and the content is delegated to other authors (“Siezure”).
This shift is prompted by the sharp and accurate sense of the contem-
porary context that each of the works is addressing, what I have termed
radical contemporaneity. Always intended towards artistic-political inter-
vention in the specific reality and conditions of life, the work of Gržinić
and Šmid has been and continues to be timely both in terms of its content
as well as its mode of address.
NOTES
1. This selection of works were presented at the exhibition “EUROPE after the
Cold War: Memory, History, Visuality” that I curated as a part of conference
“Image, Racialization, History” at Faculty of Media and Communication in
Belgrade (September 2015).
2. Cathy Caruth, “Recapturing the Past: Introduction” in Cathy Caruth (ed.),
Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1985, 151
3. Ibid.
4. Work description at http://grzinic-smid.si/?p=473
RADICAL CONTEMPORANEITY 87
5. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel
Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
6. In his famous essay “Necropolitics,” Mbembe argued that Foucault’s con-
cept of biopolitics is no longer sufficient to explain contemporary relations
of power. Unlike biopolitics that govern from the perspective of the produc-
tion and regulation of life, necropolitics regulate life from the perspective of
a production and regulation of death (in Latin: necro). The notion of
“necropolitics” refers to life reduced to its bare existence, in other words,
to life at the verge of death. This new logic of capital and its processes of
geopolitical demarcation of world zones is based on the mobilization of the
war machine. While Mbembe articulated the concept of necropolitics to
explain a process of total subjection in Africa, Gržinić was the first to use
necropolitics for explaining and understanding processes in Europe.
7. The term turbo-capitalism was elaborated by Marina Gržinić in relation to
“turbo-fascism,” a term coined by the late feminist Žarana Papić in 2000, in
order to explain the violent discriminatory processes of the hegemonic and
separatist nationalism during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and specifically
the Serbian militaristic reality in the 1990s. “The prefix “turbo” refers to the
specific mixture of cultural and political references [ . . . ] but there is still
fascism in its proper sense” (Gržinić, “The emergence of the political sub-
ject,” 2013 https://emancipationofresistance.wordpress.com/grzinic/).
8. Work description at http://grzinic-smid.si/?p=413
Miško Šuvaković
M. Šuvaković (*)
Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia
e-mail: miodrag.suvakovic@fmk.edu.rs
The question today that stays for art and theory, the social and the
political is the question of the social bond and our place inside it. Are
we capable of action, critical analysis, resistance, or better to say insur-
gency? If yes, how?3
In these examples the question “If yes, how?” relates not only to formal
techniques of academic neoclassical idealistic realist painting, expressionist,
critical para-realism in painting, film, or photography, and referential and
theoretically reflected political post-media activism. It is linked with the
complexity, in Lacanian terms, the indiscernibility of technique and ideol-
ogy4 which means the indiscernibility of means of performing affective
constructions within fields of events that are recognised (viewed, heard,
felt, reflected) as social reality in the instability of shaping life, the aware-
ness of life, and modalities of critiquing a given reality. This concerns three
different realities:
These will be rough comparisons around the question “If yes, how?”.
The question “If yes, how?” relates to the pictorial and Platonistically
idealised genre-painting scene in La Mort de Socrate (The Death of
Socrates, 1787); it also relates to a discursive politicisation of dying,
death, and suicide, defined by the ideals and values of an imaginary
Republic. The Republic is ideally constituted on contractual public laws
as the opposite of the feudal state, which rested on non-transparent
expressions of the sovereign’s will. David’s style, based on academic
rational preciseness, rhetorically stresses the classical formal-sensual ideal
92 M. ŠUVAKOVIĆ
of the Greek body politic and the meaning of the enlightened republican
politics of late eighteenth-century France. Academic and classical painting
rhetorically emphasises the intertwining of political discourse, pictorial
figures, and knowledge about the republic—in fact, an affective construc-
tion. Although David’s painting shows a scene from a Plato dialogue it
does not speak of “Greek democracy” but of Socrates as an allegorical
figure, that is, a French citizen in disguise, a republican, who has borrowed
the universal body of the old Athenian. The Socrates in David’s painting is
not the Socrates of Plato’s philosophy, although he does represent
Platonist bourgeois humanist idealism. He, Socrates, is a respected
French citizen and republican who speaks not of Athens and its democracy
but, rather, that he, as a citizen of France, acknowledges the laws of the
Republic as an expression of the will of its citizens and not his own
individual will or that of the sovereign as the essence of the state. The
state is not a feudal order, an expression of the sovereign’s will, but the
public sphere of political life. The classicist procedure of David’s painting
produces an affective construction, that is, an affective identification, bio-
logical, existential, and political, with revolutionary changes, soon to
come, and the genesis of the new political subject of bourgeois capitalist
society.
The question “If yes, how?” also relates to the pictorial disorder of
George Grosz’s Die Stützen der Gesellschaft (The Pillars of Society, 1926).
The question is posed by an intentional distortion of visible reality, search-
ing for the domain of subjectification of alienated capitalist power behind
the visible public sphere of the acting of political agents. It constitutes an
ambiguous linking of the expressive with the caricatural in deconstructing
the profaned political ideal (we might say Platonist bourgeois idealism) of
the modern bourgeois Republic and its ideological and false construction
of public sociality. Grosz’s painterly critique of capitalist power politics
rests on a caricatural-expressive debiologisation, or, to put it more pre-
cisely, a visually deformed biology and existence are represented as an
ideological cultural visual text hiding real bodies in its antagonisms and
conflicts. The idealism of early-bourgeois neoclassical realism (for
instance, David’s) has been replaced with Grosz’s cynicism5 as a visual
subversion of the biopolitical order of the Weimar Republic. References to
modern power politics—a dependent judiciary, public and secret militar-
ism, class hierarchical identities, manipulative control of media, an anti-
revolutionary Stimung, corrupt public sphere—are turned into a
grotesque faux-epic play with rhetorical pictorial figures or “pillars of
AFFECTIVE CONSTRUCTIONS: IMAGE—RACIALISATION—HISTORY 93
society.” Those figures do not mimic reality or, more accurately, do not
offer an ideal of visible reality but instead show the political ontology of
the then bourgeois contemporaneity as a compromised liberal orthodoxy,
which, in order to survive its crisis, must resort to radical means, that is,
embrace the dispositives of Nazism.
The question “If yes, how?” also relates to the diagrammatic, photo-
graphic, and video recording of a cognitivised and politicised logics of the
documentary as the procedural basis for critiquing the post-Cold War
social fiction, which means ideology. This is ideology under media pres-
sure—that is, an intensified ideology or media flux. This is ideology at
work or, to put it even more dramatically, an ideology that penetrates the
skin, modifying biology between bodily and social matter. In their video
works and printed posters, addressing their focus on contemporaneity,
Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid use montage techniques to present visual-
documentary, visual-symbolic, often self-referential and theoretical-politi-
cal affective constructions with which they show that there is no space or
scene behind the visibility of power. They show (and by showing they
interpret) that contemporary visibility is structured as a field of the antag-
onisms and conflicts of the economic, political, gender, and racial restruc-
turing of subjectivity, that is, self-perception in the unstable complexity of
a global world. Their techniques of answering the question “If yes, how?”
rest on reworking the techniques of the avant-gardes: collage, montage,
relating written or spoken text, and images, a stripped-down linking of
subjectifying and objectifying biology and existence in relation to the
body, etc. The avant-garde techniques are reworked through modalities
of mass media production and its immanent destabilisation—a critical
demonstration of the non-transparent mechanisms of media power as
cognitivised transparent strategies of contemporary art. This is a dialectical
confronting of the individual and the collective with critical questions
concerning the type or quality of the relations of current forms of life
within race, class, nation, generation, production, consumption, oppres-
sion, or desire for liberation and decolonisation. Their realised affective
constructions enable the circulation of affect and, along with it, of pack-
aged meaning relating to the stage of the “human condition” in contem-
poraneity. Also, their realised affective constructions point to the limits to
which one may or can go in terms of the norms, proscriptions, and, to be
sure, horizons of being in “turbo-contemporaneity.” All those terms
prefixed by “turbo”—turbo-neoliberalism, turbo-realism, turbo-fascisms,
etc.—point to the populist character of contemporaneity, which stages
94 M. ŠUVAKOVIĆ
among resistance, sacrifice, and terror. I have demonstrated that the notion
of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjuga-
tion of life to the power of death.10
Juxtaposing the politics of life and the politics of death enabled Gržinić and
Šmid to switch from the geopolitical locality of Eastern Europe and the
former Yugoslavia to the global non-territory of the flexible and accelerated
movement of affective constructions that cannot be located around a single
ethnic group or mixture of similar groups, but around the global issue of race
as that of a renewed research and provoking of the complexity of identity
within and via humankind. The issue of race today is not an issue of us who
are here and them who are out there, but precisely the issue of the presence
of the racial, racist, and antiracist in the everyday of every society inside global
networks, territories, and cancelled spaces. It concerns the transnational
networking of capital, global migrations driven not only by economic factors
but also the struggle to survive on the part of individuals and micro-/macro-
communities. The identity of asylum-seekers had to be re-examined and
brought to a functional phenomenality analogous to gender, class, racial,
generational, and professional identity. Issues of colonisation, the postcolo-
nial, and the decolonial are posited by affective constructions of subjectifica-
tion of individuals as well as micro-communities and the latter’s networked
position in the global/initiated order of the contemporary world. Issues
pertaining to individuals are posited as those of humankind and vice versa.
This is a multi-polar dialectics—different from Hegel’s “plus” and “minus,”
since it involves multiplying the pluses and minuses with all the modifications
of form that cannot be reduced to the transformation of a thesis and antith-
esis into a new quality but a hybrid scattering of qualities, whose phenom-
enality leaves the safe zones of culture and enter the social spaces of the
struggle of the multitude of the potentialities of life and death. Juxtaposing
theorisations of the politics of life and the politics of death leads toward
understanding the fundamental consequences of the neoliberal global trans-
formation of material into immaterial work, and thereby subjection of the
actuality and potentiality of the global population. One should note this
distinction between humankind and population.
In terms of theory, for Gržinić this meant a critical moving stimulated
by the dialectic of bio- and necro-politics from the “politics of difference”
(gender emancipating politics linked with liberal societies) toward recon-
structing a universal politics, that is, meta-politics that will enable a queer
subversion of ostensibly universal dispositives at the foundations of the
100 M. ŠUVAKOVIĆ
NOTES
1. Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” in Parables for the Virtual—
Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, 27.
2. Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage of Attractions, An Essay,” in The Film Sense,
San Diego: Harvest Book, 1975, 230.
3. Marina Gržinić, “Biopolitics and Necropolitics in Relation to the Lacanian
Four Discourses,” conference presentation, Simposium Art and Research:
Shared Methodologies. Politics and Translation, Barcelona, 6–7 September
2012. http://www.ub.edu/doctorat_eapa/wp-content/uploads/2012/
09/Marina.Grzinic_Biopolitics-Necropolitics_Simposio_2012.pdf.
4. Jacques Lacan: “As far as I am concerned, I would assert that the technique
cannot be understood, nor therefore correctly applied, if the concepts on
which it is based are ignored. It is our task to demonstrate that these
concepts take on their full meaning only when orientated in a field of
language, only when ordered in relation to the function of speech,” in
“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in
Écrits. A Selection, London: Routledge, 2001, 29.
5. Peter Sloterdijk, “The Weimar Symptom: Models of Consciousness in
German Modernity,” in Critique of Cynical Reason, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 384–386.
6. Marina Gržinić, Fiction Reconstructed. Eastern Europe, Post-Socialism & The
Retro-Avant-Garde, Vienna: Springerin, 2000.
7. Neue Slowenische Kunst, Zagreb: GZ Hrvatske, 1991.
8. Aleš Erjavec and Marina Gržinić, Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Ljubljana:
Mladinska knjiga, 1991.
9. Mladen Stilinović, “Footwriting,” in Dora Hegyi, Zsuzsa Laszlo, Emese
Suvecz, and Agnes Szanyl (eds.), Art Always Has Its Consequences: Artists’
Texts from Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia, 1947–2009, Budapest: tranzit.
hu and Berlin: Stenberg Press, 2011, 91.
10. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” https://www.dartmouth.edu/~lhc/
docs/achillembembe.pdf, 27, 39–40.
Alanna Lockward
“By creating a society in which all people, of all colours, were granted
freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution transformed the world.
It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas and
therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the
foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere.”
—Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: A History of the
Haitian Revolution, Boston: Belknap Press, 2005, 6–7.
“In my language, the tz’utujil, a visual artist, a medical doctor, a
musician and a spiritual guide are all called q’manel.”
—Benvenuto Chavajay, interview by Salazar Ochoa, “Identidad,
descolonialidad y resistencia, un acercamiento al pensamiento de
Benvenuto Chavajay,” in La Hora, 30.01.2015. Free translation
by the Author.
A. Lockward (*)
Alanna Lockward, Founding Director of Art Labour Archives, Berlin, Germany
e-mail: artlabour@yahoo.com
Northup indicates that not a day passed without him contemplating escape.
References to the Great Pine woods are a constant symbolic evocation of the
possibilities for living elsewhere than on the plantation. The journey between
that “free” space and the plantation marks the boundaries between being free
and being enslaved. Northup chooses the plantation, and in the end attempts to
secure his freedom the “legal” way in a context where the illegality of slavery
itself was in question. But in focusing so much on the plantation, the film misses
the Great Pine woods, as a free space symbolically and literally. Thus in the end
we see Northup getting his freedom ostensibly through the beneficence of a few
white people who supported him, and then actually attempting to go through
the courts when black people still were not able to testify against whites.
[t]he fact remains, and we can never emphasize it enough, that the maroon
is the only true popular hero of the Caribbean . . . an indisputable example of
systematic opposition, of total refusal.1
However, some of his critics argue that in his writings maroons are
limited to “fragmentary and opaque utterances,”2 and I add that mar-
oon women are symptomatically invisible. Fortunately, the celebrated
photographic series by Renée Cox honouring the legacy of Queen
Nanny of the Maroons contributes to expand the imprint of women
narratives in this scenario. This Jamaican national heroine who lived in
the first half of the eighteenth century was abducted from Ghana
SPIRITUAL REVOLUTIONS: AFROPEAN BODY POLITICS AND THE . . . 105
and became an expert in guerrilla tactics. She has been considered the
most relevant cultural and spiritual leader of the maroons, liberating
more than eight hundred abducted Africans in a span of thirty years.
Another female maroon figure discussed further on is the character
Yambaó in the film by the same name (1957), analysed by Teresa
María Díaz Nerio in her lecture-performance “Ni ‘mamita’ Ni ‘mula-
tita’” (2013).
In Sergio Giral’s Maluala (1979) the portrayal of maroon resistance is
accomplished majestically. Although verbal, mental, and physical abuse
intertwine in a symphony of cruelty, Giral’s faithful accounts show how
resistance counteracts the barbarism of the European “civilizing” mission
with courage and blood, supported by prayers of Islam, Yoruba, Congo,
and Christian traditions. Quilombo, Palenque, Maniel, and Manigua are
some of the many names of those physical and spiritual safe spaces where
maroons reinvented themselves as inhabitants of a free world, creating
their own rituals in conversation with their surroundings. The following
ideas discuss the relationship between body politics and the liberation Pan-
Africanist legacies of the maroon leaders that created the first Black
Republic and some Afropean Decolonial Aesthetics/Aesthesis practi-
tioners working basically with performance and moving image. In the
embodied and screened narratives of Caribbean Diaspora artists, including
Teresa María Díaz Nerio, Jeannette Ehlers, Quinsy Gario, and Patricia
Kaersenhout—members of what has become the working group BE.BOP.
BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS – as well as in others residing in the
USA or the Antilles, such as Adler Guerrier, Nicolás Dumit Estévez,
Barbara Prézeau-Stephenson, and Charo Oquet, the three axis of maroon
legacies, namely the constitution of a safe space, the development of
experimental spiritualities and the strategies of armed struggle are arrest-
ingly eloquent.
BE.BOP. BLACK EUROPE BODY POLITICS has been my con-
tribution as a curator to the further expansion of these Caribbean
radical endowments by means of introducing the modernity/colonial-
ity/decoloniality options of de-linking from the colonial matrix of
power to the discussion of Black and African Diasporas artistic practices
in Europe and beyond. BE.BOP operates as a safe space, a quintessen-
tial maroon category, and as such has become an utterly rewarding
collective experience. Rolando Vázquez, an active member of the
group and co-founder with Walter Mignolo and myself of the
Transnational Decolonial Institute, explains how the collective concep-
tualization of Decolonial Aesthetics/Aesthesis3 is particularly relevant
in the issues at stake:
106 A. LOCKWARD
Unlike contemporary art that is ensnared in the search for the newest
abstraction, Decolonial Aesthetics/Aesthesis seeks to bring to the fore
those other forms of sensing and inhabiting the world that have been
subsumed under the long history of this western-centered world, of the
modern/colonial order. In my view, decolonial artists are not seeking
innovation and abstraction for the sake of it, they are not seeking the
recognition of the contemporary art world; rather, they are bringing to
light through their practices, through their bodies and communities the
histories that have been denied, the forms of sensing and inhabiting the
world that have been disdained or erased.4
[Maya Deren’s] years in Haiti and her intense involvement with [Vodoun]
can be seen as her quest to experience a living culture that gave “credibility
to the unreal,” and thereby embody the vision she sought in her experi-
mental films. Maya Deren’s most significant contribution to postmodern
discourse might be her profound understanding of the ties that link the
avant-garde and the “primitive” [sic], the Western and the Other.10
The second component of this video triptych, Off the Pig, reproduces
the voice of Angela Davis describing how resistance to enslavement has
been an intrinsic part of its history from day one. The hymn of the
Black Panther Party is chanted while images of one of Port-au-Prince’s
110 A. LOCKWARD
[M]ost people in the Caribbean area are still proud that they are Black,
proud of the African blood and their heritage, and I think this type of pride
was instilled in my mother, and she instilled it in us too, to the degree that
she could. [ . . . ] In fact she was an active member of the Marcus Garvey
movement. [ . . . ] It was Marcus Garvey’s philosophy of Pan-Africanism that
initiated the entire freedom movement, which brought about the indepen-
dence of African nations and had it not been for Marcus Garvey and the
foundation laid by him, you would find no independent nations in the
Caribbean today. [ . . . ] All the freedom movements that are taking place
in America were initiated by the work and teachings of Marcus Garvey.12
are being taken for granted by white Europeans, which in the long run
contributes to perpetuate the misrepresentation of Caribbean women and
in this regard prevents their accessibility to other spheres of life in the
West.14
The film features rumbera Ninón Sevilla and is set on a plantation in 1850s
Cuba. Sevilla plays the role of a “mulata” called Yambaó, personifying
Ochún the goddess of love in Cuban Yoruba religion; also Caridad, a
maroon heroine nurtured and trained by her grandmother in the safe
space of a hidden cave. Her character is brownfaced, a common practice
of this popular genre of Mexican films of the 1940s and 1950s known as
“Rumbera Cinema,” embodying a category that Díaz Nerio has named
“Light Skin Blackmestizas.” The stereotypes of the domesticated enslaved
“mamita” or hyper-sexualized seductress “mulatita” played by these
actresses are pervasive even today—the hypermediated persona of
Jennifer López as a “hot Latina” is a case in point. As Kamala
Kempadoo points out:
rivers, and stones, assisted by their native African spirits and camouflaged
under the tutelage of Catholic imagery. The original idea of C Room18 was
to emulate the consultation room of Dominican Vodoun, which the artist
himself experienced growing up in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros. In
his own words:
what this was. All I needed to see was a t-shirt denouncing something
in Europe that was racist. To read that phrase made me instantly
happy. My reaction is symptomatic of how difficult it is to utter that
word in the realm of academia or the arts on the continent. The fact
that this discussion has arrived in the realm of the museum is illustra-
tive of how seriously some institutions are engaging in a dialogue with
decolonial thought. Furthermore, the undeniably Christian, heteronor-
mative, and patriarchal values embedded in the figure of the Zwarte
Piet have been successfully unmasked. Institutionalized blackfacing in
Europe has arrived at its final days and to witness this historic achieve-
ment as members of the African and Black Diasporas in Europe is
particularly healing.
Being a descendant from Surinamese parents born in the
Netherlands, Patricia Kaersenhout’s artistic journey became an investi-
gation of her Caribbean background in relation to being raised in a
West-European culture. A recent interest in performance has intro-
duced her Black radical imagination to a mesmerized audience. Her
performance Stitches of Power. Stitches of Sorrow (2014) combines her
long interest in (in)visibilities with the juxtaposition of moving image,
sound, three-dimensional objects, and audience participation. By means
of unveiling the inherent violence of the apparently innocent act of
embroidering she triumphantly conveyed key contestations of epistemic
disobedience. The narratives of the Continent of Black Consciousness
become embodied knowledge during the thirty minutes in which mem-
bers of the audience alternated their seats and the portion of a shared
piece of cloth where their stitches were permanently embroidered as a
collective memento. Kaersenhout herself was embroidering in a separate
chair. Silence is almost ritualistic, while the voice of Angela Davis on a
loop challenges the white reporter who asks her opinion on violence
over and over. On the floor a sequence of the film Cobra Verde (1987),
in which a young Black woman is emerging from the pits of a slave ship
to face imminent rape, is projected. The atmosphere is simply electrify-
ing. At the end of the performance each piece of fabric is revealed. The
artist has been embroidering a gun manufactured by a factory founded
by Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann, a German born Dane aristocrat
who owned sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean, was active in the
Triangular Trade (specifically in Ghana), and was instrumental in the
foundation of the infamous Danish East Indian Company. All along the
118 A. LOCKWARD
[When] you talk about a revolution, must people think: violence; with-
out realizing that the real content of any kind of revolutionary thrust lies
in the principles, in the goals that you are striving for, not in the way
you reach them.
NOTES
1. Celia Britton, Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of
Language and Resistance, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1999, 60.
2. Régis Antoine quoted by Britton (1999), 61.
3. Decolonial Aesthetics Manifesto: https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.
wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/
4. Email conversation with Rolando Vázquez, 26.02.2015.
5. Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” 1955,
trans. Ken Knabb, in Situationist International Online, http://www.cddc.
vt.edu/sionline/presitu/geography.html
SPIRITUAL REVOLUTIONS: AFROPEAN BODY POLITICS AND THE . . . 119
death, the physical and the spiritual, and ‘I’ and the ‘non-I.’ Her films were
intended as imaginary arenas where this point of contact could be visualized
—where boundaries normally fixed could dissolve, or become wildly flex-
ible; where protagonists could move freely between dreams and waking life
without ever resolving the differences between the two; where nature and
culture, urban and rural environments could be separated (and linked) by a
single step; where past and future selves could meet along the road,
fracturing into clones moving along parallel paths of time and space.”
Shelley Rice, Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy
Sherman, New York: MIT University Press, 1999, 70.
11. Edna Brodber, The Continent of Black Consciousness: On the History of the
African Diaspora from Slavery to the Present Day, London: New Beacon
Books, 2003, 102–3.
12. Noel Leo Erskine, “What Method for the Oppressed?,” in Lewis V.
Baldwin and Paul R. Dekar, “In an Inescapable Network of Mutuality”:
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Globalization of an Ethical Ideal,
Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2013, 251.
13. Agustín Lao Montes, “Hilos Descoloniales. Trans-localizando los espacios
de la Diáspora Africana,” in Tabula Rasa, Bogotá, Colombia, No. 7, July –
December, 2007, 55.
14. Teresa María Díaz Nerio, Ni “mamita” ni “mulatita,” (2013). Performance
text. Manuscript.
15. Kamala Kempadoo, “Gender Race and Sex: Exoticism in the Caribbean,”
2000. http://www.desafio.ufba.br/gt5-003.html. Quoted by Teresa Maria
Diaz Nerio in Ni “mamita” Ni “mulatita”: Caribbean women’s stereotypes
and the Diaspora (2014). Manuscript.
16. After La Papa Móvil in 2003 Estévez undertook a series of pilgrimages
entitled For Art’s Sake, evoking the pilgrimage of El Camino de Santiago
de Compostela (Spain), where Catholic devotees travel to the reliquary of
St. James the Apostle. Estévez’s secular twist took him on pilgrimages to
museums in the New York metropolitan area, each time with a new penance
(on his knees, walking backwards) while spreading “the Word”—of Art.
This project raised issues such as art as ritual, the artist as an emblem of
secular religion, the place of the museum in the modern art world, and the
legitimizing figure of the curator.
17. Law 391 of 20 September 1943 was promulgated during Trujillo’s dictator-
ship. It decreed the practice of African-based religions to be illegal, and in
spite of the activism of public intellectuals and artists it is still in force today.
Dagoberto Tejeda Ortiz, El Vudú en Dominicana y en Haití, Santo
Domingo: Edición Indefolk, 2014, 96–7.
18. This first component of the experience took place at the Museo Folklórico
Don Tomás Morel in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros (Dominican
SPIRITUAL REVOLUTIONS: AFROPEAN BODY POLITICS AND THE . . . 121
Histories Disclosed
CHAPTER 9
Federica Martini
As early as 1926, Mussolini shared his expectations for Italian art, declar-
ing that on the “well-prepared ground” of Fascism “a new and great art
can be reborn, that is both traditionalist and modern.”1 He concluded his
intervention asserting:
*Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di pietra (Stone Fascism), Bari: Laterza, 2007, 164.
F. Martini (*)
Head of Maps—Master of Arts in Public Spheres, Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais,
Sierre, Switzerland
e-mail: federica.martini@ecav.ch
The exhibition is filled everywhere with black flags with embroidered skulls,
especially in the shrine of the dead. One of these flags figures in the
reconstruction of Mussolini’s squalid studio in Milan. I am quite astonished.
( . . . ) It won’t evidently lead me to buy a shining croix de feu, nor it will
change me a bit, but the effect is very strong.14
vision of the exhibition and its appropriation within a Fascist discourse lies
in its manipulation into a means for building something else. In doing so
modernist aesthetics and classical ruins alike no longer considered for their
distinctiveness merged in the general plan for the construction of the
Third Rome, the centre of the Fascist imperial project. Hence, the tension
between invention and re-invention in the vocabulary of Fascist exhibi-
tion-making did not play out as a mere symbolic gesture. Under both the
classical and the modernist agenda the address of the show was decided in
accordance with its intended function within the new calendar of State-
driven political rites. Borrowing Tony Bennet’s considerations on the
nineteenth-century Universal exhibition, we see how art and political
shows produced under Fascism transformed “displays of machinery and
industrial processes of finished products and objets d’art, into material
signifiers of progress—but of progress as a collective national achievement
with capital as the great co-ordinator.”21 Where Bennet talks about capital
we may read Fascist dictatorship, being aware, as Marla Stone argues, that
themed exhibitions in the 1930s equally operated in complicity with the
industrial development of the country.22
Increasingly during the 1930s the design of industrial and Fascist
political exhibitions overlapped because of their shared concern with a
mixed progressive and conservative vision; they both inherited one pri-
mary aspect of the early twentieth-century avant-garde exhibition:23 their
mission to “transform the audience” through bringing modernism at
home.24
Instead of claiming that modernism was being imported from abroad,
exhibitions in Fascist times invented a national breed for the forms they
adopted. Founded in 1927, the Roman Quadriennale also aimed at creating
a national version of an international format, in this case the Venice Biennale,
with the clear intention of displaying works that were likely to enter public
collections and contribute to re-orient in a modernist sense national museum
symbolism. Directed by the artist Cipriano Efisio Oppo, the first
Quadriennale took place in 1931 in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni – the
same location as the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista. It is because of the
Quadriennale that the nineteenth-century architecture of the building was
updated in a more rationalist fashion in order to suit the exhibition of
modern art. If participation in the Venice Biennale was regulated by a
selection committee including international experts, the Quadriennale was
an emanation of the Fascist Artists Union. Artists could freely apply and
propose their work for the Quadriennale, and could also be part of the jury.25
“CONTINGENT MONUMENTS:” CONSTRUCTIONS OF PUBLICNESS . . . 131
We are in an era in which cinema has dispensed with the reading of novels, in
which the radio brings music into the home, and where potentially exhibi-
tions may provide a new form of aesthetic journalism.41
distinction between display and real architecture got blurred as war pressured
institutions and buildings to re-functionalize according to mutated needs. In
1943 the pavilions of the Venice Biennale were transformed into a movie set
in order to allow the production of propaganda films, while Cinecittà in
Rome was used as a prisoner camp. The last 1942 Venice Biennale hosted
the exhibition of works created by Italian soldiers at war. After the war the
Roma E42 city area would stand as a large-scale contemporary ruin along
with many others because of bombings, and in anticipation of those ruins
that other World Fairs and real estate speculation would leave around Italian
cities in the following decades. The Second World War, in advance of
cultural studies, would tragically impose a merging of high and low culture,
distributing fine arts and outsiders’ production into unexpected locations.
It is, of course, this loaded past that makes analysing exhibitions in Fascist
times difficult, as it implies acknowledging in them not only a political
dimension but also a cultural one.42 Consequently, many investigations of
1920s–1940s exhibitions have often unconsciously accepted Fascist claims
about their difference from the past, therefore overshadowing the reasons for
the persistence of some aspects of Fascist culture in our contemporary times.
To understand these appropriation gestures we need to disregard the Fascist
vehement attack against nineteenth-century aesthetics in order to see that like
the Venice Biennale the Fascist exhibition apparatus is deeply indebted with
the tradition of national exhibitions that intensified around the foundation of
the Italian State in the 1860s and across the last part of the nineteenth
century. Nor is this history separated from twentieth and twenty-first-century
blockbuster fine arts exhibitions focusing on national identities and theme-
based, mass-oriented industrial large-scale shows that would emerge in Italy
in the 1950s, the last one in order being the 2015 Expo in Milan. In this
sense “contingency” and “short-term” are not necessarily synonyms.43
NOTES
1. Cited in Jeffrey Schnapp and Barbara Spackman (eds.). “Selections from the
Great Debate on Fascism and Culture: Critica Fascista 1926–1927,” in
Stanford Italian Review, No. 8, 1990, 235–72.
2. Ibid.
3. Wolfgang Schivelbush, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America,
Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939, New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2006.
“CONTINGENT MONUMENTS:” CONSTRUCTIONS OF PUBLICNESS . . . 137
4. Ibid.
5. Building on Franco Borsi’s notion of “state monumentalism,” Schivelbush
points out that the neo-classical turn applies to dictatorships and democratic
governments alike when it comes to “manifest power and authority.” See
Franco Borsi, The Monumental Era: European Architecture and Design,
1929–1939, New York: Rizzoli, 1987.
6. Wolfgang Schivelbush, Three New Deals.
7. See Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in
Mussolini’s Italy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
8. Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista (The Origins of Fascist
Ideology), Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011. See also Maurizio Vaudagna (ed.),
America-Europa, l’estetica della politica, Bari: Laterza, 1989.
9. Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di pietra, 164–165.
10. Marla Stone, The Fascist Revolution, The Bedford Series in History and
Culture, New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2012 and The Patron State:
Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1998; Diane Ghirardo, “Architects, Exhibitions, and the Politics of Culture
in Fascist Italy,” in Journal of Architectural Education, No. 45, 1992, 67–
75; Claudia Lazzaro, Roger J. Crum (eds.), Donatello among the Blackshirts:
History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, Ithaca &
London: Cornell University Press, 2005; Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and
Italian Modernism: Art and Politics Under Fascism, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000; Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master
Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000. Another relevant study in the field is Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,
“The Dialectics of Design and Destruction: The Degenerate Art Exhibition
(1937) and the Exhibition internationale du Surréalisme (1938)” in
October, No. 150, Fall 2014, 49–62.
11. See Claudio Fogu, “Exhibition Art and Fascist Historic Culture,” in The
Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy, 184 and Marla Stone,
The Patron State, 129–30.
12. Nadia Vargaftig, “Les Expositions coloniales sous Salazar et Mussolini
(1930–1940),” (Colonial Exhibitions under Salazar and Mussolini) in
Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire, No. 108, October–December 2010, 44.
13. Ibid., 48.
14. Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy, 3.
15. Antonella Russo, Il fascismo in mostra (Fascism in Exhibition), Roma:
Editori Riuniti, 1999, 50.
16. Jorge Ribalta, Universal Archive: Condition of the Document and the Modern
Photographic Utopia, Barcelona: MACBA, 2007.
17. See Alessandra Tarquini, Storia della cultura fascista (History of Fascist
Culture), Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011.
138 F. MARTINI
33. See Lawrence Alloway, The Venice Biennale 1895–1968: From Salon to
Goldfish Bowl, Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1968, 139, 146. At
the time internationalism was only one side of the coin, as the biennale was
initially designed by the Venetian City Council as an antidote to the crisis of
the Grand Tour. Meant to enhance the local art market, the presence of
foreign artists in the show also attests the need to validate the Venetian art
scene through an international event. This aspect clearly emerges when
considering the selection of artists and genres on display. The stark predo-
minance of landscapes and “vedute” in the galleries and the chronic delay of
the Biennale’s first editions in presenting the avant-gardes reveal two main
drives of the exhibition. See Shearer West, “National Desires and Regional
Realities in the Venice Biennale, 1895–1914,” in Art History, No.3,
September 1995, 404–12. This is due to the will of creating an international
self-portrait of the local scene more than reflecting on current international
experiments; also, to the search for an increased visibility of the Venetian art
scene. See Maria Mimita Lamberti, “I mutamenti del mercato” (Changes in
the market), in Storia dell’arte italiana—Il Novecento, 100–1.
34. Marla Stone, The Patron State, 37.
35. Ugo Nebbia, “Guida sommaria dell’esposizione” (Short Exhibition Guide),
in XVIII Esposizione internazionale d’arte Venezia 1932—Estratto dal fas-
cicolo di maggio della Rivista Le Tre Venezie, year VII, No. 5, 15.
36. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
37. The new German pavilion was inaugurated in 1938 on the occasion of the
20th Art Biennale. At the time the diplomatic exchanges of symbolic archi-
tectures between Italy and Germany also included the building of a new
embassy for Italy in Berlin (1938–1943), conceived by German architect
Friedrich Hetzelt in collaboration with Albert Speer and offered to
Mussolini as a gift. This logic was exposed in 1993 when Hans Haacke’s
participation in the German Pavilion focused on the memory of Hitler’s visit
to Venice. Using the ruins of the previous Bavarian pavilion and the German
symbolic past, the title of his intervention, Germania, also refers back to
Third Reich-architect Albert Speer’s project of urban renewal in Berlin to
position it as a world capital.
38. Nancy Jachec, Politics and Painting at the Venice Biennale, 1948–64. Italy
and the Idea of Europe, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.
39. See Orietta Lanzarini, Carlo Scarpa. L’architetto e le arti. Gli anni della
Biennale di Venezia 1948–1972, Venezia: Marsilio, 2004.
40. Marcello Piacentini quoted in Claudio Parisi Presicce, “La ‘visione classica,
ma moderna, modernissima . . . ’ che ispirò il piano urbanistico dell’E42”
(“The classical but modern, very modern vision that inspired the E42 city
plan,” in Vittorio Vidotto (ed.), Esposizione Universale Roma. Una città
140 F. MARTINI
nuova dal fascismo agli anni ‘60 (Universal Exhibition Rome: A New City of
Fascism in the 1960s), Roma: De Luca, 2015, 11.
41. See Antonella Russo, Fascismo in mostra.
42. On this issue, see Alessandra Tarquini’s insightful survey on the construc-
tion of Fascist culture as a research subject in her Storia della cultura
fascista, 11–47.
43. I would like to acknowledge the invaluable support of Romina Pallotto,
head librarian at the Istituto Svizzero in Roma, in obtaining several sources
employed in this research. My gratitude equally goes to Clementina Conte,
responsible for the consultation for the historical archives of the Galleria
Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, where I was able to consult the Fondo
Maraini.
Federica Martini (PhD) is an art historian and curator. Since 2009 she has been
head of the Master programme MAPS—Arts in Public Spheres at the Ecole
Cantonale d’Art du Valais, Sierre, Switzerland. In 2015–2016 Martini was a fellow
at the Swiss Institute in Rome. She was a member of the Curatorial Departments
of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Musée Jenisch Vevey and
Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts/Lausanne. Her recent projects and publications
include Vedi alla voce (Swiss Institute Milan; MAXXX Sierre; Kunstmuseum Thun,
2015); Open Source and Artistic Research (SARN, 2014); Publishing Artistic
Research (SARN, 2014); Tourists Like Us: Critical Tourism and Contemporary
Art (with V. Mickelkevicius, Vilnius: Vilnius Academy Press, 2013); Pavilions/Art
in Architecture (with R. Ireland, ECAV-La Muette, 2013); Just Another
Exhibition: Histories and Politics of Biennials (with V. Martini, Milano: postmedia-
books, 2011).
CHAPTER 10
Andrea Pócsik
INTRODUCTION
1
In 1909 when this photo was taken, all the characters might have been
occasional or regular viewers of early cinema productions due to the
democratic performance conditions of the magical new medium of mov-
ing images (Fig. 10.1). The gendarmes, the civil inhabitant couple, the
Gypsy2 man with his daughters and the photographer himself might have
shared the same experience in a market tent screening of a travelling
cinema show owner or in one of the cheap movie theatres of the time.
But what might they have thought about the short newsreel3 connect-
ing the travelling Gypsy lifestyle to the sensational, cruel crime—the
Dános-case—after which controlling and disciplining these groups
became a crucial task for authorities and citizens, as the photo above
shows. The Dános-case was a press sensation in 1908, when a way house
owner and his family were murdered and robbed. According to historical
documents, mainly press releases, only travelling Gypsies were accused and
sentenced in the end based on the testimony of a child.4
What did the representation of “otherness” mean to them? Knowing
nothing about the ontology of the technical image but having increasingly
A. Pócsik (*)
Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary
e-mail: pocsik66@gmail.com
more experiences about private and press photos, also entertaining early
cinema productions, did they think about the way they were made? The
partial reception history shows that some of them did but most of them
did not.5 In order not to fall into the trap of speculation, in this case study
I am using the non-linear, content-driven media archaeological approach.
This might be more useful than teleological film historical research in
revealing what role technical images played in the travelling Gypsies
becoming the main enemies at the time of the embourgoisement of the
turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century and how the patterns of this
process can be recognized again a century later in the mediated crimina-
lization of Hungarian citizens of Roma origin.
I argue that scientific and popular cultural visual representations and
their blurred boundaries have a significant mutual influence and help to
create “Gypsy otherness” more effectively than any previous forms.
Criminalized travelling and poverty depicted as the fault of the poor became
the solid pillars of Gypsy images and helped justify, maintain, and further
the exclusion of the ethnic minority from the “nation.” Departing from a
reconstructed early cinema newsreel and the crime it represented in 1908,
SCREENED OTHERNESS: A MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE ROMANI’S . . . 143
Szuhay inherit the dual image from nineteenth-century literature and art:
the assimilated Gypsy, with the general habits and mentality of common
citizens, mostly musicians; and their opposite—the wild, liberty-loving,
mysterious travelling Gypsies that are dangerous to society. Photographers
were mostly interested in the latter.12
These photos justify sociologist Éva Kovács’ observations. In her study
about Roma representation in late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century
Hungarian fine art, she argues:
her study on “the body of Roma men and women in the media con-
structed by racist gazes,” through a feminist, post-colonialist approach,
uses:
interpretational frameworks that reveal and let us see the complex hierarchal
functioning of media that are registered by empirical data but do not
problematize the “observational gaze.”24
She goes further and analyzes the various forms of violence highlighting
the relevance of epistemological,25 symbolical,26 and structural, physical,
mental27violence in Roma representation.
In the Cozma-film we can find “creative” formal and narrative devices
of epistemological and structural violence. Visually the film builds up a
dark and a light side, using YouTube videos about the frightening demon-
stration of the criminals in their home town, juxtaposing them with the
normal life and mentality of handball fans and their deep emotional
sorrow. It gives an example of a “good Gypsy” attitude by interviewing
the Gypsy baron of the country as an authentic “legal representative”
(who was “elected” just after the Olaszliszka street-lynch murder in
2006). He apologised “in the name of his folk.”28 Another interview is
constructed by the filmmakers in order to question the credibility of the
EU Parliament member of that time, Viktória Mohácsi, a liberal civil right
activist of Roma origin.
The Dános murder and robbery was one of the largest sensations in the
press of the early twentieth century, particularly in the new boulevard
papers. Travelling Gypsies were accused of the cruel crime and then
sentenced, the judgement based on the testimony of a child.
Investigation methods of the time were rather questionable; a booklet
for investigators was published in which the author states that travelling
Gypsies smell of fat and mice, so it is easy to recognize them in the crime
scene.29 Media researcher György Gaál made a detailed discourse analysis
of the press reception of the case, revealing the distorting and prejudicial
SCREENED OTHERNESS: A MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE ROMANI’S . . . 147
The audience was compensated for the missing excitement with dra-
matized scenes. The title of the film about the Dános murder, The Life
of the Travelling Gypsies (The Dános Murder and Robbery), shows this
method well; since they had no authentic shots, only the photos of the
accused but not yet sentenced “murderers,” they used it at the end of
the film. Before that they shot a “primitive” feature film in the style of
Volksstücks about chicken thief women, cooking in front of the tent,
horse theft, and chase. Magyar reveals from historical sources that some
cinema owners warned the audience about the “cheating,” but some
did not.30 Thus the film assumed the function of other popular visual
genres (e.g. the caricatures of Ákos Garay based on his own ethno-
graphic photos); the ways of a peripheral, outcast existence were played
by Gypsy characters. But this colorful fiction was complemented with
the evidence of the suspects’ photo. In the films of the turn of the
century not just fiction and reality were mixed but also the “Gypsy,”
identifiable with his/her phenotypical features, was constructed, whose
recognition was made easier with the devices of film form and narra-
tion. Criminalization underpinned with heavy photographic evidence
148 A. PÓCSIK
It cannot be stressed enough that rites help the participants not just to
recognise “the truth” cognitively but also serve as direct source of emotional
power and certainty.37
SCREENED OTHERNESS: A MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE ROMANI’S . . . 149
News about sports, the environment, and other catastrophes are built on
the dramaturgy of disaster films. The mixing of this dramaturgy with the
expository, persuasive documentary is an obvious choice.
The film contains talking head interviews edited as described above (giving
the opportunity, although manipulatively, “to both sides” to tell their
narratives), shots of the mourning rituals and fictional scenes depicting
the reconstruction of the night of the murder.
I would point out the importance of these scenes in the interpretational
framework based on the parallel with the Dános-case. The reconstruction
in the early cinema newsreel resulted in the mixture of “popular ethno-
graphic inscenings” and press photos as evidence. In the Cozma-film the
police investigation method, staging the crime at the scene, became a re-
enactment used mostly in historical documentaries. It begins with the
arrival of the future murderers in a petrol station in Veszprém. They are
represented as the “dark power”; their Gypsiness is used metaphorically
for crime, and staging them suggests rather aggressive behavior during
everyday action, which increases the anxiety of normal citizens. The dan-
cing and murder scenes in the night club are performed by famous
Hungarian genre film stars like Szonja Oroszlán and Sándor Csányi, who
either out of loyalty to their producer or for money, or out of conviction,
lend their names to the project. Thus it is neither an official investigation
reconstruction nor a “real” re-enactment, but rather another persuasive
device in order to manipulate the audience.39
The Dános-case had two important consequences. On one hand it shows the
Gypsy image of the Hungarian society. Through the documents about the
investigation, the press and the reactions about the murder we can reconstruct
what prejudices, beliefs and—except for a few—hostile emotions people had at
the turn of the twentieth century toward Gypsies. Majority held them a low-
caste race that genetically carries proclivity to criminality. ( . . . ) Most of the
opinion holders thought force therapy (labor camps, ergastulum, penitenti-
aries), forced integration into modern society was held the only beatific method.
Apart from that this only case was proved to be convenient to stigmatize
(travelling) Gypsies collectively murderer. The press strengthened further the
negative stereotypes toward Gypsies and thus increased the tension between the
Gypsies and Hungarians. Meanwhile travelling Gypsies were used as a device to
propagate political views and explanation of important social issues.40
Art and culture have always been part of the nation building process.
However, they have also been able to interrupt the hypnotic effect of its
operation, to expose the manipulation of the masses through subverting the
imagined naturalness of national identity, and to uncover the process of
naturalization.47
Only if one is brave and wise enough to know where and when to start, I
would add. In 2014 my colleagues and I were planning a guerrilla street
theatre performance with the artists of Independent Theatre48 in the
framework of the OFF-Biennále Budapest.49
When we conducted interviews and asked the opinion of artists and
teachers from Veszprém they all agreed that we should not go on because
it hurts. We understood that the Veszprém inhabitants are “definitely
stabbed in their heart,” and they don’t know how to pull the knife out.
NOTES
1. The occurrence of this photo is also interesting—but takes us further from
the context of this essay. It was used in the monography of sociologist Csaba
Dupcsik (on the front cover of the book) and its introduction (titled “The
Gaze of Power”) referring to the responsibility of researchers, discussing
shortly the connection of power and knowledge after Michel Foucault.
Dupcsik refers to anthropologist Péter Szuhay who also analyzes it in similar
context in an earlier article. (Csaba Dupcsik, A magyarországi cigányság
története. Történelem a cigánykutatások tükrében. 1890–2008., Budapest:
Osiris, 2009; Péter Szuhay, “Egy régi kép,” in Beszélő, Vol. 7–8, 1998.).
2. I am using the designation “Gypsy” in two different but connected contexts.
First is the designation of the turn of the century when this term was used
for the whole although socially very different groups (musicians, travelers,
etc.) The other context involves the politically incorrect and yet in public
speech accepted term of “Gypsy criminality.”
SCREENED OTHERNESS: A MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE ROMANI’S . . . 153
Jelena Todorović
For centuries great works of art have inspired admiration, devotion, but
also myths and legends often created around them. Some of those myths
were provoked by the curious subjects of the artworks, while others were
generated by the destinies of the works themselves. Paintings like
Holbein’s Ambassadors, Bronzino’s Allegory of Love or Titian’s Allegory
of Prudence still intrigue and bewilder their beholders. A special place in
popular mythology is often given to works of art that are lost or have
perished under strange circumstances. Scholars are still searching for
Leonardo’s lost Battle of Anghiari and Vermer’s Concert, while the history
of both works is the subject of many hypotheses and rather fantastic
stories. However, in some cases the true history of a work of art is far
more intriguing than any myth could ever be.
The lost Rembrandt painting Quintus Fabius Maximus from the State
Art Collection in the Royal Compound in Belgrade (SAC) has such a
curious history. Its destiny is far greater than its myth, while its con-
structed past has never approached the wonders of its true history.
Purchased for the SAC in 1933, this painting acquired its mythical status
J. Todorović (*)
University of the Arts, Belgrade, Serbia
e-mail: jelena.a.todorovic@gmail.com
much later, after the Second World War. According to popular belief, in
the 1950s President Tito gave it as a gift, directly from the State
Collection, to Pepca Kardelj, the wife of a notable party official. The
reason for this curious state gift was never discussed nor was the highly
problematic issue of mishandling national heritage ever analyzed. Myths
rarely require explanations. Through the decades Pepca’s Rembrandt
changed its subject matter, its place and its dimensions. There were
some “eyewitnesses” that swore to its existence, while the majority only
pondered the real value of the masterpiece. The true history of this
painting is rather different.
Pepca Kardelj could not have had a chance to see Rembrandt’s Quintus
Fabius Maximus, and even lesser chance to possess it. Painted around
1653/55, Rembrandt’s Quintus Fabius Maximus (179 × 197 cm) depicts
a famous scene from the Roman republican history. Although
Rembrandt’s authorship of this painting is still contested by scholars,
until the Second World War Quintus Fabius Maximus was considered to
be not just an undisputed Rembrandt but also one of his masterpieces.1
The hypothesis of Rembrandt’s authorship is strongly supported by a
recent discovery of a small pen and ink sketch in the Berlin Museum print
room (inv. No. 956/R), while the only image of the lost masterpiece is a
black and white photograph from Bredius’s notable monograph on
Rembrandt from 1935.2 Although quite blurred, this photograph gives
a sense of that “great visual poem” that inspired art critics of the early
twentieth century.
With its monumental setting, the painting represents the triumphal
entry of Quintus Fabius Maximus, one of the main generals of the
Second Punic War. The entry of Quintus Fabius Maximus into Rome is
well described by Plutarch in his Lives of Fabius Maximus, where he
compares Maximus to great Pericles and glorifies him as one of the main
tacticians of Roman times. From Plutarch’s work the painter chose the
most rewarding scene: Maximus’s triumphal entry into Rome.3
The entire grandiose image is composed around the central depiction
of the triumphant figure on horseback, placed on the intersection of two
powerful diagonals that define this painting. With his magnificence and
solemnity, like the statue of Marcus Aurelius, the victorious general pre-
sides over the entire scene as the key figure of the composition. He is
surrounded by his solders, carrying the standards of the Roman legions,
and exhilarated Romans gather to greet him. As often in the works of
Rembrandt and his followers the light is used here to denote the main
THE PAINTING AND ITS HISTORIES: THE CURIOUS INCIDENT’S . . . 161
A particularly grandiose aspect of this work is its palette, and the intensity of
colours on a painting that in reality is almost monochrome. Few red, blue
and gold accents are singled out on the seemingly uniform surface of ochre
and red sienna. It could be said that the entire work looks like the relief
made of burning earth, red and boiling, like the earth from the Roman
countryside. His brushstroke is strong, honest and fiery, like the souls of the
painted protagonists. The scene in the far background, of the group of
soldiers entering Rome, is depicted in a technique so free that was not
surpassed even in the most daring experiments of the impressionists. The
painting is vivid and captivates our imagination ascending the work on the
level of sublime poetry.4
The very origin of this painting as well as its initial function has not yet
been clarified, but it is supposed that it was commissioned for the Hall of
the City Council in Amsterdam. The choice of the subject matter that
glorifies republican virtues, the monumentality of the composition and the
grand dimensions of Rembrandt’s paining support this assumption even
further.
In modern historiography Quintus Fabius Maximus is first mentioned
at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a masterpiece shown at an
exhibition in Amsterdam in 1808 (cat. no. 57). The painting was exhib-
ited several times in the nineteenth century: in 1836 in Gallery Far in
London, and in 1898 as part of the collection of Lord Ashburnham in
Shernfold Park in Sussex. At the turn of the century it was presented in
Leiden in 1906 and in the same year was viewed in London as a work in
the collection of the London banker James Newgrass. The exhibition in
Leiden was accompanied by one of the best texts ever written about
Quintus Fabius Maximus:
Consul. Signed and dated in 1655 the painting enchantes with its complex
composition and presents an important document in the history of art as
dating from the richest years in the ouvre of this artist. All the details in this
painting denote Rembrandt’s great knowledge of classical antiquity, while
the entire scene is not a mere illustration of the past, but possesses the
intensity of life that only a rich imagination could create.5
most important collections of his time, such as those of Rudolph Kahn and
Samuel Benson, and fashioned the taste of many European and American
collectors. Thus, the old master collections that were created in the 1920s
were often called “the Duveen collections.” Among his clients were some
of the leading collectors of the period: J.P. Morgan, Henry Frick, Samuel
Kress, but also Prince Paul Karadjordjevic, who was one of the creators of
the SAC in Belgrade.9 Until the end of Joseph’s life Prince Paul remained
not only his devoted client but also his true and close friend. A great art
connoisseur with a discerning eye and refined taste, Prince Paul would use
his knowledge and connections to shape the identity of the European
collection of SAC.10 In a letter to Prince Paul from October 1933,
Duveen acknowledged sending Quintus Fabius Maximus to Belgrade for
a month for the final approval and the King’s decision before purchase.11
Unfortunately the details of this acquisition were lost, but already in
Bredius’s monograph on Rembrandt the painting is credited as a work in
the collection of King Alexander of Yugoslavia.12 It is also the last
recorded mention of Rembrandt’s painting before the Second World
War. During the time of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia this painting was
never exhibited.
After the war there is no record of the Rembrandt, and this is when its
mythical history commences. None of the inventories of the Commission
for Government buildings of Federal National Republic of Yugoslavia
(FNRY) from 1946 record Rembrandt’s painting among the works kept
in the White or in the Royal palace of the Royal Compound in Belgrade.13
Moreover, Quintus Fabius Maximus is not present in the lists compiled by
the Cabinet of the President of the Republic immediately after its founda-
tion in 1952 (that lists all the art works in the state collections on the
territory of Yugoslavia). The absence of Quintus Fabius Maximus from the
meticulous government records does not imply an improper state gift but
rather denotes its true history. At the time when these records were made,
first in 1946 and later in 1952, this painting could not be found; it had
already been lost, forever.
Shortly after the German bombing of Belgrade in April of 1941 the
Government of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and King Peter II
Karadjordjevic visited the monastery Ostrog in Montenegro before
finally fleeing the country. In this monastery they hid a large quantity
of state treasures, among them a painting by Rembrandt rolled as a
carpet.14 The Archive of Yugoslavia in Belgrade keeps a detailed
account of the Abbot of Ostrog, Leontije Mitrović, who described in
164 J. TODOROVIĆ
great detail the hiding of the State treasures in Ostrog on 13th April
1941, as well as the subsequent arrival of German troops to the
monastery on the 26th of April. Under the threat of death the
German army seized all the treasures, including Rembrandt’s Quintus
Fabius Maximus. Beside gold, money and works of art, German troops
looted other treasures from under the monastery vaults—a great quan-
tity of famous Montenegrin prosciutto, several dozen rounds of Njeguš
cheese and more than 200 bottles of good wine.15 Then the convoy,
according to Abbot Mitrović, took all the goods, including the art-
works to Münich. For a long time after this tragic April of 1941 there
has been no mention of Rembrandt’s Quintus Fabius Maximus. This
lack of information and the unresolved circumstances of the painting’s
disappearance made a perfect setting for the birth of a popular myth.
In reality the painting was meticulously searched for, especially after
the war, and it is possible to reconstruct its real history through the
archival documentation of the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives
(MFA&A) Division.16 This special unit of the Allied troops was founded
in 1943 in order to protect and preserve the art treasures in occupied
Europe, and it should be noted that the great amount of Europe’s
cultural heritage was saved by this unit. After the end of the war the
main role of the MFA&A division was the quest for lost works of art and
their return to their rightful owners throughout Europe. If one considers
the scale of looting of precious cultural heritage that the German army
undertook during the war it is clear why this specialized division was
active until 1952. However, regardless of its devotion, expertize and
thorough research, some works were never found, while a number of
owners were never identified.
Research in the classified archives of the MFA&A Division reveals the
true story of Rembrandt’s lost masterpiece. It is first mentioned in the
request for the restitution of Rembrandt’s painting that Major Pawson
sent on behalf of the Chancellery of the King of Yugoslavia in Exile on
22nd October 1945, less than a year after the Armistice.17
It is also quite unusual that together with this request Major Pawson (a
liaison officer for the Chancellery) sent yet another request where he listed
three rather unusual items: golden wreaths from the tomb of King
Alexander in Belgrade, several oil paintings from the collection of King
Alexander, and two or three Serbian military banners from the First World
War.18
THE PAINTING AND ITS HISTORIES: THE CURIOUS INCIDENT’S . . . 165
Intelligence officer would be greatly facilitated if the claimant could give the
name of the German officer in whose possession the Rembrandt painting
was last reported, or any other pertinent facts concerning same. It is sug-
gested that photographs, documents, published reference, statements of
history of ownership and detailed description including subject, identifying
marks, material and measurements be furnished.20
From that moment the search for the lost Rembrandt painting was con-
ducted jointly by the Institution for Reparations in Belgrade and the
MFA&A Division in Berlin. Owing to the good collaboration of the two
166 J. TODOROVIĆ
institutions, only five days after Howard’s letter Major Brejc, the head of
the Yugoslav Reparations Mission in Berlin, sent two photographs of
Quintus Fabius Maximus from the famous monograph by Bredius as
well as details on the dimensions and provenance of the painting to the
headquarters of MFA&A. Almost two years of searching in dilapidated
warehouses and hidden mines throughout Germany passed with no
results. The details of the lost painting were distributed across the entire
territory of the U.S. Military Government for Germany. In the beginning
of 1948, the Yugoslav Institute for Reparations repeated its official request
for Quintus Fabius Maxmius. Time passed and many artworks were
returned to Yugoslavia, but not the Rembrandt. The final conclusion
came only on 4th August 1958:
Case closed – A simple statement put an end to the long quest for the
famous masterpiece. Rembrandt’s Quintus Fabius Maximus could never
be retrieved. It was lost in the allied bombing of Augsburg at the begin-
ning of 1944. Too late for restitution, too late for Tito’s generous gift, too
late for Pepca Kardelj. It is time for some new myths to be created.
NOTES
1. In the greatest database of Dutch art, RKD, this painting is presented as the
work of a follower of Rembrandt. It also states that the painting was lost after
THE PAINTING AND ITS HISTORIES: THE CURIOUS INCIDENT’S . . . 167
the Second World War, but it does not give any details. See RKD Follower of
Rembrandt, Quintus Fabius Maximus, no. 204157, www.rkd.nl
2. Abraham Bredius, Rembrandt-Schildrijen, Utrecht, 1935, cat. no. 477.
3. Plutarch, Life of Fabius Maximus, vol. III, London, 1916.
4. Camille Mauclair, “Rembrandt,” in Les Arts, 1911, 225.
5. Frederik Schmidt-Degener, “Le troisième centenaire de Rembrandt en
Hollande,” in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, October, 1906, XXXVI, 268.
6. RKD entry for Follower of Rembrandt, Quintus Fabius Maximus, no.
204157, www.rkd.nl accessed 5.9.2015.
7. See auction catalogue Sammlung Marczel von Nemes, Munich: Mensing en
Zoon, 1931.
8. Sammlung Marczell von Nemes, 44–48.
9. Maryl Secrest, Duveen A Life in Art, London: Random House, 2004.
10. For more information on the role of Prince Paul in the creation of the State
Art Collection of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia see Jelena Todorović, “The
Pursuit of Tradition . . . ,” in Catalogue of the State Art Collection in the
Royal Compound in Belgrade—European Art, vol. I, Platoneum, 2014,
14–41.
11. Getty Research Institute, Duveen Brothers Records, 1925–1940, box 497,
roll 352.
12. Bredius, Rembrandt-Schildrijen, Utrecht, 1935, cat. no. 477.
13. Archive of Yugoslavia, fund 804, the database of the Commission for
Government Buildings.
14. Archive of Yugoslavia, Reparations Commission of FNRY, fund 54, 319–
483.
15. Ibid.
16. The Archive of the Monuments Fine Arts and Archives Division is kept in the
US National Archives. www.archives.gov
17. MFA&A, 22.10.1945/226 1571289.
18. MFA&A, 22.10.1945/2/226 1571289.
19. MFA&A 16.12.1945/226 1571289.
20. MFA&A 21.9.1946/226 15711289.
21. MFA&A 21.9.1946/2/226 15711289.
22. MFA&A 4.8.1948/226/953.
Homosexuality, 63–67 M
Humanistic, 48, 58–59 Masterpiece, 7–8, 160–162, 164, 166
Humanitarianism, 31, 32, 39, 49 Mbembe, Achille, 3, 30–31, 50, 98
Humanization, 14 Media
See also Dehumanization archaeology, 156
Hungary, 7, 142–143 new, 2–3, 19, 29, 34
post-, 5, 90–91, 97
Migrant, 83, 95, 110
See also Immigrant; Emigrant
I
Migrations, 54, 99, 116
Identity, 4–5, 62–71, 89, 94–95,
Modernity, 6, 31, 45, 62, 98,
98–99, 127, 133, 151–152, 163
105–107, 109, 111, 116, 127
Ideology, 32, 45–46, 49–52, 56–57,
Mussolini, 125, 128–129, 135
65, 91, 93, 95, 97–98, 151
Myth, 7–8, 23, 64, 97, 113, 159–160,
Image
163–164, 166
financial-, 3
movement-, 3, 15–18, 21–22
time-, 3, 15–18, 21–22
trophy-, 25–26
virtual-, 21–22, 24–25 N
Immigrant, 115 Nationalism
Imperialism, 48, 54, 56, 61–62, 64 inter-, 132
India, 5, 64, 67–71 national-socialist, 97
Invisibility, 1–2, 13, 33 Necrocapitalism, 4–5, 26, 51–55,
See also Visibility 57–58, 77
Italy, 26, 126, 131–133, 136 Necropolitics, 3–4, 14, 24–25, 31,
50–51, 53–54, 56–58, 83,
98–100
K
Knowledge, 3–4, 29–30, 33–34, 36,
39, 47, 54, 55, 64, 83, 92, 94–95, O
112, 117–118, 149, 162–163 Object, 4–5, 14–15, 30, 35–38, 90,
117, 126, 145, 152, 165
Objectified, 36, 111
L Other, 2, 4, 6–7, 14–15, 24–26, 30,
Labour, 2–3, 78, 82, 85 34, 36, 39, 46–49, 53, 55–56, 58,
Law, 4, 30–35, 39, 52–53, 63, 69, 85, 62–65, 70–71, 77–78, 82, 86, 89,
91–92, 106 94–95, 98, 105–112, 114, 116,
Lesbian, 62–63, 70–71, 83–84, 94 127, 133, 135–136, 143,
Liberalism 147–149, 151, 159, 164–165
neo, 107 Otherness, 7, 141–142
172 INDEX
U W
Unconscious, 3, 13, 24–25 War-state, 32
Utopia Weizman, Eyal, 4, 33, 63
anti-, 97 West, 5, 18, 30–31, 46, 54, 64, 68,
70–71, 78, 94–95, 98, 109, 112,
117
V Western
Venice Biennale, 128, 130, 133–134, non-, 4, 62, 64–65, 67, 71
136 society, 4, 66–67, 71
Video, 5, 14, 19, 38, 77, 79–82,
85–86, 91, 93–94, 98, 108–110,
114–115, 118, 146 Y
Visibility, 2, 4, 26, 30, 34–36, 38, 68, Yugoslavia
83, 85, 93, 145 ex-, 79
Vodoun ceremony, 6, 108 post-, 79