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Miško Pavlović    -    Vanitas



Why would a contemporary artist choose an essentially medieval motif as the central metaphor for a series of graphic works? One way of answering this question is to consider the nature of the motif itself—the recurring image of the human torso opened up to reveal the viscera.



For the Medievals this image was a powerful semiotic device signifying the vanity of human attachment to the worldly: the body is merely the clay housing the eternal soul, whose salvation and return to God should be our ultimate concern. Certainly the body could be beautiful—there are numerous discussions of female beauty especially scattered throughout the works of scholastic exegetes—but these always occur in the context of wider discussions of the concepts of claritas and proportio, two qualities essential to medieval esthetic theories; there is no suggestion that human beauty in its purely exterior effect has any value except as a reflection of the harmony of the created universe.



But the works in this collection are not simply a discourse of the body, though the body, (the sexual object as well as the anatomical view) is central to a number of them. Or, rather, they are something as well as that. The body is (as it frequently was for the Medievals) a metaphor and we can read it as they did in its various senses. Literally the body is that which we immediately perceive in each other—but immediately we are drawn into associations and conclusions, relating to both the way we see (or wish to see) ourselves and to the way we are seen (or wish to be seen) by others: hence the representation in this collection of exaggerated male sexual organs (‘Le père fertile’) or of overtly and aggressively sexual women (“Vanity, life quality”).



The irony of these representations underlines the fundamental vanity of the desires they signify; observers are forced into an uncomfortable questioning of their own perception of those desires and, crucially, of their own selves in relation to them. The perception of the body gives rise to a system of beliefs and values regarding the self: there is an ideology of the body, a collection of assumptions and more or less imposed hierarchies, whose fragility is—not without humor and even with tenderness—emphasized by these works.



In fact what emerges from this collection is an implicit criticism of all ideologies—and indeed of the notion of ideology itself: all are, ultimately, vanity. If this dismantling of accepted intellectual structures begins with the body, it does so because it is, necessarily, our belief in the self as existing in the physical world which gives rise to all subsequent beliefs.



Thus, political ideologies too are attacked, by means of their own unsubtle iconographies—the hammer-and sickle motif, for example, or through representations of the machines of war which are universally employed both as tools of destruction and as signs of the power that makes such destruction possible.



Intellectual arrogance is also questioned. The representation of a time machine is a reminder that we remain entrapped in our blind belief in the Enlightenment and our willingness to confuse technological advances with progress.



But this collection also reminds us that there is a sense in which the Medieval world view has not expired, for the rejection of those atherosclerotic ideologies which have sustained us through the various stages of what we are pleased to call modernity, makes all the more apparent our fundamental need—however much we claim to dislike the idea—for a unified conception of what it means to be human. Miško Pavlović has produced a collection which makes this clear to us.



Simon Brittan