Artist

Jasmina Čubrilo

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Private Life As Painting As Art

All of us were and are lost, and know it, and we simply

try to set­tle in­to our lost-ness as comfortably as we can

Mun­tean/Ro­sen­blum



It is a commonplace that contemporary art has no consistent ”look”; namely, the concepts and practices of contemporary art form a network of fluctuating forms and positions, that is, an ever-changing constellation that has no distinct, well-rounded, fixed nor final shape. The contemporary art world recognizes painting, among a myriad of art forms, as one with a long and sometimes turbulent history of affirmation, domination and contestation, but which, nevertheless, still has and exhibits a capacity to actualize itself as ”contemporary” and ”authentic”. Regarding the tendency to view painting partially, if not completely, and surely not for the first time, as an exhausted option, the question of what it is that gives contemporary painting its credibility, meaning, significance and position within the contemporary tendencies in art and culture, whether we recognize it as cliche or an evergreen standard of art critique, history of art or writing about art, is still relevant, owing to the ”survival” of the practice of painting itself.

From the perspective of history, the possibilities of the new techniques of reproduction represented a huge challenge to painting — on one side, there were photography, film and video, and, on the other, art movements which studied the conventions of modernism and its institutions, that is, which, in a new way, established connections between art and life (such as performance, land art and conceptual art). In 1981, Douglas Crimp wrote that the only way for painting to be recognized as legitimate art practice would be its participation in the developed institutional critique, which in general inspired radical art movements in the preceding years.1 But, from many critics and curators the new flourishing and self-confident presence of painting in the 1980s represented, according to Jason Gaiger, a ”triumphant consolidation of the threatened artistic tradition and a decisive rejection of the oppositional spirit that had dominated the previous two decades”.2 It seems that painting today reflects some kind of ”consolidation of the threatened artistic tradition”, but, as Barry Schwabsky notices, retains through ”its Modernist and Conceptualist background the belief that every artist’s work should stake out a position — that a painting is not only a painting, but also the representation of an idea about painting”.3

After her last solo show, that had featured photographs and video installations, one of which had been very technically demanding, Margareta told me that she wished to paint again; in other words, to replace the fast media with the slow one, the cold with the warm, the machine with the body, the digital recording with the brush stroke. That is how the material (paintings and animated movies) for the Four Stories About Us exhibition was created. The paintings emerged along with the digitally animated movies, as a kind of ”blind field” of the animations, or their complementary fragments. The connection between the painted and the animated pictures can be somewhat direct (for example, the Cafe painting vs. the third story from the Four Stories About Us, and the In the Bathroom painting vs. the fourth story from the Four Stories About Us), or loose, amounting to the repeating of a detail (A Night in the Hotel vs. the second story from the Four Stories About Us), or sharing a theme (Going to the Circus and Learning About the Nature vs. the first story from the Four Stories About Us). It is usually thought that photography, film, video and digitally generated pictures work as a catalyst for the process of critical reflection about the boundaries and possibilities of painting. However, Megi’s latest paintings are certainly critically rethinking the possibilities of painting, and this process makes them even more focused on the exploration and critical rethinking of the nature, boundaries, potentialities and results of images produced by new technology. These images feature ”underlaid” details or units that point to an essentially witty interpretation  of various theoretical extrapolations on the nature and essence of image - e.g. the pixelized rerview mirror in Going to the Circus, the turned off televison, ”empty” mirror, ”opaque” window, and a painting with a skiing genre theme as a hole in a wall / ”opened window” in A Night in the Hotel; analogue image in the mirror, the illusion of ”watery” walls in the painting titled In the Bathroom. Not only do these narrative, feminized, elegant, transparent, theatrical sights, so close to camp sensibility, interpret the ”sombre” (theoretical) literature in an entertaining way, but they play the role of the index of painting understood as an exploratory process aimed at investigating the capacities of current painting and its relation with images in general. In that sense, the animated Four Sories About Us represent a derivative, a vestige of painterly activity.

Another current issue related to contemporary painting is whether and to what extent the relation between the image / painting and empirical reality, with its interesting and complex history, has lost its capacity to engage the spectator. In other words, the privileged position of painting as a source of visual information, and a means of the representation of reality, has dissipated over the last century due to the rapid development of image-producing technologies. The development of the mediatized world has not only decisively changed our attitude towards the older modes of reproduction, but also problematized painting as a slow media, and its capacity for creating the illusion of (absent, idealized...) reality. This development results in the (over)saturation with images and information that cannot be assimilated, and even less be put into a coherent frame, or recognized as an outline of a unique referential system. In that sense, the strategies of ”floating view”, ”floating signifier”, or artistic positions based on fictions may seem a logical choice because ”we simply try to settle into our lost-ness as comfortably as we can”.

Margareta’s stories are autobiographical. By fictionalizing the events of private life, the intimate world is tucked in behind the ”scenes” of general themes, such as interpesonal relations, alienation, love, male-female relations, themes of identity, the Law of the Father etc. The pulp tone of Megi’s works, drawn from the products of mass culture, becomes a parody and (auto)ironic reflection on the banalizing of these themes in the visual ”texts” of popular and mass culture.

Art as painting as private life. Painting as art as private life. Anyhow, just another Uproar (Confusion).



1 See: Crimp, D; The End of Painting, October, 1981

2 Geiger, J; “Post-conceptual painting: Gerhard Richter’s extended leave-taking”, u: Perry, G; Wood, P; (eds.) Themes in Contemporary Art, Yale University Press, The Open University, 2004, str 92

3 Schwabsky, B; “Painting in the Interrogative Mode”, u: Vitamin P, New Perspectives in Painting, Phaidon, 2006, str 8