The Cruelty of the Beautiful

/, Gallery, Blesok no. 64/The Cruelty of the Beautiful

The Cruelty of the Beautiful

Calme
“Water lilies – the tones are vague, lovingly nuanced as delicate as dream”

Charles F. Stuckey
34F

#15 As early as in the previously mentioned term paper he had presented at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, Petković was a supporter of transparency and “pallidness” in the works made with intentionally left white unpainted parts. His writings refer to the need of attaining an impression of dematerialization. Thus he is focusing his attention to the phenomena such as the air, vapor, smoke, mist, clouds, dust or the transparency of the glass, the sooted window pans on the railway coaches or, at best, the transparency of nets. These are enabling him to eliminate the volume and the third dimension and to achieve the effects of transparency and unlimited space. The artist wrote: “I want to represent the space and its wideness in order to represent its illusion, to achieve a shallow … imagined space … a space left behind the absent objects … the illusion they provoke”. The silk becomes his material of choice as it is the finest support capable of stressing the effects of immateriality and endlessness.35F In this term paper he is also pointing out his preference for the drawing, for that thin “body-less” line which is not tending towards virtuosity or sensationalism. According to the artist, the drawing gestures need to be slight. Thus, very often in the years to follow, say, in his first monochromes and after that in the entire series dedicated to Monet, his drawing lines are applied with great precision, using matchsticks, rods and spray cans. Apart from the vibrant representation, he is aiming “to accomplish serenity, through an action of calmness and composure”. All these procedures are intentionally avoiding the composition, the connection with the reality, the narrative. The calmness, the silence and the sensations of the view are very closely related to the artistic methodology of Monet.36F The act of painting the impressions from the changing light conditions during the day and, in the Water lilies, the impressions of the interlocking skies and waters of the pond of Giverny where he lived during his last decades, contain identical attraction. That which Monet aims to additionally represent in the Water lilies is the feeling of the vanishing horizon and the impression of limitlessness as an “asylum of peaceful meditation”. The point he seeks to make is about enjoying the beauty of the calmness and silence.37F The series According to Monet by Petković is also relying on the delicate shimmering of the matter, on the blotting colors, on the minutely applied pigmentation and on the discontinuous drawing lines. Of course, his initial motives are not the water lilies, visterias or the water and the skies above Giverny. On the contrary, his motive is the very ignoring of that which is referential, it is the very maintaining of the vitality and magic of the phenomenal which is to remain at the level of desired immateriality of the beauty per se – the visual absolute of things. Much more important relation between Monet and Petković is established by their persistent suggestion of peaceful and silent mood. The notion of silence “assumes that the realm of the art is in the beauty, implying that which is untold, indescribable, intransitive” (Susan Sontag). #16 It enables the colors, lines and generally the atmosphere to obtain visual resonance and at the same time to offer a virginal and more sensible communication with the public. Calmness in the silence is something that is inducing Petković to stress the absence of narrative and the estrangement from the associations. This permits the extension of the painting into the domains of the thought. This replaces the rhetoric with emotions. The ascetic “landscapes” stretching over the white canvases and drawings of the artist are made as open fields whereupon the imagination of the observer at free will may write down its proper narratives and experiences.38F The white unpainted surfaces and the calmness are engaging the discourse of the “art dandyism” with Petković. “The clean sheet of paper defending itself with its whiteness” of the dandy poet Mallarmé, the Gustave Courbet’s aristocratism, the conduct of Baudelaire as an predecessor of the 20th century avant-garde, the indifference of Duchamp, the dandiest of artists, all the way up to the Warhol’s inertness and in general to the disregard that all of these artists had for conventions in fashion, behavior and, in particular, for the conventions in the artistic language – all this is explicitly opening (tackling) the problems of a socio-cultural demeanor which is in conflict with the received norms. The very act of offering a sophisticated resistance and casting the glove as a token of challenge to the social systems and artistic standards speaks of “the history of the modern culture as of an account about the struggle of the individual against the institutions”.39F As concerns Petković, there are sufficiently convincing arguments favoring the recognition of his attitude as a dandy posture and of his creative dedication as art dandyism:40F his delicate taste and refined perceptiveness, his dissatisfaction with the milieu, his awareness of the conservativeness of the system and its institutions, of the alienation and haughtiness, his lack of interest in the comments of the others, and most of all, his countercurrent position in respect to the artistic trends and his stubborn defense of the abstraction.41F

Volupté
“Maybe in life one is looking for the greatest possible sorrow .., so that one becomes a human before one dies”.
Céline

#17 Is there anyone oblivious of the marvelous short story by Balzac “The Unknown Masterpiece”, wherein the colleague artists Nicolas Poussin and Francois Porbus looking at the vision of the old painter Frenhofer of his beloved Catherine Lescault, are ill at ease to discern anything else but paint wantonly thrown upon the canvas instead of perfection. “… On drawing nearer, they spied in one corner of the canvas the end of a bare foot standing forth from that chaos of colors, of tones, of uncertain shades, that sort of shapeless mist; but a lovely foot, a living foot! They stood fairly petrified with admiration before that fragment, which had escaped that most incredible, gradual, progressive destruction. That foot appeared there as the trunk of a Parian marble Venus would appear among the ruins of a burned city.”42F In this story Balzac is anticipating the abstract painting, while his main character, the painter, suffering from an undetermined condition between “clairvoyance and mental debility” is withdrawing into himself and is sinking into loneliness. The closure of the scene consists of him setting the canvas on fire and of his subsequent suicide. Relegating the beloved woman to a foot has its counterpart in the Origin of the World (1866), a provocative work by Gustave Courbet, which was disturbing the French intellectual milieu in the mid-nineteen century.43F It was made as a counter-thesis of Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe by Edouard Manet wherefrom we are being watched by the seducing eyes of the female nudes. The Courbet’s realism escalates in the translation of that idea: from the spread out feminine body with cropped head and arms, we are stared at by the opening of the female genitals: arrogantly perched up and aiming at our gaze.44F This kind of inversion is used by Petković in an even more simplified form: a crack-hole45F, positioned within a lush structural and coloristic setting made in collage. Speaking in visual terms, this work marks the artist’s first more decisive move out of the field of the abstraction as well as his development of an intimate realism which is suggestive of some desire for closeness and acts of love. His “female” as it is the case with Courbet, wants us regressing towards the source or to “the native obscenity”, even to the “femininity of the painting itself”.
#18 This turnaround accounts for the need of the painter, in parallel to the existing phenomenological space, to construct one which is emotionally more dynamic and sexually more explicit. He is aiming at revealing the desire as something which is concurrently standing for both, the objective and subjective energy of the beauty in art. The response to the carnal calling, the act of listening in to the proper soul, the inner landscape stripped bare and the touch of the golden ecstasies – Petković is embodying all this into an ideal of the eternal female, shivering in her beauty and perfection and yet, untouchable. The opening-vulva is but a bait. The profundity needs to be hidden at the surface (Hofmannsthal) since what is concealed is not interesting (Wittgenstein). The alluring, mysterious and pink heaven with its pulsating center is, in essence, a persistence of some unrecognized hope from the bottom of the artist’s being. In that supra-universe of his, it is the pain that is destroying the beauty. It’s time to turn our attention to the melancholy which is deconstructing the pleasure.
#19 When one’s love is lost, be it some ideal/idea or be it a person, the subject assumes the guilt and is withdrawing into oneself. The self-punishment is defined as melancholy – running away instead of a face off and struggle – “loosing oneself in the night of the body”. When the object of the desire disappears, the sorrow rears its head since love is the principle of renovating the other in oneself.46F This is proving that the beauty, as it is unable to substitute all the values because of its temporal limits, may itself find its substitute in the sorrow. When one arrives at the conclusion that it is impossible to turn love into immortality, one realizes that it is to do with a riddle which hardly anyone managed to solve. “Aristotheles likened the melancholy to the spermatic foam and eroticism, invoking exclusively Dionysius and Aphrodite”.47F During the making of the series According to Courbet, Petković was living as if he were in some de-centered temporality, stuck in the past entrenched in his attachment to the beautiful memories but devoid of future. He is painting a homage of absence, an erotic yearning entwined with a voluptuous sorrow. His dissatisfaction comes from the high expectations he devised for himself. Coveting that which is sublime and still feeling helpless – there lay the inner conflict and anxiousness. The feeling that the end of a beautiful day is growing near, is turning the walk down the eudemonic road into a crack. “Can anyone really take a good look into the naked face of an ideal? … And what is to remain then save a huge emptiness?”48F Baudelaire’s spleen – a condition of spirit which is compatible with the premonition of a catastrophe – gives an argument for that void of the eroticized agony.
#20 In the view of Ernst Bloch, the pipe is the beginning of the music. It is an expression of that which we lack.49F “This playing the pipe is an existence of that which is no more … The vanished Nymph remained as sound”50F. When life retired from Dragan Petković, we were left with his work, which not only was a sound but also a material and spiritual argument of his dedicated search for the beauty.

#b
34. Charles F. Stuckey, Blossoms and Blunders: Monet and the State II, Art in America, NY, September 1979;
35. “I did not give up on “beautiful painting” so that I have found materials that are reminding of the nature. I exchanged the linen canvas for a silk fabric. The silk is smooth and shiny, and is by itself with an ethereal and abstract effect. It is smooth because it is neutral … The color on such a surface becomes transparent and as such it is also acquiring the airy and spacey quality. When it is stretched on a frame it appears as if it were glass” says Petković in his term paper. I would like to point out that in the artist’s heritage I did not encounter an oil on silk;
36. Yet, with the great master of the impressionism, behind the abstract sensation there is the serious problem of impaired sight. Monet was subjected to twenty surgeries of the cataract as he was ailing from hanthopsia – for a period he was seeing either the yellow or the blue part of the light. In 1922 in a letter to his friend Marc Elder he is writing about the several works of his that he had destroyed, about his becoming nearly blind and of the necessity to give up painting altogether. In the artist’s studio Marc Elder noticed … “a wild butchery of canvases, massacred works, bloody as wounds”. In: Op. cit. No. 34, p. 119 (Charles F. Stuckey …); It maybe too far fetching to explain the aesthetics of this master with a sight problems, since what Monet started in his youth is not that different from his latest works – the Water Lilies commissioned by Clemanceau for the Orangerie in Paris.
37. “Considering the delicate spectacle Monet had attempted to depict-photosensitive water lilies floating on the surface of his garden pond along with the reflected images of passing clouds, the miraculous illusion of the world overhead interwoven with his feet … as if horizontal, vertical, behind, before, proximate and distant were useless concepts …” In: Op. cit. No. 34, p. 121 (Charles F. Stuckey …)
38. “Clarity of the white as a first color is the container of all others”. In: Robert Ryman, Art Forum, Summer, 1992, p. 92;
39. Carter Ratcliff, Dandysm and Abstraction in a Universe Defined by Newton, Art Forum, NY, No. 4, 1988, p. 89;
40. Idem, p. 85; Carter Ratcliff is defining the pictural autonomy in the abstraction as dandyism.
41. In the essay cited above, Carter Ratcliff is recognizing the existence of dandyism in the dressing manners which is subsequently translated into the field of art. Petković is entirely entitled to be labeled as dandy, among the rare ones on the artistic scene of ours. Maybe the only other deserving of this designation is the great master Nikola Martinoski – the predecessor of Petković.
42. In: Оноре Де Балзак, Филозофске приче, Непознато ремек дело, Култура, Белград, Загреб, 1949, p. 407;
43. “In those times it was literally qualified as “swinery”. The Courbet’s realism was immediately recognized as an attack against the good taste and the hypocrisy of the Second Empire .., as a vulgarity and obscenity”. In: Bernard Marcadé, Devenir femme de l’art, In; Feminimasculin, Gallimard/Electa, Paris, 1995, p. 25;
44. “The female genitalia that is watching us” (“un sexe de femme qui nous regarde”);
45. Associations may be found in the work Etant donnés by Marcel Duchamp; in Concetti spaziali, the lacerations or punched through canvases by Luccio Fontana who said that his “discovery is but a hole and a spot, and that’s all so that I don’t care if I die after this discovery” (Ma découverte c’est qu’un trou et un point, c’est tout, et ça m’est égal de mourir après cette découverte”);
46. Јулија Кристева, Црно сунце, Депресија и меланхолија, Светови, Нови Сад, 1994, p. 252;
47. Idem, p. 13;
48. Op. cit. No. 3, p. 31 (Guy Michaud …);
49. According to Ovid, the flute expresses the sorrow that the forest god Pan experienced after the nymph Syrinx;
50. Ernst Bloh, O umjetnosti, Školska knjiga, Zagreb, 1981, p. 150

2018-08-21T17:23:00+00:00 March 3rd, 2009|Categories: Reviews, Gallery, Blesok no. 64|0 Comments