Flower Square, March 2-9, 1999
Eleven objects entitled My Apartment (1997/98) have been exhibited in eleven shop windows in the Flower Square in Zagreb. Each consisting of two slides, two slide-visors and Styrofoam. Dimensions: 11 x 23 x 5 cm.
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A View, an Image and a Non-place
Let us begin with glass. That which Edita Schubert wishes us to see is placed behind glass. In its simple, pure form, in the dual function of reflection and transparency, glass covers the “object” – a rectangular volume made from styrofoam with eyes gouged out. It is into those very hollows, where one would expect the anatomy of a face to correspond with the slits of a mask, at the place which might correspond to the average height of a potential observer, that she squeezes two slide-visors, with slides depicting her apartment: a view from outside in, and a view from within out. Eleven repeats of a situation offering, through a dual view, a reconstruction of a two-room flat on the ground floor of a block of flats dating from the twenties within a “Clerical EstateÓ in Petrova Street, are glued to the shop windows of eleven shops situated on and around the homogenous space of a square in Zagreb, which can be regarded as relatively unavoidable in daily perambulations and pauses of a segment of the population in their negotiation of the city centre.
Although she continues to tell of the ambivalence of her daily life, having repeated in her long narration on the dual life of a working woman and an artist in the Institute for Anatomy (1997) the pop-artistic example of a painted portrait (on a photographic stand) from the ambiental short story (1996), with this latest incursion into the private, to date the most private, but at the same time the most public, she accepts the consequences of self-referentiality in the very process of recounting. Outside the gallery space, exposed in a shop-window, “on offer” alongside the articles for sale, the autobiographical aspect of the situation does however remain difficult to perceive. In lieu of it she offers a complex staging: “a view to another view”, a double coding of (The Other) ethnologist and the anthropology of place/space.
View to another view is the title of a work by video-artist Dalibor Martinis, dating from the second half of the eighties: the staging of a genuine observer of Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, in a place that has previously been occupied by a murdered official from the visa department shown on a video-tape, combines the real and fictitious space, the real and film time. In the real space and time the observer of the painting renews the experience of the murder, possibly only at the moment and in the place where, following the trail of the crime on the floor of the gallery, he is captured by the “other view”: a view of another, distorted image – an image of death in front of a “geometrical image” of two ambassadors placed into a mimetically instrumentalised interior. At the moment we find ourselves captured in the “view trap ” from within, at the moment we accede to the scopic space of Edita’s gaze(1), or rather when we descend to the two lenses lit from the other side, and when at the intersection of my image-vision and Edita’s gaze there appears an image-screen, when we succeed in avoiding a reflection in a mirror(2) of both the shop window pane and the lens of an objective, and we recognise Edita’s apartment, at that moment we might see more than that. The offered gaze from within, an incursion into the image – a plate which has just been left on a table with other objects – traces, witnesses – objects (each individual one staring from Edita’s direction, from the direction of light inside the shop), together with the view from the direction of courtyard of Edita’s building (can it itself stare with Edita’s gaze?), with parked cars, the partly lit-up facade and the avenue of trees, and looking into quite a specific point, “slightly to the side”, enables us to see the merging of these two spaces in the image. The issue no longer rests with me standing and observing a gaze-object (or a gaze imagined in the place of a Another). The question now is: who sees oneself seeing oneself, and who has eyes so as not to see.
The anthropology of space which involves the street, myself and others is being realised. Although I lower my view, it could be that I, the examinee of the ethnologist (the artist) – of “he who is located in some place (his now and here), and who is describing that which he is observing or listening to at particular moment”(3), could just as much be a possible ethnologist of the Other. There where I have stood and from where I have observed and seen, the space within was being offered – all the material data on the immediate segment of space and time (a record just taken out, fresh traces in the kitchen, or dead situations of a tidied-up space which has preceded or has replaced a “living” situation) – but so was the space towards the outside, from the point from where Edita herself has watched and seen the image from the window. In my head this new, imaginary boundary, a view to the opposite side, returns to its rightful place, where it is real, thereby also taking me back to the place from which I am observing, staying outside. The illusion of transparency is totally exposed, and the anticipated pornography of the closeness of a view does not happen. The approach has worked without a body. The artist is like an actress, with a mask and with respect for the Idea on the other side of illusion. Obscuring, yes, but also – come a new shop window – a return to a new gaze, a new-same situation. Traumatically unrealised? Where – here or there? Projection into space, onto a street, a square, Cvjetni trg (Flower Square), the external surface of a shop window, to a non-symbolised, decentralised non-place, where the real portrait and the real biography did not happen, but where we are returned to where we set out (Lebenskunst has been represented through an object, local intervention has obscured a possible action. Objects can be recognised as traces of one\’s concern with Lebensraum, but at that point they are but a part of the excessiveness of objects. That, too, is obscuring.)
The relevance of questioning is examined in relation to one’s involvement with contemporaneity (contemporaneite proche): above all, with space. If it is true that this is the category which, as an assumption of an object, a new object “which is being offered for the attention of a researcher”, fulfils the condition of the necessity for anthropological dealing with contemporaneity, then the places of the Other and of contemporaneity, beckoned by a “distorted image” in the excesses of time, space and individual, as reactions to the excesses in space and time, or rather to the immeasurable demand for sense,(4) based on the object in a shop window, are a possible mode of curiosity directed at the examination of a non-place as an opposite to the tradition of the object of ethnology as a “culture located in time and space”: in the horizon of a journey, in the devising of new itineraries, in addressing the position of a traveller; in dislocating a gaze in the market, in a shop, on the road, in relation to the given texts and images. Edita’s object offers a pause, a transformation into a non-place, before one enters the place. Concrete, historical, participating. A staging, a transformation of a square into a theatre, and de-masking. In front of a mirror as a heterotopy(5).
Mirela Ramljak Purgar
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1)The Lacanian term of the view “in the world” (le regard, the gaze) has been used by Hal Foster in explaining the paradox of repetition in connection with phenomena of traumatic realism and traumatic illusionism in contemporary American art. H. Foster: The Return of the real Massachusetts Institute of Tehnology, 1996. Jacques Lacan, Qu’est-ce qu’un tableau?, in: J.L. Le Seminaire, livre XI, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Paris, 1973.
2) “C’est ce qui se passe quand vous regardez une image dans la glace – vous la voyez la ou elle n’est pas. Ici, au contraire, vous la voyez la ou elle est – a cette seule condition que votre oeil soit dans le champ des rayons qui sont déja venus se croiser au point correspondant.” In: J. Lacan, Les Ecrits techniques de Freud, Paris 1975.
3) Marc Augé, Non-lieux, Introduction a une anthropologie de la surmodernité, Paris, 1992, p. 16.
4) Ibid p. 47; “in the concrete, physical modifications, such as urban concentrations, population transfers, multiplications of non-places” – “of transit fields in which the refuges of the planet are located.”
5) Michel Foucault, Andere Räume, in: Wahrnehmung heute, Leipzig, 1991, p. 37: “…wirkliche Orte, wirksame Orte, die in die Einrichtung der Gesellschaft hineingezeichnet sind, sozusagen Gegenplazierungen oder Widerlager, tatsächlich realisierte Utopien… gewissermassen Orte ausserhalb aller Orte…”; “…der Spiegel ist auch eine Heterotopie, insofern er wirklich existiert und insofern er mich auf den Platz zuruckshickt, den ich wirklich einnehme…”
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Edita Schubert was born in 1947 in Virovitica. 1962 – 1967 attended the Applied Arts School in Zagreb. 1965 – 1970 worked at the Croatian Restoration Institute. 1967 – 71 studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. 1973 employed at the Institute of Anatomy, Faculty of Medicine, Zagreb. Since 1997 Edita held 22 one man exhibitions and participated at the numerous group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad. 1982. Exhibited at the Biennial of Sydney and the Venice Biennial. She lives and works in Zagreb.
