Not to compromise his authority in front of the crew who would not understand that even a sailor feels the need for artistic expression, Zlatan Dumanic – releasing banked up energy and relieving psychological plights that define his hypersensual nature – drawing and writing during his voyages (most often using a blue ball-point pen) on the leaves of tiny pocket note-book that he could furtively get out and quickly get in his pocket, secretly keeps a log-book. Curators and gallerists, noticing in contents of these log entries – that for the author have cathartic and therapeutic meaning of certain extension – the values that deserve to be presented to the public, have talked him into finding the way of presentation and thus, not to tear the pages from the note-book, he makes photocopied blow-ups printed on long rolls of paper and a selection of this substantial log – two rolls, one ten, and other fifteen meters long, both created during the same voyage – are presented at the exhibition The log-book.
The tiny drawings, enlarged through the photocopying process, get a new dimension and assume a different graphic – they are not perceived as ball-point drawings, but as a dry point print. The manner is developed through a wide range, from completely simplified to rich and baroque. More often than not the artist draws tinier and technically more simple, contrasting story alongside complex and graphically rich one, thus asserting his old manner of connecting the differences and their unification by the drawing in order to create a new value and a new content. But everything that Dumani} draws is original and it is regularly created beyond traditional categories, procedures and paradigms of drawing as traditional medium of plastic arts. The crucial dimension that distinguishes the contents of two rolls is bi-location: artist’s implacable need to be at two places at the same time – on the ship where he earns his livelihood, and at home, where he, in his family circle, as a lover, father and step-father, realizes himself as a person. The lines that appear on the roll of paper during the photocopying process, dividing the pages of the log, seemingly become the walls of bedroom and other rooms of artist’s apartment in Split – where he locates the contents of his erotic and other fantasies – and leave the impression of postmodern hiatus, on which theorists of postmodern insist.
The unconventional drawings – often created with paper clips or other non-painting tools that artist at the moment found available on the ship, proving that Dumani} is skillful, intriguing and witty draftsman – are pure and direct art form that deeply personally, in honest self-analysis, reveal inner pathos, witness Klein’s “expression of pure emotion”, unique and lush, whirling human and artistic nature, complex psychological constellation, vehement psychological plights, sensibility concentrated through erotic surplus, turmoil and tensions caused by the separation from his family, qualms, unrealized libido, seething, anxiety – briefly psychograms, “the map” of artist’s nerve system, and consequently the entire chronicle of his human destiny.
Caring for no petty bourgeois or Philistine moral commentaries, Dumani} also reveals the subjective, most delicate and most intimate experiences of marriage and family life. The rolls abound in reconstruction of love experiences as well as imagined love scenes into which the artist projects his expectations of his wife, love and sensuality, always dominated by different self-portraits – created from different angles, ranging through the wide span from hyperrealistic to caricature representations of his own image – correlated to the images of his wife, mostly nude, but also wearing precious attires. These images are accompanied by declarative and verbally explicit text, always containing erotic messages to his wife – with whom he is involved in authentic love relationship – among which the most modest ones are “My love, I remember your knees”, “The love spirit is in the purest love only”. Images of the step-daughter (“Tessa in binoculars”) and son are also present. Representing his son (a child only few years old at the time) with huge genitals and pubic hair, the artist reveals some of his obvious macho projections. There are also ship plans, tentative landscapes that the ship was passing through, lists of notions about traveling, written in native languages of countries which the tanker visited during the voyages, biblical motifs through which he contemplates – eliminates and admits – the existence of sin …
However, The Log-book has not only the intimate, but also a wider human dimension. With its often gloomy moods it destroys the stereotype – invalid for almost twenty years – of exceptionally attractive, hedonistic and adventurous life of seamen, full of crazy parties and girlfriends in every port that often follow the sailor in his cabin and keep him company during the voyage. The life of seamen today, as The Log-book reveals, is quite far from by-gone wild living; today loneliness, feeling of abandonment, homesickness, neuralgia, anxiety, yearning for wife and family, sexual and every other (especially social) frustration sway the ships.
The artist’s strongly expressed social frustration is manifested through repeated representation of expensive ladies’ wear, gowns and other items – almost out of reach considering mariner’s earnings – that wives of seamen long for while waiting for them at the shore. It is also connected with the fact that for the last ten years the price of labour at the world market is reduced due to the availability of seamen from poor Asian and African countries as well as from the countries of former European socialist block. There are about 850,000 seamen and 410,000 officers in the world today, but momentarily 20,000 officers are lacking while there is a surplus of some 200,000 seamen. The Norwegian shipping company “Bergsen” has, for instance, calculated that just by dismissing 600 Norwegian and British officers by the end of 2002 and employing officers from the poor countries would save 22 million dollars per annum. The shipowners, racing for profit, aim to engage the cheapest possible crew, so that some ships are sailing with crew that works only for board and lodging! It is not much better on the ships that sail under the flags of Azerbaijan, Ukraine and some Arab countries that, for incredibly low prices of their cargo shipment services, have expelled even Croatian ships from local ports. Captains of these ships earn some $200 monthly, while all the rest of the crew does not earn even that much.
International union of seamen fights shipowners like that, often holding up their ships in order to force them to treat seamen decently and sign contracts worthy of human being. Since today it is not at all rare that somebody sails for a whole year without earning one cent, we can say that a lot of contemporary seamen are galley-slaves with matricula. In October 2001 European Week of Action Against Substandard Ships was held in 28 European countries, including Croatia. On that occasion 520 ships were inspected which resulted in 370,000$ worth fines that shipowners had to pay. Such actions force shipowners to establish a more correct treatment of seamen, especially because every time the ship is held up in the harbour the shipowner has great expenses and problems. People from developed countries reluctantly choose to sail, because they can earn decent living working ashore, something that Croatian seamen cannot presume since there is a great shortage of jobs on the dry land.
Besides, the current variant of capitalism puts seaman into the position where his employer often flies him as a bag of provisions to the deck of the ship and after the contract expires takes him back ashore by the same helicopter. In the meantime, the sailor often does not get ashore for six or even twelve months period and even when he gets to the port, he wears himself out unloading and loading the cargo since this routine work got more complex because the shipowners are trying to cut the costs and therefore only one sailor does the job for which, not long ago, three sailors were employed. Cutting down the number of crew means, among other things, intensified loneliness for seamen. The lucky ones like Dumani} resolve it keeping a log, while for the others it might end with trauma.
In this way The log-book, alongside the intimate, assumes a wider human meaning because it speaks not only for 850,000 international and 30,000 Croatian seamen with matricula – that, mostly on foreign ships, navigate all over the world as the best Croatian export product (earning some half a billion dollars per annum) – but also for few thousands Croatian citizens who, with their passports only, navigate as ship personnel.
Ivica Zupan
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Zlatan Dumanic was born in 1951, in Split, Croatia. He used to work as a captain of the ship of 300 BT or higher, having a highest possible naval qualifications. He is a member of the Croatian Association of the Visual Artists from 1986. So far Dumanic held 20 one-man exhibitions and participated at the numerous group exhibitions. He is initiator of many actions, performances and programs as well as he is the author of the numerous author’s editions, books, poetry books and librettos that have been published over the years. Dumanic has executed a huge mural in Zrnovnica near Split. He is counselor for the International Film, Video and Multimedia Festival in Split.
