A Day To Remember

 

 

by Katarina Mitrović, curator in the Historical Museum of Serbia

 

 

Published in Katarina Radović's monograph Until Death Do Us Part, Belgrade, 2011

 

 

 

Until Death Do Us Part is a meticulously planned two-year art project of research, collection of material, organising and photographing. Between March 2009 and October 2010, Katarina Radović travelled to over 20 countries and attended over 40 wedding ceremonies. All these ceremonies took place on the European Continent, apart from one, which was in fact a double wedding, first arranged in Europe, then in Africa. At every one of these ceremonies, the artist took on average 300 photographs, thus creating a series of approximately 12000 images. This photographic project focuses on two issues. The first concerns the meaning of the wedding in modern European society, in its ritual life as much as its symbolic representation, while the other one refers to intercultural relations as realised in mixed marriages or marriages on the margins of the dominant cultures of a community.

 

All the weddings the artist has photographed are characterised by the fact that they are culturologically 'curious' in a variety of ways. For example, there are the cases of the weddings between members of minority groups in countries, such as the Peruvian wedding in Barcelona, the Hungarian wedding in Bačko Petrovo Selo (Serbia), the Roma wedding in Boljevci (Serbia) or the wedding of the Hungarian Hare Krishna devotees. Others are extraordinary due to the fact that the partners are of the same sex, especially considering that gay couples have only just recently won the right to marriage or some kind of registered cohabitation in most European countries, while in many other countries, Serbia included, they still have not secured that right. What makes the majority of the weddings unusual is that the partners are of different national or ethnical origin, or of different religious confessions. Thus, mixed couples line up in the photographs: Greek with Austrian, Spanish with Nigerian, British-American with Brazilian, Dutch with Slovenian, Croatian with English, German with Turkish, French with Israeli, Serbian with Vietnamese, Indian with Mauritian, Belgian with Burkinabé, and so on.

 

The artist has pointedly avoided the conventions of wedding photographs, which are often charged with schmaltzy sentiment, such as the scenes of the exchange of rings, and of the bride and the groom gazing amorously at each other and posing for the photographer in a 'romantic' setting. Her series of photographs is envisaged as a document rather than as the series of conventional wedding photographs usually intended for an album. This documentary character of her photographs is reflected in the variety of the wedding iconography, ranging from entire areas specially chosen and decorated, to the details that accompany them. The project is wholly inclusive, and this huge series of photographs records everything, without distinction, from a traditional wedding costume, a white wedding dress, or a national costume, rings, garters, and the indispensable flowers, to wedding cakes, tents, bows, a red carpet, and food arrangements on the tables. When it comes to wedding participants, the artist also avoids the conventions of typical wedding photographs. Indeed, the bride and the groom are not always the main protagonists, nor does the artist stick to any kind of hierarchy of representation. Everyone present is equally in evidence in the photographs, whether they are guests, relatives or friends, or musicians or waiters. The photographs record wedding participants in moments when they themselves are posing and controlling the picture, but they also 'catch' them, paparazzo-style, when they least expect it – their glances, moments of dressing, discreet adjustment of hair-dos, moments of deadly boredom or frenetic gaiety, moments of relaxed conversation, of resting their feet after what was probably a long and tiring period of standing or dancing. This enables the photographs of Katarina Radović to offer the observer the specific impression that she/he is taking a peek 'backstage' and that he/she has access to unplanned memory, some sort of a blind alley where wedding participants would never wander themselves.

 

When I was talking to Katarina Radović about this project, we kept returning to the question of the essence of a wedding. Why are weddings necessary? Statistics in the EU countries show that between 1970 and 2007, the number of marriages dropped by 38%. In that same period, marriages became more and more unstable, which is indicated by the increase in the divorce rate from 0.9 per 1000 citizens in 1970 to 2.1 in 2007. What is the point of marriage? If you are not getting married 'for papers', or out of some other 'interest', that is, if the system you live in does not discriminate you based on whether you are married or not, and if giving birth to and taking care of children does not depend on your marital status either, and if many countries recognise common law marriages, it is then quite logical to ask yourself: What is marriage for? Why tire yourself out arranging the ceremony and spending huge amounts of money organising a grand celebration, picking the clothes, the restaurant, the menu, the music?

 

Another question that presents itself to us while looking at Katarina's photographs is, to what extent is a wedding a private and personal, and to what extent a public and social act? We know that in our history the idea of a marriage as an emotional union between two individuals is rather new and radical. From times immemorial, marriage has been a matter of political arrangements, tribal alliances or lucrative family contracts. In the Middle Ages, marriage became institutionalised through the Church as a universal mechanism of social control and the only legitimate framework for producing offspring. Therefore, marriage has been first and foremost a social category, but has now, it would seem, come a long way from the social to the personal.

 

Of all the events of life, a wedding is among the most exciting. Apart from birth and death, there is no other act that baffles us as much as getting married. We could say that Katarina Radović is, in a way, obsessed with weddings. In her previous project A Husband in Paris, she took on the role of an Eastern European girl who, searching for a better life in one of the EU countries, walks the streets of Paris 'on the look-out for' a future husband. After obtaining the consent of the 'candidates' chosen as husbands, the artist performed before the camera with her 'fiancé' in one of the conventional poses typical of couples. In the project Until Death Do Us Part she also uses the marriage theme, deepening its potential, in order thereby to problematise important issues in European society today.

 

No matter how much our personal integrity as individual human beings is uncompromisingly protected by the law, there is no other act that affects us to such a degree, not even today when people get married and divorced more easily than ever before, nor one that changes our identity so much as a wedding. Joining yourself with another individual still has some of the fatalistic echo of the phrase 'until death do us part'. It is because nobody gets married with the idea of getting divorced. When they decide upon the act, a person projects him- or herself as member of a couple, choosing their life companion.

 

As in any other performative ritual, self-affirmation, whether of an individual or a group, is the basis of a contemporary wedding in much the same way as it was in the past. This need is so strong that it may be the only possible explanation for the practice of getting married, which has become totally redundant if we take it that the relationship in question is merely an emotional one. The project Until Death Do Us Part reveals that wedding celebrations nowadays have a lot of the carnival spirit, in the Bakhtinian sense. Their structure is basically the same: the ceremonial, official part, in which a legal union is made between two individuals, and the less official part, the celebration. There are also the changes in the behavior of the participants. The first part is full of gravity and dignity, the appearance is meticulously prepared, the clothes are ceremonial, the posture upright, and the movements controlled. After the formal ritual joining the two persons in marriage, there comes the celebration, the part of the wedding in which control is loosened. In some countries, the period for weddings comes immediately after a long period of religious restrictions, such as fasting and restraint from other pleasures. Katarina Radović's photographs point to the fact that weddings today are still collective celebrations in which the participants transgress the limitations of everyday life, forgetting their usual duties, their job and position, and surrendering themselves to excess, to purely carnal pleasure, intoxication, overeating, uncontrollable laughter. There is copious evidence of this in the large number of photographs in the series which have food as their focus. Food is present in its extraordinary festal abundance. There are photographs of cakes or roast meat, especially in its simple 'rustic' form, both of which are the kinds of food that have been so rare throughout the greater part of history that even today, in the time of consumer culture, they have preserved their clear associations with ritual sacrifice and human beings’ predatory instincts.

 

Not only is the structure of weddings that of a ritual, but weddings also share another characteristic with rituals – that of repetition. A wedding is imagined in a time context. It is a planned memory. Ritual repetition connects us with the past more than the nature of modernism itself would allow. For modernism separates us from the past, it always proposes and supposes something new, something radical, a break with tradition, with the ancestors. That is why contemporary wedding ceremonies contradict the idea of modernity. In a way, they represent repetition, and the repetition of a wedding ceremony in a time when weddings are becoming obsolete, is one of the most durable performative modes of remembering. If we think we have discarded rituals, weddings prove the opposite. By performing the wedding ritual, by repeating the ancient customs, by inventing new ones, by mixing and combining them, we actually connect with each other, and with past, but also with future generations.

 

The meaning of marriage as an institution has been called into question by the development of civic society itself. The right of an individual defies any limitation, and marriages are abandoned at the same rate at which they are made. This has caused marriage to become an increasingly personal matter. As it has become more and more a question of personal choice and less and less a means of social coercion, marriage has gradually been transformed into a field of minimum risk. So, if we pose the question today: Why get married?, we could just as pertinently ask ourselves: Why not? We cannot lose anything, our freedom is guaranteed. And so is our right to leave, when love has faded or our interests no longer match. For Katarina Radović, this pragmatic and selfish individualism leads unmistakably to a new understanding of marriage in contemporary society, in an era in which information technologies incite us to individualistic lifestyles and impose a fast pace of life. Inspired by the study of a Norwegian social anthropologist, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, concerning the contemporary culture of the tyranny of the moment, i.e. of our times, in which the only thing we ever more increasingly miss is time, the artist sees marriage as a kind of inevitable 'vent'. And indeed, it seems that entering a marriage in the context of globalised contemporary society and the ever greater acceleration of time, provides a sense of consistency and reveals a need for some kind of balance, or at least, an illusion of stability.

 

Working on this project, the artist had in mind one far-reaching consequence of mixed marriages, as predicted by the geneticist Oliver Curry, in whose distant future of the human race we find a gradual disappearance of the contemporary races and the appearance of two new ones – one superior and the other inferior. This point of view seems to be a logical consequence of observing the global world of today and how the world's wealth is controlled. The erosion of strictly defined racial and ethnic boundaries is followed by the mingling of different cultures. Nowadays, cultural traditions are no longer obligatory, they have become folklore, a kind of ethnographic note that one can manipulate. Traditions, with their customs, costumes and rituals, have become spaces in which one can intervene, which one can summon or reject at will, depending on our needs. The very act of getting married, as well as the cultural traditions invoked in any cross-cultural ceremony, are in themselves departures to other spaces, distant worlds. They are a form of practical ethnography, in which, by calling upon diverse cultural traditions, we temporarily erase the fact of cultural uniformity in the contemporary global world.

 

Intercultural dialogue, the existence of cultural diversity and tolerance are values which have been promoted by the EU for decades. However, on October 16, 2010, in a convention of the youth wing of the Christian Democratic Union in Potsdam, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared, to the general amazement of all of Europe, that the German concept of a multicultural society had utterly failed. Not long after her, the British Prime Minister David Cameron repeated a similar judgement in his speech at a security-related conference in Münich. Katarina's photographs celebrate the differences, but they also remind us that in the culturally unified environment of the greater part of a Europe dominated by uniformity and impersonality, the exploitation of cultural differences is threatening to become more and more a screen for ideology. Rather than in real life, shaped by the cruel logic of the development of technology, cultural diversity is being pursued in the sphere of the imaginary. Differences are displayed in ephemeral events, festivities and passing rituals. They are less and less a part of everyday life. Instead, they belong in the sphere of entertainment, of something childlike and non-committal. 

 

To understand the work of Katarina Radović more fully, we have to keep in mind that her interest in cross-cultural weddings in European countries is also connected with the artist's specific background. She comes from a country which used to be part of Yugoslavia, a country in which multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity were values promoted long before the creation of the EU. Before the narrow-mindedness of the nationalist ideologies of the 1990s, life in Yugoslavia meant at least a superficial awareness of the culture, history and folklore of the different nations and ethnic groups inhabiting the country, and the state ideology of 'brotherhood and unity' had its application in everyday life with the huge number of 'mixed marriages'. Now, after a decade of wars and interethnic and international hatred, multiculturalism is being recommended to all the countries which emerged from former Yugoslavia. The experience of a person who lived this multiculturalism at a time when it was not even called that, is significant as regards her position when initiating this project.

 

Collecting field material in the classical sense of the methodology of anthropological research, the artist acts as a typical privileged observer armed with a scientific view of the world. The artist's background plays an important role here as well. Within Europe itself, the Balkans, as an exotic, culturally remote 'Other', has for centuries been the object of an occidentalist view, articulated in literary and artistic genres, from travel literature to paintings and photographs. In this relationship, the Balkans is, as Marija Todorova has formulated it, an 'imaginary' area of constant conflict, of bizarre contrasts, of odd people and phenomena which, compared to the dominant Western culture, represent a certain anomaly. In her project, Katarina Radović assumes the role of a superior observer. She is the one observing, travelling, doing research, collecting and documenting 'odd' phenomena throughout the European continent, thus thematising the very acts of observation and the political (hegemonic) pretensions underlying the very practice of collecting and forming collections of images. That is the background to be kept in mind when it comes to Katarina Radović’s project. The moments she has recorded are mainly out-of-sight scenes, most of which would probably never find their place in a wedding album. That is what makes these pictures unambiguously revealing and the people in them uncompromisingly exposed. In a way, they have been caught red-handed, unaware of the fact that they are participants in a visual performance that presents a colourful and amicable multicultural world attempting to overcome all the tensions that could shatter its tranquility. It is that part of the planet which is called Europe and which likes to think it has found ways to incorporate tradition into modern culture, to establish a balance between the old and the new and to reconcile all the differences successfully. It is only through careful interpretation that the complex structure of Katarina Radović’s art project is revealed. Through thematising the wedding as an anthropological phenomenon and displaying the contents of its performative artistry, the project actually problematises contemporary social contradictions. The artist warns us that the personal is always also political, and that no ritual is sheer form, but rather always articulates certain processes in society, which, in the final analysis, have a far-reaching effect.