... To Eternity

 

 

by Katarina Radović, photographer

 

 

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

 

 

 

It took a certain amount of time, the shaking or shattering of every prejudice and fixation from the past, and my being quite perturbed by all sorts of temptations, in order for the image of wedding and marriage to acquire what may be for me an entirely new form, dimension and significance... In the course of my two-year project of exploring the wedding ceremony – as one of the oldest anthropological genres – I had a chance to step into different corners of the European continent (and even further); to meet for the first time with what weddings are like in reality; to witness probable and incredible stories and customs; to taste something from each of those plates; to experience states of both rapture and melancholy; and to produce a firsthand record of all those scenes. Then, having completed my odyssey, I stumbled over the mine of an ‘ideal’ marriage, which in its pre-explosive state showed me that the ‘ideal’ can only feed on artificial respiration; after which, to top it all, I received a proposal of marriage for the Kingdom of Heaven(!) So, after all these experiences, with the accompanying perichoreses, peripeteia and kairotic moments, perhaps it might have been expected that I would step out of the whole cycle with entirely new feelings and attitudes(?) However, now, at this moment of giving final shape to my project Until Death Do Us Part, I still find myself facing the same, extremely difficult, recurrent metaphysical questions:

 

A beginning before an end? A beginning of an end? Or, an end before a beginning?

 

The idea of a wedding, and therefore, of marriage, has always carried a certain weight for me, as if the horizon were suddenly blurred, and madness extinguished to allow eternity to take its place. “What shall we do before eternity?”, asks the bride of her groom during the whirl of their wedding feast in John Berger’s novel To The Wedding (1996). On their wedding night, Ninon will take off her shoes and dance with Gino. They will dance as though they will never tire, as though their happiness is absolute, as though death will never disturb them. This almost archetypal image could be affixed to most of the weddings I was present at: a photograph of the moment of bliss, love and happiness, of triumph over transience. But every love story contains from the beginning an inkling of its own collapse. Eventually, whether death do us part or do us bring together will remain hovering there as a question of doctrinal or intuitive conviction.

 

If marriage, as a social institution, was originally conceived with the idea of procreation in mind, as has been the most common attitude over the centuries, it could be said that it represents the journey, not the final destination. However, as a consequence of many historic changes, some new questions are breaking through: What is the point of getting married if nearly half of marriages nowadays end in divorce? What is the connection between evolution and the ever more frequent marriage ‘for papers’? What is the social goal of gay marriage or of marriage between elderly people? Does everything, as my ninety-two-year-old grandmother has so often and so aptly declared, only come down to “mutual respect and interest”? Or can getting married actually be a gesture of pure and unconditional love?

 

In Berger’s novel, we encounter an example of marriage in which, in spite of devastating sorrow and hopelessness, love conquers all, even death: a young girl infected by AIDS gets married to a man who insists on marrying her because he loves her; she resists the idea at first, but eventually accepts it; the wedding feast is prepared, the lamb roasted, the various dishes cooked; and the family members are gathered, the courtyard around the house is tidied. And, yet, just the two of them, and a few close friends, know that she can only hope to live for a few more uncertain years. Every morning she wakes up and looks at herself in the mirror, searching for evidence of pain and blemish... The hour-glass is running too fast, and this wedding, like a vortex, draws both the characters in the novel and us, the spectators, to the very core of the problem related to the social meaning of marriage. As a response to the sense of one’s own mortality in such a delicate situation, and in the face of the absurdities of existence and of the evolutionist idea of marriage, a strong need to love prevails. Here, marriage is only a temporary station on the way to eternity...

 

In his Essays in Love (2006), Alain de Botton implies a similar standpoint when he says that the logical climax of “immature love” (immature because it is “absolute”, and has nothing to do with age) comes in death, symbolic or real, whereas the climax of “mature love” is in marriage, and in attempts to avoid death via routine. Yet, it would seem ‘death’ is likely to arrive sooner when things are defined, fixed... 

 

Marriage deprives us of the consoling option of perpetual possibility. It is, above all, a binding contract which implies a recognised long-lasting relationship between (in most cases) two people, who are expected to invest all their efforts in a cohabitation and agree on a division of duties and resources, with the aim of raising future generations. But there is nothing more desirable than what will soon disappear or what is forbidden or unattainable. Human beings are not monogamous (just as almost 99% of zoological species are not), and infidelity is more a problem of a psychological than a physical nature. However happy we may be with our partner, it is our love for him or her that inevitably prevents us from pursuing alternatives. But why should that bother us at all if we truly love our partner, unless our love has already started to fade? Why are we sometimes saddened by the impossibility of living more than one of the many life scenarios that we archive in the immense area of the imaginary? As if, at certain moments, we feel nostalgia for the times when a definite choice was not a necessity.

 

Neither Church nor State likes divorce. The marriage vow ‘until death do us part’ could, throughout its history, be interpreted as offering at least a tiny release clause. 

 

However, apart from a certain floating uneasiness, rarely do we have the image of ‘the end before the beginning’ at the moment we are entering the state of marriage. There is, primarily, that comforting feeling of planning and preparing for the future, a kind of investment in time; credit that it will certainly take a long time to repay, and sometimes with great difficulty; and, in the worst scenario, a spanner in the works of the future control system, which could remain mercilessly screwed up. Although there is no absolute guarantee for the future – and exactly because it is the present which is the most difficult to live in – there is an intensified need for security and for earthing in the ‘here’ and ‘now’, expressed via an appeal to a common destiny.

 

It is the wedding ceremony that metaphorically projects and reflects that appeal, that potential image of the future of couple, often crowned by the eschatological dimension, which gives meaning to everything through the prism of eternity. Yet, there always seems to remain that thin, slightly disturbing ‘crevice’, that latent fear of ‘the beginning of the end’, of loss, confronted with the suppressed doubt as to the rightness of one’s choice and decision. And that ‘crevice’ is also photography, so complex and contradictory as a medium, which, by some analogy, ominously announces ‘death’ with its every recorded moment, while at the same time presenting its ambitious, though precarious, claim to the truth. A photograph that documents triggers further thoughts, such as whether an image, along with its magical potential and its bipolarity – between mortalisation and realisation – can really contain its content? From the moment my camera’s shutter snapped, each of these photographs of wedding ceremonies, of parades and their personages, has borne in itself a seed of absence, of some a priori melancholy. The seed of absence also from the moment of that solemn act of union which will remain, if nothing else, a test of personal, and then, collective memory. 

 

Freed from the obligations of an official wedding photographer, I wanted to record a wedding as a uniform visual narrative containing within itself a multitude of socially and culturologically conditioned differences, but eventually reduced to one organism – a body without skin, whose form is clearly defined by its skeleton and its inner organs, and where no sign or ritual has the same meaning outside of its context. In the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s “unconscious optics”, the camera, in its merciless neutrality penetrates the cellular structure of things that would otherwise remain unconscious. But here, apart from the anatomical precision, it is also the personal attitude and acquired experience:

 

in a fluctuating embrace, between celebration, humanity, closeness, nostalgia… and excess, vanity, humour, absurdity... 

 

Lived and observed, lined up in these photographs are ceremonies and rituals – old and new, and often culturologically hybrid – either crucial for the evolution of a marriage, providing for a happy family and offspring, or protection against the evil eye, or merely present in the form of practical jokes, as an excuse for showing off and partying. On the wedding day, everything has to be perfect, because if something goes wrong, the whole marriage could turn into a failure. Hence, everything has to look as perfect as possible: settings, details of decorations, flowers, food arrangements on tables, clothes, shoes, jewelry, hats... On this day, everybody is at their best, and that is also part of the investment in the future. The wedding feast is the happiest moment in one’s life – but apparently not for everyone: while for some it means a new beginning, the somewhat gloomy looks of those who have moved away from the beginning a long time ago are evidence that there is always a flutter of uncertainty in love, that there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, and that nothing is as simple as it seems. The portraits of all these participants, brides and grooms, family members and friends – with their exultant or expressionless looks, their dignified or slouching postures, seated or in a dance trance – reveal the subtle details of human behaviour in such a sublime moment, and the different psychological states and motivations, which, with their numerous nuances, confirm and celebrate the complex nature of human affinities, leaving as much room for fantasies and happiness as for failures and vulnerability. At the moment of the joining of two people, they all become as one, and every such new beginning rekindles this appetite, even for those who lost it long ago. All wedding guests, as in Berger’s novel, symbolically turn into a single animal, a half-mythical creature, like a satyr with thirty or a hundred or more heads. Such a creature lives for a very short time, only a day or two, and will be born again when there is something new to celebrate, because it consists of those who briefly ‘got lost’ in happiness and spectacle, in order to store those moments in their memory.

 

The role of wedding photographs in the complex network of individual memory points, above all, to their private meaning; their greatest importance is to those who are in them, and as such, they most often remain in hermetic circles of families and friends. However, as usual, the established ideologies of groups can overrule the inclinations of their members. Thus, the officially commissioned wedding photographs, in their conventionality, can be more than merely the way in which individuals wish to be seen; presented to the public, they become signs in the interpretation of family and social histories. As material evidence, they meet certain expectations, but they provide even greater satisfaction because they show family structures as capable of straddling the tensions between ideal presentation and real experience.

 

On the border line between private and public, free of imposed canons, these colourfully ambiguous photographs of weddings and their protagonists are displaced in a different context of presentation and interpretation, and in this way, not only call attention to themselves as objects of general significance, and raise a number of questions, but also point subtly to both the Persona and the Anima of the social act of wedding ceremony.

 

However strange it may sound, it could be said that almost all weddings are the same. There is something in the very spirit of that event that equates them, regardless of their cultural specificities. Yet even when they fully recognise the obvious social norms and send out all the expected signals, there is always room left for exceptions and surprises. And that is the case with weddings between couples of different cultures or different races, and couples who are in conflict with society or on its margin. Then, the question arises as to in what way the rituals and customs, as well as the mere wedding celebration, actually serve to strengthen the feeling of individuality and community, when two different sets of cultural conventions meet and either find their melting point or cannot avoid confronting each other – evidence that personal histories can have a hard time fitting into family histories, and family histories an even harder time fitting into histories of communities, nations, races, continents...

 

Even since ancient times, when the enamoured Zeus, disguised as a bull, seduced and abducted the young nymph Europa, daughter of the Phoenician King Agenor – a myth according to which the European continent seems to have taken its name from an emigrant from Asia – there have been numerous contrasting peoples, races, languages, religious beliefs and ideologies on European soil. Encouraged by many centuries of migrations, conflicts and changes, these diversities have opened up an almost unlimited number of possible mixed marriages. Although historians and anthropologists insist that the group, be it family, tribe, nation or state, always comes before the individual, it could be interesting and useful to return, however briefly, to personal histories, as in these photographs.

 

In love, be it “mature” or “immature”, in our quest for ‘the absolute’, ‘the eternal’, or just “interest and respect”, we often long and search for something exotic, remote, something that is missing in our courtyard. As if it were a rule, as de Botton also pointed out, the initial spasm of love finds its inspiration in something unfamiliar; and by choosing partners from other cultures, or even races, we become attached to values that are missing in our own culture. We fall in love with the other, the ideal, because we want to get away from our own deficiencies and insecurities. Therefore it seems easiest and most logical to fall for someone who is entirely foreign, in no way conditioned by our knowledge, about whom and about whose tradition and culture we know next to nothing. Perhaps it is only then, in our moments of bliss, that we can fully ‘escape’ from ourselves. But afterwards comes the natural instinct to discover the being we have come to love and who has accepted us as we are, and at that paradoxical juncture of solipsism and emotionally coloured exoticism, in the process of our acclimatisation to the other, we often become victims of a xenophobic feeling of exile from our own tradition and our original expectations. It is then that history and anthropology take over again.

 

Therefore it is no wonder that the photographs presenting the wedding ceremonies and feasts of mixed couples are replete with indications of national, religious and other identities – symbols that assert one as opposed to another. The climax of the game is reached with the criss-crossing of those symbols, which is quite permissible, even very welcome, on the day of the wedding celebration because, it is moment for the reconciliation of differences. One is curious to know how, at these moments, members of different cultures and traditions see one another – whether Europeans in African boubou dresses seem weird and funny to the Africans themselves, whether Indians in Scottish kilts look to the others like characters in a theatre play, or whether we can take the Hungarians seriously enough in their performance of the Hare Krishna wedding ritual. In the end, the experiencing and propagation as opposed to the innate fear of differences, is much more complex and delicate, sometimes, even, a more human and personal process, that it might at first seem. After all, this is the case with everything to do with human relationships.

 

Following the line of European thought, from the Nietzschean revolt against Christianity, through the sexual revolution, to the Baudrillardian ‘illusion of the end’, marriage and family have been experiencing a major transformation. In his essay 'On Gay Marriage and Revolution: The Metamorphosis of the Western Family' (2003), Michel Onfray, reminds us how Christianity at its beginnings established an ideal of abstinence and renounciation of this world, offering as the sole option against the extinction of civilisation: marriage(!) – in other words, absolute monogamy, life under the same roof without secrets, and sexuality at the service of reproduction, with everything else to be considered a sin under the threat of eternal damnation (whether behind that threat there is a dogma, or more radically, a wife or a husband!). On the other hand, libido and the life force have been paving their own way through the centuries, so that cuckolds and betrayed wives are continuous proof that conditioned faultlessness is mere anesthesia, that the body and personal choice also exist outside of the family, and that this world is more than sufficient without the next one, so that it needs neither philosophy nor religion. The classical family, wriggling free from the embrace of the Church, has given way to the so-called ‘postmodern family’, which transfers the determinism of nature and the authorities more and more to the freedom of culture. Interethnic, interracial, interreligious and homosexual models of cohabitation are obtaining a status equal to that of a classical heterosexual marriage registered within one community. Conceived in this way, and supplemented by freedom in the sphere of reproduction, the family is being increasingly transformed into a locus of conscious agreement, where personal feelings and aspirations for happiness prevail over any other religious or moral value, and where an individual begins to control his/her own destiny. Viewed from this ‘onfrayistic’ angle, life in a couple, married or unmarried, is actually a “philosophical and existential construct“ – one might also say, an experiment.

 

Be that as it may, the time has come for me to complete my two-year project with this selection of photographs, which do not conceal a certain degree of wonder at the phenomenon of marriage, shown in its many contemporary forms and from a number of perspectives. Although undomesticated to the environment that was the subject of my research, I wanted to express a personal viewpoint, in which a photographic image as an end result does not count for much more than what precedes or succeeds it in the long chain of events, thoughts, emotions and decisions. All these images, observed as a whole, besides their denotative meaning about the institution of marriage and the wedding ceremony today, emit the already well-known message that no matter how perfect something may seem in its flickering and suavity, deep down it is containing unfathomable secrets and inextricable knots. In the cosmic process of time unwinding, in countless life plots and denouements, involutions and evolutions, in subordination or emancipation, what triumphs, in the end, is the need for procreation, and humanity but in the broad sense of the word – humanity in all its gradations of beauty and ugliness, kindness and cruelty, comedy and tragedy, pleasure and pain, ups and downs... And that is what makes this life interesting.

 

But let us for a moment return to eternity. With today’s collapsing reality of a continuous present, and the experimental nomadic subjectivity experiencing its many little deaths every day, the idea of immortality is being increasingly deconstructed and dissected. The question arises as to what principle is at the source of the human need (or right) not to disappear – as a counterbalance to the creation of the species. In his book The Illusion of the End (1994), Jean Baudrillard implies that there is no history without Utopia, but criticises contemporary man's need for an artificial biological survival at any cost, in a kind of prophylactic Utopia, as opposed to the lost metaphysical Utopia that had originated in the vision of an ultimate Christian empathy. Expanding on the medieval question as to the concrete forms of bodily resurrection, by asking whether we shall resuscitate with all our wishes, secrets, neuroses, handicaps, viruses, deliriums – in short, with our unconscious, Baudrillard ironically alludes to the simulacrum of 'ideal resurrection', which excludes all negative features, and eliminates the distinction between reality and representation.

 

Well, if that really is possibile, if we could indeed expect everything to be purified, immunised, idealised and filled with love – fragrance of paradise?! – then, I would gladly think about that marriage proposal...