Until Death Do Us Part

 

 

by Nebojša Pajkić, screenwriter and film critic

 

 

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

 

 

 

I think that conflict, a term central to all the so-called dramatic arts, and at first glance not necessarily immanent in the various differently calibrated representational arts, is a good point from which to start thinking about the photographs of Miss Katarina Radović – or, more precisely, understanding the diverse components interwoven into her project Until Death Do Us Part, which has been conceived and carried out in a way one might call totalitarian. What we have here is a multitude of images, the result of nearly two years' work throughout the regions of Europe, dedicated to recording wedding ceremonies which in most cases represent the joining in marriage of individuals belonging to different cultures, at the least, or, in more exceptional cases, to different races, or, even more radically, to the same sex.

 

Hence, the first field of conflict is to be found in the very basis of the project, in its thematic fixation (the wedding ceremony) and in its connotative or, more obviously, its conceptual nomination (until death do us part).

 

That is to say, a wedding, apart from its ritual, ceremonial manifestation, represents an act of social organisation whose raison d'etre is the continuation of the species, and this is opposed to, indeed, imposed on the idea of death in every respect, creationist or evolutionist. In that sense, all archetypal images, which in their infinitely repetitive ceremonial parades arrive at their ironic stereotypes, actually rest upon the mythic potential of collective joy, upon a mood that celebrates life, victory over death, the confirmation of cosmic infinity against material finitude.

 

Even though it may not be of significance for this paradox (this conflict), which is in the focus of Miss Radović's focus (to avoid a pleonasm via a tautology), there is no harm in drawing attention to the fact that Eastern Christian, as opposed to Vatican-Protestant doctrine, treasures the prospect of an eschatological post-material unity as the final embrace. But, quite apart from that doctrinal antagonism, the question of death raises further questions which it is important we keep in mind, particularly when photography is at the centre of our attention.

 

It is well known that André Bazin, the creator or at least spiritus movens of the ‘politique des auteurs’ (auteur theory) and an impassioned philosopher of realism, in his study “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” cantered his discourse on the fact that the invention of the camera lens released the art of painting from the complex of realism, the obsession with verisimilitude. However, on this occasion, more important than this questionable thesis of his is his expository observation which recognises in the Egyptian tradition, in the technique of embalming and the figure of the mummy, the impulse to defy time and consequently to overcome death as a restrictive temporal unit. Furthermore, in the European tradition – in painting for instance – Bazin recognises in the idea of portraying similarity a further secularised battle for continuance which, without magic potential, will be reduced to similarity as something in which posthumous memory may place hope.

 

However, for Miss Radović's project, much more indicative is the occult dimension of embalming and, we might even say, the metaphor of the mummy – mummification, as it is sometimes called.

 

This qualmish tension (of mummification) is, in fact, covertly present in an endless myriad of these photographs, which, across various religions, cultures and races, revolve the parabolic feeling of an end before a beginning, of death before birth – the death, possibly, of cultures before they have reached their cosmic paroxysmal numbness. It is almost as if a Nietzschean Dionysian orgiastic trance were being extinguished in a Schopenhauerian apologia for self-annihilation. 

  

It is difficult to know when Miss Radović is being ironic, and when she is just witnessing the inherent ironic potentials of disintegrating rites. However, when she refers to the meta-Darwinian sarcasm of Oliver Curry, who expects a synthesis of the beautiful and the intelligent in opposition to the mentally and physically deficient, she gives to her comprehensive work a remarkable elliptical momentum, which takes us back to her basic auctorial conflict. This concerns the relationship between premeditation and intuition. For example, one of Curry’s most authoritative evolutionist transtopian precursors, Theodosius Dobzhansky, in his capital work Mankind Evolving (1962), while looking at the problems of species and races, modalities and perspectives, points out that racial hybridisation, mixed marriages or the mingling of races, has occurred whenever human races have at any time lived next to one another. Further on he says, “races are capable of exchanging genes and do exchange genes.” “Perhaps there is no recorded instance of intermarriage between some races, say of Eskimos with Papuans, but Eskimos as well as Papuans do interbreed with other races; channels however tortuous, for gene exchange exist between all human races.”

 

Well, in this comprehensive overview of pre-hybridisation rites or, at least, of rituals or their secondary, accompanying off and off-off phenomena, it seems to me there are no Eskimos or Papuans, unless I have missed them. However, the exhaustivity that the author emanates seems to be forcing us to think about the level of conceptual premeditation. On the other hand, the unrestrained diversity of motifs, details, totalities, panoramas, passages, inserts and composed, precomposed, discomposed, decomposed and non-composed vistas indicates an openness, a theatrical rapture which, although it does not necessarily disguise its roots in a romantic suffragist emancipationalism à la Clara Sipprell, captivates with its approach – ludic, in a certain sense infantile, we might even say auto-erotic; but in any case, anarchic rather than positivist, emotional rather than rational. Indeed, her approach to the idea of a wedding is quite fascinating. If we have in mind the previous, equally consistent and equally ironic sequential project of Miss Radović (A Husband in Paris), a relatively random selection of partners for a crypto-marital photo-exposure, we will see that the author is more than focused on a question that could be said to trouble her personally. This personal moment, this angle and attitude, is the way Miss Radović transcends the track she is unconsciously travelling. While she is navigating the currents of the post-conceptual renewal of photography, i.e. of the photographic camera as a tool superior to the hated easel, she enters the sphere of professional, almost professionalist effectiveness, in keeping with her acquired and inborn meticulousness, her ‘akribeia’. Her photographic perfectionism, despite the ironic texture, could, in its exhaustivity, be compared to the practical execution of a mission assigned to a military, police or judicial photo expert. This is not an objection, and it would be a misinterpretation if it were to be taken as one; since this professional competence, this agonistic perfectionism, inspired by a fundamentally serious wonder at the institution of marriage – the institution which, as we saw in Dobzhansky, is essentially meant for further evolutionary processes, i.e. posterity – blossoms forth in the mysterious sexually appealing charm of these ventures.

 

This constant wonder on the part of the author at the basic question of the human community legitimates Miss Radović as an author who breaks the mould in every sense, transcending the usual questions dealt with by both the iconodules and the iconoclasts; which means that her work in its personal identification is inimicable to systematisations related to any terminology preceding or following the aesthetic.

 

What we have here is a consequentiality, the defined world of an author and an almost fanatical preoccupation which, it would seem, might surpass the frame of the topic as well as – and even more aggressively – the frame of the medium. Even though these friezes, these metaphysical convulsions immortalised in photographs, present the paradox of a wedding in the deadliest of ways, this ironic Panopticum still seems to be crying out for its choreographic continuation. These images look as if they want to flicker towards decoding their own arcana that are presented in 24 frames per second.

 

As André Bazin once observed, “on the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language”.

 

And the impressive thing in the dialectical conflict of the intuitive and the premeditated in Miss Radović's ‘weddings’ is their petrified kinesthetics. It is precisely this implosion of frozen movement which seems to radiate all the theatrical aura of an altered reality whose self-directed ceremoniousness is in its essence amazing, so remote from its own meaning that its codification is actually equal to that of a spell, arrested at its magical and mythical pre-historic root. It is fascinating that this petrification, originating in forgotten ritual choreographies, can be deciphered without the expression of recorded movement, without film. However, I believe that a film as well as a wedding are creative inevitabilities for Miss Radović, sooner or later. But this prediction must first of all be approached through the prism of the photographer's vocation. We should keep in mind that the avant-garde as a whole, on its path from the Decadent movement, through Neo-Dada, to Post-postmodernism, etc, from Man Ray to Warhol-Morrissey and now to Katarina Radović, has superimposed its own auctorial standpoint on the medium, the craft, the manner and, if need be, the style. Because the angle comes from the standpoint, and on the angle depends the choice of lens, or camera, or …

 

I have presented here my attitude toward these magic photographs that are inviting the author to exercise her right to set them moving, to provide them with sound and to do with them whatever she pleases in her creative frenzy, without ideological, vocational, media or other prejudice or restriction. Nothing is off limits to the artist.