There Is No Beauty, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
If "beauty is truth", what happens when we get "a truth" which is ugliness, poverty, lie, murder, torture, treason, betrayal, corruption, nepotism and all the socially declared ills or "wrong doings" of groups and individuals in "civilized" western culture?
Recently we have witnessed trends in Europe, which are spreading gray zones of judgment, and blurring the division between "good" and "bad". In neighboring countries, extreme right wing oriented people are growing louder and organizing an international meeting of neo-nazis & fascists in Trieste. South Austria looks from the train, with its neat hard edge painted houses/homes like a beautiful patisserie in the display windows of a bakery. We really do not have the problem in Europe of becoming Disneyfied, because even before this "giant creator" of American taste-aesthetics, we were celebrating the very same canons of visual pleasure. And so, traveling up north, looking through the window of a train, my thoughts were running from the images of the Lars von Trier film Europa to my childhood memories, when I enjoyed more the wrapper of the chewing gum brought to me from Trieste, than the gum itself, observing carefully the printed images of cartoons, which I had never seen before.
Also, I was contemplating our sense of beauty and taste, the hedonism and perversity of Europe's tiresome social repertoire, which obviously does not afford enough imagination to switch it to other tunes in contemporary life. Insistence on and persistence with the text of culture known by heart from numerous repetitions is reminiscent of psychiatric patients who reject the cure, paranoically enjoying their state of being because it is their home and they are afraid of moving to another. The concept of civility has its shadow, which is the corpse. Believe me, when traveling through Europe, you feel this everywhere. Once you turn your head to face it, it is gone. The shadow remains the shadow. Who is shadow-less?
To me, the earth is more and more round, and I have lost the vision of flat geographical images representing places. Plasticity of vision is my experience, which means that it takes time and place to check and see it from all angles.
These are the parameters of my video performances in 1999/2000, where I mainly expose myself as a woman who, by definition, does not fit into the text of her own culture. The question is, therefore: what am I doing here, anyway? States of things in life are in opposition to the anachronistic text of culture; therefore the need to correct and re-write it is an urgent necessity, meaning that, even if I choose to live the sentimental clichéd way of life promoted for women in our culture, I simply might be able to not afford this game.
These tapes are meant to communicate with people in public places as disturbing, and not decorative inserts, with the objective of recording the impossibility of escape into private domains of life due to our "script", which has the goal of directing our behavior in the way it is supposed to be. The locations were carefully chosen so that the performances mark and expose the function of the sites, as well as interact among themselves, constituting in the memory of passers-by and visitors a story of our hi-story.
When I met with understanding of my intentions from the City of Women people (Koen Van Daele and Sabina Potočki), I was pleasantly surprised and glad that somebody understood my art, even though I was having some doubts about the profile of the festival, which presents only women artists. Long ago, I stopped participating in these kinds of shows, hoping that we had overcome such segregated forms of presentation. Nevertheless, I did take the "risk" of participating in the Festival and even being "labeled" a feminist artist. Well, I ask you, whoever you might be, making this kind of judgment: would you insist on a utopian vision of "happy equality" if everyday life provided you with different facts? Also, I may say that at this point in my life, I do truly support and defend any oppressed and neglected groups in society, which seems to include women. To return to the beginning: who is being stripped bare by whom? Perhaps the right title would be: Strip tease of our pathetic bodies in order to claim lost joys and the frivolity of impulsive living without discipline and the neurotic repetition of mistakes in joke telling.
Cindy Sherman made her travesty works out of horror and fear of going out on the street when she moved to New York. She even changed her appearance to look more male, to trick the "bachelor" even. "Bad images", photographs, were the response to overwhelming male dominance in the art world in the `eighties, so she acted out her outrage and anger towards the dangerous trend threatening her existence as an artist. To survive, she managed to balance her paranoia with art and by watching horror movies.
We might also conclude that my video performances are made out of frustration and desperation, because I acknowledge that things are not getting any "better", meaning that we can not expect any protection from violence, therefore we should question the concept of civility itself.
"Even dead I am watching you", God, Father, and the Law are saying.
...nothing she - ... what? ... who? ... no! ... she! (Samuel Beckett, Not I)
And so let us hope that Ljubljana, which by the way, is not really a very good city for women, will, with the help of the City of Women Festival of Contemporary Arts, become more friendly and amiable to the female part of humanity.
Duba Sambolec
Trondheim, September 2000
[Text for the catalogue of Duba Sambolec's solo show NoHomeVideos© at the 6th International Festival of Contemporary Arts – City of Women, Ljubljana, 2000]
