Vis Major: Bad Romance
What connects a morning greeting to Mr Dirac with a huge, glossy blue articulated lorry with Pula number plates, parked at dusk on the waterfront of a small coastal town? Or a ray of light with blue velvet inside a space lined with PVC sheeting? Or a pale-skinned lady with the emptied cistern of a village well? Or Lady Gaga with Let 3? The answer is as surreal as the questions themselves: they are connected by a body that is not there! And there is nothing morbid or gruesome about this connection. On the contrary, what prevails is a sense of boundless freedom and satisfaction at what has been achieved, because, at the outset, Vis Major: Bad Romance, a project by Dragana Sapanjoš, seemed impossible to realise. This is one of the distinctive features of Dragana’s work: large, demanding, complex projects involving installations, actions and interventions with many participants, absurd situations and extended musical passages. We find all of this in V.M.: Bad Romance as well.
At its centre is an anthropomorphic performance, somewhere between performance art and theatre, in which the artist gives form to events and phenomena through a kaleidoscope of media that stands in for her own bodily presence. To avoid any confusion: all the black-and-white photographs in this catalogue show Dragana, the artist, but only during the preparation of the projects. These images serve as documentation. She is absent from the colour photographs taken during the events, whose individual parts or elements can exist independently while also forming a whole. In Vis Major, she is not the main protagonist. The protagonists are manifestations of the body: as bearers of meaning (the dead man, the corpse), as actual people (police officers, singers) or as embodiments of natural processes (rotting flowers). This strategy of staging the absent body unfolded through three performances, in three different places, at three different times, spaced at equal intervals. This need not be understood as a variation on the principle of the trinity, although such interpretations remain possible. Attention should instead be paid to the temporal structure, spanning three months, which situates the presence of one element, the flowers, within a chain of cause and effect: decomposition and decay.
Anthuriums, lilies, daisies, freesias, roses, gladioli, Peruvian lilies, gerberas and hydrangeas: a thousand freshly purchased flowers used by Sapanjoš in the first part of V.M.: Bad Romance. Subtitled Good Morning Mr. Dirac, it was presented at the Arterija festival of visual arts from 29 August to 2 September 2011, organised by the Muzej-Museo Lapidarium in Novigrad-Cittanova, the town where the artist lives and works.
What happened here? First, a new, empty, 17-metre articulated lorry had to be found and brought to the waterfront of the old town. To do this, the artist needed a special permit, had to halt afternoon traffic in that part of town and secure an empty parking space. No sooner said than done! Once parked on the waterfront, the blue lorry stood with its rear doors wide open each evening, revealing a three-channel video projection inside (45 minutes, colour, silent, loop). The footage “flowed” silently across the interior walls of the trailer and over the thousand flower stems arranged in vases. It showed time-lapse close-ups of various flowers, their petals opening and closing, as if we were witnessing a ritual of birth or death. Each day, approximately 70 litres of water were poured into the trailer (a baptism?), and each evening water dripped continuously from beneath the vehicle.
From the driver’s cab comes The Gloaming by Radiohead. The cab is empty, with no driver; only the song can be heard, repeated over and over, mingling with the voices of viewers, listeners and passers-by. Indeed, Mr Dirac, why is this space charged with negative energy? Is this a funeral? And where is the body? Who is the murderer, Mr Dirac?
Dragana addresses this question in Ray of Light, the second part of V.M.: Bad Romance, performed on 2 October 2011 at Galerija Makina in Pula, the town where the artist attended art school. The search for the murderer, or the murder victim, began at exactly 9 p.m. with the arrival of two police cars, sirens wailing and blue lights flashing.
From inside the gallery comes the velvety singing of Blue Velvet. The gallery is entirely lined with dark plastic sheeting of the kind used to cover bodies when they are discovered. The rooms are dark and unsettling, as though something terrible has happened there, perhaps a brutal murder. There are no traces, no blood, as if someone had hastily removed everything to leave no evidence. Only the police officers were allowed to enter the gallery, where Blue Velvet played throughout. At the end of a long, narrow room stands a light, positioned in front of the entrance to another space. A smell emanates from this space, somehow familiar, though we cannot identify its source. In the middle stands a built-in oven thickly coated with wax. The oven is switched on, and the wax slowly melts, filling the space with smoke and scent. Four police officers cordon off the crime scene with tape. Viewers and passers-by have to retreat behind it. At 9.10 p.m., the coroner arrives and enters the space to remove the non-existent body (of the crime?). At one point, as a piece of wax falls from the front of the oven, a ray of light illuminates the gallery. The audience, passers-by and neighbours are allowed to enter only after the police officers and the coroner have left.
They did not find the body…
A line from Bosa noga, sung a cappella by the Rijeka band Let 3, rises from the emptied cistern of the well in the courtyard of Galerija Šikuti, near Savičenta, in central Istria. The final part of V.M.: Bad Romance was performed at Šikuti. Dragana called it Alejandro, after Lady Gaga’s hit song. It took place on 29 October 2011, following the events in Pula and Novigrad. Two months had passed since the first performance. That, in fact, is how long it takes for flowers to rot. Alejandro therefore used materials from the previous events: the flowers and water from the Novigrad lorry, kept in the artist’s studio for the intervening two months, and the wax that had dripped from the oven during the performance in Pula.
The song was the first thing visitors heard as they approached the gallery, audible from approximately 400 metres away. The voices came from the ground, or rather from beneath it. Five members of Let 3 sang Bosa noga over and over for some 45 minutes, until the oxygen in the well ran out. Forty-five minutes, incidentally, is also the average duration of a funeral. The sweating Rijeka rockers were pulled out of the well one by one. Almost at the end of his strength, the singer was the last to be heard.
Not far from the well, beside the path leading to the gallery, stood a four-metre sculpture. It was constructed from a haystack, a wooden pole and a thousand rotten flowers coated in wax. The flower stems came from Good Morning Mr. Dirac, and each had been individually coated by hand with wax from Ray of Light. A heap of flowers, incidentally, evokes a burial mound and moments of mourning.
Although the physical body of the deceased was absent, its presence was felt everywhere, both outside and inside the gallery, whose floor had been washed with the stagnant water from the rotting flowers. In the middle of the space, in honour of the absent deceased, stood a small crystal monument filled with the same stagnant water. Some three hundred multicoloured Arbre Magique air fresheners hung from the gallery ceiling, intended to mask the organic stench with a new, inorganic one.
Pale-skinned lady (and Dragana is indeed pale-skinned), your drama is not dark, just as your comedy is neither funny nor divine; it is the sharp edge of a knife slicing through our evolutionary system. So, Lady, what does the body mean to us today? And what does art mean to us? In a world where everything once sacred has been reduced to commercial value and mere utility, is the body our only remaining horizon of resistance and survival? Even when it is not there?
Text for the forthcoming book Vis Major: Bad Romance. Translated from the Croatian.