THE HIGHER FORCE OF DRAGANA SAPANJOŠ
VIS MAJOR (performance for 20 voices) is the title of Dragana Sapanjoš's new work, with which she presents herself at the Mala galerija in Poreč. It is a hybrid work in which the artist combines elements of visual language, visual media, music and performative strategies – not unfamiliar to the protagonists of contemporary art practice, to whom Dragana belongs. At stake is the staging of events in the gallery space that offers not representation, but the direct experience of real time, space and corporeality. The artist uses this to thematise communication with the audience, that is, its participation in the artistic work/process. In this way Dragana's work takes the form of living sculptures, installations and interventions. She shapes them around a personal vocabulary in which her ideas are named and organised into what she calls units: different categories of thinking and of creating poetic images. Thus VIS MAJOR too is a unit in process, composed of the parts/scenes sinking and Bukkake: O ho how boy!, through which the artist gives the participants a series of tasks, using specially constructed devices or setting the result in a poetic tableaux vivants. In this series the human body is the basic working material. Dragana creates a plan; she gives tasks to her human material, which are then played out in absurd situations and long, (non-)narrative intervals.
Scene/task 1. sinking
Twenty members of the (Novigrad) choir, lined up next to each other, face the wall and perform a cappella “Wrong”, a song by the British band Depeche Mode. They wear white cotton dresses, deeply cut at the back and richly pleated at the front, the side turned to the wall.
… the voices echo through the space, at the centre of which stands the conductor. He is dressed in black and conducts the women's backs, which sway to the rhythm of the song. There is no pause. The song is repeated, performed in a loop, and the swaying of the bodies gradually evens out. As this happens, the sound atmosphere in the space changes, as does the presence/absence of bodies. Each member of the choir, in fact, performs Wrong as many times as her age! The youngest leaves the space first, then the next, and so on. The music falls silent when the oldest of them finishes singing. Then, together with the conductor, who in silence conducts Wrong four more times, they go into the second space (scene), where the other women are (or, better said, those who persevered in their roles, considering that they are neither professional performers nor actresses; most of the women sing in the Novigrad church choir!).
Scene/task 2. Bukkake: o ho how boy!
In the second space there are three large cakes, and only one is edible. As each member of the choir finishes singing, she receives a piece of cake on a small plate and a glass of a selected (non-)alcoholic drink. Anyone in the audience can also have a piece of cake and a drink, if they ask for it. Cake that is not eaten up, like what remains of the drinks and the cut cake, stays untouched in the gallery for the entire duration of the exhibition, that is, twenty days. The exhibition space thus becomes a container of the remains of human presence, and only two hand-made, artificial cakes remain.
The cakes are part of a broader concept. As sculptures/installations, with all the kitsch attributes of occasional, celebratory cakes, their shapes allude to phalluses from which sperm pours. These shapes are carefully elaborated elements taken from the bukkake genre, which is also the name of the cakes. The name comes from a Japanese word denoting a sexual practice in which several men ejaculate on one person, female or male, and it has become established in the world of the pornographic industry. In Japanese porn films, bukkake scenes contain group ejaculation onto any part of the body or into various kinds of orifices, with the aim of later consumption, that is, swallowing. In a sociological sense, bukkake represents a symbol of group rape whose only purpose is the humiliation and degradation of women, who are treated as objects. Dragana, however, is not interested in the morality of bukkake. One cannot escape the impression that she is more interested in the genre rules of specific expressive potentials that are very widespread in contemporary visual culture. The actors of VIS MAJOR actively take part in the tasting (swallowing) of taste sensations and in the disappearance of the exhibits. With this the artist diverts/returns attention to time and space in relation to a narrative taken from the language of pop music and the film industry.
At the beginning of the year Dragana made the first bukkake cakes – today in a private collection – which bore the subtitle thank God, I love the camera!. We are on the trail of a self-ironic post-feminist interpretation of the role of the woman artist, interactive to the point of becoming a happening. Realising that – as an artist – she shares with others the passion of reconnecting “live”, Dragana shapes a (visual) event based on the concept of duration. The concept was influenced by the impression of the sculptural arrangement (women, folds of dresses, conductor, cakes, glasses, plates) and by the ambient feeling in the way the “exhibition” format focuses on autobiographical elements. In the case of the women, the members of the choir, it is about the passing of the years and a personal confession of the mistakes in life that they sing – to the wall. With this Dragana places on a pedestal not the confession, but the human body – the performer who represents it. These human sculptures will create a direct experience that goes beyond the relationship between body and object. Each of them offers a unique encounter not only with the viewers but also with the artist, creating a situation that is both established and abolished in the same instance.
As in Dragana's previous (hybrid) works, VIS MAJOR too contains elements of trash aesthetics, of mass-media, especially music and film culture, surrealist but also humorous aspects, a sense of the absurdity of repetition that gives way to a sense of disorientation in a very physical way, and the viewer is confronted with the possibility or impossibility of watching, listening, staying, passing through, escaping.
The absurdity of repetition is thus pronounced in the work Gloaming – Dawn, which Dragana performed this year in the historic Cabaret Voltaire DADA Haus in Zurich. While fifteen women, each sitting alone at a table, whisper I do not wanna die incessantly for four hours, in the basement two men wrestle at the same time. On a delimited white PVC floor the artist assigned one the role of murderer and the other that of victim. After four hours of wrestling the roles are divided; we do not know, however, the outcome of the fight, because there is no trace of a body on the white floor. Only the lines left by the black-wax-polished shoes of the two men remain.
Or – the absurdity of repetition in the case of sound (ambient) installations. At the Les Urbaines festival in Lausanne she presented Until. Three musicians played the song Idioteque one after another, 85 times a day, throughout all three days of the festival. For the occasion, according to Dragana's plans, a new 600 m² space was constructed with only one entrance and exit. The construction was divided into nine rooms, one of which was reserved for the drummer, the guitarist and the singer, who stayed in it the whole time they were playing but could not be seen (found). The room also contained specially constructed urinals, because the musicians could not leave even for a moment. The urinals contained a chemical substance that crystallised the urine and neutralised its smell. The urine(s) became crystalline sculptures. Visitors could freely enter, leave, explore or stay in the remaining eight rooms.
Immediately before Lausanne, at the Arterija festival in Novigrad, Dragana presented das Schwein erwartet mich, a sound installation whose audibility extended over a radius of five kilometres! After placing loudspeakers on a tall construction crane in the town centre, she engaged seventy Novigrad restaurateurs and craftsmen to play her CD of recorded laughter at the same time, at the agreed time of 21.01 to 21.20, as loud as they could. The laughter – or rather, seventy laughs – followed immediately after a loud, really very loud scream, and then laughter, played from the loudspeakers on the crane. The scream and the laughter(s) of unidentified bodies produced for a moment a sonic chaos that ignored the stereotype of the usual Novigrad summer evening tourist promenade. The work as a whole resonates in a double commentary (laughter/scream) on the individual's awareness of the (im)possibility of a more radical exit from the mechanism.
We have mentioned a few examples of recent productions, but Dragana's inclination towards large, complex and demanding works, in which gallery presentation merges with spaces of staged subjectivity, has been present since the very beginning of her career. Aware of her role as an artist with a specific view of the aesthetic, economic and political discourses of the contemporary world, in a caricatured pose of self-sacrifice she offers us roles of hunting for ecstasy in exchange for the right solution. This role may attract us or not, irritate us or not, delight us or leave us indifferent, which makes no difference to the artist, because she is entirely devoted to work and to works that exist in the time and space they occupy, in the bodies that embody them, in sound, in memory and its perception.
Translated from the Croatian.