“Do you believe in what you see?
Motionless wheel, nothing is real
Everyone’s saying different things to me
Different things to me.”
(Zero 7 ft. Sophie Barker – ‘In the waiting line’)
In a sense looking at an artwork always has a voyeuristic quality, especially when it presents us with a different world, in other words, when it depicts a space that is not the one we find ourselves in, so basically (though not exclusively) we are talking about two-dimensional works suggesting a three-dimensional space. Originally, since the invention of linear perspective, this may have been known as ‘a window on the world’, sometimes it would be more appropriate (or at least also valid) to speak about ‘a peephole on the world’. This may not be so unequivocally clear when we watch a historical painting, a landscape painting, a still life etc., but already when we think about watching a genre painting, The Girl with a Pearl Earring for example, this is food for further thought. We are, after all, offered an opportunity to enter a part of someone’s private life in her private space.
This goes all the more for the nude. Often disguised as goddesses or other mythological personages many nude women in painting have throughout the centuries shown more than a bit of sensuality for its own sake, or, rather, for the sake of the male viewer. An interesting moment was reached towards the end of the nineteenth century with Manet’s paintings: both Olympia and the nude woman in The Luncheon on the Grass show self-assured women, confident in their own sexuality as opposite to being a sex object, who assertively look right back at the viewer and may in some sense of the word count as early feminist efforts (grrrl power!).
The other side of the coin is the use performance artists started to make of their own bodies as material, especially from the 1960s onwards. Here the viewer cannot be described as someone who is ‘peeping’ because these works usually exist in real space and time and the viewer gets involved and confronted whether he likes it or not. Moreover performances involving nude bodies weren’t the prerogative of female artists.
Somewhat apart from this we have seen the remarkable rise of marketable privacy in what has become known as reality soaps on television. Some of this spilled over into art or maybe we should rather speak of a common denominator influenced by the same Zeitgeist when discussing artworks consisting of showing everyday behaviour either on video or in concrete reality. At any rate there is an area where mixed messages are being sent and received ranging from the exhibitionistic to the voyeuristic.
The photographic images presented by Jelena Opacic may be informed by those developments but they primarily belong to the first category, that of the private image being watched by the viewer. In certain respects they even mimic paintings as we shall see shortly and thus position themselves in different art historical categories while eluding a fixed definition which may well be one of their main merits.
In almost all of Opacic’s works we see a nude or partially covered woman in a space that is very sparsely furnished. In fact there are many instances in which the function of the room is not clear beyond the fact that it contains one or two elements that define it as a room or otherwise support the event that is taking place: a bed to lie on for example, a seating element to sit on. These objects are really no more than props on a stage. In fact on closer inspection they don’t seem to be proper rooms at all but rather the mimicry of a room that is especially set up for the photographs.
As matter-of-fact or even fake as the spaces seem to be, as serious and dramatic are the events that are taking in place in them although they do convey a certain ambivalence which makes a definite interpretation impossible. They can be described but not defined by their description.
A few examples.
One work shows a room in which a woman is lying face down on a white sleeve on top of a kind of high bed. From halfway down her chest she is tightly wrapped in another white sheet which looks like a sleeve or sheath. She could be dead although the position of her arm seems to suggest otherwise but not decidedly so. Still the bed looks like an open coffin and the image conveys the idea that the woman is placed on a bier, albeit not in the usual way which would involve conventions of posture, cover, dignity, the suggestion of ‘peacefulness’, etc. Could she maybe just be asleep? Who can tell? Will she possibly at some point liberate herself from her white cocoon and morph into a butterfly? Maybe this is already happening while we watch, maybe the upper part of her body is already ‘free’…. It is rare to encounter an artwork that so strongly supports two contradictory readings. Maybe the image presents us with a contemporary version of Coleridge’s Death in Life, Life in Death. At any rate the image is unsettling because of its ambiguity which is greatly enhanced by the surrounding space: a room which seems oddly construed. Inside what seems to be a rather large, high space with an arched window lacking curtains to shelter the scene from unwanted eyes – which makes it both public and private – is a curiously curved wall and the only other element is an object of which the function is totally unclear, it looks like a white pedestal on a black Attic profile and it almost completely blocks the way along the bed. Nothing is what it seems and one could maintain that the whole space could be construed ‘around’ the main scene in order to make this look even more improbable and challenging definition than it already was. Of course often photographic artworks consist of a construed image against an existing backdrop but here it is the other way around; the secondary elements are arranged so as to provide the actual event with optimal effect which is a profound sense of alienation (a technique known as ‘staged photography’ even before the days of technical innovation through the computer). As it is, the space where the event takes place is built up from a collage of visual elements using Photoshop. Nothing is real, what we see is a carefully construed stage. After the ‘play’ the woman might stand up from the bed and walk away through the door in the curved wall and enter a ‘real’ world behind the staged setting the viewer is looking at. So the work becomes a theatre or maybe the world becomes a theatre which is not to say that what is going on onstage is not truly ‘sincere’ and ‘dramatic’: an actor is always sincere, an actor playing Hamlet is completely sincere as Hamlet. I think it is this sense of layered tension between true and fake, fact and fiction, reality and theatre, that gives the work its ambivalence and also provides us with the means to deal with it on a metaphorical level, to experience the personage as a pars pro toto for ‘man’ in the broadest sense of the word. Thus the work morphs into a kind of ambiguous parable about human existence.
In the other works the drama derives in a similar way from the interplay between the personage and her surroundings. There is always a twist there that is essential for achieving the alienating effect thereby transforming the image from a factual one taken from ‘real’ life to a metaphorical position which speaks about an existential condition, ‘the’ human condition, if you will.
On a couch sits a woman, partially covered by a fabric that looks like green velvet. The visible part of her body seems oddly distorted in a way that is reminiscent of a Bacon painting - and this is not the only work with such a reference. The surrounding space reminds one of Bacon’s ‘internalized’ spaces as well, Bacon’s spaces are hardy ever ‘real’ spaces , they are devised to echo or endorse the posture and emotion of the personage(s). Opacic goes about this in a different way and with a very different technique – her work looks ‘hi-tech’ and ‘cool’ compared to Bacon’s painterly craft - but there is definitely some emotional similarity.
Still this space is created much more like a traditional room with a couch, a door, a carpet. And yet it isn’t a room like any other one. True, there is a couch but it’s standing in an odd position on a strange spot. Moreover, the room seems empty except for the few props mentioned above. The wall on the far left consists of stones one doesn’t associate with interior spaces of this kind and the door can’t be opened completely because of the way the couch is situated. And then there is some odd red curved …well, what is it? Some kind of elastic rope? … it echoes the shape of the round carpet but there is no meaningful reason why it should. Nor is there any reason for the carpet being where it is and as if this is not enough the carpet could be a round part of a larger carpet or that one could be situated underneath it, there is just no way of knowing. At first glance everything seems more or less ’normal’, but on closer inspection nothing is what it seems. And the woman on the couch is reading a magazine that she is holding upside down. In other words, she isn’t reading it at all. Also her state of undress and being partly covered by some green velvety cloak doesn’t make sense. All this, the whole scene is fake, make-believe. But this begs the question what we are made to believe when we have found out that nothing is what it seems. Maybe there is a well hidden clue in the magazine; one could imagine the photo of a girl on the cover to be the mirror image of the reading woman on the couch which would make the magazine a mirror but then the angle is wrong and the overlap of the skin of the ‘real’ woman and that of her ‘magazine’ counterpart doesn’t quite match. Which leaves maybe one conclusion along these lines: after having peeled away several fake layers of meaning we may find ourselves as subjects here, gazing into a mirror in the form of a staged play which in an elaborate way leads us into all kinds of different directions, all dead end streets so that in the ‘end’ (which essentially is ‘nowhere’) we actually have nothing but ourselves to rely upon. So this work may be about vanitas, about the absurdity of the lives we lead, the world that we live in, the way it physically distorts both the environment and our own bodies and the way we can’t even look into a mirror to see our own image. I do believe that Opacic’s work confronts us with this kind of existential issues which the artist conveys to us from the stage: even that message might not be real and in this way we can go on and on and on without ever finding anything that is in some way defining or able to be defined. So in the end the work basically says there is no meaning and in the same breath it says that this statement may well be false.
In a few other works the mirror features more prominently, always in similar stage-like settings. One of them shows a nude woman kneeling on a mirror right in a doorway so that the door can’t be closed. It is very doubtful that there is a ‘real’ world being the doorway thus emphasizing the fact that there is no escape, as it were, from…well…from what? From reality? An obvious truth but we have already concluded that it’s all a stage where reality in the everyday sense of the word has no place. Why is the mirror placed where it is except to emphasize the unreality of the scene once more? Why are two parallel lines drawn on or attached to the mirror? Does the fact that the woman’s knees are situated inside those lines while her hands – with which she also supports herself – are on the mirror plane outside the parallel lines have some hidden meaning we should decode? And what if anything is the meaning of the red dots on the mirror following the shape of the parallel lines and of the curved mirror plane? What is the meaning of the woman kneeling on the mirror in the first place? What does she see that we can’t? Is it narcissism or some kind of worship? The image conjured up dozens of questions that do not get answered. A lot is suggested, nothing is revealed. Which begs the chilling question whether there is anything to be revealed. Maybe life and its imagery - and this specific image of life seems to strongly support this reading – consists of nothing but posing, empty rituals that hide an existential lack of meaning. This is not Alice’s mirror which gave access to a wholly different world, here it seems that the mirror is actually reflecting nothing at all – the fact that we can see that it is pretending to act like a ‘normal’ mirror as we can see the woman’s knees reflected makes this reading all the more poignant: even the mirror pretends and pretends to be pretending!
There are two works which show a woman in sexy clothing. One of them is most definitely a daughter of Bacon’s protagonists, taking on a posture that seems distorted. She sort of reclines on a big cushion on a floor which seems to consist of red cloth and against a backdrop of red curtains. The other one is sitting on a hammock in front of a mirror in a similarly red kind of space. Here the viewer seems to be watching a peep show of some sort – there are strong erotic overtones here but the show (if one can call it that) is not performed for the benefit of the viewer, the woman is present for her own sake without taking notice of potential onlookers. In both cases the woman’s posture is both vulgar and highly dramatic (and one notices that one of them is reflected by the mirror in a way that is not possible, suggesting that the mirror may not be a mirror after all – although it remains unclear what else it could be). But – much unlike Bacon’s - this drama seems mechanic, staged, faked. It seems to me that while being serious as actresses in her roles these women are at the same time mocking the drama they are depicting. In other words: again nothing is real. Or, to put it another way, the only thing that’s real is nothing. And we, the viewers, can learn this only by looking through a peephole. Instead of something sexually exciting we are taught a lesson of life, actually we are told the facts of life inasmuch as the image – as do all Opacic’s images – tells us that there are really no facts of life at all, life is but a stage play and even the reflection in the mirror is not to be trusted as being ‘true’.
The other work shows a nude woman in a red hammock kneeling head down in front of a mirror (of which the angle is again not quite right but by now we have come to expect that). The props have been reduced to a minimum, there is no pretence of a real space. As a matter of fact the scene seems to exist in a void, everything might be floating in outer space for all we know. Still there is a strong sense of intimacy and the viewer is made to feel somewhat more like a peeping tom than we was in the above mentioned works. But what kind of intimacy is this? What is happening? What is going on in the image? The woman has taken on a posture that could be interpreted as one of worship but what does she worship? Maybe her own mirror image. But that is emphatically not the case: she isn’t looking in the mirror, her head is buried in the hammock’s red cloth (which in itself may conjure up vaguely erotic connotations while the rest of the surroundings seem completely sterile). The nakedness of the body is touching, this woman seems more fragile and vulnerable than her sisters in the earlier works (I’m not talking chronology here, as a matter of fact I don’t know the sequence in which these works were made). And here she can’t even see her own mirror image, in fact both women – the ‘real’ one and her mirror image – seem lonely, probably because they aren’t looking at each other which is the whole point of having a mirror in the first place. Once again it may be nothingness, lack of meaning that is worshipped here – twice actually where the mirror image could also be seen as a mockery of the ‘original’ image. And so on. In that way the work is dazzling and enchanting: underneath its visual beauty there are layers upon layers of lack of meaning, an endlessly mirrored deprivation – is this the human condition in the first decade of the 21st century?
Another reading (leading up to a similar but possible further-reaching conclusion) is possible where the woman in the hammock is interpreted as having adopted a foetal position – that is, not being born, in other words not yet being an independent presence, being nowhere really – while its counterpart in the mirror could then be interpreted as its opposite or in a twisted, paradoxical way another ‘phase’ of the ‘original’, e.g. a dead body. This would seem reasonable as essentially these images would symbolize two states of non-being, being in a void, being ‘nowhere’, in an undefined and indefinable state – not being born and not being alive anymore which may even be regarded as synonymous in a sense – which again conjures up the idea of Life in Death, Death in Life or, in more contemporaneous terminology, the merging of ‘reality’ and ‘simulacrum’. In other words: the human condition of the 21st century may well transcend (a construct which could be termed ‘neo-Hegelian’ if such a thing existed and maybe it is something to consider) postmodernism, building confusion on ‘reality’, ‘reality’ on confusion, ‘illusion’ on reality, reality on ‘illusion’ or, ‘illusion’ on ‘illusion’ in an seemingly endless sequence of distorting mirrors where, in the end, the mirror image actually becomes reality – a different reality from, say, 19th century realism but in no way incompatible with ‘real life’ as we live and perceive it: without ‘false bottom’ – a different reality alright but a fresh one directed to the future rather than to ever more complex and contrived formulations of the past which show cultural pessimism if not despair which I don’t believe is present in this work when all is said and done.
So at the end of the day this work maybe shows us the way to a new beginning of viewing and experiencing the world having proven the ‘old’ definitions to be lacking and obsolete. If this is true, we are invited to ‘start from scratch’, like the artist does when she starts to conceive a new work – we are, in other words, invited to create a new world, or, rather, to re-create the world in a different way..
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