Truth is Shaped in the Darkness

Who would you save tonight?

The main question that arises when we look at Jelena Jelača’s painting is: What is this event about? What is the reason and what is the nature of the mysterious gathering that includes the author’s friends, colleagues, family members, famous people, living and dead, x hybrid creatures and artworks? The work has its historical references in the motif of feasts, from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, as well as to modern and contemporary examples which have always represented gatherings around the common good. In many ways, this work and this exhibition offer specific questions in a symbolic way.

After the period of the pandemic, we are immersed in current events that disturb us and hint at the fear of the apocalypse of our time. The end of the world represents the ultimate paranoia of humanity and opens numerous questions concerning the very concept of the world. What is the world from the perspective of homo sapiens – the life of an individual, the life of our species, different relationships and life protocols, the culture we have built? Does the end of the world represent someone’s death, the extermination of our species or the deconstruction of the concept of the world? Almost every apocalyptic scenario also contains a story of salvation. There are different choices according to the corresponding philosophical concept. According to Christianity, only believers who lived according to the rules of religion deserved to be saved. According to utilitarianism, those who will provide the best results for future humanity should be preserved: doctors, engineers and the most successful. In reality, generals, rich people and government officials will be the first on spaceships. When we think about the end of the world, about the possible ways to manage events, the first question is – who should we save?

The universal world, the world of all that exists, does not actually exist. According to the World Nature Foundation, around 10,000 species disappear forever every year. Our species has the ability to control and confront nature. It is naive to believe that we should not control nature at all. In every segment of our emancipation lies the manipulation of the natural order of things. The painting depicts human-like animals eating the meat of (other) animals at the table. Is the inevitability of the survival of one species the destruction of another? Have we crossed the lines of intolerance towards the worlds of others (species) and does this endanger ourselves?

For the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, every single death is the end of the world. The world is gone. The world is no longer there and the survivor remains alone “he feels solely responsible, he is assigned to carry (the world) of another and his own world”^[1] . The fate of the survivor is to live with the melancholy of the end of the world. Jelena confronts us with the fact that our world or our worlds are based on relationships. Without relationships with other(s), there are no parameters of the reality that we experience as one unique life and our world. Loneliness is determined by intentional or unintentional separation from others, the lack of relationship with others, and it is determined by the absence of relationships. There is no solitude without others. Are we without others? Is surviving at all costs a blessing or a punishment?

A personal perspective is important for the understanding of Jelena’s work. Probably because of this, the gazes of all the actors, with a few exceptions, are directed towards the observer, i.e. the author at the moment of creating the painting. The work represents Jelena’s world, her alternative to Noah’s Ark. Every message, including the art collection, is personally valuable to her. She paints her self-portrait twice and seems to unite the two roles of the artist and art in general: transcendental and social. While one Jelena is a hybrid Aries-goddess who represents the very nature of creativity, which is and remains a (outstanding) privilege united with a trained skill, the other Jelena wears a dress of the same pattern as the artist Yayoi Kusama and represents the absurdity of the relationship between artistic fame and the true unsociability of the artist, whether it stems from lucidity, spite or mutual sensitivity between the artist and his environment.

Although she spent a year painting the work, we get the impression that she created it in one breath. Her deeply lived personal experience of reality reveals the beauty of a wide spectrum of accepting and praising diversity. All actors and all actions flourish in a well-coordinated performance where there is a unique place for everything, revealing at the same time Jelena’s talent for the painting dramaturgy. There are a set of extremely authentic phenomena, which brings us to a conclusion that the unified system of values is another dominating paradox of our understanding of the world. This is best illustrated by the fine thread that both compositionally and symbolically connects Michelangelo’s David and The Joker[2] — hero and antihero. Malcolm Gladwell, in the book David and Goliath: the story of the art of fighting giants, writes the following: … much of what we consider important in our world comes from … unequal conflicts … the fact that someone is an outsider can change people in ways that we often do not notice and we don’t appreciate: it can open doors, and create opportunities, and teach us something, and enlighten us, and enable us what would otherwise seem unimaginable. David and The Joker represent outsiders: David, a weak young shepherd, confronts the oppressor and defeats him. The Joker, under the stigma of psychological illness, represents the negative result of the fight with the giant of harsh capitalist reality. In one case, violence is a virtue, in the other it is despised and condemned. The idea about good and evil is an important part of the pre-apocalyptic package. At the bottom of the picture is a reproduction of Medusa’s[3] head (ref. Michelangelo Caravaggio) – defeated evil becomes our weapon. When we look at the whole composition, we recognize the face of a clown who is grinning and swallowing everything in front of him. A dark allusion to the fact that everything comes to an end, and that we shouldn’t take anything too seriously. A sort of Hollywood-style memento mori.

Although it is impossible to draw only one conclusion from the entire work, I will allow myself to underline the words of the adventurer Christopher McCandless, also known under the pseudonym Alexander Supertramp, whose life served as inspiration for the film Into the Wild, and who died alone in an abandoned bus in Alaska. His diary contained the sentence: Happiness is only real when shared.

When the world is on fire what is most important?

These are the people you love. Who would you save tonight?

Ksenija Marinkovic

^[1] Jacques Derrida, Béliers: The uninterrupted dialogue: between two infinities, the poem (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 46; ‘Rams’

[2] The Joker is an American psychological thriller from 2019, based on the character of the same name from the DC comics. The film was directed by Todd Phillips, who also wrote the screenplay with Scott Silver. Joaquin Phoenix is ​​in the title role.

[3] In Greek mythology, Medusa is a monster in female form. Medusa’s head was cut off by the hero Perseus and then, since she retained the ability to turn onlookers to stone, he used it as a weapon until he gave it to the goddess Athena to put on her shield. In classical antiquity, an image of Medusa’s head appeared in an evil-repelling device known as the Gorgoneion.