Jovana Stokic, curator
Canon of Beauty and How to Escape
it
Marta Jovanovic’s
bodies in representation are free in many ways. They are free from conventions,
canons of beauty, gender roles stereotypes, and fashion dictates. Hers is a
difficult task: to liberate her models from impossibly rigorous standards of
both classical dance and fashion (and fashion-y) photography. Marta starts from
a democratic, all-inclusive stance: everybody deserves to be represented. Her
photography could not be imagined with the lessons of compassion by modernist
photographers such as Diane Arbus, who let the
marginal characters inhabit her representational center.
Marta’s subjects never seem treated
exploitatively. Rather, these representations have a goal of subject’s, and,
consequently, viewer’s empowerment. Even her mocking title, “Fuck Art, Let’s
Dance,” implies certain camaraderie between the artist, her subjects, and her viewers.
It is the artist who invites us all not to care about expectations and
standards of excellence, but to enjoy ourselves in performance – by posing as
ballerinas in tutus, and also, vicariously, by watching these representations.
The very act of viewing thus becomes a liberating performance in itself – an
invitation to, even symbolically, dance without constraints. Marta focuses on
the genre of portraiture and the concept beauty in contemporary photography.
The artist offers a critical intervention into the notion of contemporary femininity
in representation by mimicking the ways in which it was treated in the oeuvre
of celebrated photographers such as Vanessa Beecroft
and David Lachapelle.
Their glamorous representations are
constituent of a specific, feminine ideal identity. I use here a critical
strategy of performative reading that shows how the
representation of the body is constructed as a site of subjectivity for
particular artist, but also for the viewers.
Marta is interested in capturing performative processes through which
one
creates representations in order to show the complex femininity formation –
something I call the parafeminist subject. Her action
is transcending feminist tactics of critique and move into representations as
sites where the subversion of the consumerist notion of glamorized feminine
beauty lies.
Marta’s invitation to be photographed is
an act in which the photographer and the model both perform the same liberatory situation. The artist set in motion complex situation
of masquerade in order to liberate the subjects in representation field at
least, from these aforementioned dictates. Classical ballet, even the modernist
ritualistic scene of “Rite of Spring” did not offer liberation from the body’s normativity. Marta’s proposal cuts to the core of this
canon by insisting on non-normative, i.e., non-dancers’ bodies. Her photographs
speak about limitation of the traditional canon of beauty.
Although photographs themselves are
beautiful, their aesthetics convey a strong disdain for fashion standards of
contemporary beauty. This is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of her
strategy: to offer the viewer a lush highly polished, glossy, large-format photograph,
all in order to subvert the medium of fashion photography. The site of
subversion lies here in subjects’ bodies. Marta’s protagonists flaunt their
non-dancers bodies, obviously
enjoying
themselves altogether in the process of posing. At the same time, Marta is gently
poking fun with gender stereotypes implying all signifiers of femininity: pink
color, tulle tutu, etc., she points to gender fluidity, and moreover, proves
that femininity is a construct in itself. In my view, Marta’s images show how
contemporary beauty, along with gender stereotype, is a mere construct, a
dictate we need not follow.
Inspiration for Dance Rehearsal Project was born
from my fascination with the motif of the sacrifice of a young virgin every
early spring from the ballet The Rite of
Spring by Igor Stravinsky. The virgin is to be sacrificed in order to
provide rich and fruitful spring: she is dancing herself to death! “In The Rite, there is
no tradition and no theory” wrote Stravinsky in Chronicles of My life,
There is a strong metaphor of the ugly duckling in my
photographs - the protagonists dance on their own stage and do not care about
the stage of La Scala in Milan or the National
Theatre in Belgrade, they are happy about the fact that their dance is not
according to the norms of the ballet or of any other society. Goncourt, at the
time, named the ballerinas of Degas “little monkeys”. My “ugly ducklings” are celebrities in their
own world and they believe in themselves firmly, without streaming towards high
stylization of Vanessa Beecroft’s ballerinas or a supercelebrity status of David Lachapelle’s
models.
As I am not VB nor Lachapelle, they
are not Mikhail Barysnikov nor Pina
Bausch, but I, and them, point out the non pathetic: there is no lost case, we
do what we want to do, so Fuck Art Lets Dance*!
This exhibition is dedicated to my beloved grandmother who never
ever stopped dreaming!
Marta
* Written on Johnny
Knoxville’s T-shirt in Jackass
The Embassy of the
Gallery BOSI Artes from
have the pleasure to present
Dance Rehearsal Project
by Marta Jovanovic
November 4-11, 2010
Opening
of the exhibition and performance
“Shoot
Me!” by the
artist
on November
4, 2010 at 6, 00 pm
at the
Embassy of the