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| Fatal Insomnia by CHRISTIANA PERRELLA The anxiousness to atonish and to surprise is evident in all of Robert Gligorov’s images. Each of his works is constructed to catch the eye and astonish the viewer, seducing an imagination that has already exhausted existing possibilities and constantly needs new stimuli and impulses, continuous crowding out and breaking of everyday boundaries. Faced with a society that is inhibited by a sort of emotional paralysis and accustomed to ever more extreme and sophisticated forms of visual communication, Gligorov chooses to raise the level of shock impact and to complete on their own level with the other stupefying images that crowd our vision, that of the most prejudice-free, appropriation and in real time manipulation of ideas, suggestions and icons in order to maximize the impact. If the absolute of the media universe does not permit going into depth, a practical survival strategy is that of disenchanted or uninhibited superficiality, a complete adhesion to the surface of the work. This is a superficiality which nonetheless implies a certain love of risk, given that the margin one can tread is as thin as the layer of emulsion that records an image and is visible on photographic paper. In this way, it is also vulnerable to the injustices of time. This phenomenological and kleptomaniac attitude, half way between the ideology of the traitor and the technology of the sampler, is an attitude for times of crisis, when one is faced with the unexpected.It is thus written in the genes of those who, like Gligorov and myself, were born in the sixties, those “Roaring Sixties”, whose roar has only reached us like a faraway echo, suffocated, by a far heavier and more leaden atmosphere. Advertising and television in these postmodern times have been our (bad?) instructors in this oblique and omnivorous attitude, with images constructed according to an economy of accumulation and eclectism, capable of creating a style that works using fragmentation. Gligorov prefers, therefore, the dependence of the media to the autonomy of art and he experiments with interference, the mutations of the role of languages and the surprising possibilities of new configurations which might not even find a stable critical status, or an exact esthetic placement, but which collect the challenges of contemporary society. Working preferably but not exclusively with photographic images (in fact he also produces videos, performance art and sculpture), Gligorov amplifies the collision force with all the means at his disposal, making use of saturated colours, large printing sizes and rich use of computerized special effects. But it is in the subjects, more than the techniques, art cancall upon, with fewer resources of means than other forms of creativity that are more solidly and financially linked to the market, that his propensity for the bizarre, the eccentric and the scandalous finds the most fertile ground. The body is its protagonist, challenged in its psycho-physical resistance, its limits and its own identity. It is a body in the process of becoming; multiple, proteiform, a body which transforms itself and desintegrates only to recompose a new subjectivity. It is a body robbed of the metamorphic possibilities of the material, of possible manipulations, a body that crosses into artificial, exalts sensation, inspires carnality to its extremes and takes it to the limit of an overflow of dreams. A body made of desires, fears and fantasies, finally attained. A body which although described with a touch of glamour that re-echoes the Eighties, is nevertheless reconsidered with a posthuman sensitivity that belongs entirely to these years of AIDS and biotechnology, of unimaginable hybridizations and post-punk nihilism. As in fact, Teresa Macri observes in her recently published “Il corpo postorganico” “The corporeal themes, which were so strongly felt and expressed during the Seventies, in the era of the sexual liberation and feminist movements, reappear in the Nineties in uncontrollables, intense and nomadic forms, reactivating the body and filtered by the contemporary sensitivity. This access to the corporeal dimensions forecasts a sort of re-evalution of that which constitutes the pathology of the everyday life with the rediscovery of a new subjectivity, the reconquering of new forms of identity, and the awareness of places and areas of shadow”. The obsession with the changing body, however, before arriving at fantastic hybridizations and cyber recombinations, cannot but lead to a confrontation with its most inevitable, terrible and natural transformation : the transformation that deathbrings about. “Waiting”, two photographs taken one month apart, of Gligorov dressed in a jacket made of cow’s flesh, is a worrisome reflection on the theme : the obvious double symbolism of our own skin, in a macabre elegy of appearance showing that we are what we wear. “Waiting” shows death at work. It reveals itself with all the obstructing anguish, not of an idea but of a physical process. The jacket has an irritating solidity, a greasy and viscous consistency that we seem almost able to feel on our own skin. It is bloody and nauseating in its odour, already difficult to tolerate before beginning the process of unpacking, and yet you must inevitably look upon it, it holds our gaze, moving between equal and opposing feelings of repulsion and attraction. Repulsion because this unexpected memento mori is merciless in showing to the last organic consequence the precariousness of our own existence; attraction because the possibility of attending this “show” seduces our own common voyeurism, our accustomization to seeing everything and seeing more, even when looking does not serve to reveal that which the mind does not understand, the mystery of death. As Roland Barthes has written, concerning photography : “as much as I scrutinize, I can’t discover anything, if I enlarge the photo, I do nothing more than enlarge the grains of the paper.” The theme that winds through these two images is thus the theme of defeat, of fragility, of vanitas. Vanitas of our own flesh and our own appearance, of our ambition and our faith in the reproduction of reality, of the presumption of capturing it and understanding it in the bi-dimensionality of simulation. It is a defeat that brings to mind memorable personalities in a film by Greenaway, the twins in A Zed & Two Noughts, upset by the impossibility of understanding the mystery of death and obsessed by its performance to the point of deciding to sacrifice themselves in an attempt to understand and control it. The final scene of the film where the two commit suicide together in front of a video camera which should film their decomposition and which is instead slowly sabotaged by a group of slugs, renders vain their extreme effort. The subtle return to another of Gligorov’s images is unavoidable : the performance in which he personally hangs himself in a sort of stage set with a video camera and a monitor. The obsession to see all becomes the obsession to see oneself, the monitor, a modern-day mirror for Narcissus. On the other hand, observes the American critic Jim Lewis, “the self-portrait goes with video art like shoot-outs go with Hollywood Westerns”, and the list of artists who have recorded themselves on tape is long and prestigious, from Bruce Nauman to Vito Acconci, from Paul Mc Carty to Bill Viola, Tony Oursler, Matthew Barney, Cheryl Donegan, Sean Landers... Gligorov does self-portraits both on video and with photographs. It is a recurring motif that goes so far as to openly dedicate a work to Narcissus, in which his face, reflected in water, is decomposed by the ripples which disturb the surface. But beyond this reflection and confirmation of oneself, the self-portrait can become an instrument by which one can put one’s own identity under discussion, forcing one’s own limits, enlarging one’s own conscience, as in the psychedelic slang, consenting the overcoming mental categories of separation. This is the case in Orange Face and the other morphings, realized by blending one’s own image with elements from the vegetable and mineral worlds, real and true morphogenetic mutations where it is no longer possible to retrace the limits between human and non-human, between organic and non-organic. From Ovid to Burroughs, from Cronenberg to Kafka and right up to Woody Allen in Zelig, the perturbation and the fascination of metamorphosis across our culture, gives form to the theme of identity and its fragility, the verification of the consistency of the limits between oneself and the world, of beauty and the pain of losing a part of oneself by opening up to a new possibility of being and feeling. Even Gligorov’s work undergo this obsession with the “new skin”, the chameleon-like mutations, of becoming. They want to exist in the moment in which we leave behind evolution and biology (necessity) and go ahead, without any justifications other than the desire to see new worlds an remain stupefied by them. And here we see a return to the anxiety to amaze and to amaze oneself, and a return to the manierist attitude to the bizarre, to the ars combinatoria of breaking down and recomposing reality by forcing its limits, following the impossible incarnation and breaking with the natural universe. His trunks of flesh and bone respond to the game of exception, of remixing, of subversion more or less breaking the Rules, in literal transpositions, splatter and antibiological, from the Dantesque forest of suicides, all of the Hulk episodes, real neo-baroque caprices, silicon celebrations of arcimboldesque taste. In this way they also resemble the rose-vagina that is the explicit floral metaphor of Georgia O’Keefe and Robert Mapplethorpe. Even the diptych XXX-Ray, where a pistol and a penis are revealed in their common prosthetic and artificial nature, acts provocatively using visual assonance and double meaning. The prosthesis, as a mechanical and unnatural extension of the body, is another explosive device for shocking mechanisms of attraction and repulsion. Contradictorily, Gligorov uses it almost with modesty, revealing it only through the indirect image of the x-ray, as in the two works just cited and in XXX Man-Ray, an electric helmet, half way between electric shock and Hellraiser, or on the other hand sweetened, like the sense of constriction and the poetic details, like the little doves perched in the cage decorated with a cyber Papagena in Crinoline. Beyond the organic and the inorganic, beyond the masculine and the feminine, beyond whatever type of homologus scheme, Gligorov’s body tied to itself and open to its potential mutations, deviates from reality and delves into the visionary, becomming a polymorphous icon of the new artificial and extreme imagination. He does this using sophisticated technology, electronic images, complex scenery, but the game even succeeds using the most simple artistic instrument, colour. In Blue Boy, the video action made for the June Trailers collection, Gligorov grips a large blue paintbrush and, as if performing a ritual, begins to cover his body with signs, his arms, his chest, his face. The signs become more and more dense, resembling a tattoo, then they mix together and cover all of his skin with color. Blue is spread out over the whole surface of his body, in the end transforming and dematerializing him, letting him enter into a perturbing magnetic field of energy, that same energy which polarizes each of his works, so enables him to exorcise the banal from the everyday. |