{"id":1690,"date":"2018-05-01T00:25:09","date_gmt":"2018-04-30T23:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=1690"},"modified":"2018-05-01T00:25:09","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T23:25:09","slug":"against-the-muses-dragana-jurisic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2018\/05\/01\/against-the-muses-dragana-jurisic\/","title":{"rendered":"Against the Muses: Dragana Juri\u0161i\u0107"},"content":{"rendered":"

I first came across Dragana Juri\u0161i\u0107\u2019s work in the National Gallery of Ireland, when her \u2018Tarantula\u2019 was displayed as part of the \u2018After Vermeer\u2019 exhibition in 2017. \u2018Tarantula\u2019 was a contemporary response to the Vermeer exhibition, which featured a series of photographic self-portraits of overlapping dancing figures. Juri\u0161i\u0107 says she was \u2018immediately struck by the two main subjects of Vermeer\u2019s paintings: \u2018women in domestic settings and the light\u2019. Depiction of women in Vermeer\u2019s portraits led Juri\u0161i\u0107 to consider the female condition, and \u2018pre-conditioning\u2019 more generally, in terms of the rules women must follow in life; their pensiveness and meditative status, which gives way to a mesmerised storm.<\/p>\n

Juri\u0161i\u0107 recalls the main character of Nora in Henrik Ibsen\u2019s A Doll\u2019s House<\/em>, first performed in 1879. Nora leaves her designated role in life, daring to partake in the dancing \u2018struggle for life\u2019. Similarly the mythical Tarantati<\/em> women of Italy, once bitten by the spider, succumb to \u2018trance-like dancing\u2019, as the only way to access the euphoria of free expression. Juri\u0161i\u0107\u2019s dance, without resorting to provocative suggestions or techniques, traces a visual experiment that almost fulfils the lines of a classical figure, a preparatory drawing disclosing the artist\u2019s creative process. As in Michelangelo\u2019s sculpture \u2018The Dying Slave\u2019, these are unfinished sculptures, undressing themselves in the social marble, liberating their true shape from a carcass, not fully, but without shame, while displaying the melancholy and conflict of the process of self-cognition. Vermeer\u2019s women are stuck in a composed, but not acquiescent pose, which recalls contemporary anxieties. Juri\u0161i\u0107 untangles Vermeer\u2019s forms and empowers the female, and herself as a woman, unmasking the muses, symbols that still inform contemporary culture appreciations.[i]<\/a><\/p>\n

Some months later I walked through Juri\u0161i\u0107\u2019s latest exhibition, \u2018My Own Unknown\u2019, at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin\u2019s Temple Bar, which recalls women who wanted to free themselves from patriarchal constraints. Into Juri\u0161i\u0107\u2019s personal story is sewn the mysterious life of her aunt Gordana \u010cavi\u0107. \u010cavi\u0107, like Ibsen\u2019s Nora, disappeared from her assigned role, and native country, Yugoslavia, in the 1950s, dying in Parisian exile in the 1980s: \u2018A life shrouded in mystery, it involves tales of multiple identities, illicit sex and espionage\u2019. Out of Juri\u0161i\u0107\u2019s archival photographs, the artist recreates a diary of a personal rebirth from a cryptic loss, defining her life as woman and artist:<\/p>\n

My initial questioning of this statement took me to Paris to commence an exploration on L\u2019Inconnue de la Seine<\/em>, the name given to a young woman whose body was allegedly recovered from the River Seine, and whose death mask was cast in a bid to identify her. Her serene and quiet beauty became a muse for artists.<\/p>\n

The mask and idealistic form is an object of veneration: the fake perfection of a muse, veiled by cultural layers, and detached from any real process of accomplishment. Juri\u0161i\u0107\u2019s own undressing, displaying her true \u2018body\u2019, provides an unflinching interpretation of her own form.<\/p>\n

What Juri\u0161i\u0107 knew for sure was that Gordana \u010cavi\u0107 was made of much harder stuff than L\u2019Inconnue de la Seine<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Suddenly I was back at 11 years old, looking at a funeral procession that was beyond extravagant. \u2026 Who was she? I asked my grandmother, She just shuffled uncomfortably in response. Behind me I could hear whispers of two men from down the road.<\/p>\n

L\u2019Inconnue de la Seine<\/em> represents the inspiring\u00a0 perfection \u2018protecting\u2019 the viewer from experience of the real body; the \u2018other woman\u2019, which could alter the common sense experience, and reinforce devotion to old beliefs. Who is she? Who is Gordana \u010cavi\u0107, Nora, or the artist Dragana Juri\u0161i\u0107?<\/p>\n

In Ibsen\u2019s Women <\/em>Joan Templeton observes the muse\u2019s path through the centuries. Her powerful analysis of femininity recalls Juri\u0161i\u0107\u2019s artistic ambitions: \u2018For Gilbert and Gubar \u2026 the lady is our creation or Pygmalion\u2019s statue. The lady is the poem.\u2019[ii]<\/a> The lady is the sculpture, the statue Pygmalion carved and fell in love with, like L\u2019inconnue de la Seine<\/em>. This is a cast and frozen idealization of femininity. Templeton approvingly cites Simone de Beauvoir:<\/p>\n

But women exist without men\u2019s intervention and thus while \u2018woman\u2019 incarnates men\u2019s fantasies, women proves the falsity of the fantasies \u2026 Man\u2019s need for woman to remain always the Other. \u2026 Woman is necessary to the extent that she remains an idea into which the man can project his own transcendence; but she is danger as an objective reality existing for herself and limited to herself.<\/p>\n

A more urgent consciousness is emerging in our daily experience, beginning with many women\u2019s revelations of sexual violence during the #MeToo movement, and willingness to alter a passive condition of acceptance. Contemporary women are fighting back against an old, still unresolved disadvantage: their objectification as muses.<\/p>\n

Why is \u2018the woman\u2019 still an ideal, mythical presence, her real body still censored by intangible projections? Why do many men feel an inadequacy in front of real presences, to the extent of displaying hostility or aggression \u2013 real or unconscious \u2013 towards that which is not a fantasy? Why are artists still confronting opposition to representations of real existing forms, from ludicrous rules against displaying women\u2019s nipples on social networks, to outright censorship of nudes in exhibition advertisements, while at the same time, our visual environment is filled with sexualised content? Are these taboos veils that hide the truth? Is it the ideal of the muses we are still battling against?<\/p>\n

Not only is the idea of woman in need of revolution, our concept of masculinity needs to be reappraised. According to Dr Arne Rubinstein in The Making of Men<\/em>: \u2018in the healthy man\u2019s psychology, a man sees himself as part of the universe, not the centre of it; he takes full responsibility for his actions, he deals with his emotions and he looks for a healthy relationship with the feminine.\u2019 But \u2018the role-modelling and mentoring for boys and teenagers is very poor, and the messaging is terrible.\u2019[iii]<\/a> Rubinstein\u2019s organization attempts to reconcile the masculine and feminine in men.<\/p>\n

In her 1929 novel A Room of One\u2019s Own<\/em> Virginia Woolf endeavoured to awaken awareness of gender inadequacy. She suggested society should reconsider and re-educate our basic perceptions of sexuality, and the condition of women in the world, beginning with the artistic and creative processes:<\/p>\n

For certainly when I saw the couple get into the taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to cooperate \u2026 But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness?[iv]<\/a><\/p>\n

In the last part of her exhibition \u2018My own Unknown\u2019, Juri\u0161i\u0107 explores her self-portraits and diaries, concluding the exhibition with a previous work made in Dublin in 2015, employing the same technique as \u2018Tarantula\u2019, but overlapping photographs of one hundred women posing as nude muses in front of her. They direct their own poses using a chair and a veil, each identify themselves with one of the nine muses of Greek mythology: Calliope, Clio, Euterpe, Erato, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania.<\/p>\n

One of the final portraits is \u2018The Mother\u2019, an overlap of all the muses. This is Mnemosyne, mother of all the Muses, goddess of memory. On top of one another the bodies look like layers of negatives, memories overlapping into a majestic image. This conveys a scribble, an incomplete creative process, an operation of cognition in the \u2018struggle for life\u2019. Juri\u0161i\u0107 writes:<\/p>\n

The idea of the muse often evokes images of a male artist and a passive female muse. The female muse is often depicted as nude in visual art. And in turn \u201cthe nude\u201d \u2013 one of the biggest clich\u00e9s of Western art tradition, is a genre predominantly inhabited by male artists. At the beginning of April 2015, I began the task of photographing 100 female nudes over a period of five weeks.<\/p>\n

A powerful expression of ourselves is still needed, not only a female view on female gaze, but an entire recreation of feminine and masculine interpretation. An \u2018ownership over their body\u2019.<\/p>\n

Gordana knew that she came to Paris to survive. Survive at any cost. Shed her skin. Shed her past. Forget about the people she left behind. Or not. But she is not going back. She will never go back.<\/p>\n

The goddess mother of all the muses is the goddess mother of a faded memory, like Juri\u0161i\u0107\u2019s aunt Gordana \u010cavi\u0107 who \u2018was so beautiful, like she was her own creator.\u2019[v]<\/a><\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> National Gallery of Ireland, \u2018Dragana Jurisic: Tarantula\u2019, https:\/\/www.nationalgallery.ie\/dragana-jurisic-tarantula<\/a>, accessed 15\/11\/18.<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> Joan Templeton, Ibsen\u2019s Women<\/em>, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp303-305<\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> Quoted in: David Leser, \u2018Women, men and the whole damn thing\u2019, Sydney Morning Herald, 9th<\/sup> of February, 2018, https:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/lifestyle\/the-great-sexual-reckoning-how-did-we-get-here–and-what-happens-now-20180124-h0npcc.html<\/a>, accessed 23\/11\/18.<\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a> Virginia Woolf, A Room of One\u2019s Own<\/em>, London, Hogarth Press, p.113<\/p>\n

[v]<\/a> Dragana Juri\u0161i\u0107 \u2018My Own Unknown\u2019, 2014, http:\/\/www.draganajurisic.com\/my-own-unknown\/4587594312<\/a>, accessed 15\/11\/18.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Dragana Jurisic, ‘Tarantula’. Archival pigment print, 2017. \u00a9 the artist.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"
L’Inconnue de la Seine, http:\/\/draganajurisic.com\/my-own-unknown\/458759431<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"
Dragana Jurisic, Erato. \u00a9 the artist.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"
Dragana Jurisic, Euterpe. \u00a9 the artist.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"
Dragana Jurisic, The Mother. \u00a9 the artist.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I first came across Dragana Juri\u0161i\u0107\u2019s work in the National Gallery of Ireland, when her \u2018Tarantula\u2019 was displayed as part of the \u2018After Vermeer\u2019 exhibition in 2017. \u2018Tarantula\u2019 was a contemporary response to the Vermeer exhibition, which featured a series of photographic self-portraits of overlapping dancing figures. Juri\u0161i\u0107 says she was \u2018immediately struck by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":1733,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,1],"tags":[193,195],"class_list":["post-1690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-uncategorized","tag-2018may","tag-2018novemberplus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}