Mitja Velikonja
THE NAKED TRUTH
Text for the exhibition Yugostalgia, New York City, March 2010
Arthur Rimbaud’s lucidity “Je est un Autre” marked the artistic expression and academic discussion of the 20th century. It underlies psychoanalysis and expressionism, studies of narcissism and science fiction, performance art, cultural studies and theories of simulacra. The essential element of it is a feeling of certain discomfort when identity is in question, an uneasiness, which is not clear, which cannot be firmly located and identified. Its major characteristics are thus ambiguity, uncertainty, indefiniteness – the burning question: if not me, who am I? The same question is posed when historical personalities of the ‘age of extremes’, as the last century was labeled by British historian Eric Hobsbawm, are considered. Their inevitable fate is that they are all of them always depicted as someone else than they were previously known to be. The indisputable leader of Socialist Yugoslavia in its heydays and of its Anti-Fascist resistance, Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), is no exception in that. After being venerated and glorified by most Yugoslavs, and respected by the international community during his life, his image began to shade and compromise after his death, and even more so after the bloody collapse of his Yugoslavia in the early 90s. Tito’s legacy has been contested, attacked, even blackened by his old and new enemies, and on the other hand, defended and even more fiercely supported by his advocates and followers. Now, precisely just before the 30th anniversary of his death on May 4, 1980, it seems to be a good opportunity to reconsider his historic role, his achievements and failures, the ambitions and delusions of his reign, and of himself as well. Throughout the last decades, not only his political career, but also personal life, have become the stage of heated discussions. The whole ‘Titology’ appeared, hundreds of studies, books and articles, and interviews of his former colleagues, aides, doctors and servants, or journalists, scholars and publicists, who all suddenly know the full truth about him, from the reasons for his political decisions to trivia like his love affairs, favorite dishes, medical problems, hobbies, etc. However, his true identity was put into question even before all this – there were several theories of his real origins. It was speculated that he was in reality a Russian, a Pole, a Hungarian, a Ukrainian, a Jew, an illegitimate descendant of the Habsburg dynasty, a count, a British/Stalin’s agent, a Freemason, Churchill’s son (!), even a woman (!!), that Tito is an abbreviation for a secret organization, that he died young and that he was replaced by his half-brother Franc, and that he never existed at all. During his career, he was called the Communist Luther and The Last of the Habsburgs, The Balkan Caesar and Servant of Two Masters, Comintern agent and Citizen of the World, heroic guerilla leader and bon vivant. He became a true pop-cultural icon in the sense that the more he appeared in public, the more was exposed and the more we knew all the facts about him, the more he seemed to be alienated from us, the more undefined and mysterious.However, I understand Walter Steinacher’s works from a completely different angle. First, he does not pretend to have any special knowledge, any new, unveiled truth about Tito. Secondly, as a young Austrian artist, he is not intrinsically affected with past Yugoslav decades that would influence his creativity. His pieces cannot be easily dismissed as simply nostalgic or deliberately sacrilegious, as one would immediately think them to be if he were an ‘ex-Yugo’, as people from that non-existing country are described colloquially. And his is not just another in the wide spectrum of ironizations of celebrities of recent history, those that appear so often today in popular culture under the motto: “past times were tough, so joke about them!” These ridiculizations are coming from the safe distance, out of the reach of their once mighty power – as a mere uproar, not a critique. In these cases, to quote Barbara Everett from the movie “Looking for Richard” (Pacino, 1996), irony is only hypocrisy with style. But jokes are too serious thing to be left only to entertainers and buffoons – which is why Steinacher’s paintings leave such simplistic and superficial explanations far behind. His works are funny precisely because they are so serious. For him, humor is not just something added to his motives, a parodic surplus, a witty reinterpretation of a historical personality that is otherwise taken seriously by that person’s advocates or adversaries. Nor is he using funny twists to despise and blacken Tito, as is usual in anti-propaganda. No – contrary to communication modes that dominate in our civilization that prefers serious interactions and creativity over the funny ones – his irony is the central point of demasking history and the historical personality itself. The humor he uses is subversive and, as such, profound. As such, it is not an escapist maneuver to avoid the reality, an impotent detour or a false relief in the face of heavy circumstances (in the sense: if we cannot change the world, let’s at least have fun in it). It’s not even a “pure” joke, a joke-for-joke’s-sake. Humor in his paintings establishes a new paradigm of perceiving and creating the world around us: funny, but at the same time critical; amusing, but sharp in thought and action; playful, and at the same time liberating and emancipative; grotesque and carnivalesque, but telling us the truth. This new paradigm is one that challenges the prevailing common sense and balance of power with irony and fun.That’s precisely what enables him to demystify Tito not in points where he is usually demystified (when his image and political role is confronted with historical facts) – but on his most personal, in fact, physical, even sexual level. He not only humanizes one of the world’s leaders, he feminizes him. He leaves the usual dilemmas – whether Tito was a hero or a criminal – behind when he depicts an important historical man as a shy teenager in bikini suit; a notorious womanizer as a pregnant woman; a charmer as a degenerate and ugly old man; a determined and brave visionary as a creature broken within himself who looks in two opposite directions; that man who loved Yugoslavia and whom Yugoslavia loved as one who actually flirts with himself. To sum up, the Father of the nation as its mother. Usually, the best jokes appear when two interpretative frames unexpectedly meet and suddenly combine, when one way of understanding clashes with another. But here we see one step further: the “real” fun begins when one reality is or becomes the other reality, when antithesis turns back to thesis (and does not end in final synthesis). Steinacher successfully subverts the annoying cliché that behind every successful man there’s a good woman – he tells us that the woman behind is, in fact, the successful man himself. To tell it in other words: that Ken is not the opposite of Barbie doll, but – with all of his new clothes, perfect shape, peculiar hobbies, in short, with his obsession with himself – he is Barbie doll himself, the Barbiest doll of all Barbies. These paintings persistently remind us of the above-mentioned discomfort when political meets personal, that there’s always something odd when historical personalities are put into closer inquiry. In his series, we don’t find the classical exchange of the hero with someone else – but, in fact, an exchange with anyone else! That’s the subversive message that we get from it, as we got, for example, from the classics “The Great Dictator” (Chaplin, 1940), where the tyrant is identical with the poor barber, from “Metropolis” (Lang, 1927), where the good Maria is confounded with an evil machine created to seduce people, and from “Blade Runner” (R. Scott, 1982), with the constant speculations of who is a replicant and who is human. Or from the Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s paintings, where the shadow on one person is already the body of another, and vice-versa. In short, that everyone can be(come) everyone. Steinacher does not put Tito behind the curtain – he’s all here, on the stage, in front of us, if only we are able to accept it. The strong colors, contrasting motives, showy postures, intensive backgrounds, and Freudian ironic technique of “showing through the opposite” that he uses only reinforce his point. The accompanying video presentation by Slovenian visual artist Elena Fajt from her photo-safaris to inspiring post-Yugoslav nostalgic landscapes adds a pinch of magical realism that impulsively catches us in the thought as to whether the motives on her photos are real or staged. The whole exhibition reveals, as that snoopy kid in Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, the “Marshal’s New Nakedness”, that there’s nothing to undress anymore. It shows, literally, the naked truth about Tito.