I met Žana again after about thirty years. She had graduated as an engineer and gotten married. She and her husband weren’t able to have children, so they had adopted a boy. At the time I met him he must have been about thirteen. Žana had packed on the pounds since I last saw her. She looked like a monk seal. But the whiteness and glow of her complexion were unchanged. I noticed that she no longer lowered her gaze, but bored it right into you like a drawing pin. At first her husband seemed like a nice guy, but his voice made me uneasy, soft and arrogant when speaking to his wife and son, condescending when speaking to me.
Žana never worked in the profession for which she trained; the home was obviously her kingdom. The dining room table was heaving with food. The way she had set out the dishes, different cheeses, and ham decorated with vegetables, was sadly magnificent. She is our artist, said her husband. Mom is a real artist, the boy repeated after his father.
Before we sat down at the table, Žana gave me a tour of the house. Apart from the bathroom and kitchen, every room in the house was covered, almost wall-to-wall, in Wiehler Gobelin tapestries.[1] The entire catalogue was there: the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, Our Lady of Kazan, Constable’s landscapes, works by Francois Boucher, Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie, roses, autumnal landscapes, winter landscapes, motifs of German cities, birds, children with goats, children with cats. .
“How many years did it take you to embroider all these?”
“It’s not hard once you get going. .” she replied noncommittally.
My visit was briefer than that demanded by courtesy. All of a sudden I had an attack of tachycardia and a dizzy spell. I don’t know why, but it seemed that a terrifying emptiness gaped from every corner of the house. My host, Žana’s husband, suggested that he drop me back to my hotel, an offer I accepted with relief.
Armed with needle and thread, Žana has fought her own battle down through the years: what kind of battle, I can’t say. Whether those millions of stitches have meant victory or defeat. . I don’t know that either, but the bitterness that used to gather in her lips, the awkward toothy grimace where a smile should have been, has disappeared. The truth is, the bitterness has been replaced by a doll-like stare, and it’s enough to make you shiver.
Later I checked out the whole Gobelin thing on a Croatian “recreational forum for creative people.”[2] Half-heartedly I read the advice given to a woman who had decided to embroider a picture of her daughter based on a photograph, but hadn’t been able to find a suitable fabric and was thinking about using mosquito netting. Forum users suggested the woman buy the fabric in Italy, or at the Unitas shop in Croatia. Some suggested she go to Slovenia, and someone else suggested Zweigart’s Hardanger 100. Others warned that the Unitas cotton wouldn’t capture the natural nuances of the face, and that Anchor or DMC would be better. Someone else suggested Cross Stitch Professional 2003 as the best computer program for printing her daughter’s photo on the fabric, because it was used by the Austrian artist Ellen Maurer-Stroh, a noted reproducer of Berlin School works. The “thread” was joined by a Montenegrin who had been doing cross-stitch all his life, because he loved the fantastic feeling of seeing a picture coming to life before my eyes, the feeling of creating something. The Montenegrin explained a heavy stitch known as the “Gobelin stitch”: You do two diagonal stitches across two counts until you get a life-size image, just like the old master painted it, but the motifs look a bit rough, like when RTCG[3] has problems broadcasting and those big squares show up on the screen, that’s what a Gobelin stitch picture looks like when you get a bit closer.
Cross-stitch is a mute song, a kind of “empty orchestra” or karaoke. (In the Balkans there is also a mute kolo or ring dance, which is danced in silence, unaccompanied by music.) The anonymous cross-stitcher who completes a pattern with needle and thread is filled with the “fantastic feeling of seeing a picture born before one’s eyes, of creating something,” or simply, the fantastic feeling of having overcome the emptiness.
Jelena Radić doesn’t go in for classic works of art; she uses Gobelin techniques to copy motifs from hardcore pornography. Embroidered using traditional women’s needlework and mounted in kitschy frames, hardcore pornography is an unusual thing. Like some kind of anti-Wiehler, Radić also designs and sells Gobelin patterns. Žana, were she so inclined, could easily do a Gobelin picture with a fellatio motif. Jelena Radić is a professional artist and member of the Dez org collective. The collective promotes open source software and works for the popularization and democratization of art, the goal being that “all people, irrespective of financial status, religious, ethnic, or other designations, have the opportunity to display their creativity.” As stated in one of the collective’s manifesto type documents, “In ever increasing numbers people from different walks of life, who have nothing to do with the IT-world, are taking advantage of the freedom that reigns in the computer world. More and more people are making their books, music, and images available in open license and free formats. Liberation from the repressive mechanisms of the corporate world is an inevitable phenomenon, which has its origins in the IT-world and has as its goal the creation of a free society in which the individual will take center stage.”[4]
Edek
At the time when my own emigrant experience was still raw, and meeting my countrymen was like looking in a mirror, I had a chance encounter with a woman from Zagreb. The woman had married a Zagreb somebody (I should have known who he was, but I didn’t), divorced, and, having followed the children abroad, had ended up stuck in Los Angeles, not really wanting to be there, but with little resolve to pack up and try her luck elsewhere. In the evenings she worked at a restaurant that was owned by one of our countrymen (who apparently I also should have known, but didn’t) as an administrator or something to that effect. She shortened the daylight hours by painting. In a neat and tidy corner of her neat and tidy apartment sat an easel-mounted canvas and a box of paints.
“It reminds me of someone. .” I said uncertainly, pointing at the canvas.
“It’s our Edek. .” said the woman, opening a coffee table book featuring the work of another of our countrymen. She pointed to the painting she had just started copying. The woman was copying the work of the most significant Croatian abstractionist, Edek, two of whose signed prints hung on the wall.
My first thought was that this woman’s life must be catastrophically empty. And then a sadness crept up on me, not because of the woman, but because of the catastrophically dull automatism of my own reaction. What gave me the right to judge the richness or emptiness of someone else’s life?! Was my own life that much richer just because I didn’t copy other people’s pictures?
“I adore our Edek. .” said the woman somewhat melodramatically, putting the accent on the wrong syllable, a Zagreb girl born and bred. And it was only then that I understood the real reason for my irritation. It was Edek. Had she been copying someone else, I’d have had greater sympathy for her depressing hobby. But Edek, whether he liked or not, had become a poster boy for Zagreb’s chattering classes. Just as every Croatian redneck proudly packs his little ethnic bundle with a Croatian flag, a Dinamo or Hajduk t-shirt, a picture of the Virgin Mary, and a prosciutto ham or paprika-flavoured salami, this woman had packed hers with the requisites of Zagreb bourgeois life. These requisites (and I’m guessing now) included the repertoire of the Croatian National Theatre, a concert at the Vatroslav Lisinski Theatre, buying a hat at Kobali’s, haircuts at Kincl’s, shopping in Graz or Vienna, skiing on Mt. Pohorje. And Edek.