2.
A few years ago I attended the unveiling of an Ilya Kabakov installation at a wealthy Californian university in Santa Barbara. The installation was situated in one of the university’s parks, and it consisted of a bottle made out of wire, or more to the point, wire shaped like a bottle. The bottleneck pointed down towards a barely visible stream of water trickling from a small opening in the grass. The installation was called Mother and Son, although it wasn’t clear what was supposed to symbolize what. You could see the satisfaction on visitor’s faces, Kabakov devotees the lot of them, myself included. Indeed, out of a deep inner feeling of having been cheated — or out of shame — many of them launched into passionate explanations of the somewhat less than transparent — and therefore all the more profound — meaning of Kabakov’s installation. Kabakov is one of the stars of modern art. We never call a star’s fiasco a fiasco, but rather, a new phase, a new high in the ouevre of a celebrated artist, actor, musician, or writer. .
3.
If you type “Mutanj, Serbia” into your search engine, it will immediately respond with the question: “Do you mean: Mutants, Serbia?” I mean, yeah, whatever. The little test proves that geographers are the most passionate, precise, and pervasive professionals on the Internet. Mutanj is a hamlet on the mountain of Rudnik in central Serbia, and on the Internet you can find maps, satellite pictures, and all kinds of other information about it. Geographers don’t differentiate between massive New York and minuscule Mutanj, which has all of eighty-four inhabitants. Why is the village of Mutanj important? It’s not. Nevertheless, driving down the Ibar Highway in late-October 2007, someone caught a glimpse of a group of phantom white letters spelling “Holywood” up on Straževica hill and set off to investigate what appeared to be a bizarre teleportation of the famous sign. It turned out that the lone creator of this peculiar installation was twenty-year-old Ivan Jakovljević, a Mutanj villager and employee at the local lead and zinc mine. Above the big “Holywood” letters, there was a smaller sign in Cyrillic that said “Srpski” (Serbian). Jakovljević’s “Holywood” was missing an “l,” which he deliberately left out, wanting, as he put it, “to avoid copyright issues.” Apparently, Jakovljević wants to attract the “Seventh Art” to his village, and in particular, creators of “films about ecology, history, and ethnology.” He has stated that his campaign doesn’t have a “political background,” and that his “installation” is just a “symbol of the seventh art and nothing more.” In order to realize his project, Jakovljević took out an 800 euro loan, and over the Christmas and New Year holidays he plans to have “Srpski Holywood” up in lights.
4.
In the countries of the former Yugoslavia a capricious culture of public sculptures is in full bloom. The situation might be best explained as a kind of wild “monumental” polemic: the destroying of monuments bearing one ideological message, and the erection of new ones bearing a different message. The countries of the former Yugoslavia also boast an authentic and spirited headstone culture, with fierce competition for originality. In America the celebrated Ilya Kabakov today reconstructs vanished Soviet toilets, schools, and other emblematic Soviet constructions (Mother and Son is one of his rare fiascos), while in a God-forsaken Serbian village a replica of the famous Hollywood sign surfaces. If this happy teleportation of symbols continues in our world without borders, the field is wide open for New York’s Twin Towers to one day rise again in Shanghai, and the numerous decapitated heads of Stalin and Lenin to re-emerge from the Antarctic ice.
All of this is understandable, and a bit of a laugh. Only one thing remains a mystery: earthlings’ obsession with art. It’s almost beyond comprehension why someone in Eelde in the north of Holland would pay five thousand euros for a picture they could get at a flea market for three, or why anyone would pay ten, twenty, or thirty times more to have an ugly wire bottle in a university park, or why someone would take out a loan of several hundred euros to put up big metal letters in a forest next to his hamlet, especially when those letters already exist on another hill, on the other side of the world.
Although the motivations remain incomprehensible, the obsession with art, and art itself, are facts of life on earth. Thus I can but only encourage Ivo Jakovljević from the village of Mutanj. If he were a Serbian conceptual artist, somebody would have already lauded his installation, acclaiming it as an intelligent and incisive satire of Serbian megalomania. Were Ivo Jakovljević Andy Warhol, his installation would be exhibited in museums, acclaimed as a work that wittily unites the symbols of two cultures, Latin and Cyrillic. But Ivo Jakovljević works in a lead and zinc mine and his “Srpski Holywood” is just the lonesome enterprise of a lonesome village idiot. I don’t know if it would be of any comfort to the currently out-of-pocket Ivo Jakovljević to understand that the difference between “high art” and amateurism is negligible, and that it’s all just a question of context. People in the art world behave like the majority of people do in other spheres of life — like a majority. In other words, they behave just like those Serbian voters, who, when asked by a representative of a small anti-nationalist party whether he’d get their vote in the next elections, responded: “First of all get elected, and then we’ll vote for you!”
December 2008
BITCHES
Even those who can barely say their name in English know what bitch means. Bitch is as promiscuous and freely-spouted as the word fuck, its circulation global. Bitch rings out everywhere, for the simple reason that American films and TV series are everywhere. In Slavic languages, bitch has displaced the imposingly inventive local repertoire of words with the same meaning.
Who knows where the word bitch was ripped from? Maybe from the phrase son of a bitch, where the word renounced its mother, abandoned its son, and shimmied off on its own carnivalesque conquest, elbowing all similar words aside. Bitch is not only an expression of familiarity among young women (nigger serves a similar function among young urban African-Americans), nor is bitch simply social, gender, and age-defiant American slang. Bitch is more than this.
The word’s global conquest came with the seal of approval of “third wave” American feminism, which grew out of the punk and hip-hop scenes and the eras of consumerism and the Internet. Bitch is most often used in reference to young women. Having adopted the slogan To Be Real, women thought it better to endow the word with a positive connotation rather than censor it. While Gloria Steinem united American feminists under the auspices of Ms. magazine, “third wave” feminists are associated with the magazine Bitch. Having rejected the assumption of a universal female identity built on the life experiences of middle-class white women, the mixed bag of “third wave” feminism contains many divergent schools of thought. All of these tendencies — the “Riot grrrl” movement, ecofeminism, transgendered feminism, queer culture, anti-racism, postcolonial theory, and traditional activism — are linked by a female perspective on the contentious issues of race, class, and sex.