Marko Stamenkovic előadása
2010. május 28, péntek 18.00
Tűzraktér, Kávézó (Bp. VI. Hegedű u. 3.)
What is it about the act of suicide, be it individual or collective, that touches a number of issues concerning the image in today’s culture? Could a suicidal ritual be perceived nowadays as art or a cultural symptom that increasingly delineates the margins of our social and political horizon? Why, then, would a human being decide to disappear, to become invisible, to drift away, to cancel himself, to commit suicide, even?
In 1897 Émile Durkheim published a sociological treatise linking suicide with the stress of modern experience; this was, he suggested, a pathological symptom of social ‘anomie’ – a Greek word, restored to use by Durkheim, which refers to the failure of traditional laws and the absence of moral support. The kind of suicide which Durkheim called ‘anomique’ was the individual’s protest against a collapsing world. Such desperation became, potentially at least, a mass phenomenon. For Durkheim, suicide revealed the pathetic vulnerability of men in a society which was changing too fast. Others saw it as a gesture reclaiming responsibility. To kill yourself, in Walter Benjamin’s view, was a deed of uniquely contemporary valour. The individual had become his own God, like Elias Canetti’s bomber; to commit suicide professed superiority to life itself, disdaining its physical weakness and mental instability as Hemingway, Woolf, Rothko and Mishima did. [See: Conrad, Peter, Modern Times, Modern Places. Life and Art in the 20th Century (Thames & Hudson: London, 1998), 709-710]. In Conrad’s terms, „to kill oneself was one way of being absolutely modern”. Characterized by the impatient urge of modern times to escape from the past, to violently renounce the past, and welcome the end of history, modernity modeled itself on the act of suicide.
The last photographs of general Nogi and his wife, taken on the eve of their suicide in September 1912, had given Roland Barthes a reason (perhaps) to write about the choice of death: to take into account the image as a testimony of the „gesture of idea” (about the voluntary death, for example) that is emerging from the surface of the paper from which someone/something is looking at us. These two photographic portraits, documents extracted from Félicien Challaye’s book Japon Illustré (Librairie Larousse, Paris 1915) are figurative representations of the bodies that are missing, already there, while being photographed – because they know, as Barthes put it: „Ils vont mourir, ils le savent et cela ne se voit pas”. What we do not know, as we cannot see it, is their ultimate decision – the freedom of choice, remaining invisible upon the surface of the photographic paper. They are there, but they are almost not there anymore: they have detached/abstracted themselves from the environment that surrounds them, in a travesty of absence under the factographic veil of presence. The notion of abstraction (from the Latin „abstrahere”, to detach from somewhere) might be of crucial importance here. Pointing out the erasure of the figural subject-matter in the context of abstract expressionism, Virilio, for example, quite polemically suggests the following: that Mark Rothko ‘trapped the most absolute violence’ in his works as his suicide was an inevitable consequence of his rejection of human form’s representation; by committing suicide, Rothko exercised ‘the most nihilistic of freedoms of expression: that of self-destruction’ (Virilio, Art and Fear, 2003: 38). In both cases, the matter of the image – its ghostly aspect of the slip of representation rather than only its material presence – possesses the knowledge [ils le savent] that testifies about the choice of death.
Image Anomique puts into focus the gesture of suicidium in the context of contemporary cultural conditions that determine the current state of global political and social turbulence. It aims at building upon a collection of visual materials that, altogether, contribute to the articulation of the subject at hand, from multiple perspectives. Those perspectives, outside of their fragmentary value, serve as significant material not only to improve education about suicide and disseminate information about it but, most importantly, to eradicate the atmosphere of a taboo and raise awareness that suicide is not only possible to understand (or to commit) as a symbolic gesture, but also – necessary to prevent as an actual gesture of (self and mass) destruction.
Marko Stamenkovic