Milica Ružičić
Denmark, Copenhagen 2009, oil on canvas 32 x 42cm
South Korea, Seoul 2003, oil on canvas 32 x 42cm
Greece, Athens, 2008, oil on canvas 32 x 42cm
Kenya, Nairobi, 2007, oil on canvas 32 x 42cm
Great Britain, London 2009, oil on canvas 32 x 42cm
Australia, Sydney 2002, oil on canvas 32 x 42cm
Israel, Tel Aviv 2008, oil on canvas 32 x 42cm
Germany, oil on canvas 32 x 42cm
Stefan Jonsson, talking about the conformism of global mass media and simultaneous politicization of contemporary art in the past decade and a half, identified four tendencies within the historical process called “globalization of culture”: the triumph of American mass culture; the integration of Western high culture into life styles beyond the West; the resistance of local traditions; and the one which has the effect of inbetweenneess, i.e., of noticing, thematizing and problematizing of conflicting relationships among commercialized mass culture, standardized elite culture and forms of local resistance; and he concluded that today contemporary artistic practices compensate for blind spots of journalism. In other words, contemporary artistic practices reexamine and challenge the representational capacity of the capital and the culture of globalism (spectacle, cultural industries, local traditions), and what is disputable is the scope of their political potentials, that is, the potential of art to be a transformational social practice as a product of political intervention in everyday life.
‘Documentary style’ is articulated primarily as a strategy that contemporary artists today (more than) often pursue in exploring and redefining of porous borders of art and life, i.e., of the ways in which people can present themselves and their interests in the public sphere. Since documentary, by its definition, presents facts and/or offers proofs about something confirming its existence or appearance, by words and/or pictures, it is taken as an undoubtedly truthful form or at least describes fragments of reality so convincingly that we can’t help believing in its credibility. If the strength and potential of the documentary lie in a tautological game that implies simultaneous recording and commenting, presenting and analyzing, then the power of artistic practices lies in initiating a research in what was actually documented, who documented it, what sort of trompe l’oeil has been constructed by a document.
Although photography and video art dominate in documentary practices in contemporary art, they are still not associated with a specific genre or medium but they have a common critical sensibility that suggests that it is necessary to represent some realities, analyze and interpret their governing ideologies. Viewed in that light, the paintings of Milica Ružičić fit into the ‘documentary style’ in an eccentric way. Transferring of media pictures from electronic media (internet, television) into the medium and language of figurative painting with historical reference to the tradition of group portrait and social painting (‘large painting’) but also to pop-art and even hyperrealism and only concerning the procedure of using, taking, citing the reality which is articulated by media pictures (‘large painting’ and a series of ‘small paintings’) is a less usual approach. Since the scenes in the paintings thematize the power that the state exerts on individuals, its citizens, when they are protesting to warn that some of their freedoms or human rights, guaranteed by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, are violated or that they are prevented from exercising them, it is indisputable that the paintings have a political dimension. They represent conflicts where human rights have become the organizing instrument and which have replaced a Marxist model of class struggle, redirected it, ‘chopped it up’ into various types of resistance against different positions of power produced by neoliberalism. Milica’s paintings decontextualize the place of demonstrating of power of the state/capital (white background of ‘small paintings’) and it is only because of recognizable uniforms, clothes and colour of the skin that we, perhaps, can reconstruct a possible place or cause of the conflict. On the contrary, what is immediately and absolutely evident in these scenes is the matrix of violence of biopolitics and capital, a clear indication that politics is, as Laclau, Mauffe, Stavrakakis, Žižek suggest, inevitably structured round social divisions no matter how much has been worked on erasing the concept of antagonism from political discourse in the past twenty years.
‘Large picture’ is a case study – it ‘documents’ the process of privatization of Jugoremedia, a pharmaceutical factory from Zrenjanin, marked by its workers’ protests inside the factory and in front of it that lasted for months, by conflicts with managers’ private security, by court processes, in which the workers managed to defend themselves from predator capitalism and save what they had owned at the beginning of the process of privatization, by buying shares – the factory, the products and their value. The police/state intervened in those conflicts as the power that separated the conflicted sides – workers and private security – without a clearly determined attitude regarding whose interests should be defended. In this case, it is far from transformation of the state as a result of its inclusion into the transnational managing system and thus helping the development and growth of global economy. It is rather about the reorganization from socialist into capitalist reality, i.e., about redefining of power and resistance in the conditions of transition.
However, in the new works of Milica Ružičić the very concept of political is realized as a decision to paint scenes that are uneasy, unpleasant, disturbing, traumatic in a fetish-format: the format of collector’s paintings and the format of a museum painting. Political awareness of social and economical contradictions is not reflected only in the selection of contents but, primarily, in enjoying the paradox of joining of traditional values assigned to painting, that are items of goods-for-money exchange in the circles of middle and upper classes for gaining cultural prestige and status, with unpleasant, aggressive scenes that reveal the traumatic reality of the class system (possible historical reference - Otto Dix and Georg Grosz). Therefore, these paintings are definitely not aesthetic objects but they do redefine the concept of the aesthetic in the direction of Rancière’s deliberation of aesthetics as the “ability to think contradiction”.
Jasmina Čubrilo