The Ornaments of Power

Jasmina Cibic’s video installation The Pavilion premiered in November 2015 as part of her solo exhibition Building Desire at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina.^[1] As is the case with her previous projects, For Our Economy and Culture (2013) and the series Spielraum (2015), Building Desire explores the instrumentalisation of visual language in the construction of spectacle within the imaginarium of the nation state. For her case studies, Cibic selects symbolically laden, grandiose art projects or events from history^[2] that were initiated and overseen from the then top positions in the structure of power, the leadership of the state. Despite referring to historically different ideological and regime-related contexts of the Yugoslav state during the course of the 20^th century, in all of the above-mentioned case studies researched by Cibic (namely, the commissioning of art works for the decoration of the interior of the Slovenian National Assembly (1954‒1959), the construction of the Palace of the Federation (1947‒1959) and the construction of the Pavilion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929)), the realisation of the project was delegated and overseen by the state leadership of the time. Thus, the film Fruits of Our Land (2013) was shot inside the building of the Slovenian Parliament (formerly the National Assembly) and Tear Down and Rebuild (2015, part of the Spielraum project) was shot inside the Palace of Serbia (the former building of the Palace of the Federation and of the Federal Executive Council), whereas her new work, The Pavilion (2015), centres on the Pavilion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in Barcelona in 1929. In the examples selected, the artist focuses on the seductive language of art and architecture as soft power in the context of cultural diplomacy and self-representation of the nation state, and on the register of similar aesthetic vocabularies and metanarrative layers which accumulated over the course of history and participated in the production of the spectacle in question.

In her new video installation The Pavilion, the case study and the main protagonist of the art work is the building of the national Pavilion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia,^[3] designed by the pioneer of modern architecture in the Yugoslav state, Dragiša Brašovan (1887‒1965), and temporarily built in 1929 for the World Exposition in Barcelona. The World Exposition was one of the most important international events at the time, a display of economic, cultural and architectural achievements, featuring twenty European nations,^[4] as well as private organisations from the United States and Japan.^[5] The main agenda of the Barcelona Exposition was the urban development planning for the city and a search for a new architectural expression. The Exposition itself was supposed to serve as a testing ground for the new architectural styles which developed during the early decades of the 20^th century. The Yugoslav state responded to this challenge by commissioning Brašovan, who designed a modern pavilion which stood out from the rest of the Exposition architecture owing to its unusual star-shaped foundation, its dynamic body made up of angular modules of various sizes and heights, and its black-and-white striped façade dominated by the expressionist finish in the shape of a ship’s bow. Brašovan rejected the original idea of a national, folkloristic style, proposed by the Yugoslav government. He believed that the affirmation of Yugoslav art on the global stage was impossible without adopting the principles of an international, modern architectural style.^[6] Apart from completing high-profile projects in Belgrade,^[7] Zemun, Zrenjanin and other cities in Serbia and Vojvodina, Brašovan also designed some of the iconic edifices in Novi Sad which constitute the modern identity of the city today: the Workers’ Chamber (1931), the Danube Banovina^[8] building (today the building of the Executive Council of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina) (1939) and the Main Post Office building (1961). Taking into consideration the modern urban heritage of Novi Sad, Cibic’s installation presents the phase of Brašovan’s work which precedes his projects in this city. However, The Pavilion functions in various cultural contexts, which creates different standpoints and perspectives for its analysis.

Apart from the fact that Brašovan once occupied a position of power in the construction and presentation of the imaginarium of the Yugoslav state, one of the reasons why Cibic selected the Barcelona pavilion as the main protagonist of her artistic project is the avant-garde nature of its architectural vocabulary, positioned within a landscape of imperial geopolitical exoticism of nation states from the period between the great wars. In this context, the avant-garde serves the foreign policy goal of showcasing the modern identity of the periphery. The artist examines the relationship between the visual language of this architecture (politics, ideology) and the viewer, to which she adds subsequent archival mediation as an important step in the process of constructing a specific imaginarium.

In her exploration, Cibic’s starting point is the popular legend that the Pavilion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia originally won first prize at the World Exposition, and that the prize was subsequently, as a result of political intrigue and following a complaint submitted by the famous architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, awarded to the Pavilion of Germany and van der Rohe as its architect. Today, van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion has iconic status in master narratives of art history, and its picture is an unavoidable feature in the majority of books and textbooks dealing with international modernism in architecture. On the other hand, despite international recognition and its exceptional reputation, Brašovan’s Yugoslav Pavilion is not well known today, as the extant documentation on it is meagre and incomplete. In a way, we can think of Brašovan’s Pavilion as having disappeared in the archival process of memorising the past. On the basis of the few surviving photographs, traced in national and private archives, and the orthophoto showing the plot of land where the pavilion was located, Cibic managed to reconstruct the look of the pavilion to a certain extent, and to build a 1:7 scale model composed of a dozen parts. The exhibition Building Desire represents a unique Gesamtkunstwerk consisting of a single-channel video installation which features the above-mentioned architectural model, along with watercolour illustrations and individual parts of the model itself, which were positioned as exhibition furniture on which visitors sat. This interpenetration of different structures – media, temporal and topological ones – created an effect of a total work of art and included variations of art objects and situations, characteristic of Jasmina Cibic’s projects, which the artist creates in cooperation with architects, craftsmen, illustrators, scriptwriters and performers.

The video The Pavilion presents a group of five female performers who assemble the model of the Yugoslav pavilion from individual parts on a theatre stage. Shot from various angles and perspectives, the performance of building turns into visually seductive choreographic arabesques created by the performers in light-coloured overalls on the black floor of the stage. This video performance and its austere aesthetics of black-and-white ornaments repeats the visual language of the minimalist façade of the Yugoslav pavilion. The action unfolds on an empty theatre stage and is accompanied by the voice of a female narrator who functions as the artist’s alter ego, adopting a documentary tone to describe the methodology and the process of reconstruction of the disappeared pavilion. Cibic used a comparative method to fill the gaps in the visual documentation concerning the look of the pavilion, relying on the appearance of similar (architectural) structures which are better documented. Focusing on the striped façade of the object, as an architectural concept which aims to seduce the viewer, Cibic analyses the implementation of this visual language outside the realm of architecture, presenting this part of her exploration through illustrations featuring objects that she used as a basis for the pavilion’s reconstruction. She locates the use of stripes within the context of optical illusions and deceptions, including the camouflage technique used by the British naval fleet in the First World War and devised by the artist Norman Wilkinson. On account of a lack of documentation on the way in which the stripes on the adjoining surfaces of the façade of Brašovan’s Pavilion were connected, the artist drew upon the ornamental composition used in naval camouflage, which she applied to the outer layer of her model. Through this gesture of “identification”, the artist transposed the strategy of optical illusion employed by a military fleet into the visual identity of a state. Thus, deception becomes an ideological choice.

Cibic also identified another project contemporary with Brašovan’s Pavilion, which utilised a very similar striped façade, that of a French residence – a private villa for Josephine Baker, dancer, singer, actress and activist of African American descent. It was an unrealised project, dating from 1927, designed by the pioneer of modern architecture Adolf Loos, the writer of the famous manifesto Ornament and Crime, who defined functionalist iconoclasm in modernist architecture and design. The surprising similarity between the appearance of the façade of the Pavilion and that of the Loos villa points to the utilitisation of similar modern forms and ornaments in the construction of spaces serving very different purposes – the public exhibition space of a nation and the private space of an exotic woman that men lusted after. However, even though it is a private house, the Loos villa also creates the impression of a specific exhibition space wherein the privacy of the dark-skinned diva Josephine Baker is being exhibited. The sumptuously equipped interior, the indoor swimming pool and the transparent surfaces seemed to be tailored to the enjoyment of the visitors, who were given the opportunity to observe Baker in her intimate moments, similarly to how they would observe a work of art in a gallery or an installation of a national spectacle at a World Exposition. This observation influenced the artist’s decision to make up for the lack of documentation about the appearance of the interior of the Pavilion by using the interior of Loos’s villa. The latter was transposed into the model of Brašovan’s Pavilion. The narrator in the video describes these processes of research and analysis, and the artist’s decision regarding the final reconstruction of the building. The decision to inscribe one space into another brings this work of art into the discourse of political articulation by equating private and public politics within the same imaginarium. It is the imaginarium of traditionalism, which uses the visual language of modernity and wherein the artist intervenes from a feminist position.

Both Brašovan’s Pavilion and Loos’s villa represent works of utopianism of a masculinist panopticon that creates a space of pleasure for national authoritarianism, or an eroticised space that objectifies the female body. In the video, by giving the typically male role of pavilion builders to the women on the stage, and by introducing a female narrative voice, the artist performs a conceptual inversion of the ideological imaginarium which manifests itself through the panopticon suggested by historical factography. In this way, Cibic articulates her political intervention in the ideological imaginarium of a dissolved nation state within the framework of a contemporary recontextualisation of the memory of the periphery. The memory of the periphery is actually a reinvention of imperial power, and the feminist perspective here functions as a rehistorisation of that imaginarium. The choice of a theatre stage as the space where the performance unfolds represents the artist’s intention to elevate her artistic method to a higher level of artificiality and, at the same time, to achieve a clearer demarcation between two realities, the “archive reality” (history) and the artistic reality; thus, the women are placed in the space of theatre where illusions are created and where everything is possible. If we read the “archive reality” as a reality which is actually an extension of the dominant ideological narratives, the introduction of women into this space of narration inaugurates “otherness” as a metaphor for that which is invisible not only in the masculine but also in the imperial panopticon.^[9]

Overall, Cibic’s The Pavilion offers a model of artistic intervention as a corrective of history. Art work as an act of rehistorisation of historical spectacle of the dissolved Yugoslav state also represents a critical overview of the inclusion of Yugoslav identity in the canons of modernity, and actualises the question of the discontinuity of avant-garde utopias as the bearers of political emancipation of the periphery.