Suzana Milevska

In July 2018 Violeta Čapovska completed her land-art performance Salt. This was the third part of Čapovska’s long-term project that formed a kind of trilogy - it followed her previous land-print projects: Small Lake (1994) and I and the Eye (1996). What is common for all three projects and also makes them specific is their unique location: they all took place at the Small Lake on Baba Mountain in Macedonia. However by climbing the mountain once again all the way to the Small Lake while realising the latest project Salt Čapovska managed to address the various aspects of the relationship between her cultural and gender identity, nature, and her artistic practice.

Despite the many resemblances between Salt and the two previous iterations of her long-term project, such were the climbing, walking, and other “small performative acts” that the artist performed in order to delineate her complex relation with this particular lake, the latest project focused on entirely new elements and metaphoric repositories. For example the previous projects included mainly reflective objects (champagne glass, magnifying glass, or mirror) that established the reflexive, meditative, and mnemonic relation that the artist was continuously establishing with the location and its surrounding nature: the lake’s water and the mountain’s soil.

The Small Lake, particularly its purity and the incommensurable sublimity of nature in general could be interpreted as metaphors for temporality “culturalscapes” and “memoryscapes.” During the three projects particularly for Čapovska was important to stress the impossibility to represent the sublime and the difficulty of preservation of the fading childhood’s memories to aesthetical and ethical purity from the past. Thus in parallel to the objects that the artist borrowed from her grandmother’s house the projects included different print-making materials and graphic processes in line with Sigmund Freud’s concept “mystic writing pad” that stands as a metaphor for different layers of memories overwriting and erasing each other.

Here it is important to address the distinctive complex connotation of the material “salt” from the title of the latest project (and the exhibition) and to unravel the specific background and development of the entire concept. At first sight the art project’s concept and its structure are very simple: the artist aimed to climb once again to the Small Lake, to walk a circle around it and to “mark” her walk by a trace made of salt. She brought salt with her, but not any kind of salt. The origin of the salt was important in the artist’s words. The salt actually consisted of a mixture of different kinds of salt that originated from Europe and Australia as a kind of metaphor of the intersection and marriage between different cultural identities.

Čapovska’s ongoing concerns and the main focus of her projects is the possibility to return to the same. She admits that each time it is more difficult to climb the mountain and to make the full “circle” around the lake which circumference is (actually during the third project she didn’t even complete the tour).

There is no eternal return in terms of the old Nietzsche’s phantasm and myth of temporality. Nature changes, but its changes affect mostly our capability to co-exist and endure and live-through the changes that are effects of our actions. In Difference and Repetition Gilles Deleuze addressed in detail the Nietzschean problematic of the “eternal return of the same.” turn the technological means in a metaphorical device for pointing out the potentials and dangers of the return of the different, not the return of the same, in Deleuzean terms.

It is not the same which returns, it is not the similar which returns; rather, the Same is the returning of that which returns – in other words, of the Different; the similar is the returning of that which returns – in other words, of the Dissimilar.

Deleuze’s unorthodox emphasis on eternal recurrence as contaminated by inevitable difference leads to an entirely different understanding of temporality. According to his older pivotal book Nietzsche and Philosophy, first published in 1962, he already announced that it is not the empirically same, but difference, multiplicity and becoming which return. What remains eternal and ‘the same’ is the movement of recurring itself. “It is not the ‘same’ or the ‘one’ which comes back in the eternal return but return is itself the one which ought to belong to diversity and to that which differs.” For Deleuze eternal return implies that difference and becoming, as basic ontological principles, split the very heart of being from the beginning, and thus diversity and multiplicity cannot but fundamentally occur, which is recur.

Deleuze argued there are two aspects of the eternal return in Nietzsche. The first is its cosmological aspect, under which Nietzsche attacks the thermodynamic notion of entropy prevalent at the time of his writing. The second one is the ethical one, through which one selects the past that has to return to one’s present as if this present were perpetually repeated (e.g. the concrete and recognisable images from different historic events included from journalistic reports in the same work). Both aspects are important from today’s ecological perspective and for the project Salt.

Salt as durable substance (Sodium Chloride) that dissolves in water but doesn’t evaporate has additional pertinent significance. To be more precise in a case of imbalance of the salinity of the fresh and salt waters can subsequently cause imbalance and disruption of the micro and macro ecosystems and can affect biodiversity depending of the society’s capacity of managing the salinisation. The demarcation of the lake’s shape during the artist’s performance during which she was slowly walking around its shore as she was pouring small amounts of salt in irregular line was also a kind of ephemeral print that could be also interpreted as pointing the borderline between the intact nature and our questionable actions and calling for “paying attention” in Isabelle Stengers’ understanding of the term.

Since the early 1970s, many feminists, have defended the assumption that the environment is a feminist issue. Particularly important is the movement of ecological feminists ("ecofeminists"). For example Karen J. Warren was among the first leading ecofeminist theorists who recognised the importance of this relation and pointed to the urgency of looking at the similarities between the women's movement and the ecology (environmental) movement. In her introduction to Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology. Englewood Cliffs, she stated that “many feminists have argued that the goals of these two movements are mutually reinforcing; ultimately they involve the development of world views and practices that are not based on male-biased models of domination.” Similar arguments of the collaboration between ecological and feminist movement due to their common adversary - the male domination in various decisions regarding the political, systemic, structural, economical, and environmental issues - were developed by Mary Daly.

However, sometimes in art and writing about art projects that address environmental topics the ecological arguments are obscured and contradictory to the ones of the feminist critique and it gives way to possible conflation of the essentialisation of the relation between women and the environment and to some kind of simplification of the political connectedness of feminism, art and ecology. Although Čapovska’s project is not focused on discursive analysis of the major arguments of feminist and ecological theorists the project Salt (as well as the first two parts of the trilogy) makes clearer the argument that ecology and feminism can and should learn from each other, in many different ways. Obviously, the artist engaged with the complex relations between woman, nature, and art. Thus it is important to emphasise that Čapovska interpreted nature as culture, and not as a material resource that could be exploited endlessly in human interests.

For the artist the salt and lake offer the symbiotic context that enables our cultural anchoring in nature even when one decides or has had to leave the original territorial and cultural landscape. Thus with its subtlety and complexity the project Salt could also motivate us to look more carefully at the potential misunderstandings that could stem from the misleading essentialist ways in which some theoretical assertions of ecofeminism have been simplified, appropriated and recontextualised in contemporary art, in visual and popular culture, or throughout digital media and social networks. The danger of wrongfully representing the relation between women and nature in essentialised way when dealing with ecological and environmental issues in the project Salt is circumvented by the artist’s focus on the intersection between the nature and the cultural and gender identity.

Notes:

i It’s important to stress that this project took place twenty five years after Čapovska climbed to the Small Lake for the first time in order to realise and record her art project at this location. The project Salt thus also points the artist’s intimate relation to the nature and culture of her country of origin: Macedonia, although she lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.

ii Small Lake is one of the two lakes on Baba Mountain that is at elevation of 2180 m, near its peak Pelister.

iii In 2019 Violeta Čapovska presented the project Salt in the frame of an eponymous solo exhibition at the Open Graphic Art Studio in Skopje. She exhibited the photo and video documentation of the performance and an accumulative installation of one ton of salt.

iv Sigmund Freud “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad” (1925)., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed. James Strachey. Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1978, 225-232.

v For example during the first project Small Lake the artist had intervened on zinc plates with found objects – stones, branches, grass - from the lake, or the second project I and the Eye included hand-writing on the snow.

vi Back in 1996 Čapovska similarly brought sand from the Australian’s dessert Kakadu to the Small Lake and mixed it with the lake’s own soil.

vii Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: Continuum, 2001, p. 374.

viii Ibid., p. 374.

ix Ibid., pp. 374-275.

x Gilles Deleuze Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, London: Athlone Press, 1983, p. 46.

xi Deleuze, Difference, pp. 372–274.

xii Miguel Cañedo-Argüelles, Ben Kefford and Ralf Schäfer, “Salt in freshwaters: causes, effects and prospects” - introduction to the theme issue 03 December 2018, The Royal Society Publishing, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2018.0002.

xiii Martin Savransky and Isabelle Stengers, “Relearning the Art of Paying Attention: A Conversation.” SubStance, Volume 47, Number 1, 2018 (Issue 145), pp. 130-145.

xiv See: Virginie Maris, Ecofeminism Towards a fruitful dialogue between feminism and ecology, Eurozine, 30 October 2009 https://www.eurozine.com/ecofeminism/

xv Michael E. Zimmerman, J. Baird Callicott, George Sessions, Karen J. Warren, and John Clark (Eds.), Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology. Englewood Cliffs (NJ:Prentice-Hall, 1993), p. 253.

xvi Mary Daly, GYN/ECOLOGY The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Beacon Press: Boston, 1978, or Ecofeminism, Women, Animals, Nature, Ed. by Greta Gaard (Philadelphia, PA.: Temple University Press, 1993).

Dr Suzana Milevska

National Gallery of Macedonia, 2011

Violeta Čapovska installed her recent exhibition in the woman’s part of the 15th century Ottoman bath Cifte Amam (meaning: Pair Bath) in Skopje. Her installations made with lithographs, linocuts, photographs and haunting, partly printed organza dresses suspended from the ceiling, as well as the three video works presented on TV monitors all have in common a focus on the reciprocal relation between women’s body and psyche. Throughout this exhibition this complex relation is mostly looked at from woman’s perspective but also the artist considers the question how men had imagined and fantasized this relation as external observers or medical examiners without having the privilege of the introspective viewing. 

More precisely the exhibition deals with various gender-related issues such as early motherhood (often accompanied by ambivalence, sadness and depression), kinship, name and family, body image, eating disorder, hysteria, hypnosis and other therapeutic methods, as well as other issues already present in some earlier works by the same artist. 

Nevertheless, the main artistic strategies used in most of recent Čapovska’s works shown in this exhibition, present mostly in the linocuts, photographs and video works made after the original photographs from the photo-archive of the performative lectures of the famous 19th century French psychoanalyst Jean-Martin Charcot (1825- 1893), are the re-staging and re-enactment. Various photographed postures and written texts from the historic records of LaSalpêtrière School, where as a principal doctor Charcot led his experiments on hysteria, and the records of the medical doctors from the Australian St.Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne, provoked Čapovska in the course of her research to try to track down the process of invention of hysteria and its iconography. 

The space of Cifte Amam, a rare and huge example of Ottoman architecture with eleven breast-like domes, provides Čapovska with appropriate local historic, cultural, spatial and gender reference. This biggest hamam in the Balkans from that period is divided in male and female part, in contrast to other similar buildings where the gender division was usually made by different timing and not with different entrances and parts. Thus it becomes the perfect context for a subtle pondering into feminine psyche. The functions of any Ottoman hamam included cleansing the believers’ soul as one of its most important aims. When taking into account the fact that during the Ottoman Empire rule in Macedonia the bath provided both the local Christian and the colonizers’ Islamic women with one of the rare public spaces where they could interact and socialize, while enjoying the cleansing ritual, it becomes obvious why for both “camps” Cifte Amam had a much more complex meaning than the simple hygienic function. Additionally, the local specialized metaphor of the physical space and its cultural history are accompanied by faded memories about the anecdotal erotic narrative of the alleged fantasies and whispers of male bathers imagining their female “neighbours”, or even voyeuristic peeping through little holes in the walls dividing the male and female part. On the other side, one could easily  imagine secretive and intimate exchanges of versatile narratives between women of different generations and backgrounds that would comment, judge and gossip about each others’ bodies and personalities, womanliness and motherhood. The procession s of bathing women metaphorically is present in the linoprints from the series Naming the Name (2008-2011), where the names of different historic and real women are put side by side as if waiting to tell their feminine testimonies of womanhood and motherhood. 

However, Čapovska for her main body of reference chooses Western psychoanalysis, e.g. the psychoanalytic concepts on motherhood and childhood by both Melanie Klein (“good breast” and “bad breast”) and D. W. Winnicott (“good enough mother”, “transitory objects”). For example, according to Winnicott, the properly developed child's ability to feel the body is very important for a child’s development. It is the place where the psyche could not have been developed without a consistent technique of handling. 

His idea of "holding" and of “meeting dependence” on which he based the concept of “good-enough mother” created a very uncomfortable biased place for young mothers, an image with which many women had problems to cope with because it was not easy to look up to such idealised motherhood. Therefore, Čapovska is more importantly attracted by the contemporary criticism of historic male diagnostics of “women’s troubles”. It is well known that for centuries women were treated for various physical disorders by inventing one catch-hall junk diagnosis diseases such as hysteria and other mental diagnosis particularly “designed” to explain the complex relations between certain unusual symptoms and phenomena attributed specifically to women. No wonder why women started internalising the diagnosis and symptoms and even over-performed them after recognising what kind of performances were expected from them. In her artistic research Čapovska addresses these issues through re-enactment of Charcot’s historic experiments and spectacles that were documented with photographs, and of a different kind of “performances” described thoroughly in the horrifying testimonies found in the medical reports of gynaecological interventions that were supposedly healing mental disorders. 

The three video works presented at the exhibition make a kind of trilogy that not are only connected through related narratives but also through their main protagonist: performing or confessing persona. Namely in all three videos the same woman (featuring Olivia Davis) appears in three different roles: in Love-sick girl (2004) Davis acts as a neutral subject - actress that re-enacts various excerpts of texts from the doctors’ records, e.g. of back-yard abortions or interventions on misplaced womb from the St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne (1904-1907); in the video Hypnosis (2004) the same woman is acting out the personal confession about her disappointing experience with hypnosis through which she underwent because of suspected eating disorder; and in the work Therapy (2011) Davis engages in a semi-staged dialogue with the artist. 

In Therapy Čapovska actually “interviews” her long-term friend Olivia in analyst style’s arm-chair: asking only a few questions, letting the “analysed” subject speak, without interruptions and even avoiding any editing. Thus she puts herself in the shoes of a psychoanalyst turning psychoanalysis into a performative artistic research. In a way she tries to re-enact a therapeutic session of a psychoanalyst with a patient, similar to sessions through which both the artist-turned-analyst and the “analysed” underwent in the same therapist’s ordination. 

The parts of Čapovska’s exhibition that are direct results of the artist’s research residency at St. Vincent’s Hospital and her research in the photography and video archive of the hospital’s records are intertwined with works drawing on her personal motherhood experiences and on close family relations among women. The historic and privately known women’s names put side by side with the videos clarify the artist’s interest in the processes of research of “her-story”. The pursue of women’s psyche map through history and culture led the artist to look at the evolution of the ubiquitously used but distressing neuropsychiatric research methods, starting from early times when the naming of hysteria became stigmatic label. I

n Huberman’s words Charcot actually isolated hysteria as a pure nosological object. 2 Čapovska in this subtle but nevertheless powerful feminist project manages to challenge not only hysteria but also many other “bad names” and stereotypically depicted or over-idealised images of women or simplified and objectified concepts of their body/psyche/mind issues from her unique perspective of an artist. Not only is she choosing to critique the inherited imagery of womanhood but she also dares to try to create new images of women who are free to openly discuss the symptoms of womanhood, once seen as abnormal and tabooed.

NOTES

1Georges Didi Huberman, Invention of Hysteria Charcot and Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 2003.

2Huberman 19.

Land-Print Project at the Small Lake, Pelister, Museum of City of Skopje, 1994

THE SMALL LAKE: TOPOGRAPHY AND EXEMPLIFICATION OF THE SUBLIME

Dr  Suzana Milevska

That is sublime in comparison with which all else is small

Kant

The paradox of attempting to treat the Small Lake, topos of the land-print project of Violeta Capovska, as an example of the sublime, is contained in its very name: it, against all definitions of the sublime as infinitely big, it signifies the limitation of the dimensions. How is it possible then, to include this locality into the accustomed topography of the sublime, despite the fact that, the 18-century itinerarium of the romantic Grand Tour, included merely grandiose toponims (Alps, Appenines, Mount Etna..)?

In order to enable the successful realization of this operation of exemplification the sublime it should be taken into account the fact that the estimation of magnitude of the objects in nature is of aesthetic, subjective and not of objective nature. The measure of the sublime is in the body, it is the body which erects itself as a measure – emphasizes Derrida while in “The Truth In Painting” interprets Kant’s definition of the sublime as a relation of “body to body”, as a bridge between the unrepresentable and the presentation itself. The sublime is not “proper to the objects and phenomena themselves but exists only in the ourselves who project the sublime into nature, ourselves as rational beings”. The experience of the sublime can be defined only from the point of view of reason: The experience of inadequacy of presentation. For the sublime, in fact, each presentation is presented as inadequate, as an abyss in itself, incommensurable with the without –cise of the sublime.

The four phases of the project of Capovska are in accordance with this subjective definitation of the sublime. The first phase, the observing of her own image in the mirror, in which, simultaneously, peers out the reflection of the lake, is necessary for the identification of the limits of her own body. Like in the “mirror stage” well known from the psychoanalytical discourse (Lacan, Kristeva) in which the subject identifies oneself only through the fragmentation in “self” and “other” (the own reflection in the mirror), Capovska locates her own identity out of the boundaries of her own body – in her own reflection but, at the same time, in the reflection on the lake of the same surface of the mirror. Thus, the first relation with the Freudian Unheimlich (uncanny) is being established. And truly, the topography of the sublime always is in the relation to the inaccessible unknown localities, as, it is the Small Lake itself (at elevation of 2280 m.)

The phase of washing the four- glass object, familiar from the childhood games in the old family house, is part of the process of breaking the connection with the known and certain past and plunging into the depths of the uncertain, uncanny attraction of the creation. With the pouring water in the bottle, already containing blue pigment, Capovska establishes a relation between the unrepresentable sublime (the Lake) and the work of art, which will become an inadequate fragmented result of the idea of the reason for which the Small Lake hides the endless magnitude of the sublime. The Zink plates, the carriers of the traces of the disturbance, the terror and the delight caused by the sublime, are used for making three prints after the intervention made at the Lake. The delight caused by the untouched nature and the terror caused by the danger for self- preservation are transformed into deep incisions on the zinc plates. Only the third plate, on which ephemeral composition is made with natural elements found on the site itself (herbs, branches, water, insects) remains empty, clean, as the lake itself. Thus, the self-referential effect of this project was caused- the moment of questioning the limits of the print medium, which by definition, is reproducible. That is why the neologism land-print was invented. Here is not even the case of a monotype but maybe a kind of null degree of the print impression that is made.

Leaving the print studio, intervening with natural materials on the traditional printmaking base and the ephemeral character of the whole project, conceived as continual return to the same ambient with new interventions, makes this event (even this text itself) singular and specific because of conceptualizing the printmaking and discoursive act of defining the indefinable, presenting the unrepresentable.