Natalija Šeruga Golob: VESTIBUL (Im Memoriam Avgvsta Fapanni), 2019 (11:22)
.... Project VESTIBULE is composed of elements:
VIDEO
.... VESTIBUL
PAINTINGS
.... VESTIBULE (unfinished) (7 large-scale paintings)
EXHIBITION
.... VESTIBULE
CATALOGUE
.... VESTIBULE
Vestibule, could also the hollow of the inner ear[1]
What it means to succeed in life, if not this, this
stubbornness from childhood, this simple loyalty: never go
farther than what's bothering you that day, that hour.[2]
.... For a long time, the voices were loading in me, then I finally recognized them as a voice I've already known. The holy time in solitude is needed to sharpen the inner ear and escape from the rut. Without it, there is no entry into the Kingdom of Art, into books and paintings, which you then swallow along with bread. A meal that is like love, like play and a prayer, an act without a precaution, premeditation or interpretation. All this area of the spirit reaches its translations and interpretations much later.
.... During the long wait, I have learned that climbing is just a climb to rest, that laughter is in the undressing to the bone and that the greatest abundance is in solitude. In the meantime, the exhibited work Vestibule was taking shape. It was created in the discovery of the far-reaching and gentle world of the deceased. Along the way, this world I was approaching was just shinier than the others, erected as the pasture for eye. In this world of the deceased, I am really playing without fear, no gain or loss. I am imbued with gratitude for all these gentle deviations with wings and tails, I am burning in the perched serenity. Silent surrender, because the only obstacle dwells in me, the anchor, a hundred times cursed chain and a cage. During the play I was really just an intermediary, a catalyst or a medium[3] blinded by the desire that the swing rocked into the greatest amplitudes. My stock of passion, thoughts, feelings, images, memories and impressions were overcooked, digested and then eliminated. In this process I am never alone; I am mounted into an inevitable spiritual relationship with the giants of the art of all sorts. The present, and at the same time, all what has already been created simultaneously resides in my bones. Digesting is a fusion in which a whole new, yet unknown combination is produced. The elements entering the reaction are all my stocks of all sorts (thoughts, images, expressions...) that unite into one form in a completely new compound. And the value of the work created is, if any, that it is at least similar to whatever, that is similar to zero. Progress is therefore a continuous disappearance of me, my supplies.
.... In the work of Vestibule, I was not looking for anything, I was a catalyst and my spirit was just a receptionist for the stock of all sorts. The inventory is pointless, because the stock was resolving into something entirely different. Too many not right words have been used to recall the moment already exactly described by Walter Benjamin:
....................... Vestibule
A visit to Goethe's house. I cannot recall having seen rooms in the dream. It was a perspective of whitewashed corridors like those in a school. Two elderly English lady visitors and a curator are the dream's extras. The curator requests us to sign the visitors' book lying open on a desk at the farthest end of a passage. On reaching it, I find as I turn the pages my name already entered in big, unruly, childish characters.[4]
Saper vedere.[5]
Natalija Šeruga Golob, January 2020
[1] Vestibule or Vestibulum can have the following meanings, each primarily based upon a common origin, from early 17th century French, derived from Latin vestibulum, -i n. entrance court. The vestibule is the central part of the bony labyrinth in the inner ear, and is situated medial to the eardrum (tympanic cavity), behind the cochlea, and in front of the three semi-circular canals. The name comes from the Latin vestibulum, literally an entrance hall. ...
[2] Christian Bobin: La part manquante, Collection Le Chemin, Gallimard, 1989.
[3] Thomas Stearns Eliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent, (1919) is an essay written by poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot. The essay was first published in The Egoist (1919) and later in Eliot's first book of criticism, The Sacred Wood (1920).
[4] Walter Benjamin: One-way street and Other Writings, Translators Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, NLB, 1979, London W I, p. 47.
[5] Renaissance Maximma Saper Vedere (The phrase combines the Latin sapere, which means knowing how, and vedere, which means to see ...).
Walter Benjamin
On the Concept of History[1]
IX
.... My wing is ready to fly
.... I would rather turn back
.... For had I stayed mortal time
.... I would have had little luck.
.... - Gerhard Scholem, “Angelic Greetings”[2]
.... There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
[1] Walter Benjamin: On the Concept of History (Gesammelte Schriften I:2.), Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt am Main, 1974.
Online: http://www.arts.yorku.ca/soci/barent/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/benjaminconcept_of_history1.pdf and http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm
[2] Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit, /// ich kehrte gern zurück, /// denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit, /// ich hätte wenig Glück. (Gerherd Scholem, “Gruss vom Angelus”)
.... Natalija Šeruga Golob has a wide-ranging practice that includes paintings, drawings and videos. She has taken the medium of video to represent her own metaphysical form of the vestibule. The painter remains faithful to her recognizable topics such as time, passing, and decay. Her work is based on both the ancient and the eternal in visual creation. The act of creating video she describes with the concept of play. Children play in its double displacement from compulsion and illusion. Children are as collectors of fragments and junk, and as tinkerers, who put together a new world of things from what they have collected. For her creating art is a ritual, a bridge between the real and the transcendental.