Essays - NINA MARIC

Personal Geography: Nina Maric’s Recent Paintings

Saint Peter’s Basilica on an iceberg. London’s Tower Bridge in India, Venice’s Rialto Bridge in Alaska, Great Britain in the Bay of Bengal, Venice in the Sea of Marmara, the Mideast off the coast of South Africa – what strange paintings. Buildings and countries remain isolated in alien landscapes. Maric rearranges the globe, creating a weird new map of the world. Mostar in the same picture with the lion and domes of Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Venice – to refer to another work – is no more absurd and perverse than to put a sewing machine and an umbrella together on an operating table, as Lautreamont’s influential fantasy suggests we do. Maric’s fantasy geography is even more provocative, for it deals with political realities rather than innocent objects. All her places are charges with history, ancient and contemporary. It turns out to be the same history – a narrative of inevitable conflict.

Not only are Maric’s pictures overtly Surrealist, they are covertly Dadaist. They have an apocalyptic dimension. There is a sense of impending doom, as the image of a tiny Israel in an immense black space suggests. It is a melancholy picture of crisis and catastrophe, terror and nihilism. Maric compares the little nation to an embryo. It is unclear whether it will be stillborn or healthy. But it seems clear that no amount of artistic care can save it. It is realistic to believe that Israel will endure in the hostile void, survive in the surrounding black death? It already seems half dead – as much a ghost as an embryo. In another picture catastrophe has already occurred. It is visible in the collapsed bridge in the water, in the jagged shadow cast by the bridge. The bridge is irreparably ruined, broken in pieces. It is a modern structure that has become a relic of barbarism. Its utopian ambition – to connect opposite shores – has ended in futility. Maric’s picture looks objective, but there is a sense of dread in it, an awareness of death.

Maric’s paintings ingeniously reflect her ruined world in their very materiality. Her canvas is a patchwork grid of modular fragments. It is as though it was torn apart then put back together again, far from seamlessly. Maric is a kind of archaeologist, piecing together the canvas to reconstruct painting as well as history. Each piece is imprinted with a ghostly detail of image, generated by a computer and painted over, adding to its hallucinatory character. Manipulated by the computer and transformed by paint the original image no longer seems like a reproduction even though it clearly is one. It has become less descriptive and mechanical and more visionary and elusive. It is strangely abstract however obviously representational. For Maric, painting is an enigmatic dialectic of mechanically reproduced image and hand painted surface. It has become postmodern, a synthesis of familiar images and modernist painting – of the prosaic and the expressively profound. The hallucinatory intensity of Maric’s pictures is partly the result of this ‘duplicity’- her cunning integration of mechanical image, impersonal and clear, and organic paint, personal and murky. It is the reason why her images seem to be both in and out of focus – precise yet impulsive. Yet another dialectic is responsible for the effect of ironically doubled vision: the tension between Maric’s lively, often turbulent texture – its painterly richness reflects, however indirectly, the very physical terrain of her abstract maps – and her flat expanses of wide open space. Its emptiness confronts is through its bold color, often impassioned red. The intimacy of Maric’s painterliness and the grandeur of her space reveal the poles of her sensibility. Paradoxically, instead of the usual horror vacui, she feels intensely alive in the abyss. There is a grim attractiveness to Maric’s sensual surface and sublime space, making her pictures all the more uncanny, dramatic, and, strange as it may seem to say so, picturesque.

Mostar is Maric’s family hometown, and the famous stone bridge of Mostar was built by the Ottomans in 1557 and destroyed by bombing in 1993, more than four centuries later. The bridge took ten years to build, and probably no more than ten minutes to destroy. As Maric says, the painting in which the bridge appears is ‘the most personal one’. Maric was born and raised in a country that no longer exists: Yugoslavia. Its destruction – the civil war that tore it apart – is symbolized by the destruction of the Mostar Bridge. Just as the bridge became a heap of meaningless rubble, so Yugoslavia disintegrated into the Balkan states – an obsolete heap of small nations, the rubble of the empires to which they once belonged. The Northern Balkans were once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Southern Balkans were once part of the Ottoman empire, neither of which exist any longer – just as Yugoslavia no longer exists.

The Balkans have always been a never-never land, neither entirely European nor entirely Asiatic. They are a place where opposites meet, sometimes integrating, more often at odds. At their best, they have a hybrid identity – a dialectical identity in which Western and Eastern senses of self-cross – fertilize. But more often they are at their worst: each little state has its own naïve sense of ethnic identity. It is simpler to have such a self-same identity – much less troubling and more narcissistically satisfying – than to have an identity which reaches out to the Other. To progressively integrate with the other is to become an original self, with more resources – those of another culture – than the old narcissistic self. In comparison to the fresh new sense of self that existed in the cosmopolitan citizens if the hybrid nation of Yugoslavia – a rich, dynamic, complex self, straddling contradictory worlds yet having its own integrity – the sense of self in the Balkan states seems provincial, impoverished, and regressive. An obsolete, narrow-minded traditional sense of self has won out over the expansive modern sense of self.
Pseudo-autonomy has triumphed over enriching relationship, disconnection over connection. This is the tragedy that haunts Maric’s paintings – the tragedy explicit in the destruction of the Mostar Bridge. It symbolizes the breakdown of the relationships that formed modern Yugoslavia. The Mostar bridge is a metaphor for the failed union of opposites that is Maric’s tragic theme. It is clearly a personal as well as social tragedy for Maric.

Balkan identity is a tribal identity supported by religious ideologies as well as ethic loyalties. The tension between the Balkan states is heightened by religious as well as ethnic differences. Religious conflict and ethnic conflict become one and the same. Some people are Roman Catholics, others are Orthodox Christians, and there are also Muslims. Integrated into empires, or into Yugoslavia – a southern Slavic nation, as distinct from such northern Slavic nations as Poland – they were forced to be tolerant to their differences. But they were never seriously united. Their antagonisms were too deeply rooted to uproot – too ancient and primitive, indeed, instinctive, to overcome. The Balkan states tended to rebel against their conquerors, rarely achieving independence, but when they did they were at each other’s throats. The assassination, in Sarajevo, of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was the catalyst of one such revolt, for it ignited the first world war, which ended with the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. Yugoslavia also broke up in civil war: no common purpose could hold the Balkans together, nor could they live in peace. The attitude of live and let live – tolerance for the other – demanded a degree of emotional maturity that they lacked. But there is nothing new in this: empires collapse, not only because they were attacked by other empires, but more usually because of internal tensions – the inability to bridge differences, religious and otherwise, which prove too great for emotional as well as cultural reasons.

Maric’s pictures deal with decline and fall of empires – Yugoslavia was a small empire of incommensurate states, inherently absurd and subtly entropic like every empire – and its devastating effect on the individual. Her pictures are about the inability to bridge differences, despite the effort to do so- thus the many bridges in her pictures, all historically significant, and all destroyed or obsolete – and its destructive consequences. The physical distance between Great Britain and the Asian countries that were once part of its empire seems to have been bridged – Maric puts them in the same space – but they in fact remain far apart, suggesting their emotional and cultural as well as religious and social differences. There is no real bridge – no inner connection – between them. The sea still seperates them, confirming that they remain at odds, indeed, radically different.

There is another irony: in the past, the small kingdom of Great Britain conquered a large part of the Asian continent. Now, in Maric’s picture, it seems about to be swallowed up – certainly overwhelmed – by the countries it conquered. Maric puts it between the pincers if India and other East Asian countries, both enormous peninsulas. It is as though it is about to be crushed. It is certainly in a difficult position. And it also looks ridiculously small and trivial in comparison to the landmass of Asia. The discrepancy between them remains – their difference in physical size – but its meaning has changed. Maric has painted a picture of dominance and submission, with the once dominant power now in a position of submission – humbled before the newly empowered countries it once humbled.

Maric does the same thing with Venice, which, like Great Britain, was once a great sea power but no longer has command of the sea. It is also a small place, and was also a colonial empire. In 1198, during the Fourth Crusade, it invaded Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, and now Istanbul, the capital of Turkey, once the center of the Ottoman Empire. It was suppose to protect the Byzantines, who were Orthodox Christians, from the Muslim Ottomans invading from the East, but the Venetian Crusaders – who were Roman Catholics – decided to invade themselves, taking advantage of a dynastic crisis in the Byzantine Empire. They carried of tropies if their conquest. But the point is that Maric places Venice at the entrance to the Bosporus strait. The Surrounding land masses – the opposite sides of the strait – form pincers. Like Great Britain, Venice is about to be crushed and consumed or torn to pieces, as though in punishment for its crimes – crimes against humanity as well as a particular country.

The Bosporus strait separates Asia from Europe, old antagonists. They are next to each other, separated only by water, and on Maric’s map modern bridges cross water of the strait. Turkey belongs – literally, that is, geographically – to both worlds. It is a country where they converge. But do the bridges truly reconcile them? On Maric’s map, the bridges are puny lines, hardly noticeable. They mark the division between Asia and Europe rather than decisively link them. They can easily be bombed or destroyed like the bridge over the Danube. Like London’s Tower Bridge, the Mostar Bridge, and Venice’s Rialto Bridge, Istanbul’s diminutive bridges stand alone in the wilderness, pathetic dream pictures. The picture of Saint Peter’s, displaced from Rome to the coldness of space – it is clearly a foreign presence that has lost its greatness, like Great Britain and Venice – makes the point definitively. For all its power, which is also imperial – its domain is global – Catholicism is as destructive as they have been, all the more so because it claims spiritual not simply political and cultural authority and power. Maric’s works are about her outrage at their tyranny.
In a sense Nina Maric is a displaced person, a fact reflected in a displacements of her imagery her misplaced geography, as it were. In a note, she quotes Kafka’s The Castle: ‘K constantly felt he was lost or had wandered into more foreign lands than any human being before him, so foreign that even the air hadn’t a single component of the air in his homeland and where one would inevitably suffocate from the foreignness but where the meaningless enticements were such that one had no alternative but to go on and get more lost.’ Her global paintings are images of her own lostness in the world, which has become abstract and groundless space because she has no place to stand in it. All she can do is take a stand against the social realities that have displaced her. Her paintings are her true home, for they deal with her sense of homelessness.

Nonetheless, her pictures, which are allegories of destructive conflict, reveal her own sophisticated hybrid identity, at once cosmopolitan and deeply rooted in historical awareness. It encompasses, with thorough and incisive knowledge, learned from bitter first hand experience, all the places she pictures. T.W. Adorno once wrote that ‘Absolute negativity is in plain sight and has ceased to surprise anyone,’ and it is n plain sight in Maric’s pictures. For him Auschwitz brought it into plain sight. For Maric the destruction of the Mostar bridge and the self-destruction of Yugoslavia did. If the task of art it to make reality freshly surprising, as Baudelaire suggested, the Maric has made the reality of historical negativity emotionally surprising. She has used abstraction to make ugly reality as fresh and vivid – oddly beautiful – as it was when she first experienced it. This is a positive achievement, suggesting that all is not negative and disjunctive in Maric’s paintings, which is why they are dialectical as well as artistic success.

Imaginary Bridges Between Barren Places

One would think, looking at Nina Maric’s Bridge paintings, with their global sweep, that she was at home in the wide world, comfortably moving between continents, at ease wherever she finds herself. But no, Maric writes, her work is about the terrible feeling of being lost and misplaced in the world. Maric is a displaced person, a refugee from Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists—a world that has been wiped off the map, that tore itself apart in war, regressively disintegrating into the small states out of which it was formed, all culturally, emotionally, and ethnically at odds. To Balkanize means to divide a country into small, quarrelsome states, and Yugoslavia re-balkanized itself. In a sense, Maric’s paintings are about her own feeling of being balkanized—fragmented into parts, which she desperately tries to connect, however incommensurate they remain. Where, then, is Maric’s home? That’s the question that her paintings raise, all the more urgently by reason of their dramatic character. I suggest that the answer is nowhere and everywhere: Maric claims that the paintings are about building personal roads and bridges that might that might lead to the OHouse, that is, lead home, thus ending her exile. The important word here is might: it suggests an unrealistic possibility, lost forever. Maric’s roads and bridges don’t in fact lead home, that is, to no where personal. I think the hallucinatory bridge she sketches in work after work is her home and exile in one mythical space. It is an imaginary structure – an eccentric hypothesis eternally in the making, a fragile mirage in an impersonal world. Maric feels at home on it because it symbolizes her feeling of homelessness, which after her many years of exile she feels at home with – however excruciating it continues to be. Maric’s bridge is make-believe, an absurd hope, pathetic and glorious at once, like the proverbial castle built of thin air. In Bridge II,III, and IV it stretches between barren mountains, while in Bridge I it stretches between an upwordly tilted bridge and a column and then to a towering skyscraper, as though uniting, however tentatively, modern and ancient civilizations, as her native country did. The bridge’s ascending diagonal suggests movement to a better and brighter future, as the luminous skyscraper implies. But the spaces between antenna, column, and skyscraper are barren – emotional wastelands – as they always are in Maric’s paintings. The brown earth looks scorched, reminding one of the fact that Yugoslavia was occupied by the Nazis, and put up a fierce underground resistance. Even when lush with greenery, as in Bridge II, Maric’s space looks remote and inhospitable-a rough terrain, not entirely fit for human life. Does anybody live in this alien territory? It seems deserted, not only because it is viewed from a distance, but because the few signs of human life that appear in it seem trivial compared to its vast expanse. The stark contrast between bright sky and dark earth – both forbidding – reminds me of the similar contrast in Albrecht Altdorfer’s equally cosmic painting of The Battle of Issus, 1529, in which the human conflict is reflected in the conflict between the elements. Maric’s conflict is also elemental, but is is a psychic as well as social conflict. And yet the conflict between Alexander and Darius, the former from the West, the other from the East, has a certain affinity with Maric’s conflict, for she is torn between the East and the West, like the Balkan countries, which have something of both in them, for it is where they meet. Maric’s bridges are hesitant, restless, almost gossamer lines, resembling twisted cables. Hovering between visibility and invisibility, they seem to spontaneously generate out the Beyond, and in fact form a sort of cosmic dome – a cloudlike, colorless rainbow in the sky. No road is suspended from this enigmatic bridge. It is the ghost of a bridge, and it goes from nowhere to nowhere: Maric’s work is about absence – from her native land, and with that from a basic part of herself. I suggest that building on the height in Bridge I symbolizes this unreachable lost self, and the shakiness of the ground beneath it her insecurity. The haziness of the scene suggests this absence and insecurity – one can’t go home again, as Thomas Wolfe said, which is why Maric’s bridge is an unconscious fantasy, and why her world is divided against itself. The irony of Maric’s emotional situation is especially evident in the aerial map paintings of the Holy Land and England. Small, isolated islands of obscure space, they convey the fragmentation that is the subtext of Maric’s paintings. Extrema Americae makes this threat of decomposition ruthlessly explicit, and suggests that it may be constant. The tension between Maric’s intense linear gestures and densely packed painterliness is the esthetic essence of her map pictures. It concretizes the tension between the separated lands the wishful bridge spans. Maric’s paintings are laid out in a grid, like the flat maps from which they are derived, but her grid is an eccentrically constructed low relief, a sort of personal mosaic made of different sized collaged patches, unevenly aligned and sometimes overlapping, rather than a mathematically uniform terrain of modular planes. Tension informs the very fundament of her space, implying that it is a terra incognita that can never be adequately mapped. It is as though the very ground if her being has been crudely broken apart by an earthquake. Psychosocial space has become a disjointed puzzle whose parts can never seamlessly fit together again. Maric’s rough and tumble handling – her vigorous painterliness and surging lines – suggest that emotional harmony is impossible. Signs of catastrophe are everywhere in Maric’s paintings: her bridge symbolizes the breakdown of her world rather than the re-integration after its loss. Maric’s paintings are dream pictures, rich with sociopolitical significance, but, more basically, fraught with existential anxiety, as she acknowledges. They are, for all their often blissful radiance, nostalgic nightmares. They are Maric’s strongest, most disturbing, mournful works to date.

Donald Kuspit is an American art critic, poet, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and former professor of art history at the School of Visual Arts. Kuspit is one of America’s most distinguished art critics.