Contribution in "Critical Art in Contemporary Macedonia" (2016)
Book: Critical Art in Contemporary Macedonia
Editor: Jon Blackwood
Publisher: Mala Galerija, Skopje with the help of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland
Year: 2016
Contributor: Jasna Koteska, pp. 307-317.
ISBN 10: 6086598703
ISBN 13: 978-6086598709
See more about the book here
You can buy the book on Amazon here
EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK
[...]
JON BLACKWOOD: What Are Your Earliest Memories of Art?
JASNA KOTESKA: I
have a twofold answer.
On the one hand, I don’t believe there exists such a thing as earliest memories for each individual. Even if one starts to honestly enumerate the earliest lyrics one remembers, or colors, or scents, it would still be a lie. Humanity has long memory, but humans don’t. Freud has an article On Screen Memories and in it he says that earliest memories are always false. When I positively claim I remember a given childhood scene, it is either a scene told and retold so many times by my parents, that I later adopted it as “my own” memory, or it is an event which took place in my adolescence, but I later “projected” it onto my earliest childhood, as on a screen, Freud says. We should not disregard his insights as psychoanalytical cynicism. The neurosciences of today offer multiple evidences that Freud was downright correct. Every time I remember a given episode from the past, neurosciences say, I am already erasing the previously existing memory, and forming a new one instead. The older the memory, the more twisted and reworked it appears to be. What constitutes my past are the mosaic pieces, tesserae, with which I “decorate” my personal history in order to be able to say that I, too, am “complete”, just like the rest of us. Which is a nice assemblage, but it has a little value regarding the truth of one's being.
On the one hand, I don’t believe there exists such a thing as earliest memories for each individual. Even if one starts to honestly enumerate the earliest lyrics one remembers, or colors, or scents, it would still be a lie. Humanity has long memory, but humans don’t. Freud has an article On Screen Memories and in it he says that earliest memories are always false. When I positively claim I remember a given childhood scene, it is either a scene told and retold so many times by my parents, that I later adopted it as “my own” memory, or it is an event which took place in my adolescence, but I later “projected” it onto my earliest childhood, as on a screen, Freud says. We should not disregard his insights as psychoanalytical cynicism. The neurosciences of today offer multiple evidences that Freud was downright correct. Every time I remember a given episode from the past, neurosciences say, I am already erasing the previously existing memory, and forming a new one instead. The older the memory, the more twisted and reworked it appears to be. What constitutes my past are the mosaic pieces, tesserae, with which I “decorate” my personal history in order to be able to say that I, too, am “complete”, just like the rest of us. Which is a nice assemblage, but it has a little value regarding the truth of one's being.
When people say “You can take away everything from me, but you
cannot take away my childhood”, it is not without a certain irony that one of
the things which people never truly posses, might be precisely their own
childhoods.
On
the other hand, your question is crucial for any discussion about art. Humanity
does have earliest memories of art, only, they are not individual. One of my
favorite documentaries, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) by
Werner Herzog, tells about the oldest human painted images yet discovered in
the Chauvet cave, crafted some 32,000 years ago, twice as old as the Lascaux
caves. The birth of art, I believe, is neatly connected to constituting a
territory and then transcending it. Each territory is formed through lines,
colors, and sounds -- precisely the three basic determinants of art in its pure
state. However, the striking part of the film, for me, is that the painter left
palm prints on the paintings, but on each prints the opposable thumb is
missing. The most common artist of the Paleolithic is the one who has one or
several fingers disfigured. One hypothesis says that young hunters were undergoing
certain initiations, in which they were having their fingers cut off. But a
second hypothesis says that if digits are missing, it is because it is a
mythogram, it is meaningful; the artist is trying to tell us something; the
artist wants to leave a testimony: everybody has five fingers, but I, the
artist, must tell you that no perfect model exists; all that is complete is a
lie. The only perfect model of a human is a human who is disfigured, incomplete,
without the possibility to point to her completed identity, deprived of the
possibility to tell her personal history, etc., just like Freud tells us.
In
the Chauvet cave the oldest artistic signature in the world is stored; that
signature teaches us that art becomes art only when it deliberately leaves the
territory, leaves the finger cut off, leaves the cave. Art is about leaving a
thought, a memory, a habit, a value, a friend, a lover, an object, a finger, a
territory. Leaving is not a gesture of selfishness; on the contrary, it is a
selfless act. Appropriation is selfish, leaving is on the side of transition
rather than death, it is about being out of stasis, and the artistry of leaving
is something we learn from the Earth. People don’t know how to die because we
rarely learn how to leave. Animals, on the other hand, seek a
corner to die in, seeking a
territory for death; they know when to leave places still hospitable, sites still livable.
Art
is impossible without leaving. Take a look at Kafka, or Kierkegaard and their
broken engagements. Or the colors in Van Gogh or Gauguin, the two greatest
colorists: in their works, they employ color with greatest hesitation, Deleuze
says, it took them years and years before being able to take on color, to
consider themselves as worthy of color. Art is about leaving the known territory
and going into the unknown, it goes with certain insanity; it is also a slow
process of making a portrait of something one reaches for the first time. In
the 19 century Van Gogh saw the starry nights as they were photographed only at
the beginning of the 1930s by the first star trail photographers. Van Gogh was
the first to leave the earthly gaze; with
no technology and with a naked eye, to see
for the first time the actual motions of starts in the night sky due to the
rotation of the Earth. Recently I was amazed to learn to which extent the star
trails of one of the greatest star trail photographers of today, Lincoln
Harrison, resemble the Van Gogh’s Starry
Nights paintings and drawings. Great art precedes science, it paves a path towards
the deeper knowledge, and it is always by means of leaving. To
your actual question, my earliest conscious memories of art would be, than,
when I first learnt that once I would have to leave; when in something I
recognized the biological reminder that there is an embedded necessity to depart.
[...]
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