Exit, foreword (2018)
Published in:
Jasna Koteska, “Boro
Rudić, Exit”, Boro Rudić, Exit (photography monograph), Propoint, Skopje, 2018, p. 2-5.
ISBN 978-608-66095-0-4
ISBN 978-608-66095-0-4
Exit
Jasna Koteska
[...] Rudic’s
territory is linked to vectors of departure, which is why this book is called Exit. Still, this does not mean leaving
the territory. Leaving it just means entry into a new territory. This is the
reason why his photographs are full of signs, emissions of signals, railway
tracks, paths, steps, streets, entrances, fences, all being there as signals
intended for seekers. The objective of these signals is to be aux aguets, lookouts
for the observant eye, the camera never looks in panic in the hands of Rudic.
He catches the folds of the landscape, the line of the rock in order to
discover the new syntax of the space. The photographs from Exit are not there as portraits of
culture,
but aim to capture a specific spectral dimension of reality, akin to the yellow
sky or field in Van Gogh or the grass in Munch. This does not mean that Rudic
is stepping over into another form of art, that of painting. He remains within
the realm of photography, but at the same time he is always with one foot in
the world of painting.
1.
When
we first met, Boro Rudic explained to me as follows the concept for his latest
photographic book, Exit. He
told me that the project consists of four cycles. The first cycle is Entry, the
entrance into the city, the habitat, being headed to a place where people live.
The second cycle is Messages, which
represents the city itself. The third is Exit –
leaving the city, reaching
for the outside. The fourth cycle is the Finish constituting
a form of liberation, expansion, the possibility of an exit, a new birth. The
photographs are printed on hand-made paper, whereas people and animals in them are
silhouettes always seen from afar, in passing or in the act of leaving. Listening to Boro Rudic (the bard of Macedonian
photography and the holder of the highest professional title master
photographer), explaining in a calm, collected and complex manner the
concept of the Exit exhibition, I
caught myself thinking instinctively – he is not just a master of photography,
but
also a veritable philosopher of existence. Rudic does not possess “just” a
photographic eye, a must for any genius photographer, or “just” a talent for
perception, something without which he could not frame the passing world – no, he also possesses the cultivated
vocabulary of a philosopher.
It
is as a philosopher that Boro Rudic proposes through Exit a new concept of desire. This is
not a desire for the individual object: a tree, a path, traffic signs, the human silhouette, an animal, a chair, the
railroad, the bycicle, the rock, the field. It is the representation of the
overall context, an aggregation, a total image which appears in that singular
moment when the objects accumulate to the stage of their complete meaning. Rudic’s photographic
art is not theater, because theater can be constructed just like you construct
a factory, this being just a matter of production. Rudic’s photographs
constitute the opposite of the delirium of the theater, because they are not
linked with history, the tribes of men, to what Rimbaud described
as: “I’m an animal, a Negro“. This
delirium can hardly be defined as geographical or political, but is rather
defined by the family. Desire is something of a different nature. The world of
Boro Rudic is not confined within the small intimate geographical or political
family, it is no mere insignificant family affair. Rudic does not reduce
objects to a single meaning (horse is the
image of the father, the tree is the image of the tribe). If there is delirium in Rudic, it is more of delirium as a cosmic category. Not in the
sense of a commendation for choosing a territory (“I
entered the room, I entered the city, and now I am exiting”). Certainly not. We find in Rudic a process of
deteritorialisation,
through which he feels the
direction, the situation, the context. He does not partake in the landscape in
order to prevent an event from happening, he neither tries to parent or police
the situation, rather he is the one who is on the lookout to make sure that
things are not reduced to banality. Rudic does not employ banal
elements, nor does his art serve as a cheap ploy for fantasy. The photography
of Boro Rudic is more of an attempt to stop the world, the people, the objects
and the landscapes from turning into banalities.
2.
Territory. The
photography of Rudic is
full of silhouettes of people and animals. Yet, this is no “domesticated”
space, the space of families and pets, just as the photographs of the city by Rudic
are not mere postcards of the city. The city is freed
from the multitudes of people, it’s a city in which people have organized space according to
their signalizations. Rudic depicts individual, dual and multiplied objects
(folded chairs under a Che Guevara graffiti, mannequins in boxes behind a fire
extinguisher), while some of the objects are slowly disappearing, nearing the
end of their life or are out of use. No one notices them anymore, because no
one misses them. Yet, they are not objects that scathe. They are objects of the territory. Rudic’s territory is
not rounded, we can see the elements which comprise the territory, yet his
territory is not submissive to property or estate. The city and the suburbs in Rudic
are not barbaric, even when they are abandoned. You can feel that someone has
been there and is just gone for the moment and will be back, the territory is
not abandoned and empty.
Rudic’s
territory is linked to vectors of departure, which is why this book is called Exit. Still, this does not mean leaving
the territory. Leaving it just means entry into a new territory. This is the
reason why his photographs are full of signs, emissions of signals, railway
tracks, paths, steps, streets, entrances, fences, all being there as signals
intended for seekers. The objective of these signals is to be aux aguets, lookouts
for the observant eye, the camera never looks in panic in the hands of Rudic.
He catches the folds of the landscape, the line of the rock in order to
discover the new syntax of the space. The photographs from Exit are not there as portraits of
culture,
but aim to capture a specific spectral dimension of reality, akin to the yellow
sky or field in Van Gogh or the grass in Munch. This does not mean that Rudic
is stepping over into another form of art, that of painting. He remains within
the realm of photography, but at the same time he is always with one foot in
the world of painting.
3.
Colour. The color in Rudic is always opaque,
creating a dreamlike or vision-like atmosphere. However, this is not for the
purpose of presenting everyday life as grey, quit to the contrary. The color in
Rudic is gnostic, in the sense that for the gnostics the universe is still not
fully formed, it’s still not fully a reality. Gnostic philosophy states that
the universe is intentionally created incomplete, resembling more a periphery
as it is depicted by Rudic: rough land, tufts of grass, walls rising over
dumps, cracks in the sidewalks, crooked fences, half-finished buildings. All
of it resembling a pre-ontological ancient material from which the universe was
molded, but yet to be finished. Another reason why through the cracks of all of
the structures (buildings, lawns, playgrounds) peers this pre-existing matter. Rudic’s
universe is a gnostic universe with an authentic affection and understanding,
no matter how melancholic, for the creator of this incomplete and imperfect
universe, but one devoid of the sense of horror or ontological defeat.
This
idea of an incomplete gnostic universe appears on two levels in Rudic’s work:
in the first and fourth cycle (Entry
and Finish) the world is free and
ready for a new act of creation, a better reality. In the middle cycles (Messages and Exit) Rudic tells the story of the world as it is: the scenery is
dominated by traffic signalization, paths, streets, railway tracks, as well as
used and discarded objects. Aware that the
world is incomplete, there is no celebration of the human figure, they are only
present as silhouettes. Any portrayal would
only prove an inadequate copy, an excessive act. Sometimes, graveyards appear at
the moment of exit. They represent the symbolical permission for the world of
the dead to mix with the world of the living and nature. Parks, pathways, trees
are a frequent theme in the second cycle Messages
where the city is represented. Parks in the middle of the city are the materialization
of the idea about the symbolical node that binds the living and the dead, a
connection which aims at breathing vitality into death and the idea that death
is not the final destination of life. This is the
reason why Rudic integrates both living and withered threes, to illustrate the
way in which we humans learn from vegetation. Just like a
dead tree allows for his decomposing part to feed another plant and to re-enter
the cycle of life, so is death thus liberated from under its marble tombstones and
allowed to createа
a new life.
4.
Exit. The
birth of art is closely linked to the constitution of territory and its later
abandonment. Each territory is formed through the use of lines and colors, the
basic determinants of art. The caveman painter, the Paleolithic artist left
without exception an imprint of a hand on his or hers painting, with each hand
lacking a finger or more. The thumb-less signature is the first artist’s
signature in the world, but also the first one that teaches us that art is
created only through the act of leaving behind your territory, leaving behind a
finger, the cave, the city, only through Exit. Art is leaving behind a thought, a habit, a friend, a lover, an object, a finger, a territory.
The
act of abandoning is not a selfish gesture, quite the opposite. Staying is
selfish, leaving is what we truly learn from the land. People most often do not
know how to die, because they don’t know how to leave things behind. Animals,
on the other hand, always look for a quiet corner to depart peacefully, always
looking to find a territory for their death. Animals
know how to abandon spaces which are still hospitable and locations which are
still good to live in. Art is impossible without the act of abandonment. Look
at Kafka and Kierkegaard and their abandoned marriage engagements. Or the
colors of Van Gogh and Gauguin, two great colorists. They use color in their
works delicately, unobtrusively. It took them years of doubting and hesitation,
Deleuze states, to accept themselves as worthy enough of color.
5.
The
City. Texture. The city regularly serves as the theater, the
stage where the author goes to purchase his or her products, characters, just like the farmer goes to the
livestock market. But, this is not the case with Rudic. He doesn’t go to the
city as to a market, his camera doesn’t try to capture stock images, he looks
for the very character of what is called the”City”. He rejects the notion of
the city as a theater, he doesn’t try to domesticate it. Rudic is searching for
the “original”, its wildness and melancholy, thus underlining the differences
between the worker in photography (stock photography) and the artist. The city is populated with wild
originality. The world of Boro Rudic is the world of partial emptiness, but not
a
forbidden zone in any way. What are the societal implications of his
photographs? 1) Does it represent a post-transitional
world with its half-constructed and unfinished buildings, 2) Or is it a post-industrial world of disasters:
biochemical and architectural, 3) Finally, is it a secularised world where the
nomenclature coexists peacefully with the field and the lake. Every photograph
exudes an aura of mystery, then how to interpret them? Rudic tells us that
there is no border between the urban and the rural, the city and the passage.
The border is reality itself, the Exit is made of the same matter as the city.
Rudic’s
photography possesses at the same time two opposites and two excesses: the
matter from which the world is made and the void which has allowed for the
possibility of a world. What is striking in the work of Rudic is his specific photographic materialism, the
direct physical influence of texture on his photography. It is the texture
which generates an effect of pacifistic expansion of time, suspension of
urgency similar to the works by Van Gogh, a sense of massiveness and spiritual
corporeality, as if is made of a “material capable of sentient thought”. The
city here is a post-industrial wasteland, overgrown vegetation sprawling
between the walls, concrete tunnels, railway tracks, staid water in a quarry,
silhouettes of animals wading through thickets of wild flowers. Nature
overlapping with industrial civilization or the remnants of human artifacts
(folded chairs, fire extinguisher, Che Guevara graffiti). This is the matter
which opposes aggressive domination and exploitation and just like matter
itself – comes to life.
Translated from Macedonian by Milan Damjanoski
Translated from Macedonian by Milan Damjanoski
Post a Comment