History is a Dying Star, Jelena Telecki, NEW14, ACCA, Melbourne
Emerging from her experiences growing up in ex-Yugoslavia, Jelena Telecki’s paintings evoke a universe that may at first seem remote, but which is in fact both personally and historically ever-present. Indeed, it is disturbing to consider how quickly the very real suffering incurred by wars and other civil strife, fades in the media where it is constantly displaced by other contemporary manifestations of the same. For individuals though the opposite is the case, ‘world’ events are internalised as subjective history that is unique and non-universal. Yet Telecki’s paintings also prove that the representation of subjective truth need not automatically result in simple illustrative narratives. In the artist’s recent body of work, references to the overreaching ‘utopian’ ambitions of states and their leaders are unhinged from easy readings of historical causality. In these paintings, the expected sky-gazing of such leaders meets images of the universe, of stars and planets that, rather than suspended predictably in an infinitely ethereal firmament, seem mired instead in a viscous muck. Elsewhere, the concrete materialisation of the utopian dreams of state leaders is evident in depictions of abandoned monuments. Yet here these structures appear literally lost, washed up from a distant past, symbolically bereft due to their contemporary incapacity for aggrandising signification. Overall the content of Telecki’s paintings restlessly shifts between satire and despair, between subtle ambiguity and the harshly concrete, between the deeply personal and vastly universal.
The profile of famed WWII partisan and later Yugoslavia’s supreme leader, Josip Broz Tito appears in one of Telecki’s most baldly titled works Leader. Of course, throughout Yugoslavia’s post WWII history, Tito’s portrait was everywhere and inescapable. In this instance however, we are presented alternatively with the ‘great’ leader in profile. As a result we are symbolically able take control of the image and by extension, of our own lives in the absence of the need for a guiding patriarchal figure. Staring at the side of his face, the leader cannot watch us, cannot judge or dominate. Almost like a painting from a courtroom trial, in this work we calmly observe Tito’s dour, almost guilty expression as he gazes ahead heavy-lidded in a quasi-casual attitude that is far from visionary or heroic. Adding to this subjectifying reading are the strange coloured circles rudely superimposed over the leader’s face. These circles seem to be emerging though the paint like some kind of formalist disease. Otherwise they might represent abstraction’s reemergence and ultimate historical triumph over state-sponsored Socialist Realism, a type of historical genre painting of a particular illustrative banality. Such circles also appear in the painting State Astrologist, although in this case, as the title suggests, the circles depict stars. As the artist has described, in Serbia at the time of the 1991-2001 civil war, various state-sponsored astrologists were employed to predict the ultimate victory of the Serbs as ‘God’s chosen people’ (1). Facing intense sanctions during this period, the daily suffering of the Serbian population could always be expediently excused by its leaders as both expected and obviously temporary. In Telecki’s painting, the desperate smugness of such an attitude is overshadowed by an image of an unerringly ghostly impotence.
This overriding sense of muteness and isolation is also conveyed by paintings of stars and planets. A work like Saturn speaks of that planet’s mythological associations with emotions of despair and melancholia. By no means typically sublime, Telecki’s Saturn tilts as though sinking into the quicksand-like substance of its own painterly representation. In a similar vein, Collision depicts the absurdly pneumatic clash of three planets on the verge of bursting. Mars, the ‘bringer of war’ in Roman mythology, appears now as a giant omnipresent blood-red eye. The gloominess of another painting, Dead Stars, forces us to consider the extreme and disconcerting relativity of human and astral events: due to their sheer unimaginable distance from us, many of the stars we ponder so romantically at night, have been dead for centuries. It is merely the waning light of these celestial entities that reaches our eyes even if this still deeply affects us, just as the fallout of once cataclysmic historical events believed to have been ‘resolved’ does.
The painter’s representations of dead monuments evince a related atmosphere mixing resignation with absurdity. Collison 2 portrays an atypically horizontal monument rising as an abandoned architectural shell. Its ironically futuristic appearance suggests science fiction. Elsewhere, Textbook shows a jagged crystalline-looking monument by Yugoslavian state sculptor Miodrag Živković’. This type of monument, Telecki recounts, she used to highlight in textbooks in a state of resistant boredom during classes detailing the historical battles to which they were dedicated (2). In all these works, representations of discredited leaders, dying stars, colliding planets and shipwrecked monuments, Telecki’s subjective poetics tell a story that is as dark and troubling as it is pointedly absurd. It is a story equally dismissive of inflated attempts by history’s ‘players’ to overreach the limits of their abilities to the detriment of many.
Alex Gawronski
Catalogue essay, originally published for NEW14, 2014, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, Australia.
1. Jelena Telecki in conversation with the author, December 2013
2. Ibid.