The art program of the City Theater animated the audience with exciting artistic content again this summer - on the occasion of the exhibition "Corpus Aeternum" by the great Montenegrin artist Dimitri Popović in the Church of Santa Maria, we also saw his performance "Magdalene's Night" on Poets' Square. It builds on several compositions of Popović's cycle of works "Corpus Aeternum", in which the motif and theme of Mary Magdalene is present, and this performance was conceived as part of a panel discussion on sacred motifs in fine art "Sacred as the representation of the indescribable".
Popović's biblical Mary Magdalene, actualized in the image of a modern woman, embodied by the model Sandra Marković on the Budva square, as well as the conversation itself, gathered a large audience (the event lasted more than two hours), who took part in the debate with their questions. about one of the broadest, most mystical and most interesting topics in fine art. In addition to Popović, Aleksandar Čilikov, a professor at the University of Podgorica and an art historian, and Siniša Jelušić, a professor at the FDU in Cetinje, and a long-time researcher of the spirituality of the Western and Eastern Christian Church, spoke about the sacred as the representation of the indescribable, and the discussion was moderated by the critic Bojan Munjin.
As Popović pointed out when opening this topic, the motif of Magdalene appears in the framework of the exhibition project "Corpus Aeternum" and in the performance "Magdalene's Night" on the Poets' Square, in the context of the topic of the panel on sacred motifs in fine art, and thus outside the consecrated environment of the Church of Santa Maria in Punta, on the profane space of the square in Budva's Old Town, permeate the real and mystical through the actualization of the biblical motif.
"In addition to the thematic justification of this performance on the Poets' Square, given the theme of the panel, I also find a nice agreement with the spirit of the theater in general, because medieval rituals or performances had a direct influence on the formation of the theater," said Popović, emphasizing that Magdalene's character is extremely important in Christ's life and the Christian religion in general.
As an introduction to the topic, Munjin said that the space of the sacred for each of us who have come a little closer or entered it is a difficult place, the place of our responsibility, our conscience, our deepest composure when we think about ourselves and the unspeakable, and about the last questions and things, and we necessarily think about it when we are in the space of the sacred. The space of the sacred as spiritual in the broadest sense is actually a space of double contemplation - it depicts the world of metaphysical secrets, God, his mystical presence, i.e. God and man, his life and his destiny, which cannot be fully understood...
And painting between the spiritual and the aesthetic, according to Popović, precisely combines these two energies, and in that sense, showing the undisplayable, in fact, emphasizes how the exhibition "Corpus Aeternum" is coincidental.
"We have a performance in front of us - an installation that depicts Mary Magdalene, because she is the key person for understanding the life of Jesus. She was the first to see after his death that the tomb was without Jesus' body, and there we already have the phenomenon of the presence of the absent. We have this phenomenon in the church as well - the exhibition altar space is conceived as a scene of the indescribable - the invisible body of the resurrected is mediated by the symbols of his sacrifice. The altar represents at the same time the grave of Jesus - that duality of Christ's divine and human nature is important, that dual aspect of the God-Man is essential, because without that dichotomy, I will paraphrase Jung, the whole act of Christ's suffering and sacrifice on the crucifixion would be incomprehensible and would lack reality. Christ was not a disembodied spirit. He was the word incarnate. His human form is particularly important not only from the aspect of theology but also from the aspect of art, especially fine art. The body, that human body, expresses the complexity of the Savior's nature. Precisely in the artistic sense, the expressiveness of the body suffering on Golgotha can convincingly suggest the greatness of Christ's sacrifice. The divine aspect especially gives a mystical dimension to the nature of Jesus. On one exhibited composition titled "Pictures, Icons" I quoted Tertullian's thought: 'And the Son of God is dead, which must be believed, because it is absurd. And buried He rose again, which is certain, because it is impossible'".
The crucifixion of Christ, as Popović pointed out, was a real event, death on Golgotha, but his spirit did not perish, and the altar became a place of mystical transformation, death and resurrection, that is why Christ is always inspiring for artists.
"Crucifixion or sacrifice on the cross has a complex meaning, religious, historical, mystical, philosophical, and of all the cycles I was most concerned with the theme of Christ's suffering and death on the cross. I think that for an artist, a special creative qualitative problem is how to give a new perspective to an old theme, while keeping the essence of the plot unchanged. The expressive richness of this motif allowed me to express myself in a long series of creative media, both classical and modern - drawing, painting, sculpture, i.e. collage, object, assemblage, performance. This is how a kind of presence of the invisible or the display of the unpresentable is realized, which particularly occupied me as a problem of an artistic-aesthetic and symbolic-mystical nature," said Popović.
Analyzing the theme of depicting the unrepresentable throughout the history of art, Chilikov pointed out that painting is the visual language of the Holy Scriptures, and mentioned the monk John Damaskinus, one of the first Christian theologians who was a great fighter for the respect and painting of icons.
"Damaskinus wrote his most important polemical writing precisely against the iconoclasts, it was a great conflict in Christianity, and Damascene is one of the biggest supporters that Jesus Christ, the Virgin and saints can be painted in human form, and perhaps no civilization has found such a foundation in fine arts, as Byzantine found it. I have dealt a lot with sacred art, that which is related to both the West and the East, it refers to the period of the Middle and New Ages, and I know how artistic culture functions in the mission of Christianity. This topic is large, almost endless, and very important. For example, when lecturing at a dozen art faculties in the country and abroad, I often told students that a Christian temple, be it Orthodox or Catholic, except for a Protestant one that does not belong so much to art culture, represents a multimedia art project".
For an art historian, according to Čilikov, the Christian temple is an elite museum and a place where we really have a multimedia art system.
"It's easy to explain - the most elite building from the point of view of architecture is certainly the temple, through that sacral architecture world architecture can be viewed not only in the Middle Ages, but in ancient civilizations. Ever since religious systems have existed, and this is especially characteristic of Christianity, music has been extremely important, because it accompanies all rituals, and the entire development of music takes place through sacred culture. Not to mention painting - the entire fine and applied art of the Middle Ages rests on sacral technique, sacred paintings, icons, miniature painting, easel painting, mosaic painting, holy books.... Just to remind ourselves how luxurious church vestments, textile processing, gilded crosses, utility objects, woodcarvings, ceramics, porcelain... It is, therefore, a whole system of applied art, and the most elite. So, all art disciplines, as well as literary ones, came from the sacred," said Čilikov, emphasizing that what television, media, and digital technology are today, was sacred fine art and culture in the Middle Ages.
At the beginning of his presentation, Professor Siniša Jelušić radicalized the introductory thesis about the representation of the unrepresentable, because, as he pointed out, there is a typological difference, it is about two differentiated languages - the language of the icon and the language of the picture.
According to Jelušić, Popović's exhibition, which contains great artistic qualities, directly introduces us to one of the most difficult problems, which is how to present transcendence artistically.
"A problem that is particularly interesting, and we have already mentioned it, the conflict with the iconoclasts, although it was resolved at the seventh Ecumenical Council, I would say that it remains latently present in some way. Let's say, in the Russian avant-garde, Kandinsky poses a similar problem again, and Malevich sharpens it to the end. Malevich very clearly states in his concept of the problem of placing the Black Square on a white background: "The body stops, prevents the presence of transcendence". Thus, the XNUMXth century repeats the problem that was present in the first centuries of Christianity, and what is interesting to me is that this problem of representing God does not appear in literature, poetry and music, but is posed in the fine arts. In the system of art, therefore, it seems that painting causes the most polemics and disputes," said Jelušić.
The motif of suffering and suffering
Popović's painting oeuvre as a whole, as pointed out by Jelušić, is a strong internal tension of opposing, conflicting forces.
"In the cycle "Corpus Aeternum" and the performance "Night of the Magdalene", I would say that two clear charges are present, eros and thanatos. Death is present there, but we also have a strong erotic moment. Eros is covered by that repressive thanatos, and it is actually a universal category that is characteristic in the psychological sense of an almost general structure of being. What is also a strong characteristic of his works is the problem of suffering and suffering, in "Corpus Aeternum" he shows himself in the cycle of Christ's suffering, but also in all other motifs and themes he dealt with in his cycles. In existentialism or in existential metaphysics, the key problem of human existence is precisely suffering - what it is, what it means, and what are the ways to solve this most difficult problem. Popović has been consistently following this problem and motive for decades, and through literature," Jelušić pointed out.
Bonus video:
