Post-Lacanian theoretical literature of Luce Irigaray, from the French feminist circle around Julia Kristeva, who introduced the female body into the existing social system of art, had a great influence on the liberation of female speech and the emergence of a new discourse. Through Matrixial narratives, by opening of the artist towards her own body conditions and self-analysis, the female body and condition become a speaking subject. A subject that recognizes the language can also speak, and it must
speak because it is the only way it can last.
The post-feminist theorist Julia Kristeva believes that the language produces the world, pronounces and reproduces it, creating a symbolic membrane within which the subject recognizes itself in the language and has to reproduce that system in the process of becoming independent so that it would not return to the space of the pre-subject. The language, including the subject, is not neutral even in this work where the woman\u2019s position is clear.
In the focus of nine narratives (nine months of pregnancy) the artist sets her own naked female body, her undisguised feelings, thoughts, intimacy, love and concerns. She is entirely within the circle, she has her own place in the system of the language that she created herself and in which she speaks from the position of a Subject. Naturally, even more than that, outside of it, her jouissance speaks to others as well \u201cWrite yourself! Your body needs to be heard\u201d (Cixous). It raises the question of why
it needs to be heard, and the answer is not because of the breaking of boundaries of a primary male language system, social transgression is not the motive. The language spoken by the artist is the way to overcome her own conditions, the matrix through which she is free to speak the truth. The way she lets it out of herself is the speech covered by theoretical discourse, contemplation of her own condition, writing of diary entries, concentration, self-questioning and meticulous artistic work that gives her the pleasure to speak.
The intersubjectivity and context of pregnancy sets the author in the position for artistic research and action. Gravidity becomes a potential for creative speech in the first person. That way the work focused on her condition becomes a way of selfliberation and is very therapeutic. Applied skills are an excellent blend resulting in nine self-images in nine different phases which, like a mirror, reflect the conditions that the artist is going through during pregnancy. The artist establishes a discourse with herself and by trying to find a space for herself establishes a relationship with her child, that is, towards the child.
The author\u2019s speech is complex, it contains readable and hard-to-understand places, symbols and elements from her real environment that constitute a collage of emotions, conditions and words which describe it; the drawings are separate entities, each of which represent one month.
Fictional and real, nature and artefacts, private and public, present and absent, discipline and chaos are dichotomies which make up each of these entities. Multiple layers of language, interpretation, meaning and possibilities are ways in which the artist discovers the Barthes pleasure in language.
The author\u2019s signature is recognizable in lines, motif; although complex, it is smooth, understandable, readable, but the tone the author is giving to the drawing is serious, heavy. The emphasis shifts from the description of the condition to the emotion that the tonal drawing inevitably leaves. Like pages of a diary that fade, a slightly melancholic patina covers the months of pregnancy. The whole process and efforts are shrouded in some times gone by. All the effort to awake the condition, to record and archive, gives us a graphic document about evanescence, growth and change. But, the changes the author is experiencing in relation to her body and conditions become the generators of new art practice that she directed towards herself, inwards, towards the subjective experience. Thus, this women\u2019s writing repeats the idea that the body is a language.
The artist Mary Kelly in her famous work Post-Partum Document deals with continuous monitoring of her own conditions through the collection and recording of the child\u2019s condition, obtained by measuring and studying. Keeping a diary and using text to articulate the personal is characteristic of Ines Matijevi\u0107 Caki\u0107 as well, but her materials do not consist of external objects as an instrument for creating new artistic content, but of the reflection of the inner world, recycling the subjective, imaginary, consciously and unconsciously collected materials, items for the construction of a new system of representation. In her work the influence of Lacan\u2019s psychoanalysis and his concept of the \u201cmirror stage\u201d are shifted from the material external artefacts from the mother\u2019s seven-year-old archive (Kelly diapers, anal prints, baby undershirts, doodles) to the intersubjective archive. Regardless of the materials artists use, the result is highlighting the role of a woman as an artist and mother. Pregnancy and motherhood and that certain something (\u201cShe is not entirely here. She is quite here. But there is something more,\u201d Lacan, 1999) through the work of Ines Matijevi\u0107 are a contribution to the evaluation (of the art) of motherhood, which is so necessary in the very moments while it lasts; keeping attention, focus and the mirror are the ways in which the artist contributes to the strengthening of the system of values, while putting herself in a critical position. Each drawing constitutes a separate thematic unit: anticipation, disruption, love, identity, control, identification, separation, among which Shape and Name are the more material external witnesses of changes which are alternating in the artist\u2019s consciousness, whereas the sewing machine in the process of identification becomes the \u201cmachine for living\u201d.
Just how much the unaware and symbolic language is familiar to the author can be seen in the graphic stylization and motifs, for example the dresses as a form of citation mother \u2013 daughter. Resemblance to our mothers that we drag through life can make us angry, but we rejoice when we find it in our daughters. The matrix by which our body or face is shaped, that we recognize in the motions, tone of voice, gestures, is more evident to others.
Without big words, in Matrixial narratives the artist takes stock of a specific period of her life, finds her own framework and place within the image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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A short introduction to the Matrixial narratives
or nine images in one drawing of Ines Matijevi\u0107 Caki\u0107
The artist is certainly no longer that mythical being, alone with his work, giving each other and knowing their own meaning, self-sufficient in its self-intelligibility. It can be said that the position is completely opposite. Thus, the artist is in some sort of centre, in an environment made up of concentric circles of thick layers of different influences, pressures, challenges of aesthetic and theoretical but also ethical nature, what the art theories about the artist and his work as autonomous beings once called secondary influences. Against that environment, simply called social, the artist cannot, and in many ways does not want to fight because for a long time he has considered that fight to be a social, even subjective, utopia. Illusions about his own subversive powers have long been lost; moreover, precisely these circumstances are the ones that affect the artist with an arsenal of multitude of his own diversionary tactics and strategies.
But if these social circumstances really are seemingly or actually impenetrable and unbreakable, then where can the artist seek and find areas of his freedoms, and not only for himself, but also for us, the others?
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Many solutions are possible. For example, and not accidentally this one, seemingly impossible and contradictory to the essence of things \u2013 namely that in the space of many ideas of untouchable social conventions that make him their prisoner and hostage he finds a place where the link of that chain is the strongest and with the strength and power of his own work he turns it into his own gain and benefit of his freedom. And this can only be done if and when all of your life and artistic potentials are serving a purpose of self-preservation as an existential and self-creation as an aesthetical, but also ethical category.
Carefully shaping his artistic world deeply immersed in the nature of himself as a man, in the nature of his own being liberated from the burden of great ideas and ideologies, therefore free in the world but free from that world as well, the world of tyranny of free choice in which, by the way, almost everything is forbidden, the artist turns to himself and his deepest intimacies.
For female artists, hence already self-determined and named according to gender\/sex, these intimacies are precisely that, gender and sex.
Ines Matijevi\u0107 Caki\u0107 belongs to that art, or she is the artist of that art, or of the world of that art, and therefore uniqueness in general and in it uniqueness of individual.
Therefore, if it is about an artist who seeks and discovers her own subject of sex or gender in the shackles and chains of her captivity in a world of socially ossified conventions, including those feminist attitudes, and in that seeks her own artistic practice as a logical direction, it should be noted that Ines Matijevi\u0107 Caki\u0107 is not that artist. For her, that direction would be the line of least resistance, easy and thin. She does not break conventions on the principle of provocation, destruction and diversion, with both her work and attitude, but takes the much harder and complicated road, the road that considers itself as a thought, idea and theory of context, but also her own artistic practice that gives these ideas, attitudes, actions and behaviour artistic form.
Or, as she wrote in her diary notes or texts that should be read like a diary, \u201cExploration of my own subjectivity through drawing and the creative process of designing this work have contributed to the understanding of many questions that have arisen to me as a mother of a two-year-old girl, a pregnant woman and an artist, relating to complex maternal feelings, sensibilities, love, anxiety, emotions, fear, control, and questions about my own artistic identity. Through Matrixial narratives I strived to comprehensively accept sentimental feelings and multiplied mood extremes by separating myself from the presumption that subjectivity and motherhood in contemporary art are shameful.\u201d
Ines Matijevi\u0107 Caki\u0107 openly and frankly \u201cseparates\u201d herself from the givens of assumptions of bigoted forms of traditional social conventions and their ultimate will, but even more than that, she also separates herself from the settings of radical forms of feminist will that she certainly knows and to which she is almost inclined, enjoying the benefits of the width with which these findings open the horizons of possible and desired freedom, but still not so much that she would be a slave to them or, more precisely, uncritically serve them. From this theoretical world she takes only as much as she needs to gain mental, intellectual and emotional benefits.
And to me it seems that these are the frameworks and dimensions of social context that this artist more or less willingly accepts as much as she rejects them. This opens and closes one world, the rational and intellectual one, not without emotional dimensions of course, and opens another one, or one more in One, the artistic world of Ines Matijevi\u0107 Caki\u0107.
It is the world that the artist shapes and creates as \u201cher\u201d artistic world, a world that is formed by thinking, where this thinking is deeply immersed into emotions. It is not just a journey through the blessings of Arcadian maternal sensitivity; it is rather a journey through the Scylla and Charybdis of multiform and very contradictory feelings which include the world of Ines Matijevi\u0107 Caki\u0107 to whom, \u201ca mother of a two-year-old girl, a pregnant woman and an artist, \/ many questions \/ have arisen relating to complex maternal feelings, sensibilities, love, anxiety, emotions, fear, control, and questions about her own artistic identity.\u201d
Drawing as thinking \u2013 \u201cI draw by thinking or vice versa, I think by drawing,\u201d as the artist would say \u2013 we recognize in all forms of her exhibition practice, or her professional career, even when it is just one drawing among many others and of different authors, a drawing in the physical environment of a gallery, a drawing in various media solutions. Therefore, in all the exhibitions, in the sense that \u201cartists present themselves and not their drawings\u201d, Ines Matijevi\u0107 Caki\u0107 is impeccably consistent, unques-tionably underlining her aesthetic and ethical principles. One might wonder whether this is just pretentious moralizing. It is, but these criteria and categories were established by the artist herself, that is why we are checking them. Not because we are suspicious, but because we are trying to understand this art. Finally, by writing the catalogue data for instance, I realized that the biographical info is more than a r\u00e9sum\u00e9; it is a whole in which birth, education, work experience, individual and collective exhibitions as artistic experience are at the same level, one and indivisible.
Just as an example, drawings in collective exhibitions (Biennial), an individual exhibition in Waldinger, the previous one in Pula and finally this one ahead of us are the best examples of how precise this artist is when it comes to her every public presentation.
Again, perhaps presumptuous, it seems to me that as much as each of the previous exhibitions was precise, thorough, thoughtful, and finally realized as a specific art practice in each media solution, this cycle titled Matrixial narratives seems to be probably the most comprehensive and most complete artistic project that this artist embarked on. Even if we leave aside the fact that it is part of her doctoral thesis, which means that a lot of scientific methodologies were invested in the project, the concept of the exhibition is crystal clear in its artistic purity and independence. If we take only a small and entirely indiscreet peek into the titles of chapters in which she was preparing the final and executive solutions of her practice, like Personal understanding of the subjectivity of motherhood in the encounter with art practice, The review of works \u2018Untitled \u2013 a work dedicated to Nola\u2019 and \u2018Imaginary bestiary\u2019, According to \u2018Matrixial narratives, Mother\u2019s opinion and her body, Artistic conception, Drawings interpretation and then the names of nine drawings of equal size from this exhibition, roundels of 140 cm in diameter, in pencil drawing technique on white surface titled 1. Anticipation, 2. Disruption, 3. Identity, 4. Control, 5. Love, 6. Identification, 7. Shape, 8. Name and 9. Separation, it is clear just how complex and demanding the project that the artist embarked on is. It makes sense to once again refer to the artist\u2019s own words so that her thoughts, in words as well as in drawings, would prove their indisputable clarity: \u201cThrough the works Untitled \u2013 a work dedicated to Nola, Imaginary bestiary and Matrixial narratives I overcame the presence of a sense of shame to subjectively depict through my own work the personal experience through the prism of an artist \u2013 observer, in the encounter with motherhood and pregnancy it encouraged me to reflect on the process of my own transformation through pregnancy and motherhood, and thus the possibilities of transforming my art practice that was opened to the exploration of the subjective experience of motherhood that I expressed in Matrixial narratives. This drawing polyptych is expressed in the form of a graphic novella that builds its narrative through the collection and interpretation of contents resulting from the synergy of study of psychoanalysis, diary entries and visual comments through a series of figurative drawings.\u201d
In that world, the world as a space where sex\/gender feminist theories as well as the experience of other art practices are well known, she seeks and finds a place for her artistic being and likewise her living being, a woman. Common to both paths and goals is the experience, acquired by knowledge, but even more so the one acquired in life and art. And that is the path when thinking by drawing, as well as thinking by writing, is realized as a work that we see, watch, contemplate, interpret, and in fact it is a process in us who are looking identical to the one that the artist is going through, in one and all nine drawings. Medium rather than the technique of drawing and thread, that these drawings have also gone through, are as much a metaphor as they are a reality of the actual art practice, Hegelian thoughts about the \u201csilent weaving of the spirit\u201d that shapes the entirety of civilization, but in the art practice of Ines Matijevi\u0107 Caki\u0107 it is primarily the silent weaving by which she builds the entirety of her own being.
Vlastimir Kusik<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Matrixial NarrativesPolyptych, 9 drawinsPencil on paperP 140 cm2014 Ines Matijevi\u0107 Caki\u0107: Matrixial Narratives Matrixial narratives are a study of one\u2019s own pregnancy in nine tonal drawings that outline the preoccupations of the artist, exploration of women\u2019s writing\/language in art and its position. On the other hand, the context in which the works are created shifts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":608,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n