The inception of the image that we have of ourselves and of our own bodies coincides with the period of the formation of our ego. According to Jacques Lacan, the ego is not an inherent part of us; it puts in its appearance during the mirror phase. The phase in a child’s development when the difference between the subject and object is not yet defined (between the “self” and all that surrounds this “self”), is called imaginary by Lacan. So in this phase of development the child is of the impression that its body is in a symbiotic relationship with its mother’s body and that there is no a clear boundary between their bodies. The appearance of the father, who denotes Law, means the introduction of incest as a social taboo and disrupts the image of the undefined border between the child’s body and that of its mother, which disturbs the libidinous relationship with the mother leading to a suppression of the child’s subconscious desire. The subconscious is constituted as a language, thus the “entrance” to language is in fact an entrance to what Lacan calls Symbolic Order, ruled by the Law of the Father. If we try to apply these principles in the field of art, or to be more precise, in the very process of artistic expression and the search for one’s own artistic expression, then we can say that the imaginary phase is in some way equal to the earliest period in the creativity of the future artist (the childhood period), when he expresses himself through the visual medium, empty of tradition, of values and the urge to create something that should be of value according to these or other criteria. The moment of cognition/recognition of values and traditions introduces him to the Symbolic Order of Art and, fearing castration, he submits to tradition and creates in accordance with it and its values or, in a different case, he chooses to kill the Symbolic Father and opposes tradition.
In his work (attributed to On Kawara, born 1932, i.e. half a century before him) entitled On Kawara: Today Series 1 May 1982 (on the blackboard the date of birth of Marko Stojanovic is written with a note: “Text verso: Marko Stojanovic, the artist, was born in Negotin today”) a young artist named Marko Stojanovic completely relativises the entry of the young artist into the Symbolic Order of Art. Instead of creating in accordance with tradition or against it, instead of speaking the Language of the Father or the Language against the Father, he forces the Japanese artist On Kawara (who here plays the role of the Symbolic Father) to speak in his own language (at the same time, Kawara has created his work of art on Vietnam on the same board) for his younger colleague and thus to introduce him to the Symbolic Order, which with this act on the part of the young artist is exposed to mild irony, thus treating with irony the everlasting need of artists to create in accordance with tradition or against it. In the catalogue, Stojanovic quotes a part of an alleged interview with Kawara in the New York Times where he explains the creation of his work: “I am often asked how I knew that such an important man had been born on precisely this date in a small and distance place, and I only say: Heaven knows! Three stars showed me the way… Then I found the data on the Internet and they proved to be correct. So I made this painting, without delay, precisely on May 1st, 1982. It was a step forward in my choice of this very important event to which I dedicate this painting. In the multitude of paintings that deal with political events, this one dealing with just one newly-born man also had to take its place!” Here Marko Stojanovic makes a parody of tradition: we are not turned towards the past - just the opposite, the past is turned towards us; its not the contemporary artist who researches tradition, it is tradition that tries to “presuppose” the future artist.
In the context of shifting the coordinates of the Law of the Father and re-interpreting or supplementing tradition, another work by Marko Stojanovic, “Tabula Marina”, is notable. The internationally known artist Marina Abramovic lectured at the Academy of Fine Arts in Novi Sad from 1973 to 1975. And it was here that Marko Stojanovic graduated from the Department of Graphic Design in 2005. After she left the former Yugoslavia, Abramovic was almost forgotten in the artistic circles of her former fatherland, and this did not change even after the great success she achieved with her work “Balkan Baroque”, which won an award at the Venetian Biennale in 1997. Today she is once more topical in Serbia, not for the works that made her renowned worldwide but above all as a financial supporter of the Foundation for the Protection of the Inheritance of Nikola Tesla, while her creative work is still insufficiently known. In contrast to the still existing “setting aside” of her work in her own country, in Tabula Marina Marko Stojanovic makes a montage of a photograph which shows the entrance to the Academy with a white marble slab such as were used in the former Yugoslavia to mark the houses where veterans of the War of National Liberation lived (let us not forget that both Abramovic’s parents were veterans of this war). The inscription on the marble slab says: “In this building, from 1973 to 1975, worked the internationally famous artist Marina Abramovic”.
Playing about with history, myths and tradition is a characteristic feature of other works by Marko Stojanovic too, and is particularly evident in his cycle “H&H Hajduk Veljko versus Hamlet”. Both these historical personalities have reached an almost archetypal level - one is an image of the melancholic, “to be or not to be” intellectual, and the other a typical hero and an example of a Serbian man (or little Serbian man). The demystification of the notions of Hamlet and Hayduk Veljko in Stojanovic’s cycle is carried out partly by the way their bodies are represented, since the body is the point of social creation of the subject. Although the body is a surface with libidinous and erogenous properties, within a social context it is primarily something that is perpetually inscribed and re-inscribed through social norms and practices, so that the body becomes a text that is subject to constant valorization and revalorization, a text that is constantly amended by various regimes and institutional forces which thus transform it into a sequence of relations that are established with other objects. In those relations, the surface of the body is marked by the law, social demands, custom and tradition, bodily habits. But in the case of the bodies of archetypal persons the inscription is written indelibl,, so that their bodies become a permanent message of the folklore tradition (in the case of Hayduk Veljko) and a message given its meaning by the interpreters of Shakespeare’s works and theoretical thought (in the case of Hamlet).
Contrary to Jacques Lacan’s view of Hamlet as a character obsessed by the figure of the father, who is actually a “hidden phallus”, Stojanovic presents a different Hamlet, a Hamlet obsessed by his own figure, by his own corporality and by his own sexual organ (no longer a phallus, in Lacan’s sense) which appears erect under his jeans. While Lacan inscribes a message on Hamlet’s body, depriving him of his right to desire, Stojanovic re-inscribes him, deleting the previous messages of interpreters that have accumulated on Hamlet’s body since he was put on stage for the first time, frequently demystifying and presenting that body as a body that could be found on posters intended for the gay population. This mockery of the Hamlet’s sexuality is announced in the very tragedy of the Danish prince. In Shakespeare’s drama there is a specific subversion of genders and kinship roles by Hamlet when he bids farewell to Claudius. Leaving for England, Hamlet says to his uncle: “Farewell, dear mother” (4.3.45-46). Claudius corrects him: “Thy loving father, Hamlet” (4.3.47). And Hamlet responds: “My mother. Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh, and so, my mother” (4.3.48-49). The visual re-interpretation of the legendary Serbian hero Hayduk Veljko (who was killed in 1813, during the defence against the Turks of Negotin, the town where Marko Stojanovic was born,) is again carried out through the way in which his body is presented. In Stojanovic’s works the body is not clad in the familiar ethnic dress, it is naked, with strong muscles, half-closed eyes and a sensually half-open mouth, while the wallpaper used is from Pedro Almodovar’s film Talk to Her (Hable con Ella).
Marko Stojanovic continues the re-interpretation of tradition in his book According to Marko, which is a collection of poems and illustrations. Its title is an allusion to the New Testament, but the name Marko does not apply to Mark the Evangelist, but to the artist Marko Stojanovic. In the eight chapters of According to Marko the artist moves and/or erases borders: the borders between white substances and the ground they are placed upon (salt, sugar, flour…) in the first chapter; the borders between artists’ materials and culinary ingredients in the cycle Art Food - Eat Art, in which 20th century works of art become cookies; borders between collective and individual art (designing a tapestry with a motif taken from Malevich); between the sacred and the profane in the chapter According to Marko; between the intimate and the public, the decent and the indecent, the ugly and the beautiful in the chapter The Artistic in Private; and between birth and death in the eighth and last chapter.
In most of the chapters of According to Marko, Stojanovic re-interprets and parodies or annihilates the dichotomy between the body and the spirit. This dichotomy has been constantly present in European thought since the time of Plato. Some of Plato’s attitudes are presented in his work Phaedo. According to Plato, the body possesses its own consciousness: “pleasures that come from the body” (65a7), “the body and its desires” (66c7), the soul can “share thoughts and pleasures with the body” (83g7) which can make it “take as  true all that the body claims is so” (83d6). But the real attitude to be taken by the soul is that “it should not pay attention to anything that comes from the body” (65a7), since the purpose a human being should achieve is “to free the soul as much as possible from its association with the body” (65a 1-2). The relation between the soul and the body is paradoxical; on the one hand the soul “manages the body and it is its master” (80a94b-g); on the other hand, the soul is “imprisoned” in the body (82e - 83a). In the lecture he delivered at the College de France on January 13th 1982 and later included in his book The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Michel Foucault tries to make clear the relation between the subject and the body according to Plato as presented in Alcibiades , where Plato expresses quite a different attitude concerning the soul, one quite different from “the soul imprisoned in the body” that should be freed, as in Phaedo; there is nothing in common with the soul’s winged steeds that we should drive in the right direction, as in Phaedrus; nor is it the soul built according to the hierarchy of instances which should be harmonized, as in The Republic. Starting from the advice given to Alcibiades by Socrates - “Know yourself!” (Plato, Alcibiades: 124b), which is followed by: “we should be concerned with our soul”(Alcibiades: 132c), Foucault begins his analysis of Alcibiades (129 b-130c).With this advice Socrates leads Alcibiades towards recognizing what “self” means, setting out from the question which means “Socrates is talking to Alcibiades”, i.e. who is it that is talking to Alcibiades?, an issue which, according to Foucault, is of particular importance, since in its essence it is the issue of the subject. Socrates, separating the talking subject from the act of talking as well as all the other elements accompanying that act, with the intention of “showing the subject in its irreducibility”, numbers a sequence of actions where the subject can easily be distinguished from the instruments it uses while performing an action. This it is how Foucault summarizes Plato’s principles: “What do we do when we observe something? We use our eyes, i.e. there is an element which uses the eyes. In general, when the body does something this means that there is an element that uses the body. But which is that element that uses the body? Obviously it is not the body itself, since the body cannot use itself. Shall we say that the one who uses the body is the man, man perceived as a union of body and soul? Of course not. Because even as a simple integral part, even assuming that it is next to the soul, the body, even as a supplementation, cannot be the one that uses the body. Only the soul remains to use the body as an object.” Thence, according to Foucault, in Plato’s works (at least in Alcibiades) the soul-body relationship is a subject-object relationship, “the soul as something that uses the body, the bodily organs and instruments.” Such a dichotomy between the body and the soul has been maintained to the present day in European philosophy, although there have always been authors who advocate the abolition of this dichotomy and the approximation of binary oppositions to the point of their disappearance. At the very beginning of her book Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz stresses that this is an act against dualism, against the perception of the physical and mental, body and mind, as things that exclude each other. She also suggest that there is no a sharp border between them, because they form the subject together. “The body has the whole explanatory power of the mind”, says Grosz, since “ all the consequences of subjectivity, all the important aspects and complexities of the subjects, can be adequately explained if  we use the corporality of the subject as a framework where the conscious or the unconscious can be used”. Yet the basis of the Western theoretical interpretation of the body, at the beginning of which stands Plato, is dualism and its somatophobia, which already has been discussed. The dualistic perception continues in the Christian theological tradition too, where the dichotomization of the body and the soul is constantly linked to the mortal and immortal, and this kind of union of the body with the mortal, i.e. the soul with the eternal, is seen personified in Jesus, who for theological thought, says Grosz, “was a man whose soul, whose immortality originated from God, but whose body and mortality are human”.
Playing with the body/spirit dichotomy, in According to Marko Stojanovic brings the spirit closer to the mortal and the body to the immortal. In the illustrations to this book, placed side by side, opposed (or maybe “closer”) there are the exhausted countenance of an icon and a strong male body from some erotic magazine. Stojanovic takes Jesus down from certain artists’ canvases and, multiplying him, presents him as a dancer, in a composition that is close to Matisse’s The Dance. In the book there are a couple of saints and a homosexual couple side by side, as well as the icon of St. Demeter and the monument to Hayduk Veljko.
In his works Marko Stojanovic carries out a demystification and re-interpretation of history and the collective memory. The whole tragedy of the Danish prince is marked by the urge to remember; the spirit demands that Hamlet remembers him (“Remember me” 1.5.111) and does not forget (“Do not forget” 3.4.110), but in that emphasizing of remembrance Hamlet should forget himself - his existence should be transformed into remembering his father and avenging his death. This is a metaphor for the debt that each generation owes to its ancestors, where the right to one’s own choice of existence is sacrificed - and where very frequently the present should be forgotten and the future be created in the name of ideals (and quasi ideals) from the past. Hence the works of Marko Stojanovic are an appeal for the reconstruction of remembrance, for its change, for a different reading of the lessons of the past, and are thus acts which do not merely satisfy lofty aesthetic criteria but also call for a different approach to our own future as compared to the past, a different approach to ourselves, since they also incorporate the ethical, which is in close relation to Marina Abramovic’s maxim: “Art without ethics is merely cosmetic!”
Goce Smilevski

Translation: Gulnihal Ismail; Lecturer: Peggy and Graham Reid