Others about Megi

 Story About Us   

 ...to be like other girls To fit in in this glittering world...   

In the past seven years, Margareta Jelić has been creating a series of animated movies that, for the most part, deal with the events and life of her main protagonist, Marta, who may or may not be her alter-ego. Marta and her friends live in cosy, pastel coloured ambients, they go out to nice restaurants, do picnics and throw parties. Their world is a replica of what fashion and lifestyle magazines offer us as a desirable model of life. However, just like in any good sitcom, or romantic comedy, Marta is not sure that she lives up to the expectations that this kind of lifestyle imposes. She even wonders whether she should put up an effort. Our confused and insecure heroine is trying to cope with all the possibilities laid before her, but she only manages to pose more questions. 

Margareta’s latest work, Four Stories About Us, is an animated omnibus that has the same trait as some other brilliant movies - such as Speed, or Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia — namely, the title itself tells you all about the movie. These four short animated movies speak about the yearning to define ourselves or become someone else, to experience great love or great adventure, and at the same time fulfill all the expectations that the society placed before us; in a nutshell, they represent the sum of daily thoughts of anyone of us. 

Margareta’s heroes do exactly what all of us do many times a day: they ask themselves what it would be like to be someone else. The notion of the proliferation of identity, of an almost unlimited freedom of choice, is one of the key themes of contemporary theory, art and popular culture. Appreciating a possible generalization, and even banalization of it, Margareta deals with this theme in a charmingly autoironic way, which takes away all the portentousness from her work. Her heroes are facing limitations in the field of unlimited freedom, and find ways of surmounting them, at least in their imagination. The first story might be offering a solution to Marta’s dilemma — should she really be ”like all other girls” or go for an adventure and uncertainty? This story shows us what it is like to be a fearless lion tamer, who, night in, night out, looks death in the eye and captivates the crowd. The second story, slightly gothic in its feeling, recounts Marta’s encounter with a mysterious stranger that could turn our main protagonist into a tragic romantic heroine. The conclusion of it is partly mysterious, partly disappointing. The third story speaks about a young man who looks at passers-by from a Parisian cafe; the scene resembles an ideal beginning to a 1950s Hollywood movie. The fourth story is a small autobiographical vignette, undoubtedly the most intimate part of the whole movie, and an opportunity to enjoy, alongside Margareta, a trivial, everyday situation. 

It seems that the key question that Margareta Jelić considers in her work, whether she paints or makes animated movies, is: how do we know who we really are in a world that presents us with a seemingly infinite number of lifestyles? If we live up to the expectations of our environment, if we adopt all social and media standards, if we always use adequate hair shampoo and always choose the right dress for a party, does it all take away from us the opportunity to think about what we really want? If you took notice of the adventures of her heroes, the obvious answer is that to have a precise answer to that question means there simply is no choice. As long as you are in a position to opt for a new, unknown and uncertain road, you will be tempted to take it although you do not know what awaits you at its end. What if you ran away with the circus, or with a stranger from a train who calls you by the name of a literary heroine who ended badly. What if you decided to spend your life looking idly at the passers-by in a big foreign city? There are no answers to that; only more questions.    

Marina Martić

 

Private Life As Painting As Art   

All of us were and are lost, and know it, and we simply try to set tle in to our lost-ness as comfortably as we can 

Mun tean/Ro sen blum   

It is a commonplace that contemporary art has no consistent ”look”; namely, the concepts and practices of contemporary art form a network of fluctuating forms and positions, that is, an ever-changing constellation that has no distinct, well-rounded, fixed nor final shape. The contemporary art world recognizes painting, among a myriad of art forms, as one with a long and sometimes turbulent history of affirmation, domination and contestation, but which, nevertheless, still has and exhibits a capacity to actualize itself as ”contemporary” and ”authentic”. Regarding the tendency to view painting partially, if not completely, and surely not for the first time, as an exhausted option, the question of what it is that gives contemporary painting its credibility, meaning, significance and position within the contemporary tendencies in art and culture, whether we recognize it as cliche or an evergreen standard of art critique, history of art or writing about art, is still relevant, owing to the ”survival” of the practice of painting itself. 

From the perspective of history, the possibilities of the new techniques of reproduction represented a huge challenge to painting — on one side, there were photography, film and video, and, on the other, art movements which studied the conventions of modernism and its institutions, that is, which, in a new way, established connections between art and life (such as performance, land art and conceptual art). In 1981, Douglas Crimp wrote that the only way for painting to be recognized as legitimate art practice would be its participation in the developed institutional critique, which in general inspired radical art movements in the preceding years.1 But, from many critics and curators the new flourishing and self-confident presence of painting in the 1980s represented, according to Jason Gaiger, a ”triumphant consolidation of the threatened artistic tradition and a decisive rejection of the oppositional spirit that had dominated the previous two decades”.2 It seems that painting today reflects some kind of ”consolidation of the threatened artistic tradition”, but, as Barry Schwabsky notices, retains through ”its Modernist and Conceptualist background the belief that every artist’s work should stake out a position — that a painting is not only a painting, but also the representation of an idea about painting”.3 

After her last solo show, that had featured photographs and video installations, one of which had been very technically demanding, Margareta told me that she wished to paint again; in other words, to replace the fast media with the slow one, the cold with the warm, the machine with the body, the digital recording with the brush stroke. That is how the material (paintings and animated movies) for the Four Stories About Us exhibition was created. The paintings emerged along with the digitally animated movies, as a kind of ”blind field” of the animations, or their complementary fragments. The connection between the painted and the animated pictures can be somewhat direct (for example, the Cafe painting vs. the third story from the Four Stories About Us, and the In the Bathroom painting vs. the fourth story from the Four Stories About Us), or loose, amounting to the repeating of a detail (A Night in the Hotel vs. the second story from the Four Stories About Us), or sharing a theme (Going to the Circus and Learning About the Nature vs. the first story from the Four Stories About Us). It is usually thought that photography, film, video and digitally generated pictures work as a catalyst for the process of critical reflection about the boundaries and possibilities of painting. However, Megi’s latest paintings are certainly critically rethinking the possibilities of painting, and this process makes them even more focused on the exploration and critical rethinking of the nature, boundaries, potentialities and results of images produced by new technology. These images feature ”underlaid” details or units that point to an essentially witty interpretation  of various theoretical extrapolations on the nature and essence of image - e.g. the pixelized rerview mirror in Going to the Circus, the turned off televison, ”empty” mirror, ”opaque” window, and a painting with a skiing genre theme as a hole in a wall / ”opened window” in A Night in the Hotel; analogue image in the mirror, the illusion of ”watery” walls in the painting titled In the Bathroom. Not only do these narrative, feminized, elegant, transparent, theatrical sights, so close to camp sensibility, interpret the ”sombre” (theoretical) literature in an entertaining way, but they play the role of the index of painting understood as an exploratory process aimed at investigating the capacities of current painting and its relation with images in general. In that sense, the animated Four Sories About Us represent a derivative, a vestige of painterly activity. 

Another current issue related to contemporary painting is whether and to what extent the relation between the image / painting and empirical reality, with its interesting and complex history, has lost its capacity to engage the spectator. In other words, the privileged position of painting as a source of visual information, and a means of the representation of reality, has dissipated over the last century due to the rapid development of image-producing technologies. The development of the mediatized world has not only decisively changed our attitude towards the older modes of reproduction, but also problematized painting as a slow media, and its capacity for creating the illusion of (absent, idealized...) reality. This development results in the (over)saturation with images and information that cannot be assimilated, and even less be put into a coherent frame, or recognized as an outline of a unique referential system. In that sense, the strategies of ”floating view”, ”floating signifier”, or artistic positions based on fictions may seem a logical choice because ”we simply try to settle into our lost-ness as comfortably as we can”. 

Margareta’s stories are autobiographical. By fictionalizing the events of private life, the intimate world is tucked in behind the ”scenes” of general themes, such as interpesonal relations, alienation, love, male-female relations, themes of identity, the Law of the Father etc. The pulp tone of Megi’s works, drawn from the products of mass culture, becomes a parody and (auto)ironic reflection on the banalizing of these themes in the visual ”texts” of popular and mass culture. Art as painting as private life. 

Painting as art as private life. Anyhow, just another Uproar (Confusion).   

1 See: Crimp, D; The End of Painting, October, 1981 

2 Geiger, J; “Post-conceptual painting: Gerhard Richter’s extended leave-taking”, u: Perry, G; Wood, P; (eds.) Themes in Contemporary Art, Yale University Press, The Open University, 2004, str 92 

3 Schwabsky, B; “Painting in the Interrogative Mode”, u: Vitamin P, New Perspectives in Painting, Phaidon, 2006, str 8                                                    

Jasmina Čubrilo

About the missing parts…                       

The past is somehow always situated in Piranesi-like endless, “historical” maze-the wreck, designed of the oblivion, and of the interpretations of the past events according to the perspective of the current moment. If “history” is to mean the stable and tough collective memory, produced for the needs of the particular society, than “memory” presents the soft and changeable, “uncertain” version of the memory/oblivion for the particular society, as well as for the most intimate version, for each of us separately. The memory of an individual represents the most specific, unrepeatable highly sophisticated and individualized “historical” text in which History, Memory, ethnical, racial, religious, social, social status and every other belonging overlap, distilling any kind of generalizations, and getting them back into the domain of the concrete experience, multiple reality, to life itself actually. 

Marc Auge has written once that the space is necessary frame for memories and if happens that our memory fails, it is just because the memories are leaving its spatial frame. If we take the suppressed as “unfaithful memory”, memory whose spatial frame has been destroyed, then the return of the suppressed would imply the reconstruction of the spatial frame which disappeared with the intention “to feel again what has been missing”. 

Installations of Zorica Vasic and Margareta Stanojlovic (re)construct the spaces of the childhood of these two artists. 

In the second case, “the search for the lost time” was initiated by the occasion which every mother/parent experiences with the birth of a child, and that is the recognition of (possible) one’s own “first steps” in discovering the world, exactly by  the of all those ways in which child interprets, organizes its space. Installation connects two spatial frames: current, Teodora’s and past, Margareta’s. In other words, in the space which is formed by child’s present, we have the space of our own (perfect) past written. The installation brings together to the same level memory of the distant feeling of carelessness, the idea of innocence, the assumption of the management of reality without mediations as well as the awareness of the current series of conventionalized relations which produce every day reality. 

Why are we obsessed with the search of the past? It’s probably because the missing parts keep tripping us. 

Jasmina Cubrilo 

Tales on Love and Separation   

Mary Kelly's "Post-Partum Document" was a seminal work of the seventies in which the mother-child motif was addressed in manner unprecedented in contemporary art history. In the project Kelly has conveyed a conceptualist process of documentation to introduce an interrogation of one of contemporary art’s central and most symptomatic blind spots: the woman as artist and mother. Her seven-year process of reflection and visualization of that relationship was highly influenced by theoretical psychoanalysis, in particular by its linguistic reformulation by Jacques Lacan, which is frequently referenced to in the work.   

Namely, Kelly has used her relationship with her infant son as raw material, worked on to simultaneously construct a material archive of her mothering experience, produce a work on the social and psychological construction of motherhood, and redefine the role of an artist as producer in the frame of production, reproduction and re-articulation of gender roles and questioning divisions on the line between the public and the private, insisting on the issue of art/life connection, as quite some experimental artists of the times. In that respect, she drew subtle, but traceable relations to the procedures and works of then actual artists, such as Joseph Kosuth, On Kawara, Art & Language and Douglas Huebler.   

She has been gathering and cataloging, researching, interpreting and re-interpreting material on stages of separation of the child from the mother, not in a strict frame of producing an objective documentation on the process, but as interrogation of her own preoccupation with it. That did mean monitoring and archiving traces of a search for her own identity as a mother and that of her child, in a specific relation that was on one hand completely idiomatic, and on the other rendered to form an art performans. The whole project had a situational feature - use of commonplace environments, occurrences and customs, a structural feature – dealing with the cycles of natural life, and a self-referring or feedback feature – related to things or events which talk about/reflect themselves, which were all essential constituents of art practices that were prominent at the time.   

“Thinking Bad Girls”, by Margareta Jelic, is a clean and quite dematerialized homage to this work, rid of all the vests, dirty diapers, hand imprints, and insect specimens that in Kelly’s work stand for the mother’s memorabilia and how she makes sense of separation from the child. Margareta Jelic’s work also avoids the systematic structuring of direct experiences of the process and of quasi-scientific data that are in Kelly’s work presented by the visual diagrams. Margareta Jelic goes more into the field of fantasy and fiction.   

Installation by Margareta Jelic is a result of her research into the structure of relations between the mother and the child in the pre-Oedipal period, conducted simultaneously on three different levels: the level of personal, fully embodied, emotionally heavily loaded experience of motherhood, level of meta-discourse on the work of Mary Kelly, and the level of experimentation with models of representation in contemporary multimedia art practices in order to use them in producing an interactive media based installation that would materialize the research in the manner that is fully lens-based and fictionalized. As to the structure of the spatial display of the project, it is being realized as an ambiental installation comprising of a video work, projected onto a wall, then of two digital prints showing some aspects of the mother-child relation, a work in which audio recordings of children songs, reinterpreted by the author of the project, control the speed of the flow of images of the drawings of her daughter, and an  interactive book, made of thick plastic coated cardboard, upon whose pages the frames of other three video works of the author are being included, in a manner which is, powered by programs such as Max/MSP and Jitter, enabling interaction of the book with the viewer, who is, by browsing through the book, triggering the beamed projection of the respected video works onto the wall. These works all together make one project and their relation in respect of content, media, and the dimension provide with an atmosphere of an installation in whose range the viewer is not passive, but is being navigated around to actively experience and reflect them.   

While Kelly has also realized her work through different media, they were all avoiding direct representation of the participants in the process, and the strategies of documenting it were focused on collecting material evidences of its abject corporeality, such as shitty nappies, the scribbles over heart-felt diary writings, and its reflective impact on the very formation of both subjects in the process, constantly tested by and testing the Lacanian frame of interpreting it. Margareta Jelic, even though making a homage to the project of Mary Kelly, mainly insists on the completely opposite, except in the segment with the drawings flowing by the rhythm of reinterpreted children songs, which is the most direct experiment with Kelly type of work. What we see in other segments are the direct representational images, still and moving, of the daughter with the mother (present either in the frame or behind the camera, but still intervening into the frame by her voice), and those images are played with in either a documentary or quasi documentary manner.   

The other important characteristic of Jelic’s work is interactivity. One can say that Mary Kelly had also rendered her work being quite interactive, but that was on the level of the direct corporeal response to it’s abject content, and as well as on the level of inducing a kind of direct reflection on what is to be shown as the life world of a female artist in the project in which she equates art with life (motherhood was never up to then treated in such a manner in that context). Jelic decides for advanced media as the means for making the relation with the audience interactive and for their experimental, not conventional use.   

The visual and narrative content of all but one segments of the project is fully focused on the exploration of daily rituals, small intimate festivities and other ordinary life moments through which the complex relation of the mother to the child is being depicted, in its full emotional color and structural ambivalence coming from the urge to keep the unity with it, on one hand, and the attributed task of total relinquishment of the child to society, in order to make it into a social subject, on the other. The only narrative line that seems at the first glance to shift the focus of the complete work is the one on a total destruction of the city, caused by the evil clown, appearing incidentally in the scene in one of the videos in which the author plays herself as leaving the office of a psychoanalyst, and is spotted only by her, who suddenly realizes that the only way to escape the disaster is to run cross the bridge, while explosions burst the city. It strongly destabilizes and reframes what one could take for an idealized harmony of the represented mother-daughter relation.  

This “extimate” segment of the project, as still being partly intimate, in constructing the setting for the scene by drawing from some real life content of the author, who is engaged with the methods and practices of psychoanalysis both as passing through the analysis with a psychoanalytic therapist, and as an artist researcher into the methodologies of theoretical psychoanalysis, and partly external to her, as not fitting fully into the mother –child relation theme, actually points to the very kernel of the problem addressed by it. It functions as what Lacan calls the point de capiton (the quilting point) by rendering what was taken for a perfectly ‘natural’ and ‘familiar’ situation to be fully denatured, even  loaded with horror and threat. A small supplementary feature, in this case the appearance of clown in the office of a psychoanalyst, a detail that is not expected, that is out of place and makes any sense within the frame of the scene, intervenes and reframes everything. 

In relation with the figure of the clown in the Lacanian frame of references, it is worth mentioning the paragraph in his 1974 Lecture in Rome, when Lacan calls himself a clown, as an analyst involved with a practice that relies on establishing a relation of transference with the patient, playing the subject supposed to know, the one who is to, in one hand, provide with an illusion of providing the patient’s inner life with full meaning, and, on the other, to enable him to get behind that illusion and realize the constituent lack grounding his personal existence and his identity. The clown does not simply entertain; he uses entertainment to tell the truth, which is always traumatic, which shows the ‘desert of the Real’, behind the veil of harmonious images and symbolic constructs around them. The appearance of the clown behind the analyst in the video visualizes the double feature.   

On the other hand, in Seminar VIII, from 1960-61, on the relation of Transfer, when he is discussing the role of Aristophanes in Plato’s Fest, in telling tales on love, he (Lacan, in his lecture) names him (Aristophanes, a famous comedian of the times and key person in the dialogue), a clown, but only to state that precisely because Aristophanes is a “clown”, he is “ the only one who is worthy enough to speak of love”.  It is only the comedian who can state that one loves just in order to leave, and that one has constantly to leave what and whom one loves, and make this paradox acceptable, and even laughed about, or taken without what Nietzsche has named as the ‘spirit of heaviness’, as a simple fact of life. In the mother – child relation, that is being thought through in this project the supreme act of love is accepting different stages of separation with joy, even though they are doing away with certain shared life-worlds whose destruction may be experienced as a total catastrophe and a treat to one’s identity.   

Stevan Vukovic 

Images, images…. and once again images   

“My work starts from a personal place, but the work isn’t ‘personal’. It’s everyone.”     

We have chosen this statement by Georgina Starr, an artist of the “second wave” of so-called Young British Artists whose works form part of Saatchi’s collection, because we firmly believe it illustrates Margareta Jelić’s poetic discourse best. Margareta Jelić is a young artist from Belgrade who focuses on various issues in her art: alienation in a globalized world, unfulfilled dreams, love, loneliness and existential fear, that is, all of those dilemmas this artist is sharing with her generation and people from her immediate social environment. Bearing in mind the fact that Margareta was born at the end of the 1960s and that she belongs to a generation whose world of ideas and views have been shaped to a degree by a civilisation of images, i.e. TV, cartoons, fashion, pop culture and its icons, it is understandable why she uses symbols of that culture in her creative opus and mixes some traditional art techniques with some new media. 

In her author discourse of (un)usual stories, Margareta Jelić starts from reality. But, she builds fiction into her works, regardless of the medium they have been created in – the art of painting, animation, video or multimedia installation, because fiction turns a trivial story from everyday life into a magical world of imagination. The artist’s sensual style, bearing a resemblance to graphic qualities and pictorialism of children’s drawings, contributes to her individual approach we recognize as an authentic form of expression on our contemporary art scene. Pop iconography in the artist’s work is present as archetypical symbols of childhood, on one hand (for example, toys and objects from fairy tales) and as idols and heroes from pop culture and fairy tales, on the other hand, with whom the main protagonist or central character in the artist’s story identifies, like a “face in the mirror” (for example, the presence of the Snow Queen in her film Marta i njeni prijetelji (Marta And Her Friends) or Noah in the film Dobar dan, gospodine Noah (Good day, Mr Noah)). These symbols are important in terms of art images and set designs. They play a descriptive and narrative role in the script concepts of her films. Objects, colours, idols…bear a certain meaning which illustrates a hero’s lifestyle in a painterly representation or an animated film. Their function in the action is determined. Finally, they contribute to a successful ending of the story.   

The visit to the world of animation    

It is interesting to know why Margareta as a painter have decided to do her first animated film Marta i njeni prijatelji (Marta And Her Friends), taking into consideration the fact that creative process in the domain of animation is very complex because it combines image, movement and sound. Did this young artist’s restless creative spirit, her inclination towards researches in the domain of different media, her quest for some innovative forms of expression, and enormous potentials of modern technology prevail? Or, can the artist’s motives be anticipated in her experience gained in a “civilisation of images” which date back from her childhood that was influenced by cartoons from Disney production? For the time being, it is a mystery. Perhaps some future art critics will deal with this issue. However, what one notices as a consistent value of Margareta Jelic’s film opus is, for sure, her continual interest in those fascinating issues which marked the life of her generation. That constant and, at this point, decades-long focus on animation has resulted in the following animated films: Marta i njeni prijatelji (Marta And Her Friends) (2000), Srušeni snovi (Unfulfilled Dream) (2003), Četiri priče o nama (Four Stories About Us) (2005) and Dobar dan, gospodine Noa (Good Day, Mr Noah) (2009). Identifiable art and theme concepts of these films corroborate the fact that some everyday life stories can be indeed given in form of a single cycle of short feature films that possesses some genre characteristics of an omnibus. If one changes media of expression and transfers images from the art of painting into a multimedia form (animated film, video, installation, interactive book), this process includes changes in the status of images: from static into animated. The changes of that primal vision of a representation in the art of painting create, in such a way, a new visual identity of space, i.e. space with expanded borders of the visual field within which we can perceive both an observing subject and an observed object. Animated film is a complex form of expression, somewhere between film and fine arts. It combines experiences of the two media. At the same time, it demands an author with versatile skills in various domains of art, because animated film includes writing a script, storyboarding, creating images and working with different techniques. The principles of Dovniković’s school of animated film will help us explain, in a simple way, the working process Margareta applies. Margareta uses CGI (computer generated imagery) because it is a more suitable way of production than manual techniques. Everything happens quickly on the computer screen. It is easier to model images because a computer enables us to do various manipulations on the screen. Production is significantly cheaper too. In terms of operation, computer images are created in Flash Adobe or some other computer programme. Then they are turned into frames and put into a desired order. Afterwards, scenes are modelled and 3D figures are rigged with a virtual skeleton. The virtual space is edited, and then coloured. A script is written on the computer and storyboarding scenes are developed. Frames, combinations of plans and characters are generated. It is possible to compose music and create sound on the computer as well.    

If we concentrate on Margareta’s animated films, there is an important segment of this creative process which might be observed as the final working phase – post-production. It understands presentation of a film in a way that is typical for contemporary fine art. Bearing in mind the fact that, on one hand, animation as a film genre has never been developed in a right way in Serbian culture and that there is no recognisable production, as it is the case with the famous Zagreb school of animated film, and that there are not so many artists who are dedicated to animation as a modern medium of fine art expression, on the other hand, then the issue of presentation becomes more complex. In our art practice, animation usually means video which is presented in form of an installation in space, and Margareta Jelić’s previous exhibitions speak in favour of our claim. A complex concept and production of multimedia working process are things that define Margareta Jelić’s work as an innovative medium of expression. But they also include a new concept of animation presentation in an exhibition venue. Margareta Jelić’s project Dobar dan, gospodine Noa (Good day, Mr Noah), which is also her PhD thesis at the Department of Multimedia Art, the University of Arts in Belgrade, should be observed from that aspect. It is an animated film in form of a four-channel video with simultaneous projections. These projections positioned in different places at an exhibition venue turn the work into an installation. In that complex production and post-production enterprise, this new  creation is characterised by one more thing – interactivity between sliding images on the wall and a visitor when she/he enters the space of this work.   

Static and animated images   

Dobar dan gospodine Noa (Good day, Mr Noah), as a new interactive project, represents best a new approach towards some innovative art media in the domain of exhibiting, as well as towards interaction in communication with the public. Thanks to various manipulations on the computer and development of digital technologies, boundaries of the visual in a work of art, and they are defined usually by the relationship between the body, movement, scene and space, have been moved forward significantly. Following Merlot Ponti’s theory on phenomenology principles of observing movements of the body in motion, we realise that a figure in motion determines the mobility of scenes with its bodily movements. “The body in motion and its appearance in various points of an image create direct perspective which puts physical features of the body in the first plan (…)” According to this theory on visuality of the body, a perceptible direction of the position of the head (en face, profile, back) and movements of the head and the leg in an image define motions which make a frame move left-right and up-down. According to this theory, which Margareta has followed, space is defined as a composition and angle of observation on the bases of visual experience of the central character’s motion through different frames of a scene. That perception of space comprises inner and outer elements of the body in motion. In Margareta Jelic’s art production, inner and outer spaces in her film Dobar dan, gospodine Noa (Good day, Mr Noah) are determined primarily by its script which comprise 6 scenes. In the first scene, we see the interior of a room with bed where Noah is sleeping. He is getting up, going towards the window in order to close it; in the second scene, he is going to the kitchen, then leaving the apartment; in the third, he is in his car on his way to work, driving by various buildings and houses seen from an observer’s eye view; in the fourth scene, Noah is entering his office and working on his computer. We can see some scenes in his office. In the fifth scene, he sees on his computer screen the Red Dragon flying in the sky above the city. He registers danger on his control board. Through the window, we can see people in panic and chaos in the city streets. Manipulating on his computer, Noah starts a fight with the Dragon and succeeds in defeating him. The sky above the city is clear again and Noah realises that there is no danger any longer. In the sixth scene, Noah continues to work on his computer. We can observer the office interior from several angles. Behind Noah’s back and through the window, we can see the sunset. Noah is leaving his office. The description of the script told in such a dull way belong to so-called short form of animation (duration time: 5 minutes) although the entire projection lasts 20 minutes all together with credits. To create space in form of an animation and ambient set-up is always very interesting in each and every complex multimedia project that is done as an animated film and presented as a four-channel visual and audio installation with simultaneous projections. In the images projected on the walls, space is defined by the central character’s movements through each frame. It is presented as a flat surface with the width; the depth is determined by the width, i.e. by the position from which we observe the images slide through the space and move from wall to wall in a four-channel projection. 

The work is accompanied by an audio material the artist created by herself. Sound in the film has a functional role. The artist has used sounds she recorded in her immediate environment. Sound comes from certain physical activities of the central character (opening windows, street noisy, typing on the computer keyboard). Sound effects emphasize certain situation in the action. 

The entire project Dobar dan, gospodine Noa (Good day, Mr Noah) seems to be in a perfect harmony in all the segments of the work and technical realisation, which in the end should lead to the goal – a synchronised four-channel projection. The only things that might provoke a certain level of discomfort in this exciting monograph story are Good Bye and Good night, Noah. These words would be said to the central character, who is tired at the end of an exciting day, before he falls asleep. But, judging by some previous experiences, this might become the subject of Margarita’s next work if she continued this story about Mr Noah. It is worthwhile waiting for. But, we shall see.                                                                                                                                                                 

By Gordana Dobrić     

Bibliography   

1. Art at the Turn of the Millenium, Taschen, Köln, 1999. 

2. Brian Sherwin, Georgina Starr, http://www.myartspace.com/interviews/art-space-talk-georgina-starr.html 

3. Borivoj Dvorniković Bordao, A school of animation, Film Center Serbia, Belgrade, 2006. 

4. Antology of animation, (ed.) Ranko Munitić, Film Center Serbia, Belgrade, 2009. 

5. Rastko Ćirić, Moves your drawings, Institute for Film, Belgrade, 1986. 

6. Мaurice Marleau-Pounty, Phenomenology of perception, “Veselin Masleša“, Sarajevo, 1978. 

7. Michael Rush, New Media in Late 20th Century Art, Thames& Hudson, London, 1986.