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To quote Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex would be a distant feminist reference, but sometimes it is necessary to go back to the roots if one feels like understanding the present condition of feminine representations. Beauvoir writes: “Every subject achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out toward other liberties. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, there is a degradation of existence, the brutish life of subjection to given conditions.” Tempted by the “Evil Girl” project by Serbian artist Ana Nedeljkovic, I could not help but wonder whether this is a new way of making femininity transcendent. |
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The Evil Girl Project (There is a Lot of Us and We are All the Same) – Maja Ciric
To quote Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex would be a distant feminist reference, but sometimes it is necessary to go back to the roots if one feels like understanding the present condition of feminine representations. Beauvoir writes: “Every subject achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out toward other liberties. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, there is a degradation of existence, the brutish life of subjection to given conditions.”
Tempted by the “Evil Girl” project by Serbian artist Ana Nedeljkovic, I could not help but wonder whether this is a new way of making femininity transcendent. Does this “Evil Girl” resist instrumentalisation and should this project be thus perceived as an effective tactic of resistance? The “Evil Girl” is conceived as the process of repetition of a predefined and recognizable, simplified female figure in black and white in different contexts, spatial settings, media, materials and techniques. Be it an installation of multiple dolls playing with the electricity and attacking computers, dolls colonising an art gallery or be it just a drawing of the evil girl that appears unexpectedly on the pages of the daily newspaper, this project is conceived as a way of non-beautified intervention into the daily routine. While popping out where one does not expect to find her, both alive and dead, this girl keeps on laughing in the spectator’s face despite the bad condition of her teeth. Sometimes she has a metal belt fitted over her wheels much like a military tank to replace a foot; or instead of a hand she has a grenade. Other times a perfect, fitted military uniform is combined with a mini-skirt. She multiplies, unstoppible, and sometimes, in an utterly personal manner. These militaristic attributes combined with other details, such as hairy legs, produce characteristics of a comic book or cartoon. This figure is a product of an alienated imagination that goes way beyond childish imagery. This mixture of violence and humour makes up the core of the evil girl’s bizarre performance. This is similar to imagery found in the videos by the Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg in which she unexpectedly reveals serious behavioural patterns.
The “Evil Girl” is not just a pattern that is being recreated and repeated as the symptom of some trauma. Even when she is influenced by the audience and invited to intervene by redrawing her, it seems that she is all about playing out a detournement on what someone would label as her tragic end. It seems like she is aware of the fact that she is a cyborg and a simulacrum. This allows her to mock everyone in an implicit manner. What I thought of as possible transcendence could actually be perceived as the immanence of when one reads Linda S. Kauffman’s book about the phenomenon of the "bad girls and sick boys" of her title. She is interpreting this widely spread phenomenon as a fantasy within the realities of contemporary culture that leaves an impact on the body by changing its integrity and rectitude. However, in the Northern American context, issues of sexuality or identity are, according to some, the transgressions that are already labeled. In the Eastern European context, there is an abundance of advertising campaigns that represent women as an object of superficial beauty. These questions are just about to be answered.
What makes Ana Nedeljkovic’s art transcendent within the local context is the way she uses her position as a female artist to create a weird character and its setting. On one hand she deconstructs and subverts the stereotypes of her everyday culture. On the other hand, this project should be regarded as a resistance within the system performed by the violent and self-ironic being that is empowered by playing with her personal symptoms. That is exactly why this project could be labeled as transcendent in any other context. By juxtaposing images of mechanistic death and images of play, she produces an overall impression of a mischief that is unmistakably an “Evil Girl.”
Belgrade-born Maja Ciric is an independent curator and a PhD candidate in Art and Media Theory.
