Achilles' Heel

CIX gallery, July 15, 1998

RHETORIC OF THE MELANCHOLY

"Female melancholy is expressed through aggressiveness toward oneself and here lies the key question of the conditions in which the women accept the current cultural and symbolic order in such way that they agree with it".

J. Kristeva

The ascetic conception of the performance by Monika Moteska is articulated through the external elementary visibility of the lonely naked female body and through the internal, constantly the same dynamics of the soul. The monotonous body shaking and the petrified looks represent a reflection, a mirror of the "psychic underground of the subject" (Kristeva). For Moteska, the deserted, submissive, crushed being of the female sex represents an auto-referential projection, an intimate confession, a record that, being transferred from its own being, is projected on other, alien body.

The track of the record refers to the dominant-rational (male) and to the submissive-marginal (female) discourse. Through the economical articulation of the unity between the body and the image, Moteska realizes the censorship of the hyper-erotic discourse and affirms the sexual discourse, the discourse of the language of the female body. The subtle eroticism is manifested through the controlled narration and through the economizing of permuted symbols. In the psychoanalyses, the lonely, naked female body is an ideal place for the desire, but also a place for losing the object of the desire, "(...) a swamp region of the narcissistic myth where the image of the I is born" (Kristeva). Losing the object is losing the motivation. On the crossroads between the biological and the symbolic, the loss is melted with the low tension of the uniform waves of sorrow. Only the intensity of the external peace is multiplied in this internal desert. The Achilles heel of sorrow is melancholy. In the abyss of its crypt there is no withdrawing, no compensation for the loved object. It is its constant psychosomatic cover, a temporary or permanent skin, a layer that cannot be pushed away, a slavery that cannot be ridden of, nor ignored. Sunk in the silence of the cataleptic condition of sorrow, shaken by the pressure of the feet that activate the monotonous motor activity of the female body, the loneliness of the subject in space, according to Kristeva, provides the highest melancholic weight.

Feeling safe and protected from active response, the melancholic subject sneaks into and hides in the nest of inactivity. In this internal asylum, in this masochist skin of sensualism, it cherishes at the same time both love and hatred toward the lost, or absent world. By turning the sting toward oneself, by hiding aggression in passiveness, Kristeva is of the opinion that "narcissist melancholy nature of the subject substitutes and compensates for the desired object by sorrow", because sorrow, above all, is "the most archaic expression and ... unique object for which it is tied with reality".