Angel of Kindness, Have You Tasted Hate?: On Darja Bajagić

... unwillingness to allow a light to be shone onto a looming darkness gives life to the very darkness you desired to repress.

— Darja Bajagić [1]

Walter Benjamin said of Charles Baudelaire: “What speaks to us in his poetry is not the reprehensible confusion of [moral] judgment but the permissible reversal of perception.” [2] A climate has been brewing, at least since the closing acts of Obama’s administration, which has recast the preeminence of the ontology of identity. Whether those that renaturalize the categories of race, gender, and sexuality, claiming “the right side of history,” do so out of altruism, or are simply managing the distribution of the crumbs of decadent neoliberalism doesn’t matter. They boast of an airtight self-deceiving attitude, with which one can either agree or perish. The collapse of the neoliberal era is expressed by a pre-neoliberal nostalgia in which radical liberals (and much of the ‘left’, tailing them) uncritically imitate the social movements at the birth-pangs of neoliberalism. Failing to learn from the New Left, this generation repeats its pitfalls: anti-racism reinforces the myth of biological race, anti-sexism becomes anti-sex, and anti-authoritarianism becomes indistinguishable from authoritarianism. This recoil from change mirrors in microcosm the Romantic nostalgia for pre-capitalist civilization. The latter is nothing new, and as Benjamin pointed out, it is always a mere galvanization of what was. [3] The fixation on occultism in Darja Bajagić’s work lends to a latency of consciousness in this regard. But with the recoil against emergent post-neoliberalism, her work lies manifestly across a rift.

Darja Bajagić, Bucharest Molly, 2016. An embedded sensor causes liquid to flow from the top of the swastika on the bear’s chest. ARTnews.

Much like regressed politics, the arts undergo a permanent identity crisis. Art proceeds zombie-like, craving to be set free from the spell of its obsolescence. In reaction, some demand that art extinguish this agony by aestheticizing politics. In a vicious circle, the nonidentity and tension between art and life, artwork and artist, dissolves ad infinitum, with the pursuit of the objectification of beauty long since abandoned. Any aesthetic gesture is reduced to a political or spiritual affirmation of the world as it is, which is then projected onto the artist's own worldview. The artist’s work becomes a mood-board at best, and the experience of it is transformed into a focus group session — enabling PC hawks to avoid aesthetic self-reflection indefinitely while demanding a product that is more like them. [4]  In short, images and symbols are fetishized; their mere presence is experienced as a violent assault. Darja becomes “Molly.” It is by no fault of their own: the detractors can know no more about art than what has been internalized of the diffuse authority of mass media. Theodor Adorno said that “each product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement.” [5] Fine art long ago surrendered its claim to anything more.

Bajagić’s work emerges from this vacuum — or more precisely from beside it, teetering on the event horizon — making the aesthetic experience of the objectionable and tabooed palpable. It engages without hesitation the pornutopia, violence, and authoritarianism of contemporary society — which perniciously arises, unimpeded by any bounds of political affiliation. Though Bajagić’s work may not escape certain tropes of avant-gardist art, [6] it manages to capture pockets of discomfort, images charged with ambivalent energy.

In Molly 3 (Star), Molly’s drool of blood and outreached hands guide one’s eyes to what they want to see — which is withdrawn. The conservative element of pornography is its advertisement for and denial of sexual satisfaction. Its progressive element lies in what is just beyond reach. The flaps of works like Come to the Dark Side We Have Cookies!!! contain an implication of that aspect of sexuality which constitutes it as such: its discreteness, its naughtiness. More — or perhaps less — than a tease, the women of Bajagić’s images, from “Molly” to Mila Kunis, are symbols of the degradation of the value of sexuality: somewhere, a couple climaxes while images of Kunis flash across the man’s mind. Perhaps images of Ashton Kutcher flash across hers: one’s sexual “partner” is today no more than a masturbatory object. 

The ego, weakened to the point of near total collapse, under the brutal administration of the super-ego, and overpowered from below by libidinal forces, makes its plea for autonomy in vain. Hiding behind the queasiness which accompanies Bajagić’s artworks is what Wilhelm Reich called “the fear of freedom.” [7] The aggressions of the anal-sadistic stage of sexual development resurface, unless they are taken up in sexual experiences and satisfied. In his 1963 essay “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today,” Adorno demonstrated how a society, which had on the surface achieved sexual liberty, had in reality descended into deeper sexual pessimism and exhibited characteristic traits of the authoritarian personality. Adorno was able to lift the veil by shifting his attention towards those corners of sexual life where society had imposed the strictest taboos: homosexuality, prostitution, and pedophilia. For Adorno, it was no accident that objects of sexual attraction so often resembled the hairless, tightly stretched skin of youthful bodies, or that the legally reinforced animosity towards murdered prostitutes was well suited to the sexual satisfaction of the masses who envy the perverse sexuality of the brothel. The supposed innocence of children was disproved by Freud. For Adorno, the vigilant persecution of pedophiles says something about the taboo on child sexuality: “The cause of the complex about minors probably lies in the extraordinarily powerful instinctual impulses against which it operates as a defense mechanism.” It is noteworthy that the women of porn whose images Bajagić so often appropriates are subject to infantilizing standards of sexual attraction as much as they are designed to call attention to the earliest object of sexual gratification: the mother’s breasts.

Finally, following Adorno, it is not difficult to make the case that the weight of taboo on homosexuality has since been partially removed only as a function of the further devaluation of sexuality in general. The Pink Panthers in their time expressed simultaneously the need for sexual freedom, the valuelessness of sex, and the consequences of regressed sexual development. In all state forms, communist, fascist, and liberal, Adorno discovered a return to the partial drives of pre-genital sexuality on a mass scale. The authoritarian personality of the supporters of fascism harks back to the sadism of infantile sexuality, and in the reality of late capitalism is not limited to one state-formulation or another. Two of Bajagić’s works from 2018; Screenshot at 1349-1502 of the NUS’s “Pink Panther” Confession Video and “German Madeliene McCann”, don’t reside in a series featuring convicted neo-Nazi terrorist Beate Szchäpe by accident.

In recent works like Summer Dazbog, Sun[ce] (The Most Powerful Demon in Hell), the hidden drives of the unconscious are transposed into the symbol for Dazbog (Slavic pagan God of the sun and summer) which frames faces of children en route to a concentration camp in a smeared photograph. Serving two functions at once, the composition comports with both our conjecture about the sexualized child-image, and Freud’s characterization of phantasies of the pagans as being child-like. Freud had his own name for the most powerful demon in Hell: libido. Dazbog was shown in her exhibition “Transfiguration” at New Galerie alongside a similar work, Makos (X). Makos, or Makosh, was the Slavic goddess of women’s work and the “Great Mother.” Etymologically, “Makosh” is related to the Slavic word moknot: “get wet.” [8] Reminiscent of the flaps of Bajagić’s Come to the Dark Side, in Dazbog and Makos (X), which are more formalized with impressionistic photograph prints, the sexual content has been resubmerged within ritual symbols and meanings stripping them of overt sexuality. In contrast to the other works in “Transfiguration,” featuring pornstar Infinite Dominno, these works thus contain a more obscure, but acute sexual mechanism — they contain a transfigured sexuality.

Bajagić’s occultism is accurate insofar as the subjects of her work are compulsorily sacrificed to a discreet spirit — no one is spared reification. Her 2015 exhibition at New Galerie was revealingly titled “The Offal Truth.” All of these works are stained with the blood of a cow — perhaps a red heifer. In history, esoteric theories of spiritual undercurrents were proportional to the subjectivity of their time. Since the triumph and regression of critical self-consciousness, they struggle against themselves to attain their former resonance. “Spirit is dissociated into spirits and thereby forfeits the power to recognize that they do not exist.” [9] There is something of Schiller’s form-drive in the ancient pursuit of the Drink of immortality and his play-drive in the quest for the gold-making Stone. The transfiguration sought after by the ancient alchemists is itself transfigured into the production of commodities for a bracketed market of artworks. As Benjamin pointed out, artworks have yet to shed entirely their ritual aspect. A great many modern artists from Philipp Otto Runge to Kandinsky to Pollock have submitted themselves and their work to the hidden wisdoms. The tendency, when embraced and affirmed, merely accepts being as having purpose and meaning and thus ignores the possibility of Spirit transcending its self-degradation under industrial production — buttressing the crisis. But it is instructive insofar as it indicates that which has been lost.

Bajagić’s interest in serial killers lends to more uneasiness. Insofar as they exhibit a narcissistic wound of a particular magnitude and direction, many if not most serial killers today track the model set by Jack the Ripper in the late 19th century — the characteristics of these crimes are historically specific. The Ripper was, as it were, the Courbet of serial killing. These episodes raise the sadism of infantile sexuality to an extreme. The serial aspect of these killings is not the only expression of pathological repetition — the killing itself is the pathological repetition of the loss of the love object: the original wound. The sexual acts of serial killers’ actions (according to an erstaz account which in reality is more varied) lend to an analogy with child's play: once the immanent pleasure of his toys are used up, they are mutilated and discarded, though sometimes he picks them up to play with them once more. Not only analogous to the crime scenes, this image of child’s play is also found in the artist’s studio. One of the most fascinating and revolutionary ideas of Freudian psycho-analyisis was that neuroses were a matter of degree, not of type. Indeed the traumatic experience of the loss of the love object is not limited to a destiny of serial murder, but is experienced by every child in the process of early sexual development. Some manage to sublimate their rage into art-making or art writing, for example. In Bajagić’s work, too, all parties are implicated: eroticism and violence find common ground. 

Many of Bajagić’s works initially struck me as running the risk of avant-gardism. In Greenberg’s terms: “With avant-gardism, the shocking, scandalizing, startling, the mystifying and confounding, became embraced as ends in themselves and no longer regretted as initial side effects of artistic newness that would wear off with familiarity.” [10] The key is artistic newness: he is not simply thinking of shocking subject matter. Bajagić’s works are certainly not isolated and impotent in dull pseudo-intellectualism the way a Duchampian artwork is: they are not a banana duct-taped to the wall. With this in mind, they are far closer to Benjamin’s characterization of Dada: “an instrument of baliatics”— they demand to be confronted with sharp attention. In other words, Bajagić’s works might have come closer to a true avant-garde, if only the conditions of our historical moment permitted such a thing. But paradoxically, the bleakness of Bajagić’s scenery draws it nearer to an objectification of beauty. It offers up reflection, in spite, or rather because of, the severe resistance viewers harbor towards it. If such reflection might lead to critical insight, to say nothing of emancipation, the artwork should be defended against the most vapid of contemporary cultural authoritarianism. As Baudelaire recognized following 1848, there was an objective crisis, a contradiction in morality and judgement: “When horror [came] the way that beauty went.” [11] Those who refused to admit it were two-faced in their sanctimoniousness. They were the ones who claimed justice and rights, and yet were in the same stroke the most irreverent towards them. One must admit everything, concede nothing.  //

Darja Bajagić, Molly 3 (Star), 2016. New Galerie.

Darja Bajagić, Come To The Dark Side We Have Cookies!!! 2014.  Room East Gallery.

Taken from the artist’s website.

Darja Bajagić, SAVE A CHILD, KILL A PEDOPHILE FT, JOSEPH DRUCE, KARLIE JADE PEARCE STEVENSON, ALEXA-MARIE QUINN, AND JOHN GEOGHAN, 2016. New Galerie.

Darja Bajagić, Summer Dazbog, Sun[ce] (The Most Powerful Demon in Hell], 2019. New Galerie.

Darja Bajagić, MAKOS (X), 2019. New Galerie.

Thanks to Gabriel Almieda for his review and critical feedback of my initial draft, I lean on his suggestions on a few occasions.

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*Title comes from English translation of the 6th line of Charles Baudelaire’s Réversibilité: “Ange plein de bonté, connaissez-vous la haine?” See Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal, trans. F.P. Sturm and W.J. Robertson.

[1] “Artist Darja Bajagic Alleges Censorship of Work Featuring Swastika and References to Nazism,” ARTnews, May 31, 2016.

[2] Walter Benjamin, “Baudelaire” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, (Belknap Press, 2006).

[3] Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” 1933.

[4] See the coverage of an incident involving Boyd Rice and Bajagic’s two-person show in 2018. This is not the first time Bajagic’s work has been censored. It is telling that the author of this article, too, was intimidated into accepting an uncritical condemnation of the artists: Cody Delisraty, "Should a Gallery Show the Art of Someone with Hateful Politics?" Frieze, September 14, 2018. 

[5] Theodor Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered” in The Culture Industry (Routledge Press, 1991). 

[6] See Clement Greenberg, “Counter-Avant-Garde,” 1971.

[7] Wilhelm Reich, “Ideology as Material Power” in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1980).

[8] Max Vasmer, “Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language,” 1950.

[9] See Adorno's “Theses Against Occultism,” 1946-7.

[10]Greenberg, “Counter-Avant-Garde,” 1971.

[11] A peculiar English translation from Charles Baudelaire’s poem Danse macabre, which nonetheless comports with Baudelaire’s attitude, even if the accuracy of the translation is questionable. From the last line of the eleventh stanza: “Qui fait le dégoûté montre qu'il se croit beau.” See Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal, trans. F.P. Sturm and W.J. Robertson.