For the last week I’ve been living with Plate 32 from Tragedy of a Venus (Tragedija jedne Venere), published in the book Sweet Violence. The series was made between 1975 and 1976 by Sanja Iveković, a Zagreb-born artist of the former Socialist Yugoslavia. The plate contains two images. On the left, a clipping from Duga, a Yugoslav magazine, of Marilyn Monroe on top of a stepladder, her inner thigh exposed toward the camera. On the right, a gelatin silver print of Iveković in a similar position and framing. Below Monroe a caption reads: Seksepilnost kao glavno oružje. Sexiness as the main weapon.
A weapon implies a victim but the caption does not name its target. That is what I think about when I look at it. Monroe is on the ladder, perched as an archetype of feminine desirability, her pose already fluent in a language the camera expects. Iveković’s body is draped low, faceless, her position an echo of Monroe’s but on different terms. Throughout the week I’m transported to 1975, to Socialist Yugoslavia, where the exuberant fame which Monroe, and the West, sells would have been unimaginable for a Yugoslav artist. It arrived anyway, through magazines like Duga, and carried with it a role that women absorb into their day to day existence without choosing to. It is the impact of the lives of Hollywood celebrities on ordinary people. It is a condition that has only grown within fifty years.
What compounds throughout the week with Plate 32 is the contrast and convergence of the implication of the two images. The Monroe image is an advertisement, implying an external author, designed or commissioned to manufacture desire in a viewer. Monroe, the subject, is instrumentalized to sell something beyond herself. Iveković’s self portrait, in contrast, implies an internal author. It is a photo made in response, to interrogate what normally goes unnoticed, that the Monroe image is a kind of self portrait of the culture that produced it. The advertisement does not disappear in Iveković’s response to the Monroe image. It haunts the self portrait, a reminder that the culture that produced Monroe continues to produce the conditions in which the logic of the spectacle has become the water everyone swims in, consciously or not.
This condition is what Thomas Mathiesen called the synopticon. A counter to Michel Foucault’s panopticon, where instead of the few watching the many, the structure is inverted. The many watch the few. It is a flip from surveillance into fascination. And what this fascination does, over time, is produce not just watchers but people who want to be watched.
What Monroe was made into, people now volunteer for. The logic of the spectacle has not just persisted, it has been internalized to the point where the instrumentalization is no longer something that happens to a person but something a person pursues. The skepticism that drove Iveković to respond to Monroe is eroding in mass culture. In its place, a template. Mimicked gestures, adopted cadences, viral formulas. A life styled for visibility. The uncanny part is not that people are being made into instruments. It is that they are lining up to become one.
After a week with Plate 32 what leaves an imprint on my mind is the resistance Iveković carries. She responded to what the West was selling, and she did not buy it. That refusal has grown in poignancy over time. Success has become coupled to visibility, visibility to celebrity, celebrity to a template anyone can theoretically follow. What Iveković understood, and what her image still insists on, is that the stepladder Monroe sits on top of is not a free invitation. It is a situation with a cost. One that is always looking for those willing to pay it.
Plate 32 is from Sweet Violence by Sanja Iveković. Published by The Museum of Modern Art in 2011.
Link to Sanja Iveković’s MoMA Page:
https://www.moma.org/artists/30946-sanja-ivekovic
A Week With is a weekly writing series focused on a single image from my art and photobook library. I spend seven days returning to the image and write about what it brings into focus about culture and the present moment.