CYBORG, HYBRID ART – IN THE SIGN OF GEMINI

Abstract

The development of the mediated world has resolutely changed the attitude of contemporary man/woman to earlier forms of reproduction, and problematized the painting conceived as slow medium, underestimating the skills dimension that has traditionally represented an indispensable prerequisite of painting. Today, picture/painting exists in the referential relation to media images and realizes itself as hybrid outcome of their processing. Contemporary painting is certainly closely connected with media images, but this connection does not exhausted itself only by (literal) transfer of the media images or everyday (designed) objects from the vernacular of the world into the art world, respectively by their more or less direct appropriation. The existing relations between contemporary painting/contemporary art and “mediascape” (Arjun Appadurai) are multifold and complex, and therefore they realize in a more substantial way, beyond simple formal takeovers and citations. The concept of cyborg, as a site of the technical, biological and discursive intersections, as well as a site of the “truth” and “information” crossing, represents the paradigm (or at least one of the principal paradigms) this relation between contemporary painting and new media/new technologies. This essay emphasizes the concept of cyborg as contemporary art’s paradigm and discusses its presence and effects on the example of the cartoons about Marta (the cycle about Martha consists of: Martha and Her Friends, 2000, Broken Dreams, 2003, Four Stories About Us, 2007, Presence and/or Absence, 2010, and The Isle of Shadows, 2012) by Margareta Jelić as the one example (of survival) of painting in the age of the media, placed in the triangle of representation, technology, and (hybrid) identity.