Peter Greenaway: BOOK / contents
Jure Miku¾
Artist as a Demiurge
A film still from "The Falls"
The scenes in which Nagiko is being painted by her father perhaps represent the leading element of the film Pillow Books. On her birthday every year he ritually and symbolically performs the role of his daughter’s demiurge: when he paints her face, he writes her name on her forehead and his own name on her neck. Thus he marks her for her whole life; the painting of her body in childhood entangles her in the erotic fixation of painting her own body, and later other bodies as well. No less vital for her is her father’s erotic affair with his publisher, who first destroys her father then drives away her husband - his own nephew - and sleeps with her only real lover, Jerome. The publisher’s desire for the latter is so strong that he skins him when he dies, and then delights in touching his tanned and painted parchment. The text that accompanies the ritual endlessly repeats a basic myth about the creation of man as known in almost all civilisations and which is therefore not specific to Japan, where myths were artificially composed only in the first millennium. In the West we can find the corresponding words in Genesis (Gen 2.7): "Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being."The film director thus derives from the elemental motive of creation according to which God made the first man from earth, clay or ground dust (which in the Bible points to the transitory nature of the human body); the motive which in every single society has been perceived in a slightly different way but which most adequately reveals its laws, character and religious structure.
Jure Miku¾
1949 born in Ljubljana. He graduated in art history and history from the
University of Ljubljana, in 1975 he received master's degree in art history
and in 1983 doctor's degree in art history at the Ljubljana University.
Since 1990 he is Associate Professor of art history and art theory .
Since 1972 as a curator at Moderna galerija , the Museum of Modern Art
in Ljubljana he prepared several important retrospective and other exhibitions
of Slovene and foreign art prepared for the museum (1975 Matej Sternen,
a retrospective of Slovene impressionist painter, 1979 Slovene Art 1945-1978,
the first survey of Slovene post-war art ; 1985 Slovene Expressionism).
From 1986 till 1992 he was a Director of Moderna galerija; in 1992 for
a short period a Deputy Minister of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.
1993 started to lecture as Associate Professor at Institutum Studiorum
Humanitatis - Ljubljana Graduate School of Humanities. In the school year
1999/2000 he was a Visiting Professor at École des Hautes Etudes in Paris
and in 2000/2001 a Visiting Professor at Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
His bibliography includes some 500 units, published mainly in Slovene
periodicals and newspapers, including the following books published in
Slovene language: 1983 The Image of the Hand ; 1985 Fritz Lang (1993 translated
into Spanish); 1991 Images from the Times of Gallus; monographies (Stupica,
Jemec, Mara¾); 1995 Mute Eloquence of the Image: The Body and Slovene
Art; 1995 Slovene Painting from its Break with Socialist Realism to Conceptualism
and Western Art; 1997 Mirroring Image: Mirror and Off-space Interpretation
of Double Intercession Scene.
