In 1878, when Eadweard Muybridge made his celebrated photographs of a galloping horse, it was not the beginning of a path towards the discovery of the movie pictures as those photographs are thought of today. What fascinated his contemporaries most was the overthrowing absurdity of those photographs related to how the “frozen” running horse presents itself in paintings. None of Muybridge’s photos showed a horse at the moment when he has all four legs in the air, stretched forward and backwards, but instead; it turned out that when the horse has all four legs detached from the ground, it is when all fours are bend under the body of the animal. The photographic technique, considered capable of rendering/freezing the visible up to the moment, revealed something unknown to the eye. What was uncovered is that the instances of the movement have paradoxical disclosure. When Thomas Eakins, a painter and Muybridge’s friend, in his May Morning in the Park, painted frozen wheels instead of an “unclear mass of woolen matter that spreads around from the centre as preferred” in the art those days, a considerable disagreement started about the” artistic” value of this kind of deception. For example, artist and photographer P.H. Emerson declared that” there is nothing more inartistic than certain positions of a horse in gallop, which the eye can never grasp. However, they exist in reality”. An artistic convention is rendering the movement in the way the eye sees it and not the way it” in fact is”, revealing something about itself that it cannot face the act of presence in a place where there is no presence at all, according to that convention.
Nevertheless, this episode uncovered much more. It revealed that the core of the understanding of art is the notion of absence; absence is a characteristic of a visual representation, which confirms that represented becomes absent with the very act of representation. The character of contemplation is towards the things we do not see or have lost. The paradox dwells in the fact that when we discover that, as in Muybridge’s photographs, what we do not know, we face the absence again, with the lost experience of looking. Our visual curiosity organizes around something hidden, and as the psychoanalyst Darian Leader says, culture demands the visual field’s exclusion from the image. At the same time, when the excluded element returns, we lose the coordinates that make our world a real one. “Excluded element”, without any doubt, at least for Freudian psychoanalysts, is the genitalia. However, the question remains whether this element excludes itself, so we might not see it or so it might not see us. In the series of paintings by Filip Matic, under the unifying title” A matchless pair”, we might be interested in two paintings on this occasion (better said, two motives which appear in the paintings of this series as well). One is pornographic, “A Matchless Pair I” (2002) and the other one,” A Matchless Pair” (2002-03), shows a helicopter in flight. Matic was trained as a pilot and had to fly an aeroplane but not a helicopter.
Following this, it might be for him that a helicopter remained an aesthetic object on one side, a non-utilitarian mechanism. On the other side, it becomes an object of desire, and by that, even the visualization of desire.
First of all, the aesthetic status of the helicopter (better said, the gap between its fascinating aesthetics and its use in war operations) is conventionally confirmed:
Let us mention only the example of when the Museum of Modern Art in New York exposed (suspended) the helicopter
Bell 47D in their design department. In addition, in American war operations in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, Bell helicopters took part in those years. The connection between this usage and the object itself seemed to pass unnoticed in American media, and the critics expressed their enthusiasm in this way:
”A helicopter suspended
From the ceiling hovering over an escalator in the Museum of Modern Art, the chopper is bright green, big-eyed and beautiful !”
A helicopter, as any object, can never be neutral esthetic. Furthermore, what most concerns us here is that we must recognize this concealing.
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