Painter of death

Zoran Music: Wir sind nicht die Letzten | Non siamo gli ultimi | We are not the Last | 1970 - 1992

Zoran Music - We are not the last
1970: We are not the last | Acrylic on canvas (114 x 146 cm)
1945: Dachau | Brown pencil on paper, 30 x 21 cm | p. 85 MONOGRAPHY (Metelko / Hug)

After death (after Dachau) I found my way back to life.

Yes. But I was not the same anymore. I lost my exuberance, I was less extroverted. I became aware that the outside world has become less and less important to me and that I have fled the surface.

All are equal before death and even the things we old for the most important are in truth not worth much.

This is the treasure that I took from this terrible time. A treasure that was especially useful to me as a person and as a painter. A treasure that I absolutely do not want to lose. I hope that this vision will stay in my subconscious forever.

Zoran Music: Dialogo con l‘autoritratto, Paolo Levi, Electa, Milano, 1992.

1945: Dachau | Ink on paper, 30.1 x 12 cm | p. 82 MONOGRAPHY (Metelko / Hug)

In the heart of the world rises a skull site. This is good old European cosmogony, among us Westerners we know what we are talking about. A skull place and around it the world turns: Our world.

Around the skull-shaped dome in the suburbs of Jerusalem rise the corpses of bodies, like satellites. The Romans made short work of the insurgent Jews, who in turn already had a whole history of salvation behind them. In search of the skull site, the Crusaders made short work of Muslims, Jews, Orthodox living around. The Crusaders sing “Great God we praise you”, while the war correspondent notes zealously that the water level of the hit people reaches the bridle bridles.

The pile of corpses sky high, everyone around an ideology, which logically reasons why he had to be layered. They obscure the horizon. Our horizon.

It is no longer about Zoran Music`s body heap about art or the like. Art, that is the mastery that attributes the grace of the Dalmatian landscape as well as the saecula saeculorum, as well as the all-out yet relieving convulsion of a person hanging from the gallows.

One does not cling to art-lustful vanities, to a painter who has everything in his wrist anyway, the magic of a copper-haired Venetian, and the anatomy of a ruined larynx, see above.

It is, when talking about music, to truthfulness, which is required in the witness stand of the World Tribunal.

Zoran Music obscures the language of the hanged and those of the executioners, and those who are mercifully intoxicated by life, in safety. If even the love-sigh breaks the language, much more the rattling of the wounded.

All the more eloquent is the silence around the Leichengebirge. He says, “We are not the last”.

It does not matter to which nation the flesh came from, which was shoveled into the crematoria ovens in Auschwitz, or pushed into the pit by bulldozers in Croatia and Bosnia. The children in the rattling concrete machines, it happened to the children in Bosnia, speak the voiceless language of their previous comrades from Dachau, from Trblinka: “We are not the last”

The accomplices of the executioners of those days hold their ears when the word “Auschwitz” falls. The intellectuals, the peace movement, the alternative Hauberlstricker listen to the ears when the word Sarajevo falls. How they covered their ears when talking about the boatpeople or the killing fields. Guaranteed is the continuity of horror.

The continuity of horror is guaranteed as long as people muster the meanness of carving their skin for an ideology. The ideology which logically justifies all horror and excuses it intellectually is the deepest abyss of human wickedness.

Nationalism, Leninism, Maoism, Titoism, Nationalism: The bodies of Auschwitz, Gulags, Haiphong, Hue, Pnom Penh, Gottschee and Sarajevo are vainly mourned as long as ideologues and semi-intellectual rogues feel called to make sacrifices.

From eternity, bliss, salvation, no trace on Zoran Music`s leaves. Perhaps the heavy satisfaction of not having lied here under the gallows of Dachau. The dead of Dachau have not been the last, the children of Bosnia will not be the last. In the heart of the world rises a skull site. Da capo al fine.

Siegbert Metelko, 1992