The She-thinker

The thinker presents a sculpture based on formal and thematic relocation: it sums up a contemporary theme too advanced for the art of Rodin's time and a formal treatment too anachronistic for contemporary art; it establishes a relatively independent socio-cultural dimension, at an equal distance from both the (aesthetic) dogmatics of the past and the (aesthetic) arbitrariness of the present. This relatively independent dimension is a condition of social engagement because it enables the re-examination of culturally (un) sustainable and (in) appropriate social roles in diachrony. Namely, the Thinker embodies and promotes the figure of a woman thinker - for whom there was no place in history almost as much as there is no place for her in our language even today (since this word cannot be heard even in modern public speech). However, the Thinker is not an emblem of femininity as otherness, because such an attitude (implicitly) supports the primacy of masculinity as an orientation point towards which all other, "alternative" existences are defined. Instead, it symbolizes femininity as an unrecognized facet of universality; it does not represent an exclusively female experience but is an example, a case study of all neglected and / or new, insufficiently articulated social and cultural positions as such.

From the text by Dušica Popović