THIS TEXT HAS NOT YET BEEN EDITED.

A brief narrative of art events in after 1948 By Branislav Dimitrijević, Serbia

This text is constructed as an illustrated survey of some significant artistic events (some shaping artistic ideologies in their times, some influencing subsequent processes) in Serbia since 1945, and, as any other survey of the kind, it suffers from drastic exclusions. The criteria of selecting artists and events are modified with the aim to capture Serbian art in moments that make it both distinctive for local scene and relevant for wider international context. With only two exceptions, I have narrowed down this text only to events in Serbia by sole reason that other authors of "Total Recall" will deal with practices in other regions of the SFR Yugoslavia, that once used to form a unison political and artistic space. Otherwise I would grossly disregard a sense of artistic community that, especially between late 60s and mid-80s, accommodated a full interaction of ideas.

1. Models of Socialist artistic mainstream: Boža Ilić, Mića Popović, Petar Lubarda.

One of the general conclusions about the Yugoslav art after the Second World War1, is that it was not affected by the dogma of Socialist Realism as happened in other countries which became single party states soon after 1945. Only the brief period marked by Tito´s break with Stalin in 1948 is considered the period where Socialist Realism was the official style that was dedicatedly followed both by those artists who were involved with leftist social art of the 30s, and by those who were considered bourgeois in their inclination towards Parisian modernism. After 1948, as the argument goes, it took only a couple of years to completely break off with socialist realism, and modernism was adopted as a lingua franca of visual arts. As a consequence, a work of art was no longer obliged to represent the socialist reality, but to enhance artistic "freedom and self- awareness" as a necessity to create a new Weltanschauung of the "post-revolutionary generation".2 This trend of safe modernism (abstract painting and sculpture with reduced representational references) was labelled by a literature critic Sveta Lukić3 as Socialist aestheticism, and later by some other critics with a more general term Socialist Modernism.

It is striking that Socialist Realism in Serbia did not engender artists that had not been known previously, and that the only Homo novus was Boža Ilić who was risen to a socialist stardom in the course of months and then instantly forgotten when this style was no longer considered orthodox for the cultural policy of the new state. As an international trend, ranging from state controlled Zhdanovism in the Soviet Union to artistic currents related to political struggles in capitalist countries (e.g. Popular Front in France), Socialist Realism was not cultivated in Serbia: it was rather a local affair of political opportunism that did not produce any works that formally met standards of the Soviet model. For instance, Boža Ilić painted his most famous monumental painting Sondiranje terena na Novom Beogradu (Driving a borehole in the terrain of New Belgrade, 1948) by strictly following the pre-war academic standards of composing the painterly space and arranging figures in the manner of intimist bourgeois paintings of artists like Milo

1 As in other texts discussing only partially the art-practice in the country that was called the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, it is not easy to make a distinction between what was Serbian, Croatian or Slovene art. This text is mostly taking into consideration art events located in Serbia, but given that the capital city was on that territory as well, all of these and other events included artists that were not of Serbian nationality. 2 These are the words of the chief protagonist of Socialist aestheticism, Miodrag B. Protić, who initiated and established the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. See M.B. Protić, "Jugoslovensko slikarstvo šeste decenije – nove pojave", in Jugoslovensko slikarstvo šeste decenije (exh. catalogue), Muzej savremene umetnosti, Beograd 1980. 3 Sveta Lukić, "Socijalistički estetizam", Politika, Belgrade, 28.04.1963. 2

Milunović. Certainly, the subject matter differed from still-lives or other politically withdrawn genres of intimists: Boža Ilić depicted the quintessential motif for the new state, the start of the building of the city of New Belgrade, the biggest monument of the ideology of socialist modernism. This ideology, in words of a leading theoretician of architecture, Ljiljana Blagojević, was based upon confusing "negative reference framework of rejecting both Functionalism and Constructivism and the Soviet practice of 'formalist eclecticism'"4, that marked the Yugoslav socialist project in architecture as an "under-developed and unfinished modernism". The case of Boža Ilić is a symptom of a theoretically conflicting future of Serbian art: the noted Soc-realist leaning on pre-war bourgeois academism depicting the initiation of modernist utopia in situ of the new Socialist state. Soc-realism cannot therefore be seen as a break, but a stage of continuity between underdeveloped Modernism of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the programmatic Modernism of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

When some writers later reviewed works by Ilić, they tried not to consider him a Socialist-realist but rather a Socialist-romanticist, having in mind a great deal of naïveté this artist had in relation to political frameworks. Other artists were not that naïve, they were really realists. Political realists. The best-known Serbian dissident artist, Mića Popović, who was the first to rehabilitate Ilić not so long ago5, has been held to personify the break from Soc-realism with his first one-man show in 1950. This exhibition is one of the greatest myths in mainstream art historiography in Serbia, but actually it was simply the way to establish the position of the dissident artist as someone critically inclined towards the political structures but fully enjoying the institutional benefits that were to be on disposal to many artists within the climate of "moderate totalitarianism" of Tito's state. For example, it was Mića Popović who received the first state grant for a study trip abroad (three months in Paris) back in 1950.6 His show became more famous for the catalogue text written by Popović himself (a very unusual practice in that time) then for the paintings that did not fulfil the modernist promises emitted in the text. The paintings, reproductions of which cannot be found in the catalogue, fully maintained realist principles and did not ensue from the demand to encourage a primacy of form over content that was stated in the text.7 One of the paintings shown at this exhibition, Autoportet sa maskom (Self-portrait with the mask, 1947), may be seen as emblematic for its "content": the face of the artists disguised by a smiling mask symbolises the position of a dissident whose real political identity cannot be discerned and who in public displays false optimism appropriate in the times when bourgeois individualism was seen as counter-revolutionary. In his future career that created more dissident myths, Mića Popović paradoxically kept the spirit of realism alive and has not stimulated any innovative artistic practice.

In order to proclaim the first modernist artistic event in socialist Serbia, the dispute was created between those that saw Popović's show as a breaking point and those who are inclined to locate this break almost a year later, in 1951, when Montenegrin painter Petar Lubarda had his Belgrade show. He exhibited monumental paintings relating to folk traditions and inspired by peculiar visual impact of rough Montenegrin mountain landscape. These striking images show an idiosyncratic and autonomous path leading towards abstract pictorial language with some remote echoes of Parisian modernism. His painting Guslar (1951) takes the traditional motif of a folk singer playing a one-string instrument called gusle, that is a particular atavism in remote mountain areas. Singing and playing gusle signifies oral transmission of heroic tales from the past (and the present) accompanied with conceited ascetic identity attributed to Montenegrins. In the time Lubarda painted this and other more abstract paintings, the formalist discourse of art criticism

4 See Ljiljana Blagojević, "Great hopes, false premises, and bleak future: The case of New Belgrade", in Modernity in YU (Marko Lulić, ed., exh. cat.), Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, 2001, p. 5. 5 ULUS Gallery, Belgrade, May 1990. 6 See Predrag J. Marković, Beograd izmedju istoka i zapada, 1948-1965, Službeni list, Beograd 1996, p. 245. 7 Pref. cat. in Izložba slika Miće Popovića, Umetnički paviljon, Beograd, 1950. 2 3 fully took over, and until the late 60s the question how something was painted, rather than what was painted, came to be exclusively discussed. The cultural implications of merging Modernist visual vocabulary with the traditional motif was taken for granted as an ideal synthesis, so paintings like Guslar were celebrated by emerging, internationally informed formalist criticism as breaking with academic norms that had been strictly obeyed previously. The most influential art writer and the future founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (est. 1965), painter and lawyer Miodrag B. Protić, saw Lubarda's exhibition as the breaking point and had illustrated this claim with formidable formalist remarks: for instance, Protić asserts that Lubarda was first to break with rules of Belgrade Academia that did not allow one colour to appear in the same tone or hue more then once on a canvas, and that taught that without a three-dimensional illusion every painting is merely decorative. Lubarda's paintings from the early 50s reduced 'values' of coloured surfaces, and presented these surfaces as flat. Lubarda was the first painter to become internationally acclaimed, and one of the most influential art critics of the time, Herbert Read, wrote about Lubarda as "a painter with great sense of rhythmical composition".8 Politically, Lubarda occupied the position quite different then Popović. He stated that he was not forced to paint in Soc-realist manner in the 40s (as other modernist painters and future dissidents mostly claimed), and was in the group of "Independent artists" who may be seen as first leftist dissidents when they left the official Union of artists in the early 50s because it became the playground for mediocre conservative tendencies.

2. Two unrelated fragments for parallel histories: Bogoljub Jovanović's K55 and Zora Petrović's "Flying nudes".

There is one matchless painting kept in the Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art, that is still owned by its author who never appeared to claim it. The title of the painting is K55 (1955), and its author Bogoljub Jovanović maintained full silence about it, that is of mythical proportions. The leading art historian of Yugoslav Modernism, Ješa Denegri, states that "there is nothing similar to this painting in Serbian art of the 50s, and there are no direct parallels to this painting even in Paris of the time, where it was presumably made."9 It is an abstract painting entirely consisted of short and thick stripes of colour positioned vertically covering most of the canvas. This painting is unique for this period of Serbian art for it shows the way to achieve abstraction without relying on "natural" forms that may eventually be reduced to abstract forms, as was the road taken by other Serbian artists in the 50s and by the Belgrade Arts Academy that cherished this model as the only way to achieve and understand abstract forms. Jovanović's painting is constructed as an abstract image without appealing to nature, and in those terms for us it appears as an emancipatory and radical gesture.

Other paintings by Jovanović are more or less unknown. We can only guess that when he moved to Paris in 1953 he got acquainted with works of noted artists who worked there, including the Russian emigrant Nicolas de Staël who realised that paint alone could suggest physical density. He may have explored paint textures, tensions of individual strokes, and started employing a palette knife to drag and pull the paint into thick lines. However, the systematic way of constructing the surface of the painting by covering it with repetitive units of strokes, is quite particular for Jovanović. Where this artistic discovery would have lead later remained a mystery. Jovanović's Parisian episode was very brief and in the mid 50s he left for New York, which means how aware he was of new impulses coming across the Atlantic. However, what was his New York story is unknown for us at the present. Jovanović has returned to Belgrade at one point and refuses any contact with the art scene. One of the duties for Serbian art history is to try to discover facts behind this myth. The event of K55 did not influence the way of understanding Modernist art in

8 See M.B. Protić, "Jugoslovensko slikarstvo šeste decenije – nove pojave", op.cit., p. 25. 9 Ješa Denegri, Pedesete: Teme srpske umetnosti, Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1996, p… 3 4

Serbia, no one has taken the similar path, but it is an event that still captures our theoretical inquiry.

If Jovanović presents an artistic gesture that remained in obscurity for the dominating mainstream of the 50s, one should also point out some examples of established artists that had in their career created works not fully acknowledged or understood within the standards of the time, or that had their personal life stories hidden behind moralist norms. A series of large paintings executed mostly in 1959 by an artist that was well known even before the war, Zora Petrović, show a glorious end of one rather academic artistic career. Paintings including Njih dve u igri (The two of them playing, 1959), Zrele žene (Mature women, 1959) and Dva lebdeća akta (Two hovering nudes, 1959), develop an expressionist artistic language, that have a significant tradition in Serbian art, but achieve some kind of denial of any consideration for academic standards. Hectic gestures, intensity of brushwork, occasional drippings, creates an amazing intensity of the surface, and modelling of figures that disregards esthetical norms especially in painting the female body. Zora Petrović painted these when approaching the end of her life, the life that remains in reticence primarily because of public refusal to deal with her sexual orientation. She did not act out as a lesbian, and in art historiography no one has dealt with implications of this public secret. By observing her own ageing body, and by spending time in solitude (in her biography there is no mention of any public appearance by Petrović in 1959), she has achieved a pandemonic way of exploring her own sexuality towards the end of her life affected by illness.

Some attempts have been made to interpret this sexual exploration through appearance of symbolic objects on her canvases: red flowers on white paper, red circles with white edges.10 However, an overall impression of existential dealing with the decay of the body in a playful yet dramatic way, reveals Zora Petrović as an artist who pre-figured crucial interests in representations of gender and sexuality that will come to the forth in the 70s. On the other hand these canvases have in Serbian art a similar role of "the return of figure against the ground of abstraction" which was in Western European context played by Georg Baselitz. In my opinion it is crucial to discover in one rather isolated art community similar impulses that will shape some future occurrences in art practice internationally. An inability to understand the full significance of these paintings by local art establishment enshrouded one mature artistic vision that came to internationally relevant conclusions.

3. Prehistory of "new practice" in art: The private noartistic life of Dimitrije Bašićević - Mangelos

The concept of Socialist Modernism of the 1950s was not significantly challenged until the end of the 60s. The strength of modernist mainstream was confirmed by the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1965. Different voices were heard only in anti-modernist circles, sometimes with open right-wing implications, that revered the return to pre-modernist perspectival models in painting, and creating the trend of fantastic imagery that became the quintessential anti-socialist myth in art (with the group Mediala as pivotal). There was no strong radical gesture in Serbian art before 1970, but impulses that prepared this break came from other regions of Yugoslavia. The most significant impulse came at the end of the 60s from the Slovenian collective OHO, and the most 'invisible' one from the work of Zagreb-based art historian Dimitrije Bašićević - Mangelos, that had been literally invisible until 1968. Bašićević's family story is quite symbolical: his father Ilija Bosilj was one of the key figures of "naïve painting" in Yugoslavia, and the object of one big theoretical controversy. They lived in the small town of Šid, west from Belgrade, the town known for the greatest Serbian pre-war painter Sava Šumanović, who was killed there by Ustasha forces during the WW2. Bašićević studied in Zagreb, and it was the work on Šumanović that became his

10 See Olivera Janković, Zora Petrović. Art as life, SANU, Beograd, 1995. 4 5 doctoral thesis. Later he pursued with theoretical writings of great significance and participated in some crucial moments for contemporary art in Zagreb, that both in the 50s and the 60s gave rise to a much more radical and innovative art scene then it was the case with Belgrade. During all these years Bašićević carried out one 'clandestine' artistic project. It started when he was in the high school during the war and when, affected by tragedy all around him, he began to write short poems in his notebooks, that subsequently took shape of art-books in which he inscribed lines and words in white over pages saturated with black tint. He did similar works on blackboards and on school-globes, that all formed an imaginary classroom as a site of trauma and edification, a site where the notion of tabula rasa emerges as an artistic space that refers to the epitome of Suprematism, combined with Magritteian "uses of words", and pre-figuring a pre-conceptualist visual articulation of poetry of Marcel Broodthaers, with whose significance he could be compared. These works (Les Paysages, Anti-phones, Nonstories, Les Exercises, etc,) lead him to theoretically develop a principle on noart, a principle of radical negation: "to negate the picture by writing it with words, to negate the word by painting it".11

Bašićević took the pseudonym Mangelos in order to distinguish his private artistic project from his public role of critic and curator. The first work of art that almost appeared in public, was his "design" for one of the issues of the magazine Gorgona that was published in Zagreb between 1961 and 1966 and represented the most significant artistic project of the period in Yugoslavia. Each issue of the magazine was a special project by one artist, and Mangelos proposed that his contribution would be an issue of Gorgona that wouldn't be published. In a characteristically ambiguous and ironical manner, he later "lamented" that this issue was never accomplished?!12 The first appearance of a work by Mangelos in a gallery space happened in Belgrade in 196813, when the curator Biljana Tomić included his work in the exhibition Permanent Art, and later at four exhibitions of visual poetry. He had his first solo-show in Novi Sad in 1972. His influence on the generations of artists in the 70s and then also in the 80s, was never straightforward but his unique spirit and intelligence provides Yugoslav conceptual art with a missing thread that may help us in constructing an "alternative" history of art in Yugoslavia outside of the dominating academic status quo.

4. Breaking point: Early years of Student's Cultural Centre in Belgrade and independent artistic groups in Subotica and Novi Sad

The emergence of the Students' Cultural Centre (SKC) is a result of students' protests in 1968. As one of the ways to pacify growing dissatisfaction of the young generation with any form of authority within the Socialist system that had increasingly shown cracks in the economic system as well as in the fragile harmony of national identities, students were given a cultural venue in order to channel their political dissatisfaction through marginal cultural experimentation. SKC opened in 1971 and that very same year a couple of exhibitions were organised that gathered young emerging artists of which an informal group of six was created that included Marina Abramović, Neša Paripović, Raša Todosijević, Zoran Popović, Gergely Urkom and Era Milivojević. Most of them had already been friends during their student years in the late 60s, and had already developed a full confrontation with the academic system. Probably the most outspoken and theoretically minded of them, Zoran Popović, later summed up the artistic and

11 After Bašićević died, his brother Vojin together with Ješa Denegri edited and published three books on his work. The two of them are collections of essays by Bašićević, the art historian (Ogledi and Fotografija i umetnost, Novi Sad, 1996), and the third consists of collected essays by different authors on Mangelos, the artist (Drugi o njemu, Novi Sad, 1996). They also published a monograph Bašićević wrote on his father, Ilija Bosilj. 12 In a conversation with the artist Mladen Stilinović, "Mangelos - Umetnik u prvom licu", in Mangelos: Drugi o njemu, pp. 49-56. 13 Before that he published a book of poetry and appeared in the publication "a" (Zagreb, 1964) by the artist Ivan Picelj. 5 6 political situation in which they found themselves in, and that was characterised by two tendencies. On the one hand there was a demand that art in the revolutionary society should be socially beneficial within a general obligation to build socialism, and on the other a demand that art should have only one real obligation in researching exclusively formal issues of artistic practice: "as a generation emerging on the art scene, we found ourselves between two ostensibly opposed thoughts that were both socially established."14 In other words, this generation of artists was first to recognise various dissident formations in the Serbian society as integral, almost constitutive aspects of governing structures. This generation of artists was first to start thinking relations between art and politics in the third way, and in a sense this whole artistic event signified a first form of cultural critique coming from left wing positions (although many protagonists would not declare themselves as "left-wing") advocating fundamental changes in social role of artists, and inclusion of real life in artistic practice.

Whereas in Belgrade the main target of rebellion was the Academy of Fine Arts, which means that it was impossible to disregard its symbolic weight, the "new art practice", or conceptual art, appeared simultaneously in two cities in the northern region of Vojvodina, in Subotica and Novi Sad, where it took shape that more closely related to new forms of social behaviour fully independent from any official institution and inspired by hippie movement and its consequence for an overall lifestyle and political orientation of that generation. Chronologically, the first artistic movement of the kind appeared in Subotica when in 1969 the group Bosch+Bosch was formed and then in Novi Sad with groups Kod and (∃. The practice of all these groups was mostly unacknowledged at the time, but one should mention the crucial role some art critics and curators had in initiating and promoting this radical break, primarily Biljana Tomić and Ješa Denegri, as well as Dunja Blažević, Jasna Tijardović and later Bojana Pejić. For the first time art in Serbia got out of self-imposed isolation and started communicating with the international art scene. SKC was not only a laboratory for local artists, and those from other parts of SFRY, but also a relevant meeting point for international art community. The Belgrade scene was characterised by performance art of Abramović, Todosijević and Milivojević, but also by analytical conceptualism of Popović and Urkom, as well as by the most sophisticated synthesis of these two orientations in the work of Neša Paripović. It is difficult to single out most significant events in this period that can be roughly situated between 1971 and 1977. For the sake of this overview I will mention four artistic events that had, or may have had, many consequences for understanding of art and discourse of art that has emerged in this period.

Balinth Szombathy's Lenin in Budapest, 1972, employed the issue of ambivalence in artistic and political gestures. Szombathy, the founding member of Bosch+Bosch, carried out many projects (that may be classified both as land art and as analytical art) with an aim to erase the line between art and life by fully understanding the concept of dematerialization and centrality of artistic process as opposed to its final outcome. Lenin in Budapest is just one of these projects but may be singled out for its unacknowledged consequence towards positioning political issues in artistic behaviour at that time and especially later in the 1980s. The work is documented by the series of photos of Szombathy carrying a placard with the image of Lenin on the streets of Budapest in 1972. To expose this image within an environment saturated with representations of this icon of communist revolution seems like a superfluous gesture. The very same image was carried during organised rallies celebrating Socialist utopia in every corner of the Soviet bloc. However, Szombathy's act is an individual and not a collective act which may in itself be regarded as subversive. But straightforward subversion was not the aim of this event. It was rather the ambivalent gesture that was difficult to decode in that political milieu: is Szombathy celebrating Leninism or is he mocking it? As it now seems it was neither of the two, but it was a gesture of individual identification with the ideology that was not controlled or organised within the system

14 Zoran Popović, "Strogo kontrolisane predstave", an interview by Ješa Denegri, Moment 14, Beograd, 1989. 6 7 but outside of it. It appears as a 'legitimate' but surplus statement of enthusiastic identification with ideology that cannot be dealt with by that ideology itself. It now seems that it was Szombathy who pre-figured an artistic strategy that was developed through the activity of Neue Slowenische Kunst in the 1980s: exaggerated identification with one ideological system suspends its efficacy and this system does not know how to deal with this gesture. I think that in art and films15 of the late 60s and early 70s in , the way how to perplex ideological norms was not in direct subversion (that usually provoked instant repression) but in finding fissures that cannot be straightforwardly interpreted by an ideological apparatus.

Rhythm 5 (1974) by Marina Abramović is one of the series of her performances in which she stretches the limits of her own body, and presents herself as one of the most radical body artists. As with other works entitled Rhythm, Abramović gave a detailed description of the procedure, stressing the relation between an artistic intention and the uncontrolled result. In Rhythm 5 she sets fire on a wooden construction in the shape of a five-pointed star, then she cuts her hair and nails and throws them into a burning star, and finally she enters the burning star herself. Afterwards she described the consequence of this action: "I don't realise the fire has consumed all of the oxygen as I lay down. I lose consciousness. Because I am lying the audience does not react. When flame touches my leg and I still don't react, two persons from the audience enter the star and carry me out. I am confronted with the limits of my body and the performance is interrupted." This event happened as a part of "April Meetings " organised annually as a festival of “expanded media” or "new art" in SKC (1973-1978) that gathered many internationally renowned artists: witnesses of the event tell that one of the rescuers was Joseph Beuys, (or was it Radomir Damnjanovic Damnjan, as more reliable witnesses say) which certainly added to the drama. As the only artist in the group of six that fully "specialised" in body art, Abramović did not focus upon ideology of dematerialization but upon identifying her own body as a material in which certain spiritual or archetypal energy is evoked in the traditional form of the ritual. As Bojana Pejić rightly observes, "in her art she opposes the separation of the body and the mind which marked the Western/European tradition which has always privileged the ratio… she tries to empty the mind, either by positioning the body in a state of total quiescence or by repetition of a violent gesture or action, in order that the body and mind can become one."16 In her desire to take the ethical and mythical principles of her practice to final consequences, in her most risky performance, Rhythm 0 performed in Naples the following year, she combined the quiescence of her body with public potential for violent gestures that cannot be controlled by the artists so she reached the zero degree of artistic intention and directly confronted her body with the decision to be made by collective drives of 'others'.17

Was ist Kunst, Marinela Koželj? (1976) by Raša Todosijević is one in a series of his Was ist Kunst? performances, and a key work that marks the conclusion of an artistic course. Todosijević was the first artists to make a break with a certain sense of pathos encapsulating the "new art practice" when its initial radical impulse reached the point of no return: the group of six artists was never an organic whole, but by 1976/7 they reached an ideological disillusionment, some of

15 The film by Dušan Makavejev, W.R.: Mysteries of Organism (1971) is a prime example of this method. 16 Bojana Pejić, "Body-based art: Serbia and ", in Body and the East, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, 1998, p. 78. 17 For a detailed description of this unprecedented event by a direct witness see Thomas Mc Evilley, "Marina Abramović / Ulay - Ulay / Marina Abramović", Artforum, 1, vol. XII, 1983, pp. 52-55. It is important not to forget that this whole practice faced angry or sarcastic comments in wider public and media in Serbia. But it was especially Marina Abramović who was, by being a woman, especially targeted by most vulgar remarks. To illustrate this we can take a text published in a comical magazine Jež that literally says the following about Rhythm 0: "What if, instead in Naples, M.A. organized her performance here in the Balkans. We could have understood "body art" as "nabodi art" (= implying penetration). Maybe some philistine would make use of M.A. since she does not look bad. That would be a happening! Similar to those in Danish night clubs." (Radivoje Bojičić, "(Na)bodi art Marine Abramović i triptih Damnjanović, Todosijević, Urkom", Jež, Belgrade, 23.5.1975) 7 8 them had even a firm idea to terminate any activities in SKC and continued in different directions. Marina Abramović met Ulay and was soon to enter a very successful international career, Urkom left for England where he stayed, Popović got more involved in theorising political implications of this practice and a sense of failure of some left-wing myths that surpassed it18, Milivojević, who always kept a singular position within the group, continued his explorations of mathematical structures of archetypes, and Paripović was yet to make his finest works in which he investigated lateral artistic strategies by very discrete means of his own face and body. Raša Todosijević had a different, more cynical nerve, and the mentioned sense of disillusionment was for him a fuel for future edgy and challenging works that brought him into the 80s, and that reached the peek in the early 90s with Gott liebt die Serben installation-series. Was ist Kunst may be understood as an ideological pre-figuration of this series, but had more influence on the art project of NSK in then it had on the Belgrade art scene in the 80s.

We know of these series of performances because the tape of one with Marinela Koželj is luckily available. One of the misfortunes of the 70s in Serbia is that many works remained undocumented and can be now reconstructed only with the help of memory of their participants and viewers. This performance consists of a frontally seated motionless woman who becomes an object of "investigation" and abuse by the artist who repeatedly, in 'off-voice', shouts: "Was ist Kunst?" Close up of Koželj's face in the video document enhances the effect of intimidation and arrogance, and the very duration of this video makes the performance arduous also for the viewer due to the traumatic "real-time" transmission of the event. This work uses some traditional artistic matrices, such are dialectics between the artist and his model (who is "naturally" female) and between intention and interpretation of artistic achievements; its crucial accomplishment lays in investigating politics of art (not political art) by focusing upon a weakness to interpret art that breeds agitated behaviour. If conceptual art began with heroic definitions such is Kosuth's "Art as an Idea as an Idea" it ended with one tormenting question: "Was ist Kunst?". Pronounced in German, of course, because which other language evokes totalitarian legacy in an unmistaken way?

N.P. 1977 (1977) by Neša Paripović is a 8mm film showing the artist walking/running through Belgrade. His route is not structured by the urban grid of streets and paths, but follows an imagined trajectory: Paripović takes an idiosyncratic walk that knows of no barriers, he crosses fences, climbs roofs of houses, jumps over balconies. The urban topography is a mise-en-scene for self-representation of ephemeral and 'non-functional' behaviour. As in other works by Paripović - that always deal with the issue of self-representation of an artist achieved by discrete and "shy" means and not by an appeal to romantic myths of self-imaging that were still revered in the mainstream system of art - internal rhythmic of the body is confronted with social and environmental structures. The film camera records the moving body, and this camera both documents one event but also structures it in achieving to master the movement in its long-lasting linear route. Paripović deconstructs the linear narrative of a film by reducing it to a linear action of moving a film protagonist forward through the setting. With this film Paripović has accomplished a most significant return to the very origins of locating conceptualist artistic act within everyday behaviour, a return to Situationist models of dérive, a technique of hastily passing through varied environments as a condition of constructing relations of an individual towards structures of urbanity (through the notion of psychogeography). Every Paripović's work is, in

18 Popović, together with his wife, the critic Jasna Tijardović, spent some time in New York where they contributed to the influential Fox magazine. His text "For Self-management Art" - published for the occasion of October 75 meeting in Belgrade when relation of their practice to mostly benevolent political structures was firmly challenged - was acknowledged in some leading source books of artists' writings in the West. See: Theories and documents of contemporary art. A source book of artists' writings, Christine Stilles and Peter Selz (eds.), University of California Press, Berkley, 1996, pp. 847-849. 8 9 words of Miško Šuvaković, "an image of an overall conceptual and media matrix of one period… a tendency of exploring and finding the mature language of Belgrade conceptualism."19

5. Two ways to understand what happened in the 80s: Mileta Andrejević in New York and Armory Show in Belgrade.

It will be misleading to make a straight parallel between the destiny of conceptual art in the West and in Yugoslavia. It is difficult to speak of a developed art market and gallery/museum system that conditioned the return to painting as happened in the West. However, this is exactly what happened, along with adopting of "postmodernist" theories of Eco, Baudrillard and others. Also, Bojana Pejić is quite right to stress that the socialist gallery and museum system also enthusiastically embraced postmodernist, mostly neo-expressionist painting, and immediately started with acquisitions and historisations.20 However, what made the art scene in Belgrade dynamic, and not just a la mode, is most definitely the break of boundaries between the myths of high art and emerging popular culture represented by new wave rock music and underground clubs (namely "Akademija" situated in the very basement of the Belgrade Art Academy). Events in underground music culture were fuelled with artistic potentials, and it now seems that the most emblematic artist for the beginning of the 80s remains one photographer that managed to capture the spirit and the "look" of the times, Dragan Papić. Papić was behind a project with young musicians that he gathered in the group Dečaci (The Boys), that was later to become the most successful new wave band Idoli. It was early songs and TV clips of this band that introduced retro principles in art practice by ambiguous evocations and celebrations of formalist and ideological manifestations of the Russian avant-garde and Socialist utopia.

But, if we want to trace a typical market orientated Serbian artist of the 80s, one cannot find him in Serbia (in spite of some success of certain Belgrade artists at that period) but at the right spot, in New York. Apart from Marina Abramović there is only one artist born and educated in Serbia whose name regularly appear in different institutional international artists' directories. The name is Mileta Andrejević. "Who!?", the question would be posed by many in Serbia. Mileta Andrejević belonged in the late 40s and early 50s to the same circle of artists as the above- discussed Mića Popović. As the others he spent some time in Paris, but neither remained there nor returned back to Belgrade. Instead, he moved in the mid 50s to New York where he became the protégéé of Richard Bellamy whose "Green gallery" at that time featured Oldenburg, Rosenquist, Seagal, and others that were later taken by Leo Castelli. Andrejević's pop-art works got mentioned in Lucy Lippard's classic survey of the subject.21 In the 60s Andrejević moved out of these circles and started studying old masters like Poussin and Vermeer and teaching painting techniques that helped him to elaborate a very slow process of painting with egg, oil and tempera, as well as to elaborate his own classicist style. During the 70s his canvases attracted private collectors, but it was the early 80s that made prices of his paintings rocket-high. "Romantic realism", as this style was labelled, was a mixture of poussinesque style and contemporary setting: all his scenes are located in Central park where New Yorkers engage in athletic and cultural activities. They assume classical posturing and are associated with characters from Greek myths, with Acteon, Icarus, Daphne and others. These paintings fitted immensely well the most conservative trend in art criticism supported by big institutions such as Metropolitan Museum that wanted the art of painting back on the market. It was Hilton Cramer, notorious especially for his New Criterion journal, who gave him a major boost by writing a long review in the New York Times. Theorists of postmodernism embraced his "classical sensibility", and Charles Jencks wrote that he evoked a

19 For a comprehensive analysis see Miško Šuvaković, Neša Paripović. Autoportreti, Prometej, Novi Sad, 1996. 20 See Bojana Pejić, "Serbia: Socialist Modernism and the Aftermath", Aspects/Positions. 50 years of Art in Central Europe 1949-1999, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, 2000, pp. 115-123. 21 Lucy R. Lippard, Pop Art, (Serbian translation: Milica Drašković), Jugoslavija Press, Beograd, 1977, p. 131. 9 10

"timeless vision of contemporary life" and reminded us that along with modern life and technology "Americans still pursue the Arcadian dream".22 This Serbian emigrant sincerely believed in that, and his own life, that consisted solely of everyday walks from his apartment that was on one side of Central Park to his studio that was on the other, shaped his retro vision. It would be easy to dismiss this artist as mere "tool" of right-wing criticism. But if we discuss connections "with the Western art process"23, Andrejević found himself in the midst of an artistic trend. His studious technical excellence, but also the fact that he produced paintings (it took him around six months for each of them) that went straight to the market when finished (when he died only the canvas he was working on at that moment was found in his studio), gives him a significant role in serious attempts by conservatives in demanding revisions in purely modernist art histories of 20th century art.

Whilst New York art market blossomed, Belgrade witnessed an unprecedented event, The International exhibition of Modern Art (Armory Show) that was in some distant past held in New York. The works by Duchamp, Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky but also by Lichtenstein, Johns, Kosuth and others were exhibited in 1986 in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. The project did not played with mystification, it is clear that works were neither "originals" nor "forgeries", but "genuine copies" of which some were not even made since they were dated in the year 2013 or later. In a lecture Walter Benjamin gave that same year in Belgrade on a series of Mondrian's paintings of which the last was to be made in 1996, the status of the copy was rehabilitated: an original has only a feature of an original whereas a copy has features both of an original and of a copy. This key series of art projects that happened in Serbia during the 80s have not been associated with any author, but have been associated with other similar projects such was the Last Futurist Show 0.10 in one Belgrade apartment in 1985 and Gertrude Stein's Salon de Fleurus that can still be visited in 41, Spring Street in New York.24 These projects again are linked with the work of one conventionally untrained artist, Goran Djordjević, who in the late 70s started copying famous works of art including Djordjević's own, hilariously bad, high- school painting Glasnici Apokalipse (copy from the 1980). All of these projects raised many discussions about originality (and "other modernist myths") in the most radical manner, especially given that they appeared in circumstances far remote from artistic and ideological schemes that shaped Western art history, art market and modes of institutionalisation. All of these projects reveal possibilities of radical artistic gestures in the time when radicalism of the 70s reached an impasse through aesthetisation and institutionalisation. By observing the trend of the return to traditional painting, and by working on an "un-artistic use of a traditional artistic medium", as Slobodan Mijušković put it, Goran Djordjević creates a vacillating cultural subversion: "If my attitudes may seem radical to some, I must say that they are first of all an expression of sympathy toward intellectual anarchism that is unfortunately not far away from utopistic by having in mind that the true power of Tradition and Institution is incongruously and discouragingly big".25 The awareness of this power of the Big Other use to be the steadiest stumbling block both for institutionalisation and for radicalisation of artistic space in Serbia, with Goran Djordjević it became one of the central points of departure for one rigorous art project of international significance.

6. Out of collapse: Some events in the 1990s

22 Charles Jencks, "The Classical Sensibility", The Post-Avantgarde Painting in the Eighties, Art&Design, vol.3, No. 7/8, 1987, pp. 48-65. 23 As requested by initiators of the "Total recall" project in their invitation letter. 24 For an extensive analysis of these projects see Marina Gržinić's text in Fiction Reconstructed, (exh. catalogue), Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, 2001 25 Slobodan Mijušković, "Goran Djordjević. Original i kopija" (an interview), Moment, no.2, Belgrade, 1985, pp. 9- 11. 10 11

Political situation in Serbia in the 90s is a widely discussed topic. Art of that period has been unavoidably seen through the prism of war, ethnic cleansing and political ploys. Instead of structuring any narrative of this period, I will mention four works of many that I have written on those days. These works were also related to some significant art events. The first one was originally shown at Vršac Biennial of Young Artists in 1996, and the next year at Manifesta2 in Luxembourg. The following two were produced for the Second Annual Exhibition (a.k.a. Murder) of the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art in 1997. The fourth was firstly shown at the exhibition Konverzacija, Belgrade, 2001.

Tanja Ostojić, Personal Space, 1996 (Performance in which the artist stands still, naked and covered with white marble powder.) "… A very rare example in contemporary Serbian art of a work, which has avoided cynicism of artists of her generation, caught between their inability to alter the political events and their disavowal of any kind of torment inflicted upon them by these circumstances. In this performance Tanja Ostojić has critically evoked spiritual visions of the body from the medieval spiritual tradition and combined two aspects: nuditas naturalis and nuditas virtualis. This performance exposes body simultaneously as a human condition of nakedness, either being a sign of vice or a sign of humility, and as symbolising innocence and the raiment of the soul. In a position where the beholder fixes his/her gaze on a body vulnerably exposed, s/he witnesses not only a mute statement of the indisposition of an artist to act within a hostile environment but also discloses the wider image of woman’s body in art history as a sad affair of symbolisation and manipulation. … Reduction to a virtual body of a woman/child/alien is a disturbing and poignant sign of a desire to be born again, as pure, empty of thoughts, free to depart from material conditions."26

Zoran Naskovski, Voice of the hand, 1997 (Video-installation, sound and image of a hand rubbing the top of a wet glass.) "…The much used concept of abjection in recent art depends on a specific stage of Western societies: an ultra-conformist milieu inhabited by the "hyper- bourgeoisie" in an illusion of total aseptic purity. At the same time, this milieu is also absorbed by media imagery of disease, war, famine, violent threats of "the others". Representing 'impurity' becomes a means of endangering the symbolical structure, and, by these representations, art reminds us of fragility and limits of the body, the body that becomes the only connection between "viewers" and the image, the only identification between "us" and "them". Although he is very aware of these currents in contemporary art, Zoran Naskovski is an artist working in the different social and cultural climate: a society quite literally far from "aseptic image", but a society in which purification rituals are more perverse, and manifested through rituals of erasure up to a point of disappearance. These rituals erase traces, all the information disappear. And what is most important, the "justifications" for this erasure techniques are never in a particular hygienic eagerness of the performers of these rituals, but in frivolousness and carelessness that make everything disappear, including the ritual itself…"27

Milica Tomić, XY Ungelöst, 1997 (Video installation with two projections, the date, 28.03.1989, that appears at the beginning of the tape refers to a crime committed by Serbian police in .) "… In order to re-create the very incident that has not happened in front of any watchful eye, apart from two intersected gazes of victims and their executioners, Milica Tomić invited people around her, mostly members of the Belgrade art community to pose in shabby dated clothing from the mid-eighties, in order to attribute individual symbols to each and every ethnic Albanian murdered at that particular incident. These garments were an actual reconstruction of original clothing worn by murdered citizens, i.e. Milica re-created these garments according to

26 From "Pain on both sides", in Manifesta 2, Luxembourg, 1997, pp. 116-117. 27 From “Trans-/ Trance, or, Journeys by Intensity”, in Zoran Naskovski: Last Exit, Publikum, Belgrade, 1997.

11 12 family photos of the victims she managed to obtain. When inviting her "actors" she involuntarily adopted a restricted method of disclosing the content of their act. The method was based upon her insight into particular political orientation of her actors, i.e. upon the recognition of their political identities. Those for whom she knew that have taken a clearly anti-nationalistic standpoint she had explained in details her request for that person to identify with a murdered Albanian; those who “wouldn’t mind” (the majority of her actors) she informed on their roles but claimed inexplicit political orientation of the work; finally, those who would have objected to this idea, following their nationalistic attitude, were in effect manipulated by the artist, and were trapped by a ‘magic’ invitation to appear in an art work - and who can decline that? Apart from making this an unintentional 'revenge' on those who effectually supported the state of affairs in Serbia, and more or less silently authorised crimes committed in the name of the protection of Serbian national interest, Milica Tomić exposed a dominating belief in art as an autonomous sphere unaffected by social and political contexts. According to this belief, it was art that was supposed to provide consolation in social and political crisis, to be a mask of traumatic political identifications and relations. With xy ungelöst, Milica Tomić pursued an opposite direction: this video installation operates precisely with the very content of a political trauma."28

Vladimir Nikolić, Rhythm, 2001 "… Five persons are filmed standing on a stage whilst they make the Christian-Orthodox sign of cross, repetitively, following the four-tact techno-music beat. Whether religious rituals will fully replace Communist rituals, and whether the only thing worse than Communism is Anti-Communism (to quote one waken-up Polish intellectual), is a matter of political attitude. But, what is in fact striking in this powerful video work is that it brings us back to one of the first formulas of ideology written in the 18th Century by Blaise Pascal: kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will start to believe. Ideology is in material practices, it resides in bodies and their rituals, and Vladimir Nikolić makes these rituals redundantly overachieving.

28 From "Traps Of Identification: Three Videos By Milica Tomić" (written with Branka Andjelković), in Milica Tomić (Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck + Kunsthalle, Wien, 1999) 12