A Personal Story – Part 1
The Beginnings
For a few years now this image has been my computer screen (Fig. 1) and the scull within it became my Google avatar (Fig. 2). As they say, even in my wildest dreams I never expected this would happen, and that is why I thought it might be interesting to tell the story of this painting which I named Harbingers of the Apocalypse.
I thought this painting to be a failure when I painted it, and I was ashamed of it for many years. It was not the subject matter, but the way it was painted, the technique, or rather the lack of it, that I considered embarrassing. The only reason I didn’t destroy it was because I considered my subsequent works to be much better and kept this first one as a measure of my progress. When friends would visit me at my home I would proudly show my latest achievements and, to show how much I have advanced, I would pull out the Harbingers and say: “And this is where I started”. That was the main reason this painting survived the following several years, until it was given a second chance.
The earliest record of this painting I found in a notebook full of drawings and notes I worked on usually while having an evening coffee with my friend Vojislav Radulović, we called him Kokan, at the hotel “Avala” cafe located on the main Marshal Tito Street in my hometown Prishtina(Fig.3, 3a).The notebook is from 1970 which indicates that the correct year for the Harbingers is 1970 and not 1969 as I mistakenly stated many years later.
In the notebook are these two sketches on two neighboring pages, both showing that originally the composition had two parts, above and below the Earth (Fig.4). The key features can be recognized on both: the horizon, the burned trees, the UFO-like objects. The only thing missing is the hanging scull. While examining the notebook I noticed that at least one page had been removed between these two, probably another sketch on the same subject.
Most likely the idea for the scull came from a painting “War” I made in high school (Fig.5, 5a). I remember exhibiting it in the school hall at the Red Cross charity exhibition which I happened to be organizing.
Interestingly, while going through the sketches, I noticed this one titled “Midnight”, a fictional street view, but with “eyes” on each of the street lights and a big ominous “eye” hovering above, as if it was somehow anticipating the present (Fig. 6).
At one of our evening cafe meetings in November 1970, while drawing a sketch, a thought crossed my mind that perhaps we should start working on a real exhibition. I never came to understand where this idea came from since there were no galleries in Prishtina at that time and I had never seen an exhibition before. Perhaps my high school exhibition had something to do with this. Although my friend was a bit surprised, he accepted the idea and we begin seriously working on the exhibition. The first thing I did was to make an easel in order to produce larger works. It can be seen in these two sketches depicting my room (Fig. 7, 8).
I chose one of the Harbingers sketches for the first painting. I decided to use tempera on paper, but after finishing the upper half I was not happy with the result (Fig. 9).
At that point I decided to stop working on this painting, cut the lower part of the sketch and change the technique. Instead of tempera I decided to try a pointillist technique with color pens and selected another sketch titled “Adam and Eve” . It took me longer to finish it but this time I was satisfied with the result (Fig. 10).
The next work was structurally more complex but again I was happy with the result (Fig. 15). Interestingly, in one of the corners it includes a sketch for the previous work.
I continued working in this manner and managed to produce enough works that winter for the show. Most of them had some SF theme and that seems to be the only similarity with the Harbingers (Fig. 12).
By that time, thanks to my mother’s contacts, we were able to get a permission to hang the exhibition in the Yugoslav Army Cultural Center foyer (Fig. 13).
Although the exhibition titled “Pro-Humanism” lasted only a week (March 28 – April 5 1971) a couple of thousand visitors came to see it, including organized schools visits. Many of them signed in or wrote comments in the guest book (Fig. 13).
An art exhibition in Prishtina those days must have been an unusual event. There was even a review in the local newspaper “Jedinstvo”. After Prishtina, the exhibition moved to Prizren, and it was installed in the city Cultural Center(Fig.14). Not necessary to mention that Harbingers of the Apocalypse were not included in this show. It would be exhibited for the first time ten years later at the SKC Gallery in Belgrade.
One of the notes reminded me that at the last exhibit in my part of the installation was a mirror framed with a black passe-partout titled “Self-portrait”. I remember the prominent local painter and professor Muslim Mulliqi saying “I like it” while standing in front of the mirror. I never thought to repeat this work until now, and arrange a proper context just for this illustration (Fig.15).
A couple of years later I did another kind of self-portrait, this one based on a thumbnail print in my 1972 notebook(Fig. 16) that was then in 1973 enlarged as a linear drawing on paper (Fig.17).
Sometime in May 1971 we heard about an important exhibition that opened in the National Museum in Belgrade and decided to go to see it. We took an overnight train (Fig. 18) and upon our arrival in the morning at the Belgrade train station went directly to the museum.
The exhibition was “From Delacroix to Picasso” and I remember waiting in a long line to enter the museum. Of course we were very much impressed with the entire show although I had never heard of most of the artists before. This was the first real art exhibition I had ever visited and I was happy to find the catalog a few years ago in a second-hand bookstore.
Also, I remember getting close to this still-life by Picasso and noticing how in my opinion it appeared to me to be painted a bit clumsy (Fig. 19). The rest of the day we spent walking through the city even venturing over the bridge to New Belgrade (Fig. 20).
Encouraged by the success of our exhibition I continued working in the same manner on the SF-futuristic themes, improving my technique. This one was left intentionally unfinished; although I no longer remember why (Fig.21).
Gradually I became more interested in the formal properties of the pictures than in the subject matter, and with time they became simpler (Fig. 22).
In the fall of 1971 I moved to Belgrade to continue my studies at the Faculty of Electric Engineering and by the following summer (1972) my work was reduced to the most simplified forms (Fig. 23, 24, 25).
Interestingly at that point I even tried “translating” this Mondrian composition into “my language” (Fig. 26). The picture was taken from a three volume General History of Art bought from a street vendor in Prishtina (Fig.27).
At that time this was my main source of knowledge about art. At some point near the end of summer I decided to give up using the pointillist technique and continue working only in notebooks (Fig. 28) and at the same time I began calling my work “visual explorations”.
This is reflected in the title of the interview I gave that summer “There is Only Exploration” for the student newspaper “Novi svet” , where I contrasted it with the notion of “creativity” commonly used in the art context, stating that human creativity is an illusion (Fig. 29).
Humans can produce, explore, discover, but they cannot create. I haven’t changed this position all these years. It might be worth mentioning that in the interview, among important artists I mentioned Klee, Picasso, Van Gogh, Miro, Ernst, “even Mondrian”, but stating that particularly important for me were two works by Kazimir Malevich: Black Square on White and White Square on White, “that deserve greater attention than they have now” (Fig. 30).
It is almost certain that the source of my knowledge about Malevich and these two works came from the same three-volume Art History. The same year poet and editor of the Prishtina literary magazine “Jeta e Re” Esad Mekulli published several of my drawings as illustrations in its No.6 issue(Fig.31).
Moving to Belgrade in the fall of 1971 represented a fundamental change in my life. Not only was I living by myself for the first time but also Belgrade was like a metropolis for me, especially regarding the art scene. So many galleries, museums, exhibitions… Usually after classes I would go to some of the galleries to see a show, any show that was taking place. And there were plenty of them, at the Cultural Center, Youth Center, Graphic Collective, Kolarac, etc. I remember seeing an exhibition at the MSU Salon which was in complete darkness, with only the sculptures emitting light and moving.
Later I learned that these were lumino – kinetic sculptures by Aleksandar Srnec, an artist from Zagreb(Fig.32). This exhibition was particularly interesting for me since at that time I was thinking about having an exhibition of (static) sculptures made of electric heater parts which would be plugged in and radiating light (and heat) in a completely dark gallery. Something like this picture above. After seeing this show I gave up on that idea.
One of the places I would visit regularly was the Museum of Contemporary Art(Fig.33). At some point I learned that there were open classes and guided tours through the museum every Saturday morning and this is how I met Kosta Bogdanović, a prominent sculptor and exceptional person, who was holding classes at the time.
I could never have imagined that he would one day be one of participants in the Harbingers project with his interpretation of this painting(Fig.34). This is our Polaroid picture from the Venice Biennale 1980 the same year he did the painting (Fig.35).
At that time, I was thinking about how I would organize a show and begin sending applications to galleries I thought might be interested, but I soon became disappointed after receiving negative replies like this one(Fig.36).
At that point I was just a student of nuclear physics at the Electrical engineering faculty and felt as a complete outsider for the Belgrade art scene as I tried to express on this contemporary self-portrait(Fig.37)
All this changed by a certain chain of events that began one day at the KST café located in the faculty basement where students could have a coffee break between classes. I was having coffee with a colleague while making sketches in my notebook. We were chatting as usual until at some point he asked if I had seen the latest issue of the magazine “Treći program”. This was a printed version of the cultural and theoretical radio program broadcasted regularly by Radio Belgrade. I looked up at him and replied that I had not. He then told me that there was an article published in this latest issue about contemporary art that might be interesting for me. A few days later while passing a nearby bookstore I noticed the publication in the window and decide to buy it(Fig.38).
It had indeed an article with an intriguing title “The End of Art in the Age of Science?” and many illustrations about recent developments in contemporary art written by a certain Oto Bihalji-Merin, whom I had never heard of before. Nevertheless, when I came home and started reading the article, I began noticing statements I was disagreeing with, so I wrote several comments in the margin. At some point I decided to write a letter to this gentleman explaining what was wrong with his approach to art. I don’t remember how I found his address, but I wrote the letter and send it to him. I don’t have to say how surprised I was to receive his quite elaborate reply(Fig.39).
Although it seems I didn’t make a copy of my letter, it might be possible to identify what my points were, mainly along the thinking already articulated in the interview. Of course, Mr. Bihalji-Merin disagreed with almost everything I wrote and stated it in a polite but very argumented way . Needlessly to say, I was not convinced, and the story would have ended there, if I hadn’t found another page in the envelope which did not belong to the letter. It had a page number and obviously belonged to some longer article, like an exhibition review. Since the letter was written on memorandum paper, his name, address and phone number were printed on it. So I made a phone call and explained who I was and why I was calling. He told me that this was indeed a mistake, that the page was part of an article which was supposed to go to print soon. He had been looking for it, and asked if I could bring it to his apartment – he lived in a building across the main train station.
Of course, I obliged. His wife Lisa greeted me at the door and took me to a spatial room with a high ceiling, each wall completely covered with books. She introduced me to Oto who was sitting behind his desk (Fig.40). I later learned that his surname Bihalji-Merin consisted of his surname Bihalji to which he had added his wife’s surname: Merin, which at the time was quite unusual. As I was returning the missing page, I mentioned how impressed I was with his library. He was a bit surprised and shook his head: “No, this is just my study, our library is in the other two rooms”. All I had at the time was a single shelf about a meter high with a couple of dozen books on it. However, that didn’t prevent me from immediately continuing to elaborate my thoughts about art as an illusion of human creativity. He invited me to stay for coffee and listened to me patiently, with a few comments here and there. When he finally got a chance to say a word in edgewise, he mentioned that he knew artists like Klee and Kandinsky, and that he even organized an exhibition for them – in London under a pseudonym, if I remember correctly. This didn’t impress me much, since at that time I believed that all this “old art” was obsolete, built on an illusion. Many years later I found a Penguin book titled “Modern German Art”, printed on the occasion of the related 1938 London exhibition, which took place counter the Entartete Kunst exhibition of 1937 in Munich(Fig.41).
The author of the book was a mysterious Peter Thoene, which was in fact one of Bihalji-Merin’s pseudonyms while living in Nazi Germani, and I finally understood what was he telling me back then (Fig.42).
As I was leaving he gave me his book “Advances of Modern Art” which he kindly signed for me, and at the door, almost casually, he said: “You know, the Students’ Cultural Center is not far from here, go there and find Dunja Blažević, the gallery director. Tell her that I sent you.” And I did. (Fig.43).
Interestingly, three years later there was a screening of Lutz Becker’s film “The Double Headed Eagle” ) about Hitler’s rise to power based on documentary footage. It was an informal screening in the small auditorium on the ground floor of SKC, since it wasn’t allowed to be shown publicly due to censorship. It so happened that I was sitting next to Oto, and when the book burning scene appeared on the screen he turned to me and whispered: “I was there”. He was most likely the only person in the auditorium who was an eyewitness of the events shown in the film. While we were all watching “history” for him these scenes were triggering personal memories as well.(Fig.44)
A couple of years ago, while preparing a lecture at Columbia University about the early years in SKC, I found this photo of Lisa and Oto as guests at a panel organized by Biljana Tomić (Fig. 45).
This was one in a series of talks with a number of art critics, theoreticians and curators from all of Yugoslavia, on the occasion of the very interesting exhibition titled “Critical Contributions, Exhibition of Text by Yugoslav Critics” curated by Biljana Tomić (Fig.46).
This was the first time I ever saw pictures from those discussions, which were broadcasted at my suggestion through the speakers in the SKC main lobby during the exhibition “Octobar 73” two years later(Fig.47).
It seems that the idea for the “Two Times of One Wall” (a picture of the gallery wall taken in November 1973, and projected on the same wall in January 1974) (Fig. 48) and the exhibition “Octobar 74” titled “Octobar 72” and realized later that year, came from this work. There will be more about October 72-74 further below.
So, following Bihalji-Merin’s suggestion, I showed up the next day at the SKC Gallery office with a selection of my works in this folder (Fig. 49) under my arm. I knocked on the door and entered. There was a young woman standing next to a desk. “I am looking for Dunja Balžević, Oto Bihalji-Merin sent me”. She smiled and said: “Sure, come in!” (Fig.50).
I thought I was coming to apply for a show, not realizing that this office would become my classroom, a place where I would be going to almost every day for many years to come, meeting interesting people and hearing interesting stories (Fig.51). Dunja was very friendly, she carefully went through my folder, but I noticed that she was not very impressed with my old SF “masterpieces”. I should have brought my most recent notebook with the visual explorations instead.
Nevertheless, she suggested I go down the hall to the gallery and see the current show of which she was one of four co-curators, by six young artists titled “Octobar 72” (Fig.52).
The invitation card showed a larger group of artists and art historians associated with the gallery standing in front of the gallery wall(Fig. 53).
Four of the artist from this show (Marina, Gera, Zoran and Raša) would later take part in the Harbingers project. The exhibition looked strange to me, like nothing I had seen before in Belgrade galleries. I remember a series of Xerox copies of a round clock by Urkom Gergelj (Gera), where two machines were recording each other’s work (Fig. 54).
Gera was not in the country at that time, so he gave instructions to Zoran Popović over the phone how to produce and display the work. A couple of years later, not knowing what to do with this work before leaving for London, Gera offered it to me as a gift. I told him that I would take it but only for safekeeping until he finds someone to buy it. Just like with this work, many years later he gave instructions over the phone for copying the Harbingers, either to Zoran or to me, I cannot recall. His copy was to be made as a pencil drawing on transparent paper placed over the painting (Fig.55).
Something that became customary for the gallery were public discussions about
current exhibitions. Here, in the smaller conference room we see some of the participants on the panel while Dunja was sitting on the floor (Fig. 56).
It seems this “sitting on the floor” customs , which became SKC gallery common practice for many years, was for the first time introduced in September that year at the public conversation with Daniel Buren and Giuseppe Chiari (Fig. 57). At that time there was no other public place in Belgrade where participants and public will together sit on the floor.
At the “October 72” discussion the auditorium was packed, there were many familiar faces there. I was even able to find myself in the crowd, barely recognizable, far back in the audience.(Fig.58)
Two years later, on the occasion of the “Octobar 74” I projected the group picture from “October 72” on the same gallery wall with the following text: “This photo represents the participants and organizers of the exhibition OCTOBAR 72”. On it, a certain state of mind is preserved as well as the relations within this group of people in that moment. Projecting this photo, two years later, on the same place it was taken, I wanted to point out the changes that took place. This period of time becomes a proximate motive and medium of my action”.(Fig.59, 60)
Obviously this was just another version of the “Two Times of One Wall” and, in a way, this happened to be my first exhibition about another exhibition.
At that time the SKC Gallery was in its early years but already internationally recognized as one of the important places that promoted what was called “the new art” (conceptual, minimal art, body art, performance, etc.) and I felt that my work on visual structures could be shown within this context.
In December that year (1972), Jasna Tijardović, who was in charge of the “Small Gallery” on the ground floor next to the entrance, invited me to bring something for the annual sales exhibition, and I decided to bring a selection of the last pointillist works I did that summer that looked like this , thus for the first time presenting my work in the SKC(Fig.61).
By that time, I had already been accepted as part of the team, hanging out with the group and taking part in board meetings (Fig. 62). It was a positive and dynamic atmosphere, there was always something happening, someone would come from abroad bringing catalogs, the latest issues of Flash Art, Heute Kunst… I was spending more time in SKC than at my university classes. The gallery office was our meeting place, our classroom, workshop… If I had an idea for a project, I didn’t need to send an application and rely on luck to get a term a year later. Here we could squeeze between two regular shows and use the gallery to realize a project, and then move on to the next one.
Two regular and most important annual events were the Octobar exhibitions and the April Meetings, an international multimedia manifestation also known as the “Expanded Media Festival”. Something like the old Parisian tradition of the Autumn and Spring Salons. The April Meetings included all of the SKC departments; film, music, theater, forum and gallery. There are numerous photographs from these events in the SKC archive, and a few years ago, while preparing a lecture about this period, I was surprised to identify myself in the photos from some of these events that I don’t even remember attending. But I do remember a theater-performance project realized together with my friend Kokan during the second April Meetings in 1973(Fig.63)
Although by then I had been in Belgrade for some time, and he had stayed in Prishtina, we managed to stay in touch and I kept trying to bring him over. Thus, we came up with an idea for a project in which the SKC gallery would be divided in half, with a big curtain and pillows for sitting arranged on the floor. First, a group of visitors would come in and sit down facing a closed curtain. Then, new pillows would be brought in behind the curtain and a second group of visitors would come in and sit down facing the curtain as well. At some point the curtain would open and the audience on both sides would be facing each other, being thus on stage and in the audience at the same time
These are some of the pictures from that event, thanks to the SKC Archive (Fig.64 ). Later I found in this Mixed Media a similar idea previously proposed by Albert Fine, but I am not sure if it was ever realized. My first copy of this book I later gave to Jon Hendricks for his Fluxus collection and found this one at a bookstore a couple of years ago. (Fig. 65).
However, I remember some events that were not photographed, like a conversation with Joseph Beuys the day he gave his well-known lecture. That morning I arrived at the office and to my surprise found Beuys sitting at the table alone with papers in front of him. I introduced myself, took a seat, and he begin explaining to me the subject of his talk that afternoon, he was in fact rehearsing his presentation.(Fig.66)
At some point he drew a coordinate system with one axis representing “socialism” and the other – “democracy”, with a circle in the middle representing “Society”. I immediately interrupted him and said that it is incorrect to say socialism and democracy, because “socialism is democracy”. He disagreed and we went back and forth on this for a while, before he moved on. At the end of the “lecture” he collected his notes leaving me this one which was the subject of our dispute(Fig.67)
I remember asking him if it was his first time in Yugoslavia, and he said: “No, as a Luftwaffe pilot during the war, I was stationed near Zagreb for a few months”. I felt he told me this as though he wanted to get it out of his chest. He was twenty back then. And I thought to myself: Wow, so one of those Stukas in the movie “Neretva” might have been Beuys. When he was about to leave the office I asked to take a very short Super8 film-portrait of him. For this we had to go outside, since my simple Agfa camera didn’t have enough light indoors. We were in front of the entrance and I told him where to stand and to hold a meter since I needed exactly 1.5m to get a sharp image. I was impressed that he, the famous Joseph Beuys was so friendly and cooperative. He did everything I asked him to do in order to help me get his 15sec portrait. I still respect him for this.(Fig.68)
That afternoon, during Beuys’ lecture, somebody gave me an 8mm camera and I took a 3min black and white film of his lecture. I still have it but I don’t remember if it was ever shown.(Fig.68.a)
Most of the lecture I spent sitting on the floor next to Zoran Đinđić and Slobodan Žunjić, philosophy students I met at the office a couple of days before. At the end of the lecture they asked Beuys some questions, in a way criticizing his presentation for inconsistencies from the sociological point of view. I remember how Jerko Denegri defended Beyus saying: “Criticizing Beyus from the position of sociology is like criticizing Picasso from the position of anatomy.”(Fig.69)
Those years I have been making portraits of the April Meetings participants as it could be seen on this 1975 photo by Vlado Gudac while I am taking film-portrait of Katherina Sieaverding .(Fig.70)
Here are a few frames from the 1974 film-portraits of Lutz Becker(Fig71), Bonito Oliva(Fig.72), Gera Urkom (Fig.73) and Barbara Reice (Fig. 74) from the magazine Art International who would later that year propose my work on visual explorations for the 1975 Paris Bienalle (Fig.90).
and Barbara Reice (Fig. 74) from the magazine Art International who would later that year propose my work on visual explorations for the 1975 Paris Bienall. It was Gera who arranged a meeting with Barbara in the Hotel Yugoslavia café, where I showed her my work on visual explorations.(Fig.75)
The same year the Pegaz comic magazine No. 4-5, published several pages of my work as some kind of “abstract comic”(Fig.76,77)
At that time, I also did a series of short super8 films with a static camera and a static subject like “Blue Sky”, “The Book”, “Family Portrait”, “Self-portrait” (Fig. 78, 79, 80, 81). The last film had a single sentence on the screen: “Art is Illusion”, which shows that my position on art, as a result of illusionary belief, hadn’t changed (Fig. 82).
Those films were projected several times as part of the film- program organized by Zoran Popović (Fig. 83).
All that time, I continued working on my visual research and at some point decided to prepare an exhibition and show some of the results (Fig.84).
Since I was still hoping to continue to work together with my friend Kokan, I asked him to help me prepare some of the material for the exhibition. The exhibition with a long title: “Visual Representation of the Processes in the Square System” opened on March 15th 1974 at the SKC Gallery (Fig.85)
On this occasion we also produced a Xerox book in a small edition of 30-40 copies(Fig.86).
After this exhibition my friend felt that this work was not something he would be interested in doing in the future. I was sorry to learn this but I understood him, and since then I continued working on this with the idea of eventually developing some kind of meaningful visual language and occasionally exhibiting the results throughout the 1970s.
An interesting case was the 1977 exhibition and lectures program under the title “Regarding Certain Works of Kazimir Malevich”, which I did together with Jasna Tijardović and Jovan Čekić (Fig. 87, 88).
It was interesting for me to analyze the formal properties of some of Malevich’s icons from the perspective of my visual explorations. This work was later published in the art magazine “Umetnost” (Fig. 89).
One of the landmarks for this work was my 1984 thesis paper at MIT titled “Discrete Visual Structures” (Fig. 90), and I still continue to working (Fig.91)all these years on this even today. Thus, the time difference between these two pages happened to be 48 years (Fig.92)
Being associated with a gallery also helped me learn from within about the galleries and museums, and to better understand how the entire system works. A good example was the 1974 exhibition of contemporary art from Yugoslavia in Graz, organized by the Contemporary gallery in Zagreb . This was the first time I was included in such a representative selection and I was happy to send several pages from my manuscript of visual explorations (Fig. 93).
Several months later I got the works back together with the exhibition catalog. And that would have been all, if one day Zoran Popović hadn’t come from Zagreb with an interesting story. While there, he went to the Contemporary Gallery and visited its director Marijan Susovski in his office. At some point Susovski briefly left the office and Zoran noticed a document on the desk. He took a closer look and realized it was the list of artists from the Graz exhibition in, which included him as well, and next to each of our names was a sum of 2500 dinars. This was how the gallery was calculating the exhibition budget. It was surprising for us to find out that a certain amount of money based on our work was taken from the state budget and then spent, while we were not even informed about this.
Experiences like these and, for example, the fact that the entire SKC staff from director to the janitor were receiving monthly salaries for programs, while those who realize the program don’t get anything, led to the growing awareness about the functioning SKC as a cultural institutions. . This was not only a practice in SKC but in all other cultural institutions. On the one hand, I was lucky to have a place where I could show my work and enrich my experience, but on the other, I wasn’t getting anything for making a program for the institution, even when I had a show, for example.
We, of course, talked in the office about these issues, and it was articulated in the exhibition Octobar 75 initiated by Dunja Balžević(Fig.94), which consisted in fact of several bound articles by artists and art historians from the SKC gallery circle, piled up on a table in the gallery(Fig.95)
During the 1976 April Meetings a conference was organized titled “Art of Our Time and Marxism” with many participants (Fig.96).
I remember listening to Predrag Matvejević, a well-known “leftist dissident” writer from Zagreb. For some reason I felt that we didn’t have much in common, so I was very surprised to find that I agreed with many things he was saying. I knew something was not quite right, though, but couldn’t understand what. During the Q&A I raised my hand and told him that I agreed with many things he said, I then asked him if had any artwork at home. He replied that he did, and when I asked him to name some he said: Mersad Berber (Fig. 97).
Berber was a very popular artist at that time, but in my opinion his work was one of the most mediocre and opportunist one can imagine, true kitsch. I was taken aback. I couldn’t understand how we could agree rhetorically, yet have completely different things in mind. Part of the explanation might be that Matvejević was a writer. Quite a few times I’ve noticed that people whose main medium are words do not understand things expressed visually. But ironically it seems that what they couldn’t really comprehend was Conceptual Art.
Another time in 1979 I read a pretty mediocre art-review by Danilo Kiš, who was one of the best-known writers in Yugoslavia, written with certain totalitarian overtones characteristic for someone like Dragoš Kalaić, whom I happened to meet a couple of times in the gallery office. I wasn’t surprise so much by the review itself, but by the author, and had to write a parody about it. Ironically titled “Toward the Final Victory of Apollonian Light” it was published in the literary magazine “Književna reč” (Fig. 98). (When I later met David Albahari, a writer, and at that time one of the editors of the magazine, he told me that he liked the article). Another text was published on the same page – “The Most Certain Signs of Traditionalism” by Raša Todosijević as a reaction to an article by Đorđe Kadijević who would also from time to time show up in the gallery office and occasionally participate in its program.
So, the next morning after the conference I was sitting in the office with Raša Todosijević. Still thinking about the events of the previous evening I asked Raša how on some other occasion would we be able to recognize those we agree with rhetorically, but who in fact don’t think the same as us? He looked at me and in a slow voice said: “Don’t worry, you don’t have to recognize them, they will recognize you”.
The same year Lutz Becker made a film titled “Kino beleške”, that captured this self-reflecting politization within our micro-scene. These two frames show Dunja Blažević and Jerko Denegri from the film (Fig. 99).
The mainstream cultural scene had been deliberately ignoring what was happening in SKC from the beginning, but we would still be invited to represent the country abroad, just to show that our art was not lagging behind the West, while internally, SKC was treated as a foreign body, an “import from the west”, a nest of “lazy conceptualists” that could make dozens of works a day without moving a finger. This is why I was surprised to receive an official invitation from the city mayor to take part in the 7th Triennial of Yugoslav Art (Fig. 100).
However, this was yet another case of showing foreigners that we have the most advanced art, since the exhibition was organized in the context of the European Conference that was taking place in a new modern glass building, built especially for this occasion. At least, this time the artworks were not going abroad, but would be shown to the local public and in a very representative context. In order to reflect this unusual situation, I proposed that the mayor’s invitation I received should be reproduced on my page in the catalog. In another letter I asked the organizers to share information about the exhibition budget, how big it was and how it was going to be spent, and who would be in charge of managing it.
Needlessly to say, my proposal for the catalog was ignored and I never received any response about the budget. At this point I decided to publish both letters in the magazine “Vidici” together with the article “Subject and Pseudo-subject of Art Practice” (Fig. 101). In it I was arguing that the real subjects in the art scene were institutions, while artists and works in art were just the “fuel” necessary for the institutions to function and justify their existence.
During their stay in New York, Jasna Tijardović and Zoran Popović established very good contacts with the British members of the Art&Language Group that was at that time also there working with Joseph Kosuth and Sarah Charlsworth on a new magazine called The Fox.
While in New York, Zoran made an interesting film titled “Struggle in New York”, in collaboration with Art&Language, about the current developments within this specific segment of the conceptual art scene there. Fig (103)
After returning to Belgrade, Jasna and Zoran managed to bring three U.S. members of the group to hold public talks at the SKC Gallery: Michael Corris, Jill Breakstone and Andrew Menard who stayed in my apartment where I took these Super8 film portraits of them(Fig.103a, 104).
A few years later Menard will send me his multiple b&w photo-copy of the polaroid picture of Harbingers I sent him to copy(Fig.104a)
Soon after they left for NY I sent to The Fox an article titled “On the Class Character of Art”, based on my contribution for the October75 with some additional theses, and was happy to get a letter from Mel Ramsden that he will edit it and it be will published in the next issue No.3. When I received the magazine I was a bit surprise to find also an article written by Jasna with an ominous title “The Liquidation of Art: Self-management or Self-protection?” in which she was stating that ”…some people in the Gallery have begun to suggest the “liquidation” of art, the need to “transcendent art”.(Fig.105). Since in my articles published at that time, like one in the “October75,” I was stating that art as an expression of a religious consciousness based on illusionary belief in human creativity, should be overcome or transcendent, I understood that Jasna was directly referring to this my position. Never before she mentioned disagreement with my ideas. I could understand that she was not sharing my position about art, but will never understand how from there she concluded that:” – in this case the idea of “transcending” art remind me too much to transcendence and liquidation of people.”(!?)
I didn’t want to bring this up with Jasna then but I remember that she was a bit surprise to find my article expressing those ideas was published in the same issue, and furthermore, that was edited by Mel Ramsden for whom she had a great respect. Seems to me she completely misunderstood my position. We never mentioned this article and continued to meet and work together until mid 1980es when we stop seeing each other due to political differences. Simply, I could not stand national-socialism that was at that time emerging as the dominant ideology.
The next year I got an invitation for the exhibition “Radical Attitudes to the Gallery” (Fig. 106) and sent a text as my contribution, which was published later in the special issue of Studio International related to the exhibition.
I was only able to find a photocopy of the article that was in very bad shape and managed to clean it a bit. (Fig. 107)
The article was later published in Belgrade magazine Kultura No.41, 1978 under the title “On Art Galleries”(Fig.108)
At that time I really felt I was part of the international art scene, on equal footing with the artists from the West. Perhaps this ephemeral episode from Venice could illustrate my state of mind back then.
One afternoon, during the 1976 Venice Biennale, I happened to be sitting at an outdoor restaurant with Katharina Sieverding, her partner Klaus Mettiig, Joseph Kosuth, Jorg Immrendorff and Mao Thompson who brought me his new record “Corrected slogans” (Fig.109). During our conversation I heard someone saying: “Hey you, shut up, you are talking too much!” We all looked toward the person sitting across the table. When I realized he was talking to me, I replied: “No, you shut up!”, and then everybody turned eyes toward me. Some were a bit surprised, others amused. Then Katherina whispered to me: “You don’t know who that is? It is Conrad Fisher, a well-known gallerist from Germany.” I realized that this was some important guy, but shrugged my shoulders. In fact I didn’t care much, especially since at that time (and later) I wasn’t thinking about having or belonging to an art gallery.
Sometime in 1979 several people from the SKC gallery received an invitation from de Appel Gallery in Amsterdam to take part in an East-European Art Exhibition. Since Marina Abramović was living there with Ulay, and had contacts with the gallery, I am almost certain that the exhibition was her idea. Knowing Marina, I think she primarily wanted to bring us from Yugoslavia and the broader context was the best way to do realize it. However, when I got the invitation I didn’t like the title and also the geo-political context, implicitly treating us as some kind of followers of what was happening in the West. I am almost sure this was not the intention of the de Appel people, but it was how it appeared to me. And when Josine van Droffelaar from de Appel came to Belgrade to meet us and talk about the exhibition, she was very much surprised that I refused to take part in this project. I suggested that, instead of a geo-political, they should organize a thematic exhibition (performance or conceptual art, for example) and invite people from all sides based on the work they do. It seems Josine and other the people from the gallery had the best intentions and understood my reasons, since soon after de Appel changed the name of the exhibition to “Works and Words”, included some Dutch artist and invited Stuart Brisley from London (Fig. 110).
Although I was not participating in the exhibition I was invited to have a public conversation about my objections related to the concept of the exhibition. Information about this was published at the end of the catalog. Since my English at that time was not so well, Marijan Susovski was sitting next to me translating into better English what I was trying to convey.(Fig.111).
My entire experience at the de Appel was quite positive and few years later I was very sadden when I heard that people from de Appel I met back then, Wies Smals, Gerhard von Graevenitz (De Appel committee member and Wies’s partner), their baby Hendrik, colleague Josine van Droffelaar and her boyfriend Martin Barkhuis, were killed in a plane crash.
At that time, in the late 1970′ I was also working on non-static films, films that would show some kind of change. The question was what would be the measure of the duration of each sequence, and I came up with the idea that certain structural properties of the image on the screen would determine how long it would last (Fig. 112).
While in Amsterdam, I had the chance to show five of those films at the Stedelijk Museum (Fig. 112).
Those were the years when I was beginning to feel that the “New Art” scene was approaching a kind of dead-end, and started thinking about proposing some radical project that might shake-up the scene. I came up with the proposal for the “International Artist’s Strike”. To put things in prospective, at that time I was still formally a student without income, supported by parents, living in a non-market society, never sold any work and the only gallery I knew was that of the Students Cultural Center.
Nevertheless, I wrote a circular letter and sent it to many artists I thought might understand and support the proposal (Fig. 114).The addresses I found in the Flash Art Diary address book that was published in those days. The attempt was unsucessful and the reply I received published the next year in the “3+4″magazine.(Fig.115)
Some of the published replies are listed bellow:
In June that year Zoran Popović invited me to go with him to the London Film Festival (Fig. 127) and bring some of my films with me. As far as I remember he and Tom Gotovac were participating in the main/official program (Fig. 128), but Zoran somehow managed to
squeeze me in the unofficial/open program and one evening I screened my films in the main theater, but only with a handful of people in the audience (Fig. 129)
While in London we went to see Gera who was making some new paintings and then Zoran suggested to go and visit Mel Ramsden who lived in Middleton Cheney, a couple of hours by train from London. So we went there, and I met Mel for the first time.(Fig.131) We spent all afternoon with his family and friends in a long conversation about the latest developments in the art world.
We all agreed that the end of the decade was somehow also marking the end of the expectation that Conceptual Art will bring any real change in the art world. At some point Mel said: “Perhaps the only achievement of Conceptual Art was its iconoclasm”. At that point this sounded reasonable to me and I agreed with him. When we were leaving the town Zoran took this picture of Mel and me (Fig. 132).
Mel will later contribute to the Harbingers project with this small size b&w painting(Fig.132a).
The next day, while in the airplane on our way back to Belgrade, I was still under the impression of our conversation with Mel, thinking about his statement on iconoclasm and Conceptual Art. Then an image of a “Definition” by Joseph Kosuth’s came to my mind, and I said to myself: this conceptual work is quite iconic . And then I asked myself, what would be the most senseless thing to do with it? The answer was: to copy it. The first thing I did when I got back home was to pull out a Flash Art issue with a reproduction of Kosuth’s definition “Number” on the cover, place it on the window, put a blank paper over it and start making a drawing (Fig. 133).
This is how I entered the magical world of copy, not even being aware of it yet. Another illustration on the cover was a tile sculpture by Carl Andre and copy it the same way. Then I noticed on the bookshelf Sol LeWitt on the cover of Lucy Lippard’s “Changes”, and walking Beuys photo in a publication, and copy them too.(Fig.134, 135, 136)
At some point I remembered my early unsuccessful painting, The Harbingers of the Apocalypse(Fig.137). I decided now to treat it as if it is a masterpiece.
First I made six sketches for it and then presented together with the original in the “Against Art” exhibition at the SKC Gallery January 1980 (Fig.138,139). Then, after the exhibition I decided to copy it, not once but many, many times(Fig.140). At that point I couldn’t imagine anything more senseless to do and still somehow remain within art context.
What was Modern Art? 