The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

Magazine Gorgona. 1961-1966 Ivan Koarit's concepts. albeit chiefly in the
(Julije Knifer. Marijan Jevovar) form of "models" and "sketches'', titled
Unusual Projects (1960), the project of making
a cast of the interior of public spaces, objects,
which "painting is reduced to an endless repetition even heads of famous people (1963) 11, are a
of signs"2 represented as a two-colored, most often rebellious statement of a need to change one's
black and white meander, may be said to be a own environment, even if only in a poetic
very clear conceptualization of the reduction tone. Koarit proposed the project of Slicing Mount
and repetition method.8 Only with the devel- Sljeme of giant proportions, naturally, never real-
opment of conceptual art in the second half of ized. But the sculptures such as Segment of a River
the 1960s, and even later. in the 1980s and (1959), which imitates the surface of a stream, or
1990s, Knifer's method was to focus more on Inner Eyes (1959/60), closest to the concept of cast-
the conceptual and less on the painterly prob- ing the interiors, are equally absurd. 12
lem. A similar delay in reception and apprecia- Back to the subject of staying power of a work of
tion happened to the Gorgona group (1959- art and its relevance, let us review Mladen
1966) of which Knifer was a member. A shift Stilinovit's emblematic post-conceptual work An
from the art practice of the late 1950s, domi- Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist. Made
nated by established versions of abstract art, in 1992. soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this
into no-art was recognized by a broader criti- work related not only to Croatian artists, but to
cal and art audience only 10 or 15 years later. numerous artists from all ex-socialist countries that
And in the early 1960 the Gorgona introduced tried to reach the developed West in order to
an entirely new model of artistic action. It achieve their dreams.13 The cynicism permeating
consisted of meetings. hanging out together as this and almost all Stilinovit's works, back to the
a "form of creative and spiritual discharged°, 1970s, hits the spot with an almost incredible accu-
motivated purely by intellectual and spiritual racy. This work openly expresses doubts as to a
alliances. while Gorgona, as defined by speedy and smooth inclusion into the art scene
VaniSta, "seeks neither work nor results in art" which is dominant in the world (Anglo-Saxon). Since
and "speaks of nothing. It is undefined and Stilinovit's work, as usual, functions on several lev-
indeterminable". This togetherness generated els. on one level he cynically predicts that preju-
concepts and projects, sometimes quite "con- dices and stereotypes such as "picturesque exotic"
ceivable" and feasible, but often purely ana- East and "perfectly civilized" West will not be so
lytic-critical and not really meant to be carried easily quenched. Although made ten years ago, this
out.
THE MISFITS I 08