The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

Grupa Penzioner Tihomir Simie on themselves, their position and their rela-
Rewiey with water, doorway hall at 2a Frankopanska tion to community. Gotovac rarely announced
Street, Zagreb. 1969 his performances and actions in advance;
Begging24 from 1980 and Cleaning Public
Spaces, performed on 28 May 1981 were such
If there is an artist who managed to bring his criti- actions - a rejection of ideology that demand-
cal attitude to notice in public life, this is certainly ed a beautified image of the community rather
Tomislav Gotovac. a structuralist in experimental than the ugly truth. During the 1980s Gotovac
film22 and performer from the 1960s. With his first carried out a number of "thematic" perform-
happening Happ Our-Happening which he pro- ances in Zagreb squares and elsewhere, in
duced in 1967,23 smashing furniture and throwing which he mocked ideologies of mass hypnosis,
feathers in the audience, he demonstrated that he from film to politics, treating Hollywood's
was far from petty bourgeois mediocrity, and Superman and communism's red star, hammer
with the performance Streaking. carried out in and sickle exactly the same. The most impressive of
1971 on the streets of Belgrade. he started a his actions/performances in the 1990s was Point
series of radical acts that provoked the public. Blank (1992), an anticipation of events from the
The performance Lying Naked on the Asphalt. global paranoid perspective:25 Gotovac symbolical-
Kissing Asphalt (Zagreb /Love You) from 1981 ly identified New York with Croatian city of
when naked Gotovac took a stroll through Vukovar. destroyed in the war.
downtown Zagreb flabbergasted the eyewit- In Foxy Mister from 2002 Gotovac exhibited photo-
nesses. To be naked in public was unimagin- graphs of his naked body in lascivious poses. identi-
able, and the striking combination of his naked cal to that of the porno diva from the Foxy Lady
body and professions of love for the city cre- magazine. For Tomislav Gotovac everything is a
ated a novel tension, a situation that for a mystification and everything is true. His artistic dis-
moment capsized reality and overturned course is global paranoia through which he ridicules
established norms. Gotovac was pitied. all positions of power and all those who serve the
admired and criticized at once ... but he cer- power. regardless of political and social systems.
tainly prompted everyone involved to reflect
THE MISFITS I 10