The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

Tomislav Gotovac
Foxy Mister, 2002
Institutions and power
From the early 1970s institutions were criti-
cized and their role in the cultural and artistic
life discussed. Among the first to do it was
Goran Trbuljak who in 1971 exhibited conceptu-
al works in the shape of small-sized posters with his
statement that indirectly polemized with the gallery
system.26 In 1981, after ten years of such exhibits, he
mounted Retrospective, a show that encompassed
three previous ones. Although these works are tau-
tologically and conceptually defined, the action
from 1969 with the descriptive title "I occasionally
pushed my finger through the hole in the door of
the Gallery of Contemporary Art and showed it
without the authorities knowing about it" is a
Fluxus-style witty predecessor of a number of works
that ironized the relation artist/gallery. Beside the
gallery system Trbuljak ironized the attitude
towards traditional painting in his action Sunday
Painting (1974). Every Sunday he would come to the
art supplies store and secretly painted in mono-
chrome on the shopwindow glass, behind which
stood an easel with white canvas, pretending he was
painting on canvas. Every Monday the shop assistant
rubbed the "painting" off, creating random informel
compositions. This unusual "painterly" procedure is
visible in the series of works from the second half of
the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s in which
Trbuljak, deliberately setting a number of obstruc-
tions, postpones a direct contact with the surface of
the canvas.
In his painting cycle Curses from 2000, eljko Kipke
severely criticized institutions and their (lack of)
activity. Kipke "borrowed an old ritual and applied
it in places where symbol has devoured time".27 He
selected six most important cultural institutions in
Croatia and gave his opinion of them in form of
curses. He wrote sentences such as May you never
lift your little finger ever again. May you never wake
up again or Keep on wallowing in the same mud
across monochrome, simplified images of the build-
ings housing Ministry of Culture, Museum of
Contemporary Art and Croatian National Theater.
Kipke's output in the 1990s proves that post-con-
ceptualism (of Duchamp's type) may be applied to
traditional painting and that processuality no
longer has advantage over the materialization
of the work, in other words, his paintings-
objects are part of the language equal to men-
tal process.
Economic realism
Although syntagm -economic realism sounds
like a clumsy term of a kind that were mass-
produced in socialist-era ideological work-
shops, this is how Vlado Martek describes his
creative process. For him art does not really
exist. He calls what he does a "walk through
art" and like a typical post-modernist refuses
to define both his field of activity and disci-
pline. as well as the form that could define his
11 I THE MISFITS