The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

Nada Bero
It has always been the ambition of art histori-
ans to pull artistic events and phenomena
together, to find the sources of them, to find
the ox-bows and the bifurcations, in other
words, to find the forebears, the ancestors,
the disciples. the adherents, the epigones. As if
only with the formation of a complex family
tree can events take on their true importance and
significance, and hence the right to go down in his-
tory, to receive their monuments and epitaphs.
Even when events, or perhaps rather the artistic
individualities, have resisted being ordered in
strings and series, the conclusion of the art histori-
ans has often been: so much the worse for the
events.
Taking things all in all, to write today the his-
tory of contemporary art does not differ
essentially from the writing that preceded it in
the past few decades. Even when we believe
that we are hard on the heels of some new
understanding, some new methods, we still
make use of the well-known apparatus and the
tried and tested formulae in order to acquire
historical legitimacy for artistic phenomena
that were alive until a very short time ago. However
unclear outlines these events frequently have
because of their "excessive propinquity", however
much they might seem to be isolated phenomena in
the current network of time and space (the tree of
yore), we are ready to decode them according to
the time-honoured key: the sons (it would be more
PC to say and daughters as well) inherit less from
the fathers than from the grandfathers.] This
extremely ancient discovery of the Russian
Formalists has still not been successfully refuted by
even the modern interpreters of contemporary art.
Similarly, the history of contemporary art, for quite
practical reasons, most frequently takes over the
old classification of the "spirit of the age" accord-
ing to decades, however aware of the limitations
and inevitable simplifications, the deformations
and historical falsities that such divisions bring with
them. When we say today, for example. the art of
the eighties. it would seem that we all know what
it is we are talking about: the Transavantgarde, the
New Painting, the New Sculpture. Die Neue Wilde,
New Expressionism... they have become synonyms,
as it were, for the art of that decade. It is a
fact, though, that these phenomena are only
the most omnipresent. the most vigorously
marketed and most powerful protagonists of
the eighties. but never an all-embracing
expression for the spirit of the time.
Nevertheless, many hold that concessions.
simplifications and generalisations of this type
are indispensable for us to be able to commu-
nicate at all.
When we discuss the theme of the "art of the
nineties" we are suddenly on very slippery ground.
The problem is not only that the previous decade is
too close to us, still to hot to handle, and has thus
not yet been petrified, rather in the fact that it
resisted uniformity and the domination of one set
of ideas over others. The cacophony of the nineties
can be interpreted as an expression of the demo-
37 I THE MISFITS