The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

cratic aspirations of art, but also as the inabil-
ity or impossibility for existing energies to
accumulate and combine in a common pas-
sion, whether for a social utopia, the subver-
sion of the art system or something similar.
Analysing the difference between sixties art
and the art of the nineties. French theorist
Nicolas Bourriaud claims that there are with-
out doubt important points of contact, for
starting from the sixties (Daniel Spoerri, Yves
Post Gorgona
Leaving losip Vanita's Painting in Medvednica Forest,
1986
(Josip Vanista, Marijan levovar, Radoslav Putar)
Klein, George Brecht. Ben...) the formal regulation of
all models of sociality is a historical constant, and
all the most important artists of the nineties have
dealt with this question (Felix Gonzalez-
Torres, Carsten H011er, Jorge Pardo, Phillippe
Parreno. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Rirkrit
Tiravanija, Vanessa Beecroft. Douglas Gordon).
According to Bourriaud, the art of the nineties
is defined by the sphere of interpersonal rela-
tions, intersubjectivity, conditioned by com-
mon existence, coexistence, the civilisation of
nearness, which we have inherited through life
in the city: he calls it relational art, or rela-
tional aesthetics.2
THE MISFITS I 38
Four years ago. writing an essay called From the
Esoterics of Gorgona to the Dematerialisation of
Weekend Art, focused on the new artistic project
called Weekend Art: Hallelujah the Hi11,3 I drew an
ambitious parallel between the cult Croatian avant-
garde group Gorgona (1959-1966)4 and the new
informal art group XXXL.5 This group of artists, or
rather a trio of friends who are artists, made up of
Aleksandar Battista Ivana Keser and Tomislav
Gotovac, creators already well known on the
domestic and international scene for their
individual oeuvres, got together around the
common project Weekend Art in the second
half of the nineties; this developed out of
Sunday friendly excursions to nearby
Medvednica, a not very large mountain in the
environs of Zagreb.6 Linking these two groups
together, like Bourriaud, I
got into the area of
thinking about the art of the sixties and that of
the nineties, without knowing of Bournaud's
writing, later to be published in the Relational
Aesthetics that is so influential today. I have
to admit that at times the comparison of
Gorgona and Weekend Art seemed to incline
to the pretentious: however, four years later,
with the additional resource of Bourriaud's
book and the international reception of
Weekend Art, I can say: so much the better for
Gorgona.
The almost four decades that divided these
groups of artists brought so many changes and
differences, deep and surface level, in both art and
in society, that at first glance it was difficult to find
common points of departure and points of contact
between the Weekenders and the Gorgana group.
What is more, the gap was so great that it was more
effective to draw up a list of differences than of
similarities. Nevertheless, what might have seemed
most contentious was my attempt to define the
kindred ideological premises. It is known that
Gorgona worked in the shadow of the Berlin Wall,