The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

1 Official art history in Croatia, as
elsewhere, still knows too little,
and writes little too, of the moth-
ers and grandmothers as possible
sources of inheritance.
2 Nicolas Bourriaud: Esthetique
relationnelle, Les presses du reel,
2001, p.31.
3 Nada Bero: De l'esoterisme de
Gorgona a la dematerialisa-
tion de Weekend Art, Art
press, no. 241, December 1998,
Paris, pp. 46-52.
4 Gorgona, comprising the
leading intellectuals and
artists of the time, Josip
Vanita, Marion JevSovar and
Duro Seder, the sculptor Ivan
Koarit, the architect Miljenko
Horvat and the art critics and
historians Radoslav Putar,
Dimitrije Bai evic and Matko
Metrovk. worked in almost
total isolation, on the margins
of artistic and social life.
5 The artists called their little
group XXXL because of the
exceptional height of the
three artists; however, when
the group is written and spo-
ken about, it is the phrase
Weekend Art that is most common-
ly used. The full title of the project
- Weekend Art: Hallelujah the Hill is
a reference and dedication to the
film of the avant-garde American
director Adolfas Mekas Hallelujah
the Hills.
6 Weekend Art as perform-
ance. or Sunday excursions to
Medvednica, started in sum-
mer 1996 and ended in 2000.
but the dissemination of the
project is still going on today,
via various media and distri-
bution channels.
7 "The aspirations of
Gorgona." in the words
of Josip VaniSta. the spiritual
father of the group. "were
directed towards an extra-
aesthetic reality. Intellectual
restraint, passiveness and
even indifference were above
the bare, ironic denial of the
world in which we lived.
Importance was not attrib-
uted to the work, activities
were extremely simple: for
example. walks together in
the environs of the town,
committee inspections of the
beginning of spring. as Putar
said jokingly. simple talks in
nature. Gorgona sometimes
did nothing, it just lived. I too
like others at time was inter-
ested in the emptiness of Zen,
aspired in an ideological-
ly filled world, towards
normal behaviour, a nat-
ural life."
43 THE MISFITS
8 At the end of 2001. the
same artists set in motion a
new initiative, a kind of off-
shoot of WA. called CoCoArt
(Contemporary Community
Art) with the aim of a more
successful self-organisation
through existing parallel mod-
els in the community.
9 As in 7.
10 In her Weekend Art News (1999)
Ivana Keser writes: "We became
weekend artists gradually. We
spent the weeks doing incompati-
ble jobs, that brought us sufficient
material gain for us to be on
Sunday what we actually are -
artists. Doing all kinds of things is
not unusual, but to persist in the
conditions of amateurism is fairly
difficult. Thus the point of
Weekend Art is reversing the per-
spective. where a hopeless situation
can be turned inside out for its ben-
efit. Our joint Sunday trips to
Sljeme had at first more of a thera-
peutic than an artistic reason."
11 Nena Dimitrijevit: [Gorgona - art
as a manner of existence], preface
to the catalogue. Gallery of
Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 1977.
12 Lichtungen. 1997 and Der
Standard. 2000 (within the context
of Museum in Progress, under the
curatorial baton of Hans Ulrich
Obrist).