The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

Tihoinir M ilovac
E FITS'
The term used for the title of this exhibition does
not belong to art history proper or related theories;
rather, it has been borrowed from social psycholo-
gy. It chiefly refers to those members of a commu-
nity that act in a way inappropriate to the
environment and circumstances. The term
came in useful to cover artistic trends in
Croatian contemporary art from the 1950s to
the present, different in expression and strate-
gies yet similar in their field of action. The
subheading conceptualist strategies in
Croatian contemporary art indicates that the
trends are not of the same type but are con-
nected by their attitude to the artistic and,
above all, non-artistic context. This could eas-
ily be termed "relational art"2, discerned in
various manifestation of conceptualist idiom
(from proto-conceptual art very close to
Fluxus at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, conceptu-
al art from the late 1960s and 1970s to post-and
neo-conceptual art of the 1980s and 1990s). Within
this range of strategies. languages and procedures,
most emphatically present is the phenomenon of
looking for interspace in a "deviation from the envi-
ronment and circumstances"; the discourse used by
such an artistic practice is critique, regardless
whether it criticizes social reality determined
by social system; politics and ideology and its
dogmas; state as a mechanism of repression: or
art itself and its institutionalization. Actions of
artists and artistic groups may be seen as their
refusal to accept the limited space (of free-
dom) and ghettoization but also the values
promoted by dominant culture.
While procedures differ from artist to artist,
what links them is the attitude that they do
not produce works of art, but rather investi-
gate various relations, introduce new modes
of behavior and "disturb traditional and habit-
ual modernist conventions of creation, pres-
entation, reception and consumption of art".3
Art in The Misfits show has another specific
character trait. An analysis of these artistic
practices must take into consideration local
ideological, i.e. social, political and cultural
context, in this case the European fringe, for-
merly socialist, today in transition, which does not
a priori mean that its art is inferior to that of the
West. Most relevant concepts (phenomena) over
the past forty years transcend local limitations and
can easily cross cultural and territorial borders since
they function equally well in divergent ideological
contexts. Therefore they may be said to be more
than a mere "trace, remnant and ruin"4 testifying to
a worn-out, obsolete real-socialist ideology or to
transitional democracy. 5 Since here we are dealing
with a period in history6 .1 have tried to apply the
criteria of "staying power" in my analysis and selec-
tion of artists and their works, in spite of them
being of a moment. The period of almost 50
years, encompassed by the exhibition, implies
heterogeneity of art production, but it is also
an art that functions on the same level and can
still act as a trigger.
Julije Knifer's work, for instance, as it evolved
in the late 1950s (in the hard edge atmosphere)
and remained unchanged to the present, in
07 I THE MISFITS