The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 1966-1978

(M. Matanovi's book), or randomly arranged cards which could
b rearranged at will because their order was not connditioned by
a text (M. Hanek). I. Geister's sound book bore the word
Silence on the first page, and when the page was turned with
the paper rustling, the word Noise appeared on the next page.
Marko Poganik and Iztok Geister each produced a number of
delightful picturebooks and witty comic strips and collaborated
in books of poetry (e.g. Pegam in Lambergam, published by
OHO, lkebana published by Znamenja, with Geister's texts
and Poganik's drawings): several of their projects, for
instace the very funny story entitled The Bottle Would Like to
Drink, have not been published yet.
The video-sonic structure of the OHO book represents an
«open work.. The viewer can manipulate the book freely,
he can read it from the beginning or from the end (I. Geister,
Two Poems), he can turn it upside down, put it together or
take it apart. The direct and pure «literature'. of that edition
was complemented by the reistic drawing; the poems and
their presentation did not follow any established image of the
West European humanist tradition.
In this first literary series with the first happenings and songs
produced by Nako Krinar, in OHO's activity in publishing and
in their work for Journals Tribuna and Problemi, we can also
observe a growing interest in visual arts. The early activity of
OHO centred on the seeing and observation of the object; in
the second stage the same attitude to objects was established
in galleries.
In February 1968, Marko Poganik, Milenko Matanovi and
Andra alamun exhibited their articles at the Ljubljana
Modern Gallery. Marko's exhibits included, among other things,
about a hundred plastic bottles cast in pastel coloured plaster
(the models were borrowed from consumer industry), those of
Milenko Matanovi coloured packaging for eggs, and Andra
alamun's a triptych with a figure, on which he later hung his
own clothes. The pop-artistic nature of the articles, their
basis in the reality of every-day consumption, was transferred
with minimal interventions into the OHO art. It showed simple
products, not in their utilitarian significance but with a fine
feeling for their immediate, unburdened visual presence.
The same year, after OHO's fluxus-show at the Students'
Centre in Zagreb, the group was joined by David Nez, then a
student at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts. Soon after that
he and Matanovi exhibited for the first time coloured plastic
objects at the Zagreb exhibition entitled «Object and Colour",
while Nez, Matanovi and Andra alamun later presented
their objects at the Studio 212 Gallery (Galerija Ateljea 212)
during the BITEF theatre festival. On that occasion the group
organized one of the first professionally produced happenings
in Yugoslavia on a theme from the Old Testament.
Analysing the group's work in visual arts at the time of these
exhibitions Braco Rotar writes: «In relation to the Slovene
tradition in visual arts the formulations of this group represent
a big step towards a new sensibility. The most obvious shift
has taken place on the visual plane, where the 'classical'
techniques of painting and sculpture have been almost totally
abandoned. The colours are usually pure, the compositions
schematically simple. They are characterized by play on
meaning: the formulations are non-symbolic and untransparent,
while the levels of meaning, strictly directed and compulsory in
traditional Slovene art, are unintentional and uncompulsory.
The formulations and their purpose are based on visual
effectiveness and not as in the Ljubljana school on
expressiveness or impressiveness ... The OHO type of
forumulation is a closed sign system whose meaning is not
pre-determined and therefore it is not part of an ideological
notional sphere. In the cultral context these formulation are
the consequence of a consistent differentiation between the
visual and the notional, i.e. ideological level. The visual element
is based on one of the fundamental ways of feeling the world,
and that is through sight and not through speculations about
truth, essence, nothingness and existence. The visual means
the organization of the material world according to a visual
code..
It was on this level that their activity stopped at the end of
1968. By that time they had mastered the Reistic levelling of
objects and their visual registration, they explored the
techniques of fluxis and happening, published books in the
form of 'open works, while their literary activity gave way
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to enquiries into the visual language. These researches,
however, went towards the utmost reduction of the traditional
aesthetic premises of the work of art and, in extreme cases,
the total disappearance of the work of art as an object among
objects, i.e. towards the final dematerialization of the work of
art.
Arte povera (Land Art) Process Art: exhibitions and projects
in 1969
The universality of the Reistic technique started to lose ground
at the moment when Nez and Matanovi began to integrate their
coloured objects and included the urban space in a number of
happenings, which culminated in Triglav (Fig. 6) (December 30,
1968) a three-headed live sculpture. Its meaning was ironical
and political: Triglav, the highest peak of the Julian Alps, as a
symbol of the Slovene nation combined with the connotations
springing from Reistic linguistics three heads-three-headed:
Reism required a meditative rigorousness in the observation of
objects, basic lines in their presentation, while the activity of
the OHO group, initiated by Toma alamun, turned to objects
themselves. In February 1969, Toma joined Nez, Matanovi
and Andra alamun at the Zagreb Gallery of Contemporary
Art. In the exhibition, which was entitled «Great-Grandfathers.,
Toma presented hay stacks (Fig. 8), a pile of maize-cob husks,
a scattering of tiles, Matanovi showed an environment of
poliurethane foam entitled The Embryo of Albin Gessner's
Elephant (Fig. 7) and The Seven Hills of Rome, which were
made from umbrellas and wool; Andra alamun exhibited
The Wood (Fig. 5), a construction of objects with softly lined
walls, and he also had a show at the opening. David Nez
presented his Roof (Fig. 4) which consisted of roof tiles
arranged on the floor of the gallery, and The Jungle made from
iron wool. As the first exhibition of arte povera in Yugoslavia,
it was, understandably, received with a lack of understanding
by the critics (apart from a few exceptions, such as Zeljka
Corak). The OHO artists were continuing the exploration of
reistic experiences within the context of a gallery. But these
efforts were accompained by the attempt to enquire into the
possibilities of shaping, ordering and placing simple
materials in a gallery. Of course, Toma's hay-stack contains
the iconographic tradition which starts with the genre scenes
by Nicole dell'Abate and leads over the Dutch seventcenth
century, Millet, Monet to Slovene impressionism. Therefore
Toma was not looking for an ironic continuation of that
tradition (which, being an art historian he knew very well), but
was more interested in the possibilities of establishing the
biological and mineral substantiality of reality within the space
provided by the gallery a demand typical of the arte povera
movement. The first exhibition was, understandably enough,
-;onsiderably influenced by the poetic gesture the
presentation of such materials that produce the effect of an
unexpected confrontation though the solutions displayed
consistent formulations and coherence. While Matanovi's work
was influenced by Pascali's sculptures, David Nez presented
a semantically interesting solution: he transferred the roof of
the gallery to the floor. The effect of the double nonsense as
regards conventional meaning, commented Braco Rotar, was
not only that of a play with meaning or of an ironic transposition
of a familiar object. For the formulations of arte povera Nez
tried to find a different «drawing., a different material field
from which the spectator could perceive his object. While
alamaun's hay-stack meant the bare and direct presentation
of the gesture, Nez's sculptures embody anti-form, the
presentation of nonsense in an eccentric environment, which is
what galleries have become. The search for specific
morphologies of objectivization within the conceptual framework
characterizes Nez's contribution to this exhibition. The swing of
the exhibition was left throughout that year: firstly, as freedom
over the object, which makes it possible to get beyond the
registration of its presence and penetrate into its biological
sensibility and direct existence; secondly, as an exploration
into the specific morphology of the material, and thirdly,
as the development of a special imagination, which could lead
to such a drawing that could transform the gallery space into
a uniform, conceptually generated environment.
In March and April 1969, the OHO group had another
exhibition at the Ljubljana Modern Gallery. Its conceptual
nucleus consisted of animals, plants, minerals, biological and
physical waste of the technological civilization, i.e. of simple
materials, arranged according to their internal objective logic,