The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 1966-1978

an exact mental model, which shows its function: in them
reality is united in a harmonious spiritual symbiosis. Like in
nature, elements are here linked in order to mediate the
course of the idea, returning it to the earth: sculptures
hang on long threads, almost touching the ground. The
ideal, unmaterialized field of cosmic energies is materialized
by means of vibrations, which we perceive as intellectual and
sensory effects (such as light, love, purity, truth, peace and
freedom) into wool, clay, wood and iron, thus maintaining
the circling of the elements: the thought in the element of air,
energy in the element of fire, perception in the element of
water and form in the element of the earth. Energy and
thought, perception and form have thus been inseparably
linked. Tradition is now clearly observable in this construction:
the sculpture is the sensory visible realization of Heraclytus'
thoughts, linked by the mechanics of Neo-Platonism. This
unusual combination of artifacts, Neo-Platonism, Hellenistic
tradition and contemporary esoteric theories, this re-reading
and putting together of memories realized in commic
processes, is interesting from the standpoint of modern
sculpture too. True, the formal articulation of these sculptures
is unusual and breaks away from the accepted attitudes to
sculptural design: but is it at all possible to find a form with
a generative function within the academism in which
contemporary sculpture is searching for solutions? The
contemporary formalistic sculpture and most of the contemporary
architecture are dead in this sense and can only be described
as the waste material of our civilization. The family at Sempas
are trying to reconstruct the practice of sculpture (i.e. artistic
practice as a whole) from a position outside art into a simple
and effective spiritual proposition, whose immediacy,
smiplicity and necessity (because this is, in their opinion,
a basic question of human spiritual survival) will have a direct
effect on the spectator, impress him and call his attention
to the message it carries. Their aim, then, is not an aesthetic
blindness but the spiritual metamorphosis of man and of the
world in which he lives. This the purpose of the public
manifestations of the family, such as the so-called healing of
the earth (Fig. 42) i.e. ritual movement, meditation and
conversations in which the earth is relieved of its pollution in a
spiritual way.
At the time when the only basis of artistic activity is seen
in the total politization of artistic practice (in this respect
both OHO and the family at Sempas have aroused uneasiness
in bureaucratic structures in this country), it seems to me that
the family at empas may be described as a contribution to a
return to the spiritual and ethical tradition of European art in
general, as a proposal to the spectator to look at the drawings
and sculptures from empas without prejudice and loftiness.
The experience of such viewing may lead him to questions
that he may have rejected as unnecessary or perhaps even
ignored.
Toma Brejc
Nua and Sreo Dragan
jubljana
Figs 43-46
The beginnings of the conceptualist work of Sreo and Nua
Dragan are linked with OHO's manifestations in 1968 and
1969. Later Sreo Dragan stayed in contact with Marko
Poganik and David Nez and it is therefore not surprising that
Reism became one of the basic principles of the independent
work of these two artists. The same commitment can be
observed in their work today, especially when they follow
the tautological connection between the statement and vision,
the conception and its realization.
For them art is an alternative language, a form of
communication, whose outward manifestation is the creative
process. The process is totally non-material and is realized only
in the medium of the idea: what is shown on the videotapes, the
photographs or the films they produce is, in their opinion, only
an impulse for the spectator's mind. Their work consists
therefore of various «impressions of the creative
consciousness» (Fig. 43). This principle is expressed in their
Project of the Mental Visualization of the Object, Belgrade,
the April Meeting 1972 (Fig. 44), in which the object is
outlined only in a graphic diagram and is formed in an
infinite number of variants in the spectator's mind. A similar
principle applies to their project of the audio-verbal group
communication of syllables (Fig. 45). They seem to have
noticed that throughout the practice of conceptualism as a
dematerialized form of the work of art the invisible, imaginary
object is always present. In their work the object is at certain
moments fixed as group intuition, as the identity of
conception and action, as the freeing of the creativity in the
spectator's mind. Nua and Sreo Dragan create the basic
identity of the conception and the spectator's participation
in space and time by means of the vidoetape or the
photograph: the spectator is watching the videotape and is
being watched at the same time: being recorded on the
videotape, he participaties in the happening even if he only
registers their projects passively. For the April Meeting in
Belgarde Students' Cultural Center, 1974 (Fig. 46) they produced
a scenario in which they used photographs and video and
which show their orientation to spiritual experiences: they
wrote a programme for collective communication which begins
with the simple instruction: «This is a gesture which you have
to repeat and then communicate to someone else.» The
project lasted seven days and nights in the alpha-theta
rhythm of human tradition (in which alpha is the repetitive and
theta the innovative process). The project was also carried
out in the form of a «round table», at which the participants
were, among others, Bogdanka and Dejan Poznanovi,
Joseph Beuys and Braco Dimitrijevi. It was a realization on the
level of an oral message, which used slides that were projected
for seven successive days, so that the project also developed
as a condensed chain of gesture messages. In actual fact it
was a (re)formation of the imaginary but everpresent
spiritual communication, which is impress:ad on our
consciousness only as an experience and never materializes
in any other way (of course, it is impossible to record
this kind of communication on video-tape or by means of
photography!).
The video-tapes of Nua and Sreo Dragan are not concerned
with the picture and its analysis, with electronic experiements
or a multi-layered story: they use the equipment only as a
means of placing into the continuum of time and space a
«dematerialized» piece of information which has no
aesthetic or ideological connotation. The video-tape is used
only to stimulate the spectator's imagination: its directness
should help in overcoming the static and hermetic nature of
the conceptualist statement. The resulting communication
outlines the joint field of communication of the creative mind
of the two artists and the participating spectator.
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