The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 1966-1978

Davor Matievi
The Zagreb Circle
Figs. 47-146
There is a widespread belief in the art circles that Zagreb
has maintained a long and uninterrupted constructivist
tradition in art. According to the same opinion, the dominant
trends before World War II were surrealism M Belgrade,
Expressionism in Ljubljana and Constructivism in Zagreb,
while after the war the salient trends were the Mediala in
Belgrade, the lyrical expression of the graphic circle in
Ljubljana and Exat-51 and the New Tendencies in Zagreb.
This rough-and-ready div'sion, though basically correct, has
the flaws of all generalizations and its consequences can
still be observed as the same generalizations are being
applied to the younger generation of artists.
Zagreb is the centre of a comparatively small geographical
area and almost the only scene of activity in contemporary
forms of culture including v'sual arts. Though always in
contact with European art centres, mainly through a number
of artists who were either close to them or formed their part at
least during their artistic apprenticeship (since the turn of the
century, at least one in each generation), this milieu shows
the characterist cs of the international art developments coupled
with those of a small town located on the cross-roads between
Central Europe and the Balkans.
We could identify a number of factors that steered the course
of our recent art history in this direction. But for the ongoing
period this would be more difficult, because its overall
evaluation is possible only from a greater distance in t me.
What is more, the period and the phenomena we want to
present here are still developing and their meaning still open.
It is difficult to give a decided and definitive assessment of
very recent or current developments from an art h'storian's
point of view. This can be done by the chronicler and possibly
by the art critic who, however hard they try, can never be
absolutely objective.
The continuation of the constructivist tradition after the
New Tendencies period came into question. Introducing
innovations, a whole generation of Zagreb artists utej,
ibenik, Gelid, Kuduz after op-art joined the new trends in
hard-edge painting, resorting at the same time to the latest
technical achievements. Their work was evaluated against ihe
background and qualities of the New Tendencies, to which
they reacted by questioning the justitcation of the judgment
and by asking whether they should take part in these
activities. The next generation of artists, whose work is the
subject of the present survey, did not feel they belonged to
this line of avant-garde tradition, which they manifested by not
taking part in the New Tendenc'es. It is here that we see a
break in the continuity of Constructivism in Zagreb, the
emergence of a new attitude to art and a new practice of
artistic behaviour.
Another art movement, the Gorgona, developed almost
simultaneously with the New Tendencies, but it was based
on very different principles.
From these and parallel act vities during the nineteen sixties
we can single out several artists, whose specific characteristics
mark them as predecessors of the current practice of art
associated with the young generation. They are Josip Stoi
and Tomislav Gotovac, whose mediums are poetry and film,
and two representatives of the Gorgona, Julije Knifer and
Ivan Koari. Julije Knifer (Figs. 47-51) is a painter, whose
main motif for twenty years has been the meander, presented Mth
minimal modifications. Over the years this theme has grown
into an individual work programme, with which it is possible,
on the bas s of various changes in art trends, to interpret
almost the same material in different ways and it probably
has different meanings for the artist himself. We can interpret
it as the presentation of a rhythm, as the formation of a
20
super-sign, as hard-edge painting or the painting of
achromatic surfaces within prmary painting. In his most
recent work the final product still has its value, but the most
important element for the artist is the procedure and the
lasting of the work process in the painting, or increasingly
often, the drawing.
The repetition of the same motif, a combined result of the
artist's programme and his inner compulsion, links Knifer
with the new generation of artists more closely than his projects
of intervention and the unique action of paintng a gigantic
meander in quarry near TObingen (Fig. 50).
The sculptor Ivan Koari (Figs. 52-57), on the other hand, is
subject to constant changes, not on the plan of a discernible
programmatic activity but in a perpetual search for new
possibilites of expression for his unchanging interpretations
or even literal portrayal of his immediate surroundings, objects,
ideas and associations. From cars and teapots to parts of the
river, rain and space he shapes and remodels at the same
time, he paints and accumulates or simply re-arranges his works,
thus re-interpreting old and new experience. Rs numerous
early landscape and urban projects of intervention seem to
express a need to give back to the environment his enriched
and processed experience. By recording ideas he makes
abstractions tangible: examples of such works are Shapes of
Space, Temporary Sculptures, the latter made from foil, which
the audience was allowed to re-shape, or more precisely,
to re-organize, and Former Sculptures (Fig. 53), the
scattered rema'ns of a previous work, which he exhibited
instead of making new ones. His new attitude to art enables
the audience to experience a hitherto unknown dimension in
which the medium itself becomes a problem, which is a common
characteristic of the new generation of artists.
Josip Stoi (Figs. 58-61), an art historian, concerns us here
primarily as a poet. who is not interested in the distinctions
between fields and media but turns all his attention to the
structures of mental processes. Very early on he saw the
possibility of creating a new language by combining words,
objects and space. The result were some of the most
acceptable works of the new practice of art (A/Vrror and stone
with text: or, then, Fig. 60). Having produced an active
interest in the spectator and placed him into the position of
active creator, Stoi offered him a number of projects for
completion. However, the majority of his works exist only in the
form of notes, known to a small circle of f r-ends. He
communicates his experiences by creating an awareness and
atmosphere through direct contact rather than by producing
works that could influence the work of the new generation of
artists.
Tomislav Gotovac has worked mostly in film and has not
had direct links with the fine arts, but his very early procedures
and behaviour (1960), in whch he stressed his own person
in various situations, may be considered together with the
works of other predecessors as the beginning of a new form of
art, the more so because he still uses similar procedures in
registering various processes of his personal experiential
sphere. H s photo-notes and the series entitled: Heads (Fig. 222),
The Presentation of ELLE, Posing, which were produced in
Zagreb and Belgrade and only recently shown to the public,
may be classified by the origin of the idea either as film art
or as the new visual art in the narrower sense. One of his
works, however, was known to a group of fine artists at the
time of its creation. It was a happening entitled Our Hap (Fig.
221) and performed with Ivan Lukas and Hrvoje ercar and a
photo mods] in Zagreb in 1967. And yet, its influence was not
transmitted by the fine artists who were among the audience
arid some of whom even partic pated in the happening, and
even less by the scanty comment in the press, but orally, and
particularly thanks to Hrvoje ercar. Somewhat later the same
year Sercar acted as the initiator of a more dynamic.
behaviour in the already heightened atmosphere of the
Hit-Parade (an exhibition of objects by Gelid, Kuduz, utej
and ibenik at the Students' Centre Gallery, Fig. 64), where he