The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 1966-1978

They met Tihomir Simi in a doorway hall in a Zagreb
street (llica): on the inside of the doorway the «arranger"
was holding a plate of clay on the level of the door-knob. The
first person who tried to open the door left an impression of
the door-knob in the clay. Trbuljak and Dimitrijevi asked the
man, Tihomir Simi, to sign the sculpture produced in this
way and he agreed. After a few days, they went to see him
and asked his permission to use his name for artistic purposes.
During the same period Trbuljak produced several works
based on the juxtaposition of reality and its photographic
reflection: he photographed holes in the asphalt in several
places in the town and then placed the photocopies of the
photographs on the pavement next to the photographed object;
or he photographed a building from the tram and then stuck
the transparent photograph on the window, supposing that
during the tram's circling the town, the photograph and the
building would at one moment overlap. In the works which he
produced in the summer of that year he ommitted the
photographic stage and reduced the procedure to the
tautological statement of a natural fact: the See Landscapes of
Kvarner and the Southern Adriatic are created by throwing
picture frames into the sea, whereby out of the vast expanse of
the sea a detail is singled out and framed: all pictorial
mimicry is powerless before the realism of the See Landscape
composed of colour, sound. smell and movement of the sea
water.
The actions in streets or in open spaces were only one of the
possibilites of work. However, the need was soon felt for a
more static form of presentation of non-processual works and
the groups started to look for an exhibition space where they
could show their works as they were produced, without
having to rely on the fixed dates of a gallery's annual
programme and without anybody's interference. These
conditions were met by any space in a busy street that could be
used occasionally free of charge. They found a doorway hall
at 2a, Frankopanska Street in Zagreb (Fig. 63) the tenants of
the house kindly agreed to let the two students use the
doorway hall as an exhibition space. The artists were motivated
by two reasons in wanting to show their works in the street or
doorway hall: firstly, they wanted to democratize art by leaving
the circle of specialized, socially and educationally defined
gallery spectators and secondly, they were trying to
emancipate themselves from the gallery system in order to be
able to show their works without depending on the annual
programme and exhibition policies of galleries. By the same
token, an exhibition in a doorway hall and action in an
actual life environment demanded some of the enthusiasm
and total involvement, similar to those children experience
when they have shows for their friends form the neighbourhood.
The organization of the exhibition included a number of
preparations, such as cleaning the doorway hall, talking
to surprised passers-by, bringing and installing the lighting
in the flat on the ground floor. In exhibitions which lasted
several days the exhibits had to be dismounted every evening
and stored away in the caretaker's flat. The exhibitions were
announced in mimeographed leaflets and were usually well
attended The group consisted of Trbuljak, Dimitrijevi, the
photographer Nada Orel and myself. The spectators at the
shows were on the one hand the most progressive and best
informed experts in visual arts, i.e. critics, custodians and
artists associated with the Gallery of Contemporary Art and
the Students' Centre Gallery, and on the other, people who
had nothing to do with artistic circles, passers-by who were
attracted by the crowd in the doorway hall and therefore came
to see the show. The spectators in the doorway hall differed
from the visitors of the established art institutions in town by
the absence of cultural and art snobs and of the more
conservative art professionals.
Five exhibitions were held in the doorway hall: «The Show
with Water by Dimitrijevi and Trbuljak in June 1970,
DimitrijeviCs Three Sets of Objects and Trbuljak's one-man
exhibition of photography also in June 1970; in February 1971
30
This method of democratization of art seems naive today, because in
spite of the flight into the street and nature, art remains in the same
cultural framework. the channels of the art system being the only
means of spreading the information about such undertakings. The same
criticism has been raised about all Land Art and Earth Art works,
the works performed in the desert or by the ocean could reach the
spectators only by means at photographs or film documentation shown
at galleries,
Trbuljak presented a show of panels with vibrating rubber
bands, and in April 1971 the international show of conceptual
art entitled At the Moment was held. The Show with Water
included various manifestations of that natural element as
well as objects that can be associated with it: Dimitrijevi
exhibited salt, fresh and warm water, a picture reflected in
the water, a mirror reflected in a vessel filled with water, a
thread in water, and Trbuljak presented a wash-basin with
a live fish and a boot, «ground waters", i.e. traces of
dampness on the wall of the doorway hall, a sheet of paper
with a dried patch of water. Apart from that, «everything
connected with water (rivers. lakes, seas, rains, floods, clouds,
icebergs, firemen, water-sprites. washing, swimming and
navigation) will participate in our show from 17.00 to 19.00
hours on June 5, 1970." At the Show with Water Dimitrijevi
and Trbuljak presented (for the first time in an exhibition)
works with characteristics of conceptual art and arte povera: the
shaping procedure was altogether replaced by the association
of conceptually related objects: the choice was no longer
determined by the aesthetic qualities of an object but by the
characteristic of the group the concrete or notional
association with water. The Show with Water was followed
by a conceptually related exhibition: Three Sets of Objects
included a) red, b) round, and c) pointed objects. This
taxonomy brings to mind Borges' classification of animals in «a
certain Chinese encyclopedia" and provokes the same
slightly uneasy feeling. The inclusion in one group does not
exclude the entrance into the other two groups and
positivist thought is baffled by the principles of such a
classification.
Trbuljak's series of panels with stretched rubber bands derived
from the postulates of Gestalt Art, but the application of the
common mechanical principle instead of the possible use of a
technical device shows a new sensibility for simple every-day
materials and media.
The first period od Dimitrijevi's and Trbuljak's work may be
described as a search for coherent individual languages,
although the co-ordinates of their individual fields of problems
were alreday defined. The common aesthetic and ethical
features of their activity at that time, which also make them
an integral part of the international movement of anti-formal
art, may be defined as follows: the conceptual component
always dominates over iconic and expressive factors, they use
all the available objects and techniques to communicate a
conceptual content and express the criticism of the oppressive
cultural mechanisms through their artistic production.
At that time their work was often provoked by concrete events
and was the expression of the rebellious irony of young people
who were not integrated in the established cultural structure.
At the opening of J. R. Soto's exhibition at the Gallery of
Contemporary Art in Zagreb in June 1970, Dimitrijevi
performed the first action of the Ali Baba series. The Ali Baba
concept is based on the incorporation of other people's works
of art (the metaphor of Ali Baba who steals the treasure) in
the structure of the meaning of one's own work. In the case
of Soto's exhibition the irony was not directed against the
artist or his work but against the event as such, i.e. the
opening of the exhibition. Dimitrijevi distributed popcorn
among the spectators and by this intervention changed the
course of the opening: the popcorn was falling on the floor,
it influenced the way of speaking, changed the rhythm of the
talk and in the end transformed a fashionable social event
into a noisy gathering accompanied by the sound of cracking
popcorn. The following Ali Baba action took place at the 1970
Bitef in Belgrade when Dimitrijevi distributed red-tinted glasses
among the audience who had come to see a film by Bergman,
thus modifying the chromatic appearance of the object the
film show. The intervention was not directed against the
integrity of Bergman's work, but implied criticism of the
fetish-status that artistic products enjoy in our culture. The
latest works derived from the Ali Baba concept were produced
with the help of the Berlin Nationalgalerie, which allowed
Dimitrijevi to use the original paintings by modern masters
(Manet, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Jawlensky) as elements in
compositions with common objects and natural products. The
premise of that operation eliminates the aura surrounding the
work of art and levels the products of élite culture with those
in everyday use.