The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 1966-1978

in the contents of the photographic series In Honour of the
Soviet Avant-Garde and The Period from 1963 to 1974, and to
the contents of the performance in Graz, completing in this way
the group of works in which Damnjan expresses his awareness
of the need to state personal views on the position of the
individual artist and the position of art within the concrete
social and political context of modern reality.
Damnjan's later work Nothing Superfluous in the Hurtan Spirit
in the photographic medium, continues along these same lines.
The structure of this work consists of two sets of 16
photographs, the first set showing the artist's face painted in
white, grey or black, differently each time, while in the second
set, instead of the painted mask, we see the artist's face with
ordinal numbers written on his forehead. Besides, in both
sets the artist has plaques with numbers from 1 to 16 on his
chest, and all the photographs are distributed on the walls of
the gallery according to a definite pattern of four works with
four photographs each. The signs included in the structure of
the subjects of these photographs (the painted face of the
artist, the number on his forehead, the number on his chest,
strictly determined lay-out of the photographs) allow for the
possibility of conveying that type of expression in which
Damnjan's already characteristic ideological and ethical views
can be recognized. This work was first presented at the
artist's one-man exhibition in the Gallery of the Students'
Cultural Centre in Belgrade in May 1976, and was later exhibited
among the Yugoslav works selected for the Biennial Exhibition
in Venice in the same year, then at the exhibition ,,Avanguardia
e sperimentazione Le piu avanzate ricerche artistiche
yugoslave» in the Galleria civica d'arte moderna in Modena
in March 1977, and finally at the Arts Center Gallery in Genoa
in May 1977.
At the April Third Meeting in Belgrade 1974 Damnjan handed
around drawings on offices forms from his series Intervention,
confirming his authorship by stamping the works with the
following text: R. Damn/an -- Free Work of Art. In 1976 he used
a similar way of establishng his authorship by means of a
specially made seal in a series of works entitled This is a
work of verified artistic value, first shown at his exhibition in
Studio 16.:e in Turin, in January 1977, later presented at the
5th Triennial in Belgrade and finally, in November of the same
year, shown at his one-man exhibition in Gallery Nova in
Zagreb. In this work, Damnjan proceeded from the problem of
determining the part played by the artist in evaluating his
own works. He asked himself whether, once he completes his
work, the artist is deprived of the possibility of having any
further insight into its fate, and social evaluation. In attempting
to answer this question by including this dilemma in the very
structure of his work, Damnjan indicates that the fundamental
value criterion in art can be no other than that which, beyond
any sort of a priori standards, is always based on different,
new problems of the concrete artistic practice.
From this insight into Damnjan's views after 1970, we can
conclude that his work has been carried out along two parallel
lines: the first contained in the series Proposal for a New
Experience of Colour, Misinformation, Interventions and in
the two series of primary paintings, he focuses on the
problems of the internal structuring of the language of art,
while in the second, contained in works carried out in the
media of photography, video and performance, he wishes to
express his reflections on some of his personal states and on
the general conditions within the concrete social and historical
reality. While the first works are characterized by an objective
and analytical approach, in the second, the artist speaks in
the first person, presenting views which are based exclusively
on his subjective experience. In this use of different methods
of expression, there are, however, no contradictions in
principle: since both approaches, the objective and
analytical one, as well as the subjective and synthetic
approach repersent complementary components of a
strategy in which, through the artist's practice and behaviour,
rejects the possibility of a passive integration into a world
of operative and functionalistic existence. In Damnjan's case,
the gestures of this rejection assume at times the form of
chearly conflicting solutions which with time seem to approach
the limits of the ever challenging, but at the same time
extremely risky self-destruction of the artist.
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