The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 1966-1978

Jea Denegri
Tomislav Gotovac
Zagreb
Figs. 221-222
Among the works of Tomislav Gotovac (1937), one of the
protagonists of experimental and «structural» film in
Yugoslavia (Number One, Afternoon of a Faun, Circle,
Direction, I Feel Well, Don't Ask Where We are Headed, and
others, shot from 1962 to 1966), there are also several series
realized in the photographic medium which, considering the
date when they were made and the radical conception which
underlies them, deserve to be recorded in this publication.
Though he has only lately become part of the new art
scence by participating in the exhibition «New Photography 2.
and by a one-man exhibition at the Gallery of the Students'
Centre in Belgrade in 1976, Gotovac has produced works which
quality him as a precursor, quite isolated until recently, of the
presently wide-spread use of photography as a specific
medium of expression.
Gotovac has been involved in this field since the summer of
1960 when he made a series of five photographs with motifs of
himself in different consciously selected situations, and this
work already contains all the main elements of his approach
to the use of the medium: i.e. the author's views on the use
of «speaking in the first person., extreme reduction of
statement and the obvious but intentional, poor visual
formulation of the Composition. The next two series of
photographs (Browsing through the Magazine Elle, and Inhaling
Air, which appeared in Zagreb in February and March 1962)
show a different approach: they represent recordings of events
which can be totally identified with the usual daily
manifestations and in them Gotovac selects scenes and
gestures which in the literal interpretation of a situation create
the impression of ambivalent fascination of an otherwise quite
realistic picture. The same characteristics can be found in the
four series made in Belgrade in 1964 (Hanls, Three Men,
Posing, Suitcase), in which the documentary, factual quality
of the scene, though subjected to a conscious structuring of the
photographic frame, has a direct, provocative expression, with
visible sociological and psychological elements.
The same provocative effect is found in one of the artist's
most radical achievements: i.e. the happening which took place
in April 1967 in Zagreb (Fig. 221) where the act of chopping
a discarded wooden cupboard with heavy axes had an
extremely drastic and destructive effect. After a prolonged
interval, during which Gotovac went to Belgrade to take up
studies at the Academy for Theatre, Film, Radio and Television
in the autumn of 1967, he returned to the medium of
photography on two occasions: in 1970 with the series Heads
(Fig. 222) and in 1976 with the series In this very Place,
where the artist's desire to use the method of a neutral
approach to the bare statement of a factual reality in order
to express an extremely personalized choice is once again seen.
These series of photographs were produced at considerable
intervals of time and were not orig;nally intended for
exhibition. However, they did not come as a result of a
casual, random interest in the possibilities of exploiting the
medium, on the contrary, they were the product of highly
cultured mind, possessing an in-built consciousness of the
non-metaphorical and anti-narrative character of modern
artistic speech, a consciousness which Gotovac gained
through his experience of highly selective choice of a
certain type of film, ranging from classic to underground.
Hrvoje Turkovi rightly noticed that «Gotovac strips the
constitutional tradition of the cinema down to those mechanisms
which are most closely related to the primary character of the
medium that of recording eliminating in the process
everything that could cover up these mechanisms.. The same
views, which in their very approach show a high degree of
professional understanding of the nature of the resources
which he uses, were applied in his works in photography
which, like the films, are based on the principle of the extreme
reduction of the scene and on the repetition of these scenes,
using closely related variants with the full consciousness of
the correlation between the preliminary plan and the consequent
part played by chance. In addition, the artist's works bear
a visible trace of concrete existential decisions: they testify
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to the aspiration towards a kind of manifestation in which
the intellectual reflection on the very nature of the media
of film and photography are linked together with the need
to express some extremely individualized and almost
anarchistic views on life.