The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 1966-1978

While artists usually make films and record their
performances and actions in order to illustrate a certain kind
of artistic work, neutralizing the media of photography and film
at the expense of the content they want to present, Paripovi
defines his work (films, photographs, books and catalogues)
as a symmetrical relationship that works both ways: on the
one hand he stresses the psychological qualities of the work
and on the other the technical, recording nature of the
medium. For him the record of an art work is at the same
time the work itself.
Zoran Popovi has described his work The Axioms (1971/72),
(Fig. 230-231) as the seven basic symbols-notions which
represent abstract objects, in this case the art object and art
itself: "These Axioms have not been arranged in relation to a
kind of art, they themselves are art". He presents the axioms in
a number of media: on photographs, slides, film, video tape,
drawing. performance, poster and then gives their
definition by means of a grid structure (The Diagramme,
1971/72) consisting of several co-ordinate systems (the
descratian righ-angle co-ordinate system) into which the
axioms are built. Each axiom is placed in a co-ordinate system
and is multiplied according to the number of the systems in
the drawing and defined by the corresponding mathematical
formula. In this way Popovi shows the apparent, objective
truth of the selected axioms, as for instance in the diagramme
of their definitions, and the direct, experimental
demonstration of proving the artistic truth the sensory and
experiential truth in order to solve the dichotomy formal
truth/material truth and art/the real world.
The work on the axioms requires the application of
knowledge and scientific experience; Popovi's text about it
expresses his ideas about the nature of art, the art work and
the function of art.
The Axioms was followed by a series with photographs and
slides, the project The Pre-Idea and the film Pretty Good
(Edinburgh).
During his stay in New York in 1974 and 1975 he established
contact and exchanged ideas with the Art and Language
group. These discussions led to his text Notes on Art in
Yugoslavia, which was published in "The Fox", No. 1. In 1975
he wrote a number of texts, voicing his critical attitude to art
and the need for a re-examination of his own work. Mention
should be made of For Self-Managing Art (written for the
publication "October 75", the SCC 1975), and A Criticism of the
Art Mechanism in Belgrade. Both texts, and especially the
latter, are an application of socio-political ideas and terminology
rather than a concrete proposal for alternative methods of
work in art and culture. As a contribution to that discussion
Popovi made his Concise History of Modern Art, the subject
of which is the controversy about socially committed art in the
Russian avantgarde. It consists of four photographs and an
extract from Herbert Read's book A Conscious History of
Modern Painting, in which the author describes the conflict
between the suprematists, constructivists and productivists
about the function of art in society and gives the reasons for
which, in his opinion, the attempt at solving the problem
ended in failure. The second and parallel subject of the work
is the problem of translation of the text into Serbo-Croatian:
in the translation some sentences are left out while the
statement of one of the participants in the debate. Naum Gabo,
has been reformulated.
Popovi resumed his discussion about the dichotomy art/society
in the two films he made in 1976. In Without a Title (camera
Slobodan ijan, Fig. 252) nine artists from Belgrade and
Zagreb were asked to conceive autonomously a part of the
film within the context of the set subject. In Struggle in New
York (camera Howard Schmest, Fig. 255) he uses the same
technique, this time with the participation of thirty artists from
New York, members of the Art and Language group and of
groups that sprung from it: the International Local, the Red
Herring and Artists Meeting for Cultural Change.
Popovi's preoccupation with the function of the art work
resulted in his work Miodrag Popovi, a Worker: His Life. Work
and Leisure Time (1977, Fig. 254), a series of slides
accompained by a text by Miodrag Popovi recorded on tape.
Rasa Todosjevi uses objects, materials and ready-made
products and arranges them in groups of objects: his
constructions consist of canvas, laths, plaster castings, gauze,
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wire, string, wood, rope, sacs, sand, grass, chains, coloured
water, pots, bedside tables, bread, nails, hot-water bottles,
thermometers ... The exhibition arrangement of the art work is
an artificial organization of different materials, objects and
constructions, each of which has no meaning in itself but
is meaningful within the arranged context. Todosijevi
obliterates the aesthetic of the art work by producing works
whose reality is illusory. His early use of materials shows
similarities with Fluxus, whose participants also reject the
idea of the art work as a mere object.
In the period from 1972 to 1975 he created a number of
performances. In them he used such materials as paint, soil,
salt, rubber plants, an aquarium with fish, glass, slogans on
cardboard, and water. (Decision as Art. Edinburgh. 1973. Fig.
258) The Washing of Clean Feet in Dirty Water, the SCC
gallery Belgrade. 1974: Water Drinking Inversion, Imitation
and Contrasts, the SCC, 1974. Fig. 256). He performed most
of these actions jointly with Marinela Koelj.
In 1975 Todosijevi abandoned the use of objects in his
performances and replaced them with words and the spoken
language, which he uses in a similar way. Such performances
include My Last Masterpiece ("4th April Meeting", the SCC,
1975), in which he appeared with a scarf cover'ng the lower
part of his face and gave an improvised recital of names of
artists and art phenomena from Altamira to the present day,
Reminiscences of Raga Todosijevi's Art (1976), Was ist Kunst,
Patricia Hennings, (Fig. 257), Studio Brda, Galerie Ursula
Krinzinger, Brda, Istria.
From 1973 until 1975 Todosijevi worked on paintings which he
describes as elementary painting within the framework of
Elementary or Post-Aesthetic Art (his own term). They were
shown at exhibitions of post-conceptual, post-object or
primary painting, Damnjanovj-Todosijevi-Urkom (the SCC,
1974, the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art, 1975, the
Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 1975). This painting on
canvas and wood is not defined, however, by the polished
manner, the brushwork, colour and surface as is the case in
the so-called logical or tautological type of painting, to which
Todosijevi's elementary painting is related but is less mannerly
and refined. He applied the same ideas in the sculpture Proto-
-Object, Proto-Art, an avant-garde sculpture (the SCC. 1978).
Todosijevi criticizes the local artistic practice even more
radically and openly in the work which consists of a canvas
painted white and the captions: "Title: Death on the Barricades
(France 1865)" and "Title: Paint on Canvas".
Todosijevi has written a number of texts in which he
explains his own works and attitudes and the works of other
artists: "Who makes a profit on art and who makes an
honest living" (1975. Fig. 259), "Art and Revolution" (October
75), "For Art Against Art", "Introduction to History". "On
Lines". The exhibitions he has organized include 1 1
(couples who create art together, the SCC, 1974), 12 Yugoslav
artists and the magazine The Saw (the Happy New Art Gallery,
the SCC, 1976), Art, Irony, etc. (the same gallery as above,
1977). He is now preparing an exhibition entitled Art and
Stupidity.
Todosijevi's attitude to the institutionalization of art is
expressed in his series of works On the Line, in which the
number of lines (the quantity) depends on the quality of
the insititution in which the work will be shown: Nulla dies sine
linea Not a day without a line (drawings on paper, 1976),
and a number of wall drawings: 10 lines in the gallery (Galerie
Wspolszesna, Warsaw, 1975), 10,000 lines (Art Tape, Florence,
1976), 1 line in an abandoned house (Folonica, Italy, 1976
Fig. 260) 20,000 lines in the gallery (the SCC, 1976), 100,000
lines in private (1976), 1 line in private (1976), 1 line in a hotel
room (Bovec, Slovenia, 1977) 200,000 lines (10th Biennale of
Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1977, Fig. 261),
20,000 lines (Studio 16/e, Turin, 1977).
At "October 71" Gergelj Urkom exhibited a tubular tin object
which he entitled Urinal M.D. (Marcel Duchamp). In this way
he argued the use of the ready-made object introduced by the
dadaists, who ass:gned the object metaphorical meanings
within a context. In an unpublished text written in 1973 Urkom
recognized the importance of the dadaist approach to
ready-made objects. But unlike the dadaists, for whom the
essence of art was to be found in association, ambivalence and
humour, Urkom uses the object not to create something else or