The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 1966-1978

Jea Denegri
Goran Dordevi
Belgrade
Fig. 270
Typical of a large number of Yugoslav artists, who in the last
few years have been dealing with new artistic procedures, is
that they did not acquire their initial experience by studying at
an Art School, and symptomatic fact points to the following
situation: it has been found, on the one hand, that a traditional
art education not only does very little to help, but it often acts
as an obstacle in penetrating those areas of artistic speech
in which mental and conceptual approaches predominate, while,
on the other hand, a training in the humanities or in exact
sciences helps bring the artists closer to such views. Such is
the case of Goran Dordevi (1950), a student at the Electrical
Engineering Faculty in Belgrade, whose first appearance on
the art scene was at the 2nd April Meeting in the Art Gallery
of the Students' Cultural Centre in 1973. Before this,
Dordevi went through an autodidactic period in which he
practised a certain type of abstract painting, and though
this practice did not have a strictly defined linguistic form, it
created in the artist a predisposition towards a rigorous way
of thinking, as shown in fragments of a text from an interview
published in 1972. In this text the artist quotes as his model
Malevitch to whom several years later, together with Jovan
Ceki. he was to dedicate a comprehensive analytic study
(On the appearance of some worlcs by Kazimir Malevitch,
publication "Umetnost", Belgrade, No. 55, 1977). His affinities
towards suprematism and the rigorous methods applied in
science, which were the subject of his studies, led Dordevi in
1974 to formulate a cycle entitled Examples of process in
square system (first realized in collaboration with Vojislav
Radulovi), and the following year, with the completed work,
he took part in the Ninth Biennial Exhibition of Young Artists
in Paris.
The basic assumptions in the elaboration of questions
contained in the cycle Examples of process in square
system (Fig. 270) are presented by Dordevi in the following
statement: «This work of mine tends to investigate and set
up a visual method which would serve to present and carry out
thought processes. Since thought is a function of time
(process), the problem of the inclusion of this dimension is
resolved through a series of successive visual states of the
system under analysis.. Further pursuing this line of thought,
Dordevi concluded that a fundamental means for conveying
thought is language and, in addition to language, there is also
mathematics which, owing to a high degree of internal
organization, may become a very suitable instrument for
explicating visual presentations of the flow of thought processes.
Dordevi started to work on the realization of his idea by
setting up a series of successive units within whose square
fields he fixed numerous temporary states, and a series of
such individual elements, which otherwise do not have any
final and independent aesthetic quality, make up the unified
structure of a given theme.
A similar principle, this time presented in a different visual form,
was demonstrated by Dordevi in his work entitled Some
elements in the analysis of spacial-quantitative structures and
processes. The work was presented in December 1976 at the
exhibition in the Gallery of the Students' Cultural Centre in
Belgrade. On that occasion, Dordevi made the following
statement: My research aims at setting up a formal-logical
system of a visual character, which by its very nature could be
classified as a set of fundamental principles of the organization
of thought processes. The nature of this system is determined
by the possibility of its graphic representation.. And finally,
at the exhibition Trigon 77, held in OctoberNovember 1977 in
Graz, Dordevi presented a work entitled Discrete special
structures and their connection with the theory of graphs, in
which he developed his earlier thoughts on the exact structure
of an operation which, presented within the framework of given
cultural conventions, may assume the nature of a work of art.
There is no doubt that Dordevi's tendency to explicate such
themes is founded on the specific field of his studies, however,
in the case of this artist it is not only a question of
searching for possibilities of synthesis of art and science, but
rather an operation with sociological implication, which tends
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to draw on relations and criteria within an existing artistic
system (system of art). Dordevi, as a matter of fact, believes
(and he has stated this view on several occasions in texts:
«On the Class Character of Art., The Fox No. 2, New York
1976, in «Subject and Pseudo Subject of Artistic Practice.,
Vidici No 3, Belgrade 1977, as well as in the text of the
catalogue for the exhibition «Radical Attitudes to the Gallery.,
London, 1977) that the present-day artistic production is subject
to economic and ideological exploitation by those forces of
society which exercise control over the functioning of the
artistic system (system of galleries, system of the education of
artists and the system of the the evaluation of their works). He
sees a possibility of opposing such a state of affairs in the
strategy of «constructive diversion., which would consist in
setting up an extremely rigorous, exact and basically unique
(monosemic, according to B. Venet) artistic language which, as
such, would not be subjected to distorted and arbitrary
interpretation and to all the harmful consequences arising for
the artist from this kind of interpretation. Dordevi himself
clearly formulated this view in the following statement: «The
application of formal linguistic instruments taken over from
science is the expression of the desire of some artists to
achieve and maintain in this way through formal, rigorous
methods the integrity of their work».