THIS TEXT HAS NOT YET BEEN EDITED.

A brief narrative of art events in Serbia after 1948

By Branislav Dimitrijevi, Serbia

This text is constructed as an illustrated survey of some significant artistic events (some shaping
artistic ideologies in their times, some influencing subsequent processes) in Serbia since 1945,
and, as any other survey of the kind, it suffers from drastic exclusions. The criteria of selecting
artists and events are modified with the aim to capture Serbian art in moments that make it both
distinctive for local scene and relevant for wider international context. With only two exceptions, I
have narrowed down this text only to events in Serbia by sole reason that other authors of "Total
Recall" will deal with practices in other regions of the SFR Yugoslavia, that once used to form a
unison political and artistic space. Otherwise I would grossly disregard a sense of artistic
community that, especially between late 60s and mid-80s, accommodated a full interaction of
ideas.

1. Models of Socialist artistic mainstream: Boa Ili, Mia Popovi, Petar Lubarda.

One of the general conclusions about the Yugoslav art after the Second World War1, is that it was
not affected by the dogma of Socialist Realism as happened in other countries which became
single party states soon after 1945. Only the brief period marked by Titos break with Stalin in
1948 is considered the period where Socialist Realism was the official style that was dedicatedly
followed both by those artists who were involved with leftist social art of the 30s, and by those
who were considered bourgeois in their inclination towards Parisian modernism. After 1948, as
the argument goes, it took only a couple of years to completely break off with socialist realism,
and modernism was adopted as a lingua franca of visual arts. As a consequence, a work of art was
no longer obliged to represent the socialist reality, but to enhance artistic "freedom and self-
awareness" as a necessity to create a new Weltanschauung of the "post-revolutionary
generation".2 This trend of safe modernism (abstract painting and sculpture with reduced
representational references) was labelled by a literature critic Sveta Luki3 as Socialist
aestheticism, and later by some other critics with a more general term Socialist Modernism.

It is striking that Socialist Realism in Serbia did not engender artists that had not been known
previously, and that the only Homo novus was Boa Ili who was risen to a socialist stardom in
the course of months and then instantly forgotten when this style was no longer considered
orthodox for the cultural policy of the new state. As an international trend, ranging from state
controlled Zhdanovism in the Soviet Union to artistic currents related to political struggles in
capitalist countries (e.g. Popular Front in France), Socialist Realism was not cultivated in Serbia:
it was rather a local affair of political opportunism that did not produce any works that formally
met standards of the Soviet model. For instance, Boa Ili painted his most famous monumental
painting Sondiranje terena na Novom Beogradu (Driving a borehole in the terrain of New
Belgrade, 1948) by strictly following the pre-war academic standards of composing the painterly
space and arranging figures in the manner of intimist bourgeois paintings of artists like Milo

1
As in other texts discussing only partially the art-practice in the country that was called the Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, it is not easy to make a distinction between what was Serbian, Croatian or Slovene art. This
text is mostly taking into consideration art events located in Serbia, but given that the capital city was on that territory
as well, all of these and other events included artists that were not of Serbian nationality.
2
These are the words of the chief protagonist of Socialist aestheticism, Miodrag B. Proti, who initiated and
established the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. See M.B. Proti, "Jugoslovensko slikarstvo este decenije
nove pojave", in Jugoslovensko slikarstvo este decenije (exh. catalogue), Muzej savremene umetnosti, Beograd
1980.
3
Sveta Luki, "Socijalistiki estetizam", Politika, Belgrade, 28.04.1963.
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Milunovi. Certainly, the subject matter differed from still-lives or other politically withdrawn
genres of intimists: Boa Ili depicted the quintessential motif for the new state, the start of the
building of the city of New Belgrade, the biggest monument of the ideology of socialist
modernism. This ideology, in words of a leading theoretician of architecture, Ljiljana Blagojevi,
was based upon confusing "negative reference framework of rejecting both Functionalism and
Constructivism and the Soviet practice of 'formalist eclecticism'"4, that marked the Yugoslav
socialist project in architecture as an "under-developed and unfinished modernism". The case of
Boa Ili is a symptom of a theoretically conflicting future of Serbian art: the noted Soc-realist
leaning on pre-war bourgeois academism depicting the initiation of modernist utopia in situ of the
new Socialist state. Soc-realism cannot therefore be seen as a break, but a stage of continuity
between underdeveloped Modernism of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the programmatic
Modernism of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

When some writers later reviewed works by Ili, they tried not to consider him a Socialist-realist
but rather a Socialist-romanticist, having in mind a great deal of navet this artist had in relation
to political frameworks. Other artists were not that nave, they were really realists. Political
realists. The best-known Serbian dissident artist, Mia Popovi, who was the first to rehabilitate
Ili not so long ago5, has been held to personify the break from Soc-realism with his first one-man
show in 1950. This exhibition is one of the greatest myths in mainstream art historiography in
Serbia, but actually it was simply the way to establish the position of the dissident artist as
someone critically inclined towards the political structures but fully enjoying the institutional
benefits that were to be on disposal to many artists within the climate of "moderate
totalitarianism" of Tito's state. For example, it was Mia Popovi who received the first state grant
for a study trip abroad (three months in Paris) back in 1950.6 His show became more famous for
the catalogue text written by Popovi himself (a very unusual practice in that time) then for the
paintings that did not fulfil the modernist promises emitted in the text. The paintings,
reproductions of which cannot be found in the catalogue, fully maintained realist principles and
did not ensue from the demand to encourage a primacy of form over content that was stated in the
text.7 One of the paintings shown at this exhibition, Autoportet sa maskom (Self-portrait with the
mask, 1947), may be seen as emblematic for its "content": the face of the artists disguised by a
smiling mask symbolises the position of a dissident whose real political identity cannot be
discerned and who in public displays false optimism appropriate in the times when bourgeois
individualism was seen as counter-revolutionary. In his future career that created more dissident
myths, Mia Popovi paradoxically kept the spirit of realism alive and has not stimulated any
innovative artistic practice.

In order to proclaim the first modernist artistic event in socialist Serbia, the dispute was created
between those that saw Popovi's show as a breaking point and those who are inclined to locate
this break almost a year later, in 1951, when Montenegrin painter Petar Lubarda had his
Belgrade show. He exhibited monumental paintings relating to folk traditions and inspired by
peculiar visual impact of rough Montenegrin mountain landscape. These striking images show an
idiosyncratic and autonomous path leading towards abstract pictorial language with some remote
echoes of Parisian modernism. His painting Guslar (1951) takes the traditional motif of a folk
singer playing a one-string instrument called gusle, that is a particular atavism in remote mountain
areas. Singing and playing gusle signifies oral transmission of heroic tales from the past (and the
present) accompanied with conceited ascetic identity attributed to Montenegrins. In the time
Lubarda painted this and other more abstract paintings, the formalist discourse of art criticism
4
See Ljiljana Blagojevi, "Great hopes, false premises, and bleak future: The case of New Belgrade", in Modernity in
YU (Marko Luli, ed., exh. cat.), Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, 2001, p. 5.
5
ULUS Gallery, Belgrade, May 1990.
6
See Predrag J. Markovi, Beograd izmedju istoka i zapada, 1948-1965, Slubeni list, Beograd 1996, p. 245.
7
Pref. cat. in Izloba slika Mie Popovia, Umetniki paviljon, Beograd, 1950.

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fully took over, and until the late 60s the question how something was painted, rather than what
was painted, came to be exclusively discussed. The cultural implications of merging Modernist
visual vocabulary with the traditional motif was taken for granted as an ideal synthesis, so
paintings like Guslar were celebrated by emerging, internationally informed formalist criticism as
breaking with academic norms that had been strictly obeyed previously. The most influential art
writer and the future founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (est. 1965), painter
and lawyer Miodrag B. Proti, saw Lubarda's exhibition as the breaking point and had illustrated
this claim with formidable formalist remarks: for instance, Proti asserts that Lubarda was first to
break with rules of Belgrade Academia that did not allow one colour to appear in the same tone or
hue more then once on a canvas, and that taught that without a three-dimensional illusion every
painting is merely decorative. Lubarda's paintings from the early 50s reduced 'values' of coloured
surfaces, and presented these surfaces as flat. Lubarda was the first painter to become
internationally acclaimed, and one of the most influential art critics of the time, Herbert Read,
wrote about Lubarda as "a painter with great sense of rhythmical composition".8 Politically,
Lubarda occupied the position quite different then Popovi. He stated that he was not forced to
paint in Soc-realist manner in the 40s (as other modernist painters and future dissidents mostly
claimed), and was in the group of "Independent artists" who may be seen as first leftist dissidents
when they left the official Union of artists in the early 50s because it became the playground for
mediocre conservative tendencies.

2. Two unrelated fragments for parallel histories: Bogoljub Jovanovi's K55 and Zora
Petrovi's "Flying nudes".

There is one matchless painting kept in the Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art, that is still
owned by its author who never appeared to claim it. The title of the painting is K55 (1955), and its
author Bogoljub Jovanovi maintained full silence about it, that is of mythical proportions. The
leading art historian of Yugoslav Modernism, Jea Denegri, states that "there is nothing similar to
this painting in Serbian art of the 50s, and there are no direct parallels to this painting even in
Paris of the time, where it was presumably made."9 It is an abstract painting entirely consisted of
short and thick stripes of colour positioned vertically covering most of the canvas. This painting is
unique for this period of Serbian art for it shows the way to achieve abstraction without relying on
"natural" forms that may eventually be reduced to abstract forms, as was the road taken by other
Serbian artists in the 50s and by the Belgrade Arts Academy that cherished this model as the only
way to achieve and understand abstract forms. Jovanovi's painting is constructed as an abstract
image without appealing to nature, and in those terms for us it appears as an emancipatory and
radical gesture.

Other paintings by Jovanovi are more or less unknown. We can only guess that when he moved
to Paris in 1953 he got acquainted with works of noted artists who worked there, including the
Russian emigrant Nicolas de Stal who realised that paint alone could suggest physical density.
He may have explored paint textures, tensions of individual strokes, and started employing a
palette knife to drag and pull the paint into thick lines. However, the systematic way of
constructing the surface of the painting by covering it with repetitive units of strokes, is quite
particular for Jovanovi. Where this artistic discovery would have lead later remained a mystery.
Jovanovi's Parisian episode was very brief and in the mid 50s he left for New York, which means
how aware he was of new impulses coming across the Atlantic. However, what was his New York
story is unknown for us at the present. Jovanovi has returned to Belgrade at one point and refuses
any contact with the art scene. One of the duties for Serbian art history is to try to discover facts
behind this myth. The event of K55 did not influence the way of understanding Modernist art in

8
See M.B. Proti, "Jugoslovensko slikarstvo este decenije nove pojave", op.cit., p. 25.
9
Jea Denegri, Pedesete: Teme srpske umetnosti, Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1996, p

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Serbia, no one has taken the similar path, but it is an event that still captures our theoretical
inquiry.

If Jovanovi presents an artistic gesture that remained in obscurity for the dominating mainstream
of the 50s, one should also point out some examples of established artists that had in their career
created works not fully acknowledged or understood within the standards of the time, or that had
their personal life stories hidden behind moralist norms. A series of large paintings executed
mostly in 1959 by an artist that was well known even before the war, Zora Petrovi, show a
glorious end of one rather academic artistic career. Paintings including Njih dve u igri (The two of
them playing, 1959), Zrele ene (Mature women, 1959) and Dva lebdea akta (Two hovering
nudes, 1959), develop an expressionist artistic language, that have a significant tradition in
Serbian art, but achieve some kind of denial of any consideration for academic standards. Hectic
gestures, intensity of brushwork, occasional drippings, creates an amazing intensity of the surface,
and modelling of figures that disregards esthetical norms especially in painting the female body.
Zora Petrovi painted these when approaching the end of her life, the life that remains in reticence
primarily because of public refusal to deal with her sexual orientation. She did not act out as a
lesbian, and in art historiography no one has dealt with implications of this public secret. By
observing her own ageing body, and by spending time in solitude (in her biography there is no
mention of any public appearance by Petrovi in 1959), she has achieved a pandemonic way of
exploring her own sexuality towards the end of her life affected by illness.

Some attempts have been made to interpret this sexual exploration through appearance of
symbolic objects on her canvases: red flowers on white paper, red circles with white edges.10
However, an overall impression of existential dealing with the decay of the body in a playful yet
dramatic way, reveals Zora Petrovi as an artist who pre-figured crucial interests in
representations of gender and sexuality that will come to the forth in the 70s. On the other hand
these canvases have in Serbian art a similar role of "the return of figure against the ground of
abstraction" which was in Western European context played by Georg Baselitz. In my opinion it
is crucial to discover in one rather isolated art community similar impulses that will shape some
future occurrences in art practice internationally. An inability to understand the full significance
of these paintings by local art establishment enshrouded one mature artistic vision that came to
internationally relevant conclusions.

3. Prehistory of "new practice" in art: The private noartistic life of Dimitrije Baievi -
Mangelos

The concept of Socialist Modernism of the 1950s was not significantly challenged until the end of
the 60s. The strength of modernist mainstream was confirmed by the opening of the Museum of
Contemporary Art in 1965. Different voices were heard only in anti-modernist circles, sometimes
with open right-wing implications, that revered the return to pre-modernist perspectival models in
painting, and creating the trend of fantastic imagery that became the quintessential anti-socialist
myth in art (with the group Mediala as pivotal). There was no strong radical gesture in Serbian art
before 1970, but impulses that prepared this break came from other regions of Yugoslavia. The
most significant impulse came at the end of the 60s from the Slovenian collective OHO, and the
most 'invisible' one from the work of Zagreb-based art historian Dimitrije Baievi - Mangelos,
that had been literally invisible until 1968. Baievi's family story is quite symbolical: his father
Ilija Bosilj was one of the key figures of "nave painting" in Yugoslavia, and the object of one big
theoretical controversy. They lived in the small town of id, west from Belgrade, the town known
for the greatest Serbian pre-war painter Sava umanovi, who was killed there by Ustasha forces
during the WW2. Baievi studied in Zagreb, and it was the work on umanovi that became his

10
See Olivera Jankovi, Zora Petrovi. Art as life, SANU, Beograd, 1995.

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doctoral thesis. Later he pursued with theoretical writings of great significance and participated in
some crucial moments for contemporary art in Zagreb, that both in the 50s and the 60s gave rise
to a much more radical and innovative art scene then it was the case with Belgrade. During all
these years Baievi carried out one 'clandestine' artistic project. It started when he was in the
high school during the war and when, affected by tragedy all around him, he began to write short
poems in his notebooks, that subsequently took shape of art-books in which he inscribed lines and
words in white over pages saturated with black tint. He did similar works on blackboards and on
school-globes, that all formed an imaginary classroom as a site of trauma and edification, a site
where the notion of tabula rasa emerges as an artistic space that refers to the epitome of
Suprematism, combined with Magritteian "uses of words", and pre-figuring a pre-conceptualist
visual articulation of poetry of Marcel Broodthaers, with whose significance he could be
compared. These works (Les Paysages, Anti-phones, Nonstories, Les Exercises, etc,) lead him to
theoretically develop a principle on noart, a principle of radical negation: "to negate the picture
by writing it with words, to negate the word by painting it".11

Baievi took the pseudonym Mangelos in order to distinguish his private artistic project from
his public role of critic and curator. The first work of art that almost appeared in public, was his
"design" for one of the issues of the magazine Gorgona that was published in Zagreb between
1961 and 1966 and represented the most significant artistic project of the period in Yugoslavia.
Each issue of the magazine was a special project by one artist, and Mangelos proposed that his
contribution would be an issue of Gorgona that wouldn't be published. In a characteristically
ambiguous and ironical manner, he later "lamented" that this issue was never accomplished?!12
The first appearance of a work by Mangelos in a gallery space happened in Belgrade in 196813,
when the curator Biljana Tomi included his work in the exhibition Permanent Art, and later at
four exhibitions of visual poetry. He had his first solo-show in Novi Sad in 1972. His influence on
the generations of artists in the 70s and then also in the 80s, was never straightforward but his
unique spirit and intelligence provides Yugoslav conceptual art with a missing thread that may
help us in constructing an "alternative" history of art in Yugoslavia outside of the dominating
academic status quo.

4. Breaking point: Early years of Student's Cultural Centre in Belgrade and independent
artistic groups in Subotica and Novi Sad

The emergence of the Students' Cultural Centre (SKC) is a result of students' protests in 1968. As
one of the ways to pacify growing dissatisfaction of the young generation with any form of
authority within the Socialist system that had increasingly shown cracks in the economic system
as well as in the fragile harmony of national identities, students were given a cultural venue in
order to channel their political dissatisfaction through marginal cultural experimentation. SKC
opened in 1971 and that very same year a couple of exhibitions were organised that gathered
young emerging artists of which an informal group of six was created that included Marina
Abramovi, Nea Paripovi, Raa Todosijevi, Zoran Popovi, Gergely Urkom and Era
Milivojevi. Most of them had already been friends during their student years in the late 60s, and
had already developed a full confrontation with the academic system. Probably the most
outspoken and theoretically minded of them, Zoran Popovi, later summed up the artistic and
11
After Baievi died, his brother Vojin together with Jea Denegri edited and published three books on his work.
The two of them are collections of essays by Baievi, the art historian (Ogledi and Fotografija i umetnost, Novi
Sad, 1996), and the third consists of collected essays by different authors on Mangelos, the artist (Drugi o njemu,
Novi Sad, 1996). They also published a monograph Baievi wrote on his father, Ilija Bosilj.
12
In a conversation with the artist Mladen Stilinovi, "Mangelos - Umetnik u prvom licu", in Mangelos: Drugi o
njemu, pp. 49-56.
13
Before that he published a book of poetry and appeared in the publication "a" (Zagreb, 1964) by the artist Ivan
Picelj.

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political situation in which they found themselves in, and that was characterised by two
tendencies. On the one hand there was a demand that art in the revolutionary society should be
socially beneficial within a general obligation to build socialism, and on the other a demand that
art should have only one real obligation in researching exclusively formal issues of artistic
practice: "as a generation emerging on the art scene, we found ourselves between two ostensibly
opposed thoughts that were both socially established."14 In other words, this generation of artists
was first to recognise various dissident formations in the Serbian society as integral, almost
constitutive aspects of governing structures. This generation of artists was first to start thinking
relations between art and politics in the third way, and in a sense this whole artistic event signified
a first form of cultural critique coming from left wing positions (although many protagonists
would not declare themselves as "left-wing") advocating fundamental changes in social role of
artists, and inclusion of real life in artistic practice.

Whereas in Belgrade the main target of rebellion was the Academy of Fine Arts, which means
that it was impossible to disregard its symbolic weight, the "new art practice", or conceptual art,
appeared simultaneously in two cities in the northern region of Vojvodina, in Subotica and Novi
Sad, where it took shape that more closely related to new forms of social behaviour fully
independent from any official institution and inspired by hippie movement and its consequence
for an overall lifestyle and political orientation of that generation. Chronologically, the first
artistic movement of the kind appeared in Subotica when in 1969 the group Bosch+Bosch was
formed and then in Novi Sad with groups Kod and (. The practice of all these groups was mostly
unacknowledged at the time, but one should mention the crucial role some art critics and curators
had in initiating and promoting this radical break, primarily Biljana Tomi and Jea Denegri, as
well as Dunja Blaevi, Jasna Tijardovi and later Bojana Peji. For the first time art in Serbia got
out of self-imposed isolation and started communicating with the international art scene. SKC was
not only a laboratory for local artists, and those from other parts of SFRY, but also a relevant
meeting point for international art community. The Belgrade scene was characterised by
performance art of Abramovi, Todosijevi and Milivojevi, but also by analytical conceptualism
of Popovi and Urkom, as well as by the most sophisticated synthesis of these two orientations in
the work of Nea Paripovi. It is difficult to single out most significant events in this period that
can be roughly situated between 1971 and 1977. For the sake of this overview I will mention four
artistic events that had, or may have had, many consequences for understanding of art and
discourse of art that has emerged in this period.

Balinth Szombathy's Lenin in Budapest, 1972, employed the issue of ambivalence in artistic
and political gestures. Szombathy, the founding member of Bosch+Bosch, carried out many
projects (that may be classified both as land art and as analytical art) with an aim to erase the line
between art and life by fully understanding the concept of dematerialization and centrality of
artistic process as opposed to its final outcome. Lenin in Budapest is just one of these projects but
may be singled out for its unacknowledged consequence towards positioning political issues in
artistic behaviour at that time and especially later in the 1980s. The work is documented by the
series of photos of Szombathy carrying a placard with the image of Lenin on the streets of
Budapest in 1972. To expose this image within an environment saturated with representations of
this icon of communist revolution seems like a superfluous gesture. The very same image was
carried during organised rallies celebrating Socialist utopia in every corner of the Soviet bloc.
However, Szombathy's act is an individual and not a collective act which may in itself be regarded
as subversive. But straightforward subversion was not the aim of this event. It was rather the
ambivalent gesture that was difficult to decode in that political milieu: is Szombathy celebrating
Leninism or is he mocking it? As it now seems it was neither of the two, but it was a gesture of
individual identification with the ideology that was not controlled or organised within the system

14
Zoran Popovi, "Strogo kontrolisane predstave", an interview by Jea Denegri, Moment 14, Beograd, 1989.

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but outside of it. It appears as a 'legitimate' but surplus statement of enthusiastic identification
with ideology that cannot be dealt with by that ideology itself. It now seems that it was
Szombathy who pre-figured an artistic strategy that was developed through the activity of Neue
Slowenische Kunst in the 1980s: exaggerated identification with one ideological system suspends
its efficacy and this system does not know how to deal with this gesture. I think that in art and
films15 of the late 60s and early 70s in Eastern Europe, the way how to perplex ideological norms
was not in direct subversion (that usually provoked instant repression) but in finding fissures that
cannot be straightforwardly interpreted by an ideological apparatus.

Rhythm 5 (1974) by Marina Abramovi is one of the series of her performances in which she
stretches the limits of her own body, and presents herself as one of the most radical body artists.
As with other works entitled Rhythm, Abramovi gave a detailed description of the procedure,
stressing the relation between an artistic intention and the uncontrolled result. In Rhythm 5 she
sets fire on a wooden construction in the shape of a five-pointed star, then she cuts her hair and
nails and throws them into a burning star, and finally she enters the burning star herself.
Afterwards she described the consequence of this action: "I don't realise the fire has consumed all
of the oxygen as I lay down. I lose consciousness. Because I am lying the audience does not react.
When flame touches my leg and I still don't react, two persons from the audience enter the star
and carry me out. I am confronted with the limits of my body and the performance is interrupted."
This event happened as a part of "April Meetings " organised annually as a festival of expanded
media or "new art" in SKC (1973-1978) that gathered many internationally renowned artists:
witnesses of the event tell that one of the rescuers was Joseph Beuys, (or was it Radomir
Damnjanovic Damnjan, as more reliable witnesses say) which certainly added to the drama. As
the only artist in the group of six that fully "specialised" in body art, Abramovi did not focus
upon ideology of dematerialization but upon identifying her own body as a material in which
certain spiritual or archetypal energy is evoked in the traditional form of the ritual. As Bojana
Peji rightly observes, "in her art she opposes the separation of the body and the mind which
marked the Western/European tradition which has always privileged the ratio she tries to empty
the mind, either by positioning the body in a state of total quiescence or by repetition of a violent
gesture or action, in order that the body and mind can become one."16 In her desire to take the
ethical and mythical principles of her practice to final consequences, in her most risky
performance, Rhythm 0 performed in Naples the following year, she combined the quiescence of
her body with public potential for violent gestures that cannot be controlled by the artists so she
reached the zero degree of artistic intention and directly confronted her body with the decision to
be made by collective drives of 'others'.17

Was ist Kunst, Marinela Koelj? (1976) by Raa Todosijevi is one in a series of his Was ist
Kunst? performances, and a key work that marks the conclusion of an artistic course. Todosijevi
was the first artists to make a break with a certain sense of pathos encapsulating the "new art
practice" when its initial radical impulse reached the point of no return: the group of six artists
was never an organic whole, but by 1976/7 they reached an ideological disillusionment, some of
15
The film by Duan Makavejev, W.R.: Mysteries of Organism (1971) is a prime example of this method.
16
Bojana Peji, "Body-based art: Serbia and Montenegro", in Body and the East, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, 1998,
p. 78.
17
For a detailed description of this unprecedented event by a direct witness see Thomas Mc Evilley, "Marina
Abramovi / Ulay - Ulay / Marina Abramovi", Artforum, 1, vol. XII, 1983, pp. 52-55.
It is important not to forget that this whole practice faced angry or sarcastic comments in wider public and media in
Serbia. But it was especially Marina Abramovi who was, by being a woman, especially targeted by most vulgar
remarks. To illustrate this we can take a text published in a comical magazine Je that literally says the following
about Rhythm 0: "What if, instead in Naples, M.A. organized her performance here in the Balkans. We could have
understood "body art" as "nabodi art" (= implying penetration). Maybe some philistine would make use of M.A. since
she does not look bad. That would be a happening! Similar to those in Danish night clubs." (Radivoje Bojii,
"(Na)bodi art Marine Abramovi i triptih Damnjanovi, Todosijevi, Urkom", Je, Belgrade, 23.5.1975)

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them had even a firm idea to terminate any activities in SKC and continued in different directions.
Marina Abramovi met Ulay and was soon to enter a very successful international career, Urkom
left for England where he stayed, Popovi got more involved in theorising political implications
of this practice and a sense of failure of some left-wing myths that surpassed it18, Milivojevi,
who always kept a singular position within the group, continued his explorations of mathematical
structures of archetypes, and Paripovi was yet to make his finest works in which he investigated
lateral artistic strategies by very discrete means of his own face and body. Raa Todosijevi had a
different, more cynical nerve, and the mentioned sense of disillusionment was for him a fuel for
future edgy and challenging works that brought him into the 80s, and that reached the peek in the
early 90s with Gott liebt die Serben installation-series. Was ist Kunst may be understood as an
ideological pre-figuration of this series, but had more influence on the art project of NSK in
Slovenia then it had on the Belgrade art scene in the 80s.

We know of these series of performances because the tape of one with Marinela Koelj is luckily
available. One of the misfortunes of the 70s in Serbia is that many works remained undocumented
and can be now reconstructed only with the help of memory of their participants and viewers.
This performance consists of a frontally seated motionless woman who becomes an object of
"investigation" and abuse by the artist who repeatedly, in 'off-voice', shouts: "Was ist Kunst?"
Close up of Koelj's face in the video document enhances the effect of intimidation and arrogance,
and the very duration of this video makes the performance arduous also for the viewer due to the
traumatic "real-time" transmission of the event. This work uses some traditional artistic matrices,
such are dialectics between the artist and his model (who is "naturally" female) and between
intention and interpretation of artistic achievements; its crucial accomplishment lays in
investigating politics of art (not political art) by focusing upon a weakness to interpret art that
breeds agitated behaviour. If conceptual art began with heroic definitions such is Kosuth's "Art as
an Idea as an Idea" it ended with one tormenting question: "Was ist Kunst?". Pronounced in
German, of course, because which other language evokes totalitarian legacy in an unmistaken
way?

N.P. 1977 (1977) by Nea Paripovi is a 8mm film showing the artist walking/running through
Belgrade. His route is not structured by the urban grid of streets and paths, but follows an
imagined trajectory: Paripovi takes an idiosyncratic walk that knows of no barriers, he crosses
fences, climbs roofs of houses, jumps over balconies. The urban topography is a mise-en-scene for
self-representation of ephemeral and 'non-functional' behaviour. As in other works by Paripovi -
that always deal with the issue of self-representation of an artist achieved by discrete and "shy"
means and not by an appeal to romantic myths of self-imaging that were still revered in the
mainstream system of art - internal rhythmic of the body is confronted with social and
environmental structures. The film camera records the moving body, and this camera both
documents one event but also structures it in achieving to master the movement in its long-lasting
linear route. Paripovi deconstructs the linear narrative of a film by reducing it to a linear action
of moving a film protagonist forward through the setting. With this film Paripovi has
accomplished a most significant return to the very origins of locating conceptualist artistic act
within everyday behaviour, a return to Situationist models of drive, a technique of hastily passing
through varied environments as a condition of constructing relations of an individual towards
structures of urbanity (through the notion of psychogeography). Every Paripovi's work is, in

18
Popovi, together with his wife, the critic Jasna Tijardovi, spent some time in New York where they contributed to
the influential Fox magazine. His text "For Self-management Art" - published for the occasion of October 75 meeting
in Belgrade when relation of their practice to mostly benevolent political structures was firmly challenged - was
acknowledged in some leading source books of artists' writings in the West. See: Theories and documents of
contemporary art. A source book of artists' writings, Christine Stilles and Peter Selz (eds.), University of California
Press, Berkley, 1996, pp. 847-849.

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words of Miko uvakovi, "an image of an overall conceptual and media matrix of one period
a tendency of exploring and finding the mature language of Belgrade conceptualism."19

5. Two ways to understand what happened in the 80s: Mileta Andrejevi in New York and
Armory Show in Belgrade.

It will be misleading to make a straight parallel between the destiny of conceptual art in the West
and in Yugoslavia. It is difficult to speak of a developed art market and gallery/museum system
that conditioned the return to painting as happened in the West. However, this is exactly what
happened, along with adopting of "postmodernist" theories of Eco, Baudrillard and others. Also,
Bojana Peji is quite right to stress that the socialist gallery and museum system also
enthusiastically embraced postmodernist, mostly neo-expressionist painting, and immediately
started with acquisitions and historisations.20 However, what made the art scene in Belgrade
dynamic, and not just a la mode, is most definitely the break of boundaries between the myths of
high art and emerging popular culture represented by new wave rock music and underground
clubs (namely "Akademija" situated in the very basement of the Belgrade Art Academy). Events
in underground music culture were fuelled with artistic potentials, and it now seems that the most
emblematic artist for the beginning of the 80s remains one photographer that managed to capture
the spirit and the "look" of the times, Dragan Papi. Papi was behind a project with young
musicians that he gathered in the group Deaci (The Boys), that was later to become the most
successful new wave band Idoli. It was early songs and TV clips of this band that introduced retro
principles in art practice by ambiguous evocations and celebrations of formalist and ideological
manifestations of the Russian avant-garde and Socialist utopia.

But, if we want to trace a typical market orientated Serbian artist of the 80s, one cannot find him
in Serbia (in spite of some success of certain Belgrade artists at that period) but at the right spot,
in New York. Apart from Marina Abramovi there is only one artist born and educated in Serbia
whose name regularly appear in different institutional international artists' directories. The name
is Mileta Andrejevi. "Who!?", the question would be posed by many in Serbia. Mileta
Andrejevi belonged in the late 40s and early 50s to the same circle of artists as the above-
discussed Mia Popovi. As the others he spent some time in Paris, but neither remained there nor
returned back to Belgrade. Instead, he moved in the mid 50s to New York where he became the
protg of Richard Bellamy whose "Green gallery" at that time featured Oldenburg, Rosenquist,
Seagal, and others that were later taken by Leo Castelli. Andrejevi's pop-art works got mentioned
in Lucy Lippard's classic survey of the subject.21 In the 60s Andrejevi moved out of these circles
and started studying old masters like Poussin and Vermeer and teaching painting techniques that
helped him to elaborate a very slow process of painting with egg, oil and tempera, as well as to
elaborate his own classicist style. During the 70s his canvases attracted private collectors, but it
was the early 80s that made prices of his paintings rocket-high. "Romantic realism", as this style
was labelled, was a mixture of poussinesque style and contemporary setting: all his scenes are
located in Central park where New Yorkers engage in athletic and cultural activities. They assume
classical posturing and are associated with characters from Greek myths, with Acteon, Icarus,
Daphne and others. These paintings fitted immensely well the most conservative trend in art
criticism supported by big institutions such as Metropolitan Museum that wanted the art of
painting back on the market. It was Hilton Cramer, notorious especially for his New Criterion
journal, who gave him a major boost by writing a long review in the New York Times. Theorists
of postmodernism embraced his "classical sensibility", and Charles Jencks wrote that he evoked a

19
For a comprehensive analysis see Miko uvakovi, Nea Paripovi. Autoportreti, Prometej, Novi Sad, 1996.
20
See Bojana Peji, "Serbia: Socialist Modernism and the Aftermath", Aspects/Positions. 50 years of Art in Central
Europe 1949-1999, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, 2000, pp. 115-123.
21
Lucy R. Lippard, Pop Art, (Serbian translation: Milica Drakovi), Jugoslavija Press, Beograd, 1977, p. 131.

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"timeless vision of contemporary life" and reminded us that along with modern life and
technology "Americans still pursue the Arcadian dream".22 This Serbian emigrant sincerely
believed in that, and his own life, that consisted solely of everyday walks from his apartment that
was on one side of Central Park to his studio that was on the other, shaped his retro vision. It
would be easy to dismiss this artist as mere "tool" of right-wing criticism. But if we discuss
connections "with the Western art process"23, Andrejevi found himself in the midst of an artistic
trend. His studious technical excellence, but also the fact that he produced paintings (it took him
around six months for each of them) that went straight to the market when finished (when he died
only the canvas he was working on at that moment was found in his studio), gives him a
significant role in serious attempts by conservatives in demanding revisions in purely modernist
art histories of 20th century art.

Whilst New York art market blossomed, Belgrade witnessed an unprecedented event, The
International exhibition of Modern Art (Armory Show) that was in some distant past held in
New York. The works by Duchamp, Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky but also by Lichtenstein, Johns,
Kosuth and others were exhibited in 1986 in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in
Belgrade. The project did not played with mystification, it is clear that works were neither
"originals" nor "forgeries", but "genuine copies" of which some were not even made since they
were dated in the year 2013 or later. In a lecture Walter Benjamin gave that same year in Belgrade
on a series of Mondrian's paintings of which the last was to be made in 1996, the status of the
copy was rehabilitated: an original has only a feature of an original whereas a copy has features
both of an original and of a copy. This key series of art projects that happened in Serbia during the
80s have not been associated with any author, but have been associated with other similar projects
such was the Last Futurist Show 0.10 in one Belgrade apartment in 1985 and Gertrude Stein's
Salon de Fleurus that can still be visited in 41, Spring Street in New York.24 These projects again
are linked with the work of one conventionally untrained artist, Goran Djordjevi, who in the
late 70s started copying famous works of art including Djordjevi's own, hilariously bad, high-
school painting Glasnici Apokalipse (copy from the 1980). All of these projects raised many
discussions about originality (and "other modernist myths") in the most radical manner, especially
given that they appeared in circumstances far remote from artistic and ideological schemes that
shaped Western art history, art market and modes of institutionalisation. All of these projects
reveal possibilities of radical artistic gestures in the time when radicalism of the 70s reached an
impasse through aesthetisation and institutionalisation. By observing the trend of the return to
traditional painting, and by working on an "un-artistic use of a traditional artistic medium", as
Slobodan Mijukovi put it, Goran Djordjevi creates a vacillating cultural subversion: "If my
attitudes may seem radical to some, I must say that they are first of all an expression of sympathy
toward intellectual anarchism that is unfortunately not far away from utopistic by having in mind
that the true power of Tradition and Institution is incongruously and discouragingly big".25 The
awareness of this power of the Big Other use to be the steadiest stumbling block both for
institutionalisation and for radicalisation of artistic space in Serbia, with Goran Djordjevi it
became one of the central points of departure for one rigorous art project of international
significance.

6. Out of collapse: Some events in the 1990s

22
Charles Jencks, "The Classical Sensibility", The Post-Avantgarde Painting in the Eighties, Art&Design, vol.3, No.
7/8, 1987, pp. 48-65.
23
As requested by initiators of the "Total recall" project in their invitation letter.
24
For an extensive analysis of these projects see Marina Grini's text in Fiction Reconstructed, (exh. catalogue),
Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, 2001
25
Slobodan Mijukovi, "Goran Djordjevi. Original i kopija" (an interview), Moment, no.2, Belgrade, 1985, pp. 9-
11.

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Political situation in Serbia in the 90s is a widely discussed topic. Art of that period has been
unavoidably seen through the prism of war, ethnic cleansing and political ploys. Instead of
structuring any narrative of this period, I will mention four works of many that I have written on
those days. These works were also related to some significant art events. The first one was
originally shown at Vrac Biennial of Young Artists in 1996, and the next year at Manifesta2 in
Luxembourg. The following two were produced for the Second Annual Exhibition (a.k.a. Murder)
of the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art in 1997. The fourth was firstly shown at the exhibition
Konverzacija, Belgrade, 2001.

Tanja Ostoji, Personal Space, 1996 (Performance in which the artist stands still, naked and
covered with white marble powder.) " A very rare example in contemporary Serbian art of a
work, which has avoided cynicism of artists of her generation, caught between their inability to
alter the political events and their disavowal of any kind of torment inflicted upon them by these
circumstances. In this performance Tanja Ostoji has critically evoked spiritual visions of the
body from the medieval spiritual tradition and combined two aspects: nuditas naturalis and
nuditas virtualis. This performance exposes body simultaneously as a human condition of
nakedness, either being a sign of vice or a sign of humility, and as symbolising innocence and the
raiment of the soul. In a position where the beholder fixes his/her gaze on a body vulnerably
exposed, s/he witnesses not only a mute statement of the indisposition of an artist to act within a
hostile environment but also discloses the wider image of womans body in art history as a sad
affair of symbolisation and manipulation. Reduction to a virtual body of a woman/child/alien is
a disturbing and poignant sign of a desire to be born again, as pure, empty of thoughts, free to
depart from material conditions."26

Zoran Naskovski, Voice of the hand, 1997 (Video-installation, sound and image of a hand
rubbing the top of a wet glass.) "The much used concept of abjection in recent art depends on a
specific stage of Western societies: an ultra-conformist milieu inhabited by the "hyper-
bourgeoisie" in an illusion of total aseptic purity. At the same time, this milieu is also absorbed by
media imagery of disease, war, famine, violent threats of "the others". Representing 'impurity'
becomes a means of endangering the symbolical structure, and, by these representations, art
reminds us of fragility and limits of the body, the body that becomes the only connection between
"viewers" and the image, the only identification between "us" and "them". Although he is very
aware of these currents in contemporary art, Zoran Naskovski is an artist working in the different
social and cultural climate: a society quite literally far from "aseptic image", but a society in
which purification rituals are more perverse, and manifested through rituals of erasure up to a
point of disappearance. These rituals erase traces, all the information disappear. And what is most
important, the "justifications" for this erasure techniques are never in a particular hygienic
eagerness of the performers of these rituals, but in frivolousness and carelessness that make
everything disappear, including the ritual itself"27

Milica Tomi, XY Ungelst, 1997 (Video installation with two projections, the date, 28.03.1989,
that appears at the beginning of the tape refers to a crime committed by Serbian police in
Kosovo.) " In order to re-create the very incident that has not happened in front of any watchful
eye, apart from two intersected gazes of victims and their executioners, Milica Tomi invited
people around her, mostly members of the Belgrade art community to pose in shabby dated
clothing from the mid-eighties, in order to attribute individual symbols to each and every ethnic
Albanian murdered at that particular incident. These garments were an actual reconstruction of
original clothing worn by murdered citizens, i.e. Milica re-created these garments according to

26
From "Pain on both sides", in Manifesta 2, Luxembourg, 1997, pp. 116-117.
27
From Trans-/ Trance, or, Journeys by Intensity, in Zoran Naskovski: Last Exit, Publikum, Belgrade, 1997.

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family photos of the victims she managed to obtain. When inviting her "actors" she involuntarily
adopted a restricted method of disclosing the content of their act. The method was based upon her
insight into particular political orientation of her actors, i.e. upon the recognition of their political
identities. Those for whom she knew that have taken a clearly anti-nationalistic standpoint she had
explained in details her request for that person to identify with a murdered Albanian; those who
wouldnt mind (the majority of her actors) she informed on their roles but claimed inexplicit
political orientation of the work; finally, those who would have objected to this idea, following
their nationalistic attitude, were in effect manipulated by the artist, and were trapped by a magic
invitation to appear in an art work - and who can decline that? Apart from making this an
unintentional 'revenge' on those who effectually supported the state of affairs in Serbia, and more
or less silently authorised crimes committed in the name of the protection of Serbian national
interest, Milica Tomi exposed a dominating belief in art as an autonomous sphere unaffected by
social and political contexts. According to this belief, it was art that was supposed to provide
consolation in social and political crisis, to be a mask of traumatic political identifications and
relations. With xy ungelst, Milica Tomi pursued an opposite direction: this video installation
operates precisely with the very content of a political trauma."28

Vladimir Nikoli, Rhythm, 2001 " Five persons are filmed standing on a stage whilst they
make the Christian-Orthodox sign of cross, repetitively, following the four-tact techno-music beat.
Whether religious rituals will fully replace Communist rituals, and whether the only thing worse
than Communism is Anti-Communism (to quote one waken-up Polish intellectual), is a matter of
political attitude. But, what is in fact striking in this powerful video work is that it brings us back
to one of the first formulas of ideology written in the 18th Century by Blaise Pascal: kneel down,
move your lips in prayer, and you will start to believe. Ideology is in material practices, it resides
in bodies and their rituals, and Vladimir Nikoli makes these rituals redundantly overachieving.

28
From "Traps Of Identification: Three Videos By Milica Tomi" (written with Branka Andjelkovi), in Milica
Tomi (Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck + Kunsthalle, Wien, 1999)

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