Chronologies
Jelena Vesić

Objects and Projects – Exhibition of the ‘Belgrade Six’ (Collective Practice and Individual Authorships)

Keywords: collaboration conceptual art cultural politics exhibition practice and art history

The exhibition Objects and Projects by its very title demonstrates the shift from object-based art to project-based art, characteristic of the new paradigm of contemporary art. Together with Drangularijum and At Another Moment, it represents one of the first exhibitions of New Art realized within the SKC gallery space. Held in 1971, it was also the first exhibition to present the work of the so-called Belgrade Six artists[1]—Marina Abramović, Slobodan Milivojević-Era, Neša Paripović, Zoran Popović, Raša Todosijević, and Gergelj Urkom. They participated in the SKC collective and communitarian life embodied in the work of the gallery’s editorial board (Redakcija, or redaction), but they also pursued individual artistic carriers. This tendency was supported by the same generation of critics and art historians who profiled the work of Belgrade Six artists within the classical discourse on “grand authors,” this time the representatives of New Art Practices.[2]

Programmatically and ideologically, the Objects and Projects differs from the rather horizontal and participatory form of “playful collective practice” manifested by the exhibition Drangularijum, presented just a few months before. It makes the shift from an inclusive model of experimental exhibitions by young artists gathered around SKC gallery toward a more professional, individualistic, and conceptually articulated form of New Art. This shift mirrored the attitudes and ambivalences inscribed into the “experimental institutionalism” of SKC since the very beginning. In my introductory text to this exhibition chronology I examine this specific modus operandi where simultaneity of horizontal and vertical forms of organization blur the possibility for more experimental exhibitions to be clearly situated on either side of the binary opposition between institutional versus self-organized. This ambivalent situation is also captured in the documentary photographic material of the SKC artistic community (analyzed in the introductory text), which is simbolically, in terms of cultural representation, connected to two different modes of presentation of art and institutional practice exemplified by Drangularijum and Objects and Projects. The collectivity of te SKC artistic community is represented in Milan Jožić’s famous photo of people “who used to be there” (in SKC), “who used to be that institution” (the photo is reproduced in the introduction text). The second photo by Jožić, made during the same session, represented the six most distinguished artists in the eye of art critics and curators of the time—the photo of the Belgrade Six (the photo can be found among the images accompanying this article).

A larger selection of photographs from the opening and closing of the exhibition Objects and Projects can be found in the archive of SKC here.

[1]

The name “Belgrade Six” is the mirror-term of the name of the group of Six Artists – Zagreb, which is established little before and named as the group of Six Artists by artists themselves. The term “Belgrade Six” is coined by the critics who probably aimed at connecting alternative art scene of Belgrade and Zagreb and establishing visible parallels in contemporary art developments in the two biggest centers of culture in Yugoslavia of the time. The term “Belgrade Six” operated among the local critics and art historians both colloquially and formally. As difference from Zagreb’s group of Six Artists the term Belgrade Six is used without the prerogative of the “group,” rather, it signified “the generation of individual artists.”

[2]

Starting the first historicization of the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, the Belgrade Six Artists appear as the main protagonists of the SKC art scene in both critical writing and historical exhibition records. We can trace this history from the Documents on Post-Object Phenomena in Yugoslav Art 1968–1973, curated by Ješa Denegri in the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1973 (its summary can be read here), to more elaborate exhibitions such as: New Art Practice in Yugoslavia 1966-1878, curated by Marijan Susovski in the Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 1978 (the introduction can be read here), or New Art in Serbia 1970–1980, curated by Ješa Denegri and presented in 1983 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, and Art Gallery, Prishtina.

Date: October 9, 1971 (exhibition opening)

Participants: Marina Abramović, Slobodan Milivojević – Era, Neša Paripović, Zoran Popović, Raša Todosijević, Gergelj Urkom and Evgenija Demnijevska

Location: Student Cultural Center (SKC) gallery, Belgrade