At Another Moment – The First International exhibition of Conceptual Art in SKC – Belgrade

Author: Jelena Vesić
Keywords: collaboration, conceptual art, international network, thematized role of the audience

Dates: September 15–20; September 22–27; September 29–October 3, 1971

Participants: Giovanni Anselmo, Robert Barry, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Jan Dibbets, Braco Dimitrijević, ER Group, Barry Flanagan, Douglas Huebler, Alain Kirili, Jannis Kounellis, John Latham, KOD Group, Sol LeWitt, OHO Group, Goran Trbuljak, Lawrence Weiner, Ian Wilson.

Curators: Nena Dimitrijević and Braco Dimitrijević

Location: Student Cultural Center (SKC) gallery, Belgrade

The exhibition At Another Moment was conceptualized as curatorial translation of the temporary exhibition At the Moment, organized in the entrance of an apartment house in Frankopanska 2A, Zagreb, into a more “permanent” exhibition, taking place within the (alternative) institutional space of the Student Cultural Center (SKC) in Belgrade. Ivana Bago describes the background of original exhibition in Zagreb as “the result of Braco and Nena’s travels across Europe where they became acquainted with the burgeoning new art scene. The process of organization involved sending letters of invitation to the participants. Whatever was mailed back to the organizers by those who had responded to the invitation was then exhibited. […] The exhibition included the participation of some of the best known figures of Conceptual art.”¹

Nena Dimitrijević also reflects on the process of production of the original exhibition in her introductory text for the catalogue, published by the SKC gallery in conjunction with At Another Moment. She emphasizes the process of communication and the exchange of ideas as the main substance of the exhibition project that results in “public moment”—three hours of presentation/display in the contingently selected entrance hall of a residential house. Dimitrijević comments on the exhibition context and choice of space where the artworks were shown: “To exhibit in a noninstitutional space, almost in the street, fundamentally follows the idea of this avant-garde creation and results from the consequently conveyed thesis of the democratization of art, since, apart from the permanent gallery public, it gives the opportunity to a casual passer-by and man for whom exhibition visiting isn’t programmed in his free time, to see the show. The hall-gate of Frankopanska 2a was chosen at random and it can just as well be suddenly abandoned and the whole happening can be transferred to another place. If one insists on a location, then it becomes an institution like any other gallery with a fixed programme, (catering for) its reputation and permanent public. It wasn’t our intention. The point is that out of an almost street space, we wanted to make a center of interest and information—but not to establish it.”²

In Dimitrijević’s statement there is an attempt to avoid the classical functionalist position of the curator whose performance exhausts itself in the well-ordered and polite display of artworks in a “neutral” exhibition space. She abandons the “firm exhibition structure” to underline the temporality and “ephemerality” of ideas, friendship, and information circulating within the art world. Dimitrijević’s curatorial performance translates the new paradigm of Conceptual art into “conceptual exhibition practice.” In this process of translation, the curators change the name of the exhibition from At the Moment to At Another Moment—both titles can be understood as manifestations of the curatorial desire to create an exhibition structure that “captures the contemporary moment.” Dimitrijević comments on the new contextual conditions in the exhibition catalogue: “If the show At the moment by its organizational conception was the negation of the gallery […] at first glance it could seem that At Another Moment held under traditional gallery patronage means the denial of all previous theses. […] However, in this order of strictly determined organizational procedures there is an aberration which, by its apparent groundlessness and absurdity, provokes restlessness and uncertainty that normally follows every disturbance of a previously set order. This illogicality appears within the structure called the holding of an exhibition, a structure of which one of the main dispositions is either a longer or a shorter lasting period but always complete and continuous.”³

The curator introduces an absurd conceptual proposition in the exhibition process that plays the role of a “noise” as that which distorts the normality of the curatorial and exhibition functionalism, and is characteristic of museum and gallery spaces. Nena Dimitrijević reflects on this in her curatorial statement for the exhibition in SKC: “The show At Another Moment will last 3 times 5 whole days with intervals of one day in between. During these intervals the exhibition will be rearranged; this inapprehensible and apparently absurd proceeding, without justification within the organizational difficulties, but too regularly repeated to be accidental, is not motivated by efforts of more effective setting up and neither has its origin in the altered aesthetical motives of the ‘arranger’; each arrangement is given to another member of the technical staff of the gallery […] so that the categories of ‘taste,’ ‘professionalism,’ ‘knowledge of the works and their authors’ which are of main importance in the arrangements of most exhibitions lose all its priority in this particular case. […] A visitor is induced to find his own explanation of this organizational aberrance [sic]. In terms of art which moves creative action from the personality of artist to a receiver is adequate to transfer of the role of an arranger of the exhibition from the theoretician of art to any other person whose active participation is not limited to accomplishment of the exhibited works, but in creation of the show as a whole.”⁴

At Another Moment was important for (self-)educational processes within SKC that was based on the international exchange of experimental ideas and practices. It also had a certain formative value for the process of instituting New Art in the local context because it gathered some of the most important artists from the West, guaranteeing the relevance of that practice within the local institutional and professional environment. The exhibition is documented by representative catalogue designed by Nenad Čonkić and Braco Dimitrijević.

The three exhibitions – Simultaneity of promotion and historization of New Art Practices (From Alternative Spaces to the Museum and Back)

Author: Jelena Vesić
Keywords: conceptual art, historization

The Examples of Conceptual art in Yugoslavia

Dates: March 3–22, 1971

Curated by: Biljana Tomić and Ješa Denegri

Participants: OHO Group (Marko Pogačnik, David Nez, Milenko Matanović, Andraž Šalamun), Ljubljana; KOD Group (Mirko Radojčić, Slobodan Tišma, Miroslav Mandić, Slavko Bogdanović, Peđa Vranešević), Novi Sad; E Group (Ana Raković, Čedomir Drča, Vladimir Kopicl, Miša Živanović), Novi Sad; Dragan Srečo, Ljubljana; Braco Dimitrijević, Zagreb; Goran Trbuljak, Zagreb.

Location: Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade

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Young Artists and Young Critics 71

Date: 1972

Curated by: Jadranka Vinterhalter, Nikola Vizner, Slavko Timotijević, and Jasna Tijardović

Participants: Slobodan Milivojević-Era, Zoran Popović, Raša Todosijević, Gergelj Urkom, Miroslav Antić, Radovan Hiršl, Vladimir Jovanović, Boško Milenković, Branimir Mijušković, Marina Abramović, Neša Paripović, and Group E from Novi Sad, Group Bosh+Bosh from Subotica, and group A3 from Belgrade

Films by: Zoran Popović, Slobodan Milivojević, and Slavko Matković

Location: Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade

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Documents on Post-Object Phenomena in Yugoslav Art 1968–1973

Dates: June–July 1973

Curated by: Ješa Denegri and Biljana Tomić

Participants: OHO Group (Marko Pogačnik, David Nez, Milenko Matanović, Andraž Šalamun, Tomaž Šalamun, Nuša and Srečo Dragan), KOD Group (Mirko Radojčić, Slobodan Tišma, Miroslav Mandić, Slavko Bogdanović, Peđa Vranešević), Novi Sad; E Group (Peđa Vranešević, Vladimir Kopicl, Mirko Radojičić), Miroslav Šutelj, Ljerka Šibenik, Mladen Galić, Ante Kuduz, Josip Stošić, Boris Bućan, Dalibor Martinis, Sanja Iveković, Braco Dimitrijević, Jagoda Kaloper, Gorki Žuvela, Goran Trbuljak, Bosh+Bosh Group (Slavko Matković, Balint Szombathy, Laszlo Kerekes, Laszlo Szalma), Slobodan Milivojević-Era, Zoran Popović, Raša Todosijević, Gergelj Urkom, Marina Abramović, Radomir Damjanović Damnjan, A3 Group.

Location: Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade

The exhibitions The Examples of Conceptual Art in Yugoslavia, Young Artists and Young Critics 71, and Documents on Post-Object Phenomena in Yugoslav Art 1968–1973 took place between 1971 and 1973 in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, the most prestigious state institution of art. The three exhibitions can be seen as as a way of both promoting and systematizing (historicizing) the work of individual artists and artist groups operating in the context of Student Cultural Center (SKC) in Belgrade, or in other alternative youth centers in former Yugoslavia. In addition, these exhibitions displayed the interconnections, interdependence, and mutual dialogues happening between the official and alternative art scenes in former Yugoslav space, proving that alternative art was not being developed in isolation from the “general public” as a kind of dissident activity, but was precisely part of the same “public sphere,” as the critical, shifting voice of younger generations of artists.¹ In that sense, this chapter of the selected exhibition chronology could also fall under the title From Alternative Spaces to the Museum and Back.

The first exhibition, The Examples of Conceptual art in Yugoslavia, took place in the Salon (gallery) of the Museum of Contemporary Art from March 3–22, 1971, and was curated by Biljana Tomić and Ješa Denegri. Conceptualized as an overview of the early examples of New Art Practices in the former Yugoslavia, the exhibition introduced Conceptual art to Belgrade cultural institutions for the first time. Precisely from this reason the exhibition was mainly structured around the issues of promotion, education, and information. It can be observed that the presentation of the Conceptual art scene in the Museum of Contemporary Art preceded three experimental exhibitions in SKC, which happened in the summer and autumn of the same year (Drangularijum, At Another Moment, and Objects and Projects). However, the SKC projects were always developed through the exchange within the editorial board of the gallery,² which included the participation of Denegri and Tomić, among other artists and critics. Aside from her later SKC activities, Tomić was one of the most active exhibition makers and freelance curators who collaborated with the Tribune of Youth in Novi Sad and the Atelier 212 – BITEF program in Belgrade. Both institutions were promoting ideas of New Art and theory, including experimental film and performative practices.

Denegri, who was at the time working as young curator in the Museum of Contemporary Art was also involved in the independent exhibition practice as one of the main critics following the development of the scene of New Art in Yugoslav cultural space. In his catalogue text entitled “For the Possibility of One New Artistic Communication,” Denegri, in his particular art-historical manner, opens out the referential field for a better understanding of Conceptual art. He finds these references in the artistic tendencies of the historical avant-gardes of 1920s and ’30s (more specifically in Malevich’s abstraction, and in the nonaesthetic operations by Man Ray, Picabia, and Duchamp). The next historical moment overlaps with the experiments with immaterial in the radical modernist art practices of the 1950s and early ’60s (i.e., the work of Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni), which Denegri links with the contemporary theory on the dematerialization of art practice by Lucy R. Lippard. Finally, according to Denegri, the primary structures by Donald Judd and the theory of anti-form by Robert Morris were the last historical stages preceding the Conceptual art, bringing us back to the beginning of his text that opens with the quote from Sol LeWitt’s famous essay, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.”

Tomić writes the curatorial statement comprising three conceptual arguments that comment on the processes through which ideas transform themselves into distributional forms (communication) and, consequently, into value (symbolic and financial capital):

idea = work of art = communication / idea = art = value / idea = utopia = reality

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The second exhibition witnessing on simultaneity of promotion and historization of the New Art Practices opened in February 1972 under the descriptive title Young Artists and Young Critics 71. As part of the regular program, annual presentations of new artworks by the latest generation of artists were organized at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Artists were usually selected by members of the museum’s curatorial council.³ This exhibition, however, was not curated by museum council members, but by four young critics broadly associated with SKC: Jadranka Vinterhalter, Nikola Vizner, Slavko Timotijević, and Jasna Tijardović. They selected eleven artists and artist groups, mostly strong proponents of New Art.

The then director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Miodrag B. Protić (himself a painter of geometrical abstraction), stated in the official introduction to the show’s accompanying catalogue: “We consider that bringing together young critics and young artists and facilitating their mutual collaboration fits the main intentions of the Museum: to truly discover new impulses within the youngest generation of artists and critics and enable the articulation of contemporary moment in its full force. […] This novum is not visible merely in the artworks, but also in the texts of the exhibition curators. And since this connection existing between the artistic piece and the intellectual comment by the critic of the same generation can be nothing else but fruitful collaboration, Museum considers the facilitation and support of these links as its responsibility and its obligation.”⁴

In contrast to the previous exhibition, curated by Denegri and Tomić as a self-initiated, authorial project, the exhibition Young Artists and Young Critics 71 was part of an official museum program. Compared to The Examples of Conceptual Art, the second exhibition was more heterogeneous and less “strict” in terms of the discourse of Conceptual art proper. It presented a variety of work by young artists of the time, and included installations, performances, experimental films, text-based works, conceptual materials, minimal and hyperrealist painting. Despite transgressing the “purity” of New Art in the exhibition plan, the curators emphasized some of the important changes in the language and the art form in the catalogue texts, in a similar educative manner as Denegri and Tomić had done for The Examples of Conceptual art.

Jadranka Vinterhalter stated that contemporary art stepped outside of the colored surface of painting and expanded into space and time, which requests from the observer not only a visual perception of the art piece but also a mental perception and engagement of the thought. Nikola Vizner emphasized that one of the main characteristics of the exhibition resided in the use of ephemeral materials, which meant that the upkeep of the artworks as “objects” existed only for the duration of the exhibition process—the majority of the work was dismantled (dematerialized) together with the exhibition. He also underlined four main characteristics of the exhibited artworks: “a) The artworks do not have a value per se, the value is created in the process of realization b) The ephemerality stresses the significance and value of the moment, of the present tense c) Reproductivity becomes the goal of the artwork d) The artwork does not request the physical presence of the author.”

In her catalogue text, Jasna Tijardović interpreted the exhibited artworks and revealed her views on contemporary exhibition practice. She wrote: “The exhibition should not serve as a confirmation of existing values, but should hint at the new ways of artistic behavior. It should be an experiment. […] The goal of exhibition is not in presentation of particular development or in sharing a certain style-characteristics of individuals or groups, but in becoming an expression of the present moment situated between the art and life.” Slavko Timotijević focused on the change in the position of the artist at that time, quoting the member of the KOD Group Peđa Vranešević, who claimed there was a shift in focus from the primacy of the artwork itself to the primacy of the person behind the work. Timotijević concluded that “the artist ceased to be just the ‘Hand of God’—the one who invokes and reinvigorates the memories—becoming instead, through the power to execute out of ideas, the very God itself.” All the remarks, as to be expected, overlap with the radical change in production of art in which conceptual proposition by an artist often resembles God’s creatio ex nihilo (“creation out of nothing”).

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Finally, the third exhibition, was curated by Denegri and Tomić and presented in the Museum of Contemporary Art between June and July 1973 under the title Documents On Post-Object Phenomena in Yugoslav Art 1968–1973. It was actually the first elaborate art-historical summary of New Art in a Yugoslav context, which preceded the two similarly comprehensive surveys of art of the 1960s and ’70s: the famous exhibition New Art Practice in Yugoslavia 1966–1878, curated by Marijan Susovski in the Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zagreb in 1978;⁵ and the equally significant and much referenced 1983 exhibition New Art in Serbia 1970–1980, curated by Denegri and presented in three institutions, the Museum of Contemporary Art – Belgrade, Gallery of Contemporary Art – Zagreb, and Art Gallery – Prishtine.

Document: The summary of Denegri’s curatorial text, written for the catalogue of the exhibition Documents On Post-Object Phenomena in Yugoslav Art 1968–1973

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

Author: Jelena Vesić
Keywords: collaboration, conceptual art, cultural politics, exhibition practice and art history

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

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 artists¹—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.

Postal Packages by Želimir Koščević

Author: Ivana Bago
Keywords: commodification, conceptual art, curatorial position, dematerialized exhibition, historization, international network, irony, mail art

Date: 1972

Place: Student Center Gallery, Zagreb

Curator: Želimir Koščević

Participants: undisclosed mail art works by international artists

The exhibition “Postal Packages” (1972) was a culmination of curatorial experiments that Želimir Koščević, the director of the Student Center Gallery in Zagreb, realized in the late 1960s and early 1970s. ¹ In collaboration with the 1971 Paris Biennial, which was dedicated for the first time to Conceptual art, the exhibition presented the biennial’s “mail art” section to Yugoslav audiences in Belgrade and Zagreb.² However, after taking the exhibition from Belgrade, where it was held in January 1972, to Zagreb, Koščević decided to exhibit nothing but the unopened package in which the works arrived. This disobedient gesture indicated that the role and responsibility of the curator was not merely to choose and exhibit, but also to choose to refuse to exhibit. The exhibition was accompanied with a statement in which Koščević rejected the commodification and institutionalization of Conceptual art. The fact that Conceptual art had become so innocuous to be included in a biennial, as the most conventional exhibition form, meant for Koščević the beginning of its demise:

“Unconventional, brave and provocative, conceptual art has witnessed its own history by the establishment of a special section at the Paris Biennial. There were also earlier attempts, as some museums and corporations have tried to systematize artistic concepts and reduce them to the level of catalogued data. Many artists accepted this game. The positive valorization of the Paris Biennial officially marked the end of the life of this idea which, at its core, is not foreign or unacceptable to us.”³

Instead of offering the (local, peripheral) audience insight into the latest international trends, Koščević intervened with a sharp critique of the ways in which the radical ideas of Conceptual art have been undermined by their conforming to the conventional rules of art’s institutionalization:

“Instead of participating in the further deterioration of conceptual art, instead of supporting its demise under the gallery and museum lights, we have exhibited the content of this exhibition in its genuine state. We have exhibited—we believe —the sublimate of conceptual art—the postal package as postal package. […] Art is not to be found under a glass, under a glass bell, art is facing us.”⁴

In the Student Center Gallery’s newspaper, documenting the exhibition, this text by Koščević was juxtaposed to an excerpt from the original statement by one of the curators of the Paris Biennial. Stressing the primacy of the idea over matter in Conceptual art, the curatorial statement presented the Envoi (“postal packages”) section of the Biennial as a prime example of the radically new, dematerialized understanding of the art object, in which the “transmitting of information has become more important than transporting goods.”.⁵ Koščević’s intervention—the exhibiting of “the postal package as postal package”—appropriates the original title of the biennial section and puts into question the validity of the claims made by the biennial organizers, of the primacy of information (idea) over matter. The cumbersome, unopened package placed in the center of the gallery space epitomized the true state of affairs behind the claims of the art’s dematerialization, revealing that the “transport of goods” was still the undisturbed kernel of the art system.

Document: Exhibition-statement by Želimir Koščević

Guide for the chronology (Ivana Bago: Something to think about: values and valeurs of visibility in Zagreb from 1961 to 1986)

 1 See Ivana Bago, “Dematerialization and Politicization of the Exhibition: Curation As Institutional Critique in Yugoslavia during the 1960s and 1970s,” in Museum and Curatorial Studies Review, vol. 2, no. 1: 7—37; [link].

Direct Week

Author: Dóra Hegyi - Zsuzsa László
Keywords: avant-garde, collective actions, conceptual art, environment / installation, festival, irony, metaphors of repression, performative practices, political reflection, semi-public event, site-specificity

Date: 6-9 July 1972

Organisers: Gyula Pauer (1941), Tamás Szentjóby (1944)

Participants: László Beke, Miklós Erdély, Gyula Gulyás, Miklós Haraszti, László Haris, Ágnes Háy, Tamás Hencze, Péter Lajtai, Péter Legéndy, József Molnár V., Gyula Pauer, Margit Rajczi, Tamás Szentjóby, Endre Tót

Location: Chapel Studio of György Galántai, Balatonboglár

Direct Week was an exhibition and event series that incorporated works and actions replying to Pauer’s and Szentjóby’s call, as well as lectures and screenings that were originally in the program of the “Avantgarde Festival” planned in April in a Budapest Club, but banned shortly before its scheduled date.

Documents:

Gyula Pauer, Tamás Szentjóby: Call for “Direct Week” (1972)

Gyula Pauer: II. Pseudo Manifesto (Advertisement) (1972)

Tamás Szentjóby:  Exclusion exercise – Punishement-Preventive Autotheraphy (1969-72)

Source: Törvénytelen avantgárd. Galántai György balatonboglári kápolnaműterme 1970–1973 [Illegal Avant-garde, the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio of György Galántai 1970–1973], eds. Júlia Klaniczay and Edit Sasvári  (Artpool–Balassi, Budapest, 2003):  126-135.

On the website of Artpool Art Research Center

Today You Open the Exhibition – responsibility-taking action

Author: Dóra Hegyi - Zsuzsa László
Keywords: censorship, collective actions, conceptual art, irony, metaphors of repression, semi-public event, site-specificity, unofficial event

Date: 28 July 1972

Participants: György Galántai (1941), István Haraszty (1934)

Location: Chapel Studio of György Galántai, Balatonboglár

The action took place during the exhibition of the Pécs Workshop (Ferenc Ficzek, Károly Halász, Károly Kismányoki, Ferenc Lantos, Sándor Pinczehelyi, Kálmán Szíjártó, Katalin Nádor) and István Haraszty’s kinetic sculptures.

Documents:

István Harasztÿ – interview (1998)

György Galántai – manuscript (1998)

Source: Törvénytelen avantgárd. Galántai György balatonboglári kápolnaműterme 1970–1973 [Illegal Avant-garde, the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio of György Galántai 1970–1973], eds. Júlia Klaniczay and Edit Sasvári  (Artpool–Balassi, Budapest, 2003): 138.