HAPPSOC I. – sociological happening

Author: Daniel Grúň
Keywords: artist as curator, conceptual art, dematerialization, happening, mail art, urban space

Date: 2–8 May 1965

Participants and organizers: Stano Filko (b. 1937), Alex Mlynárčik (b. 1934)

Location: Bratislava, Czechoslovakia

The legendary “HAPPSOC I.” Was a pivotal work by Stano Filko and Alex Mlynárčik that took the form of an invitation card. Those invited were asked to participate by turning the city of Bratislava into a work of art for seven days between May 2–8, 1965. This is the time where two important national holidays are celebrated: Labour Day and Liberation Day. The invitation for “HAPPSOC I. “ contained a list of all things found in the city (including their statistical number) that were to be used to produce the artwork. The list included the total number of: women, men, dogs, houses, balconies, agricultural estates, plant buildings, flats, water supply in flats, water supply out of flats, kitchen ranges electric, kitchen ranges gas, washing mashines, refrigerators, Bratislava as a whole city, a castle, Danube in Bratislava, street lamps, TV aerials, cemeteries, tulips, theaters (including amateur theaters), cinemas, chimneys, trams, motorcars, inns, trolleys, buses, typewriting machines, broadcasting sets, shops, libraries, hospitals, etc.

In collaboration with Zita Kostrová, Filko and Mlynárčik wrote a manifesto to accompany the happening titled “What does HAPPSOC mean? Theory of anonymity that in twelve points defines their intentions.”

J.K. Ping-Pong Club

Author: Daniel Grúň
Keywords: dematerialization, fluxus, interactivity, thematized role of the audience

Date: March 1970

Participants and organizers: Július Koller (b. 1939), Květoslava Fulierová, Igor Gazdík, Milan Sirkovský

Location: Galéria Mladých / Gallery of the Youth, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia

Since 1965, Július Koller has been dissolving boundaries between sporting and artistic events. In March 1970, he used the independent exhibition space Galéria Mladých to play table tennis with visitors at regular intervals for the duration of the exhibition. For “J. K. Ping-Pong Club,” Koller turned the gallery into a sports club complete with a ping-pong table, sports flags decorated with the initials J.K., and a list of playing conditions posted on the wall.

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, dematerialization, educational event, 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

———————————————————–

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

———————————————————–

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

———————————————————–

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”).

———————————————————–

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

Postal Packages by Želimir Koščević

Author: Ivana Bago
Keywords: art market, conceptual art, curatorial concept, dematerialization, historization, international network, irony, mail art, youth/student organization

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].

A White Space in a White Space

Author: Daniel Grúň
Keywords: abstract art, avant-garde, dematerialization, environment / installation, painting

Date: 1973-1974

Participants and organizers: Stano Filko (1937), Miloš Laky (1948–1975), Ján Zavarský (1948)

Locations: Studio of Stano Filko, Bratislava; House of Arts, Brno; Young Artists’ Club, Budapest

The joint initiative of three artists—Stano Filko, Miloš Laky, and Ján Zavarský—left behind the sphere of science and technology in order to reach a spatial experience of the color white, and to equate painting to a mystical experience. White paint was applied, without any personal gesture, onto various objects and materials (i.e., carton tubes, felt)—it considered as a sign of transcendence beyond the the boundaries of the objective world. In a joint manifesto, the authors removed themselves from all systems of representation in order to fulfill the following goals: to create a visual equivalent of an empty space and in a sense to dematerialize art objects to exceed individuality; to clear away a single author’s personal perspective; and to negate traditional means of painting in visual art. The project was exhibited in the House of Arts, Brno (1973) and in the Young Artists’ Club, Budapest (1977). Two self-published catalogs by the artists were published, accompanied by a manifesto, and texts written by Jiří Valoch, Tomáš Štrauss, and László Beke.

“Strike” by La Galerie des Locataires

Author: Ivana Bago
Keywords: apartment exhibition, art market, conceptual art, curatorial concept, dematerialization, institutional critique, mail art

Date: 1976

Concept by: Ida Biard & La Galerie des Locataires

Can an exhibition take the form of a postcard? For Ida Biard and La Galerie des Locataires (Tenants’ Gallery) postal communication was crucial for establishing networks among artists, critics and curators from Budapest to Canada. Founded in 1972 in the rented Paris apartment of the Zagreb art historian and critic Ida Biard, La Galerie des Locataires (Tenants’ Gallery) was a self-organized curatorial project dedicated to “communicating” the works of artists who, in line with the credo of the new, dematerialized art, privileged “ethics over aesthetics.”¹ Artists from all over the world were invited to send their works by mail, to be exhibited in the window of Biard’s apartment, or realized, according to artists’ instructions, in public spaces of different cities, and in the framework of various exhibitions and projects.

La Galerie kept close ties with the Yugoslav art scene, especially through Biard’s collaboration with artist Goran Trbuljak on the French Window project, as well as different programs realized in collaboration with the Student Center galleries of Zagreb and Belgrade. At the same time, based in Paris, Biard collaborated with artists such as Daniel Buren, Annette Messager, Christian Boltanski, and Sarkis, who were to become among the most well-known protagonists of the international art scene.

La Galerie held a strong anti-commercial and anti-establishment stance, and believed in the potential of conceptual art to overcome the material and ideological confines of traditional, bourgeois, object-based art. However, by the mid-1970s, it became clear that the old patterns were only being re-affirmed, with conceptual artists becoming part of the mainstream institutional and commercial art scene. In order to protest this development, Ida Biard sent a card to all the artists she had collaborated with, specifically those in France, declaring a strike and announcing that La Galerie des Locataires would no longer “communicate the so-called works of art”^⁠ in order to express its  “disagreement with the conduct of artists/so-called dissenters and the avant-garde within the current system of the art market.” ² Inverting the logic according to which artists are expected to rebel against the system, while curators and critics secure their positions within its hierarchies, here it is the curator/gallerist who protests against the behavior of artists being integrated into the commodity system and betraying the ‘essence’ of conceptual art and their own earlier practice. ³

This gesture of a curator’s strike, of a refusal to exhibit art if that implies perpetuating the status quo, was also an experiment with the form of curatorial communication — the exhibition. Strike could be interpreted as a mail-exhibition, a translation of artists’ usage of post and the emerging “genre” of mail art. Crucial for establishing and maintaining networks, postal communication here served to declare a dissolution of the network, as an expression of protest and, implicitly, a declaration of the failure of “dematerialized” art to radically transform the art system.

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

For Art as Knowledge Production and Theoretical Inter-Textualism: The Seminars of the Group 143

Author: Jelena Vesić
Keywords: art and theory, collective practices, dematerialization, educational event, processuality

Date: November 8–11, 1978

Participants: Jovan Čekić, Miško Šuvaković, Paja Stanković, Darko Hohnjec, Igor Leonardi, Maja Savić, Boris Demur, Bojan Brecelj, Biljana Tomić, and Marko Pogačnik

Location: SKC gallery, Belgrade

The Seminar by Group 143 was conceptualized as theoretical artistic event. It was paradigmatic for the work of the group whose main artistic medium was conversation, and as such, events were often presented in the form of artistic seminars and theoretical performances. The Seminar in SKC was an exploration of various formal, semantical, and contextual issues of art placed behind the “surface of visible” of an art object (as the assumed fetish of modernist aestheticism). Artists, critics, and philosophers—members of Group 143 and their guests from Šempas and Zagreb—were interrogating and performing different artistic, philosophical and logical questions, emphasizing process-based work (or thought) and focusing (aesthetically) to the very process of lecturing. Some of the investigations by participants of the Seminar unfolded under titles such as “Specific character of the structure or of the process,” “Specific character of meaning,” “Theory of numbers in the domain of visible-sensible manifestations,” “History of art as the process of education of the humankind,” “The art of nature and the art of man,” and so on.

The Seminar experimented with the concept of art-as-knowledge-production in line with the tradition of analytic Conceptualism in Britain and the United States, but also with the other institutionalized avant-garde forms of artistic education such as the Bauhaus school where the learning of art making coincided with the urge for theoretical reflection on art by the artists themselves. In the similar fashion, the occasion for the artistic talks and investigations where their artworks exhibited in the gallery space in the medium of film, photography, performance, and analytic drawings. Some of the theoretical references, important in the development of Group 143 and the structure of their (internal or public) seminars and workshops, were the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Art & Language, the concept of a “paradigm shift” by Thomas S. Kuhn, Joseph Kosuth’s investment into linguistics, and Germano Celant’s concept of critical critique. The work of the group was oriented toward “non-utilitarity, non-partisanship and ethical, rather than political statements. In other words, the group didn’t support any forms of artistic activism, but rather insisted on theoretical intertextualism.”[1]

Group 143 was established in 1975 by curator and art critic Biljana Tomić, one of the most influential figures in the history of Student Cultural Center (SKC), Belgrade, who became head of the visual arts program at the end of 1975, when Dunja Blažević moved to the directorial position of SKC. Tomić was also one of the editors of the Likovni program of the Belgrade International Theater Festival (BITEF), which was the visual arts program organized by Atelier 212 as an accompaniment to the festival of avant-garde and experimental theater, held in Belgrade since 1967. Within the context of BITEF and Tribune of Youth, both predating the establishment of the SKC gallery, Tomić organized different projects of experimental art, collaborating with early Yugoslav conceptualists (OHO, Braco Dimitrijević, Goran Trbuljak, KOD Group, Group E, etc.), and presenting various actors from the international art scene—from performance artists to protagonists of Arte Povera and Conceptual art (Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jannis Kounellis, Daniel Buren, Germano Celant, Catherine Millet, etc). At the time, Group 143 was joined by young philosophers and artists who were often influenced by analytic philosophy and logical positivism—among these were Jovan Čekić, who later called himself a media theorist and artist, and Miško Šuvaković, who later became a significant theorist of the art of 1960s and 1970s in both the Yugoslav and international context.

Group 143 continued working until the 1980s. One of the reasons why the members of the group dispersed was, according to the statements by its members, the perceived lack of interest in conceptual thinking within contemporary art production at the turn of 1980s, and their refusal to participate in the new “paradigm shift” that lead to the supremacy of painting. This particular period was marked by the return to image and painting, which, in the local context and within the microclimate of SKC, was probably fostered by visits of Achille Bonito Oliva, and promotion of the concept of Transavanguarde by the local critics and curators, including those who supported New Art in the 1970s.

Red Year – International Festival of Socio-cultural Processual Feasts

Author: Daniel Grúň
Keywords: artist as curator, dematerialization, festival, fluxus, international network

Date: 1979

Participants and organizers: Róbert Cyprich (1951–1996), and with the creative cooperation of 365 friends from all over the world.

Location: Czechoslovakia

Róbert Cyprich’s pseudo-festival Red Year is connected to several other events that he organized in 1979 including Faga Ready-Made ’79, ONE MAN SHOW? 15 000 000 ”MAN“ SHOW!, BEIG Inc., Time of Cage, and Bee Flower. The conceptual poster–calendar Red Year came about as a creative collaboration with 365 friends from around the world, and was conducted via mail. The work emerged from the collision between the international utopian ideals of the avant-garde and the reality of everyday life in Czechoslovakia at that time where official ”red” idealogy was imposed on society.