Today You Open the Exhibition – responsibility-taking action

Author: Dóra Hegyi - Zsuzsa László
Keywords: artist run space, censorship, collaboration, conceptual art, didactic exhibition, irony, metaphors of repression, performative practices, 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.

Lines – exhibition curated by Branka Stipančić

Author: Ivana Bago
Keywords: art and theory, artist run space, conceptual art, curatorial concept, didactic exhibition, humor

Date: December 1979

Curated by: Branka Stipančić

Participants: Željko Jerman, Željko Kipke, Antun Maračić, Marijan Molnar, Goran Petercol, Darko Šimičić, Raša Todosijević

Location: Podroom—the Working Community of Artists, Mesnička 12, Zagreb

“Lines” was the second curatorial concept the art historian Branka Stipančić presented at Podroom (Basement)—the Working Community of Artists in Zagreb. Podroom, a self-organized artist space that existed between 1978 and 1980, brought together Zagreb artists associated with the “new art practice” (conceptual, performative, and process-based art of the late 1960s and ’70s in Yugoslavia).¹ Most exhibitions and events were organized by artists. The two exhibitions organized by Stipančić in 1979—“Values” and “Lines”—were exceptional. They were the first two curated projects by Stipančić, a then emerging art critic and curator. For both projects, she was concerned with finding an appropriate mode of exhibition that would communicate the basic problems and meaning of the new Conceptual art to the public.

In particular, “Lines” was conceived explicitly as a didactic exhibition. In the introductory text of the accompanying catalogue, Stipančić states that she is exhibiting a “method,” a particular mode that would enable those unfamiliar with the “new art” to understand its radical departure from traditional ways of making art.² By showing the exhibition in Podroom, the curator admitted that she was preaching to the converted, and that the exhibition would better achieve its didactic purpose in another space, such as a university.

But how was this lesson delivered (i.e., curated)? All works included in the exhibition involved a single element: a straight line drawn on a flat plane. This uniform visual identity was chosen, on the one hand, for its simplicity and the narrow range of metaphorical implications it potentially draws, and on the other, because it exposed the inadequacy and absurdity of the method of conventional formal analysis when applied to the new art. Stipančić elaborated, with humor, the likely results of such a conventional reading, if applied to the works she presented:

“By selecting artworks that resemble one another, what is revealed is the absurdity of the attempt to read the ‘new artistic practice’ by means of the existing formal, aesthetic, value-based criteria of traditional art criticism and theory. If we would proceed by such method, here we would find ten (and more, because these are merely examples) of the same visual contributions, i.e., a multitude of plagiarisms, pointing to a troubling tendency among young artists, who would seem to have found their expression in drawing and exhibiting lines.”³

Instead, new art required new tools of critical interpretation, as well as new methods of curation. Stipančić showed that the same visual element—a straight line—was in fact not at all the same, but acquired new meaning in each artistic iteration, with each change of idea, motivation, process, and context. Ultimately, what was revealed was not the work as a mere visual and aesthetic fact but “the work as a specific system within the system of art and society.”⁴ In order to make this as explicit as possible, Stipančić decided to exhibit each of the artworks with an accompanying text written by the artist to explain the particular concepts, processes, and intended meanings pertaining to the work. The most comprehensive and theoretical text “What Are Lines?” (1977) by Raša Todosijević explained the artist’s continuous engagement with the line-form since 1973, as a way to question “art by means of art.” Stipančić’s concept could be considered a translation of Todosijević’s artistic process into a curatorial one, into questioning the meaning and function of exhibition by means of exhibition.

Document: Branka Stipančić: Lines (1979)

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

1 For an account of Podroom, see Ivana Bago,  “A Window and a Basement: Negotiating Hospitality at La Galerie Des Locataires and Podroom—the Working Community of Artists,” ARTMargins, vol. 1, no. 2–3 (June–October 2012):116–46.

New Art = New Tradition: The exhibition Against Art by Goran Djordjević

Author: Jelena Vesić
Keywords: absurdity, amateurism, conceptual art, didactic exhibition, exhibition practice and art history, institutional critique

Date: 29 January – 5 February, 1980

Participant: Goran Đorđević and the most famous artists and artworks presented within Short History of Art

Location: SKC, Belgrade

Exhibition Against Art is organized in Student Cultural Centre in 1980, a year after Goran Djordjević’s call for The International Strike of Artists “against art system’s unbroken repression of the artists and the alienation from the results of their work”, in which he suggested the radical halting of art production on an international level. The exhibition Against Art was opened with the following statement:

A work of art expresses, among other things, certain attitude towards art. The works showed at this exhibition are not works of art. They are only attitudes towards art. More precisely, they are attitudes against art. I think it’s high time to tear the powdered mask of freedom and humanism of art and reveal its proper face – the face of faithful and humble servant.

Against Art is one of first conceptual exhibitions (or artistic statement in the form of exhibition) in former Yugoslavia. It is composed as the collection of peculiar artifacts:

1. The painting Harbingers of Apocalypse (the first painting by artist Goran Djordjević from 1969, that one he was ashamed of for a long time);

2. Series of Preparatory Drawings for the Harbingers of Apocalypse (what is significant is that these are made 10 years after the painting itself);

3. Series of Marginal Drawings (scribbles over mathematical formulas that Djordjević wrote on his Technical Science Studies in Belgrade 1970s);

4. The Short History of Art – series of copies of famous art historical moments (pencil on paper), from cave paintings to Joseph Beuys performances;

5. Minimalist sculptural object with the kitsch reproduction on its back titled The Self-Portrait With The Model.

Exhibition Against Art can be interpreted as the project of liquidation of the last remnants of “transcendental” (imaginary and physical) experience of art, including the leftovers of representation, style, individuality, craft, even of the fetish of idea characteristic for the production of value in art itself. Reasons for this liquidation are many, and can be found in historical, institutional, artistic and personal domains of life and work. The exhibition is performed according to the philosophical strategy of “immanent critique” – as an analysis of cultural forms, which locates and presents contradictions in the rules and systems necessary to the production of those forms. Contrasted with “transcendental” observations of art (and including the recent Conceptual Art production among this “classical” forms of art), the exhibition plays with critical contextualization of both: of Art as the object of its investigation, and of the ideological basis of that object presented in the historical perspective.

Exhibition Against Art is also the first project of Djordjević’s “radical copyism”, based on idea that copy can become more significant that the original, since it contains all of the visual information as presented in the original, but also points to the story to which the original belongs and through which it was being made.

Exhibition Against Art have been reprised in the Gallery of Student Cultural Centre – Belgrade in 2011 as part of the retrospective exhibition “Against art – Goran Djordjevic: Copies 1979–1985” curated by Branislav Dimitrijević, Dejan Sretenović and Jelena Vesić, and produced by Museum of Contemporary Art – Belgrade.