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

1/4Goran Đorđević: Harbingers of the Apocalypse and Preparatory Drawings for the Harbingers of the Apocalypse, Against Art, 1980.

1/4Goran Đorđević: Marginal Drawings, Against Art, 1980.

1/4Goran Đorđević: Self Portrait With the Model, Against Art, 1980.

1/4Goran Đorđević: Short History of Art, Against Art, 1980.

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.