This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb 151791423X, 9781517914233

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This Is Not My World

This Is Not My World Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb

Adair Rounthwaite

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

This publication has been supported by Kontakt. Kontakt Collection is an independent nonprofit association based in Vienna. Its purpose is the support and promotion of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Art. www.kontakt-collection.org This book is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance provided for the publication of this book by the University of Washington. A portion of chapter 3 appeared as “Photography against Reproduction: Željko Jerman’s My Year, 1977,” ARTMargins 11, no. 1–­2 (June 2022): 201–­25. Copyright 2024 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-­1-­5179-­1422-­6 (hc) ISBN 978-­1-­5179-­1423-­3 (pb) A Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer.

33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 2410 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For parents everywhere struggling to get through the workday on too little sleep

Contents

Introduction Intimate Art Maps

1

1

The Square Smiled: Site and Subjectivity in  the Group of Six Authors’ Exhibition-­Actions

29

2

Written Assignments: Space and Language in  the Art of Vlado Martek and Mladen Stilinović

77

3

The Life and Death of the Trace: Photography,  Performance, and Željko Jerman

121

4

Loving Kitsch: Vlasta Delimar and  Tomislav Gotovac Perform in Public

171

Conclusion Notes for the (Postsocialist) Present

219

Acknowledgments Notes Index

233 239 269

Introduction Intimate Art Maps

The place at the center of this book is the city of Zagreb, in the former socialist Yugoslavia, as it was from the mid-­1970s and into the early 1980s. Do you feel at home here, or do you need help getting oriented in the city? If it is the latter, walking the streets around 1975 or so, you might stop by a secondhand bookseller and pick up one of these guidebooks, cheap consumer items that chart the space of the city. These two were printed in 1959 and 1962, and by 1975 they are already outdated. As publishers constantly reissue such print materials to reflect the changing city, older editions filter into spaces such as crowded personal bookshelves, glove compartments, secondhand stores, and flea markets.1 Though already obsolete, the maps can still provide us with some starting points.2 If you are new to Zagreb and your German is better than your Croatian, the 1962 tourist guide might be the most useful, with its foldout map, photos, and explanations of historical landmarks and points of interest (see Figure I.1).3 The map has charming mod-­style illustrations of key buildings to explicate the city plan, like the drawings of the cathedral, built and rebuilt in various cycles since 1217, and of the Austro-­Hungarian-­looking Croatian National Theatre, opened in 1895, on Marshal Tito Square. The map shows you where to take a tram (number 14) from the central Square of the Republic all the way south to Novi Zagreb (New Zagreb), which has been changing fast. Yugoslavia has already left behind its economic miracle of incredible growth of 1953–­56 and experienced a slump late in that decade, followed by a new constitution of 1963 that effectively introduced “market socialism,” a change accompanied by a shift from heavy to consumer industries and a rise in spending and inflation.4 Here in Novi Zagreb, the desire to build a new socialist good life is visible all around you in the construction boom of residential buildings ongoing since the 1960s. The neighborhood’s carefully planned parks, avenues, and concrete brutalist apartment buildings create open, vertical, regular spaces at stark odds with the grand, ornamented buildings and tighter streets of the old town to the north. Predictably for a publication aimed at tourists, this German-­language guide is appealing and lends you a sense of the city’s variegated spaces, but it lacks detail. If you can read Croatian and perhaps need more specific directions to a particular 1

2  Introduction

address, turn instead to this guide Zagreb: Popis ulica i plan grada (List of streets and city plan) with its detailed listing of every street and directions for getting there on transit and on foot (see Figure I.2). If you were trying to find your way to the homes and studios of members of the city’s 1970s experimental art scene, the map could lead you to Sanja Iveković’s apartment, which looks out at the Hotel Intercontinental constructed in 1970 and from which she created her now-­famous photo-­text-­performance work Triangle (1979). This guide could also take you to Željko Jerman’s home-­cum-­photographic studio at Voćarska cesta 5 (take the tram to Kvaternikov trg, then walk north on Domjanićeva cesta) and to the nearby flat of the brothers Mladen and Sven Stilinović located in Voćarsko naselje. You would have to take another tram or a long walk east to get to Vlado Martek’s apartment in Konjščinska ulica, in the neighborhood of Dubrava. The art of this moment that engaged with city space belonged to the middle wave of Yugoslavia’s famous New Art Practice, a flexible, politically astute conceptualism that spanned the late 1960s to the early 1980s and that was among the most generative art movements to emerge in formerly socialist Europe. At the heart of my study are a group of friends now known as the Group of Six Authors (Grupa šestorice autora) that included Mladen Stilinović, his little brother Sven Stilinović, Boris Demur, Vlado Martek, Željko Jerman, and Fedor Vučemilović. Be­ tween 1975 and 1979, the Group of Six created around twenty “exhibition-­actions” (izložbe-­akcije) in public spaces in Zagreb and occasionally elsewhere.5 At these festive events, the artists conducted a range of activities across the spectrum of making and disseminating art: they set up and showed their work in the streets, created artworks on the spot, executed performances, and talked with passersby. Members of the Group of Six were all twenty years old or under in 1968–­1969, when the initial investigations of art’s relationship to its context that marked the New Art Practice appeared. Their work reflects a somewhat different mentality than the early pioneering experiments with chance and relationality by artists such as Goran Trbuljak or Braco Dimitrijević. In the later 1970s and into the 1980s, two other essential contributors to the local practices of art in public space were the performance artist Vlasta Delimar (b. 1956), the Group of Six’s friend and sometimes collaborator, and the much older Tomislav Gotovac (1937–­2010). Gotovac was an experimental filmmaker who shared Delimar’s fascination with the power of the body to generate new publics, though their first actions in public space were separated by more than two decades: his in 1967, hers in 1979. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia itself fostered new kinds of public spheres, different from the other countries—­both socialist and capitalist—­that surrounded it and different from the history of this region itself before World War II. Yugoslavia was a socialist country founded by the Partisans, whose resistance against an unspeakably brutal Nazi puppet state became the only local grassroots movement to overthrow Nazi occupation. A single-­party state with a charismatic

Figure I.1. Map of Zagreb city center from Ivan Raos, Zagreb: Führer Durch Die Stadt (Zagreb: Vjesnik, 1962).

4  Introduction

Figure I.2. Map 19 from Zagreb: Popis ulica i plan grada (Zagreb: Epoha, 1959).

leader, Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia cut ties with Stalin in 1948, pursuing a form of self-­management socialism that revolved ideologically around the empowerment of workers and their direct democratic participation in workplace decision-­making. Neither capitalist nor a part of the Eastern Bloc, Yugoslavia actively sought an alternative to Cold War polarization through its founding participation in the Non-­ Aligned Movement, an alliance of small and so-­called Third World countries that aimed to foster sovereignty and solidarity and to battle racism, imperialism, and colonialism.6 Yugoslavia’s embrace of solidarity across differences in its foreign policy was logical for a nation whose own unity was defined through difference, as a federative state made up of six republics (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Serbia) and two autonomous provinces (Kosovo and Vojvodina, both in the Republic of Serbia). Most of the country’s citizens were native speakers of what was then known as Serbo-­Croatian or sometimes Croatian-­Serbian, a polycentric language with much regional variation, with other groups speaking Slovenian, Macedonian, and Hungarian, among other languages.

Figure I.3. Pedestrians pass Boris Demur’s work Industrial Landscape laid on the ground at the exhibition-­action in front of Zagreb’s Student Center on October 27, 1977.

Figure I.4. Neighborhood children near a work by Mladen Stilinović from the cycle Me, You, Mine, Yours held down with bricks on the ground between two cars at the exhibition-­ action in Šenoa Street at the Sopot I housing block, May 29, 1975.

6  Introduction

Figure I.5. Mladen Stilinović and Željko Jerman set up for the exhibition-­action on Jesuit Square, near the City Gallery of Contemporary Art, on the evening of June 14, 1975.

The populace was a tapestry of ethnic identities that were both religious and linguistic, as many Slovenes and Croats were historically Catholic, many Serbs were historically Orthodox Christian, and many Bosnians were historically Muslim. The 1970s, the decade at the heart of this study, was a period in which tensions in the country’s ideological and economic projects were palpable in the fabric of public life: extensive unemployment, especially among the young; massive foreign debt; a constitutional crisis stemming from the 1968 student protests that led to a conservative reentrenchment of the country’s management class; the suppression of ideological debate about the nature of socialism, with the censorship of the Praxis philosophy group and Black Wave cinema movement; and anxiety surrounding the relationship between Yugoslav federal identity and ethnonationalist identifications, evident in the 1971 protests of the Croatian Spring.7 In this context, where issues of difference and solidarity, collective identity, and its discontents were major dimensions of public life, the Group of Six Authors and their circle created art both in and about public space. Public space, in their works, could be a locus and was also frequently art’s focus, as they experimented with the sensual, social, and political nature of inhabiting spaces in their home city and elsewhere. In Yugoslavia, in contrast to other European socialist states, experimental art was shown openly in state-­sponsored galleries and museums,

Introduction  7

instead of being exhibited mostly in the unofficial spaces of private homes and apartments. The Group of Six Authors and their peers chose not only to work in public as an alternative but to do so in ways that foregrounded and problematized questions of subjectivity. This critical modality is centrally on display in another guide to the city with a very different function than those I already mentioned: Mladen Stilinović’s Taken Out from the Crowd of 1976 (see Figure I.6) and its related work Loneliness II of 1975. Among Stilinović’s now best-­known early works, Taken Out from the Crowd appropriates an aerial photograph of the central Square of the Republic. This square was renamed Trg bana Jelačića in the postcommunist period after Austrian-­Croatian Josip Jelačić, duke (ban) of Croatia from 1848 to 1859, in one of the many acts of name-­changing designed to consolidate a Croatian national identity and to obliterate socialism’s claim on public space. For these works, Stilinović used a photograph taken from a skyscraper on the square, either by himself or by his wife, the curator and art historian Branka Stipančić.8 The artist sliced six small segments from the image, which the title written along the bottom implies have removed people from the scene (the Croatian title is Izvađeni iz gomile; izvađeni are “those [people] taken out”). Loneliness II is a small handmade book that shows us what became of these cut-­out people. Single figures are pasted on blank pages of a small notebook and labeled “taken out of the crowd” in red colored pencil. These pages then alternate with others where a figure has been pasted beside a group and labeled “returned to the crowd.” The last two pages show us one more solo figure, labeled “Unity,” and then another figure pasted beside a group, labeled “Brotherhood,” in evocation of the motto “Brotherhood and Unity” (bratstvo i jedinstvo) of Yugoslavia (see Plate 1). The two artworks, made from the same appropriated image, take complementary critical stances on the question of collective versus individual subjecthood and their tense intertwine as produced by the spaces of the socialist city. The unexplained removals in Taken Out from the Crowd evoke the capricious yet precise operations of state surveillance and censorship and might be read in light of a larger interest on the part of artists in twentieth-­century socialist Europe who played with the genre of the state-­surveillance documentation.9 The white cutouts are also eerily reminiscent of white sheets used to cover dead bodies in public spaces—­for example, following a car accident. At the same time, the mysterious nature of the removals raises the possibility that these individuals have removed themselves, perhaps mentally if not spatially, and that they are “taken out” in the sense that their mentality diverges invisibly from that of the crowd. Loneliness II pursues this same interest in the fraught status of the individual versus the collective through the way that it returns single figures to the crowd by placing them close together on the page while also stressing their isolation in different bits of the cut-­up image. The work thus suggests the artificial nature of state ideological discourses that would seek to claim the congregation of crowds at events such as

Figure I.6. Mladen Stilinović, Taken Out from the Crowd (Izvađeni iz gomile), 1976. Black-­and white-­photograph, crayon on cardboard, 27.56 × 17.32 inches. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić.

Introduction  9

parades and mass celebrations as reflective of an affirmatively socialist subject position. If the two maps with which I started provide ways of navigating the city (one for visitors, one for locals), you might read Taken Out from the Crowd and Loneliness II as depicting subjects who are already lost in urban spaces that are experientially and ideologically loaded, yet unstable. Viewed within a global comparative framework encompassing art produced across socialist and capitalist countries in the later twentieth century, these works point both toward affective experiences of city space as saturated with meaning that has correlates in many contexts and to the very different ways that socialism and capitalism have dramatized the gap between individual subjectivity and the generalized subject positions into which a society interpolates its people. Socialist and capitalist regimes have compelled different performances of compliance and made different performances and experiences of noncompliance possible. Those possibilities are shaped by national frameworks but also by the topography, ideology, and history of much smaller and more specific sites, which invite given kinds of normative behavior, enable particular forms of nonnormativity, and emphasize certain dimensions of collective identity. Through evoking the terms of Brotherhood and Unity, Loneliness II highlights the presence of ideology in Zagreb’s central square but also casts doubt on ideology’s hold on everyday experience and individual subjecthood. The artists analyzed in this book used particular sites for their works in ways that drew attention to the slippage between generalized subject positions and individual subjectivity. Moreover, they gravitated toward the thematization of intimacy as a way of addressing the nature of individual subjectivity, the subject’s relationship to other people both specific and anonymous, and subjectivity’s dependence on particular places and contexts. Intimacy, in these practices, is deeply desirable yet also fraught and problematic; this is truest of all in terms of the intimacy that might flourish between artists and their audiences. In taking the term intimacy as foundational for this book, I propose that we focus on pleasure and affect within a Central and East European art historical geography often dominated by discussions of ideology. The Group of Six Authors was not an artistic collaborative but rather a handful of friends who came together, for an open-­ended amount of time, to share their work with each other and with the public. The circle of colleagues and friends within which they worked, their “referent group” as Matthew Jesse Jackson terms it in his discussion of Moscow conceptualism, was small and porous, characterized by relationships of interpersonal trust and tension as opposed to official membership.10 The name “Group of Six Authors” would seem to indicate clear belonging of a certain number of participants to the set, but it quickly unspools into multiple acts of counting that trace the artists’ personal and intellectual affinities and conflicts. It was first coined by critic Radoslav Putar, head of the City Gallery of

10  Introduction

Contemporary Art, in the magazine Spot in 1975 and then canonized by Putar’s junior colleague, the curator Marijan Susovski, in his exhibition and catalog The New Art Practice 1966–­1978.11 It was a pragmatic moniker, open to revision, as opposed to a formalized statement of self-­identification. Delimar, who collaborated with Željko Jerman and then later Vlado Martek and was successively married to both men, might be counted as an unofficial seventh member of the group (making, in Croatian, a grupa sedmorice autora).12 Gotovac, though much older, was a friend of some group members and familiar with all of them, a closely connected fellow artist in a small scene. Some people claim that there are in fact only three, four, or five integral members of the Group of Six; the selection shifts depending on who is narrating. The group also breaks down into many pairs of personal or aesthetic affiliation: Mladen and Sven Stilinović as brothers; the Delimar/Jerman and Delimar/ Martek romantic and aesthetic pairs, which in turn imply a Jerman/Martek pair; Mladen Stilinović and Tomislav Gotovac as filmmakers; Delimar and Gotovac as performers who prioritize the naked body and as collaborators later in life; the married couple Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić, Stipančić being instrumental to the historicization of Stilinović’s practice in particular and that of the Group of Six more broadly; Sven Stilinović and Vučemilović as art school buddies; Martek and Demur, friends from childhood, who were both breastfed by Martek’s mother (Martek says that Demur referred to them as “brothers by milk”).13 Then beyond the twos, the threes, the six, the seven, there is also the around twenty, the group of people in the artists’ circle who attended the actions, who sometimes participated in them, and who came to the shows in tiny artist-­r un spaces of Podroom (1978–­80) and PM Gallery (1981 onward), which received some nominal state support and were officially open to anyone but in practice usually addressed a much smaller crowd of committed fans and peers.14 These networks of relation gave rise to complex politics of gender (in)equality that reentrenched some forms of male privilege while also providing opportunities for both men and women to experiment with their gendered identities and enter as serious interlocutors into debate about art.

Geographies of Conceptualism Conceptual art, broadly understood, was a reaction against modernism and the formulations of artistic subjecthood and objecthood that modernism proposed—­ namely, an authentic subjectivity connected via the hand’s original mark to a unique and valuable object. Art in public in late 1970s Zagreb is a particularly striking instance of the dialectical quality of that reaction, in the sense that artists relentlessly deconstructed modernist notions of the aesthetic while also engaging strategically with the emotive expressivity and pathos of the modernist artist. Moreover, as I discuss below, far from being a negation of art’s materiality,

Introduction  11

as conceptualism is often conceived, these artists’ dirty, ephemeral, and occasionally disposable artworks addressed their contexts and viewers in ways that were powerfully material and grounded in a sense of the body. As Branka Stipančić noted in a 2012 conversation with Zdenka Badovinac and other scholars, in Yugoslavia the term conceptualism applied widely to a range of practices beyond the strictly analytical work of the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of the movements it most clearly designated was the New Art Practice.15 Curator Marijan Susovski, in the catalog for his landmark 1978 exhibition that was definitive for the historicization of the New Art Practice, describes the movement as centrally defined by its use of new media and its innovative understanding of artistic social commitment.16 Susovski saw the artists’ nonconformist attitude as one that thrived because of the conditions presented by Yugoslavia, “a society which is as a rule open to changes and permanent investigations.”17 The New Art Practice’s social commitment ultimately constituted a call for renewal of the entire conception of art and the systems of which it was a part: In striving to ensure a non-­commercial status for the work of art, the artist resists the dominant role of the market, raises the question of the function of criticism and its value judgements made to correspond to the present-­day art systems, and in the criticism of galleries he points to manipulative procedures with artists and with the functioning of the system in creating works of art. He will, therefore, point to the need of demystifying the artistic act, of democratizing art and allowing for participation of the spectator in creating works of art.18

Though this description could equally have come from a politically astute curator of practices in North American or Western European conceptualism and institutional critique of the late 1970s, such a curator would have been unlikely to frame those capitalist societies as fundamentally “open to changes and permanent investigations” in a way that nurtured experimental art.19 Susovski’s discussion of the art market has two important valences. First, it implicitly emphasizes how the New Art Practice rejects the more straightforwardly consumable forms of art widely exhibited in Yugoslavia, including naive art and the socialist modernist painting and sculpture that came in various degrees of abstraction.20 But it also points to the artists’ awareness of their situation within a global condition of art’s commodification and an investment in the potential of conceptually oriented and institutional critique practices to offer resistance against that consumption. That awareness developed locally, in relation to conditions of commodity socialism, and also drew on Yugoslavia’s rich cultural and intellectual traffic with other parts of the world (for example, in 1979, the year after Susovski’s exhibition, the journal Ideje published a translated excerpt from Lucy R. Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, in which Lippard posits the resistance of conceptual art to

12  Introduction

the market).21 Ultimately, artists of the New Art Practice felt the need to respond critically both to the socialist context around them and to the global consumer capitalism with which Yugoslavia interfaced via popular culture and via the country’s many diplomatic and economic contacts with the West. Members of the New Art Practice have entered unequally into canonical discourses of global contemporary art: Mladen Stilinović and his Zagreb-­based peer Sanja Iveković have achieved global fame since the first decade of the 2000s that puts them second only to Marina Abramović in terms of world-­renowned artists to emerge from this generation (Abramović was from the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, but was based in Amsterdam for much of the 1970s). Other artists discussed in this study, including Željko Jerman and Vlado Martek, are acknowledged in their context as crucial contributors to conceptualism but have had scant exhibition histories and scholarly reception outside the region. Vlasta Delimar, however, is poised at a moment of burgeoning national and international recognition, as scholars and curators have increasingly recognized her huge contributions to regional and global histories of performance and to the treatment of women’s subjectivities.22 Susovski’s framing of the New Art Practice and the rich body of scholarship from the decades following it pose persistent questions about the extent to which the New Art Practice should be understood relative to the story of Yugoslavia as a nation. Scholars point out that the New Art Practice was characterized by an “uneven” urban/rural geography and thus cannot be understood as a summation of all Yugoslav postmodern art of the 1970s.23 But it is nonetheless widely seen as central to the country’s attempts to come to terms with the relationship between art, politics, and subjectivity during late socialism and, in turn, is crucial to the legacy of multicultural Yugoslav socialism as a sorely needed alternative to the capitalist ethnonationalism of the postsocialist period. Indeed, much scholarship on Yugoslav art of the latter half of the twentieth century reflects an interest in the legacy of Yugoslav socialism as a project connected to, but not limited to, the state. A great strength of this scholarship is the way it has firmly displaced polarizations between cultural practitioners and the state that are common tropes in the art history of Central and Eastern Europe—­for example, in Jelena Vesić’s 2012 analysis of the “many faces” of the Belgrade Student Cultural Center (SKC) in the 1970s, which enabled that one institution to function as a locus of both resistance to and reinscription of state ideology through a fundamentally performative modus operandi.24 Later books by scholars published with North American presses, such as Bojana Videkanić (2020) and Marko Ilić (2021), continued to flesh out how different agents navigated their commitments to diverse visions of socialism across a pluralistic field of visual production that occasioned both collaboration and conflict between state and nonstate actors.

Introduction  13

The way in which these accounts render stories about Yugoslavia’s art as stories about Yugoslavia is sometimes highly apposite, as in Videkanić’s discussion of the aesthetics tied to bilateral relations with other Non-­A ligned nations.25 But at other moments it feels like a bit of a stretch, such as when Ilić draws a parallel between the Group of Six’s loose collective affiliation and the 1974 constitution that weakened the central government to place more power with the eight members of the Yugoslav federation, creating an unworkably high threshold of consensus for any major decision-­making.26 Certainly, the new constitution was ratified in the mid-­1970s when the Group of Six also emerged, and national politics can be a valuable interpretive heuristic for understanding the import of past art movements. However, this interpretation leaves something to be desired in the sense that the artists’ experiential realities and concerns, as well as the theoretical and affective stakes of their works, were not necessarily aligned with the blow-­by-­blows of national politics. For example, when I asked Stipančić whether she was aware in 1974 of the changes to self-­management brought about by the new constitution, she responded: “No, not at all. But perhaps others were aware. Per­sonally, politics didn’t interest me, and in 1974 I was busy with my [art historical] studies. . . . But you knew, let’s say, that that constitution made it so that each republic could de facto split off.”27 Stipančić’s comments indicate that the awareness of and response to one’s context existed in a complex tapestry with other kinds of personal or intellectual foci. Moreover, as I will demonstrate in this book, the ways in which the artists responded to state ideology often operated more at the level of affect, atmosphere, or general type of discourse, rather than commentary on particular events or declaration of a stance for or against government policies. This perspective has subtle but important consequences for how we read the works. For example, Mladen Stilinović’s 1975 work in which he hung banners declaring his and Stipančić’s mutual love for each other in the city during the annual May 1 celebrations can be seen as a destabilizing insertion of a message of intimacy into the ideological context of the state holiday. But it might also be read as an exhibitionistic gesture of turning inward, of asserting the power to genuinely ignore the parade of state ideology in favor of a focus on the personal, in a way that plays the universal legibility of socialism’s ideological messages off against the celebration of an intimate connection to which passerby audiences lacked access. In 2009, Piotr Piotrowski published an article advocating for the use of Louis Althusser’s concept of the ideological state apparatus for studying the art of Central and Eastern Europe, to combat long-­standing perceptions of the region as an ideological monolith. Piotrowski emphasized how the same Marxist ideologies were deployed differently in different national and local contexts, producing varied meanings for similar-­looking art and divergent official reactions to parallel types of practices, from direct repression to permissiveness.28 The contextual

14  Introduction

impact of national versus local factors can itself be hard to tease apart. Piotrowski’s formulation raises questions about how art historians may project national histories “downward” onto artworks and particular local histories but also about how we can tend to tell the stories of cities, or even neighborhoods, as if they are the stories of nations. As Ješa Denegri points out, the Yugoslav cultural space was characterized by regionally distinct local art cultures revolving especially around the major cities of Belgrade, Ljubljana, and Zagreb. Those centers were densely interconnected through travel, exchange, and friendship among artists, critics, and leaders of museums and galleries.29 This state of affairs adds complexity to the question of how a history of the nation might be anchored, in any given study, to particular cases and to the localities they reflect. If it is already clear that the artistic map of Yugoslavia is polycentric, attending to local “maps” of art practice and collegiality can bring further texture to the context-­specific analysis Piotrowski advocates, enhancing understandings of the diversity of conditions of production and of audiences that existed under twentieth-­century state socialism. Simultaneously, my goal here is not to present the city as an interpretive framework that would displace either the nation or the region (“East” or “Central and Eastern” Europe). To do that would ignore the way in which the history of Zagreb has for centuries been bound up with the history of imagining a nation, whether it be an independent modern Croatia in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, united socialist Yugoslavia, or postsocialist independent Croatia.30 Instead, in its approach to place, this book takes intimacy as a guiding thread. Intimacy is a term that denotes a kind of familiarity typically born of physical closeness. In this sense, it is directly connected to perceptions of space. Physical closeness enters in different ways into the circuits of intimacy that the art both relied on and fostered: intimacy of different kinds between the artists; intimacy between their practices and the particular spaces in which those practices blossomed; intimacy in terms of the type of response the artworks sought from viewers; and intimacy also as the capacity of a city to signify, through its urban fabric, proximity and belonging to regional, national, and transnational contexts. Intimacy also denotes an inability to confidently draw boundaries between the self and others and thus points to the ambiguity of individuality and collectivity. The term intimacy I propose here has some resonance with Boris Groys’s 1979 description of Moscow conceptualism as infused with a “lyrical” or “romantic” quality that opposed itself to the aridness of officialdom.31 Groys depicts lyricism as a kind of openness to the viewer’s emotional predisposition but also as a connection to the premodern past, a “magic” world of “unexpected forebodings and amazing discoveries.”32 This conceptualism both reaches deep into its own national context and imagines an art that overcomes aesthetic boundaries: “Romantic conceptualism in Moscow not only testifies to the continued unity of the ‘Russian soul’; it also tries to bring to light the conditions under which art can

Introduction  15

extend beyond its own borders.”33 Groys’s formulation was an early act of looking at local forms of conceptual art in a way that decentered Western European/North American analytic conceptualism. Histories of global conceptualism, including Luis Camnitzer’s landmark 1999 exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–­1980s, continued that work of decentering. Such scholarship demonstrates in particular how conceptual artworks could respond politically to their contexts and how the visions of artistic subjecthood they reflected could vary widely from the model of the artist as a self-­reflexively antiexpressive maker who looms large in dominant Western histories of conceptual art.34 Notably, though, while Groys’s account decenters Western conceptualism, it recenters the nation as an interpretive framework by depicting art as profoundly connected to a national spirit, to an eternal and self-­evident Volk. The conceptualism of the New Art Practice is often understood as anti­aesthetic or dematerialized, a studied rejection of the possibility of reading art “based on form,” as Branka Stipančić wrote in 1979.35 Branislav Jakovljević describes how the Group of Six’s embrace of deskilling and nonart materials, their disregard for exhibition conventions, and their direct address to the audience constitute a wholesale rejection of established models of artwork and author: All of this speaks about an intentional degradation of the work of art, its radical integration into the fabric of the everyday, and, ultimately, depriving artists of any exclusive position that the society assigns to them. The work of the Group of Six Authors is poor, but without any pretense of profundity and pathos; it is as communicable and everyday as any street advertisement, and just as difficult to accept as a work of art. In short, it fully embraces the condition of nonart.36

Indeed, many New Art Practice members in Zagreb resolutely refused to treat their artworks as materially precious. For example, at one point Sven Stilinović threw out a number of his brother Mladen’s artworks because he was moving house and Mladen had failed to come pick them up when asked. By the time Mladen and Branka Stipančić arrived to get them from where Sven had left them on the curb, they had already been soaked with rain.37 Mladen Stilinović theorizes the aesthetic and political import of “laziness” on the part of artists, and indeed this anecdote suggests an explicitly lazy or casual attitude on the part of both Sven and Mladen toward artworks as material entities.38 As the ensuing chapters will show, laziness had myriad implications in the work of the Group of Six, from the group’s overt performances of nonwork in public spaces, which I will discuss in chapter 1; to text-­ based works by Mladen and Martek that mined notions of childishness that are the focus of chapter 2; to Jerman’s production of consciously failed photographs, discussed in chapter 3. Laziness can be an aesthetic that accentuates the affective dimensions of a work, such as in an early self-­portrait by Jerman consisting

16  Introduction

of three photographs shaped roughly with scissors (see Figure I.7). Two show the same image of the artist’s torso holding a medium-­format camera, one printed in faded gray and a second, smaller one with the artist’s face sliced and ripped out. Crowning the work is a different image of Jerman’s face looking down, cut out so it gently resembles a Greek kouros. Photographs poorly printed, paper quickly cut and ripped, images hung straight on the wall with no ground or frame—­the means are simple to the point of being degraded, but the work is a poignant meditation on the difficult relationship between identity and the photograph. Jerman has torn his face out of one image but shown himself in another looking both introverted and almost godlike, both effaced and glorified. The images shed light on his subjectivity while also being fragile, simple objects. Crucially, recognizing the deployment of antiaesthetic tactics in this art does not necessarily mean that such modes of reading are sufficient for the project of the art’s historicization. In Zagreb’s living context of the 1970s, antiaesthetic tactics in art were deployed among a group of artists and intellectuals with regular experiential access to the artworks, intimate knowledge of the relational networks in which art was produced, and embodied familiarity with the public and private spaces that the art addressed and occupied. In other words, there was a sensory and affective richness to people’s holistic experience of the art in context that can get washed away by stressing only its conceptual and ideological nature. Moreover, as Eve Meltzer writes in her study of British and American conceptualism, the understanding of conceptual strategies as resolutely antivisual “has affected our readiness to see these strategies as nonetheless taking shape within the visual field, and to read them in light of the formal structure of their visual ambivalence.”39 Throughout the book, consideration of how artworks engaged with space will be an important tool I use for bringing questions about feeling and relationality to the fore and for refocusing on sensory texture and perception, even with fundamentally conceptual artworks that can be easy to read as active rejections of visuality. In creating their artworks and performances, the artists embraced the deconstruction and dirtying of the work while also making things and staging events designed to elicit sensual engagement. Furthermore, in these practices, a major dimension of the “visual ambivalence” Meltzer describes lies in the way the artists implicated the artwork closely with the body. This occurred through direct representation of the body, such as in Jerman’s self-­portrait just discussed; through the porousness and vulnerability of art objects to their environment, like a work Martek made using pieces of mirror that a man scrubbed and hauled away; through performance, such as Vučemilović’s request to passersby to photograph him; and through the presence of the artists alongside their works, whether to explicate them to audiences or to create them on the spot. The modality of the works therefore was not a dematerialization but rather a

Figure I.7. Željko Jerman, Self-­Portrait, 1973. Hand-­cut photographs. Courtesy of Bojana Švertasek.

18  Introduction

fanning out and reactivation of the artwork’s materiality to create a series of relays between work, body, and context. In the process, the act of exhibition became reworked into an act of personal exhibitionism. Ivana Bago notes that because the New Art Practice was still visual art, it remained dependent on the exhibition as the condition of its possibility.40 Indeed, the Group of Six’s exhibition-­actions constituted an especially conscious instance of playing with and problematizing that remaining dependence on the format of the exhibition. In these events and in Delimar’s and Gotovac’s performances, exhibitions recast as personal exhibitionism became instances where the artists’ expressive activities suggested fraught, alluring forms of intimacy.

Zagreb’s City Spaces In his entry about Zagreb for Susovski’s catalog on the New Art Practice, curator and critic Davor Matičević describes the city as displaying “the characteristics of the international art developments coupled with those of a small town located on the cross-­roads between Central Europe and the Balkans.” 41 To what extent was Zagreb’s character also informed in the later twentieth century by belonging to a socialist nation? Henri Lefebvre, in his canonical 1974 work The Production of Space, posits that changes in the economic base with the transition to socialism should necessarily change the production of space, because a society assigns spaces to reflect its own division of labor. “One cannot help but wonder,” he reflects, “whether it is legitimate to speak of socialism where no architectural innovation has occurred, where no specific space has been created: would it not be more appropriate in that case to speak of a failed transition?” 42 Ultimately, he argues, the goal of socialist space production should be to transcend the opposition between the city and the country, facilitating the “inevitable” urbanization of society, but in a way that does not exacerbate uneven patterns of development.43 This discussion connects to a debate ongoing in geography since the 1960s about whether there is an identifiable “socialist city” with traits that reflect state control over development and the goal of a classless society, such as large public spaces, new housing development on the periphery, and lack of a dense central business district or wealthy suburbs (a map much like the ones of Zagreb with which I began).44 This debate fell largely into two camps, the first of which saw urbanization in socialist countries as operating according to the same principles of industrialization and modernization as under capitalism but at a lag or delay, and the second of which stressed, like Lefebvre, the historical import of socialist modes of production in creating cities fundamentally different from those under capitalism.45 While other scholars argue that neither framework can provide a total explanation, and make the case for the need to turn our attention toward the spatial qualities and histori-

Introduction  19

cal circumstances of specific cities, these debates persist in recent discussions of how to theorize the now postsocialist city.46 Much of the experimental art that engaged Zagreb’s public spaces in the 1970s implicitly operated with an understanding of space that resonates with aspects of Lefebvre’s theory. Namely, artists engaged with space as something material, produced through human action, but unlike a simple object in that it encompassed other material things in a set of dynamic relations with acting subjects. Moreover, they seem to have been attuned to space as an entity that shaped the possibilities for future activity and relation. In Lefebvre’s words: “Itself the outcome of past actions, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others.” 47 This kind of awareness of space is conducive to innovative artistic engagement with an audience. In the 1970s, Zagreb saw the emergence of several aesthetic phenomena involving new interests in crossing boundaries between the artwork and the world beyond it, including audience participation and site-­specificity. These currents are broadly characteristic of global contemporary art; different versions of them emerged in multiple places along parallel timelines, sometimes spontaneously based on local contexts and sometimes facilitated by transnational intellectual networks. In this sense, these phenomena are grounded in local heritages of avant-­garde practice, while their development through a transnational awareness of art in other places also reflected what David Joselit refers to as “debt” to other aesthetic contexts.48 The dimensions of heritage and debt interwove over the course of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries to create art practices that can be legible internationally in some respects but that also respond to their particular localities in ways that are not always transparent when works are viewed out of context. Though scholars have most often considered participatory art practices relative to notions of intersubjectivity and dialogue, they are arguably even more consistently concerned with the importance of space and how certain public spaces enable particular social forms. The question of how innovative uses of space could augment possibilities for human subjectivity was also centrally at stake in the writing of architect and critic Antoaneta Pasinović, who in the 1960s and 1970s published an important body of work that took up specific aspects of Zagreb’s built environment, as well as the larger politics of space and architecture. In her 1972 text “Teze za identifikaciju prostornih vrijednosti” (Theses for the identification of spatial values), published in the magazine Arhitektura, Pasinović defines “spatial value” and architecture’s role in shaping it as follows: Architecture three-­dimensionally encompasses every human action. Simultaneously, the true content of architecture, space, is actual [read: both real and contemporary] exactly as the realization of the possibility for the development of the embodiment of essential human content, which corresponds

20  Introduction

precisely with the aesthetic-­problematic sphere of space, that is, the aesthetic conception of space as color, structure and form. Across this aesthetic functioning, every constructive act of architecture is realized as the perfection, the uplifting of man’s essential human qualities; through aesthetic effect, through spatial value every ethics of the spatial is measured. That which is spatially valuable is good and true in architecture.49

Pasinović theorizes “value” in a fundamentally democratic, human-­centered way as that which maximizes human potential. She defines potential simultaneously as proprioceptive and as a kind of essential human quality; architecture functions ethically when it enables the unfolding of that potential. Architecture is thus for Pasinović a pragmatic but also a utopian practice, guided in the best-­case scenario by this human-­centered ethics. Though the Group of Six Authors and their peers were not architects, Pasinović’s spatial ethics resonates with the way in which they sought to realize new forms of potential through works in public space, which took the form of unpredictable manifestations of colors, images, and forms, accompanied by opportunities to discuss the meaning and value of these sensory inputs. In the process, the artists put subtle pressure on more mainstream organizations of bodies and time within the space of the city and on the aspirational narratives about belonging and productivity organized around each. Those points of pressure could take the form of surprising acts of exhibitionism and also performative rejections of the status quo, as epitomized by Željko Jerman’s large banner This Is Not My World, from which this book takes its title (see Figure I.8). Jerman produced a couple of different versions of this work, including one for the group’s first exhibition-­action under a bridge in Zagreb in 1975 and another the next year, on a visit to Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center (SKC) during the renowned April Meetings, on April 17–­18, 1976. For this event, Jerman wrote the title phrase in photo fixer on a large roll of photographic paper. He then hung the completed work on the exterior facade of the SKC, where it was displayed for only a short time before being taken down on the insistence of some members of the center’s management.50 I will discuss this incident further in chapter 1 vis-­à-­v is the work’s politics within the context of the Belgrade SKC.51 For now, though, note the open-­ endedness of the rejection, which Bago convincingly argues was subversive because, “unlike the loud parading of the slogans of both left and right, the artist does not pretend to know where he is headed or what the alternative to ‘this world’ could be.”52 Jerman and his friends lived in a country that had seen several different rounds of mass mobilization that had failed to produce a world with which they identified. These included the Partisan resistance struggle of World War II; the student protests in Belgrade in 1968, in which students’ mass mobilization was quickly reabsorbed into a political consolidation of the regime; and also the

Figure I.8. Passersby look at Željko Jerman’s This Is Not My World at the exhibition-­action outside the Belgrade SKC, April 17–­18, 1976. Courtesy of Fedor Vučemilović.

22  Introduction

Croatian Spring of 1971, which saw huge protests in support of Croatian ethno­ national self-­determination, against the Yugoslav federation that some thought to be dominated by and skewed in favor of Serbs.53 The Group of Six supported socialism but with an anarchistic bent. As Croats, they were also literally not at home in the capital city of Belgrade, a fact subtly indexed by the Croatian spelling of world on the banner (svijet as opposed to the Serbian variant svet), which in Belgrade’s context would have indicated a variant of the shared language germane to another region. Jerman’s artwork, in short, indexed a sense of outsiderness that was atmospheric and prevalent but not pinned directly to a certain referent or structure of power. This kind of critical positioning raises questions about the artists’ agency relative to dominant power relations in their own context. Though censorship was real, for the Group of Six and their circle the biggest problems with the state-­r un cultural system were its slowness and bureaucracy and the lack of support it offered to artists without professional training (for example, excluding them from the Croatian Union of Artists and thus making them ineligible for important benefits like retirement pensions).54 Ljubica Spaskovska, in her study of Yugoslavia’s youth generation of the 1980s, notes that until the country’s final decade, young people’s critical attitudes toward the system did not result in overt demands for an “exit” from socialism as such.55 Her account parallels Alexei Yurchak’s landmark analysis of the late Soviet context, in which he argues that the core values of the communist state—­equality, community, friendship, education, work, creativity, and concern for the future—­were of great importance for most people, even as they regularly engaged in everyday practices that reinterpreted or transgressed norms presented by the state.56 Yurchak describes Russia’s countercultural scenes of the 1970s and 1980s as vany, simultaneously inside and outside the system, contexts in which participants ignored official events like elections and parades to engage in the “deterritorialized” pursuit of creativity, sociability, and spending time in nature.57 He notes that instead of being “carved out” of the communist system, these practices were in fact widespread models of living under and reworking late communism, specifically through the modification of its spaces and temporalities.58 Though there are clearly important differences between the Yugoslav and Soviet contexts, Yurchak’s description of aesthetic experiences and relational pursuits deterritorialized from socialism’s organization of roles and relationships resonates with the work of the Group of Six and their circle. Notably, Yurchak’s study does not present a theory of how aesthetic activity can be political so much as it uses aesthetic concepts to understand individuals’ relationships to politics—­ for example, through his description of the “poetics” of vocal tone and affect that had huge consequences for how subjects positioned themselves relative to social-

Introduction  23

ist ideology.59 Working on the Yugoslav context, Jakovljević more recently theorizes that performance was central to Yugoslavia’s entire political economy, the linchpin of a form of socialist realism understood not as a rigid visual style but rather as the labor of the representation of labor that revolved around the figure of the individual worker.60 For Jakovljević, experimental art practices functioned in this context to keep alive a nondoctrinaire socialism and a reflection on the relationship between the individual and collective that was shut down at the level of governance through the party’s response to the 1968 protests and the conservative constitutional reforms of 1974.61 Considering Yurchak’s and Jakovljević’s theories together leads me to reflect on how forms of artistic sociality that were unconventional yet not directly oppositional constituted zones that opened other understandings of public and personal relationality. Moreover, the social engagement Susovski identifies as characteristic of the New Art Practice is arguably not diametrically opposed to the disinterest that Yurchak sees as typical of alternative milieus. This is because of the ambivalence of the artists’ engagement with their audiences: at once solicitous and withholding, turned outward toward the city and inward toward the self. Moreover, through bringing their art into public spaces, the artists foregrounded the fact that they spent their time in ways not aligned with socialist understandings of productivity, an assertion of using time otherwise that addressed the politically and affectively loaded nature of Yugoslavia’s unemployment—­a gigantic problem hidden in plain sight, visible and sensible to everyone, yet rarely named within public discourse.62

Chapter Map This Is Not My World is organized into four chapters, plus a conclusion. Each chapter will bring you to a set of key sites in Zagreb and elsewhere to analyze acts of artistic appropriation of space. At the same time, each chapter has a different thematic investment, from analyzing actions in public space to the oeuvres of particular artists and the tactics they employed—­such as performance, photography, and the use of language—­in order to interrogate the relationship between the individual and the public sphere. The historical scope of the book runs from 1975, when the Group of Six Authors held their first exhibition-­action, to 1985. Though the group disintegrated in 1979, fanning out into the city’s larger experimental art scene, I have chosen this later end date because of the crucial ways in which this generation of artists shaped artistic production in the 1980s and, moreover, created works in that decade that reflected in trenchant ways on Yugoslavia’s changing public sphere as the country’s economic and political instability accelerated. Chapter 4 engages closely with the period of the early to mid-­1980s, looking at

24  Introduction

performances such as Vlasta Delimar’s act of standing tied to a tree in a public square in a costume suggesting that she had recently been violated (Tied to a Tree, 1985) and Tomislav Gotovac’s repeated performances of selling newspapers on the central square dressed as the Grim Reaper and other characters. Chapter 1 addresses the exhibition-­actions the Group of Six Authors held in public spaces, where they performed, made and exhibited art, and sought dialogue with passersby. Sites included Zagreb’s Square of the Republic and others associated with leisure, such as the banks of the Sava River in Novi Zagreb and the seaside town of Mošćenička Draga. I pay attention to the implications of sites where the artists were at home, in their “own” city, but also to others where they were visitors, such as a seaside town and the Belgrade SKC, mentioned above. Drawing on a comparative transnational framework for understanding the Group of Six’s particular form of conceptualism, the chapter analyzes the ambivalence with which they approached audiences and the possibilities for dialogue and encounter to which the exhibition-­actions gave rise. The exhibition-­actions ultimately engaged with specific sites in order to manifest a concrete praxis of “lazy” sociability and to flaunt the artists’ outsider status. They thereby connected questions about the function of the art exhibition to a critique of the productive Yugoslav citizen-­subject, a critical project with roots in Yugoslavia’s experimental culture going back to the 1960s. In the exhibition-­actions, the artists’ performances of self became central to audience experiences of the artwork, a shift that has correlates in North American and Western European pop art and conceptualism of the 1960s and 1970s. But whereas artists in those other regions often enacted carefully curated identities that drew on the language of capitalist commercialism, the Group of Six presented themselves and their works in public as aesthetically undone and studiously uncultivated—­a stance that had both aesthetic and political implications in their context. The following three chapters zoom in on the practices of particular artists and the ways that they addressed the public sphere through aesthetic and emotional experimentation with certain media. Chapter 2 expands on the discussion of the ideological position of youth in the former Yugoslavia and how artists responded to it critically and playfully. It takes up the individual practices of Vlado Martek and Mladen Stilinović, in whose work language was central. Through the examination of works using language—­such as Martek’s posters urging passersby to “Read Mayakovsky”—­and the cheap, delicate handmade books both artists made, the chapter analyzes the connections their practices draw between language, education, and creativity. It argues that these works addressed the question of pedagogy in a moment when the politics of the educational institution were defined by the protests of 1968 and the conservative reconsolidation of the state that followed them. In that context, Martek and Stilinović found numerous ways of making

Introduction  25

reading and writing into spatial processes that concerned the body, which enabled them to assert juvenile positions that did not conform to accepted forms of either politics or aesthetics. Chapter 3 focuses on the practice of Željko Jerman and his unique approach to the relationship between photography and subjectivity. Jerman exploited techniques of cameraless mark-­making in which he altered and destroyed photographic negatives and developed them in intentionally botched ways. The chapter argues that he treated photographic development as a performative process in which photographic materials come into direct encounter with the artist’s body to produce a “trace” of his living subjectivity. Making the photographic process performative at the levels of development and image capture gave Jerman an expanded toolbox for addressing questions of intimacy, which in his work emerges both as spatial and as affectively difficult. The chapter devotes extensive attention to Jerman’s magnum opus My Year, 1977, in which he presented a photograph of himself and a short written reflection for every day in 1977. I analyze the work’s treatment of the relationship between intimacy and space and also its relationship to the broader practice of image appropriation within the New Art Practice. The chapter then examines how Jerman’s photographic commitments informed his performance collaborations with Vlasta Delimar—­works that constitute theorizations of intimacy in a world of changing gender relations. Chapter 4 foregrounds the work of two artists who both employed strategies surrounding the critical potential of kitsch. These are Delimar and Tomislav Gotovac, who were both close associates of the Group of Six and in whose practices the performing body was central. Delimar’s work of the 1970s and early 1980s encompassed live individual and collaborative performances and also photo-­ based self-­portraits that reflect an interest in explicit representations of the body and in kitschy, highly gendered found objects and materials. Gotovac began his career as an experimental filmmaker and went on to create eccentric actions in urban space, such as running naked through a busy shopping street screaming, “Zagreb, I love you!” (1981). Gotovac’s work from the 1980s engaged extensively with American film and low-­brow popular culture. The chapter analyzes how both artists used overdetermined kitsch images and objects to create experiences for audiences that combined familiarity and legibility with the strange, the obscure, and the erotic. If the Group of Six presented themselves as hippies whose “lazy” demeanor and sloppy appearance echoed that of their work, Delimar and Gotovac provided an alternate model for the inseparability between artist and artwork by each foregrounding their own specific, gendered corporeality as a key dimension of their works. Finally, the conclusion considers how the artists’ work evolved in relation to changing circumstances of the mid-­1980s and then the war in Croatia (1991–­95),

Figure I.9. Vlasta Delimar, Visual Communication, 1983. Action in Rijeka, Korzo Street. Courtesy of the artist.

Introduction  27

which created a cultural breach and ultimately gave rise to new configurations of public life and space. Today, if you were to walk around Zagreb with one of those old guidebooks from 1959 or 1962, it would act like a guide to ideological change, helping you spot the many streets and squares with new names, such as Square of the Croatian Republic, the erstwhile Marshall Tito Square. The artists analyzed here have responded in different ways to the ethnonationalism of postsocialist Croatia, imagining diverse configurations between personal expression and the public sphere, as their artworks have continued to circulate both at home and abroad.

1

The Square Smiled Site and Subjectivity in the Group of Six Authors’ Exhibition-­Actions

One day in late October 1975, a woman in chunky high heels and a red skirt crossed Zagreb’s Square of the Republic with a purposeful stride, perhaps on her way to catch one of the several trams stopping here in the city’s busy central square. She passed by two long-­haired young men bent down on their knees on the pavement, busy using a pot of white glue to attach twin rows of identical images to the ground. These images showed smiling, shiny lips bared around perfect white teeth, like in an ad for toothpaste or lipstick (see Figure 1.1). Though the passerby in heels kept her efficient stride as she walked by, others in the square stopped to look, perhaps breaking their routines for a few moments on the way back from shopping or watching the spectacle curiously while they waited for a friend or for the right tram to pull up to the stop. Mladen Stilinović had already given out copies of this image, taken from a fashion magazine, to people passing by. Then, with help from Boris Demur, friend and fellow participant in the Group of Six Authors, he glued down two rows of twenty-­five identical images each and let them be walked across by people in the square (see Plate 2). The work in effect passively recruited those pedestrians in the casual desecration of the smile, whose superhuman nature might suggest perfection, artifice, compulsion, ideology, or commercialization, depending on the viewer’s perspective. This was one of a series of works and actions that made up the Group of Six’s important early exhibition-­action on the Square of the Republic on October 25, 1975, the fourth such event they held together.1 The action was held under the auspices of the Center for Photography, Film, and Television (CEFFT), which was part of the City Gallery of Contemporary Art, which helped the Group of Six obtain a police permit for it and also provided a small amount of financial support.2 At the event, passersby could witness the creation of artworks, including Boris Demur’s painted banner Eto (There you have it) (see Figure 1.3), or peruse displayed works such as Fedor Vučemilović’s My Mountains (see Figure 1.4), four black-­and-­white images making up a continuous mountain landscape suspended on wooden supports of varying heights. This chapter analyzes the approximately twenty exhibition-­actions that members of the Group of Six Authors organized between 1975 and 1979. At these events, 29

30  The Square Smiled

Figure 1.1. Appropriated image used by Mladen Stilinović for his work at the Group of Six Authors’ exhibition-­action on the Square of the Republic, Zagreb, October 25, 1975. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić.

group members made and displayed art, performed actions, spoke with curious passersby about their work, and hung out socially, creating a festive, open-­ended atmosphere. Most of the events were held in Zagreb, but others took place elsewhere, such as in the Yugoslav national capital of Belgrade, in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, on the Adriatic island of Cres, or in the sunny coastal beach town of Mošćenička Draga. These events were not the first to make use of public spaces for experimental art in Zagreb or in Yugoslavia more broadly. In 1969, for example, Braco Dimitrijević began his Casual Passersby series, in which he blew up his portraits of anonymous city dwellers into billboards and banners placed in public spaces to create a canny reflection on the relationship between ideology, everyday life, and private experience. But despite such precedents for art in city space, the Group of Six’s exhibition-­actions were trailblazing in their articulation of an iterative mode of working in public and in their explicit reworking of the exhibition as something that, through outdoor locations and a dialogical approach, could become public in a different way. The simple, descriptive name exhibition-­ action (izložba-akcija) that the group gave to these events highlights how the act of showing art became dynamic and performative. In the mission statement for Maj 75, their self-­published artists’ magazine, the group also state that the activity of informing people about the artwork was an artwork itself.3 Beyond any specific performance actions that might unfold at a given event, the exhibition-­actions thus had a broadly performative quality in which art creation and viewing became practices performed to be watched by others. In the process, the art object did not disappear or dissolve into irrelevance but became an emotionally loaded entity whose material porousness enacted the breakdown of boundaries between the intimate and the public. Zagreb’s public sphere was shaped by many cultural currents and political changes over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Long under the

Figure 1.2. Aerial view of the Group of Six Authors’ exhibition-­action on the Square of the Republic, Zagreb, October 25, 1975. Photograph by Fedor Vučemilović.

Figure 1.3. Boris Demur, Eto (There you have it), 1975. Acrylic on paper with site-­specific installation, Group of Six Authors’ exhibition-­action on the Square of the Republic, Zagreb, October 25, 1975. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

The Square Smiled  33

Figure 1.4. Fedor Vučemilović, My Mountains, 1975. Black-­and-­white photographs on wooden supports, Group of Six Authors’ exhibition-­action on the Square of the Republic, Zagreb, October 25, 1975. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

influence of Austria because of Croatia’s domination by the Habsburg monarchy, the Austrian Empire, and then the Austro-­Hungarian Empire up to 1918, Zagreb’s social life changed greatly with the waning of the landed gentry and ascent of the bourgeoisie starting in the late nineteenth century. This period brought new openness to other cultural influences, especially French ones, as well as closer ties to Czech culture and greater international mobility for the population due to new railways and increasing social mobility.4 By the end of the nineteenth century, the city had a robust world of cafés, where people could meet, drink, read the international press, and discuss ascendant ideas about a Yugoslav state promoted by cultural figures, such as the internationally renowned sculptor Ivan Meštrović.5 Following the horrific trauma of occupation by the NDH Nazi puppet regime in World War II, the foundation of the Yugoslav socialist state by the victorious Partisan resistance initiated yet another round of changes to the public sphere and the models of subjectivity that attended it. Despite the state’s central premise of empowering workers via self-­management socialism, Bojana Cvejić and Ana Vujanović argue that its presentation of itself as representative of the people forcibly displaced the public sphere as a space of mediation between the people and the state, and with it the possibility of pluralistic expression.6 The Group of Six’s exhibition-­actions show, on the contrary, that some forms of pluralistic expression

34  The Square Smiled

were indeed possible. At the same time, the group’s acts of expression sought not to propose a more perfect representational relationship between the people and the state but to trouble the logic of representation through messy conceptual artworks and the presentation of the artist as a desiring, emotional, opaque subject. The artworks, moreover, addressed public space as a realm populated by multiple conflicting messages that included state propaganda, the commercialism germane to Yugoslav market socialism, and the personal interventions and creativity of city dwellers themselves. Because the Group of Six used public spaces differently, their exhibition-­ actions stand in a perhaps overdetermined relationship to Michel de Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City” from The Practice of Everyday Life. Originally published in French in 1981, shortly after the Group of Six stopped organizing these events in 1979, de Certeau’s essay has become a signal text for understanding everyday urban life as a field of practices and tactics that resist the administrative, disciplinary function of the city.7 “Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city,” de Certeau writes, “the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer.”8 It is tempting to read the exhibition-­actions in de Certeau’s terms, as exemplars of knowledge from below, which helped imagine a city that would no longer be a terrain of bureaucratic socialism and disrupted the ossified social relations that accompanied it. But that reading is contravened by the events’ legal status and their attitude toward their audiences. The exhibition-­actions were, for the most part, countercultural but not illegal, and they were officially held under the auspices of the city’s preeminent contemporary art gallery. The artists obtained compulsory police permits for all their actions except a few, such as a walk around Zagreb holding artworks in 1977 that did not technically count as a public gathering. Moreover, the Group of Six’s work rejected any straightforward politics of resistance, and as I will demonstrate throughout this chapter, did not embrace passerby audiences wholeheartedly as cocreators of a new public sphere. The exhibition-­actions might instead best be described as correlates to the forms of Soviet alternative culture that Alexei Yurchak describes as vany: cultural practices that existed inside or alongside the dominant system without seeking aggressively to confront that system, yet that still used time and space otherwise in ways that reworked extant socialist ideologies for new ways of being.9 The exhibition-­actions were not perceived as major symbolic threats to the system: a short report on the 1978 central square action in the mainstream newspaper Večernji list referred to it as a “pleasant surprise” to passersby.10 The Yugoslav cultural and political milieu was one in which the different visions of art and subjecthood that the artists materialized could exist without persecution or scandal and simply be ignored or not engaged in by the majority of people who had more mainstream tastes and values. At their exhibition-­actions on the Square

The Square Smiled  35

of the Republic, held in 1975 and 1978, the group recorded the spoken responses of some viewers to their works. Responses included the following: “Well there you go, they’re amateurs.” “They’re some kind of epileptics.” “I read in the paper there would be an exhibition, and this is stupidity!” “They’re students. They’re raising money to go to the seaside.”11 Rather than being seen as threatening or even seriously frowned upon, the exhibition-­actions were more smirked at or shrugged off by many viewers. The ambivalence was mutual. My analysis will demonstrate that through the format of the exhibition-­actions, the artists approached nonspecialist viewers as both conceptually necessary to their interests in chance and in the everyday and paradoxically also as unengaged and unenlightened representatives of mass culture whose conformism was exactly what the artists sought to reject. In opposition to that conformism, the exhibition-­actions opened up an ethics of intimacy that was exciting yet elusive and that suggested but did not by any means guarantee new forms of connection between experimental art and the public. This notion of intimacy was sometimes connected explicitly to subject matter that signified as private: exposed bodies, declarations of love, personal photographs. But it exceeded that specific content to become a structure of more generalized boundary-­ crossing between artworks and their surroundings and between artists and their public. That mode of working drew on various dimensions of a broader European history of conceptualism and was also highly responsive to the signification of diverse public spaces, which the artists occupied in ways that inverted their typical function. Their actions of aesthetic boundary-­crossing were also exhibitionistic acts of spending time for ends not traditionally productive, which rejected the Yugoslav ideal of the social, enthusiastic worker-­citizen.

Zagreb’s Earliest Art Projects in Public Space In the early 1970s, members of the Group of Six were mostly in their late teens or very early twenties, in the nascent stages of developing their individual artistic practices, whether in school or outside of it (a nine-­year age difference separated Mladen Stilinović, the group’s oldest member, born in 1947, from his baby brother Sven and Fedor Vučemilović, the youngest members, both born in 1956). In Zagreb’s broader artistic milieus, the early part of that decade saw developments that were important in claiming the city’s public spaces as potential loci for creative activity.12 The projects that took place in public in Zagreb in the early 1970s ranged both in the extent to which they were institutionally based and in terms of how much they privileged individual artistic creativity versus other forms of activism, urbanism, and visual culture. Particularly formative was The City as a Space of Plastic Happening, the experimental “Proposals” section of the 1971 Zagreb Salon,

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which was the first curatorial event in Yugoslavia to focus explicitly on urban space and which framed art as a social “plastic practice” with transformative potential.13 The 1971 salon was the occasion for the creation of Gorgona member Ivan Kožarić’s Grounded Sun, a two-­meter sphere in gold plexiglass initially installed on Marshal Tito Square.14 Grounded Sun was Zagreb’s first noncommemorative and nonfigurative public sculpture and as such drew both curiosity and occasional aggression from city dwellers.15 Also in 1971, Zagreb’s City Gallery hosted Possibilities for 1971, with contributors including Sanja Iveković, Gorki Žuvela, Braco Dimitrijević, Goran Trbuljak, and Jagoda Kaloper, artists who were around the same age as Mladen Stilinović and a little older than most members of the Group of Six. In the project’s catalog, Davor Matičević asserts that the drive to exit “dead and artificial” museums and galleries for public spaces was notably a generational tendency among these artists. They were, he writes, interested less in “individual artistic considerations in isolated privacy” than in a socially engaged practice that highlights everyday reality, with “simple” ideas and execution “in order to be communicative and in order to have the halo of sanctity taken away from art.”16 However, as Ivana Bago points out, the tension between the desire for art to be socially engaged and for it to be unique and expressive was in fact a defining contradiction of the project, as was the organized, institutional framework from within which it attempted to exit supposedly deadening art institutional spaces.17 Other projects of the 1970s more explicitly embraced politicized understandings of art and highlighted the creative, unpredictable nature of urban space itself. Key in this respect was Grupa TOK (the FLOW Group), which formed in 1972 for the second edition of The City as a Space of Plastic Happening and responded directly to the public artistic projects of 1971 and to the Croatian Spring of the same year, which had given rise to mass protests advocating greater power and visibility for a Croatian national identity. Maja Fowkes describes Grupa TOK’s work as a “critical revision” of art displayed in the street the previous year, one that was animated by a socially and ecologically conscious spirit and by the desire to explore and strengthen the relationships between different parts of the changing city of Zagreb, especially between the historical center and the newly constructed residential areas of Novi Zagreb.18 Grupa TOK’s activities of 1972 included the artists cleaning the streets on their hands and knees and creating see-­through garbage cans designed to heighten people’s awareness of what they threw away.19 Also in the 1970s, architect and scholar Fedor Kritovac took photographs documenting uses of urban space, such as the piling up of garbage.20 Kritovac’s garbage photos reveal how everyday acts like stacking trash combined with urban planning to shape city space. His images are effectively documents of a kind of ambient creativity that inheres in the practices of city life but is not attached to named authors. A 1977 exhibition at Zagreb’s Student Center gallery reflected a parallel interest in collective creativity and the way it shaped the city’s visual culture. For

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Figure 1.5. Mladen Stilinović, May 1st, 1975 (detail), 1975. Black-­and-­ white photos published as artist’s book. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić.

that show, entitled Writing-­Painting (Pismoslikarstvo), the gallery borrowed hand-­ painted signs from local businesses and curated an exhibition entirely made up of them.21 Right around the same time as the Writing-­Painting show, Mladen Stilinović created several series of photographs documenting handmade city signage, including signs and decorations for the May 1 celebration of International Workers’ Day (May 1, 1975, 1975) (see Figure 1.5), the fronts of photography studios displaying quotidian portraits (Photographed Photographs, 1975), signs advertising mechanic shops and the regional specialty of lamb roasted on a spit (alternated with each other in Letter and Image, 1976), and signs for hairdressers (Hairdressers, 1977). These series provide the viewer with opportunities to reflect on the emergence of certain aesthetic conventions of commercial self-­presentation in urban

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signage, which become articulated over the course of especially awkward acts of representation. You can see the curious preference for white-­on-­black paintings of amateurishly rendered models and their fashionable haircuts and the consistently misshapen, blob-­like forms of roasted lamb, which truly strain the limits of recognizability. Notably, the photographs of May 1, 1975 also include images documenting a now-­famous action Stilinović created in the city that day in which he hung banners with the messages “Ađo loves Stipa” and “Stipa loves Ađo” across a street between two buildings and around the trunk of a tree. These inclusions inserted an intimate message about the love between himself (Ađo) and his partner Branka Stipančić (Stipa) into the ideological glorification of the Party and Tito that abounded in the city. The inclusion of these images of Stilinović’s intervention among the documentation of May 1 signage illustrates a point that is obvious yet important when considering the work of the Group of Six Authors and their peers: at stake here are both an interest in the city as a locus for individual artistic action and an interest in city space as a particular form of visual culture shaped by agents with different kinds of power. That duality is visible in a great many works of the period by group members, such as Fedor Vučemilović’s act of asking passersby to photograph him in front of Belgrade’s signature high-­rise Beograđanka (built 1969–­70), creating a meeting between what was then a distinctly modern icon of the city and unpredictable, inexpert acts of street photography. Vlasta Delimar, in her 1981 work My Daily Visual Communication on the Relation Voćarska Street 5—­Kvaternik Square took a series of photographs of pedestrians and storefronts on her fifteen-­minute walk from her and Željko Jerman’s home in Voćarska Street to the nearby shopping square (I discuss this work further in chapter 4). Delimar also did a performance in the shopping street of Korzo in Rijeka in 1983 (illustrated at the end of the book’s introduction, in Figure I.9), in which she wrote the names of stores and brands visible in her vicinity on a long piece of paper in the middle of the pedestrian street. Jerman, as I will discuss in chapter 3, made a year-­long diaristic work that documents his daily life and foregrounds its relationship to certain types of space, especially courtyards and doorways, which represent liminal zones between interior and exterior. The dual engagement with public space that these works reflect, as both as a venue for intervention and as a representation or palimpsest of various power relations, was a connecting thread throughout the exhibition-­actions.

The Basics of Site Relative to the earlier public art projects discussed above, the Group of Six established an ongoing practice, or what I might describe as a habit, of working in public space. Moreover, though the group sometimes held an event where they had already done so before (like in the central Square of the Republic), in general they

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sought out a variety of locations, indicating that the act of bringing their work to different sites was important to them. Each action took on a particular character shaped in large part by its site, and the artists were attentive to those variations. For a group of young artists who in the 1970s were careless or even neglectful toward their physical artworks, the Group of Six Authors kept pretty good track not only of what they each exhibited or performed at every exhibition-­action but moreover of the general character of every event. To return to the exhibition-­action in Square of the Republic in 1975 with which I began, this action is described in the group’s 1977 catalog of their activities as their biggest and busiest one to date: Experience with a larger number of viewers -­conversations, discussions, explanations; information about the works and the works functioned equally. Discussion and information maximally problematized the work itself and the whole exhibition.22

In an article written after the action and published in the student newspaper Studentski list, Mladen Stilinović notes that some of the activities conducted at this event were planned in advance and some unfolded spontaneously on the spot. The idea that each artist’s selection of works for a given event was individual and not coordinated with his friends was important to the Group of Six.23 However, at this particular action a preponderance of works pointed to questions of presence in space and time, in some cases alongside what seem to be commentaries on the nature of Square of the Republic. In the first category, Željko Jerman exhibited two large banners made by writing in fixer on photographic paper, one of which declared “i love you” and the other of which recorded the recent date of September 5, 1975 (written in Croatian as “5.9.1975.”). The choice to write in fixer on photographic paper brought attention to the moment of the work’s creation, a specificity that chafed subtly with the declaration of love (supposedly eternal but often grounded in a particular moment of passion) and the already out-­of-­date statement of the date. I Love You put pressure on the question of address by broadcasting an intimate statement in a large format to a sizable, anonymous audience, giving the work a simultaneous sense of grand gesture and banal meaninglessness. Jerman also created a work by drawing on the ground around the square’s iconic public clock, the first one to be erected in the city, which was brought from Vienna in 1920 and which serves Zagrebites to this day as a habitual meeting place in the busy square. He painted a line in red on the ground pointing north labeled “XII,” which would show the correct time at noon, but another pointing south labeled “VI,” which would show an incorrect time because of Zagreb’s location in the Northern Hemisphere (see Figure 1.6). He thus in effect turned the clock, a mechanical device consistently showing the correct time, into a site-­specific sundial that would only be correct at one time of day. Vučemilović exhibited My Mountains, mentioned above, and performed another work in which he invited passersby to

Figure 1.6. Željko Jerman, action at the Group of Six Authors’ exhibition-­action on the Square of the Republic, Zagreb, October 25, 1975. Photograph by Fedor Vučemilović.

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Figure 1.7. Boris Demur and Vlado Martek making Demur’s Eto (There you have it), 1975. acrylic on paper with site-­specific installation, Group of Six Authors’ exhibition-­action on the Square of the Republic, Zagreb, October 25, 1975. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

photograph him. While the first work juxtaposed images of an idyllic natural elsewhere with the urban here-­and-­now, the second foregrounded passersby as partners in making images but prevented them from seeing the images they produced. One of the largest visual statements of this exhibition-­action was the work Boris Demur created with help from Vlado Martek (see Figure 1.7). Demur took a big, thick piece of paper of about ten by ten feet, then, with Martek’s assistance, painted it entirely black, with the exception of one quadrangle, perhaps three feet wide, painted bright yellow. In block capitals in that yellow area he used black again to write “eto,” a modal interpellation that indicates that a certain fact is true and needs no further discussion (as in, “Well, there you have it, we lost the match” [“Eto, izgubili smo utakmicu”]). Once the painting was completed, Demur hung it up on a fat, round pillar used for posting bills and advertisements, one of the familiar locations for legal posting in a city where the presence and content of print materials was strictly controlled. Demur’s work constituted a hinge between two dimensions of how the exhibition-­action addressed site. First, as I have been discussing, it acted as a sort of generalized index pointing toward presentness, being-­here in a particular moment. It reflected Demur’s broader focus on adapting the linguistic strategies of analytical conceptualism to limn the being-­for-­and-­in-­ itself of the artwork, an immanence inseparable from the site or situation of its perception. The word eto reinforced a sense of presentness, pointing to the reality of the artwork’s situation as if to suggest it was not amenable to interpretation or elaboration. Simultaneously, this and other works highlighted the ideologically loaded character of the square as a space of messaging, which the artists saw as coming

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from both state and commercial sources. Demur conceived Eto as a direct comment on Yugoslavia’s post-­1968 consumer society.24 The 1960s saw a series of changes to the central government’s exercise of economic control, with a move toward decentralization, enabling greater foreign investment, and measures such as tariff elimination and currency devaluation geared at making the country more competitive in international free markets.25 Major student protests rocked the capital, Belgrade, in 1968, but students’ calls for a more transparent and accountable socialism were ultimately reabsorbed by the regime, paving the way for the conservative reorganization of the country’s economy around the concept of “associated labor” in the 1974 constitution.26 The moment of 1976 in which Demur produced Eto was one where many young people experienced themselves as living in a society both socialist and increasingly consumerist but where the good life that commodities promised was increasingly unavailable to the legions of unemployed people and any possibility of collective political mobilization for positive change felt naive and remote. In this context, Eto employed scale, text, and site-­specific installation in ways that played strategically with questions about the ambiguity of public messaging and address and with notions of implicit versus explicit meaning. In terms of scale, the closest parallel to the size of the text in the Square of the Republic were the signs with the names of stores and brands that adorned the facades and tops of buildings; large billboards for individual commercial products were nonexistent in the city center in this period. In addition to those signs, the advertising pillars provided space for more specific ads and announcements. Demur wrapped the work around a pillar, blacking out its other messages with a word both simple and elusive: “Well, there you go” or “Well, there you have it.” The word means almost nothing on its own, functioning in speech to refer to a situation that is contextually obvious to both speaker and listener. What messages or states of affairs, the work seems to ask, are obvious to everyone in this context? What is clear, and what is opaque? To what extent does life in this place bring with it common understandings of reality? Is the artwork a simple, physical thing—­ there you have it—­or an entity capable of directing viewers to some kind of deeper reflection or understanding? In another work shown that day, Jerman explored similar questions about the relationship between art, context, and ideology. This work had the words “Life -­not slogans” (“Život -­a ne parole”) juxtaposed over a background made up of collaged newspaper clippings. When displayed in the square, the work might read as a sort of meta-­comment on the function of the exhibition-­action: an assertion of “life,” embodied in the interactive and open-­ended exhibition format, over and against the “slogans” of official accounts of national events and the assertion of ideological positions that newspapers represented. The physical square could itself of course be the site of political sloganeering, whether via overtly ideological state-­sponsored events or the Yugoslav flags that sometimes adorned the space,

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more implicitly through the ubiquitous police presence that maintained a certain orderly vision of public socialist life, or in the huge Croatian Spring protests of 1971, when thousands of people gathered here to waive placards and shout slogans asserting the desire for greater Croatian national visibility and power within the Yugoslav federation. Stilinović’s pasted smiles with which I opened also indexed several layers of interpretation concerning the ideological nature of the square and the kinds of experience that the exhibition-­action might enable there. First, note that Stilinović both pasted the postcards on the ground and handed them out to passersby, making it clear that the address was personal. In a text entitled “Actions in Open Space,” which Stilinović published in Studentski list after the action concluded, he wrote that, thanks to the pasting action, “the square smiled.”27 This comment is brief but rich for interpretation. First, certain passersby probably did smile with amusement or surprise when they saw the images pasted to the ground; the comment casts them as embodiments of “the square” itself. But the action also put a literal smile onto the terrain of the square, and the nature of that smile—­feminized, presentational, and manic—­suggests that, in addition to a smile of amusement, it is a smile of compliance, of social pressure, or of the performance of ideology. A version of the same image Stilinović hand-­colored red that year stressed this ideological dimension. Stilinović’s lo-­fi temporary intervention thus invited reflection on how the square was a space of collective attention, including for amusing and surprising phenomena, and a space for the compelled enactment of ideology and rigid forms of behavior. Pasting the images down where passersby would walk over them let those people passively enact a performance of destruction of the ideological smile, but it also stressed the heedlessness and routine nature of their passage through space. Moreover, the work used an image from a commercial advertisement in a way that had implications for questions of state ideology, playing with the ambiguity of those levels of messaging in a market socialist context. The works discussed here epitomized conceptual modes of art making, in the sense that they were rigorously critical of their own structures, sought to analyze the power relationships at play in their context of display, and relentlessly undid familiar notions of aesthetic pleasure. Their formal eclecticism seems to fit with Sol LeWitt’s description of the arbitrary nature of form for conceptual artists: “Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the artist may use any form, from an expression of words (written or spoken) to physical reality, equally.”28 At the same time, the cheap materials and provisional nature of the Group of Six’s works were important to how these works functioned in their context and thus to their ontology. For example, with Stilinović’s pasted smiles, the disposable material of thin cardboard and its physical vulnerability were key to the way in which it became destroyed by being walked on, as people passed over it unhindered by possibly worrying about stepping on something valuable. With Demur’s Eto, the

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use of paper and acrylic paint to produce the large, quick-­drying painting on-­site put the process of the work’s production on display to passersby, a dimension of many of the exhibition-­actions that, as I will argue later, had implications for notions of labor. Another crucial tactic in the Group of Six’s address to the conditions of commodity socialism was their appropriation of found images and objects. This move was especially important to the work of Mladen Stilinović, Vlado Martek, and Željko Jerman (as I will analyze in chapter 3), as well as, for example, in Vučemilović’s piece showing a picture of Michelangelo’s David bearing dots that mirrored Vučemilović’s own moles, one of his many celebrations of fascination with his own appearance. Notably, while group members’ use of found objects located their works squarely in the material reality of commodity socialism, such appropriations are also some of the clearest illustrations of how the artists’ subjectivities were shaped by their male privilege. Especially in Stilinović’s and Martek’s works, treatments of commodification and the feminine often emerge in tandem, signifying commodified pleasure and thereby ambivalent attitudes toward that pleasure. For example, for a 1976 day of actions at Mošćenička Draga on the Adriatic coast, Martek created In Place of a Poem, consisting of five pairs of women’s underwear in different sizes spread out on the rocky beach, held down by pebbles (see Figure 1.8). The piece was sexual in several respects, including via its use of mass-­produced garments literally designed to be in contact with women’s genitals and the placement of the underwear on the beach, which evoked its removal for swimming or potentially for sex. The documentation image of Martek resting with eyes closed on the pebbles below the work gives it the feeling of a surrealist dream about sex and commodity fetishism and connects it directly to his personal pleasure. In Mladen Stilinović’s work, an engagement with the commodified feminine emerged especially via his interest in pornography. Some works from the 1970s employed appropriated porn images, such as an untitled 1978 work showing three images with star-­shaped stickers in yellow, green, and red stuck over key points of contact between bodies: where a tongue meets a vulva, where the tip of a penis touches a woman’s lip, and at the site of penis-­in-­vagina penetration. In the context of Stilinović’s persistent interest in deconstructions of the signs and color symbolism of the socialist state, the image on the right with the red stars reads as a juxtaposition of Yugoslavia’s cardinal red star onto porn, inviting subversive readings about the intersections between ideology and pleasure under commodity socialism. The authorial positions of male privilege indexed in these works were also reflected in all six group members’ ability to navigate public space without fear of gendered violence or discrimination and in their ability to resignify notions of labor and productivity connected to the normative masculine subject of discourses of both work and art in Yugoslavia.29 I will discuss those resignifications later in

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Figure 1.8. Vlado Martek, In Place of a Poem, 1976. Action at the exhibition-­action at Mošćenička Draga, June 27–­28, 1976. Photograph by Fedor Vučemilović.

the chapter, after laying a foundation for that analysis through positioning their work vis-­à-­v is currents of conceptualism in neighboring countries both socialist and capitalist. The Group of Six’s treatments of the relationship between concept and materiality, and their engagement with the relational dimension of conceptualism, resulted in artworks that meditated on the ambivalence of their own relationship to context and audience.

Warm Conceptualism In Yugoslavia in the 1970s, the label “conceptual art” could be applied to numerous art practices, both domestic and foreign. Nena Baljković, in a contribution to the New Art Practice catalog in which she discusses the Group of Six, articulates a now widely accepted historical contextualization of the group’s work as following in the footsteps of earlier important conceptual art created by Goran Trbuljak and Braco Dimitrijević starting in 1969. Baljković presents the Group of Six as building on Trbuljak’s and Dimitrijević’s interest in the way art is shaped by its context, to analyze the nature of signification, authorship, and artistic medium.30 In part because of the existence of these different cohorts of conceptual artists in Zagreb,

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the work of the Group of Six and their direct peers, such as Sanja Iveković and Dalibor Martinis, is often referred to by critics as “postconceptual.” But this difference in terminology may not be especially significant, because the larger aesthetic and intellectual formation of conceptualism bears in varied ways on the work of many artists from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Mladen Stilinović, in interviews in the first decade of the 2000s, gave intriguing texture to the notion of conceptualism as it pertained to his cohort. He described seeking to make the creation of individual artworks as simple as possible but not to mechanize them, thereby creating things characterized by a certain “warmth” that held conceptual and aesthetic importance.31 He characterized that approach as typical of his generation of conceptualists in Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe more broadly, who, in contrast to the machinic neatness and regularity of much Western conceptual art, embraced a “poor” aesthetic. I will elaborate further on parallels between the Group of Six and the Italian Arte Povera below. For now, note how Stilinović argued that the kind of aesthetic poverty he described was symptomatic of a lack of access to advanced technology and luxurious support staff, as well as a lack of market for the art.32 Stilinović’s comments form part of a larger discussion about the specificity of conceptualism in Central and Eastern Europe vis-­à-­v is other global variants. That conversation is ultimately inseparable from wider analyses of the specificity of postmodern and contemporary art practice in the region and how its legacy can be ethically managed in critical and institutional practices in the postsocialist present.33 Stilinović’s 1992 artwork An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist and his 1993 manifesto “In Praise of Laziness,” in which he asserts the value of Eastern aesthetic laziness as key to the very nature of art, demonstrate his preoccupation with these larger questions in the period directly after newly independent Croatia broke off from the former Yugoslavia.34 His claim for a certain critical potential not inherent in Western art resonates with the thought of other commentators. For example, Czech critic Helena Kontova commented in a 2016 interview with Klara Kemp-­Welch that Eastern European art of the 1970s embodied a “moment of authenticity” lacking in Western art at the time.35 László Beke, in his analysis of East European conceptualism for Luis Camnitzer’s 1999 catalog Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–­1980s, frames it in related terms as inherently utopian and antiauthoritarian in nature: art was “always ready to become a social activity of a group of young people or even an alternative movement.”36 Beke’s most expansive but also most simplistic assertion is that the function of conceptualism in this context may have been to pave the way for social and political change and that, once that change was accomplished, it could disappear from the mainstream of contemporary art.37 Despite claims for a Central/East European art more critical, more authentic, and less market-­driven than Western conceptualism, there is in fact little consensus about whether it is useful to generalize about conceptualism across the region

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and what should be the grounds for doing so.38 As Kemp-­Welch documents, those disagreements are not new. The famous Works and Words exhibition held at de Appel in Amsterdam in 1979 already occasioned disagreement among participant artists about whether they should be grouped together based on geography, with Hungarian and Yugoslav participants being particularly vocal about the problematic way the category “Eastern European” prevented a contextualization of artists within relevant international developments.39 Moreover, conceptualism in Central and East European contexts consistently existed in different forms of contact and dialogue with the West. As Piotr Piotrowski describes in conversation with Zdenka Badovinac and others, the West functioned as a “mirror” through which Euro­ peans under socialism understood their own practices. But it was a distorted mirror in the sense that East European artists underestimated the import of the Left in the formation of Western conceptualism, because their own ideological contexts made it hard for them to see socialism as resistant to dominant power structures.40 At the same time, conceptualism was conducive to international networking activity, thus bringing artists into contact with others’ perspectives and histories.41 For Piotrowski, Central and East European conceptualism was characteristically undemanding at a technical level, which made it accessible to nonprofessionals, and heterogeneous in a way that reflected the nature of cultural production in a geopolitical margin, where there is typically less commitment to doctrinal purity than in the center.42 But he also warns against overemphasizing Eastern Euro­ pean conceptualism’s distance from “classic” conceptualism, because tautological and language-­based forms were present throughout the region (just as “warm” and analytical forms were both present in the West, too). Considering the work of the Group of Six qua conceptualism, two dimensions are especially important. The first is the relationship between the idea and its materialization, which encompasses both the details of the materiality of particular works and the ways that appropriated images and objects functioned in this art, which I just discussed. The second key dimension is the social or relational nature of conceptually driven practices. Within a broadly European comparative framework of the 1960s and 1970s, questions about materiality find resonance in the work of the Group of Six’s Slovene colleagues OHO and Arte Povera in neighboring Italy, whereas their approach to relationality bears fruitful comparison to conceptual practices by Moscow-­based Collective Actions and the Polish duo KwieKulik. OHO’s analysis of the relationships between objects and subjects under commodity socialism was an important precedent for the Group of Six’s rendering of materiality. OHO’s first exhibition outside of Slovenia was at Zagreb’s SC Gallery in 1968, and their work circulated to the other republics via Ljubljana-­based student publications.43 At that 1968 show, Exhibition of Shoes, Marko Pogačnik showed his Plaster Casts of Bottles and Other Objects, plaster casts made from mass-­produced bottles that turned viewers’ attention toward the shapes and dimensions of everyday

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consumer objects but also stripped those objects of their labels and thus their identities. OHO’s work moreover acted as a kind of conduit through which other global currents came to circulate regionally. In Marijan Susovski’s 1978 catalog for The New Art Practice, Tomaž Brejc noted Arte Povera as among those influences.44 Indeed, the relations Arte Povera established between concept, human body, and the materiality of the art object also constitute a meaningful parallel for the work of the Group of Six. This is so despite the distance between the Group of Six’s late-­1970s political irony and ambivalence and the early understandings of Arte Povera as a form of revolutionary class warfare, which critic Germano Celant saw as explicitly allied with the global student protests of 1968.45 The magazine Data, edited by Tommaso Trini was read within art circles in Zagreb, fostering a familiarity with Arte Povera’s history and the ongoing work of its members.46 Stilinović’s comment about a handmade “warmth” inherent in his artworks denotes a quality that is both material and affective; it indicates the nature of a physical thing but also a sense of invitation that concerns the body of the viewer. Moreover, his description of Western conceptualism as “machinic” bears an interesting parallel to Benjamin Buchloh’s observation that Arte Povera took an antitechnological stance, informed by “the Italian misreading of American Minimalist sculpture [that] emphasized technology as its primary mode of production.” 47 Celant, in his 1968 text “Arte Povera,” situates “poor” art at the convergence between the ideological world of conventional aesthetic production and life itself. Importantly, Celant posits that for Arte Povera, tautology—­a hallmark of analytic conceptualism—­is necessary material: “The sea is water, a room is a perimeter of air, cotton is cotton, the world is an imperceptible set of nations, a corner is the convergence of three coordinates, the floor is an area of tiles, life is a series of actions.” 48 In a strikingly similar formulation, Stilinović stated in “In Praise of Laziness” that “just as money is but paper, a gallery is but a room.” 49 For Celant, the artist who draws attention to these nonrepresentational equations “plac[es] himself at the point where idea and image converge, becom[ing] the true protagonist of the event.”50 In an essay of the same year, “New Alphabet for Body and Matter,” Tommaso Trini notes in Arte Povera a similar turn toward questions of subjecthood from between the polarity of art and life.51 Near the end of his text, in a discussion of the work of Giovanni Anselmo, Celant specifies one particular way in which a turn to subjectivity can occur via the object. Anselmo’s objects, he writes, come alive at the moment of their assembly. They do not exist as autonomous, “immutable entities”; they convey a sense of recomposing themselves each time in the context of a situation that depends on direct human interaction, becoming “alive as a function of our life.”52 In their sense of contingent dependence on a situation that involves the viewer, these objects have an alive, corporeal quality; they are distinct from the viewer’s body but are body-­like on their own terms. A case in point is Anselmo’s Untitled (Sculpture That Eats) of 1968, in which a piece

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Figure 1.9. Vlado Martek, Just Tell Me Please on Which Shelf to Place My Heart, 1973. Poetic object. Courtesy of Darko Šimičić.

of wire is used to tie a smaller block of granite to a larger, upright block of stone, squishing a large head of lettuce in between. If the sculpture is left on display long enough, the lettuce will wither and desiccate, letting the small block fall to the ground. The sculpture therefore “eats” the lettuce, and eats away at its own structural integrity, through setting in motion a slow process of falling apart that will unfold just by virtue of the materials Anselmo employed. A parallel focus on the fundamentally material but also contextually contingent nature of the art object is at play in Vlado Martek’s early “poetic object” of 1973, Just Tell Me Please on Which Shelf to Place My Heart (see Figure 1.9). In this work,

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Martek presents four slender books of poetry by Bartolo Cattafi, Antonio Machado, W. H. Auden, and Nelly Sachs. The dilapidated cover of Sachs’s book is wrapped around backward to envelop the stack, with the artwork’s title phrase scrawled on its inside. The whole is stuck through with two long nails that, at a practical level, hold it together and affectively seem almost to crucify the books. The work uses the books as readymades, making them unreadable and turning them into an object to be looked at, in a gesture that recalls Marcel Broodthaers’s Pense-­Bête of 1964. Rachel Haidu argues that Pense-­Bête stages the pathos of Broodthaers’s artistic identity as a successful artist but failed poet; Martek’s artwork is also characterized by a certain melodramatic pathos.53 However, whereas Broodthaers used books of his own poetry, Martek takes volumes by powerful modernist masters and makes them into his own “heart,” complete with a red/pink color scheme from the covers of the Sachs and Auden books. Martek thus renders the act of bearing one’s “heart” via poetry as urgent but also painful, and even somewhat tawdry. The title also states that the heart is being placed on a “shelf,” which arguably implies not only that it is publicly on display but also potentially for sale. Moreover, the phrasing of the title, the same text that is written across the reversed cover, is in the formal address that would characterize exchanges between strangers in public, including in a store or at the market. These different layers of the work come together to interpolate the viewer as someone who receives something precious and intimate but encounters it in an everyday transactional context. The work thus stresses its own unfreedom: its form is physically bound; it is the object of conventions both social and poetic; it fails to exit the routine, transactional everyday. But the work also proposes that when you receive the bleeding heart of poetry it might scratch you and make you bleed. Compared to the poverty of the materials in Just Tell Me Please, Anselmo’s use of marble blocks seems quite bombastic. Martek’s work goes even further in stressing that its coherence as an object is functional and contingent but still visceral. Its material contingency and vulnerability heighten its emotional nature. A more cool-­headed engagement with the nature of materials played out in the same period in the art of Demur, who, of all the members of the Group of Six, practiced the most classically analytic conceptualism. At the same 1975 exhibition-­action in Square of the Republic discussed above, Demur exhibited twenty-­t wo black-­ and-­white photos documenting his action Changing the Position of Pebbles in the Hand (see Figure 1.10). The images show the artist’s slender hand outstretched, holding pebbles arranged differently in each photograph, against the ground of a beach from which he clearly scooped them up. The action is so simple as to barely rise above the level of an everyday gesture, but it nonetheless foregrounds the materiality of the stones, their specific weight and feel while held in the hand, and the nature of the conceptual artwork as infinite material variation on a core

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Figure 1.10. Boris Demur, Changing the Position of Pebbles in the Hand, 1975. Photodocumented action. Shown at the Group of Six Authors’ exhibition-­action on the Square of the Republic, Zagreb, October 25, 1975. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

proposition. In the later 1970s, Demur also created “analytical sculpture” works such as geometric arrangements made out of sugar cubes (1978) and an action in which he pounded an orange-­sized stone into gravel using a mallet (1977). These works are careful explorations of materials insofar as the artist is able to draw out, manipulate, and alter their properties—­acts that bring a heightened awareness to the temporal contingency of the artworks’ unfolding. Demur’s text-­based works also embraced a rigorous approach to the immanence of the work with its material conditions, which takes on an ethical dimension in terms of performing a kind of rigorously meditative artistic subjectivity. For example, the 1977 work Time, Light, Support, and Space Are United in This Work through Each Inscribed Black Letter shows this phrase written in felt-­tip pen at the top of a piece of paper (see Figure 1.11).54 That work is a bare, descriptive, tautological statement of how the act of writing and the resulting text embody dimensions of the aesthetic, which both directs viewers’ perception toward the stark plainness of the material work and conveys an almost spiritual sense of the inaccessibility to the senses of the work’s true significance. Members of the Group of Six also used materials in ways that highlighted the

Figure 1.11. Boris Demur, Time, Light, Support, and Space Are United in This Work through Each Inscribed Black Letter, 1977. Felt-­tip pen on paper, 29.5 × 21.1 cm. Courtesy of Kontakt Art Collection.

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Figure 1.12. Sven Stilinović, site-­specific action with paper towel at the Group of Six Authors’ exhibition-­action on Jesuit Square, in the old city of Zagreb, evening of June 14, 1975. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

actual shape or dimensions of certain spaces. These treatments of space constituted a crucial hinge between their interest in the vulnerable, porous, and disposable materiality of artworks and the relational implications of conceptualism. Mladen Stilinović’s pasted smiles discussed above and Demur’s Eto are examples of works that made this connection. So is the action created by Sven Stilinović for the event in Jesuit Square on June 14, 1975, in which the artist unrolled two long strips of paper towel from the facade of a building to frame the door, unwinding them across the sidewalk, down a shallow set of stairs, and into the street (see Fig­ure 1.12). The paper was placed in a shape reminiscent of a red carpet leading to the door, but quickly became torn and mangy from foot and car traffic, looking like an act of vandalism or the untidied remainder of some raucous public event. The white strips of paper, moreover, bore a notable resemblance to garments worn by clerics for mass, with white being the liturgical color for high celebrations such

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Figure 1.13. Mladen Stilinović, Cotton Pad Step, 1975. Black-­and-­white photographs self-­published as artist’s book. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić.

as Easter and Christmas. In a square named after the former Jesuit monastery that stood there, the intervention thus also suggests a profanation of the holy, which serves in turn as an analogy for the work’s own antiaesthetic approach to art. Implicit in this work is an interest in how the activities of passersby will alter the paper, leaving a record of their passage but also of their lack of consciousness that what they are walking over is an artwork. This focus on altering the public’s relationship to city space via simple materials becomes even more explicit in Mladen Stilinović’s Cotton Pad Step, a 1975 action documented with black-­and-­ white photos that the artist made into a small accordion book (see Figure 1.13). The first image shows Mladen and Sven unrolling a piece of white gauze around eighteen inches wide and securing it with tape across a sidewalk. In the other images, we see the reactions of people who encounter the gauze: a gentleman in a trench coat who gingerly steps over it; an older woman carrying a shopping bag who walks over it but then glances back with an amused expression; a hip-­looking young man, caught in midair as he springs to the other side. The effect of the images is unmistakably humorous. The people pictured are the “straight men” in the joke that is the work, who respond to the gauze as a physical predicament but are unaware of their capture by Stilinović’s camera. Though we cannot access their thoughts, from the outside only the older woman, with her sideways glance at the gauze, seems to display a hint of self-­reflexivity about the setup. Ivana Bago speculates that the title Korak gaze may also be a play on the name “Gaza Strip,” Pojas gaze in Croatian, in which gauze and Gaza sound the same, suggesting an intriguing tongue-­in-­cheek reference to international politics and leftist solidarity.55 Cotton Pad Step displays what I would call a sociological approach to the passerby public. They are recruited into the work as actors who are necessary to complete the piece, but that does not mean they are interlocutors with the artist. Indeed, it is their unknowing that makes the whole thing work, as the photos

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of their behaviors become studies in how art can reveal and redirect small habits of everyday life. This sociological approach to the public is evident in earlier New Art Practice conceptualism mentioned above, especially works created under the auspices of the Retiree Tihomir Simčić Group. Starting in 1969, this so-­called group functioned as the framework for actions that established scenarios where an unknowing participant would create an artwork—­for example, by opening a door and making an impression of its handle on a carefully placed piece of wet clay or driving over a small carton of milk placed in the street. In a 1969 text, Braco Dimitrijević and Goran Trbuljak describe the function of the artist in these works as someone who “enable[s] a person to perceive what are for them momentarily invisible fragments of the environment.” In the case of the milk carton, discussion with the driver, Krešimir Klika, after the fact was a documented part of the artwork.56 But the artworks would be very different if these collaborators were notified in advance, because their actions would then lose the function of examples of nonartistic everyday behavior, which was key to the concept of the works. Another example of this sociological approach to relationality is the group of films entitled Open Forum that the Polish duo KwieKulik created in 1971, in which they used a 35mm camera to stage different types of participation. One of the films, entitled School, is made up of footage the artists took at a grammar school in Warsaw, showing a large group of students in a gymnasium. Highly conscious of the presence of the camera, the students roughhouse, make faces, and engage in boisterous acts of small-­scale destruction, such as piling up papers and lighting them on fire on the wooden floor of the gym (two sweep up the ashes at the end). Unusual camera angles, such as a three-­quarters bird’s-­eye view and a shot from underneath the bottoms of two young men seated on wall-­mounted ladders give a strong sense of the situatedness of the artists in the milieu they observe. The students are knowing collaborators but are also focused on their own social dynamics and the fun of their self-­conscious antics performed for the camera. The artists approach them both as willing participants in the work and also as interesting targets of observation, positioned as exterior to the mentality that drives KwieKulik’s own aesthetic practice. You might imagine different kinds of participatory engagement with audiences as falling along a spectrum in terms of the extent to which participants are positioned as “inside” or aligned with the artists’ own perspectives on the works. If in School KwieKulik’s camera looks curiously at the behavior of the work’s participants, at the other end of the spectrum are works such as the activities of Collective Actions based in Moscow, which, starting in 1976, organized outdoor actions that addressed small, in-­the-­know audiences of friends and colleagues. As Yelena Kalinsky explains, some actions had only the organizers present; when there was a larger audience, it was made up of people who received direct invitations ahead of time. The events themselves had a social nature and aspired to

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occupy a place of “regular communitas” for Moscow’s conceptualist milieu.57 As such, though the actions unfolded as surprises to most audience members, they also positioned those audiences on the inside of a collectively understood commitment to experimental art.

Public Space as Alternative to Institutions The Group of Six’s exhibition-­actions were a fertile mix between these different approaches to the question of relationality. They turned inward toward an established circle of friends and confidants and also outward toward a large, anonymous public. Their goal, as the group stated in a 1978 proposal to CEFFT, was “to inform as wide a circle of people as possible about these works of art.”58 That was facilitated by the choice of high-­traffic locations. Some group members felt strongly enthusiastic about showing in highly public places. Vučemilović, recalling the activities on the central Square of the Republic, estimated that a thousand people crossed through it during the individual exhibition-­actions: “When can you have a thousand people at a [gallery] exhibition?”59 At the same time, the group grew out of close friendship and familial bonds, and it was an extension of its members’ social activity together as part of a close-­knit circle of friends. These intimate bonds were many: between the Stilinović brothers; between Demur and Martek, who was breastfed by Demur’s mother; between Jerman, Demur, and Martek, who formed a childhood friendship; between Demur and Mladen Stilinović, who were introduced by Branka Stipančić and her childhood friend Lida, Demur’s girlfriend, who was also a student of art history; between Sven Stilinović and Vučemilović, who met as teens at the School of Applied Arts. The exhibition-­actions had a social quality, involving hanging out, light social drinking among some members near the end of the events, and travel together to other locations such as Venice and Belgrade when the actions happened outside of Zagreb. In this sense, the exhibition-­actions extended and solidified an existing social group and their dialogue about art and everything else among themselves and a small circle of partners and friends. Group members in fact had different positions on the question of how important actual interaction with viewers was. Because their activities together were based on a “democratic” acknowledgment of and respect for each other’s individuality, these differences reflected not a problematic lack of alignment but a plurality that was part of what they embraced about their work together.60 For Mladen Stilinović, the primary draw of the exhibition-­actions was having a place to show work. Though he and his peers had friends who were powerful in the city’s art institutions—­such as Radoslav Putar, the director of the City Gallery of Contemporary Art from 1972 to 1979, and Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos, head of CEFFT—­exhibition opportunities in extant venues were limited and involved waiting and extensive bureaucracy.61 The exhibition-­actions, though most of

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them necessitated obtaining permits ahead of time, enabled a more frequent way of showing art with freedom from curatorial and institutional control. Moreover, even the most open and progressive institutions had politics with which exhibiting artists had to contend. A clear example of the Group of Six’s experience of those restrictions was an incident in 1976 that took place when they exhibited at Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center (SKC), during that year’s April Meetings. The group showed works both inside and outside the building, some of which were created on-­site, such as Demur’s Fact, on which he wrote fact on various surfaces around the building (see Plate 3). Another work created there was a version of Jerman’s This Is Not My World, with the phrase written in photo fixer on a large roll of photo paper. The work was affixed to the facade of the SKC, where it remained only briefly before being taken down by administration of the gallery.62 Curator Dunja Blažević became the director of the SKC in 1976, at which point art historian Biljana Tomić took over as curator of the main gallery. Blažević was the daughter of a prominent member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, who earlier in the 1970s used her position to support highly progressive art. But in the later 1970s, her role as director made her less directly involved with curation, and Tomić pursued efforts to show art more widely accessible to a broad public.63 In the case of the controversy over Jerman’s work, Mladen Stilinović recalled that, despite the group’s generally good relationship with Blažević, she held the line that the piece had to come down.64 The impact of Blažević’s personal decision-­making in this context highlights the complexity of freedom of expression within what Marko Ilić describes as the state youth infrastructure of the SKCs and more broadly within state art institutions such as Zagreb’s City Gallery.65 Indeed, Stilinović recalled having a work censored from exhibition in a certain venue, in an act of censorship conveyed not to him but to his friends, the organizers, who were members of the Party.66 But he showed the same work two months later in another gallery without a problem, indicating that the possibilities for displaying critical art varied greatly depending on context. Cultural workers who were Party members also sometimes got nervous about censorship that came to nothing: when Stilinović was preparing his first exhibition for the City Gallery in 1980, director Bože Bek asked him about the possible consequences of showing works made using real money, because it was illegal to destroy emblems of the state such as currency and the flag. Stilinović said he was happy to take full responsibility for the work, but no consequences ever arose; the visual arts were ultimately less surveilled than the mass media of film and literature, which could reach much larger audiences.67 Stilinović also noted that the level of openness shifted hugely between the three major cities of Zagreb, Belgrade, and Ljubljana and smaller, less urban centers, across what Ilić describes as the “uneven geographies” of Yugoslavia’s political and cultural sphere.68 In short, the exhibition-­actions provided the group with important freedom

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from control, which was present in different forms even in institutions run by astute and sympathetic friends and colleagues. Sven Stilinović recalls that the inherent independence, and lack of need to obtain funding to mount an event, was especially appealing to his anarchistic spirit.69 All the artists embraced this freedom from gallery structures, but some, especially Martek, Jerman, and Demur, had an especial interest in the kinds of interaction born of the public format.70 A 1978 document prepared for CEFFT about the three-­day action on Trg Republike that year posits the establishment of “direct contact between the public and artists” as a central goal.71 The proposal, signed by the whole group and addressed to CEFFT and Zagreb’s City Gallery, was a version of an earlier draft written by Martek. Martek also collected the list of audience reactions to that exhibition-­ action that I cited at the beginning of the chapter, which were typed up by his partner, Branka Jurjević, Jerman’s former spouse.72 Martek’s list illustrates the observational attitude toward the audience I described with KwieKulik, in that the artist is interested in the comments as illustrations of certain kinds of attitudes toward artists and experimental art, from people positioned outside its history and discourse. In this sense, they represent the dimension of the exhibition-­ actions that constituted a social experiment. An interest in experimenting with the audience members and their reactions is also evident in Martek’s proposal for an exhibition-­action in which the artists would show their work to audiences from inside a cage at the zoo, an idea that went unrealized until its manifestation in the documentary film made about the group by director Gordana Brzović in 2002.73 Martek also proposed showing art in a soccer stadium during a Dinamo Zagreb game, an idea that never came to fruition and that, as Mladen Stilinović noted in retrospect, would likely have produced a highly volatile situation.74 These different sites would have acted like snapshots of particular publics, appropriating certain established viewing attitudes and experimenting with what happened when they were diverted onto advanced art. In sum, not only did the public locations of the exhibition-­actions provide alternatives to the state cultural apparatus, they also established a connection between site specificity and audience specificity. Each site brought with it a different constellation of material conditions but also held different implications for how the artists negotiated power, dialogue, and aesthetic experience with particular audiences.

The Politics of Site and Audience The conception of site specificity that developed over the course of the exhibition-­ actions was not by any means strategic. It was not thought out as a grand plan or critique ahead of time. It emerged from certain tendencies, the pursuit of personal pleasure and interest, and networks with colleagues in other places, such

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as Belgrade. Yet, across this contingent approach materialized certain consistent ways of working that substantiated an attitude toward space and the power it encapsulated and that proposed new ways of navigating familiar spaces. The group’s first exhibition-­action together was at the public bathing area on the banks of the Sava River, with artworks spread out on the grass and on wooden boards designed for sunbathing. The next event later that month took place in the street beside the Sopot I housing complex in Novi Zagreb, recently constructed in the earlier 1970s. These sites were likely chosen at least in part for the pragmatic space they offered. Sopot was a place that group members would not organically have a reason to visit because none of them lived there, and Stipančić speculates that little if any interaction with the public may have occurred.75 But after those two events, the group quickly moved on to what Vučemilović described in retrospect as “the most important” locations in the city.76 These included Jesuit Square in the old Upper Town, where the Gallery of Contemporary Art was located, and the central Square of the Republic, which I have already discussed. Both had obvious symbolic significance; the first because it gave the artists an opportunity to stage an exhibition outside in the street right beside the city’s predominant institution of modern and contemporary art. Several of the artworks at this action foregrounded the site of the street itself, including Sven Stilinović’s aforementioned work with paper towel, Mladen Stilinović’s act of writing in chalk on the sidewalk, a series of photographs displayed by Vučemilović entitled Trash, and a piece by Demur that was part of his work My Street, in which he wrote about the spatial, temporal, and personal relations between himself and the street on long ribbons of yellow paper. The paper was then laid down in the middle of the street, and the artist imagined that once it was complete it would be as long as the street itself.77 This event, like others that followed it, was based on permits obtained by the City Gallery, and as such it represents less a rejection or insult to that institution than a playful alternative to its function of containment, which made the street into the locus and focus of the artwork. The street was where the group created art, shared it with audiences, and brought it to destruction, through the action of passing feet and cars. The subsequent few years saw exhibition-­actions unfold in locations including but not limited to Belgrade’s SKC and the pavement in front of it, inside the SKC Gallery and the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, on the beach at Mošćenička Draga, in the vestibule of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, on the cement plateau outside the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, on the Piazza San Marco in Venice, and once more in the Square of the Republic. In each of these spaces, the artists exploited certain forms of freedom and ran up against constraints. The most basic form of constraint was the need to have a permit for most actions. Sometimes permits were not strictly needed—­for example, in the “freer” spaces beside the Sava River and at Mošćenička Draga, where the artists

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could have been taken for any other group of friends hanging out or celebrating a birthday.78 However, for the busier and more central city locations, permits were a necessity, as those spaces were strictly surveilled to prevent protest against the regime. Notably, though, the process of obtaining the permits was itself somewhat porous, as opposed to a unilateral imposition of the will of the state. Namely, as Mladen Stilinović recalled, in the permit applications they would write down titles for works to be exhibited, but they would just write something with no necessary bearing on their plans. Stilinović speculated that CEFFT curator Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos did not even read it and would not have cared if he did. The same went for the police, who would not have understood the description even if they did read it.79 “So in fact we received permits blindly, even in a literal sense.”80 In addition to this decidedly porous process, the actual written descriptions on the permits were as brief as a line or a couple of words: the permit for the 1977 action in the Neboder pedestrian tunnel describes it simply, and very opaquely to non­ specialists, as an “exhibition-­action.”81 The permits thus provided law enforcement with a statement of the actions’ legality but virtually no information about their purpose. The permits also functioned within what were already complex relationships between law enforcement and the citizenry. Mladen Stilinović’s 35mm documentation films of the actions reveal police presence at different points, including a police car parked near the action. Vučemilović recalled that the police who surveilled the actions often initially approached the group suspecting they did not have permits and expecting to arrest them, only to be surprised when they produced the required documents.82 Remembering along similar lines, Stipančić related an incident during the 1977 Neboder action when a militiaman tore down a work, thinking it was some kind of illegal advertisement, prompting the group members to jump forward proclaiming, “No, no, we have a permit!” This scared the officer, who suddenly realized he had destroyed something that was part of a legal activity.83 Moreover, the law enforcement patrolling the streets were members of the national militia, who, according to the system in place at the time, served in locations other than where they were from. Vlado Martek’s recollections of the militia members reflect a strong cultural clash: They were recruited from rural areas where people barely know how to read and write. . . . Some of them came here from southern Serbia, so they didn’t use [grammatical] cases, they spoke wrong, etc. I hear that and to me it sounds really wrong, even just on a linguistic level. . . . They felt [their own lack of belonging], . . . and often saw that they weren’t accepted.84

Martek notes that because of these circumstances, it was especially hard for the militia to understand the artworks on display, when “they didn’t even understand the Mona Lisa.” These memories all portray the group’s public activities

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as the occasion for micro power negotiations with the police. The police had the power to detain and to remove people and objects from public space, but they may have experienced otherness in Zagreb’s spaces that corresponded to stereotypes about the rural/urban divide, and they also likely lacked the artists’ spunky willingness to bend rules and test boundaries. In these accounts, the police appear as the exhibition-­actions’ most clearly uninitiated and uninitiable viewers, the starkest examples of people whose viewership reflected their position within a certain power structure and the imaginative limitations that position inculcated. Individual officers may also have functioned as a part of the casual dialogue that sprung up around the works. The filmic documentation of Demur’s Eto that shows the camera panning around and around the advertising pillar moves at one point over the shoulder of a police officer who stands facing the pillar beside two civilians, his head turned to chat with them apparently about what they see. Whether for the police or for members of the general public, the possibility of dialogue with the artists around which the exhibition-­action format revolved did not necessarily mean that dialogue resulted in mutual understanding. Generational and ideological differences could exacerbate misunderstandings. Demur recalled an older woman who approached him about Eto during the 1975 action on the Square of the Republic, prompted by the black and yellow color scheme. The woman said the colors reminded her of the Holocaust, specifically the yellow stars that Jewish people were forced to wear. Demur remembered his own somewhat dismissive response along the following lines: “Ma’am, I wasn’t born then, I was born in ’51 and I’m a student at the art academy. What do I have to do with the Holocaust? I have no idea, we just learned about it in school.”85 This anecdote gives a sense of Demur’s attitude as conversational yet also mildly confrontational. He does not seek to reconcile the contradictions between his perspective and the older viewer’s, instead asserting quite an unapologetic rejection of her interpretation. The comment might also function as a rebellious or anarchic rejection of the official Yugoslav state narrative of twentieth-­century history, in which Partisan resistance against the Nazi occupation loomed large. At other times, the artists had less confrontational conversations with their viewers and reveled in the easy flow of exchange the exhibition-­actions enabled. Sven Stilinović remembers that one time on the central square, “my big collage started a conversation, and I participated a little, but in the end I left, and left them to it. A group of people gathered and debated among themselves, and I was gone. This one defending me, that one accusing me, etc. In Belgrade it was the same.”86 Martek’s list of audience reactions includes some such exchanges: “Only a primitive could think this was good!” “No, the primitive is the one who could think it’s bad!”87 In fact, audiences may have found conversation with the artists themselves not to be the most important dimension of the events. In a 1978 written description of the Neboder passage action, Martek notes: “The experience of the last

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exhibition-­action in front of the Student Center gallery in Zagreb was that regardless of the presence of the authors and the selected outdoor space, passersby were primarily intrigued by the exhibited works themselves, as if they hadn’t been connected to the presence and behavior of the artists and the place of presentation.”88 This observation is interesting in that it suggests that for some passersby, the exhibition-­actions may have offered access to art in a way that was relatively uncomplicated by reflection on the meaning of encountering it in the street and being able to dialogue with artists. Viewed within the scope of artists’ experimental engagement with audiences in the later twentieth century, the exhibition-­ actions share a certain spirit with Jerzy Grotowski’s formulation of a poor theater, in that they are the outcome of interrogating the nature of the exhibition itself and creating a practice that seeks to be rigorously immanent to the present situation, and thereby to challenge both the artists and the audience.89 The Group of Six’s use of public space was closely connected to that challenge; however, the challenge may not have been a focus, as such, for the public. But whether the questions raised by public space were on the audience’s radar, it appears they did experience an unusually free flow of conversation and interaction around the art, which was encouraged by the outdoor venues. As Stipančić points out in an article she wrote about the 1975 Trg Republike action, “In the street you look differently than in the gallery. . . . The public isn’t a gallery-­going audience, and the space isn’t foreign to them.”90 Moreover, beyond fostering certain kinds of looking, the public locations enabled passersby to respond to the exhibitions with their own physical appropriations and manipulations. These included a man who scrubbed a piece of glass on which Martek had written and then took it away with him. After the Jesuit Square action, people used chalk left at the scene to draw on the pavement, and one person wrote “Forbidden to affix pictures and photographs to this building (thank you)” on the building against which the group had leaned their works.91 For passerby audiences, individual exhibition-­actions were likely unique in character, something they encountered once or, in a few cases, maybe twice as they went about their lives, with experiences of the actions highly dependent on whatever part of the city it was where they happened upon the event. However, the events’ relationship to site should also be considered as a whole, in terms of the approach it represented. Baljković describes the exhibition-­actions as “the result of a carefully elaborated program”: In their exhibition practice [the artists] don’t depart from a general conception of the city, but thoughtfully select the locations for appearances as representative samples of different forms of urban life: once that was in the city center itself (Trg Republike), another time in a place devoted to relaxation and escape (the city bathing area on the Sava), then a new housing development without any cultural content (Sopot), the historical center of the city

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(Jezuitski trg), and finally the educational establishment of the future “elite intelligentsia” (Faculty of Philosophy).92

I think Baljković overstates the extent to which the selection of the locations was programmatic. But her description is important in highlighting how the particular sites connected not only to different activities but to different subject positions, from the students working hard in the university, to the people relaxing by the river, to the workers and families in their modest apartments in the concrete midrise blocks of the Sopot neighborhood. Certainly, one person might live in one of those apartments, attend the university, and go bathe in the river on a Sunday (the day the action there was held). But Baljković’s statement about “the future ‘elite intelligentsia’” highlights how the locations also indexed subjects with different identities and different levels of cultural capital. I will return below in greater detail to her complicated framing, but observe for now that she distances herself from the “elite intelligentsia” while also categorizing the housing bloc that was home to working-­class people as being “without any cultural content.” In all these contexts, the Group of Six came off at the level of their dress and grooming as sloppy hippies. Their long hair and loose clothing read as countercultural, which perhaps contributed to one viewer referring to them as “sick.” Vučemilović also remembers that at one point he dyed his hair, a move seen at the time as actively nonnormative.93 Though Vučemilović told me that having long hair was associated with being gay, there was still a distinct difference between the way the group signified and the self-­presentation of the few out gay men of the period, who faced violence and abuse despite the easing of homosexual repression in the 1970s and its decriminalization in some Yugoslav republics, including Croatia, in 1977.94 Members of the Group of Six instead signified as adherents of bohemian youth culture connected to Anglo-­A merican pop music, in which they were indeed immersed: Demur remembered that the Spencer Davis Group played “nonstop” at the SKC and that they also listened to the Animals, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Donovan, Jefferson Airplane, and the Plastic Ono Band, as well as classic rock like the Beatles (though Mladen Stilinović hated rock and pop).95 The group’s position of obvious visual difference vis-­à-­vis their audiences is especially visible in two images from the 1978 exhibition-­action on the central square, in which we see Jerman in faded, worn-­out bell-­bottom jeans painting “Intimate Inscription” on white paper hung on a wooden support, assisted by Delimar, who wears a loose, shapeless smock over pants (see Figure 1.14). Delimar and Jerman both have dark hair down to their collarbones (though his is messier). Jerman and Delimar’s style stands in marked contrast to the people viewing Intimate Inscription in another image taken shortly afterward: five men with short hair, three of whom wear button-­up shirts and all of whom wear pants in the tighter, high-­waisted style common for the time (see Figure 1.15). A middle-­aged man is captured just turning away, his white, short-­sleeve collared shirt tucked tidily into his belt.

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Figure 1.14. Željko Jerman and Vlasta Delimar set up Jerman’s Intimate Inscription at the Group of Six Authors’ second exhibition-­action on Republic Square, Zagreb, July 17–­19, 1978. Event organized by CEFFT and Galerija Nova. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

These documents at one level tempt me to generalize about people’s mindsets and their attitudes toward art based on their appearances. That would of course be inaccurate; specific viewers’ experiences ultimately cannot be accessed via photos of them looking. Rather, present-­day viewers of the documentation photographs may perform generalizations akin to the ones people make about strangers based on their appearance. These familiar identity categories in themselves—­specifically, the artists’ signification as members of the youth counterculture—­had important implications for the critical dimension of the exhibition-­actions vis-­à-­v is dominant Yugoslav constructions of subjecthood, especially in connection with the use (or, to some viewers, misuse) of time.

Spending Time The artists’ countercultural self-­presentation reinforced the sense inherent in the exhibition-­action format that they were making use of city spaces and of their own time in unconventional ways. The exhibition-­actions thus troubled the normative experience of public space insofar as it was connected to a socialist notion of a pro-

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Figure 1.15. Passersby view Željko Jerman’s Intimate Inscription at the Group of Six Authors’ second exhibition-­action on Republic Square, Zagreb, July 17–­19, 1978. Event organized by CEFFT and Galerija Nova. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

ductive citizenry. Branislav Jakovljević argues that an embrace of the unproductive and the useless manifested at several levels in the Group of Six’s work, including in “the way they present their art (on streets and city squares, sea beaches and riverbanks, where it gets ‘spent’ and literally washed away), the media in which they produce it (ordinary plastic bags, newspapers, and other everyday objects that easily get categorized as trash), and the figure of the artist as an outsider who is not integrated in any way in the (still functioning) institutions of the political economy of socialist aestheticism.”96 As such, the rejection of productivity is rooted in the material conditions of the art’s objecthood and its exhibition but also manifests in the artists’ performative self-­assertion within the exhibition-­ actions as unapologetic outsiders. In this sense, it is thematized at the levels of both materiality and temporality. In a document reflecting on the 1977 action in the Neboder passage discussed above, Martek noted that it was not only an intervention in space but “simultaneously an intervention in time, primarily in our private time.”97 A viewer of the 1978 action on the Square of the Republic dismissed it in related terms: “We don’t have time for this.”98 Mladen Stilinović, in “In Praise of Laziness,” homes in on the conceptual import of wasting time, by extolling the

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virtue of laziness as key to the identity of art as such. Laziness, a state of stasis, inactivity, indifference, and impotence, must manifest at the level of performance and not just concept: “It’s not enough to know about laziness, it must be practiced and perfected.”99 This framing presents laziness as a kind of ethics, an ideal that must guide practice and behavior. As mentioned above, that text was written in 1993, amid Yugoslavia’s disintegration, and was informed by questions about what changes in the critical power of art the postsocialist transition might bring. But it also invites a reading of the Group of Six’s earlier exhibition-­actions as subversive insofar as the artists appeared in public as lazy hippies. In their context, the group members’ unconventional appearances and use of their own time would have activated associations not simply with laziness as a personal quality but specifically with unemployment, a widespread and highly political phenomenon in Yugoslavia. In the modern industrial era, unemployment played a key role in labor movements’ definition of the worker as subject. The interest of workers in staying employed was directly connected to the interest of unemployed people in finding employment, because the strength of labor movements depended on workers being invested in collective solidarity to ensure their jobs and rights would be protected.100 Unemployment was also a key ideological and policy concern under twentieth-­century state socialisms, because of the centrality of economic growth to Marxist-­Leninist ideology and Communist parties’ claims to represent workers’ interests.101 Economist Susan Woodward argues that Yugoslav unemployment specifically was characterized by a paradox unique among socialist states. While in Yugoslavia full citizenship rights hinged on employment, unemployment was also not hidden as it was in other socialist countries.102 But far from delegitimizing the state’s claim to represent the interest of labor, unemployment was met with a broad silence of indifference from many different factions in society, including everyday citizens, policymakers and politicians, analysts, and critics of the state.103 An important reason behind this silence was the policies that atomized who counted as unemployed and who was eligible to receive unemployment benefits. To be counted as officially unemployed, jobseekers had to register with one of the unemployment bureaus, which had a low success rate for finding people jobs and imposed the requirement that someone be willing to relocate anywhere to get one. This meant that only those entitled to benefits bothered to register; even still, the number of people registered as unemployed rose an average of 11.4 percent annually between 1952 and 1975.104 Moreover, the way in which unemployment was acknowledged as a matter of social and not economic policy enshrined hierarchies of gender, age, and rural versus urban disparity in the distribution of unemployment benefits. Compensation for previous employment was not available to those who had alternative means of support—­namely, women and youth who were assumed to have an employed male head of household to provide for them.105 Moreover,

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the economy was understood as divided into two halves: the public sector of self-­ managed enterprise and the private sector of small-­scale and subsistence agriculture. Various barriers prevented peasants and unskilled laborers from entering the public sector, and in 1950, revisions were made to labor laws aimed at returning such workers to the land or the family, with the aim of the “consolidation of the working class.”106 Woodward writes that the imagined division between parts of the population securely supported in the public and private sectors obscured the growing groups of people in neither world: workers who had been judged superfluous by management and workers’ councils yet who wished to remain in industry or had no land to which they could return; a highly mobile collection of unskilled laborers traveling from one short-­term construction job to another; the unemployed who gathered at dawn to wait for recruiters in informal day-­labor “markets” on the outskirts of the major cities; a large number of peasant-­workers who continued to live in the village and migrate seasonally to industry and mines; and an ever-­larger percentage of the younger generation waiting at home for their first job.107

Concerning the last category, youth under twenty-­five made up almost 80 percent of the rise in unemployment between 1972 and 1983. The vast majority had no work experience or claim to compensation.108 Woodward’s description is powerful in that it highlights that the figure of the worker-­citizen was not just a normative mold to which a few outsiders failed or refused to conform. Rather, it was an idealized subject position inaccessible to a great many people, even within the context of a state consciously geared at achieving universal equality. Mladen Stilinović highlights this exclusion in a 1975 work consisting of a simple photograph of a sign stating “Employees Only,” a phrase that in Croatian more precisely reads “Prohibited -­Entry to Nonemployees” or, literally, “to the Unemployed” (see Figure 1.16). The phrase is accompanied by a black silhouette of a walking man crossed out in red, which via the artist’s appropriation conveys an intense negation of the subject position of the unemployed. The Group of Six Authors were not the first artists to grapple with the ambivalent and contradictory subject positions created by self-­management socialism. Indeed, such reflections were central to Yugoslav Black Wave cinema. For example, one of its early films, Dušan Makavejev’s Man Is Not a Bird (1965) is a nuanced portrait of a provincial industrial town that both highlights the gendered inequality that exists there and bluntly displaces any idealization of the workers’ identity as key to personal flourishing and happiness. Moreover, Ilić argues that the New Art Practice as a whole emerged from yet was also critical toward the combination of workers’ self-­management and economic liberalization that characterized Yugoslavia’s late 1960s and 1970s.109 In the context of those extant critiques, what was innovative about the Group of Six’s activities is how they troubled notions of productivity

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Figure 1.16. Mladen Stilinović, Employees Only, 1975. Hand-­colored photograph. Courtesy of Darko Šimičić; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

through the exploitation of specific sites that let the exhibition-­actions resonate with existing tensions and fractures in the social fabric. The exhibition-­actions arguably played both on people’s curiosity and on their insecurities. In light of the discussion of youth unemployment above, Baljković’s comment that the Faculty of Philosophy was “the educational establishment of the future ‘elite intelligentsia’” reads in a complex light. Why is the key phrase in quotation marks? Because these people considered themselves to be an elite intelligentsia but were looked on with scorn by others, or perhaps because a university education might give them cultural capital but by no means a secure path to a job? The quotation marks also suggest the author’s act of distancing the students’ mentality from her own critical attitude. Such distance is emphasized by her additional comment that the students’ reactions were unfriendly, demonstrating that “resistance to innovations in art rarely come from the so-­called ordinary public, but that prejudices of ‘knowing what art is’ are in fact associated with educated groups.”110 This last statement performatively aligns innovative art with the working class and with the inclusive nature of public space, against the aspirational striving of would­be white-­collar workers. Simultaneously, she frames the spaces of working-­class people’s everyday lives as lacking culture, arguably a statement of resistance

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against the state’s glorification of the working class. The artists’ own description of the action at the Faculty of Philosophy suggests that they shared Baljković’s critical attitude toward this particular institution: “The intention of the exhibition was the problematization of the work itself and this exhibition within the institution of the Faculty of Philosophy.”111 But at the same time as the artists and Baljković may have distanced themselves from the educated position of the Faculty of Philosophy students, some viewers to the group’s other exhibition-­actions saw the obtuse nature of the art as aligned with a position of cultural capital with which they disidentified, such as those who muttered, “Who can translate this for me?” and “What does that look like? Maybe I’m not cultured enough or something.”112 Martek’s list of audience reactions indicates that some people took the artists for students (which some of them were: Martek graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy himself in 1976, Demur from the Art Academy in 1975, and Vučemilović with a degree in film and television in 1980). This impression appears related less to a clear categorization of their identity than to an instability in terms of how their activity signified in public. Another person referred to them as “amateurs,” which has a similar association with lack of professionalization or skill but none of the class or group identifications connected to “students.” The exhibition-­actions, in opening up subject positions outside of existing class identifications, bore some resonance to the Situationist International’s practice of the dérive, where people moving in certain experimental ways through urban space aimed to position themselves as neither working class nor bourgeoisie.113 In the case of the Group of Six, the instability in terms of identity vis-­à-­v is Yugoslavia’s dominant labor organization lay in how the exhibition-­actions flaunted laziness and the unstructured, open-­ended use of time but also in exhibited stints of activity in which the artists were hard at work making things whose meaning and function would have been quite mysterious to most people. Documentation shows how the different exhibition-­actions had varied textures in terms of the intensity and strenuousness of the artists’ activities, textures that depended on the various sites, on the works shown, and even the moment in which a passerby encountered the group. Namely, the dynamic or static configurations that the artists’ bodies took up at different moments were important in terms of how passersby might read the artworks and how they might understand the works and their makers vis-­à-­v is notions of labor and productivity. In a particularly memorable image from the 1975 action on the Sava River, Jerman lies with his head toward the camera (see Plate 4). Wearing sunglasses and with sweat on his brow, he almost looks like he is sunbathing, but his black shirt, jeans, and shoes are incongruous with such activity, and the surface on which he is lying is in fact a large piece of photographic paper. This work seems like a comically literal embodiment of Mladen Stilinović’s theory of the importance of laziness, much

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Figure 1.17. The Group of Six Authors’ first exhibition-­action, held in the bathing area by the Sava River, May 11, 1975. Photograph by Fedor Vučemilović.

like Stilinović’s own photo series of himself lying in bed (The Artist at Work, 1978), a work itself dedicated to Belgrade-­based artist Neša Paripović, who, in 1975, had photographed himself staring at a blank piece of paper.114 Behind Jerman, we see two friends, seemingly Vučemilović and an unidentified woman, sitting casually on the same boardwalk, and behind them are an older couple in bathing suits, enjoying the site in a more conventional way. Other images from the same day show Demur and a friend lounging like tigers in the long grass between Sven Stilinović’s works, and a small row of people sitting on the same boardwalk as artworks loom in the foreground (see Figure 1.17). These acts of being an artist at rest—­a lazy artist—­who nonetheless still asserts the status of his activity as art, presented nonspecialist onlookers with a model of artistic identity that for many would likely have been both novel and hard to accept. Mainstream Yugoslav society offered several different models of artistic identity, which could be complex and individualist yet still aligned with the socialist state’s own self-­understanding. The prototypical example of this is writer Miroslav Krleža (1893–­1981), an intellectual giant of the Yugoslav twentieth century who held various cultural posts in postwar Yugoslavia and served Josip Broz Tito as a personal adviser on cultural issues. Krleža was a publisher of leftist liter-

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ary reviews in the 1910s and 1920s who joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1918 but was later expelled for his critique of socialist realism. Krleža refused to join the antifascist Partisans during WWII despite his opposition to the Nazi occupation. But in the postwar period he still found favor with Tito, who supported Krleža in establishing the Yugoslav Institute of Lexicography in 1950, an organization with important political power in a country where matters of language were closely tied to the politics of national identity and modernization. In a sense, Krleža’s nonconformist record in the prewar period was well-­suited to ascent in the postwar period in a nation that considered itself to embody socialism with a human face, opposed to the dehumanizing collectivism of Stalinism. Krleža’s immense productivity and public involvement in reckoning with the relationship between aesthetics and the Yugoslav national project stood in stark contrast with the Group of Six’s acts of public laziness and the “lazy” art they exhibited. But the latter did suggest a different kind of integrity via its commitment to uniting art and life and via the artists’ interest in extending dialogue as a possible (though not infallible) way of explaining art to the public. Moreover, if moments such as Jerman’s creation of the photo imprint signify stasis and passivity, there are many other images that show the artists’ bodies acting dynamically to make art. Other images of Jerman specifically are especially dramatic in this respect, because of the large scale of some of his works. One can see him, for example, standing somewhat precariously on a table steadied by Delimar, reaching up to write “Intimate Inscription”; as the finishing touch on this work, Jerman lifted Delimar up to put a dot on an I. In an image of Jerman on his hands and knees on the sidewalk in Belgrade, writing “This Is Not My World” in photo fixer on a giant roll of paper, passersby are focused on the artist making the work as much as or more than on the work itself. Similarly, in the image of Demur and Martek producing Eto I discussed earlier, a young man looks down with interest at Demur’s activity when the work is still in a very early stage of completion, just a big brown piece of paper to which the artists have begun applying black and yellow paint. These images suggest that what was unusual for passersby about the exhibition-­actions was not just the artists’ laziness but also the fact that they were energetically and industriously focused on making things that had mysterious and provocative qualities. Central to the novel position the artists took up was not just opening themselves up to dialogue but also putting themselves on display as producers of strange things. Doing no work, or no work in a conventional sense, is of course also an act of exercising privilege and power. This is especially clear with tourism. While most of the Group of Six’s exhibition-­actions took place in Zagreb, they also held some events while traveling as actual tourists to neighboring towns, cities, and countries, adding an additional valence to their public performances of leisure. In Yugoslavia, to travel was to avail oneself of a privilege not easily available to

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people in other socialist countries. Indeed, Hannes Grandits and Karin Taylor argue that visa-­free travel was a linchpin of Yugoslav identity.115 At the same time, Yugoslavs lived in cities where organized public activities and the posting of material was prohibited except by permit, meaning that freedom of movement was the greatest freedom that they exercised vis-­à-­v is public space.116 Far from being a unilateral assertion of freedom, though, tourism was an important ideological activity in Yugoslavia from the early days of the Republic, starting from 1945 when the leadership defined holidays with pay and recreation as a key part of the state’s socialist project.117 The Yugoslav coast was a Mediterranean destination open to both foreign and domestic tourists, and while domestic visitors tended to spend less money, they also visited more underdeveloped regions, creating important opportunities for economic gain in those areas.118 In 1976, the group held an exhibition-­action at a prototypical domestic tourist site, the seaside town of Mošćenička Draga, around two and a half hours from Zagreb by car. This was the event where Martek created In Place of a Poem with women’s underwear, as I discussed above. Some works shown at this event played with questions of the body at leisure. These included an action by Sven Stilinović who sunbathed with the phrase “I’m so happy I have a tan” painted on his back and then wiped away the paint, leaving behind the phrase in lighter skin (see Fig­ ure 1.18). Jerman’s works also involved a repetition of the action from the Sava River, in which he lay on a piece of photographic paper to create a body print. Martek, however, produced works that directly thematized questions of tourism, economy, and how they interact with the natural landscape. He performed Tearing Banknotes, in which he tore up money and scattered it in the sea, motivated by his sense of the intense contradiction between the sea as a material reality and money as an abstraction.119 He also photographed other tourists on the beach and later wrote a poem to accompany that action: To the origins of homo turisticus (a part), by way of a poem Morning; we’re swimming and then animals come out of the sea; the animals march from the sea sprouting human hands, but homo turisticus forges a sword from a friendly tree and kills everything which emerged from the sea. There remains of this exodus: the weakness and strength of glass and mirrors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .120

In Martek’s larger body of writing, glass and mirrors are recurrent metaphors for questions about identity and about how embodied perception mediates the world. Given this context, the last sentence quoted indicates that the human subjectivity of “homo turisticus” is the aftereffect of a violent destruction of the natural world. Notably, the artists are positioned not as tourists themselves but as third-­party witnesses, swimming in the morning when homo turisticus forges the sword and kills the creatures. Martek’s action of tearing money and throwing it in the sea

Figure 1.18. Sven Stilinović after creating I’m So Happy I Have a Tan, 1976. Action at the exhibition-­action at Mošćenička Draga, June 27–­28, 1976. Photograph by Fedor Vučemilović.

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further emphasizes his status as an outsider who does not conform to the role of tourist: in opposition to tourism as an activity that generates income, he uses the beach to destroy money, making it into literal garbage that pollutes the sea. His works at Mošćenička Draga highlight the use of a site both for the pragmatic possibilities it afforded—­the opportunity to gather with friends, without the permit that would be necessary in the city, to socialize and make art—­and for the possibility of contravening its mainstream signification. This chapter has demonstrated how the artists, across such acts of appropriation, positioned themselves as outsiders, just as in Martek’s poem the artists witness the destruction wrought by homo turisticus but do not perpetrate it themselves. The artist’s position is thus ethical by means of being a position of witness, triangulated between mainstream culture and the magical animals from the sea who seem to represent a kind of unmediated or untamed expressive creativity. Importantly, Martek’s poem does not depict the seaside as a place of reprieve from the ideological and commercial character of the city; rather, it is still a space of tensions, albeit different ones. Across a diversity of sites both in Zagreb and beyond it, the Group of Six Authors’ exhibition-­actions highlighted how public space was shaped by multiple messages, from state ideology to commercial seduction to traces and interventions left by individual people. The consequence for the artwork is that it became an entity in constant material and semantic negotiation with its surroundings. As artworks became things that could be highly tangible while also troubling the fixity of form, the artists exhibitionistically displayed their own difference from familiar models of subjecthood—­of the worker/citizen but also of the artist/citizen as a productive participant in national culture. Moreover, the Group of Six’s ambivalent attitude toward their audiences formed a crucial part of their refusal to imagine a utopian, or even a coherent, new paradigm for collective life. Their ethics of being neither conformists nor exactly rebels but rather witnesses to the contradictory nature of art and subjecthood stands in instructive contrast to the way that Alexander Alberro describes the ethos of conceptualists in capitalist America in his study of Seth Siegelaub, Joseph Kosuth, and their circle. Alberro writes that in the 1960s, artists “increasingly resembled personnel in other specialized professions in which success came to those who managed and publicized their work most strategically.”121 Siegelaub and Kosuth were both adept at making the case for how cultural capital could be accrued through art patronage and at positioning the persona and reputation of the artist as crucial marketing addenda to works of art that were becoming increasingly ephemeral and less identifiable in visual terms.122 The Group of Six’s antinomy to that kind of absorption of art into publicity or to a carefully crafted persona, and the way they highlighted the ambivalent forms of subjectivity fostered by the intersection of commercial and state “publicity” in their context, might make you see the logic of the statements I discussed earlier

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about Eastern European conceptualism being more authentic or, in Stilinović’s words, warm. At the same time, though, the works undermine a notion that such a warmth or authenticity could be straightforwardly extended into the art’s relational dimension. In the Group of Six’s antiutopian practice, the sparks of hope and possibility lie in the notion of intimacy that pervaded the works and actions. But while the artists were available to talk, while they put their bodies on display and channeled their emotions and desires into artworks shown for all to see, they also made work that had a tendency to evoke the possibility of intimacy while also referring those expectations tautologically back to the structure of the art itself. A dramatic example of this is Jerman’s Intimate Inscription, mentioned earlier, in which the self-­declared intimate inscription takes on the scale of commercial signage or an ideological slogan that fails to provide any deeper intimate content. The photos of Jerman and Delimar installing it on the square stage the gap between the public display of Intimate Inscription and the intimacy of their personal and creative relationship, which would have been legible to passersby only to the extent to which the artists conformed to the broad types of a hippie guy and his girlfriend. In 1998, American critical theorist Lauren Berlant noted that intimacy, while it has no predictable aesthetic, repeatedly emerges in artworks as a structure that “relies heavily on the shifting registers of unspoken ambivalence.”123 Jerman’s work declares its intimacy in an overblown scale, establishing a form of address that flirts with viewers’ curiosity while refusing to substantiate closeness. Audiences who paused at the exhibition-­actions might encounter something recognizable to them as art or an artist, but as often as not they might find themselves referred back to the present as they sifted through such shifting registers of unspoken ambivalence: “Eto,” as Demur’s work announced, “Well, there you have it.”

2

Written Assignments Space and Language in the Art of Vlado Martek and Mladen Stilinović

Mladen Stilinović’s 1993 artwork An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist dramatizes some key differences with the practice of his friend Vlado Martek.1 Now among the best-­known works not only in Stilinović’s oeuvre but in contemporary art from formerly socialist Europe, this pink satin banner bearing the work’s title phrase highlights the fraught conditions that a globalized art world presents to non-­Western artists, whom it both exoticizes and compels to “speak,” aesthetically and linguistically, in its idiom. Vlado Martek, however, does not speak English. With a few exceptions, neither do his artworks: his hybrid poetic-­v isual practice revolves centrally around language but almost always the Croatian language (formerly known under the name of Serbo-­Croatian, a polycentric language that exhibits substantial regional variation across the terrain of what used to be Yugoslavia).2 Unlike Stilinović, whose practice is rich with witty translation games that make his work accessible to global audiences, Martek rarely creates artworks in other languages and tends to do so when he wants to make a site-­specific point about the context in which he is exhibiting, such as the biscuits inscribed “Menti lo stato,” “Lie to the state” in Italian, which he distributed in an unauthorized action at the Venice Biennale in 1984.3 Though An Artist Who Cannot Speak English is not a comment on Martek’s work, the piece makes visible what divides the artists’ oeuvres and also what they share: namely, a commitment to analyzing the constitutive relationship between language and power, and how embodied subjects are formed unequally within that nexus. Beyond this broad similarity, Stilinović and Martek share an interest in questions of learning and unlearning. Stilinović’s 2013 career retrospective at the Mu­ seum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb was aptly named Nula iz vladanja (Zero for Conduct) a bit like an F for Effort to North Americans. The title elegantly evokes a particular anti-­institutional attitude in Stilinović’s work while also playing on the biographical fact that he dropped out of high school.4 The goal of this chapter is to understand the significance of pedagogy in Stilinović’s and Martek’s practices and to situate it within their sociopolitical context.5 Their practices address the pedagogical through explicit references to childhood and learning, through asking questions about how and why we read and write, and through the interrogation of 77

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institutions, including educational institutions specifically, but also other societal institutions insofar as they seek to instill knowledge and discipline. I argue that far from being an idiosyncratic interest on the part of these artists or a coincidental similarity between their works, this pedagogical theme reflects their attempts to articulate the relationship between politics and aesthetics in Yugoslavia’s long 1970s, which, for the purposes of this analysis, stretches from 1968 into the early 1980s, the years directly following Josip Broz Tito’s death. June 1968 witnessed huge student protests in Belgrade, fueled by demands for better learning conditions and for a more genuine and truly egalitarian type of socialism.6 The protests of 1968 were one of a series of events that Sabrina P. Ramet describes as the broader “reform crisis” lasting from 1962 through 1971, a period in which efforts to enact decentralizing economic reform were implicated with drives for greater independence on the part of the federation’s constituent republics.7 John Lampe describes the student protests as the first major public opposition to the Communist Party and state, while Branislav Jakovljević characterizes the conservative reforms that followed 1968 as nothing less than an “abdication of the idea of the self-­managing subject.”8 This chapter builds on Jakovljević’s arguments that the politicized art of Yugoslavia’s (and especially Belgrade’s) early 1970s inherited the protestors’ radical impulse, an impulse that ultimately failed to secure its goals in the political realm.9 I argue that Martek’s and Stilinović’s works of the mid-­to late 1970s responded to the decade’s political and intellectual climate by using questions about teaching and learning to address the relationship between art and politics in this decade in the wake of young people’s political failure. Instead of politicizing the educational institution, as did the student protestors in 1968, Martek’s and Stilinović’s work with language fragmented that institution’s function into a series of different spaces and highly individual experiences, thereby thwarting the spatial integrity of collective experience—­whether in the university classroom, at the Youth Day celebration, or the protest—­and its aim of creating uniform subjects. I will demonstrate here that both artists use language to perform different kinds of juvenility, which aim to establish communication alongside or even with the help of ideological language, but without reproducing the power structures it dictates.10 In these experiments, the choice to make writing and reading into spatial acts is important. Liz Kotz observes that treating words like things to be materially broken, moved, and manipulated is a central tenet of conceptualism in the Anglo-­ American tradition.11 In Martek’s and Stilinović’s art, language is concrete in that it is spatial; language is also emotional. Those qualities form the basis of materialist critiques of ideology and subjectivity. In this respect, Martek’s and Stilinović’s oeuvres should be seen as part of a larger internal critique of Yugoslav socialism that unfolded over the 1960s and 1970s. Their art shares deep parallels with the conceptions of humanity and the

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critique of Yugoslav self-­management advanced in the work of so-­called Praxis school philosophers. Praxis was a journal published from 1964 to 1974 by a group of Marxist thinkers who sought to return to Marx’s recently rediscovered early writings to emphasize a humanist, critical, inherently creative subject as central to socialism, over and against the rigid and bureaucratic forms embodied in Stalinist dogmatism but also, they felt, in mainstream conceptions of Yugoslav self-­management. Praxis occupied a unique position in postwar Yugoslavia as a de facto institution that constituted part of the political system while also functioning to present the public with deep criticism of the country’s fundamental tenets.12 Stilinović attended part of a Praxis “summer school” in Korčula in the late 1960s while traveling north from Dubrovnik with his friend Krsto Mihaljević, but Mihaljević remembers that they went to a couple of lectures and did not understand anything.13 Stilinović’s and Martek’s art should not be construed in any way as an intentional elaboration of philosophical texts but rather as animated by convictions about the centrality of interdisciplinary creativity to human existence in the world and about the crucial value of critique of all existing systems of power and meaning-­making, ideas that parallel notions found in Praxis writings. But as conceptual artists, Martek and Stilinović also applied a critical lens to notions of creativity and materiality that went far beyond the ways Praxis conceived of those qualities. Indeed, their works revisit the childlike nature of creativity both as a way of positing creativity’s centrality to human existence and as a way of undoing claims about man’s ability to shape the world around him both materially and intellectually (an idea that was central to Marx’s understanding of humankind). Precisely because of their critical stance, Praxis were de facto global advocates for a Yugoslav vision of self-­management socialism, but events, including group members’ association with the 1968 protestors, led to the repression of their activity by 1974.14 In the work by Stilinović and Martek I will analyze here, created in the mid-­to late 1970s and early 1980s, you will encounter stagings of human creativity as crucial yet impotent, and spaces—­whether in the gallery, outdoors, or on the page—­that read like gray zones inside the dream of self-­management socialism.  In the larger picture of global conceptualist and postconceptualist art, Martek’s and Stilinović’s works complicate the narrative that conceptual practices have shifted us away from the artist as an expressive figure.15 Curator Nataša Ilić describes Stilinović’s work as a “loosening of the analytic language of post-­ conceptual art by opening up to emotional contents and reactions.”16 Eve Meltzer argues that British and American conceptual art shared with structuralism a common investment in antihumanism.17 Relative to the antihumanist understanding of the subject as the delayed effect of various systems, Meltzer argues that conceptual art’s particular contribution was to produce affects that engaged and resisted that posterior positioning, including by foregrounding feelings of attachment to

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the institutional and linguistic systems themselves.18 Especially important to the understanding of the affected subject in Euro-­A merican conceptually informed practices of the later 1970s were feminist artists such as Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, and Adrian Piper, who drew on Marxism, psychoanalysis, and critical analyses of race and gender to understand how language shapes subjects in coercive, unequal ways. By contrast to those artists, Stilinović and especially Martek were, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, less willing to dispense with the expressive individual artist-­ subject. They also conceived of difference differently than their North American peers, positing individual difference more at the social level as a chosen vocation in terms of their position as experimental artists, but with an awareness of how their location within socialist Yugoslavia placed them in a position of difference vis-­à-­v is Western art. From within that position, their practices strategically retained and manipulated the figure of the expressive artist to ask questions about labor, power, marginality, and avant-­garde lineage.

Stilinović and Ideology The political drama that unfolded in Yugoslavia in June 1968 was in many respects a drama of space. The student unrest began with a fight between students and members of a voluntary youth work brigade over admission to a variety show in the auditorium across from the dorms in Studentski trg (Student Square). As Jakovljević points out, these events got rolling just a week after the celebration of Youth Day in Belgrade’s central stadium, where over 60,000 spectators watched 8,500 participants engage in acts of “voluntary discipline” in the form of group aerobics, dance, and athletics.19 On June 2, a power outage in the university dorms brought students who were studying for their final exams outside and into proximity with Youth Brigade volunteers, who were being afforded privileged entrance into a dress rehearsal of the mainstream popular variety show Caravan of Friendship.20 Fights between students and brigade members about who should gain entrance drew bigger and bigger crowds and, eventually, a forty-­man squad of riot police with two fire trucks.21 The police presence only caused the crowd of students to grow, and shortly after midnight this throng began marching toward the old city, with the stated purpose of staging a sit-­in in front of the federal parliament. At a railroad underpass, the students encountered a huge brigade of riot police; after students set alight a fire truck they had captured at Student Square and rolled it toward the police, the police opened fire. Students suffered gunshot wounds and forty were arrested.22 On Monday, June 3, another, larger march led to a second confrontation at the overpass, but this time gave rise to a three-­hour meeting between government officials and student representatives, which, Dennison Rusinow writes, transformed “the student revolt from a physical confrontation into a verbal dialogue.”23 The

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following day, a series of meetings began, attended by both students and professors at Studentski grad (Student City), the Philosophy Faculty on Studentski trg, and at the Faculty of Engineering. By that day the strike and its ongoing meetings had spread to all faculties of the university, which the students adorned with state and party flags, pictures of Tito and Marx, and posters bearing their demands.24 Those demands included the release of arrested students, the firing of all police involved in violence against the students and of directors and editors of Belgrade newspapers for pro-­regime reporting, and the convening of the federal parliament to discuss student needs for better learning conditions and work opportunities following graduation.25 The week that followed involved extensive machinations at all levels of government and university administration about how to respond to the demonstrations. That week was capped off by a speech by Tito the following Sunday in which he commended the character of “the 90 percent of the students [who] belong to our socialist youth” and their desire to strive for genuine socialism. He called for the “wholehearted” resolution of their grievances and a return to normal order.26 As Rusinow describes, this speech was part of a governmental and administrative strategy of recuperating the protestors’ demands into a reconsolidation of state ideology that relied on the unfulfilled clauses in the program of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, which “contain[ed] enough participant democracy, personal liberty, progressive economics, social justice, and anti-­ establishment (here called anti-­bureaucratic) invocations to tickle the palate of any but the most jaundiced young idealist.”27 On March 17, 1977, nine years after these events, the Group of Six Authors visited Belgrade and staged an exhibition-­action in the paved area, slightly below street level, between the Faculties of Philology and Philosophy on Student Square (see Figure 2.1).28 This so-­called Academy Plateau, completed just a few years earlier in 1974 based on a design by the young architect Svetislav Ličina, forms an open connection between Studentski trg and the nearby Ulica Kneza Mihaila. In chapter 1, I discussed the Group of Six Authors’ encounter with the politics of the Belgrade SKC during their visit there in 1976. This 1977 event in Belgrade, by contrast, was one of a handful the Group of Six held in university settings not intended for cultural events. Other examples included the action of April 2, 1979, at Zagreb’s Faculty of Economy organized by Darko Šimičić (where the artists stayed afterward to talk to students) and another event of March 18, 1980, at Zagreb’s Faculty of Philosophy with the participation of some of the Group of Six plus others from their wider circle, including Vlasta Delimar, Tomislav Gotovac, and Goran Trbuljak.29 Documentation photographs for the 1977 University of Belgrade action show its location in the Academy Plateau as a cold, transient space, with the particular harsh yet disheveled look of relatively new brutalist buildings that have already become grubby with use. The photographic documentation of the event shows a few people turned to look at the artworks, suggesting that the exhibition-­action

Figure 2.1. Passerby viewers at the Group of Six Authors’ exhibition-­action on the Academy Plateau, University of Belgrade, March 17, 1977. Photographs by Sven Stilinović.

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added interest, if not exactly coziness, to a space that many people used only in order to travel through while heading somewhere else. In their 1977 catalog published by CEFFT (the City Gallery’s Center for Photography, Film, and Television), the group provides short, aphoristic descriptions of all exhibition-­actions to date. They describe the 1977 University of Belgrade action as “satisfying” and as taking place in a “totally unknown” space.30 You might read this as describing not only their own status as outsiders to Belgrade but also the antiaesthetic quality of the Academy Plateau itself. The history of June 1968, less than a decade before on this same campus, highlights the quirky, individualist quality of the Group of Six’s manifestation on the plateau and also brings added layers of meaning to the works they showed there. In the documentation photographs, people stand alone or in small groups, their postures expressing passive curiosity or casual conversation, worlds away from the passion and intensity that flooded the bodies of student protestors. Željko Jerman showed works from his Intimate Slogans series, including ones that read “Long Live Art” and “Long Live Mladen Stilinović.” The exhibition of these works in this site heightens both their poignancy and their cynicism. Jerman effectively declared art, in its rebellious and materially deconstructed form, a substitute for organized collective revolution and elevated his friend Stilinović to pride of place in a way that parodies the adoration of Tito. In this respect, the works replace the affective pair authority/collective adoration with friendship/personal attachment. Stilinović himself showed two sets of works at the exhibition-­action: For Dürer (1976), which consists of four black-­and-­white photographs of pillows (see Figure 2.2), and four red paintings, in which he wrote the word red (crvena) in different shades of red next to loosely square swatches of the same color (in Figure 2.3, Stilinović holds these same works at a 1976 exhibition-­action in Zagreb). The pillow photographs are connected conceptually to Stilinović’s better known Artist at Work, a set of black-­and-­white photographs that show the artist lying in bed, manifesting a resistant laziness that Stilinović understood as essential to art’s political and intellectual power.31 Compared to the explicitly performative Artist at Work, For Dürer is both bleaker and more mysterious. Whereas Albrecht Dürer’s drawings of pillows were precise studies of volume and form, the pillow in Stilinović’s photographs has a deflated shapelessness that may bear the imprint of a sleeper’s head but records nothing with any clarity. If we consider the pillow as suggesting a form of historical subjectivity, it would seem to be a subjectivity that forgets: both in sleep and in the wrinkled surface that is not a blank slate, yet offers no legible message or memory. The red paintings Stilinović displayed reflect his larger preoccupation with color, and specifically with the color red. In his 1979 text “Consumption of Red-­ Pink,” published in an eponymous catalog by the artist-­r un space Podroom,

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Figure 2.2. Mladen Stilinović, For Dürer, 1976. Black-­and-­white photographs. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić.

Stilinović describes the way in which his use of red keeps its ideological character in focus at the same time as the work puts ideology under erasure: Red is a color that contains many different meanings. Threading this color across different content I aim to desymbolize it, to make it just a color. So that the effort, if we want to read the painting correctly, consists in erasing our knowledge instead of confirming it. If we want to read the work by way of knowledge about that color, we will arrive at an absurd reading. Since we can’t conceal our knowledge[,] those works read as symbols but also desymbolifications.32

In a 2005 interview with Stipančić, Stilinović made the point about the impossibility of desymbolizing red even more bluntly: “You cannot interpret the swastika omitting its connection to Nazism.”33 But, he insisted, red’s meaning still remains elusive. The works he displayed at the 1977 Belgrade action literalize that elusiveness by matching the word red to different shades that demonstrate the chromatic

Figure 2.3. Mladen Stilinović, Red Paintings, 1976. Image of the artist holding the works during the Group of Six Authors’ exhibition-­action Walk around Zagreb, May 19, 1976. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić.

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Figure 2.4. Mladen Stilinović, Gifting Red, 1976. Photographic and text documentation of 1976 action held in Belgrade. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić.

and, by extension, ideological polyvalence of the color. That interest in deconstructing red intersected, in turn, with an interrogation of the commodification of communist ideology evident in other works of the period. For the fifth edition of the April Meetings (Aprilski susreti) in 1976, Stilinović conducted two actions at Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center: Gifting Red, in which he gifted a painting with the words “red as a gift” written diagonally on a white ground to Belgrade-­ based artist Raša Todosijević (see Figure 2.4), and Auction of Red, in which he auctioned off a painting bearing the title phrase in red, which art critic Biljana Tomić bought for the small sum of one hundred dinars. The same year, he created the photo-­documented performance My Red, in which he cut into his hand with a small, sharp knife and then used his own blood to write the title phrase across his palm and ring finger.34 These works all highlight circuits of exchange in which red moves, from the personal gift to a friend, to the public auction (in which a friend also, ultimately, bought the work), to the act of bringing his “red” into public view by literally drawing it from his body. If you read the red works that Stilinović showed in Belgrade in 1977 in dialogue with these concerns about commodification, they offer viewers a false choice between different versions of the same ideological paradigm. But at the same time as the viewer only gets to choose between socialist red and socialist red, the different shades—­the particular materiality of each expression—­turn a signifier that is supposed to index socialism universally into a question about personal choice and context. Simultaneously, relative to June 1968, the works suggest a fragmentation of the ability of language, wielded either by the government or by protestors, to secure a certain reality. The events of 1968 involved extensive negotiation, among agents on all sides of Yugoslavia’s political spectrum, about which red was really red. The red paintings use color to enact a parallel conflict in language and then

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reduce its resolution to something that happens in the experience of the individual viewer, abstracted from the collective subjects of both state and protest. Which red is your red? In centering the viewer’s sense and choice, the work stages a failed, or imperfect, duplication of ideology. The viewer of the work becomes a chooser or selector whose position mirrors that of the postmodern artist but whose status also reflects the commodity socialist context in Yugoslavia, where citizens had, since the mid-­1960s, come to feel increasingly empowered and entitled to participate in global popular and commodity culture.35 Arguably, those expectations made it all the more difficult to face the economic conditions of the late 1970s and into the 1980s, when unemployment worsened, inflation ballooned, and real earnings dropped.36 This left more and more people without prospects, especially young, highly educated people well aware of what they were missing on a global level. Stilinović brought these reflections on language and the imperfect duplication of ideology more explicitly into dialogue with questions about Yugoslavia’s institutions in Submit to Public Debate, an installation first shown at the City Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1980 (see Plate 5). This work addressed questions of pedagogy in relation to how ideology is communicated by overlapping institutions, including the university, the workers’ council, and the media. The artwork consisted of approximately sixty phrases taken from public discourse and the media, such as “concrete actions,” “important factors,” “they should be an incentive,” “achieving goals,” and “common interests.” In an interview with Stipančić, Stilinović specifies that he purposely did not use phrases that referred overtly to self-­ management or to socialist ideals of brotherhood and unity.37 He describes this choice as reflecting Yugoslavia’s political climate at that time, which was the year of Tito’s death: “Suddenly ordinary words and speech turned into political speech, or political threats. Since this happened with language, I decided to put language up for public discussion.” Stilinović wrote each phrase on a piece of cardboard, which ranged from square to horizontally rectangular and from white through various shades of pink to red (Stilinović described pink as embodying a “contradictory” “civil-­revolutionary-­civil” relationship).38 In Submit to Public Debate, he hung the pieces of cardboard salon-­style on the gallery wall, with a longer piece bearing the title phrase affixed at the top, like a heading or a small banner. Facing the wall were twenty-­five simple wooden chairs, arranged in a five-­by-­five formation. The space of Submit to Public Debate reads, at the most basic level, as a space of pedagogical communication. The chairs turned forward suggest acts of watching and listening and the consequent reproduction of authority. Jakovljević notes that the arrangement of chairs resembled the way they would be set up in workers’ council meetings, but with the wall of placards replacing the speaker’s dais toward which the meetings trained participants’ attention.39 Established in 1950, workers’ councils effectively displaced unions as the venues through which workers

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were able to exercise political power.40 Nataša Ilić also notes the similarity to the space of the workers’ council and argues that the work comments on the status of the meetings as a “false facade” of self-­management.41 I think Ilić’s reading is a bit heavy-­handed. While the artwork indeed has elements of unambiguous ideology critique, it also addresses the relationship between discourse and labor at numerous levels, positioning audiences in a more complex way than simply as witnesses to the laying-­bare of empty political promises. Submit to Public Debate deals with the intersection between two different types of labor: the labor of making things and the labor of making words. Arguably, the linguistic production to which the work alludes is not just ideological speech as produced by politicians and state media but also the work done by educated workers. The number of those workers was on the rise in Yugoslavia in the 1970s, especially among young, recent university graduates. But their growing presence was associated with public discussions about unemployment and about the mismatch between the professions for which young people were being trained and the trade jobs and physical labor where the country had the greatest need of workers. The colors of the placards enact a sliding scale of ideology concerning labor: from socialist red discussed above, to pink, which for Stilinović addresses consumerism, to white, which in his practice signifies pain and death but one might also read here as indexing that which is white collar.42 Jakovljević argues that post-­1968, Yugoslavia moved increasingly toward a blurring of the boundaries between material/productive and immaterial/ unproductive labor, which bears striking resemblances to the rise of the informal, networked post-­Taylorist economy that Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello trace in the same period in the capitalist West.43 Key in this paradigm is what Jakovljević describes as the organization of labor “through interpersonal relationships, rather than through its relationship to the object of labor.” 4 4 The workers’ council meeting as a keystone of the political definition of the worker enacted this blurring because it made the activity of generating politically efficacious discourse into a job requirement, regardless of a worker’s sector or whatever else their work produced. Moreover, essential to the changes of the 1970s in Yugoslavia were self-­managing communities of interest (samoupravne interesne zajednice, or SIZs), institutions introduced with the economic reforms of 1974, which oversaw the five areas of education, science, social welfare, health, and culture. Edvard Kardelj, economic architect of the self-­management system, described the SIZs as venues for the “social exchange of labor,” via which workers in productive/material sectors could participate in decision-­making concerning the funding of immaterial sectors (whereas previously that funding would have been redirected by governmental bodies).45 In practice, an SIZ was composed of a council of users of services and one of providers of services, who would decide together on questions relative to a particular area of service. Where relevant, these decisions happened in collaboration with social-­

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political organizations (društveno-­političke organizacije) such as the Communist Party, the Alliance of Communist Youth, or the Women’s Antifascist Front.46 This additional layer of consultative bureaucracy in an already ponderous bureaucratic system thus formally connected workers in material and immaterial sectors while also performing an additional incitement to discourse. Moreover, the 1976 Law on Associated Labor also attempted to diffuse the ability of workers’ councils to push for higher wages by allowing larger firms to subdivide their workers’ councils into so-­called basic organizations of associated labor (osnovne organizacije udruženog rada, or OOUR). This resulted in an OOUR membership of over seven hundred thousand workers nationwide, but it also enabled company directors greater leeway to control and manipulate the decision-­making process. At a pragmatic level, it exacerbated lagging productivity by eating up more and more of the workday into meetings.47 Instead of simply unmasking the falseness of workers’ council meetings, Submit to Public Debate evokes the many layers and forums for the production of words surrounding work, in a context where the country was witnessing a progressive blurring between material labor (object making) and immaterial labor (word making). Thinking with Stilinović’s system of colors, this was a period of the proliferation of many shades of pink, such as we see in the installation’s placards, on the spectrum from white-­collar labor to the bright red of physical production traditionally central to socialist and communist thought. Moreover, this was a time and place where Yugoslavia’s now firmly established consumer culture, associated especially with educated young people in the cities, was creating increasing cultural similarity with the capitalist West. Simultaneously, Submit to Public Debate is not a direct response to any particular economic policy or shift but rather a more ambient address to the expedient intersection between the language of ideology of work, on the one hand, and management speak, on the other, and the kind of public sphere that they open up (or fail to open up).48 At the most basic level, the installation presents us with language that cannot find anchor to particular objects or activities but instead floats in a gray area—­or pink area—­ between different social organs and economic paradigms. At the same time, the space of the installation itself is one where no actual work is taking place. Or is it? Igor Zabel points out that Stilinović’s artworks always need to be completed via viewer interpretation, and with this work I would go even further to argue that one’s presence in the installation is a subtle performance.49 Arguably, in this as in other instances, Stilinović was interested in thinking about the activity of art viewing as a form of labor, but one that comes into definition through its opposition to other, more physically strenuous and objectively taxing, kinds of work.50 Submit to Public Debate appears to position the viewer as a contributor to the debate, as someone potentially investing work and energy in participating in the public evaluation of these forms of language. But

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the whole framework of the piece—­w ith its emphasis on the fact that all speech is ideological—­and its resonance with the different forums for the production of ideologized, bureaucratic speech in Yugoslavia undermines the critical efficacy of debate as such. So while Stilinović positions the viewer’s activity on a continuum with various forms of immaterial labor, he also throws into doubt whether that work can achieve anything except a tautological reproduction of its own form, an empty yet self-­perpetuating performance. This emptiness returns experientially in the installation itself. Of all the works by Stilinović I have seen in person, this one actually struck me as one of the least compelling at an aesthetic level. Whereas many of Stilinović’s other works draw me in as a viewer with humor, poignant sadness, and material texture, Submit to Public Debate is characterized by a kind of blankness or loneliness. I see this not only in the installed form of the work I have experienced but also in a documentation photograph of a gallery security guard seated in it during its 1980 installation in Zagreb (see Figure 2.5). In this black-­and-­white image, the employee sits with his back to the viewer, alone in the installation. He might be taking a break during his paid shift. Whether staring blankly in front of himself or truly contemplating the work’s meaning, his isolated figure and slouchy posture convey no urgency to participate in debate. Rather, they stress the site of the installation as one that fails to materialize collectivity on multiple levels, from the ideological collectivity pursued within the workers’ council meeting or SIZ, to other, more rebellious or critical forms of collectivity, of the type to which the artist himself seems to allude with the comment about putting language itself up for debate. Instead of coming together for a debate, even a critical one, the installation seems more to cast us alone in the gallery, confronted with the empty yet slippery quality of its many words. Jakovljević argues that in taking over the initial impulse of June 1968, Belgrade’s rigorous performance practices of the early 1970s disrupted the presumed representational transparency of state events such as Youth Day by inserting pale, undisciplined student bodies into public space at the wrong place and the wrong time (for the state).51 This argument focuses on works in which artists voluntarily injured, immobilized, or otherwise pushed their bodies to their limits, such as in pieces by Marina Abramović, Raša Todosijević, and Era Milivojević up to 1974. Notable about Stilinović’s and his friends’ responses to the conditions of an increasingly bureaucratic and consumer-­driven socialism later in the decade is that they generally did not put their bodies under pressure or at risk. Rather, they investigated how subjecthood is constituted through acts of interface with various signifying systems, which may seek to instill certain messages but ultimately have unpredictable results. Stilinović in particular was strongly invested in what Kotz describes as conceptual art’s field of “language in general”—­that is, language as found in the everyday world, in ads, grocery lists, bureaucratic records, or banal conversations.52 In the works and events I have described here, Stilinović engaged

Figure 2.5. Mladen Stilinović, Submit to Public Debate, 1980. Gallery employee sitting in the installation of the work at the City Gallery for Contemporary Art, Zagreb. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić.

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that field of language in general in order to stage the spaces of the campus and of the workers’ meeting as sites where the institution’s attempt to form subjects in a particular way had failed. In that space of failure, art arrives to materialize a more independent and also less dependable subject who is alone in their experience despite the fact that ideology’s universalizing statements ring with painful familiarity. In the following section, I analyze how Martek locates the possibility of failure in a different way and in response proposes a public pedagogy of self-­ driven affiliation with the avant-­garde.

Martek and Lineage For the exhibition-­action at the University of Belgrade, Martek contributed one of his “poetic objects,” which Stilinović executed for him. Martek was unsatisfied with the result; even communication between close friends is fallible. Three years later, at the March 18 exhibition-­action at Zagreb’s Faculty of Philosophy in which some of the group members and peers in their wider circle participated, Martek displayed pre-­poetry works and also a piece consisting of a university diploma on which he pasted a pencil. This simple gesture has both a sweet and a subversive dimension, a duality typical for Martek’s work. On the one hand, the diploma and pencil have a logical, even childlike association in that before the digital era, the latter was necessary to obtain the former, so the pencil acts like a concretization of the labor that went into graduation. On the other hand, gluing a pencil to the diploma violates the latter’s symbolic sanctity, calling into question its status as an adequate representation of an immaterial achievement. I see Martek’s practice not as one that employs innocent gestures in the service of cynicism but as a genuine vacillation between positions of sincerity and criticality, through which the artist strives to understand his own historical position. It is striking that other writers have not tended to discuss Martek’s art in pedagogical terms, given how focused it is on scenes of reading and writing and on questions of acquiring and deconstructing received knowledge. Multiple works throughout his career look almost like penmanship exercises, such as pieces from the Sonnet Cycle of 1978–­79, one of which features the Croatian alphabet simply written fourteen times in pencil and signed “poet,” under the title “Poem about Truth” (see Figure 2.6). Martek started writing poems at age fifteen because of girls but then turned away from conventional poetry at age twenty-­three, in 1974, because he was frustrated with how the delay of publication prevented it from connecting directly and immediately with its audience.53 He described this to me as a broadening of poetry “so that it wouldn’t sleep in libraries, dead like that in books.”54 Martek’s drive to playfully deconstruct the poem to its most basic elements shared some common ground with the work of Moscow-­based artist and Collective Actions cofounder Andrei Monastyrski, whose practice was centrally

Figure 2.6. Vlado Martek, Sonnet Cycle (detail), 1978–­79. Pencil on paper. Courtesy of Kontakt Art Collection.

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focused on the sound of language and who wrote poems designed to be read in live performance.55 Martek’s work was equally deconstructive in impulse but tended to background the aurality of language in favor of its visually concrete dimensions. As such, the dimension of performance that pertains to Martek’s work is more akin to body art as a visual and spatial practice than to the sense of a vocal performance or reading more traditionally allied with poetry. This ethos of concretism led him, in the early 1970s, to the production of “pre-­poetry.” Pre-­poetry involves the creation of objects and texts that stress the material grounds that form the requisite basics of writing, like paper and pencils, but that also emphasize how those materials intersect with discursive norms, such as the role of the artist or the surface as a place to inscribe meaning. Fellow poet Dubravka Đurić describes this as an abandonment of poetry as a practice of writing in favor of a practice of physically making poems.56 Branka Stipančić quotes Martek as calling pre-­poetry a “controlling,” “a tidying up before I write a poem.” Stipančić describes pre-­poetry as a place of unrest and of setting up of obstacles.57 Pre-­poems themselves are characterized by a rather messy handmade quality and range greatly in form from handmade books to the alphabet written out in pencil or oil pastel, to “poetic objects” of the kind that I discussed in chapter 1. Building on these interpretations, I see pre-­poetry as meditating on the process of learning through a certain childlike quality via an experimental, unruly use of materials and a heightened sense of wonder. Pencils call up associations with school and early learning. Moreover, as Martek glues, cracks, and stacks them, he refuses to abide by adult knowledge of how they “should” be used, entering instead into a childlike, experimental play (Are these toys, or do they do something else? Should I use this to make a mark or put it in my mouth?) (see Figure 2.7). The works also display a desire to accumulate pencils, erasers, and other writing-­related objects—­that is, to take pleasure in their basic material existence beyond their functionality. In a work from 1976 entitled Preserved Tools and Materials, Martek “pickled” writing materials in glass jars, filling one with short green pencils, one with small sheets of paper, and one with erasers (see Plate 6).58 Far from preserving the materials for future use, the acidic pickling liquid denatured them, perhaps a tongue-­in-­cheek joke about the dependence of poetry on its immediate context and the limits of trying to store it for future use.59 Notably, these works bear substantial and totally accidental resemblance to some of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s glass Bólides.60 They reflect a childlike interest in the materials themselves, by hoarding them in a fetishistic but ultimately destructive way. An overtly childlike approach to materials is also evident in small, unfired clay sculptures that Martek made starting in the late 1970s, which present abstract shapes, stars, bodies (animal and human), and houses all molded in an extremely primitive way, with objects embedded in them, including pencils, pencil sharpeners, fragments of mirror, and breadcrumbs. These works are fragile and most of the early ones are

Figure 2.7. Vlado Martek, I’m Not a Poet Because If I Wanted to I Could Be, 1982. Assemblage with pencils on paper. Courtesy of Darko Šimičić.

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Figure 2.8. Vlado Martek, Untitled, circa 1985–­89. Clay sculpture with found objects. Courtesy of Vlado Martek; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

lost. Viewing a collection of examples from the later 1980s at the artist’s retrospective in 2019 was like looking at the output of a melancholy kindergarten class. It is important to note that what Martek achieves with these simple, literal, rough uses of material is not just a regression from art as refined craft but a differently expressive pathway into avant-­garde history. The value that he places on that history is clear in his “poetic agitations.” This is a series of works created from 1978 onward in which he posted signs in city spaces entreating viewers to “Read Mayakovsky’s Poems” (“Čitajte pjesme Majakovskog”) and then progressed to numerous other avant-­garde authors, who correspond both to his own tastes and to the literary histories of specific sites where iterations of the work took place (see Figure 2.9). Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s dynamic and provocative relationship with audiences in the early Soviet period was inspirational to Martek.61 Stipančić explains how the mode of these signature works began with a failure: Martek proposed to CEFFT, which often helped the Group of Six Authors obtain permits for their public events, to conduct a series of actions where he would post and distribute leaflets around the city entreating viewers to “Read Mayakovsky’s Poems,” “Read Éluard’s Poems,” and “Read Mallarmé’s poems.” CEFFT rejected the proposal, and so, lacking the ability to obtain a permit, Martek decided to

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Figure 2.9. Vlado Martek, Read Branko Miljković’s Poems, 1980. Poetic agitation, Belgrade. Courtesy of Vlado Martek and Branka Stipančić.

paste the posters up illegally. The silkscreened posters were small, just A4 size turned horizontally, with the text in blocky black, and were produced in editions of approximately one hundred. Stipančić emphasizes how the posters stood out, by virtue of their simple and uniform style, the scarcity of ads in 1970s Yugoslavia relative to the present day, and also the artist’s decision to post them on storefronts, underpasses, and other locations apart from the official boards reserved for the legal posting of print material.62 In a 1979 article in Polet, art critics Josip Depolo and Rene Bakalović offer the following tongue-­in-­cheek description of encountering Martek’s poetic agitations: All peaceful citizens of this city, myself included, were taken aback in the second half of last year by imperatives written in extremely simple black letters on small white posters pasted around the city: “Read Rimbaud,” “Read Mayakovsky.” I thought this was the first terrifying act of some fanatic terrorist organization of crazed literature professors who would later with stern reprisals force us, for every poet mentioned, to learn ten poems to start.63

This description kicks off an article titled “How Much Longer Will Mama Feed the Artists?” that is highly critical of the New Art Practice, especially of the way in

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which its artists intentionally call criteria of artistic quality into question. How­ ever, the description, in all its irony, does pinpoint the simultaneous pedagogical investment and ambiguity of speaking position that characterizes the poetic agitations. The ambiguity of speaking subject is accentuated by the printing style of the early posters, especially those of 1978–­79, which were characterized by minor imperfections, where slightly wobbly edges and corners not perfectly lined up demonstrate clearly that the stencils Martek used were made by hand. Martek had neither the means nor the desire to have the posters professionally produced and thus to eliminate such imperfections, and so he created a style that placed them at a distance from professional print materials and from the handwriting present in much of his practice. This makes their speaking subject feel somehow collective yet still unofficial, a duality to which Depolo and Bakalović allude with “terrorist organization.” Moreover, as they note, the posters want us to get educated and thus to be introduced to a canon of knowledge, figured here by the rote memorization of poems. What, in fact, does Martek want viewers of the agitations to learn? Martek is consistent in referring to these works as “poetic agitations”—­that is, not performances, not actions, but also not just prints or text-­based works. To call them “agitations” puts the emphasis on their reception. And indeed, the messages the posters deliver, the appeal to read Mayakovsky or whichever other author, would seem to seek from the viewer/reader a certain kind of behavior in response. At the same time, when Martek and I spoke about the work, he explained to me that it is in fact not essential that viewers actually go on to read Mayakovsky or Rimbaud. Rather, “what’s important is that they have an encounter with that urging, with that agitation to read a certain author. And that it creates curiosity inside them, even the semiliterate ones,” about who that author is.64 I understand Martek’s use of the term semiliterate to be polemical here and to encompass not only people with a low level of functional literacy but also those who lack familiarity with artistic and literary culture, for whom reading literary classics for intellectual engagement is foreign. He elaborated with a metaphor of the artist as like God tossing seeds in the Parable of the Sower: “Some fall on thorns, they don’t sprout, some fall on rock, they don’t sprout, some fall in the earth, and they sprout.” 65 The agitations position the viewer as someone potentially, though not by any means necessarily, activated by the work, who receives a proposal or entreaty but may either engage or ignore it as they would with a commercial or ideological text they might encounter in the city space. The agitations made an implicit claim not only that avant-­garde authors such as Mayakovsky and Rimbaud are universally valuable but also that literature can express the spirit and history of a site, as Martek made clear in later agitations where he visited somewhere and made posters for a local author—­encouraging passersby in Frankfurt to read Georg Trakl, in Belgrade to read Branko Miljković, or in Moscow to read Marina Tsvetaeva. Important context for this belief is the

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strong global connection, in the twentieth century, across nation-­states between literature and the political question of the subject, a connection that was the object of public debate in Yugoslavia since at least the nineteenth century.66 Starting in the 1830s, the Illyrian movement, led by Ljudevit Gaj, articulated a direct connection between the codification and promotion of Croatian as a literary language and the national self-­assertion of united South Slavic peoples in the context of rising Hungarian nationalism in the Habsburg Empire. The connections laid in the nineteenth century between the specificity of the language and the viability of the nation have persisted over the course of the region’s history, up into the recent cultural politics of postsocialist Croatia.67 Questions about Croatian language specificity also played a central role in the articulation of nationalist sentiment that gave rise to the Croatian Spring of 1971. The Matica hrvatska, the cultural organization that was a major advocate for Croatian national self-­assertion during that crisis, gained political attention and broad cultural purchase in the late 1960s, due to protests by Croatian linguists when the first two volumes of a common Serbo-­Croatian dictionary were released in 1967. The dictionary was the realization of an agreement reached at Novi Sad in 1954 to establish a common language, and Croatian linguists protested that it systematically privileged Serbian variants over Croatian ones. Ensuing debates between the Matica hrvatska and its Serbian counterpart in Novi Sad, the Matica srpska, not only derailed the dictionary’s eventual completion but provided fuel for broader dissatisfaction within Croatia about the republic’s cultural and economic position in the Yugoslav federation.68 Another important point of context for Martek’s elevation of local literary figures was the fact that artists and cultural figures of various levels of renown played important political roles in Yugoslavia. These included especially writer Miroslav Krleža, whom I mentioned in chapter 1, but also more minor figures such as Mladen Stilinović’s father, Marijan Stilinović, a Partisan veteran who acted and worked in radio and print journalism, in addition to serving as Yugoslavia’s ambassador to Argentina in 1951 and helping to establish Zagreb’s City Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1954.69 Finally, Zagreb was not only the geographic cradle of the Illyrian movement; it also became the subject of poems of that period that rhapsodized about its beauty.70 Martek’s poetic agitations are like a reversal of that mode that use the visual grammar of city signage to direct us toward poems. Martek’s work also reflects an interest in complex regional histories of language and literature as they were bound up with the possibility of articulating a modern artistic subjecthood outside of Anglo-­A merican twentieth-­century art. In his approach to the question of who can claim to be modern, canonicity plays an important role. The authors to whom the poetic agitations direct viewers are not obscure but rather acknowledged members of the modernist canon. The agitations in effect suggest that readers access that canon but in a self-­directed, extra-­(or even anti-­) institutional manner, which is responsive to geographic context. Miško Šuvaković describes Martek’s position vis-­à-­v is the modernist canon as one of

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standing apart from “homogenous” (which I take to mean Western-­dominated) modernism with a humorous attitude of “observer and transfigurator.”71 It can seem that that there is a paradoxical impasse between Martek’s impulses to dissolve producer/viewer boundaries, on the one hand, and to elevate the universal human and national cultural value of artistic expression, on the other. But this duality is part of his larger interest in questions of hierarchy as such and the way that they give shape to aesthetic and linguistic experience. You can see these ideas at work in a text entitled “The Hierarchy of Symmetry” from 1978.72 Like Martek’s other writings from this period, it is written in an unbelievably dense, wordy style. This style pulls the reader into a maze of words that blur the boundary between the philosophical text and the poem, explicitly taking philosophy toward the boundary of indecipherability and confronting the reader with the opacity and polyvalence of language. Martek here identifies two “directions” of hierarchy, the first of which “begins with the visual fact of the word and reaches through stages to purified forms of symmetry.”73 He describes the development of the word “in the eyes and minds of viewers” as a circular form, which “attains another reality from the one in which we think that we exclusively reside.” He posits the mirror (which often reappears in his work) as a space of playful unfolding for this process, in which the viewer comes to focus on “that which is interior.” I understand the role of the mirror here to be a place where the viewer’s own relation to materiality and language becomes self-­reflexive. In hierarchy’s other “direction,” Martek writes, the role of the mirror “belongs to memory.” “Hierarchy is constructed with the help of the memory of the mirror in interiority as a typical locus of reflection, and that in stages from the read to the spoken word.” He then goes on to connect this play to the status of the poem: “The mirror also shows that the written poem is always on the border between the interior and the exterior, like that which hierarchy shows.”74 In these passages, hierarchy carries the meaning we would usually associate with this term—­that is, a system of ranking—­which delineates gradations in importance and authority between the spoken and the written word, between past and present, between interior and exterior, between the viewer and the object of their contemplation. At the same time, Martek casts hierarchy in a more unusual light as something that shows. What does it show? Arguably, instead of strictly delineating relationships between categories, it points us in the direction of their relational connection with each other and shows how each always holds the potential to give way to the other. As such, Martek’s interest in working at the boundaries between these categories involves both highlighting their difference but also constantly making them give way onto one another. Šuvaković writes that Martek’s works “gain their ontological base only in his behavior that delays their presence in the same way that language delays the present of the thing (reference),” casting Martek’s practice as structured by a performative quality that functions like a kind of archive of possibilities both realized and unrealized.75

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In 1979, Martek created another poster agitation instructing viewers: “On each thing that you buy or own, write its name.” He followed his own instructions in a series of different actions, and in 1980 created the related work Writing the Name (Tit), in which he wrote tit (sisa) in black paint onto the right breast of his wife, Branka Jurjević, and then taped the brush with which he did so vertically onto her ribcage. Another important iteration of this work took place later in House (1997), in which he wrote the word KUĆA in large, cut-­out red letters on the side of his childhood family home, which at that moment was slated for demolition. In a 2015 interview, the artist described these works as an attempt “to alert people that they need to become conscious of everything they do from spending to being, that is, naming.”76 This framing presents naming as a material activity in the world, on the same plane as labor and bodily existence. The work performs a cartoonishly simple application of language to different material sites, but in doing so it highlights the complicated interventions of individual experience and of systems of representation. Martek’s childhood home is not just a house but the house, foundational to his subjectivity, but at the same time it has a certain anonymity that cannot explain his work or adult self. And Writing the Name (Tit) alludes to the status of the nude female body as art historical object, so that within the frame of the artwork this particular woman’s breast is never just her own but is part of an endless series of breasts connected together by representation (a process that Martek, as an artist with male privilege, perpetuates despite his self-­reflexivity about naming and representation). Through anchoring language materially to particular objects in space, Martek both grounds it in the everyday and demonstrates its virtual quality, its opening onto the unknown and the unexpected. The works I have discussed here enact different ways of making language spatial: as something overtly, even comically concrete in the pre-­poems and labeling works and as a modernist canon that unfolds and reflects on particular geographic spaces in the poetic agitations. The works are concerned with pedagogy and how we absorb language, but always relative to specific physical configurations of bodies and space. My next section expands on this analysis by considering how familiar objects, including the table, chair, and book, become motifs through which Martek and Stilinović spatialize language in order to consider how it forms individual subjects.

Spaces of Language At the 1980 exhibition-­action in the courtyard of the Student Center on the Uni­ versity of Zagreb campus that I mentioned above, Martek staged a performance in which he did everything but write (see Plate 7). The artist drew a chalk square of a little less than two by two meters on the ground, in which he placed a heavy stack of paper several inches high, a large pile of pencils, and many small, white erasers. He moved a chair and table into, and then out of, the square. He moved the

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stack of writing materials back out again, placing them not on the table but on the ground next to it. Photographic documentation shows that passersby—­two women, in particular—­stopped and bent down to help him round up stray erasers. The dark brown skin of three men who stopped to chat with the artist moreover suggest the racial and national diversity of the campus audience for whom the action unfolded, as the student population encompassed both domestic students and international students, whose mobility to Yugoslav universities was facilitated initially by the solidarity politics of the Non-­Aligned Movement and later by profit-­driven recruitment.77 On the whole, the documentation images appear to demonstrate extensive viewer interest, from these conversations to the curious gazes of many onlookers who stopped to watch. With this performance, Martek used the pencils, paper, erasers, and furniture as props in a performance that recalled, but did not manifest, writing as it is traditionally conceived. Instead, the performance took the act of sitting solo at a desk and made it public in several ways. First, and most obviously, the action unfolds in the public space of the university campus. As such, it takes the activity of writing, which one can assume was happening inside many buildings nearby, and brings it into the open. The large stacks of materials Martek brought were also disproportionate to the writing activity of a single person, implying either endless, overzealous writing activity or the possibility of sharing the materials with others, in turn suggesting a participatory dimension. The work, moreover, makes Martek’s intentions for writing into the object of public speculation—­what is he doing? Is he actually going to write? Is he just clowning around? In this work, the chair and table serve as emblems of the individual bodily posture and thus labor of one who writes, labor that the performance redirects with its incessant, somewhat awkward, and lightly comic physical activity. They stand therefore as representations of how the individual performs writing, an act the artwork overturns into a process that is public, physically dynamic, and without the expected outcome of words on paper. Chairs and tables form an unexpected motif throughout a number of works by both Martek and Stilinović, including, as I have already discussed, Submit to Public Debate. The table is one of Karl Marx’s famous examples, in Das Kapital, of the commodity form. While the table is just made of wood and is an ordinary thing, as soon as it enters circulation as a commodity, “it metamorphoses itself into a sensually supersensual thing. It does not only stand with its feet on the ground, but it confronts all other commodities on its head, and develops out of its wooden head caprices which are much more wondrous than if it all of a sudden began to dance.”78 Stilinović’s major group of works Exploitation of the Dead (1984–­90), which addresses questions of labor, value, and the body in Yugoslav socialist history, features numerous images of chairs and tables, including a small panel made of light, varnished wood, on which the artist painted a black triangle

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Figure 2.10. Mladen Stilinović, Exploitation of the Dead (detail), 1984–­90. Assemblage sculpture. Courtesy of Darko Šimičić; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

and on that a little red table, tiled playfully down to the left, almost as if it is dancing. Throughout Exploitation of the Dead, Stilinović combined familiar everyday objects such as cups, saucers, and alarm clocks with a color scheme and abstract motifs evocative of the Russian avant-­garde and the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich in particular. Exploitation of the Dead uses found photographs of voluntary work brigades and many images of people sitting down to work, including large auditoriums of delegates and a bank teller seated in a booth, her head and neck bent down over her work.79 Another piece from the cycle shows two similar photographs of rows of school desks, topped with a star that recalls the Yugoslav flag but painted black and nailed on so that it stands slightly akimbo (see Fig­ ure 2.10). Stilinović also created a 1985 drawing in oil pastel on paper that seems

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almost like an overt parody of Marx’s passage and that is also reminiscent of his engagement with the space of the workers’ council meeting (see Plate 8). In this drawing, a group of twelve crude, black chairs clump together underneath a red Yugoslav star, against a supercharged yellow background (note that in Croatian, table is stol and chair is stolica, meaning that, unlike in English, the words have the same root). The chairs are tilted every which way, giving the sense that instead of inanimate objects, they are living beings holding their own meeting. Stilinović’s works, Marx’s formulation, and Martek’s performance of awkwardly making a table dance draw their impact from the familiarity of the objects to readers and viewers and from people’s own muscle memory of the postures that these pieces of furniture compel. In addition to being commodity items, chairs and tables are sites where work happens. This duality—­concrete objects versus the implicitly cerebral work of reading, writing, and discussing—­resonated with the dual position of the Yugoslav worker of the 1970s as both physical producer and discursive producer, which I discussed above. In Stilinović’s and Martek’s artworks, chairs and tables are significant because they are concrete physical sites where subjectivation in and through language takes place. Martek’s work at the Faculty of Philosophy disrupts the way in which these pieces of furniture give rise to performances that locate the individual as a disciplinary subject within language. An unusual and compelling work by Stilinović from 1983 entitled Head seems animated by a similar sensibility (see Plate 9). The piece consists of a silhouette of a head cut from brown corrugated cardboard, decorated with scribbles in red, green, yellow, and white pastel. The head has a black, cigar-­shaped lozenge extending from its mouth. Perched on top of the lozenge and hanging off the bottom of it are two simple chair silhouettes, on which sit little humanoid figures, with the suggestion of vacant, passive smiles on their faces. Two more similar chairs with figures are attached to the top and back of the head. In this artwork, I read the black lozenge as symbolic of language; it looks like a speech bubble and sits in an indeterminate space between inside and outside, coming as language does neither fully from the interior nor unilaterally from the exterior world. The head could be a figure for the state as ideological speech machine, on and around which the little humanoid figures sit passively planted on their chairs. Or perhaps they are like ideas or even identifications that take up residence on the head, itself lacking eyes but with bright green lips that further accentuate the mouth. Speculating on the different layers of possible interpretation, I am left with the impression of a subject in language that is occupied from the outside by certain imperatives or forces but maintains a fundamental unruliness. In the predigital era, sitting in a chair, at a table, to read or write involved paper or a book. Books are perhaps less obviously connected to space than are

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chairs and tables, but Martek and Stilinović manipulate them in order to stress how their material dimensions bear ideological significance and structure experience in certain ways. Martek created numerous works in which he modified existing books. Examples include Yes or No? (1976), an ordinary notebook with a cover featuring midcentury-­style abstract designs in earth tones, to which Martek affixed a lumpy clay quadrangle incised with the title phrase. Clay-­Blocked Book (1976) is a similar type of notebook with a different mottled cover, with clay applied somewhat messily to the three sides where the pages should open. The clay barrier makes it physically difficult to open the book, but the opportunity to attempt that would not be available to most viewers anyway. Instead, the real effect is to interrupt our act of imagining opening the book and to focus our attention instead on the disruption of the usual everyday use of the object. In this respect, the modified books have something reminiscent of Fluxus instruction works by artists such as Yoko Ono and George Brecht, which often present “instructions” impossible to carry out—­like Ono’s 1960 Blood Piece, “Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint (a). Keep painting until you die (b)”—­or which place such emphasis on the materiality of language that attempts to translate words into action remain self-­consciously speculative (like Brecht’s Word Event: Exit of 1961). Stipančić observes that the material surface of writing has an important role in Martek’s practice.80 We can see how in the artist’s act at the exhibition-­action on the Sava River in 1975, where he displayed his journal, open to viewers, alongside a handwritten poem and a poem on a poster. Stipančić reads this act as a demonstration of Martek showing he has nothing to hide.81 Indeed, physically opening the journal to the public also performs an emotional opening or making-­transparent in which the revealed surface of the pages enacts a bearing of the artist’s interior subjectivity. The temporary, ephemeral nature of the work emphasizes that the viewer’s role—­as reader, as voyeur—­is another dynamic and performative term in the encounter. Stilinović, too, engaged in a subtly performative way with the act of writing in a set of works from 1977 in which he copied text from početnice (spelling books or primers for both elementary school and adult education) from 1949 to 1951 (Figure 2.11). Stilinović copied simple grammar lessons in black pen onto gray and brown paper and circled certain repeated words in red in order to show their significance: “Simo has a cap. Our Pero has a pen and paper. Mitar has a meter. We have a goat. Zlatko had a pistol. Which bird has the brightest eye?” (“Simo ima titovku. Naš Pero ima pero i papir. Mitar ima metar. Mi imamo kozu. Zlatko je imao pušku. Koja ptica ima najbistrije oko?”) Children’s educational materials are geared, at the most basic and pragmatic level, at developing literacy and subjecthood in parallel; primers pose the question of how the subject comes into being and what kind of subject a person will become. With his act of copying, Stilinović emphasized how the primers teach not only language but so much more

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Figure 2.11. Mladen Stilinović, From First Grade Primers, 1977. Pen on paper. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić.

besides. First, there is the verb to have, placed here in different sentences that overall highlight both polyvalence (the different meanings of “to have a pen” versus “to have an eye,” etc.) and possessiveness. Some of the examples also make me reflect on the material and ideological conditions of recently post-­W WII Yugoslavia: “having a goat,” in many places with still rural and poor populations; “having a pistol”; “having a titovka,” or a cap in the Partisan style, named in popular language after Tito. Stilinović’s emphasis on the possessive moreover has a subtly subversive dimension in the context of copying a text clearly geared at socialist ideology, in that he makes the assertion of possession seem elemental to subjectivity. The dates of the copied primers also bring attention to the moment of the early Yugoslav nation directly after the 1948 split with Stalin, when questions about the nature of Yugoslav versus Soviet socialisms were highly fraught.82 Ultimately, unlike the serious users of the primers, Stilinović writes not in order to consolidate linguistic and ideological knowledge but to demonstrate the ideological work taking place. The deliberate yet childlike block capital letters, with attempted corrections of a malformed letter here and there, draw the viewer closer to the bodily

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nature of his performance of writing. The series of works based on primers also retains a sense of the affects and attachments that constitute subjectivity, as another example shows copied phrases that center on the verb to love. In addition to artworks that make found books more corporeal and performative, Stilinović and Martek both had career-­long practices of producing small, cheap, self-­published books that involve different degrees of hand intervention.83 By contrast to Stilinović’s books, which treat the paper as a surface for writing, pasting, and painting, Martek’s are more sculptural: he is more likely to bend and cut into pages or attach found objects to them. Moreover, though equally interested in the materiality of language, he approaches that materiality more from the angle of language’s production in the writing process, as opposed to via the visual puns common in Stilinović’s art. In this respect, Martek’s books have a less didactic feeling, because, unlike Stilinović’s, a number of them cannot even be read straightforwardly. Two small, evocative, untitled books from 1981 exemplify Martek’s sculptural experimentation with the book form. The first consists of a horizontal commercial notebook with a sheet of white paper stapled to partially obscure its front cover. Opening the book, the viewer discovers a series of pages that have been stapled: a single staple in the middle of the right-­hand side of the page; a line of four staples down the edge of the text page; an uneven line of five staples in the bottom right corner; and a few more pages where staples have been used to hold a diagonally or horizontally bent page in place or to tack down an intentionally bent corner. The following page has Da (Yes) spelled crudely in staples near the right-­hand edge (see Figure 2.12). Finally, to the last page are affixed three pencil shavings, taken from a pencil with a neon red wrapper, arranged in ascending sizes from left to right. This book, with its very simple materials, develops a complex meditation on the elemental composition of language. The staples on the first three pages, which do not actually hold anything together, pose the question of whether they just serve a decorative function (albeit an antiaesthetic one) or whether they should be taken as a kind of meaningful language. That language might be from some extant system, like braille or Morse code, or one that is developed within the course of the book itself. But as soon as the viewer gets used to looking for signs about how to interpret the code, the pages where the staples hold the bent paper in place introduce another function: as an anchor for the sculptural folding of the book. Martek takes this a step further with the page that says Yes, where he uses the staples to clunkily yet clearly spell out a recognizable word. Yes to what? Yes as an affirmation of the viewer’s interpretation? Yes as an embrace of simultaneous plural registers of meaning-­making and of the simple staple as the emblem of crossing those registers? Yes to some question posed to the author about himself or his work? Finally, the viewer arrives at the page with the pencil shavings, with their delicate yet vibrant red edges. These shavings are presented in the context of a book

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Figure 2.12. Vlado Martek, untitled artist’s book, 1981. Library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

where Martek has not used pencil at all to write or draw. As such, they stand like reminders of a more normal way of communicating but also as exemplars of the usually discarded refuse of a typical writing process. Throughout the book, Martek asks the viewer to stay with him as he successively presents, and then undermines, a series of what feel like potential languages or codes but that quickly fail to follow a logical system or to establish clear communication. The book thus poses the question of to what extent language must depend on a regulated external code or whether it can freely develop its own, and if so what kind of message it might be able to communicate to the addressee. If this book has any content to communicate, it is the question of where to locate the boundaries of language as a signifying system. Yet despite its breaking down of our confidence in codes that communicate clearly, flipping through the book still creates an emotional trajectory for the viewer: from bemusement at the initial stapled pages, to mild amusement once you reach Yes, to (at least in my experience) a tender feeling on the last page with the vulnerable and delicate pencil shavings and their celebratory red edges. The book thus retains something of the poetic, in the sense of that which pertains

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Figure 2.13. Vlado Martek, untitled artist’s book, 1981. Library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist.

to the emotionally sensitive or imaginative use of language, even as it largely sets aside recognizable language. This quality of being emotionally evocative yet highly concrete is also present in a smaller book made the same year (1981), sized about the span of my open hand (see Figure 2.13). This book is crafted from thickish, lower-­quality paper with a yellow tone, cut unevenly by hand. Two staples on the left-­hand side hold together a small stack of the paper in three different sizes, with the largest pieces at the back and the right-­hand corners on the front pages sliced diagonally away. Martek drew the schematic, cartoonish outline of a house in pencil in the upper right where the foremost pages are cut away, so that the image overlaps all three sets of sheets. Apart from the house, all the pages are blank. Or at least blank on the front, because once they open the book, the viewer can observe that the pages are made from reused paper, so that there is text on the verso of each page, though rotated upside down. The reused paper turns out to be radio programs for musical

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sets on Zagreb’s Radio Sljeme. The programs list European and global musicians under rubrics such as “Music from Our Neighbors” (which includes Greek singer Mikis Theodorakis, Romanian guitarist Nicolae Covaci, and Johann Strauss played by the New York Philharmonic) and “Let Us Remind You” (dedicated specifically to work by John Lennon). Other artists include Ella Fitzgerald and Elvis Costello. The sets of Anglo and neighboring European artists conspicuously lack many Yugoslav names, though a couple do appear as “editor” (urednik) or selectors of the sets. The programs bring attention to the pragmatic mechanics of Yugoslavia’s participation in global popular culture and to local cultural workers’ own expertise in global music. Combined with the schematic pencil-­drawn house, this unfolds the book’s meaning into a meditation on what constitutes a cultural versus a geographic home. As Martek suggests here, to be at home culturally does not mean hewing to that which is indigenous but is rather a practice of adopting, editing, and appreciating, which corresponds to the desire of a particular audience in a certain place and time. The intimate, sweet size of the book takes this question to a small scale and poses it relative to the particular viewer, with their own cultural knowledge and location. Martek’s and Stilinović’s respective interests in what the viewer brings to the artwork are characteristic of the work of numerous artists from the New Art Practice, who turned away from the generic subject of New Tendencies—­the technomodernist movement that dominated Zagreb’s experimental scene in the 1960s—­and toward questions of individual experience and desire.84 The two artists’ book works bring questions about what is in the viewer already—­their engrained relationship to language, to reading, to ideology—­into connection with detailed investigations of the materiality of language and its limits as a signifying system. To provide some insight into what they considered to be the commonalities and differences in their approaches to the book, I will look last here at Bookwork of 1980. This collaborative work between Martek and Stilinović was produced in conjunction with their shared exhibition of the same title held at the Student Center Gallery in Zagreb, which then traveled to Belgrade’s SKC gallery (Galerija Srećna nova umetnost, or Gallery of Happy New Art) in 1980. The book emphasizes its own function as a sort of catalog by including short lists of the exhibited works. It has a blue cover, professionally printed with white text, and is bound by two staples in the middle of the stack of paper, so that the viewer must choose whether to open it on the left-­hand or the right-­hand side. The artists’ names, in white at the top of each side of the cover, indicate whose side is whose. Though it could theoretically be opened on both sides at once, it is hard to do this alone without ruining the book. Stilinović’s portion of the book is on the more-­ natural-­to-­open right-­hand side. He presents us with the following series of texts about pain (bol) written lightly in pencil:

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A—­BOL 1—­BOL SUBOTA—­BOL [Saturday—­Pain] bol [this time in lower-­case cursive, below a patch of red oil pastel] Mladen [again in cursive] bol [a couple of inches below it]

Stilinović’s part of the book bears a similarity to Martek’s use of staples that I discussed above because of its interest in evoking but then undermining a series of signifying systems. He presents single terms that refer to basic and familiar systems of meaning—­the alphabet, numbers, the days of the week, colors, personal names. The first two, alphabet and numbers, begin with A and 1 and so start at the very beginning (a very good place to start!), but that pattern is quickly undermined when you are presented with Saturday, which in European calendars is the last day of the week. Red is then figured in a presentation of the color itself, instead of via a word, and Mladen is a name that in this context is hardly generic. In pairing each term with pain, Stilinović emphasizes how none of these systems get us away from pain, they only provide different routes for returning to it. Stilinović discussed elsewhere how pain is connected both to work and to laziness.85 Martek’s contribution, in the left side of the book, unfolds with similar visual bareness and restraint but with considerably more drama. His half is an exploration of the practice of pre-­poetry and the identity of the “pre-­poet.” On the back of the book, where each author has a short framing text for the work as a whole, Martek frames his half as a performance of this identity that unfolds in the present: “I give myself a window of time for passing across the conditions of contemporary poetry. In the moment of prewriting, I discover the genesis of the name out of anonymity.”86 In this way, he emphasizes not only his own act of performance in creating the book but the unfolding choreography of our experience of it as viewers. Over the course of the five pages, he writes: I consciously withdraw from the poem I renounce all contents of poetry which arise from language as the material of the work I accept the responsibility of writing a poem pre-­poet87

I have transcribed the text here as one line per page, but in the book each is broken into two short lines, written in cursive in pencil. The second to last page has a white rectangular eraser glued to it, and to the last is affixed an ordinary yellow pencil in a vertical position. In the version I saw, it had smudged its lead on the back of the opposite page. The pencil also leaves a vertical crease in the whole book, visible even on the cover.

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Martek’s presentation first of the eraser and then of the pencil mirrors the progression of the text, from conscious withdrawal and renunciation of content as a kind of wiping out to the acceptance of responsibility for writing a poem. In this text, which feels inescapably like a poem, he presents a succinct staging of the role of the pre-­poet as one who makes an iconoclastic gesture against the poem in order to return to it on different terms. The iconoclastic gesture is aimed at the materiality of the poem: “contents . . . which arise from language as the material of the work.” Once he has rejected content as something that follows material, he can make room for taking up a more meaningful personal responsibility. It is striking that Martek actually foregrounds the materiality of pencil, eraser, and paper. So it would appear that part of the act of “taking responsibility” in fact lies in emphasizing the materiality of language in a very concrete sense. As such, I read Martek’s claim of responsibility vis-­à-­vis the poem to inhere in the election of a conscious and active relationship to the concrete materiality of language production. By the time “pre-­poet” arrives at the end of the text, it reads like both a signature and a logical conclusion of the operations described on the previous pages. “Pre-­poet” seems to evoke that which is temporally anterior to poetry, like prehistory (or even, if we consider the act of artistic creation as an erotic act, like pre-­ejaculate). But it also suggests something that has not yet taken its full form. In this respect, Martek’s claim to be a pre-­poet constitutes a stepping back to focus on the basics of writing so fundamental that conventional poetry considers them to be below its threshold of attention. Simultaneously, it is a taking up of a juvenile or in-­becoming position in which he hangs back from declaring himself a full-­blown poet (which he in fact did in the early, more actually juvenile phase of his poetic/artistic production). Indeed, a certain elective juvenility is affectively and conceptually central to both artists’ halves of Bookwork. Martek and Stilinović didactically chart basic vocabularies for expression. At the end of their halves, both sign their contributions within the framework they have built up, Stilinović as “Mladen—­pain” and Martek as “pre-­poet.” But though both conclude by referring to their own subjectivity, Martek’s half is much more confessional in tone and results in a clearer claiming of an identity as a pre-­poet. His flirtation and struggle with poetry come off as a kind of romantic venture, even despite the very minimal material means of the book. Stilinović instead inscribes his name as just one more term in an economy of meaning that will always refer back to pain, refusing to elevate his own subjectivity as a privileged term. But at the same time, his contribution subtly circles back to the idea of subjecthood through its feeling of being like a sad, stunted version of a children’s writing exercise, like the works from the primer I discussed above.

Juvenility and Ideology Critique While the kind of ideological speech Stilinović addressed in Submit to Public Debate had an obvious connection to contemporary politics in late Yugoslavia, the no-

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tion of creativity as such also carried a political valence. Creativity was central to Praxis philosophers’ understanding of human nature and thus to their conception of humankind’s ability to shape the world and history, as well as philosophy’s crucial role in that process. Namely, Praxis rejected the dialectical materialist concept of “reflection” that was key to both Stalinist Marxism and to orthodox Yugoslav Marxism, which posited the existence of an objective world of matter independent from human intervention, implicitly positioning extrahuman forces as the primary movers of history.88 In “On the Problem of Practice,” his signal contribution to the first issue of Praxis from 1965, Predrag Vranički argues, by contrast, that it is impossible to exist in relationship to the world without some kind of “theory,” attitude, or purpose. In place of a notion of man as secondary to the material world, Vranički offers a notion of a creative subject whose bodily, affective, and intellectual interactions within the world are of a holistic piece: In his childish games, at work, in family relations, in scientific experiments, in artistic creation, or in his historical acts, man is always in a practical, immediately sensuous relationship to his object (nature, other men, etc.), and not simply in a contemplative relationship. If practice is essentially conscious, to a greater or lesser extent free, and planned, creation, [i.e.] transformation of a reality which is not only a reality of thought, but above all a reality of the medium of man’s being, that is, natural historical reality[,] then, we repeat, this concept embraces man in his totality in his family, as a producer, in his political, artistic and scholarly work etc.89

If Marx theorized the alienation of the worker from the products of his labor via the production process as paradigmatic of life under capitalism, Vranički’s description posits creativity as both an innate quality definitive of human existence and the potential foundation of a disalienated world.90 Praxis thinkers, including Mihailo Marković, stress the unity of consciousness and action in praxis, a process of creating both oneself and the world that is fundamentally social and thus provides the grounds for a critique of alienated political life.91 In the writing of Milan Kangrga, this ongoing self-­and world-­creation took on an especially utopian cast, orienting humankind fundamentally toward the future: “Man is what he is not yet, and is not what he already is or what he was, neither past nor present time but the active, practical-­critical, ‘revolutionary’ (Marx) negation of that which he is and was; a turning toward his future which he realizes and infuses with truth in his actions, today, now, here, every hour.”92 Kangrga and other thinkers thus recentered the power and agency of the individual in socialist revolution and the making of history. Jakovljević explains how Praxis formed part of a complex traffic of ideas between the Yugoslav state and its critics and how, despite disagreements, these two parties agreed on an important point: both saw Yugoslav self-­management

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as proof that disalienation of the working subject was possible and could be achieved even under conditions of alienation.93 Over the course of exchanges between Praxis members and Party politicians, concepts could mutate and take on different ideological valences. Such was the case with “creativity,” which, over the course of the late 1960s to early 1970s, migrated from association with Praxis’s revisionist, critical perspective on self-­management to absorption into the dominant ideological discourse, even enabling it to become instrumentalized in attempts to police certain aesthetic practices.94 Jakovljević details how the 1968 protests, which some Praxis members were fired from the University of Belgrade for supporting, radicalized the gap between philosophers’ and politicians’ positions on self-­management.95 The student movement thereby showed how the tensions between those positions were unsustainable and could no longer be normalized as two halves of an ideological dialectic that ultimately supported the status quo of an increasingly ossified state. In the context of these discourses about humanity, creativity, and the possibility of disalienation, Martek’s and Stilinović’s aesthetic gravitation toward juvenility is striking in terms of the incisive critique it offered of how subjectivity was constituted within the ideological framework of late Yugoslavia. Namely, the works discussed above enact scenes of learning and becoming but never give way to harmonious or unproblematic self-­realization. Stilinović copies primers and Martek writes out the alphabet, but in revisiting such scenes of basic learning they disrupt a narrative of teleological progress toward adult consciousness and thereby also the normative role of the figure of the child in discourses of political futurity.96 Moreover, whereas for Vranički children’s play is a prime example of a simultaneously bodily and conscious relationship to the world, Stilinović and Martek engage in childish games that hint at a fetishistic fascination with materials, objects, and words and that stress the resistance of materiality to being shaped by human activity. This is especially clear in Martek’s glass jars of pencils, erasers, and paper soaked in vinegary water, artworks that simultaneously remove the items from use, accumulate them like little tokens or fetishes, and put pressure on their material integrity by subjecting them to slow destruction. In Stilinović’s My Red, in which he cut his hand to write the phrase in blood across his palm, the artist’s own hand—­the body part traditionally privileged in artistic creation but also in production more broadly—­is injured to make visible the novel material of Stilinović’s own blood, so that body, artwork, and consciousness seem troublingly implicated instead of powerfully in sync. Even Stilinović’s characteristic childlike handwriting, evident in Bookwork and many other pieces, conveys a sense of friction between the artist and his materials and a difficulty in shaping the world. Martek and Stilinović thus depict themselves as subjects intensely driven to create but also, in some sense, impotent in doing so. The artists also, crucially, deploy language in strategically childish ways that

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question language’s normative role in forming subjects. A speaking subject who seems both insecure and haughty emerges repeatedly in Stilinović’s work—­for example, in his declaration “I can do that, too” at the end of his 1979 book Red-­Pink.97 In the same book, Stilinović presents a sentence with which he worked in multiple artworks: “An attack on my work is an attack on socialism and progress,” written in red paint on a plain white sheet of paper. This act of appropriating ideologically coded language to discuss his own practice is ironic because it highlights how the phrase cannot be adopted by an ordinary citizen and still retain its power. But the appropriation is also poignant if we see it as an enactment of the awkward and energetic way in which children become subjects of ideology.98 The work makes desire visible through an incongruous juxtaposition between individuality and authority, a move also evident in a 1976 piece consisting of a postcard of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, stuck to a white-­painted wooden panel (see Figure 2.14). Below the postcard written in pencil is the following text in Croatian, its lack of punctuation in the original highlighting its deadpan quality: “One Sunday in London I visited St. Paul’s Cathedral / I said, collapse / and it collapsed” (“Jednu nedjelju u Londonu posjetio sam katedralu St. Paul / Kažem sruši se / i srušila se”). This artwork calls up a speaking subject who asserts a fantasy of being able to crumble a cathedral with words, a fantasy of both material and historical power belied by the building’s solidity in the postcard image. Moreover, the fact this is a postcard points to the cathedral’s canonicity in Western history and the commodified status of that canon. By writing in Croatian, Stilinović locates himself as an outsider to that history, whose art displays both his own impotence and the ways in which individual subjects come to (mis)recognize themselves inside ideologies of power. Across Stilinović’s and Martek’s art, language functions like a bank of scripts available to the subject that are tautological, repetitive, and problematic, drawn from a variety of sources from political ideology to myths of modernist genius. As such, language can be wielded by the subject and, moreover, locates them in a certain matrix of contextual conditions and discourses, but it is not straightforwardly conducive to raising individual or collective consciousness. In sum, Stilinović and Martek problematize the notion of praxis in terms of its two crucial dimensions of creation and consciousness, as they stress the resistance of materiality and direct viewers toward tautological, fantastical, and immature ways of conceptualizing the world. That modality constitutes the core political nature of their work. This reading provides an alternative perspective to Piotr Piotrowski’s critique of Stilinović’s work: in his discussion of Exploitation of the Dead, Piotrowski is critical of the work’s politics, arguing that Stilinović places too much faith in his power as an individual and in his ability to appropriate political symbols at will.99 But how much faith in one’s own power is too much? In response, Stilinović’s and Martek’s artworks might perhaps assert that agency, political or aesthetic, cannot be measured in a mode of careful realism. Instead, both artists

Figure 2.14. Mladen Stilinović, St. Paul, 1976. Collage. Courtesy of Darko Šimičić; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

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foreground aspiration as a prototypical mode of subjectivity, one that responds to but is always somehow out of alignment with the world. Aspiration blows the subject’s conception of their own power out of proportion but also makes the subject vulnerable because of the potential for failure. This dynamic is dramatically at play in Pride, the important work Martek exhibited on the Group of Six’s May 19, 1976, exhibition-­action Walk around Zagreb. Though all the group’s exhibition-­ actions were characterized by a degree of spontaneity, this one was particularly last minute. The format that the artists thought up, in which they would walk around the city each carrying or wearing an artwork, circumvented the bureaucratic permitting process that they usually needed to undergo in order to hold what was more clearly an exhibition in public space. A color documentation photo shows members of the group walking down the sidewalk, between a heavy stone building and a row of parked cars, with Sven and Mladen Stilinović leading and Boris Demur and Martek following behind. From this image, it seems that though the artworks they carry are visible to passersby, the artists are not overly obvious in the act of showing the works, instead carrying them casually with the help of shoulder straps to the side of their bodies. They might easily be mistaken for young people just transporting the objects from one place to another. For the Walk around Zagreb, Stilinović carried a board with two of the red paintings that I discussed earlier in the chapter. Martek bore Pride, a bicycle wheel with a picture of himself, shirtless and long-­haired, wedged in its spokes and a small rectangle of white paper with the word ponos written in pencil, affixed over the center of the wheel (see Figure 2.15). The bicycle wheel is a reference to Marcel Duchamp that would be obvious for anyone with cursory knowledge of twentieth-­ century avant-­garde history. The photograph stuck in its spokes is not enlarged to meet the scale of the wheel but is a small, snapshot-­sized image, showing a distinctly hunky-­looking Martek, arms crossed in front of his stomach below a tanned chest, gazing directly at the camera. Pride is a work centrally focused on Martek’s personal ego and aspirations. Whereas Duchamp’s readymades explicitly displaced the role of the artist as expressive individual in favor of attention to institutional and discursive structures, in Pride the wheel itself becomes a space for staging Martek’s own angsty relationship to his ego. The work offers the viewer a single word, which is also one of the seven deadly sins, and an image of a handsome young man baring his chest, whom it is tempting to read as an illustration of “pride.” But how? Is Martek guilty of pride about his own youthful appearance? Or should we instead focus on the medium of photography and see its representational function as a kind of “pride” that the readymade effaces? Should we think of the hubris inherent in Duchamp’s gesture of reducing the creative act to one of brazen selection? As Martek carried this work on his body during its initial exhibition at the walk, anyone who paid attention to the work would witness two different versions of Martek: the photograph and the live artist, fully

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Figure 2.15. Vlado Martek, Pride, 1976. Poetic object. Courtesy of Darko Šimičić.

clothed and looking less poised than in the photo.100 Moreover, the string attached to the wheel is longish and quite conspicuous, almost as though it were designed to hang around the artist’s neck, letting him wear the work like a mark of penance. Wheels are of course also historically associated with torture. These details suggest one can read Martek’s act of walking the work around the city as a march

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of shame. But at the same time, he is the one who decides to march himself, as opposed to being forced to do so by some more powerful agent or act of collective will. This fact stresses the sovereignty of his individual will but also his isolation, even in an act that seems to perform a bearing of his sinful self. Pride is aesthetically pared-­down but highly melodramatic in terms of the subject it presents, who is caught between pride and shame, aspiration and laziness (evident in the work’s extreme formal simplicity), public exhibitionism and private emotion (figured by the small, personal size of the photograph). Martek, in a conversation we had in 2017, made a link between juvenility and excess in general: “That’s my fate, I want to verbalize the whole world, everything. And . . . anything which is an extreme isn’t good. In youth extremes are desirable, but with age, they’re not.”101 In the 1970s, a decade of dampened possibilities and weakened collectivity, Martek’s and Stilinović’s refusal to find a balanced middle ground and a realist way of measuring agency led viewers away from the possibility of re­inventing a new kind of collective subject and toward their own very specific embodied experiences of words. The durable appeal of these works for later generations of viewers lies in the fact that, while they enact a marked deflation of Yugoslav socialism’s revolutionary subject, they also give viewers space to consider how, in their own desires, aspirations, and failures, it is all right to be a subject not totally in sync with the world.

3

The Life and Death of the Trace Photography, Performance, and Željko Jerman

“My practice is founded on a consciousness of existence,” Željko Jerman wrote in 1978. “The causal product of that consciousness is the need to leave a trace.”1 Jerman initially penned these sentences as part of a statement to accompany his magnum opus, My Year, 1977 (hereafter, often shortened to My Year), for the occasion of its first exhibition in the Studio Gallery of the City Gallery of Contemporary Art. This show took place in Zagreb shortly after the completion of the work, an entire year’s worth of photographs and texts that document Jerman’s daily life and state of mind over the course of 1977 (see Figure 3.1).2 The various photographs that make up My Year include ones that are splotchy, faded, washed out, and almost illegibly dark. Though at first they may seem to just be poorly developed, these variations in fact reflected Jerman’s interest in manipulating elements of the photographic process other than the camera’s capture of an image. Jerman’s experimentations throughout the 1970s with techniques such as using developer to splash on paper, scratching in emulsion, and employing elements of photogram bore some formal commonalities with the work of contemporaneous young, male European artists who stretched the limits of the photographic process in order to ask questions about subjectivity and its relationship to the image. These included Sigmar Polke, who made deconstructed photographs in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Ulay, who created unfixed photographs for a live audience in his FOTOTOT series of 1976.3 In this chapter, I argue that Jerman’s art renders the photographic development process a performative act, one with deep significance for the artist’s enactment as a creative subject in the world. The dual dimension of photography-­ as-­performance is centrally on display in My Year, which juxtaposes Jerman’s overt performances of bodily posing and his movement through social space with the performative process of the photograph’s printing. Because of this structure, trace in Jerman’s practice does not mean a single point in lived reality indexed by the photographic image but rather refers to multiple moments in time, including the camera capturing an impression of light and the photographer using a negative to craft a photographic artwork. Both those time frames, moreover, are situated relative to the overarching fact of human mortality. Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida famously established a connection between the photograph and death—­the 121

Figure 3.1. Željko Jerman, My Year, 1977, 1977. Photo-­performance. Entry for August 2: “It’s terrible when you can’t work. Damned right hand!” Pen on paper and black-­and-­white photograph. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

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“that-­has-­been” quality of photography—­a nd founded, in studies of twentieth-­ century photography, the accepted understanding of the photo as marking the ephemeral nature of subjectivity.4 However, by his own admission, Barthes was focused on the acts of posing for and interpreting photographs, not so much on making them, and thus he saw the moment of posing for the camera as emblematic of photography’s address to mortality.5 Jerman, however, took photography’s relationship to death as a problem for artistic practice and connected it explicitly to his individual mortality. He did so at the thematic level—­his images abound with graves, skulls, and ghostly visages—­but even more fundamentally at the level of facture of the image. In his work, photographic prints and negatives become like bodies that are vulnerable to material decay and destruction. The result is artworks that resonate with forms of early photography, in which photographic images were unique, hand-­produced objects with variations that defied precise mechanical reproduction. Kaja Silverman describes Henry Fox Talbot’s salted-­paper prints of the 1840s and 1850s as “siblings, not identical twins,” whose subtle variations invited many ways of looking.6 Carol Armstrong explores how early photography’s special focus on plant life cast the photograph as a biologically based phenomenon, an early history that interrupts the narrative of photography as irrevocably destined for hegemonic mechanical reproduction.7 Jerman’s work resonates with the anti­ reproductive thrust of these earlier practices. It also casts that stake against mechanical reproductivity as an investment in relationality by emphasizing the relationship between performance conceived in terms of the body situated within a particular place and time and performance conceived as photographic making, in the sense of handcrafting of photographic artworks. Within a global history of contemporary photographic practices, his art brings our attention to the important conceptual work that can be done at the handmade, material level of photographic production—­a dimension often overlooked relative to the focus on the camera’s capture of an image. At the same time as Jerman’s photographic practice unfolded in relation to death, it also functioned for him as a special site for the documentation of the living body. This is clear through the work’s relationship to sexuality, connected in turn to its broader preoccupation with the possibilities and limitations of relationality. Chapter 1 established how the visibility of Jerman’s own body in public space was a key component of works such as Intimate Inscription and the body prints on photographic paper that he created for multiple exhibition-­actions. His photographs also situate space relative to the body. In his works you will often encounter bodies at thresholds, both actual thresholds between public and private space but also thresholds between visibility and invisibility, which throw the self-­evidence of the photograph’s representational space into question. In this sense, Jerman’s photography corresponds to the Group of Six Authors’ wider

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interrogation of the relational and affective dimensions of space, but it also turns viewers more intensely inward, as his images plumb the artist’s own loaded feelings about life, love, and death and suggest that the communication of subjective experience is a generally fraught and difficult activity. The difficulty of communication is also an important focus of Jerman’s collaborative performances with Vlasta Delimar, with whom he began a romantic relationship in 1977 (the same year he completed My Year). Delimar and Jerman collaborated from 1978 to 1983. While Delimar’s work is a central focus of chapter 4, here I position her as a collaborator with Jerman and as a key historical witness of his creative process. Their collaborative works were critiques of gender relations and the forms of intimacy and communication those relations enabled; they corresponded in that respect to denaturalizations of gender and explorations of intersubjectivity in art and culture of the 1960s and 1970s, in Yugoslavia and beyond. At the end of chapter 1, I argued that in their exhibition-­actions the Group of Six Authors tended to invoke intimacy but refuse to substantiate it, referring viewers tautologically back to the structure of artworks themselves. In their collaborations, Jerman and Delimar also took intimacy to be problematic but gave it greater, more affectively intense content through putting their own relationship at the center of their works and through direct involvement of the audience in some performances. Across these analyses, the chapter gives consideration to Jerman’s place within the New Art Practice, the generation of artists that emerged in Yugoslavia starting in the late 1960s, whose socially aware, flexible conceptualism left a lasting impact on the region’s contemporary art history.8 While some members of this cohort—­ such as Marina Abramović, Sanja Iveković, and Mladen Stilinović—­have become globally famous, others, like Jerman, have remained largely unknown to audiences unfamiliar with the former Yugoslavia and the surrounding region. Though Jerman’s lack of broad renown is related to some tragic biographical facts, including his untimely death in 2006, I believe it is also connected to his way of working with the photographic image. His murky “sibling” photographs reproduce less easily than the artworks and performance documents of some of his peers, and they invite slower, more obscure ways of looking than many of the politicized, critical art practices for which the New Art Practice is best known. For precisely those reasons, his work is a crucial pillar in the story that this book tells about the expressive and emotive investments that went in dialogue with the politically astute conceptualism and practices of critical image appropriation in the work of that generation.

Jerman’s Early Art in Context In the place and time where Jerman lived and worked, photography was practiced in a variety of forms. A form of highly aestheticized social documentary was well-­ developed in the former Yugoslavia, as were connections between photography

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and conceptualism. Sandra Križić Roban writes that the first issue of Gorgona magazine, produced by Josip Vaništa in 1961, was a milestone in terms of those connections. The issue consisted of a series of pages bearing nine half-­tone prints of a photograph of a shop window, displaying a wooden structure in which a horizontal piece of wood connects four smaller, shelf-­like pieces. Vaništa had encountered this mysterious display on a walk and been captivated by its strangeness and its uncanny resonance with his own work.9 Vaništa did not photograph the window himself but asked his friend Pavel Cajzek to return the next day and photograph it as a favor, putting distance between Vaništa and the image.10 More­ over, the seriality of the photograph bluntly highlighted by the string of identical images mirrors the seriality of the magazine: two entities founded on structures of multiple reproducibility. A decade later, in 1971, Goran Trbuljak brought an interest in the inscrutable photograph into dialogue with the artist’s performative self-­enactment, when, for his solo exhibition at Zagreb’s Student Center Gallery, he presented only a single poster showing a close-­up, black-­and-­white portrait of his own face, under which appeared the text: “I don’t want to show anything new or original,” followed by the artist’s name and the information about the location, dates, and opening hours of the exhibition.11 In a global context, Trbuljak was one of numerous artists in the early to mid-­1970s who used photography to depict artistic subjectivity as performative and opaque and to analyze its intersections with systems of aesthetic value and power. The photographs employed in these contexts included found images, such as On Kawara’s use of picture postcards (I Got Up, 1968–­79), as well as other images that artists produced themselves but that still bore a citational quality, such as Eleanor Antin’s evocation of Eadweard Muybridge in Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972) or Martha Rosler’s eerily empty quotations of American documentary photography in The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974–­75). The Gorgona group was not only conceptually but also institutionally central to how the history of photography unfolded in Zagreb in the 1970s, due to member Radoslav Putar’s position as the founding director of the Center for Photography, Film, and Television (CEFFT). Created in the early 1970s, CEFFT was a branch of the Gradska galerija, the City Museum for Contemporary Art (parent of the current Museum of Contemporary Art). Putar also curated the first exhibition in which Jerman participated, New Photography in 1973, which was organized by the editorial board of the magazine SPOT and held showings in Maribor, Belgrade, Ljubljana, and Zagreb. CEFFT provided Zagreb-­dwellers with a rich, stylistically diverse regional and international program of photography and film. In the 1970s, its offerings on local history included a show on nineteenth-­century Zagreb photographers (1978), as well as a 1975 show of photograms by Petar Dabac, nephew of famed documentary photographer Tošo Dabac of the so-­called Zagreb school.12 Petar Dabac was the only artist in Zagreb in that decade besides Jerman to show

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Figure 3.2. Željko Jerman, Untitled, circa 1974–­75. Photogram. Courtesy of Bojana Švertasek; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

sustained interest in cameraless photography.13 Dabac’s photograms display grid-­ like structures in saturated oranges, dark purples, yellows, browns, and greens, which seem to pop forward toward the viewer (the catalog was one of the few that CEFFT printed in color that decade).14 Jerman also produced classic contact photograms then that were darker than Dabac’s both visually and in tone, such as a work of circa 1974–­75 that shows an X-­ray of a skull, rendered in black on white by the reversal of the photographic process, placed beside a pair of scissors and developed on a piece of paper that Jerman cut roughly into an irregular shape (with the same scissors?) (see Figure 3.2). CEFFT’s international programming of the 1970s included an exhibition entitled Photo San Francisco curated by Gorgona member Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos (also 1977) and the show Contemporary Polish Photography (again 1977).15 In 1977, it also screened Struggle in New York, a new experimental film about the politicized downtown New York art scene made by

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Belgrade-­based artist Zoran Popović.16 Popović also showed his untitled film made in Belgrade in 1976, in which several artists, including Mladen Stilinović, Jerman, and Demur, discussed their works and their position in society. Jerman’s contribution to the film involved five texts written out by Stilinović because Jerman was delayed traveling to Belgrade, which included “This Is Not My World,” “Life, Not Slogans,” “I Am a Member of the Artistic Proletariat,” and “Twenty-­Seven Years of Inaction,” the last referring to Jerman’s age at the time.17 In addition to CEFFT’s photographic and filmic programming, the program at the Genre Film Festival that included work by international artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Andy Warhol, and Yoko Ono further enriched the city’s offerings in filmic media.18 After dropping out of high school, Jerman completed a photography course in 1968 and showed a selection of works, including nudes and portraits of friends, for the first time in 1969 in the Youth Club in Šrapčeva ulica, a place where young people in his neighborhood met to dance and socialize.19 Over the 1970s, as he developed his photographic practice, he was financially precarious and traveled only minimally, and thus lacked much exposure to ideas in the broader world of contemporary art. He actively disliked both aestheticized commercial photography and the social documentary tradition of the Zagreb School.20 During this period, Putar provided important support for Jerman’s career.21 It was with his help that the artist initially began showing the so-­called subjective photographs on which he had been working since 1970 and would produce until 1974, at which point he turned to spend the next decade focused on “elementary photography,” or the creation of photographs usually without a camera, which are highly self-­reflexive about the status of the photograph and focused on its processual, tautological deconstruction.22 The destructive dimension of Jerman’s practice made it controversial: in a review of the very first exhibition in which he participated, in 1973, a critic dismisses his deconstructions of photography as “unripe,” “uninspired” škart—­t hat is, “write-­offs” or “spoilage”—­in effect stressing their distance from traditionally well-­executed photographs.23 But in his introduction to the catalog for CEFFT’s 1975 exhibition Željko Jerman: Subjective Photography, Putar locates Jerman as an artist who arrives to deconstruct photography precisely at the moment when its forward momentum becomes stagnant: Željko Jerman isn’t the first to try to cross the boundaries and overcome the limitations of classical photography. But amongst us [in Zagreb] it was he who did it the most radically and with the greatest measure of conviction in the justification of his intentions and means. And he did it just at the moment of stalling or at least stabilization of the development of photography in our context.24

In what, exactly, did this boundary crossing consist? And how did it make both the photographic process and the image itself more dynamic? Damir Grubić points

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out that Jerman’s approach to photography borrowed from the painterly experience of Informel and as such was constituted through the operations of other media.25 Antun Maračić aptly observes that though Jerman’s practice embodies strong impulses toward negation and annihilation, it also expanded the classical photographic procedure with techniques such as multiple exposures, the use of photogram effects, and scribbling and scratching on negatives.26 This is an important observation, as it highlights that some forms of cameraless or extracameral intervention Jerman employed should not be taken as antiphotographic but rather as a selective engagement with techniques in the history of photography that occupy a peripheral position relative to the dominant use of the camera to center and extend the eye of the viewer.27 In this sense, even the destructive-­seeming interventions occur in close dialogue with photographic practice, as you can see from a work entitled Counting While Enlarging of 1976, which consists of six developments of a negative in which Jerman and Branka Stipančić stand in a gallery space, arms linked, and holding copies of a catalog (see Figure 3.3). Jerman labeled the time of exposure of each enlarged version of the image, from sixty seconds counting down to ten. Predictably, the longest is murkily dark and the last is largely blown out. The work looks almost like a student’s darkroom exercise, but instead of showcasing progress toward a perfectly developed image, it positions the time of exposure as a performance that slides the negative through a range of enlargements in which traditional viability of the image is only one possible manifestation. The negative that Jerman selected, of himself and Stipančić posed in a particular, fleeting moment of relationality, highlights the work’s focus on the temporality of ephemeral performance, in which the performance of everyday life encounters techniques of photography to leave images in its wake. Perhaps most profoundly, Jerman’s desire to transgress the boundaries of photography as a socially conventional medium was closely connected to his fascination with the thin boundary between life and death. His “subjective photographs” of 1970–­74 make a strong connection between formal experimentation and preoccupation with the emotional intensity of life and relationships as death throws them into relief. Notably, the origin of Jerman’s interest in death as something that can happen both to the body and to the photograph was highly personal. His father died when he was a teenager, and his close friends Vlado Martek and Darko Šimičić both describe him as obsessed with death.28 And as opposed to adapting death as a focus from other artists, his early art practice developed largely in a vacuum: he stated that he had no knowledge of art historical precedents, traditional or contemporary, and only in 1975 became aware of other experimental practices, when critic Nena Baljković invited him to participate in an event at the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade.29 In the beginning, working out of his own intense sense of rebellion and with no familiarity with other artists who mined destruc-

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Figure 3.3. Željko Jerman, Counting While Enlarging, 1976. Photo-­text. Courtesy of Darko Šimičić; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

tion creatively, “I thought I was smashing the world.”30 In a 1988 text, Jerman reflects that his initial departure from the model of the “perfectionistic and technically polished photo-­product” occurred in 1970. At the time, he was still running a photographic studio in his home, but eventually he “realized the world isn’t just black-­and-­white (as it appears in photographs with an artistic pretension).”31 This realization gave rise to his initial experiments with creating “bad” pale and gray images. His first photographic interest lay in portraiture, and many works in his early experimental period employ undone or intentionally misfired technique on

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portraits of both anonymous sitters and close friends and partners that Jerman wrecks, modifies, and superimposes with other images.32 One evocative example of circa 1972–­73 juxtaposes an image of an anonymous infant, its face opened wide in a laugh or perhaps a cry, above the ghostly silhouettes of a young, naked couple, beside the blurred image of a tree (see Plate 10). Tree, couple, and infant come together to convey a sense of the beauty and pathos of ongoing cycles of human life, posing questions of what we each inherit and pass on versus the ways that every individual will encounter the world anew. An important early sitter in both Jerman’s straight portraits and his experimentations with the limits of portrait photography was his wife Branka Jurjević, whom he married in 1969; their relationship would dissolve by 1977 when he formed a romantic partnership with Delimar (Jurjević, in turn, would eventually marry Martek). Jurjević is the subject of several melancholy, emotive portraits from 1970–­71 that show her alone, in different grounds that combine areas of developed negative and hand modifications, including scratching and spilling done during the development process. On the whole, the works in which she stars demonstrate how Jerman’s formal manipulation and experimentation with the limits of photography ran parallel to his working through questions about the nature of human relation and the limitations of our ability to understand each other’s emotions. In Branka and the Sea of 1970, for example, we see Jurjević screaming, in the center left of a largely blank sheet of photo paper, where it seems that Jerman splashed the developing agent onto the page to create the area where she is visible (see Figure 3.4). That splashing echoes the sea of the title, a setting you can also discern from the fragment of water visible behind Jurjević, from her white bikini or bra top, and from the flip-­flop-­clad foot of someone walking on the beach behind her. Her face is contorted into a scream that in this context seems a reaction to the splash of cold water but on first glance looks more like a scream of pain. The work develops the parallel chains water-­splash-­scream, developer-­splash-­image, making the creation of the photograph itself into an enactment of the feeling that affects Jurjević. This combination of a portrait image with hand modifications that have a performative, highly emotional quality returns in another group of works from a year later, The Beginning of the End (1971) (see Figure 3.5). Jerman stated that he intended the title to suggest his increasing departure from photography as a perfectible craft.33 He created at least two versions of this work. On the left-­ hand side of both, we see the ghostly visage of Jurjević, her face all but obliterated through the use of both a blurred negative and a very light exposure onto the photographic paper. On the right-­hand side is a form that looks like a nuclear mushroom cloud, rendered in one version in white on black using tempera painted on the photo paper, a technique Jerman employed to create a negative image of what he painted. The cloud billows up from three horizonal lines that indicate a horizon

Figure 3.4. Željko Jerman, Branka and the Sea, 1970. Black-­and-­white photograph. Courtesy of Bojana Švertasek; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

Figure 3.5. Željko Jerman, The Beginning of the End, 1971. Photographs. Courtesy of Bojana Švertasek; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

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in the most schematic way, nearly reducing it to pattern. In a second, black-­on-­ white version, we see the cloud rendered in a reverse or positive photogram, using a cutout moved slightly during the exposure to give it shaky, doubled edges. If these images were intended as meditations on Jerman’s separation from traditional photography, the image of the mushroom cloud paints that separation in intensely ominous terms, using a shape that evokes mass annihilation in a post-­ WWII context. Less starkly frightening but still unsettling is a compositionally similar set of works, Experience of the Factory 1 and 2, created in 1972, when Jurjević had just begun a factory job (see Figure 3.6). The works show her in the bottom of the frame, frowning slightly and with wet hair, with a blurry smokestack, tree, and buildings visible in the background. Jerman exposed both sheets of photo paper twice, once to capture the image in low contrast and then again overlaid with a small cog with teeth, which leaves a mark like an industrial star or flower in the upper left above Jurjević’s head. Finally, he subjected the surface of each piece of paper to scratching in the emulsion, leaving open hatchings of scribbly white marks in the place of the sky. Experience of the Factory 1 and 2 are works of breathtaking beauty and delicacy. Despite the impoverished quality of the photographic images from the negative, they have an intensely affecting tone that makes us feel we are in intimate contact with a particular atmosphere and emotional tenor. Jurjević’s frown is inscrutable; she does not look sad so much as angry, or maybe bored. But the network of white scribbles above her head seems like an animation of her thought, making space for the question of her interiority, which the marginalization of her image to the bottom of the frame actually heightens. The toothed cog up in the left is a thematic reference to the industrial production of the factory and to the status of the single worker as just “a cog in the machine.” In both works, there is a lighter halo around Jurjević, where Jerman protected the photosensitive paper during its second exposure with the cog. This gives her a saintly air that by implication poses the question of sacrifice: clearly, her experience of the factory is not a positive one. It makes me wonder about her labor relative to her husband’s. Why does she go to work in the factory when he does not? What type of spousal negotiation gave rise to this arrangement between her industrial labor and his artistic labor? These questions make clear that the image is not simply a commemoration, mournful or otherwise, of the time she started work. It is instead the terrain of an ongoing negotiation, an emotional and pragmatic push-­and-­pull between spouses who need to feed themselves and each other and who are affectively interconnected yet each have their own interior processes that remain opaque to the other person. All of these works featuring Jurjević manipulate her image to make her seem living yet ghostlike, creating a conflicting pull between the live presence that the photographic portrait indexes and the artworks’ invocation of death, spectral presence, and passing time. Barthes writes that photography’s ability to convince

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Figure 3.6. Željko Jerman, Experience of the Factory 1 and 2, 1972. Courtesy of Bojana Švertasek; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

us so strongly of its referential quality presents the irreplaceable singularity of a photographed person but also their already past, “that-­has-­been” quality.34 As such, there is a melancholy at the heart of photography: “By attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past (‘this-­has-­ been’), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.”35 Death also invades the sitter’s experience of posing for the photograph, in which the sitter undergoes a “micro-­version of death,” as the camera transforms them into a “specter,” somewhere between subject and object.36 Barthes’s focus on the experiences of the sitter and viewer of photography reflects the deeply personal nature of Camera Obscura, because, as he himself states, he is not a photographer and as such that role does not interest him.37 Jerman’s practice encompasses a strong presence of death at the heart of his interrogation of photography’s ontology, but unlike in Barthes’s text, the questions this raises are primarily ones for him as an artist at the level of process and of his treatment of photography’s grounds of inscription—­namely, the paper and the negative. Crucial in this respect was Jerman’s propensity to create

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artworks in groups that were neither formalized series nor handmade editions but rather open-­ended clusters of works in which he used the same negative or appropriated image as the basis for several interventions that are sometimes only subtly varied and other times substantially different. In the groups of images made from a single negative, there is no privileged one that would stand as the key exemplar but rather there is a chain of variations in which Jerman introduces both repetition of some elements and difference in others. Jerman referred to these works at one point as “unique photographs.”38 This way of working stresses the extent to which the development process is not just the execution or realization of the negative but a performative space of creative license that exploits the negative and paper to give rise to numerous varied and unpredictable results. Jerman made his negatives bloom into images in an unusually open-­ended manner, emphasizing their fruitfulness for creative production beyond technological reproduction. At the same time, he altered negatives in irreversible ways, ultimately enacting a death of the negative, by curtailing its ability to produce new images. You can see this in a group of work from 1974–­75, in which death operates at the level of the destruction of the negative but is also directly present in the content of the images (see Figure 3.7). These works show a group of Jerman’s friends, including members of the Group of Six, at a funeral, standing together under a gabled arcade in the Mirogoj cemetery (Sven Stilinović is the most clearly recognizable). Located in the sleepy and prosperous northern part of the city, Mirogoj’s vast terrain is like a repository of the city’s rich and diverse history. This is so not just because it contains the graves of famous figures like August Šenoa and Stjepan Radić and monuments to the dead of various wars but because of the graves of people of many faiths, each with designating symbols, that line its aisles: Catho­ lic, Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Latter-­Day Saints, and Communist. Jerman’s work shows a group of five people standing together, their dark figures melded into one by the backlit negative and hard to distinguish from the pillars that rise to form the arcade behind them. As Cecilia Hawkesworth relates, the construction of Mirogoj in the late nineteenth century was an ambitious modernizing project for a city as small as Zagreb, and the town council hired Hermann Bollé, an architect of Franco-­German origin whose designs had majorly shaped the city. The project was ultimately too expensive to complete exactly as Bollé envisaged it, but some elements were successfully realized, including the signature gabled arcades shown in these photographs.39 By picturing his friends here, Jerman implicitly represents their connection to the deep history of the city where they live while also drawing on the quality of the cemetery as a place that is public yet feels very different from Zagreb’s center, moving at a slower, more contemplative pace and bathed in green. Above the friends’ heads in light gray we see the sky with trees, and at their feet is a massive collection of candles that creates a shimmering pool of light, beside which is a

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large, soft-­looking flower. The effect is that the figures form an uneven band, the darkest part of the image, across its center but also that they gain a kind of architectural solidity, their physical togetherness making them meld visually into the background even as it seems to imply the strength of their union. The five images developed from a single negative range in tone and display different alterations to the emulsion, including scribbly scratches in one and a triangular tear in another. Even though they depict an actual funeral, the images convey a powerful sense of life through the cohesion of the bodies framed by the mass of illuminated candles below and the sky, crackled by tree branches, above. Jerman underscores this with writing scratched in the negative, which develops progressively between two of the images. One says, “This is—­my optimists” (“To je—­optimisti moji”), with the last two words vertically down the left side of the paper. In the second image, this then appears with the addition “Meaning and life” suspended just above the candles. The words and images work together to suggest the nature of the optimism as lying in the friends’ togetherness, their decision to remain in life in the face of death. Jerman’s framing of his friends within the arcade moreover creates an ambiguity between interior and exterior spaces, making the scene seem to oc-

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Figure 3.7. Željko Jerman, Untitled, circa 1974–­75. Photographs. Courtesy of Bojana Švertasek; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

cupy a liminal space between life and death. His friends are neither dead nor firmly rooted in life. They are the living looking into an eternal void that effaces the boundaries between togetherness and loneliness. Two other works of this early period pivot away from that emotional quality and toward a punkier, more self-­consciously iconoclastic destruction of the image. The first, Drop Dead, Photography! (Krepaj, fotografijo) of 1972, is one of Jerman’s best-­known works, one of many text-­based pieces on photographic paper made throughout his career (see Plate 11). The title phrase is written in red marker on a splotchy gray piece of photo paper, and on top of it SMRT (“death”) is written in black paint and underlined. Below the title phrase in pen is faintly visible “neću te fiksirati” (“I’m not going to fix you,” but in the sense of “fix with photographic chemicals” as opposed to “repair”). The grammar of the titular phrase makes it clear that this is a personal and direct address to photography: krepaj (“die”) in the imperative command and then fotografijo (“photography”) in the vocative, the case used in Croatian for calling people’s names in an emphatic way (as in, “Hey, Jerman!”). The refusal to fix the paper is a formal enactment of what the text demands, in that it led to the “death” or irreparable graying of the paper. The bottom

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of the work bears another enigmatic inscription: “Umrla je jedna dobra žena danas kada se posti i kad pada kiša” (“Today when we fast and when it rains, a good woman has died”). The work is thus a kind of memorial, but of a misfired quality, which fails to represent or “fix” the image or the person commemorated. Some of the most disturbing works in Jerman’s oeuvre were made two years later and combine this angry, rebellious spirit with his interest in portraiture. In these 1974 works, Jerman wreaks destruction on a found portrait photograph of a little girl of maybe five or six years old, her hands folded on the back of a couch, beneath her chin (see Figure 3.8).40 The original image is split down the middle into a negative and positive half and appears to be a sample from an instructional book for photographers. Jerman made several altered versions of this found image, by desecrating it and then making photos of that altered version, which he further manipulated and made into a poster for his 1975 exhibition at CEFFT.41 In the first altered version that became the basis for the others, Jerman’s violent interventions include holes ripping out the girl’s eyes and fingers and angry words of intense vitriol scrawled across the image: “SPASM,” “your mother’s a whore,” “like she’s full of my sperm,” “too bad, she’ll catch on,” “this is a clumsy picture [zdrkana slika],” and “thank you.” The words are dirty in terms of both their content and their execution, as Jerman made them with different tools, including thin, red paint, a blue crayon, a faded marker, and a ballpoint pen that evokes a teenager scratching letters into a school desk. The combination of the different kinds of marks is aesthetically unpleasing. At one level, the works are clearly a critique of photographic craft, conventional portraiture, and the polite images that both seek to produce. However, that level of interpretation does not touch the most striking aspect of the works, which is their violent and violating nature. These works pre­sent the male artist’s intervention in photography as a sexualized assault not only on the little girl’s image but on her body, effectively presenting the act of reworking photography via hand modification of the “body” of the photograph as an act of child rape. For me as a viewer, the violent effect is intense enough that I want to omit this work from my discussion, to refuse to further canonize it as part of Jerman’s oeuvre. But to do that would be to sanitize his practice. It makes more sense to understand it as a limit case of his attempts to address the difficult dimensions of intimacy, the fact that being close does not mean something feels good, and that closeness can in fact pose a grave risk to the subject. Perhaps the intensity of the violence in these works also indexes shards of ambivalence on Jerman’s part about his own life, specifically vis-­à-­v is conventional photographic portraiture. As Antun Maračić points out, by 1970 Jerman has finished a photography course, opened a small business (a photo studio), and gotten married, in effect consolidating a bourgeois life for himself and abandoning the fervor of 1968, all by the young age of twenty-­one.42

Figure 3.8. Željko Jerman, Untitled, 1974. Hand-­altered found photograph. Courtesy of Bojana Švertasek; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

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Across the works I have discussed here, there is a persistent thematization of death, both at the level of the images’ contents—­skulls, graveyards, mushroom clouds—­and in terms of the concrete treatment of the artwork itself. If ripping, burning, and destruction are the formal analogues of Jerman’s funeral imagery, then perhaps his interest in liquids and flows is the formal counterpart to his depictions of love, friendship, and the living body. In 1989, Canadian photographer Jeff Wall wrote a short reflection on photography’s origins at a moment when digital photography was transforming conceptions of the medium.43 In his text, Wall theorizes photography as manifesting a “liquid intelligence.” For him, the liquids historically involved in the production of photographs represent a symbolic connection to natural processes different from the institution of “optical” photography, or what he calls “the projectile or ballistic nature of vision.” Wall writes: “For me, water—­symbolically—­represents an archaism in photography, one that is admitted into the process, but also excluded, contained, or channeled by its hydraulics. This archaism of water, of liquid chemicals, connects photography to the past, to time, in an important way.” 4 4 Silverman elaborates on Wall’s statement to draw attention to a suppressed history of photography as “analogue”—­essentially, as affective contact—­that has run alongside its industrialization, which she associates with the representational function.45 Vlado Martek, in a short biography of Jerman for the 1990 Group of Six Authors retrospective catalog, stated that Jerman loved liquids.46 Though Martek’s comment was a tongue-­in-­cheek reference to Jerman’s fondness of alcohol, it seems to resonate with the photographs at a formal level, too. Arguably, for Jerman, the liquid was significant as a property both of photography and of subjectivity. His partial, grayed-­out portraits and hacked-­ apart images refuse to even try to fix individual subjectivities, which they take to be in ongoing transformation. In My Year, 1977, the artist brought that focus on the dynamic, fluctuating nature of subjectivity to his own everyday life through a durational documentation work that illuminated the mix of desire, friendship, and melancholy that made up his experience of life in the city.

My Year, 1977 In a 1991 interview, Jerman stated that the desire to leave a trace or contribution behind in the world predated even his awareness that he wanted to make art.47 Željko Kipke describes this process of trace-­leaving poetically as the connection of the artwork to “the affective terrain of the author’s being.” 48 Kipke’s term “affective terrain” asks us to imagine Jerman’s individual subjectivity not as interiorized but as spread out like a landscape of feelings and experience. Such an understanding of subjectivity is powerfully visible in My Year, which critics consider his magnum opus. As I will show here, My Year marked for Jerman a new engagement with performance and also with questions about found popular imagery that were more

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broadly germane to the New Art Practice. The new use of performance created an opening to the new direction of his collaborations with Delimar. It also presented subjectivity as something that unfolds spatially, over particular urban and domestic spaces. I would describe My Year as an antimasterpiece because of its semantic richness and the sustained effort it required but also because of its deconstruction of both popular-­culture and avant-­garde myths of masculine artistic creativity. It was one of several works Jerman made in the late 1970s that consist in series of photos of himself, labeled with the ostensible times or dates they were taken, in a way that lets the viewer imagine his activity over a certain period. One of these works, labeled 31. XII 1977 (December 31, 1977) shows him in the bath, at a bar, smoking in bed, smoking in front of a Christmas tree, and installing an artwork on a wall, each image labeled with a different time ranging from 2:40 a.m. to 5:20 p.m. (see Figure 3.9). Jerman used Polaroids for this piece and mounted them on cardboard in a way that makes them look like the storyboard for a film. He exploited the Polaroid format to allow immediate exhibition and stress the closeness between production and exhibition contexts: the final image in the work shows him posed next to it completed except for the one image being taken in that moment, as it is already hung for display at an exhibition-­action in the Neboder passage.49 The production of that work came at the end of the year of the much more ambitious My Year, in which, for each day in the year, he presented a photograph of himself alongside a small diaristic entry, sometimes as short as one word. In a diary entry from the end of 1976, Jerman wrote simply that starting in the new year he would “record each of my days. In short . . . what I did, with whom I passed the day, etc. Likewise I’ll need to photograph myself each day, maybe with some people, or in some situation, or just a portrait.”50 The structure of the work that resulted gives rise to aberrations: some entries show two photos, and one shows the absent image of a solid black unexposed frame. Many show Jerman hanging out with friends, in particular friends from the Group of Six Authors. The language is candid and simple, markedly different from the approaches to language taken by other Group of Six members, such as Vlado Martek’s poetic density or Mladen Stilinović’s playful interrogation of the ideological dimensions of language, which I discussed in chapter 2. Though Jerman is the artist of the work, he is not the photographer, as each image arose from a small performance of inviting someone—­a friend, a lover, an acquaintance—­to take the camera, look through the viewfinder, and take a picture of him. The ensemble was shown initially in the Studio Gallery of the City Gallery of Contemporary Art in January 1978, directly following its completion, with each photograph mounted on an A4 piece of paper, on which was written the diary entry for that day.51 Jerman found it very important to show the completed work as soon as possible.52 For its twentieth anniversary, Meandar published the whole as a book, and that form has been an important vehicle of its circulation beyond exhibition contexts.

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My Year is not visually spectacular, and it contains substantial aesthetic negation, such as the January 7 entry where Jerman presents an accidentally unexposed frame with the declaration, “Here I am!” As I discussed in this book’s introduction, critics and historians have tended to view the work of the Group of Six as a whole as an embrace of the condition of nonart, and it may be tempting to read My Year, 1977 this way too, as a studied dissolve of art into life. But when we pay close attention to it, especially when situated within Jerman’s wider practice, it becomes clear that the work is in fact very much about images as such and about the particular kinds of experience that conceptually driven art images enable within a visually saturated global popular culture. It is, moreover, about the status of conceptual art images within a Yugoslav visual environment populated with many different types of images: those that circulated within global popular culture, those pertaining more specifically to Yugoslav socialist consumerism, and those connected with the ideology of state socialism. At the same time, ever-­ present here are the “liquid” aspects of photography I discussed above, which

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Figure 3.9. Željko Jerman, work from the series Recorded in Space and Time (detail), 1977. Photo-­text. Courtesy of Bojana Švertasek; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

contravene photography’s representational function and ask that it be understood it in a tactile, even nonoptical way. A striking absence in discussions of My Year’s aesthetic qualities, or lack thereof, is a consideration of how the work delivers pleasure through inviting us to look at the artist himself. Zdenko Rus, for example, writes that Jerman “roots for neither truth nor beauty.”53 Ješa Denegri also argues that at the core of My Year is a rejection of everything that makes photography an aesthetic object.54 But in this artwork, Jerman is beautiful. Not only that, he presents himself both as the subject of desire (mention of romantic relationships is woven throughout the entries) and also as desire’s object. I see this in the many images where he looks with sensual melancholy directly at the viewer but also in others where he lets the camera’s gaze hit the side of his face as he cooks, smokes a cigarette, or plays with a dog. The combination of these two dynamics is evocative of the visual dance you play with a lover to whom you are deeply attracted: staring soulfully into each other’s eyes alternates with watching that person move about the world, so beautiful, so

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particularly themselves, and so other from you all at once. The romantic play of gazes that My Year sets up with the viewer parallels a romantic arc from the artist’s own life that is reflected in the entries: his courtship with Delimar, whom he met that year and would marry in March 1978 (see Figure 3.10). The Delimar/ Jerman love story and the way Jerman engages with the viewer’s gaze are two of the registers on which My Year asks what it means to be seen and desired as a man. Another essential layer consists in the way the work evokes popular cultural images of young men in the 1960s and 1970s in film and particularly in rock and roll. Darko Šimičić explains how Jerman’s turn to photography followed “years of playing the guitar in a rock band and watching Antonioni’s film Blow-­Up.” Jerman liked the 1966 Blow-­Up so much that he gave the name to the photographic studio he opened in 1970 in his house on Voćarska Street. The studio was tiny and low-­tech: Jerman had only one reflector, and the whole darkroom area measured about five by five feet.55 Financially it was not a huge success, due at least in part to Jerman’s stated refusal to take anyone’s picture, even for a simple ID card, unless he had the opportunity to get to know them, to smoke a cigarette, and to talk “for at least half an hour.”56 Jerman described that desire for duration as an attempt to get beyond the superficial picture and create portraits that really showed a person’s essence.57 He would also try to intervene creatively in the format of the ID photo, posing people in front of a flowered screen or producing grayed-­out photographs, prompting customers to return angrily from the police department upon having their photos rejected.58 The central protagonist of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-­Up is a young fashion photographer who comes to realize that he may accidentally have photographed a murder. Visually and conceptually, the film revolves around his viewership. But instead of showing us what he sees, it stages the spectacle of him viewing, placing him as an object in the film’s visual field, where the definitive visual proof of the salient act of murder eludes him, however much he may live by his use of the camera as a tool to master and consume women and the world. The music Jerman listened to also came with an important and specific visual culture concerning young men’s self-­presentation. As various scholars of popular music analyze, in the 1960s and 1970s in Britain and the United States, mainstream rock and roll defined a new form of white masculinity that revolved around a rebellious, phallic man who opposed himself to the nine-­hour workday and the nuclear family—­that is, to the economic, social, and sexual institutions that had defined masculinity in earlier decades of the twentieth century.59 The sexy, confrontational musical and personal style articulated by bands such as Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors found resonance far beyond the Anglo-­A merican contexts where it emerged, sparking innovation in many other parts of the world, including Yugoslavia. Yu­ goslavia had an extremely rich history of pop music, both in terms of the music produced there and the culture of fandom surrounding Western rock. As Radina

Figure 3.10. Željko Jerman, My Year, 1977 (detail), 1977. Entry for November 15: “A ‘private revolution’ has taken place in me (living together).” Photo-­performance. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

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Vučetić argues, British and American rock influences in Yugoslavia were not just an example of Westernization but the most highly visible and paradigmatic forms of Westernization.60 The 1960s saw the creation of a magazine, Džuboks [Jukebox], devoted to rock and roll with a strong Western orientation and the widespread emergence of disco clubs, where young people could go to spend their leisure time in a new way (My Year contains references to Jerman and his friends visiting disco clubs). The 1970s saw increased experimentation with mixing Western influence with regional or experimental interests, such as in the hybrid folk-­rock of Bijelo Dugme (The White Button) from Sarajevo and the conceptual rock of the group Buldožer (Bulldozer) from Ljubljana. The Doors were an audible influence on Buldožer and also a favorite of Jerman and some of his friends in the Group of Six Authors. Looking at a photo of the Doors’ Jim Morrison from a teen magazine in the 1970s, I notice the similarities between his image and the way Jerman presents himself: long hair, slouchy posture, gaze straight at the camera, unremarkable physical surroundings. In its evocation of this general type of image, My Year should be included with the other important works by artists of the New Artistic Practice that probed their authors’ complex relationship relative to Western popular cultural imagery. The most obvious are Tomislav Gotovac’s Showing Elle Magazine of 1962 (to which I return in chapter 4) and Sanja Iveković’s Double Life (1975–­76) and Tragedy of a Venus (1975). Iveković’s and Gotovac’s works both involve the artists’ self-­staging in visual juxtaposition with highly gendered Western media imagery, though the stakes are different: Iveković’s work addresses the coercive psychological and physical pull of those images on her as a woman, while Gotovac presents himself as a sexually ambiguous imp, both on display as an unlikely object of desire and parading as a voyeuristic consumer of the image he mimics. Iveković and Gotovac direct us to consider the friction with which popular cultural images travel across the globe between different contexts but also the ways that they enable new kinds of self-­enactment not controlled by their points of origin. My Year resonates intellectually with those works, with the difference that rather than showing us appropriated images that conform to a certain popular culture category, Jerman evokes them via his own reenactment. However, this reenactment is ambivalent in several respects, nowhere more so than in the quality of the images themselves. As Šimičić and others note, the photographs in My Year are intentionally of poor quality when judged from the perspective of photographic craft.61 This occurs at the level of the negatives, such as in images that are unfocused or awkwardly framed, which Jerman enabled by handing his camera to nonspecialists. You can also see it at the level of the photographs’ development, from overly dark photographs, to others that are almost totally grayed out (see Figures 3.11 and 3.12 respectively), to still others where the contrast is so high the image heads toward dissolving into a series of abstract shapes. In another image, the one illustrated at the beginning of this chapter,

Figure 3.11. Željko Jerman, My Year, 1977 (detail), 1977. Entry for April 22, no caption. Photo-­ performance. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

Figure 3.12. Željko Jerman, My Year, 1977 (detail), 1977. Entry for October 9: “Either go totally mad or go to hell . . . my mom said to me.” Photo-­performance. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

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dark spots from a mistake in the development mar Jerman’s face, in what is otherwise one of the more conventionally well-­framed photographs. Throughout the work, images give clues to how central Jerman understands these mistakes and infelicities to be for his own authorship. We can see this, for example, in the two side-­by-­side entries of June 19 and June 20, which are both among the minority of days to feature two photographs. In the June 19 entry, you see Jerman seated in a grassy area in front of bushes, holding a leafy branch (see Figure 3.13). In the first, vertically composed image, Jerman holds the branch upright against the dark ground of the bushes, where its leaves and his hand appear in tones of gray. In the second image, which is horizontally composed, he holds the branch down against the much lighter grass, where it appears washed out and in such high contrast that it is just an area of darker dappling, with the artist’s hand obliterated into a patch of white. This is not the only place in My Year where the hand, the traditional mark of artistic creation, is put under erasure. A running theme throughout the year is an injury to Jerman’s hand caused by throwing a “thug” out of the night tram on February 4, and in subsequent entries we see him wearing a white bandage, while the text tells about the pain of the injury and how it causes interruption to his work. This piles up as one more barrier to the creative process, which, Jerman constantly underscores, is difficult both emotionally and pragmatically, from “pointless conflicts with the curator,” to “Calming my nerves with valium,” to the declaration, “I know I’ll never be able to live off my work,” to “Creative euphoria! If only it were always like this . . .” In the second set of photos, the ones for June 20, we see Jerman next to a wooden door leading into the courtyard of his house (see Figure 3.14). The house, in addition to serving as a photographic studio earlier, acted as a site for art exhibitions for the work of his friends, starting in 1976.62 The two images from June 20 are very similar, except that in one the door is closed and I see Jerman with a somewhat sullen expression and in the second one, developed in higher contrast, the door is open and he looks happier, face tilted more upward toward the viewer and with a slight smile. In the photo with the door open, the lower half of the outdoor space seen through it is almost entirely melted away into white. The text for this day is “Speaking of work . . .” (“Govori se o radu . . .”). Notable in this image is how much Jerman looks like he is standing next to an artwork. The door has the dimensions of a large-­scale painting or, for that matter, of the components of Triptych, a major work Jerman created between 1975 and 1977 that consisted of impressions of his body produced by lying on photo paper, lying on concrete, via an x-­ray, and outlined in sand scattered on the gallery floor. In the entry of March 16, he appears standing next to the concrete imprint component of this work, and for years Jerman kept that imprint in the courtyard leaned up against the outer wall of his house, meaning that it stood in this same space during the time many of the images from My Year were taken there.63 In the June 20 photo of him next to the open

Figure 3.13. Željko Jerman, My Year, 1977 (detail), 1977. Entry of June 19: “My home is full of visitors and those permanently resident here.” Photo-­performance. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

Figure 3.14. Željko Jerman, My Year, 1977 (detail), 1977. Entry of June 20: “Speaking of work . . .” Photo-­performance. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

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courtyard door, the area inside the door retains some recognizable semblance of a courtyard scene but dissolves into white flatness. It looks like the gray of the tree and gate have been etched or printed onto the square of white. Reading the door as an artwork about which Jerman seems proud emphasizes the degree to which his agency as an author lies in making the photographic image do something other than show us reality. Instead, it becomes a place of physical inscription or contact that is unique and defies the logic of reproduction. Doors appear not only in this one entry but are a recurring feature in the images that make up My Year. Jerman frequently appears in the threshold of a door, often standing in or near it on the outside of a building and, in one case, standing outside and photographed from the dark interior. In fact, once I start looking at the setting of the photos, a striking majority are staged outdoors. In the whole year of entries, at least 263 show images in which Jerman is outside, surely a larger-­than-­ proportional representation of the spaces in which he spent time over the course of 1977. Moreover, the outdoor spaces and the way he appears there have certain commonalities. Some of the outside scenes show recognizable places in Zagreb, such as the exterior of Galerija Nova, the pavilion designed by Ivan Meštrović built in 1938 in the Square of the Victims of Fascism, and the famous sculpted fountain, also by Meštrović, that stands in front of the National Theatre, in what was then Marshal Tito Square. But most of the outdoor images are taken in more indeterminate locations and especially in the enclosed courtyard of Jerman’s house. The images show that the courtyard featured brick walls, trees, ivy, a doghouse, and a table at which Jerman gathered with members of the Group of Six and other friends to socialize, drink, and play chess. In addition to the prominence of these courtyard scenes, the outdoor images of Jerman often show him underdressed, coatless, and hunching his shoulders against an apparent chill and sometimes even in the snow or smoking outside in a bathrobe. These images foreground the relationship between his body and the environment to which it is exposed. In the short 1972 text “Man’s Apartment Is a Part of His Destiny,” Zagreb’s renowned architectural theorist Antoaneta Pasinović meditates on the fundamental relationship between human society and the private living space. Pasinović observes that the marital bedroom is foundational to the production of living units, which are basic units of society’s spatial organization. The right to a private living space is a key societal right for the individual and family. The exact design and spaces of the apartment are not neutral but important factors in shaping human relations: “The organization of the apartment represents the organization of interhuman relationships: their image and their shaping as (daily) processes.” 64 Interestingly, Pasinović stresses that the practice of homemaking is an individual creative act and that the space of the home should be designed in such a way that it enables instead of stunting creativity.65 Private domestic spaces as creative spaces held notable importance for Jerman’s cohort of friends and peers in the New Art

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Practice. Tomislav Gotovac used found objects like bottle caps and openers and popular cultural imagery to create a wondrous Merzbau-­like interior in his family apartment on Krajiška Street. Boris Demur, over the course of several years leading up to his death, made his apartment into a chaotic, layered archive of his creative process. Branka Stipančić and Mladen Stilinović held exhibitions in their apartment, and Dalibor Martinis and Sanja Iveković hosted many international visitors for meals in theirs.66 Notably, the courtyard, around which My Year revolves and that it implicitly posits as central for Jerman’s daily-­life-­as-­creative-­activity, is an indeterminate space. It is outdoors but not public; as in the style typical of houses in Zagreb’s old city center, it was totally hidden from the street outside. The courtyard is also characterized by visual indeterminacy, with rough textures of bricks, dirt ground, wood planks, and ivy and shrubs that do not signify as pure nature but rather as indexes of an interregnum between the intentional design of architecture and the chaos of life beyond human control. The images of doors and of the courtyard, and the ones in which Jerman is inappropriately dressed, posit the threshold as key for understanding his subjectivity and creative process: the space neither inside nor outside but always giving way onto something else. Thinking with Pasinović’s understanding of the home, and also with Henri Lefebvre’s ideas about urban space corresponding to the division of labor that I discussed in the introduction, the way that My Year privileges the threshold appears to assert not only a different type of intimate relationality but also a use of space not limited by the dominant division of labor. The kind of relational space the work materializes has implications for how art making is conceived, as My Year makes clear that Jerman’s work of making art is a subjective process that follows him everywhere and is bound up with his encounter with the world. But the rendering of domestic and public spaces also takes on meaning vis-­à-­v is period debates about the vaunted sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and its consequences for gender relationships. In one of the entries, Jerman describes the beginning of his cohabitation with Delimar as a “private revolution.” Zsófia Lóránd demonstrates how the notion of sexual revolution induced ambivalent responses in Yugoslavia, for example in Black Wave director Dušan Makavejev’s famous take on Wilhelm Reich’s thought in W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), in which the film’s protagonist, Milena, elevates a Reichian embrace of free love to the level of dogma. Ultimately, W.R. places Reich’s work under the same ironic scrutiny as the Soviet communist and Yugoslav socialist ideologies it deconstructs (all of which ultimately have disastrous consequences for Milena, who ends up beheaded by her lover, a star skater from the U.S.S.R.).67 Lóránd points out how the popular press, which in Yugoslavia did not undergo prepublication censorship, was a crucial venue for the circulation of ideas about sexual revolution. These included women’s magazines, which over the course of the 1960s and 1970s became less focused on emancipatory socialist discourses and

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domestic labor and more on fashion and sexuality, as well as Start (founded 1969), which featured high-­quality journalism alongside softcore pornographic imagery and lewd cartoons.68 Start was an ambivalent yet important venue for the treatment of gender relations. Despite its overt objectification of women, feminist authors Slavenka Drakulić and Vesna Kesić were long-­term contributors, and the magazine actively engaged with international debates about feminism, gender, and pornography—­for example, through interviews with Western feminist authors such as Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem.69 In an article entitled “Woman and the Sexual Revolution” published in a different magazine in 1980, Drakulić emphasizes the crucial nature of mass media for sexual education but also expresses skepticism about the relationship between free sexuality and a genuine revolution in gender equality. Drakulić argues that if women adopt a “male” model of sexuality, they “gain[] nothing,” because in such formulaic relationships “no new values develop.”70 Drakulić warns that superficial notions of sexual revolution may simply instrumentalize sex: “Above all sex is instrumentalized, used, and spent exclusively for the fulfillment of personal selfish desires, without creating any true contact between partners.”71 Drakulić’s concern is that so-­called sexual revolution may bring more sex not only without equality but without true intimacy. My Year constitutes a thoughtful contribution to these conversations about the changing nature of gender roles and sexuality. Jerman and Delimar experience a “private revolution” of cohabitation outside of marital norms. The space of their domicile is porous, always giving way to the outside and to their social world, a space not of conformism or bourgeois morality but of the dynamic creation of both art and new forms of intimacy. And while, as I established, pop-­culture models of masculinity are a palpable undertone in the work, My Year also feminizes Jerman relative to traditional gendered associations through its excavation of his narcissism. In a grumpy review of the work’s 1978 exhibition, critic Vladimir Maleković is quick to dismiss it on that basis, chastising it as a “dilettante’s manifestation of self-­loving individualism,” focused not on aesthetic result or the artwork as such but solely on the artist’s “own psychological, biological, spiritual, emotional, and social behavior.”72 Maleković’s review indicates a strong discomfort with the intimate tenor of the work and the lack of distance that it affords the viewer. Indeed, Jerman invites viewers into his space, and this role as host constitutes another dimension of his subtle feminization within the work.73 The images of Jerman in the doors of his house and courtyard metaphorically beckon us, as viewers, into his domestic sphere. The many scenes of him socializing with friends heighten that sense of invitation. Though the role of host can of course be traditionally masculine, that identification is subtly disrupted by the staging of the quiet spectacle of Jerman’s body—­injured, desiring, intoxicated, exhausted—­and his beauty as a

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central tenet of the work. Moreover, the work constantly stresses the dependence of Jerman’s subjectivity on that which lies outside it. Like the duality of death at the level of image and photograph in the works of the early period, the stress on interdependence and contingency is both formal and thematic: in the capture of the images by other photographers and in terms of the overall emphasis on how Jerman’s creative process is channeled by the events of his life (like the lasting pain in his hand from the fight on the tram). At the same time as My Year disrupts traditional gender roles and overflows with references to intersubjectivity, the images make it impossible to read as a story about the triumph of intimacy. Namely, the images of Jerman inside his home, which increase greatly in frequency near the end of the year in November and December, largely show him by himself, and usually cropped close in ways that emphasize his isolation. A particularly evocative example from Decem­ ber 23 shows him sitting in a curled posture, with the caption “Intimate pain” (see Fig­ure 3.15). Perhaps there are more of these solo indoor images because once Delimar moved in, she was more often the one to take daily pictures of him. But they also manifest the domestic space as one of problematic, and only occasional, relationality. We can see this through the contrast of looking at images of Delimar and Jerman in these exact same spaces taken by their friend, the photographer Boris Cvjetanović, in 1987 during what ended up being the last meal of their cohabitation together, when Delimar had already begun a relationship with Vlado Martek (see Figure 3.16). The images frame the two artists seated on either side of a table; they eat what appears to be pasta and Jerman drinks a beer. Between them is a mostly closed window that casts a peaceful, hazy white light on the scene, highlighting the edges of their faces. This was a poignant moment for the artists; Delimar recalls that when they split, they “cried like children.”74 Though it is possible to imagine we can read the pain of their relationship’s demise in the photos—­Delimar is calmly solemn, while Jerman looks groggy and disheveled—­the images themselves have an almost holy appearance to them. The light from the window bathes and elevates the scene and unites the space into one in which they both clearly belong. This is a relational space, if a fraught one. In contrast, with a couple of exceptions, such as the entry announcing Delimar’s move in, the interior images in My Year show domestic space as dark and murky, usually with a solo Jerman framed closely against a wall or background. The images communicate that it is in fact in the transitional spaces of the courtyard and doorway where the year really happens for Jerman, and it is those spaces that we should understand as definitive of his creativity. Is this approach to My Year reading too much into photographs that were taken by people other than the artist and that accumulate throughout an entire year but also stress their own visual impoverishment? Perhaps. But I would argue that

Figure 3.15. Željko Jerman, My Year, 1977 (detail), 1977. Entry of December 23: “Intimate pain.” Photo-­performance. Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

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Figure 3.16. Boris Cvjetanović, image of Željko Jerman and Vlasta Delimar’s last meal together in the Voćarska Street house, 1987. Courtesy of Boris Cvjetanović.

as Jerman’s love for Blow-­Up underscores, he was interested precisely in understanding photographic authorship as bound up with the activation of a field of the optical unconscious—­what the camera or photograph can see that the artist cannot—­in which the photographer is unable to control the truth value of the image and, moreover, becomes entangled with it as one of its objects. At issue in Blow-­Up is whether the protagonist can keep his hands on the salient images and whether they can be used to piece together the murder’s narrative; its own filmic images are hyperslick and the narrative does not take up the photograph’s self-­ deconstruction or its illegible opacity, which Jerman fervently pursued.75 Recall­ ing Wall’s ideas about liquid intelligence, My Year engages with various images of slick popular culture that confirm the identity of male protagonist/artist but then redirects both identity and images into a series of failed, partial incidents of contact and illumination. This space, between certain kinds of conventional roles and messy, open-­ended, terrifying, but joyful relationality, is one that Delimar and Jerman mined in their collaborative performances, to which I now turn.

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Delimar/Jerman Collaborations The previous sections analyzed how, for Jerman, the trace in the photographic artwork is connected to an encounter with the artist’s physical being/process, a “trace” that may contravene, displace, or exist in tension with the cameral image. How does this equation change when one turns to focus on live performance? Delimar and Jerman created their first performance together on his suggestion in 1979 and collaborated in that capacity until 1983. Their works are part of the history of partner performances by artists in the former Yugoslavia, of which the work of Marina Abramović and Ulay is the best-­known example.76 Though Jerman and Delimar shared with Abramović and Ulay an interest in interrogating the mutual dependence and antagonism of coupledom, the former’s work revolved more centrally around an interest in the audience’s position relative to those dynamics. That interest also differentiated Jerman and Delimar’s approach from the collaborations of Raša Todosijević and Marinela Koželj. Performances such as Decision Art and Was ist Kunst Marinela Koželj? have a more abstract and intellectual character and stage Koželj as both a witness and foil, a kind of prop who grounds Todosijević’s pushing of the boundaries of art and the figure of the male artist.77 Whereas Decision Art and Was ist Kunst actively exploit tropes of the feminine muse in ways that highlight Todosijević’s potent (if angst-­ridden) male creative agency, Delimar and Jerman were concerned with processes of how gendered difference becomes socially coded and rendered legible on the body. Moreover, in comparison to Abramović and Ulay’s works, Jerman and Delimar’s works are more about photography in terms of how a photograph produces a flat image that fixes the body and contributes to this gendered coding. Notably, this usually created documentation images that are less able to stand on their own as all-­encompassing representations of the works, compared to Abramović and Ulay’s documentation photographs that assert their self-­sufficiency through theatrical composition, blank backgrounds, and central framing of the artists’ bodies. This final section of the chapter completes my analysis of the relationship between the trace and the photograph by discussing how Jerman and Delimar’s collaborative works position the photo as a key term in performance, but one that stands in a problematic and partial position relative to performance. The couple’s collaborative performances continued the reflection on the relationship between space, social life, and creativity that I demonstrated in My Year. You can see this in two interrelated performances that together make up Wedding, which also play subtly with the status of photography. Delimar and Jerman got married in 1978 and then again in 1982. Together the weddings constituted a performance. Their first one, on March 1, 1978, occurred in the registrar’s office, where the couple stood behind a modern wooden desk framed with potted plants with a portrait of Josip Broz Tito on the wall, listening as an official read from a folder.

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They and their two witnesses, friend and fellow artist Sven Stilinović and his girlfriend Neda, appeared in simple street clothes.78 The second wedding of 1982 took place in the Church of St. Mark in Zagreb’s Upper Town (Gornji grad). Constructed and then reconstructed over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the church contains Romanesque and Gothic elements and a spectacular tiled roof bearing the coats of arms of Zagreb and the Habsburg Kingdom of Croatia (1527–­1868). For this iteration of their vows, Delimar and Jerman dressed more conventionally, he in a suit and tie and she in a wedding dress and pleated veil that concealed much of her body, as per the fashion of the time. The ceremony was followed by a reception at the nearby City Gallery of Contemporary Art (GSU) with cake and drinks for guests. At that event, the artists played audio recordings of the speeches given by both the registrar and the priest four years apart, which Delimar notes were largely the same despite the different secular and religious venues.79 This was so regardless of the fact that, during socialism, marrying in church and marrying with the city were two unrelated procedures because of the strict separation of church and state; many couples had only a bureaucratic ceremony and skipped the religious wedding entirely.80 In a statement accompanying the catalog published by the GSU, the artists stated unequivocally that the institutionalization of love “involving the state and god . . . is absurd and quite unnecessary.” But they decided to engage in its conventions because: —­Without first-­hand experience we would have had no right to subject the marriage ceremony to criticism; —­Without the documentary material we could not have spoken out in the language we use, the language of art.81

Wedding made these forms of documentation central to the audience’s experience of the work through exhibiting the documents following the second ceremony and through the small catalog the GSU produced about the work in 1982. The artists’ use of documentation in the work was designed to present proof of it as a historical event, but it also subtly displayed the documents’ tenuous claim on that wedding/performance, including through the structure of repetition that throws the uniqueness of each individual marriage into question. Moreover, the photographs play with questions of proof and convention, which connect in turn to the denaturalization of gender roles evident both in My Year and in Delimar’s later solo work. While the images from the registrar’s office show nothing that necessarily looks like a wedding, those of the second ceremony emphasize moments that correspond to conventions of wedding photography, such as the couple in front of the church, exchanging rings, and at the party afterward. These images are strongly frontal, especially one with the couple posed with their witnesses in

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Figure 3.17. Vlasta Delimar and Željko Jerman, Attempt at Identification, 1979. Performance, Podroom Gallery, Zagreb. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

front of the church doors that was used on the front of the work’s catalog. If the first images show a wedding approached so casually it created markedly neutral and understated visual records, the second set places such emphasis on convention that it is hard not to read the photos within the context of the artwork as ironic, as enactments of a conventional performance of gender distant from how the artists understood their own subjectivities and relationship. The first work that Delimar and Jerman consciously declared as a collaborative performance was Attempt at Identification of 1978, which took place in Podroom, the gallery situated in the basement of Sanja Iveković and Dalibor Martinis’s studio (see Figure 3.17). In their text on Attempt at Identification, Delimar and Jerman frame the work as a rejection and disruption of “medieval Christian dogma” and “petite-­bourgeois manners” and the forms of “morals, dress, behavior, etc.,” that those norms dictate.82 Attempt at Identification was the first (but certainly not the last!) performance that either Delimar or Jerman undertook in the nude. The documentation images show them standing in front of a low arc abutting the wall, the crescent shape it carved out painted black. They stood on a black cloth with a white wooden chair between them and two brushes and a small can of black paint poised on the chair. The artists initially stood frontally facing the audience. Then

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they each picked up a brush and wrote the word JA (I) on their naked torsos. After writing, they turned toward each other for a tight, close hug, creating a messy blurring of the words on their torsos, which they then displayed again to the audience. Jerman and Delimar created a small self-­published catalog containing photocopied documentation images of the performance, accompanied by an explanatory text. They characterize the work as a “self-­analysis of reciprocal relationships.” [The] starting point is personal egocentrism, assertion of one’s I, pre­ occupation with the self, that is, consciousness of one’s I. A further development of that singularity is connection with another ego—­“consciousness of community”—­t he establishment and fostering of it. The final epilogue of the self-­analysis of reciprocal relationships is the exact conclusion that the individual exists first and foremost when they base their existence on their individual character.83

Recalling Slavenka Drakulić’s concern about sex instrumentalized for personal satisfaction and cut free from intimacy, Delimar and Jerman’s statement about Attempt at Identification can be read as a theorization of intimacy as a return to one’s own individuality. The statement emphasizes how Attempt at Identification presented viewers with a visualization of the artists’ “reciprocal relationship” as a union that heightens each individual’s sense of their own singularity, leading to a fuller actualization of their own being. Notably, though the artists’ physiques were different, they both undertook the exact same action, stressing equality across gender difference. Their acts of writing I on their torsos seem like self-­assertion or maybe even narcissism, but they also had an awkward quality because of the difficulty of writing the letters legibly upside down and backward without the aid of a mirror. The hug is the moment in which the legible signs of each artist’s separateness become blurred into illegibility, but it is also, of course, the emotional crux of the performance, a moment of warm slippery embrace that interrupts the almost institutional neutrality of their frontal stances for the viewers’ inspection. Attempt at Identification both inscribes the body with a literal text and pre­ sents the body as a frontal surface, legible like a text for signs of sexual difference. Viewers of this performance were invited to read the words the artists wrote on their torsos and also to “read” sexual differences in the artists’ full-­frontal, naked bodies. Throughout their collaborations, Jerman and Delimar continued to play with these juxtapositions between the individual naked body and strongly determined legible codes of gender difference, especially in the form of colors. I see this at work in Desymbolization, a performance conducted in various locations, including at the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade, in Zagreb, in Kassel, Germany, and also during their visit with friends to an artists’ event on the island of Cres in June 1980. This was the same event at which Delimar undertook her own performance

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Ball Painting, in which she painted the testicles of Jerman, Vlado Martek, Antun Maračić, Sven Stilinović, and Darko Šimičić. The enactments of Desymbolization differed in terms of the artists’ state of undress: for some they were naked only from the waist up, Delimar wearing a plaid skirt and Jerman pants, but for the version on Cres, performed on a nudist beach, they were completely naked. Again standing frontally facing the audience, the artists painted on their chests, Delimar this time painting a female symbol in pink and Jerman a male symbol in baby blue. They then each proceeded to paint their entire torso, including the fronts of their arms, in the same color and to hug to blur the colors, as in Attempt at Identification. In the E issue of Maj ’75, published in 1981, the artists describe the work as part of a larger investigation that aims to denaturalize gender: “We analyze and criticize existing symbols of the presentation of the sexes, from medical-­scientific denotations, to clothing, to the symbolic colors engrained in the West—­male blue and female pink.”84 The numerous similarities between Desymbolization and Attempt at Identification encourage us to read them almost as variations on the same work and underscore the importance of their attendant themes to the creative and intellectual substance of the artists’ collaboration. Both works are centrally focused on the tension and interface between being an embodied subject, specific and alive, before a public, and the legibility of that body/self in terms of cultural frameworks of meaning-­making, which compel a binary divide between male and female identification. This is a critique not only of how language, symbols, and colors produce difference but also arguably of photographic portraiture as a rigid system of recording identity, in the sense that the artists’ frontal poses before the audience evoked not only posing for a portrait but also, more ominously, the presentation of the docile body to the camera in the institutional framework of police, medical, or ethnographic photography.85 It is then perhaps unsurprising that the works give rise to appealing photographic documentation. An image of the artists painting their bodies on Cres is luminous (see Plate 12). They stand on a clear concrete area in front of jagged rocks and low trees typical for the coast, looking like two Adriatic gods adorning themselves before jumping back into the sea. Delimar puts a finishing touch on her right nipple, while Jerman smiles, looking down, and occupied with painting his still-­uncovered arms. Even as they stand facing toward the camera and not each other, the image conveys a feeling of their playful, sensual intimacy; their frontal pose toward the camera/viewer makes me feel included. Tactile Communication of 1981 took the inclusion of the viewer further by making it a central operating principle. The work was performed on April 15 at PM Gallery (Gallery of Extended Media), then under the directorship of Mladen Stilinović. A small, simple invitation card was sent to advertise the action, with only the title, artists’ names, and basic information about date and time. In the performance, the artists each passed separately through the room, touching au-

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dience members as they went, thereby establishing “tactile communication.” Photographic documentation shows Delimar caressing multiple visitors with both her hands on their cheeks, including Tomislav Gotovac. The performance received a thoughtful review from Damir Grubić in Polet.86 Grubić observes that the artists’ basic act of establishing “direct communication” with audience members through their hands renders the audience no longer passive viewers, especially as each person present responded to and participated in the touch in a different way. Delimar, in one of our conversations, gave a similar description, stating that the performance’s beauty lay in seeing people’s reactions with their bodies, making it into a performance conducted not just by the artists but by the audience as well.87 Grubić connects the performance to “a category of communication which has deep roots in human nature” that encompasses the need to feel touch. He situates Jerman and Delimar’s intervention within the contemporary moment of mass media, which he argues gives rise to an intangible desire for encounter and learning through touch “not only in the exterior, material world and space in which we move, but also internally, whether emotionally or reflexively.”88 At a formal level, the images of Delimar holding people’s cheeks in both hands suggest certain ways of touching evocative of healing or the laying on of hands in a religious context (notably, this reading is also informed by my own experiences of how she uses touch in an unusual, warm way in professional interactions). Those kinds of gestures would perhaps have supported Grubić’s impression of the healing, deeply resonant function of touch in the work, though he does not mention them specifically. You might also read the acts of touch as establishing a comparative framework between social and amorous forms of touch, which the artists both delineate and break down. The artists’ personal relationship and their collaborative performance history would have been strongly familiar to many people in the room. What are the politics and the interpersonal dynamics of a couple coming to demarcate itself, both in the context of a tight-­knit intellectual community such as the New Art Practice and in society at large? To what extent does the couple’s relationship gain public form or legibility, and in what ways does the essence of its relation remain something secret? Tactile Communication is also in a sense about noncommunication and about the performing body’s taciturn refusal to communicate the artist’s (or artists’) interior state.89 The artists’ last collaborative performance, Male and Female of 1983, further mined questions about what types of communication and connection are possible within and beyond social conventions for gendered relationships (see Figure 3.18). Earlier that year, they had experimented with dissolving performance almost entirely into sociability, with Invitation to Socialize at Galerija Događanja, in which they simply hung out with friends, talked, and watched a porn film.90 Male and Female, by contrast, was carefully structured into three distinct parts. The artists appeared dressed in loose, somewhat ill-­fitting clothing—­Delimar in a pink skirt

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Figure 3.18. Vlasta Delimar and Željko Jerman, Male and Female, 1983. Performance. Multimedia Center, Zagreb. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

and button-­down shirt and Jerman in a blue button-­down shirt and pants, in a return of the pink and blue from Desymbolization. Delimar also wore pantyhose, though Jerman was barefoot. In the first part, they performed ballroom dance together. In the second part, they engaged in an intense, slowed-­down performance of touch that was by turns violent and sensual. This was followed by a short black-­ and-­white film in which Jerman ran his hands over Delimar’s naked body. Delimar remembers that the film, which is now lost, was around five minutes long and was most likely filmed in the Voćarska Street house.91 Of these three segments, the second is the only one for which documentation remains. The five-­minute video shows the artists walking up to each other, clasping each other’s hands, and kissing, and then Jerman starts to stroke Delimar’s face and hair. She begins stroking his face and beard, and then they each turn to look directly at the audience. Viewing the documentation, this feels like a loaded moment, especially as Delimar lingers with a knowing, almost sly gaze, whereas Jerman seems vaguely embarrassed, turning his face but failing to raise his eyes completely, and quickly looking away. The moment in which he turns away inaugurates a tonal shift, when Delimar grabs a handful of his hair, he roughly pushes her away, and then he slaps her cheek. The subsequent four minutes of the perfor-

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mance consist in this kind of fighting that sometimes seems like play but sometimes not like play at all: they slap each other’s faces, pull hair, push each other violently to the ground. Both tear open the other’s button-­down shirt, and Jerman eventually also tears off Delimar’s skirt, revealing that she is wearing nothing underneath her pantyhose. At one point, he holds her down by her wrists and sits on her stomach, but then slides off and allows her to get up. This is one of the moments that most clearly evokes sexual assault. At another, he grabs the collar of her shirt and violently jerks her around and onto the floor, but then holds out his hand and helps her get up. While at some moments the performance seems frighteningly real, at others the staged and halfhearted nature of the slaps gives a sense of slapstick but also of the erotic games of dominance and submission. At the same time as numerous acts feel staged, I get a clear sense of Jerman’s larger size and superior physical prowess as he throws Delimar around in a way that is frightening and hard to watch. She, moreover, ends up with her breasts exposed with only sheer pantyhose covering her lower body, while he retains his pants, shirt, and even undershirt. All this action was improvised in the moment.92 Delimar states that Male and Female addressed the couple’s abiding concern with cohabitation.93 Its three sections might be read as steps from the public world of social convention to the intimate space of the bedroom. At the same time as it charts that trajectory, the work disrupts the idea that the private sphere is co­ extensive with intimacy by upsetting oppositions not only between public and private but also between real and staged, nurturing and destructive, and violent and sweet. The video documentation contains an index of audience discomfort in the form of boisterous laughter, which comes loudly and frequently early on and then peters out. The laughter, which erupts at moments of intense violence, seems to point to the audience’s unsureness about how to locate themselves relative to the polarities the work establishes. It might also, to some extent, have been the result of this particular performance having a larger audience beyond the artists’ intimate and familiar circle of friends, as Delimar notes that it drew an unprecedentedly large public.94 The moment around 1968 had seen important work by women artists who addressed how gendered norms shaped their labor and codetermined their roles as artists and mothers, such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969! (1969). In Paris in 1968, Argentine artist Lea Lublin performed My Son (1968), in which she occupied a gallery while caring for her baby in his crib, a work that Catherine Spencer argues shared the protestors’ resistance to social norms but also highlighted how the movement left assumptions about gendered labor in place.95 Male and Female similarly deploys highly personal material, but instead of analyzing the institutionalization of gendered labor it critiques the heterosexual relationship as institution, which the artists highlight through the title, the gendered pink and blue of their clothing, and the use of

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different familiar codes of representing partnership, from formal dance to erotica. With its second segment of volatile live performance, Male and Female poses stark questions about the limits of well-­being for both men and women within the normative heterosexual domestic relationship and about the sustainability of such relationships. In this sense it is the darkest in tone of Delimar and Jerman’s partner performances, and it makes me wonder about their mutual feelings about their collaborative endeavor as it was about to come to an end. I began this chapter by citing Barthes’s notion that photography constitutes a trace. 96 Importantly, for Barthes that trace does not record a world unmediated by images. Instead, the pageant of taking a photo, especially the act of posing, constitutes reality as a constellation already moving toward its own image capture, which is like an enactment of the eventuality of death.97 For performance theorists, especially those writing since the field’s turn to questions of documentation in the 1990s and early 2000s, the photograph most often stands as a trace of performance, but one with an amazing, lifelike ability to produce new experiences and interpretations that exceed and extend the live event itself.98 Even in its removal from the live event it supposedly documents, the performance photograph is a perky, dynamic entity that gives birth to meaning and to fresh aesthetic experience. Delimar and Jerman arguably position their collective performances as having a documentation-­like quality: they mimic the frontality of forms of photography centered on identification; they pose questions about how the body becomes legible like a text for signs of identity; and the artists situate performance as investigations of the artists’ own experience, which Jerman and Delimar refer to in their text on Wedding as constituting “documentary material.” Delimar notes that they stopped collaborating in 1983 because Jerman lost interest in performance, in particular because of the organization and coordination it required.99 However, their performances together were less an isolated episode in his career than another valence of the investigation of the relationship between photography, performance, and relationality. As I will demonstrate in chapter 4, Delimar’s own commitment to relationality structured her solo performance career, which went further than these collaborations with Jerman to mine viewer desire and discomfort in intense, sometimes confrontational ways. As I have discussed in the introduction to this book and its preceding chapters, the rich body of scholarship on Yugoslavia’s New Art Practice extensively considers the question of the movement’s particular modalities of political engagement. Jerman’s work was closely connected to the history of the New Art Practice proper, and some of his best-­known pieces corresponded to its socially engaged yet open-­ ended address to the political, such as the banner This Is Not My World that he displayed in various contexts starting in 1974. Ivana Bago argues that This Is Not

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My World was transgressive precisely because of its simultaneous rejection of the teleological confidence of both right-­w ing and left-­w ing politics and its embrace of the unknown.100 But alongside such works, much of Jerman’s art had an inward-­ looking quality that asserted an alternative to his peers’ political engagement. Jerman took an active stance in favor of a “romantic” approach that represented an alternative to major narratives of the New Art Practice. The March 3 entry for My Year states: “In today’s society, to be romantic is to be revolutionary.” Less than two years later, in 1979, Jerman and Martek published a short text in the C issue of Maj 75, the group’s self-­published periodical that included artworks and texts reproduced through a variety of means, including photocopying and hand production. Entitled “The Only Contemporary Romantic Decree on Art,” the text rejects any attempt to either dismiss or exploit big concepts concerning “man’s Whole,” such as God, love, and pathos.101 But in place of a kitschified romanticism expressed through “capital letters, color symbolism, [and] sublimated monograms,” the artists embrace a deeper conception of emotive self-­expression: “We accept the place where suffering meets us.”102 The decree indexes a complex wrestling with questions about the artist as an expressive subject, which positions itself against both an outdated modernism and a dry, intellectualized postmodernism. One way in which this double-­sided relationship to art’s “romantic” nature is evident in Jerman’s work is through the entity of the artistic medium, which in his practice, and arguably that of other Group of Six members such as Martek and Demur, was as much a set of emotional attachments as anything else. Jerman and his peers worked in a postmedium condition, as Rosalind Krauss defines it. Krauss sees a shift away from a Hegelian conception of the medium as something that compelled forward movement through a progressive series of redefinitions and toward approaches that took it as the object of archaeological analysis, a field of forms, frames, and questions to be mined and rearranged for addressing new realities.103 In Jerman’s and his friends’ work, the medium is deconstructed only to be taken up again as a set of affective identifications that concern the status of the artist as artist. In this sense, the command “Drop Dead, Photography!” might read as a cry of frustration at the impossibility of destroying photography but also as an acknowledgment of wonder that it could survive even the artist’s most intense attempts to blow it up at a formal level, by becoming an emotional and performative constellation that went far beyond the registration of light on paper. Reflecting on the historicization of Yugoslavia’s art of the 1970s and 1980s, Martek opines that contemporary curators, both in Croatia and internationally, have been heavily focused on excavating art from the former Yugoslavia that corresponded to a politicized impulse.104 The tendency to privilege artists from the New Art Practice whose works are politicized—­or perhaps, more broadly, highly self-­reflexive about processes of ideological subjectivization—­might arguably be

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the result of two very different imperatives. On the one hand, there is the urgent project driven by scholars in and from the former Yugoslav region to write histories of socially engaged art that fight the liquidation of Yugoslavia’s art history into the nationalist silos of the successor states by demonstrating the cross-­ regional, multiethnic political solidarity that art has embodied.105 On the other hand, there is the less salutary tendency on the part of Western scholars and institutions to look at art from Central and Eastern Europe through a lens heavily overdetermined by their own fantasies of revolution.106 Within both these frameworks, practices that privilege critique, irony, textuality, and easily reproducible images travel more smoothly than do Jerman’s photographs, which have a certain material and conceptual fragility. Within his oeuvre, context is less a set of socio­ ideological coordinates and more something addressed at the micro level, which I have demonstrated in this chapter was bound up with relational connections to others and how they unfolded across the spaces of the artist’s home and city in a historical context of changing gender roles. Mladen Stilinović, in his 1984 text “Foot Writing,” writes famously that “art without consequences does not exist.”107 Stilinović’s smart formulation both stresses art’s relationship to the world around it and subtly emphasizes that having consequences can in fact thwart agency conceived as intentional: art unavoidably has consequences in the world, but not necessarily the ones the artist intends. The conflicted and situated qualities of intimacy in Jerman’s work make me want to reformulate Stilinović’s statement for Jerman’s practice as “intimacy without consequences does not exist.” Intimacy here is not contained or controlled but rather implicates the artist uncomfortably with a world around him. Jerman’s acts of trace-­making pull us as viewers into the terrain of that uneasy implication.

4

Loving Kitsch Vlasta Delimar and Tomislav Gotovac Perform in Public

On September 1, 2009, two men and a woman took a walk down Ilica Street in central Zagreb. Even without knowing this was a performance by Vlasta Delimar, Antonio Lauer (formerly Tomislav Gotovac), and Milan Božić, passersby would have noted that the event was unusual. Most obviously, all three were naked, or mostly naked: the woman in the middle, Delimar, wore a black hat and black high-­heeled lace-­up shoes and carried a black jacket over her arm (see Figure 4.1). They walked directly down the middle of the street and went at a leisurely pace in the early morning when most people out on the street were busily heading to work; the majority of spectators of the performance viewed it from inside the tram.1 At the time of this performance, Delimar and Gotovac/Lauer both had long careers behind them as artists working across media, with a deep belief in the power of performance. Božić, a veteran of the wars that broke up the former Yugoslavia, began his art career later, when he started participating in Delimar’s performances after the two entered a domestic partnership in 2005.2 The three made a collective statement that with the walk they aimed “to transform the space of the street into a space of art and connect our cumulative experience as mature artists who have opposed all ideologies. We celebrate each other’s work up to this point.”3 An interest in the power of the naked body in public is a connecting thread between the oeuvres of Delimar and Gotovac, arguably the two most important body artists to emerge from Zagreb’s experimental milieu in the later twentieth century. In this chapter, I will argue that, more deeply than their common use of the naked body, the artists also share a career-­long engagement with the notion of kitsch, which they both mine for its provocative connection to questions of subjectivity and viewership. In this chapter, I construct a notion of kitsch that is not bound to commodity objects per se but rather revolves around reception. Specifically, it concerns the artists’ use in performance of highly familiar or even clichéd images, materials, and aesthetics, which speak to audiences in impactful ways but can also be nuanced, overturned, or problematized within the scope of the work. Gotovac and Delimar were close friends and collaborators late in life. But their careers also exist on a historical continuum with one another, because of their 171

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Figure 4.1. Milan Božić, Vlasta Delimar, and Antonio Lauer/Tomislav Gotovac, Two Men and One Woman, 2009. Performance, Zagreb. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

respective ages and their concomitantly different roles in the unfolding of the New Art Practice. Gotovac was born in 1937 in Sombor, Serbia, and moved to Zagreb as a child. He became interested in film at a young age, frequenting the Zagreb amateur film club in the late 1950s and making his first film in 1962, following the completion of his military service. He moved to Belgrade in 1967, where he was extensively involved with the experimental film scene and attended film school but was prevented from graduating because of his starring role in Lazar Stojanović’s censored film Plastic Jesus (1971). In 1976, he returned to Zagreb to join his wife at the time, Zora Cazi. Delimar was born in 1956 in Zagreb and attended the same elementary school as Gotovac had twenty years earlier.4 At age seven, her family left their life of poverty in Zagreb for the town of Koprivnica near the Hungarian border. Delimar returned to the city in 1972, at age sixteen, to enroll in the School of Applied Art, where she met Sven Stilinović and, through him, became connected with the Group of Six Authors. That experience led to her definitive turn away from modernist understandings of art and toward a performative practice centered on the sensual, relational body. After Gotovac’s return to Zagreb in 1976, both he and Delimar were part of the same like-­minded circle of artists who went to films at the Multimedia Center and exhibitions at Podroom, Galerija Nova, and the City

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Gallery of Contemporary Art and who participated in public exhibitions in variously configured groups following the dissolve of the Group of Six Authors around 1979. Gotovac’s presence amid this younger group—­Group of Six member Vlado Martek jokingly nicknamed him “grandpa”—­marked a point of continuity with the experimental film activity of the 1950s and 1960s, when film was emblematic of the country’s aesthetic experimentation.5 In the 1970s, many artists were less focused on film as such and turned instead toward performance and video (the latter a medium Gotovac firmly rejected).6 But Gotovac’s close connections to the younger cohort are one of many examples of how the aesthetic heritage of the earlier postwar decades was crucial in fueling the experimental art of the 1970s and 1980s. Other scholars note the importance of kitsch for understanding these two oeuvres, especially Gotovac’s. Slobodan Šijan writes that the hallmark of Gotovac’s style was his combined commitment, on the one hand, to experimental and avant-­ garde film and, on the other hand, to Hollywood cinema, which was often considered kitschy trash within Yugoslav artistic circles.7 However, in this chapter, instead of seeing Gotovac’s love of film as a kind of origin point for notions of kitsch in the Zagreb circle of the New Art Practice, I will approach kitsch via the issues of performance and reception that Delimar’s work raises and will draw out the commonalities in this respect between her art and Gotovac’s. My goal in doing so is both to offer kitsch as a concept that clarifies some stakes in Delimar’s enigmatic and provocative practice and to reframe the notion of kitsch in Gotovac’s work as something that concerns not only image and sound appropriation but also, fundamentally, the body. Both artists use their own bodies to broker worn representations into new modes of existing in public that contest normative notions of the body in the artists’ own context. It is also possible that their respective positions as supposed amateurs outside established institutions played a role in their gravitation toward the typically denigrated objects of kitsch: Gotovac had gotten his extensive film knowledge through seeing movies as a kid and participating in Zagreb’s Kino Club, and Delimar had graduated from the School of Applied Arts but jettisoned her artistic training in favor of the unconventional and experimental practice of performance. But despite these commonalities, Delimar’s and Gotovac’s practices represent fundamentally different positions on the question of the gendered body and reflect different lived experience of gender embodiment. Jasmina Tumbas, in her discussion of the F issue of Maj 75 that Delimar organized to include only women artists, argues that the issue and its individual contributions staged tensions between women’s corporeality and male-­dominated conceptual art discourses established in the 1960s and 1970s. The result, Tumbas argues, was a positioning of the body as the site of feminist politics that resisted universalizing political and artistic projects.8 As Tumbas details, Delimar’s relationship to feminism was ambivalent in various respects.9 Marina Gržinić describes Delimar’s practice as asserting a

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“bastard feminist” position endowed with power by its kitschy quality. This chapter builds on scholarship such as Tumbas’s and Gržinić’s to elucidate the treatment of space in Delimar’s work and the audience address of her public performances. I argue that Delimar’s art provides an interpretive framework for reading Gotovac’s performances because her trenchant treatments of women’s pleasure and violence against women highlight the specificity of his engagements with femininity from a position of male privilege. Specifically, I will argue here that Delimar mobilizes kitsch to limn the space between predetermined codes and emergent possibilities for women’s embodiment, ultimately revealing the challenge of representing women’s subjectivity within a patriarchal order. Gotovac, however, deploys dimensions of femininity always via the use (whether overt or covert) of appropriated kitsch types that the artist can assume and discard. Both these modes of performance involve staging the artist’s own desire in public in a way that has relational implications. I use the term relational in this chapter to indicate how artworks can imply the possibility of interaction between artists and audiences and between audience members among each other but may or may not result in concrete or substantive encounters. This use is different from Nicolas Bourriaud’s term relational aesthetics, coined in 1998, in which the social interactions that unfold within a participatory artwork constitute a fulfilling substitute for utopian dreams that seem no longer realizable within the actual structures of society.10 But in using this term, I do mean to suggest that Delimar’s and Gotovac’s practices should be seen as a different, Yugoslav genealogy for the development over the 1980s and 1990s of conceptualist concerns into art that was overtly interactive or participatory. Delimar’s and Gotovac’s contributions to that history lie in the way that their works invite viewers to parse the relationships of power and desire that attend any viewer/artist interaction. Moreover, the artists’ use of public space as the venue for their performances had important implications for the works’ relational qualities because the possibility but not the guarantee of interaction or connection reflects the unpredictable nature of navigating public space and the volatile mix of experiences of solitude and togetherness that goes with it. The twentieth-­century history of the concept of kitsch is an archive of ideas about reception and the politics of art. “Kitsch” has a loaded valence in the territories of the former Yugoslavia, where thinkers such as Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić posit its strong connection to ethnonationalist culture, a culture that played a pivotal role in the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and exercises a caustic role in regional politics in the present. This chapter draws on those associations to understand how Delimar and Gotovac position themselves vis-­à-­v is constructs of power and the nation. But I will also locate Delimar’s use of kitsch relative to its deployments in feminist art of the 1960s to 1980s that used kitsch to address tensions between objectification, pleasure, and empowerment in women’s experiences of their bodies and sexualities.

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Kitsch and Reception In a deeply melancholy short text published in early 1990 when Yugoslavia’s politics were in free fall, art historian Želimir Koščević accused himself and his peers of naive idealism concerning the power of art to address political reality. Koščević writes that the New Art Practice was ultimately unable to address a culture of nationalism, lies, human rights abuses, environmental destruction, poverty, and “kitsch culture and cultural policy at home and abroad.”11 Koščević’s text not only speaks about disillusionment but also—­perhaps unconsciously—­performs it, because of the unrealistically high bar it sets for an adequate politics of art. Notably, his framing of kitsch culture as an integral part of the crisis facing Yugoslavia reflects a larger understanding of kitsch among intellectuals from the area, who saw it as connected to nationalism and to nationalism’s delusional and coercive forms of address. As literary scholar Dragana Obradović points out, kitsch operates in these discourses simultaneously as an aesthetic and a political category.12 Obradović’s characterization of this duality resonates not only with the region of the former Yugoslavia but also with Milan Kundera’s classic characterization of socialist political kitsch. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1982), Kundera describes kitsch as a denial of the “shit” of human existence (both in terms of actual poop and the more general unpleasantness of life).13 It is also a self-­ consciously sentimental act of reveling in aesthetic universality: “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass. The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass. It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”14 Indeed, kitsch arguably only becomes legible as such by virtue of one’s failure or refusal to identify with the vision of collectivity that it projects. In the former Yugoslavia, the indissociability between kitsch’s aesthetic and political valences is embodied by the decorative Licitar heart or licitarsko srce, an inedibly hard cookie shellacked in red glaze with frosted decorations or texts and sometimes also small mirrors stuck to it. T-­shirts and picture frames adorned with images of Licitar hearts fill souvenir shops in present-­day Zagreb. In a 1973 interview, renowned novelist Danilo Kiš argued that it was not just the cookies themselves that counted as kitsch but rather the endless debates about which regional culture—­Serbian, Croatian, etc.—­originated them.15 Kiš’s statement encourages a reading of kitsch as constituted in a dialectical relationship between a commodity object and the discourses that use it to concretize a claim to authentic identity. Revisiting the licitarsko srce more than twenty-­five years later, on the other side of Yugoslavia’s breakup, literary critic Dubravka Ugrešić describes it as a saccharine mask plastered over the reality of war.16 Ugrešić sees nationalist kitsch as a flexible structure in which images or figures with different ideological content can be exchanged for one another: “tunes which we have already heard, but in a new arrangement, symbols which we have already seen, but in a new design.”17 Socialist

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Yugoslavia and the capitalist successor states thus share imagery and symbols (for example, Croatian president Franjo Tuđman wore white jackets evocative of Josip Broz Tito’s), but their forms of kitsch differ in that socialist kitsch was forward-­ looking and openly declarative of its ideology, while ethnonationalist kitsch looks toward the past, abandoning any utopian dimension.18 Beyond the cultural specifics that Kiš and Ugrešić discuss, the concept of kitsch is a natural fit for critiques of nationalism because of its historical connection to questions of coercion. Theorists of kitsch range in terms of their attitudes toward the relative valuation of high versus mass culture, but they broadly agree that kitsch is connected to the involuntary or the unconscious, whether in terms of the affective response it solicits or its aspirational positioning relative to “art.”19 Moreover, authors’ various attitudes toward high versus mass culture are often themselves rooted in differences of opinion on whether a material object can dictate a predictable response or whether the kinds of reception that kitsch fosters exist in a more open-­ended relationship with commodity objects.20 Umberto Eco, in his 1989 essay “The Structure of Bad Taste,” is careful to make a distinction between kitsch as such and broader mass culture, emphasizing that mass culture has existed for centuries and arguing for attention to the huge variety of attitudes present at the level of mass consumption.21 Eco’s analysis recalls other formulations when he writes that kitsch involves the “prefabrication and imposition” of an experience or affect, which it samples liberally from avant-­garde traditions in order to achieve.22 But perhaps more importantly for him, kitsch is distinguished by its erasure of its own citational quality. Kitsch plucks a styleme from original art and imports it into a new context where it “sticks out . . . like a sore thumb, and yet is never acknowledged as an intentional citation.”23 Instead, kitsch proposes the product as a newly created work, enacting an “imitat[ion] of the discovery of pleasure” and mobilizing a sense of aesthetic pleasure as a justification for its own operations.24 Delimar’s and Gotovac’s interests in questions of gender highlight how male scholars such as Eco and Greenberg neglect questions of gendered positionality as they inform desire in its connection to kitsch. Indeed, the association between the feminine and decoration, domesticity, pleasure, and reproduction consigns the feminine to the unthought ground of many theorizations of kitsch. Ugrešić provides an intriguing spin on these associations with her stress on how the derivative, repetitive nature of kitsch is valuable insofar as it undermines the myth of an autonomous, original (male) authorship.25 Seen in this light, kitsch becomes a tool for crafting forms of authorship that distance themselves from modernist originality, while also highlighting the ideological conditions that attend to reproduction (that is, industrial production, but also sexual reproduction) in a given context. The work of feminist pop artists such as Evelyne Axell (Belgian) and Marjorie Garber (American) are particularly dramatic and appealing embodiments

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of this approach, as both produced hyperbolic versions of kitschified representations of femininity, drawing on sources from pornography to advertising. Axell’s works have a joyful intensity and strongly center women’s erotic pleasure, even as they present women who are highly schematic and literally flattened into shapes of color. The works suggest that Axell’s agency as a woman artist might lie in proliferating stereotyped gendered images to the point where they become something else, taking on their own intriguing dynamics of abstraction and recombination. Though created in a totally different medium and aesthetic than Delimar’s work, Axell’s practice suggests an intellectual kinship in its approach to deploying but also reshaping kitsch images of femininity. In the realm of performance, Gržinić also suggests a parallel to the work of American feminist performance artist Annie Sprinkle.26 Sprinkle draws on her own early-­career experience as a sex worker and pornographic film actor to create works that use sexualized stereotypes of femininity but stretch and transform them to fundamentally alter their audience address. A famous early work by Delimar and Gotovac each will let me demonstrate the multifaceted nature of the artists’ respective addresses to audiences and how they mobilize both political and commodity kitsch to offer complex depictions of their own gendered subjecthoods. The first work is Delimar’s This Was Me in 1980 When Comrade Tito Died (1980), a performance documentation photograph of herself standing naked against a white-­painted brick wall, with the title phrase (“Ovo sam bila ja 1980. kada je umro drug Tito”) written in black pen to the right of her image (see Plate 13). The photograph documents Delimar’s first solo public performance, which took place at the Student Center Gallery but had been postponed for several months due to Tito’s hospitalization and impending death. The delay was frustrating and emotional for Delimar, who saw it as absurd and as unrelated to her art. The performance she eventually conducted consisted of stripping naked in the gallery in front of viewers. Jasmina Tumbas interprets the resulting photo/ text work as a layered commemoration, marking Delimar’s own “ordeal” caused by Tito’s death, but also paying homage to the man himself and the way his “special type of charm” was formative for notions of sexuality in Yugoslav society.27 This Was Me in 1980 When Comrade Tito Died engages with nationalist constructs of political kitsch by performing the idealist subject position of an adherent to the cult of the leader, but with subtle hyperbole. Bojana Videkanić analyzes the symbolic and actual space that Tito and his image occupied in the Yugoslav public sphere and argues that this presence structured adoring, affectionate relationships between the leader and Yugoslav youth.28 Videkanić argues that collective youth activities such as the yearly štafeta in celebration of Tito’s birthday enacted a “strange symbolic exchange that could be characterized as secular religiosity,” establishing vital connections between Tito’s omnipresent/absent body and the concretely visible bodies of the country’s youth.29 This Was Me in 1980 When Comrade

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Tito Died points to the connection between Delimar’s own subjectivity and her historical context: Tito’s death was a defining moment for the country and for her generation. At the same time, the work’s visual rhetoric emphasizes the compulsory dimension of performing national subjecthood, as well as Delimar’s defiance of those compulsory modes. In chapter 3, I discussed how the photographic documentation of Delimar’s collaborative performances with Željko Jerman consistently featured the artists naked, frontally facing the camera, in a way that echoed disciplinary functions of photography and also presented the body as something to be read like a text for legible gender difference. This Was Me uses this same format of static frontality and shows Delimar posed against a white-­painted brick wall that might signify as belonging to various types of institutions (artistic, medical, educational) but not to a personal or domestic space typical for Yugoslavia at this time. Delimar appears to be standing at attention, but with small irregularities that resignify the pose: her right foot is lifted slightly off the ground, and her head is tilted a bit upward and to the side in a way that seems like a defiant position of observing the camera. The overall effect is that she shows herself as a disciplinary subject, situated by her context and its discourses of subjectivity, but also as legible on her own terms, both able to shape her own representation and possessed of an interior subjectivity that the photograph cannot fully render. In relation to Videkanić’s point that for Yugoslav youth Tito was simultaneously omnipresent and ethereal, I would argue that the pose Delimar takes, like an imperfect version of a young athlete standing at attention, both uncomfortably implies a fantasy of Tito’s gaze on her naked form and hints at her own agency in rejecting the eroticized, surveilled notion of the body that such a gaze would enact. In its analysis of the uneasy relationship between women’s sexuality and the figure of Tito under late Yugoslav socialism, This Was Me shares common ground with Sanja Iveković’s collage Tito’s Dress of 1981–­82, in which sexy ladies, cartoonishly sketched in pen, sport clothing made of collaged newspaper images of the leader’s face. While Delimar’s This Was Me evokes athletics and parades that constituted physical performances of Yugoslav nationhood, Iveković’s work constitutes a complex meditation on the relationship between commodity culture and ossified socialist ideology in the same difficult period following Tito’s death. Recalling Eco’s statement that kitsch’s borrowed styleme sticks out of its context like a sore thumb, I interpret Delimar’s use of the phrase “Comrade Tito”—­the habitual way of referring to Tito in Yugoslav parlance—­as a canny evocation of the clash between state ideology and experimental aesthetics. Its effect is to assert a practice of intentionally jarring citation, which is key to the politics of Delimar’s work. Whereas in Eco’s description the true practitioner of kitsch uses a discourse of aesthetic pleasure to paper over the citational nature of their work, This Was Me cites political kitsch in a way that renders that political speech obvious as a

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genre, through the contrast between the respectful appellation “Comrade Tito” and the visual bareness of the work (the artist’s body and wall behind her are literally bare, and the text is simple and functional). Simultaneously, the bareness of Delimar’s body does not just reveal her physicality but activates layered representational codes that overdetermine her identity (the young athlete at attention or the rigidity of a subject pinned by the ethnographer’s camera). In this sense, she is “wearing” her nudity as one more form of masquerade. This notion of nudity as a costume is connected to Delimar’s other works in performance and collage of this period that display an interest in the serial juxtaposition of different presentations of femininity. These include Transformation of Personality performed the following year in the SC Gallery, in which Delimar staged a solo fashion show where she paraded in different outfits on a catwalk before finally appearing naked, and Untitled, a collage of 1979 that shows ten duplicates of the same portrait of her taken by Jerman, on which are awkwardly superimposed different hairdos cut from magazines (see Figure 4.2). Created almost two decades earlier, Tomislav Gotovac’s Showing Elle Magazine of 1962 (see Figure 4.3) is more iconic in Yugoslav art history than This Was Me in 1980 When Comrade Tito Died. But it is distinctly similar in modality: a photo/ performance work focused on the artist’s body and highly contingent on the circumstances of its creation, which is centrally concerned with questions of citation, kitsch, and their implications for understanding artistic subjectivity. Showing Elle Magazine consists of six black-­and-­white photographs of Gotovac wearing dark pants and no shirt in the snowy forest landscape of Sljeme mountain near Zagreb, holding up a copy of Elle to show pages to the camera, and leafing through the magazine as if to read it. The work was the spontaneous result of a walk on the mountain with friends shortly after Gotovac completed his compulsory military service. He decided to strip and asked photographer Ivica Hripko to take pictures, resulting in this work and also in Breathing in the Air, which shows him similarly attired but sans magazine, taking exaggeratedly deep breaths of the mountain atmosphere. Ješa Denegri interprets Showing Elle as groundbreaking in several respects: the first instance of Gotovac’s use of his (semi)nude body in his art, his first performance in a public space, and one of the first uses of photo-­ documented performance in all of Yugoslavia.30 Ana Janevski describes the work as a nascent initiation of Gotovac’s later confrontation with “living urban texture” and petite-­bourgeoise morality.31 In a widely cited 1977 interview with fellow conceptual artist Goran Trbuljak and film scholar Hrvoje Turković, Gotovac described Showing Elle as a kind of manifesto connected to his desire to show his work to the public, which in turn was part of a sense of “entry into society” brought about by the military draft.32 Denegri argues that, in particular, Gotovac’s experience of living in all-­male company in

Figure 4.2. Vlasta Delimar, Untitled, 1979. Photo-­collage. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

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Figure 4.3. Tomislav Gotovac, Showing Elle Magazine (detail), 1962. Photo-­performance. Courtesy of Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb; photographs by Ivica Hripko.

the army informed the treatment of gender in Showing Elle.33 Indeed, the work revolves around gendered juxtapositions that are comically obvious but also complex in their implications for how to understand Gotovac’s gendered subjectivity. On the one hand, it juxtaposes the artist’s seminaked male body with the images of women in the pages of the magazine, one of whom is wearing only underwear and another of whom looks seductively out at the viewer, crowned by a tiara. Gotovac is not handsome, and the work is funny because his own nudity reads clearly as exhibitionism rather than a state that permits viewers to eroticize him. While it does not show him dressed in women’s clothes, as he did, for example, with a bonnet and nightgown in Disguise of 1967, Showing Elle still presents him masquerading as feminine. Gotovac appears as the obvious subject of pleasure, both in terms of the joy he takes in his own crazy antics and because he occupies the role of the one who shows eroticized images of women’s bodies to the viewer. Showing Elle is both a bare-­bones document of art rendered a process or “behavior,” as Sandra Križić Roban describes it, and a careful meditation on the workings of viewership.34 This concern about viewership shaped the work at a basic, procedural level: Gotovac refrained from stripping entirely naked because of the presence in the group of a woman, Hripko’s girlfriend of the time.35 The fact that Gotovac’s action

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was witnessed by people not behaving in the same way is evident in some of the images, where his fully clothed friends are visible, out of focus, in the background. At a conceptual level, the work uses the kitsch object of Elle magazine to raise questions about how highly gendered images cultivate certain forms of subjectivity. Elle’s images are coded here as kitsch because of the rote responses that they demand from viewers—­identificatory/aspirational on the part of women and desiring on the part of men. Gotovac offers an alternative performance of a highly unusual act of reception of the images, in which he makes an intentionally failed gesture toward imitating them with his own nudity but also seems to take disproportionate pleasure from them that heightens their erotic dimension. Eco notes that key to kitsch is the author’s intent to “sell” the work to the audience and the audience’s intent to appreciate it.36 Gotovac evokes the act of sale here—­he is displaying a commercial product with great enthusiasm—­but renders the notion of appreciation unstable and uncomfortable. Moreover, crucial in terms of the work’s use of kitsch is how it builds a sense of context, which brings me back to Eco’s point about the borrowed styleme as a sore thumb. Namely, Showing Elle explicitly destabilizes the context into which it imports the magazine’s images. Gotovac’s act of self-­exposure not only raises questions about the viewer’s pleasure and his own, it makes the scenario in the photographs feel acutely time-­limited, as he is standing outside, half-­naked, on a snowy winter day. Gotovac looks distinctly cold in the images, with his neck muscles tensed and his arms clamped down close to his bare torso, giving the viewer the impression that he will need to run and put his clothes back on at any minute. This sense of instability is heightened by the presence of the magazine, an item that signifies urban commodity culture, which is clearly out of place in a freezing forest landscape. The woman in the group had brought the magazine with her on the walk, though this is not at all clear to someone viewing the photographs.37 What is clear is that the magazine needs to be taken back to the city afterward, or if left here on Sljeme, it will quickly degrade into something no longer usable or desirable; even setting it down briefly on the snowy ground would wrinkle and denature its pages. Whichever way you interpret its fate or origins, the magazine actively chafes at the context of wintery Sljeme. Showing Elle mimics kitsch’s enthusiastic promotion of the commodity object via Gotovac’s silly performance of displaying the magazine, but it also inverts kitsch’s attempt to blend its borrowed stylemes unproblematically into their new context by constructing a context for the commodity item that is weird and unstable. From these close looks at Delimar’s This Was Me in 1980 When Comrade Tito Died and Gotovac’s Showing Elle Magazine, it appears that both artists are interested in treating kitsch’s modes of subject formation while also rendering the citational operations that kitsch attempts to conceal into a conscious and obvious dimension of their works. Moreover, both resituate the notion of aesthetic pleasure that kitsch employs as its justification by making it clear that aesthetic pleasure

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involves erotic pleasure. At the same time, the works reflect vastly different experiences of gendered embodiment and its implications for what one’s own nudity means. John Berger, in his 1972 Ways of Seeing, provides a now-­classic formulation for understanding the differences in the Western art historical tradition between men’s and women’s positions: a man’s presence in an artwork is dependent on his power and what he can do for the viewer, while a woman’s presence is dependent on what can be done to her. Berger argues that this establishes a sense of self-­ surveillance for women, where they must contain and interiorize the objectifying conditions of their own visibility, thereby coming to occupy a split position of both surveyor and surveyed.38 This Was Me in 1980 When Comrade Tito Died implies, as I discussed above, a coercive sense of surveillance, thus attributing to Delimar’s nudity an unsettling quality, at the same time as it constitutes an act of self-­assertion. Gotovac’s nudity in Showing Elle Magazine is more liberatory because, despite the complexities of the piece’s work with gender, he still inhabits the image as a man, doing instead of being done to. The feminine type the magazine suggests is something Gotovac jokes, via the work, about performing but never fully assumes, ultimately dramatizing his own power to step into and out of differently gendered roles. In the works discussed above, Delimar and Gotovac simultaneously interrogate their own position as artists and implicate their viewers. The erotic nature of the works creates a push and pull with viewers, which is in turn connected to both artists’ stakes in the highly relational nature of art practice. Both works question the viewer’s position and how that position is implicated with pleasure: Delimar’s work situates the viewer’s gaze relative to an economy of national representation problematized within the scope of the work itself, and Gotovac unsettles the typical consumption of Elle’s images to enmesh both himself and the viewer in different, strange types of pleasure. The questions about legibility and relationality operative in these works also bore on each artist’s treatment of urban space, as I explain next.

Reading the City in Early Photographic Works The sensory fabric of the city was a central focus in both Delimar’s and Gotovac’s art. Their interests in city spaces were comprehensive, from experiments with the relational possibilities of shared space to reflections on the material dimensions of the urban fabric, such as Gotovac’s 1977 series of photos of drain covers in Belgrade streets, which appear like orifices or perhaps monograms of the city itself. This section brings into focus the artists’ respective approaches to how urban space can generate meaning and interpersonal relationality, through a discussion of a black-­ and-­white photographic work from early in each artist’s career. Like This Was Me in 1980 When Comrade Tito Died and Showing Elle Magazine, these works have some

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striking commonalities, but they also have differences in terms of their modalities of citation and the kinds of desiring subjectivity they seek to illuminate. This time, I will start with Gotovac’s work Suitcase, a series of four photographs made in Belgrade in 1964 (see Figure 4.4). It dates to the same year Gotovac created his so-­called Belgrade trilogy of films, Straight Line (Stevens—­Duke), Circumference (Jutkevič—­Count), and Blue Rider (Godard—­Art), and the year after the creation of Forenoon of a Faun in collaboration with Vladimir Petek, considered a milestone for Yugoslav experimental film. Gotovac’s friend Petar Blagojević-­A ranđelović, who was the director of photography for the Belgrade trilogy of films, took the four photos that make up Suitcase. The images show four men, Gotovac and Blagojević-­ Aranđelović included, in deserted city streets. In each image, one man holds a light-­colored suitcase, but who does so varies from photo to photo. Three of the images are clearly taken right around the same location, where a set of wide steps with a railing meets a neatly cobbled street that slants downhill, with a church on one side. The fourth photo shows Mihailo P. Ilić carrying the suitcase in a narrower street with more irregular cobbles, as an unaware passerby walks briskly around the corner. Denegri argues that, in Gotovac’s oeuvre, film forms the guiding thread and intellectual logic of all works, including those not “physically manifested” in a filmic medium.39 Gotovac made a parallel comment in the 1977 interview with Trbuljak and Turković, stating that everything he did was related to film and that the movie, as he called it, became a principle that displaced ingrained notions of traditional media.40 Suitcase renders the filmic use of photography highly palpable. Each image invites speculation on the narrative to which it might belong, in a mode familiar to many global art viewers from Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills of more than a decade later (1977–­80). But unlike Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, which she composed of discrete images each evoking a certain story or genre, Gotovac presents four photos whose recurring characters and central prop—­the suitcase—­invite the possibility of reading them as a narrative. At the same time, the oblique quality of the images also troubles that possibility. The four photos show physical movement through city streets but lack progression. One image, showing Blagojević-­A ranđelović holding the suitcase alone in the foreground with downcast eyes and hunched shoulders, seems to hint at a marital melodrama or tragedy, while another showing Mihailo P. Ilić looking straight into the camera with a determined expression evokes a heist film. In another, Gotovac stands a bit behind his friends on the stairs while one of them looks back at him and at the camera behind him with a jovial expression, breaking the fourth wall to bring out the staged nature of the photos. Gotovac described to Trbuljak and Turković the powerful impression made on him as a young teenager by certain film stills, including one published in the Zagreb-­based magazine Film revija from Luchino Visconti’s Obsession (1943), con-

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Figure 4.4. Tomislav Gotovac, Suitcase (detail), 1964. Photo-­performance. Courtesy of Tomislav Gotovac Institute.

sidered by some to be the first neorealist film. In Suitcase, the stripped-­down black-­ and-­white images’ focus on city spaces, prominence of questions of masculinity, and emotionally dark overtones echo the style of neorealism. Obsession, in fact, has an iconic scene in which the protagonist walks down an open road holding a light-­colored suitcase, trailed by the woman with whom he is obsessed and who will ultimately spell his downfall. These similarities make the images in Suitcase read both as an embrace of blunt everyday life and as sites of fantasy or, more specifically, as meditations on how the relationship between fantasy and the everyday material reality of city life can be bound up with experiences of viewing film and related media. Moreover, the way that Suitcase mixes the staged with the aleatory is clearly something Gotovac was more broadly interested in at the time, as parallel concerns emerge in the Belgrade trilogy of films.41 Those films make extensive use of footage filmed in everyday situations, such as inside a restaurant and looking out the window of a moving tram, letting the films take shape through a combination of the director’s agency in deciding where to film but also the contingency of who and what falls under the camera’s gaze. The notion of kitsch in Suitcase is certainly more subtle than in some of Gotovac’s later public performances, which I will discuss shortly. However, already

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present in this work is the power of an established, even worn-­out vocabulary of representation shaping emergent experiences of urban space. Italian neorealism stretched approximately from Visconti’s film in 1943 to 1952, meaning that by the creation of Suitcase in 1964 its heyday was more than a decade in the past. Gotovac and his friends are reenactors of no-­longer-­current aesthetic tropes, and their actions ultimately result in a series of distinctly disappointing images. Gotovac was famous for stressing the continuity of his own perception with film (“As soon as I open my eyes, I see a film”).42 Turković interprets his oeuvre as centrally focused on “awakening his [own] observer’s sensitivity in the audience.” 43 The unpolished and unsatisfactory qualities of the images in Suitcase foster such an awakening by setting in tension everyday urban experience and the filmic representational codes that imbue that experience with meaning. Amid that tension, what are the relational possibilities of city space? To what kinds of interpersonal encounters might it give rise? Suitcase provides more than one answer. Gotovac and his friends engage in a citational practice of reenactment that is not only conscious but actively social. The photos seem as much as anything to be documents of their camaraderie, their shared love for film and art making. The work has a subtly prank-­like character. In a 1969 text entitled “Group Fun,” Gotovac wrote an instructional narrative for a group of people to engage in an adventure that involved actions such as going to a train station, buying sandwiches and eating them in the bathroom in a way that blocked others from getting in to use the toilet, and buying train tickets to a town whose name shares a first letter with the Zodiac sign of one of the members of the group.44 In the conclusion to this text, Gotovac instructs participants: “Think of the atmosphere of a film you have watched. Gather round in a circle and taking it in turns utter the word that first comes to mind until your mouth becomes dry.” 45 After reading this text, Suitcase seems almost like a performance of similar “group fun,” an activity of exploring public space structured by the sense of atmosphere of a certain kind of film. This kind of activity recalls the Situationist dérive but is informed by enthusiasm for film viewership and by an embrace of the way that media shape perception, as opposed to the Situationists’ more puritan commitment to undo types of perception and social structures stemming from the Spectacle.46 While Suitcase shows us Gotovac and his friends enjoying their group fun, the lone, naive passerby visible in the last image, the man in a trench coat who rounds the corner walking quickly somewhere else, seems to be in a different world. This image makes it clear that if for some enthusiasts everything is a movie, not everyone has the same experience. The space of the city thus emerges here as one that fosters subjective differences and ruptures between people’s experiences as much as it can ever produce a shared reality. The question of relationality within an urban fabric overdetermined by representational codes comes more clearly to the fore within Delimar’s 1981 pho-

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Figure 4.5. Vlasta Delimar, My Daily Visual Communication on the Relation Voćarska Street 5— Kvaternik Square (detail), 1981. Photographs. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

tographic work My Daily Visual Communication on the Relation Voćarska Street 5— Kvaternik Square (see Figure 4.5). Within the broad scope of Delimar’s oeuvre, this work is highly unusual in the absence of a direct representation of the artist’s own body. However, in this anomalous quality, it helps bring into focus aspects of her attitudes toward city space and highlights some commonalities and differences with Gotovac in that respect. My Daily Visual Communication consists of a series of nine black-­and-­white photographs arranged sequentially, following the path of Delimar’s walk from the home that she shared with husband Željko Jerman in Voćarska Street to Kvaternikov Square, a medium-­sized square in the east-­central part of the city with a tram hub and shops serving the surrounding neighborhood. The house at #5 Voćarska was the site of extensive social and artistic activity on the part of Delimar, Jerman, and their social circle and was the location of the small printing press with which they somewhat haphazardly attempted to make a living. My Daily Visual Communication is on one level like a phenomenology of Delimar’s everyday experience as she walks from home to Kvaternikov trg,

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where she might go on a daily or near-­daily basis to buy bread or veggies. At the same time, the photos are shot spatially straight instead of evoking the gaze as it would flit and meander around the environment. As such, the work appears like a semantic reading of the text of the city, especially because the photos tend to focus on storefronts and signage. The signs—­including for a butcher, a household goods store, a cheap restaurant, and a hairdresser—­appear shabby and deeply ordinary, less advertisements for enticing products than offers to help people fulfill their basic quotidian needs. The desire to record such commonplace signage was also evident in another performance I mentioned in the book’s introduction, Visual Communication of 1983, where Delimar set up a long strip of paper in Korzo Street in Rijeka and used a stick with a paintbrush attached to write the names of stores, offices, and products she saw in the vicinity (she recalls being struck by how few people understood what she was doing without an explanation).47 Whereas in Showing Elle Gotovac paraded the obviously aspirational pages of Elle magazine, in My Daily Visual Communication and Visual Communication Delimar analyzed signs that were mass cultural but so commonplace they did not rise to the level of kitsch. And unlike in Suitcase, where a group walk through the city is animated by filmic archetypes, My Daily Visual Communication presents an ordinary walk in the city stripped of fantasy, almost like an anthropological examination of the artist’s own environment. Notably, though, city space in My Daily Visual Communication emerges subtly as a space of potential relationality between the artist and other Zagrebites. This sets the modality of the work clearly apart from that of Suitcase, which, as I established, juxtaposes the in-­t he-­k now collaboration of Gotovac and his friends with the clueless passerby who becomes a part of the “movie.” My Daily Visual Communication indexes the relational potential of city life via occasional gazes of other people walking in the city, who look directly at the artist and the camera. In one image, a woman with dark hair, an open coat, and a heavy bag stares directly at the camera, caught below a sign for a business that services elevators. In another, a hunched old woman clutching her purse looks through her glasses at the artist from the right-­hand side of the image. It is notable that of all the potential photos Delimar could have taken and selected for inclusion in the work, she chose ones where the passersby who meet her gaze are women. This conception of urban space as full of indeterminate relational potential is visible in other works created around the same time as My Daily Visual Communication. These include Photos Left in Public Space of 1981, a work in which Delimar left small photos of herself in spaces such as tram seats and café tables (see Figure 4.6); Reflect on Yourself Daily from the same year, which consisted in posting the title phrase in different spaces; and Self-­Communication, which involved a mirror displayed in the vitrine of a bookshop, from 1983. For Reflect on

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Figure 4.6. Vlasta Delimar, Photos Left in Public Space, 1981. Urban intervention. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

Yourself Daily, Delimar made posters of various sizes, some simply written in pen. She glued smaller ones in spaces like advertising boards, pillars, the windows of abandoned houses, and other empty spaces.48 She posted a large version on the facade of the Belgrade SKC in the same year. In Self-­Communication, Delimar positioned a large mirror with an elaborate gilded frame in the window of August Šenoa bookstore, with cards placed on the sill outside the window that people could take (see Figure 4.7). They read: “Breathe out of your mouth onto the window, check that you’re alive.” Delimar remembers that the audience enjoyed this work, because of its “very open” quality.49 These works foregrounded notions of selfhood and enabled participatory experiences for their passerby audiences. Such acts of participation range from the almost covert intimacy of picking up and keeping a photo of Delimar, to the immaterial and hard-­to-­pinpoint activity of “reflecting on yourself daily,” or perhaps momentarily imagining what it might be like to do so, to the overtly play-­like quality of Self-­Communication, which elicited extensive interaction from people

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Figure 4.7. Vlasta Delimar, Self-­Communication, 1983. Urban intervention. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

of all ages. While none of these artworks center on the body in the obvious way that Delimar’s partner performances with Jerman did or her solo public performances would from the mid-­1980s onward, they all bring up questions about the relationship between embodiment and identity. The works all demonstrate an embrace of chance, vulnerability, and indeterminate possibility, commitments that remained present in Delimar’s later performances in which she presented audiences with more intense and confrontational imagery that played more clearly on kitsch types.

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I end this section with some takeaways from this discussion of some of Gotovac’s and Delimar’s early photographic works and the latter’s early urban interventions. The two artists were interested in notions of legibility vis-­à-­v is urban space, both in terms of how people read the signs and signals embedded in the city and in terms of how fantasies and associations become palpable within urban space. The works just discussed raise questions about how people can perceive the same space differently and how people’s habitual practices of absorbing images and information from the city can be exploited to generate unusual experiences and unexpected encounters. Those questions are thrown more spectacularly into relief in each artist’s public performances of the 1980s. These public works, like This Was Me and Showing Elle, also drew on the artists’ different gendered embodiments, specifically on their experiences of existing as a woman and a man, respectively, in city space.

Delimar’s Public Acts of Kitsch Delimar’s and Gotovac’s public performances of the 1980s mobilized kitsch costuming and personas in ways that played off the notions of relationality and fantasy I discussed in the previous section but dialed them up to invite more intense affective responses from viewers. These interventions should be understood relative to the intersection between ideology and aesthetic dimensions of public space in late Yugoslavia and the ways that intersection shaped notions of collective subjectivity. Bojana Pejić, in her discussion of public works by Sanja Iveković, argues that the term public space itself implies a democratic public sphere, which would not and could not come into being under state socialism, despite the fact that Yugoslavia’s socialism “involved liberties of which the countries under Soviet surveillance could only dream.”50 In this chapter and throughout the book, I employ a milder definition of public space in that I use it simply for shared outdoor and other common spaces in which people might encounter various types of ideological messaging concerning the society in which they live. Within cities, public spaces tend to enable a density of interpersonal encounters and relational moments, from conversation to a flirtatious or frosty glance, to simply sharing the same space for a period of time. In public spaces, the intensity of encounter ebbs and flows, and we can experience the same spaces differently based on time and other factors (riding the bus on a clear summer night versus during a rainy morning rush hour, for example). The sensible forms that ideology takes in public space can consist in overt messaging, whether textual or performative, like the banners celebrating May 1 that adorned Yugoslav cities annually or the parade of Tito’s motorcade during which Iveković performed Triangle in 1979. In terms of the sculptural aesthetics of nationhood that provided context for artists’ public interventions of the 1970s, Pejić notes

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two important factors: the predominantly abstract, modernist memorials to the antifascist struggle, such as the Stone Flower monument at Jasenovac death camp designed by Bogdan Bogdanović and erected in 1966, and the “apolitical” female nudes that adorned modern socialist cities.51 Moreover, as Sanja Horvatinčić discusses, women were grossly underrepresented in Zagreb’s public spaces through a lack of monuments created by women, through the comparatively tiny number of streets named after historical female figures, and by the prevalence of sculptures of female types by male artists, an “originally sacral model that is used in the secular context as a symbol of female reproductive and didactic function in society.”52 A typical example of the latter category is Mother’s Game by Frano Kršinić (1897–­1982) created in 1962 and placed in Mirogoj Avenue in 1978 showing a woman rocking a child, their bodies joined in a U shape. Examples also remained in the city from the pre-­W WII period, such as Dora Krupićeva by Ivo Kerdić in Kamenita Street about August Šenoa’s eponymous fictional character, a woman who fell in love with a priest. Though the figure does not appear nude, her nipples and navel are clearly visible through her thin garment. By contrast, Zagreb’s urban landscape of the twentieth century was also shaped by several equestrian sculptures of male heroes, such as Saint Juraj Killing the Dragon, erected in 1908 in what was then Marshal Tito Square. Zagreb’s most famous equestrian monument, of Duke Jelačić, was installed in the central square in 1866 as the city’s first public sculpture but covered in 1947 because of its associations with Croatian nationalism and eventually removed, before being returned in 1990. Tumbas argues convincingly that women’s art production in Yugoslavia was shaped both by the country’s patriarchal culture that recruited women’s bodies to build a certain vision of nationhood and by the liberatory promise of its multi­ ethnic socialism. Tumbas analyzes how, in performance art of the 1970s and 1980s, women’s emphases on their own bodies offered different visions of the Yugoslav national body.53 This framing is salient for understanding women artists’ interventions in public space, where mainstream patriarchal ideas of nationhood found concrete manifestation in the kinds of monuments and performances of state I mentioned, and in the naming of streets and squares after august national figures who were predominantly male.54 In this context, the power of Delimar’s public performances rested on two key foundations: her willingness to make her own body into a public spectacle and her use of costuming in order to do so. In her public interventions and related gallery-­based performances of the early to mid-­1980s, kitsch enters via the dramatic ways she presents herself. But the works can also be seen as metacritiques on the political kitsch of the socialist public sphere and the kinds of conformism it demanded, especially from women. In what follows, I will establish some context for understanding the relationship between kitsch, costuming, and critical treatments of identity in global performance art of the 1970s and 1980s and also provide cultural context for grasping how audiences might have

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received such acts of costuming in Zagreb in the 1980s. I will then analyze key works by Delimar from this period, with special attention to the types of subjectivity they suggested. Gotovac’s performances of the 1980s, including the iconic Zagreb, I Love You! (1981) and his actions of selling newspapers dressed as figures such as Superman and the Grim Reaper, do not challenge patriarchal norms from the perspective of someone in a structural position of gender oppression in the way that Delimar’s performances do. But they still embody gender nonnormative forms of masculine subjectivity and do so in ways that play on late Yugoslavia’s particular relationship to Western consumer culture. They will be the focus of the following section. One of Delimar’s most striking public performances of the 1980s was Tied to a Tree of 1985 (see Plate 14), in which the artist stood tied to a tree in Flower Square, a square full of cafés and florists’ booths, near the city’s most important art house movie theater, the now-­shuttered Kino Europa. Delimar wore a low-­cut, tangerine-­ colored garment with much excess fabric, making it seem less like a conventional dress and more like an antiquated robe or sheath. It was also cut all the way up to her hip on one side, suggesting access to her genitals and sexual violence. Her eyes were covered in heavy black makeup, giving the impression both that she had been beaten and been crying. A fake bloody bruise adorned her lip. Her short hair was messy, and she had dirt on her hands and the exposed parts of her chest. As Tumbas points out, the work evoked images of beaten women and of witch burnings.55 The latter is especially resonant because of the premodern vibe of Delimar’s dress and the fact that the tree to which she was tied was of the highly upright, manicured variety typical of city squares in Europe, making it look actually less like a tree than like a thick post. Documentation images of the work show how important Delimar’s outfit is to the performance, in which she is largely physically static. Her attire renders the tree into a sort of stage set, amid the everyday activities of flower vendors, small children, and onlookers (many of whom, it appears from the documentation, were male). Within the global scope of experimental art practices of the 1970s and 1980s, costuming was a tactic that other performance artists exploited in order to insert a sense of unruliness into given institutional or public contexts, while also heightening viewers’ awareness of the performance event itself. In June 1972, Chicano performance collective Asco paraded down Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles dressed, as the title says, as a Walking Mural, with members Patssi Valdez, Willie Herrón, and Gronk costumed as a gothic Virgin of Guadalupe, a living mural with three expressive faces, and a Christmas tree. Asco coalesced from a high school clique called the Jetters, a group that Gronk describes as “the kid[s] with the fashion look. . . . Our credo was ‘If you can walk, wear it.’”56 The 1986 issue of High Performance magazine in which that interview with Asco appeared featured Valdez on its cover, wearing an extravagant ballgown and headdress that appear to be

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made out of paper. While Walking Mural was a street performance with high public visibility, Asco notably also wore special outfits while conducting clandestine actions, such as when members sported green bowler hats and red dinner jackets to graffiti their names on the doors of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art at 2 a.m. on an April night in 1972. On the other side of the United States, in 1980, Black artist Lorraine O’Grady carried out an action entitled Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1955 at the gallery Just Above Midtown/Downtown (JAM) in New York, in which she appeared in the guise of the title character wearing a dress made of 180 pairs of white gloves with a rhinestone tiara, carrying a white cat-­o’-­nine-­tails whip. JAM was one of the country’s only experimental galleries for Black art at the time, and O’Grady’s unannounced intervention was intended to challenge the timidity and conformism she felt it represented, through her act of manifesting a Black art that took greater risks. O’Grady performed other versions of the intervention, including in 1981 at the all-­white exhibition Persona at the New Museum, and also wrote a script that details Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s entrance into a gallery and the reaction that ensues. The script is notably very focused on her attire and the responses it provokes: “Photographers and video cameramen are having a field day. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, in her 180 pairs of white gloves, white cat-­o-­nine-­tails, and rhinestone and seed pearl crown, is very photogenic.”57 These uses of costuming were responses to site-­specific issues the artists sought to foreground in their contexts and their practices, including notions of queerness and Chicano youth culture in L.A. for Asco and institutional critique as it intersected with constructions of Blackness for O’Grady. At the same time, the deployments of costuming have some structurally similar effects, which share common ground with how Delimar and Gotovac used costumes in Zagreb. First, costumes function to signal that an action is performance even when it is unscheduled or uninvited, and as such enable simultaneous surprise and awareness on the part of the audience. This stands in contrast to performances in which artists exploited the public’s lack of awareness that a performance was taking place, as, for example, in covert actions Jiří Kovanda conducted in 1970s Prague, such as walking the wrong way down an escalator or standing in a busy pedestrian area with his arms outstretched in a Christlike position. While Kovanda’s low-­key approach was tailored to the repressive society of normalization in Czechoslova­ kia, in the more liberal contexts of the United States and Yugoslavia artists had greater leeway to make viewers self-­conscious of the act of viewing a public performance.58 In addition to fostering audience awareness, their costumes served to assert unruliness, suggesting unconventional modes of behavior and relationality. This is of course the classic function of costume as connected to the carnivalesque: to temporarily scramble hierarchies and to provide space for new roles and ways of relating. Many societies have socially acceptable periods of carnival, including Halloween in the United States and fašnik in Croatia, a spring festival

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involving masks, costume parades, and the nomination of a prince. Fašnik dates to the nineteenth century and was celebrated throughout the socialist period, but more intensely in smaller cities than in Zagreb, where it is typically considered to be mostly for children. Compared to the big American metropolises of New York and Los Angeles where O’Grady and Asco were living, Yugoslav culture of the 1970s and 1980s was more dominated by conventional modes of personal appearance. Subcultural forms of dress had been present in Yugoslavia since the appearance of hippies in the 1960s. But the vast majority of people who appeared in public not wearing mainstream civilian clothing would have donned a uniform or outfit indicative of organized group activity, such as military or police uniforms, school uniforms or uniforms from the Pioneers youth organization, or athletic clothing during the annual spectacle of the štafeta. This context made subcultures who expressed difference via their appearance especially visible; in chapter 1, I discussed the sloppy hippie dress and hair of the Group of Six Authors and the way that it set them apart from their audiences and the mainstream. Tumbas notes that Delimar’s use in collages of materials such as lace, tulle, and foil resonated with punk fashion of the 1980s, and Tied to a Tree also fits that trend: with similar attire though maybe slightly less gory makeup, Delimar looks like she could be dressed to attend a Clash concert.59 As such, the nonconformism her appearance indexed might have appeared to passersby to reference familiar forms of collective subcultural identity as opposed to just her own individuality. At the same time, in early 1980s Zagreb, to see an adult in public wearing what was clearly a costume would have been highly unusual and potentially unsettling. Delimar’s self-­presentation as a battered and violated person, and possibly one awaiting her death, would have intensified the jarring effect. Importantly, Tied to a Tree drew its potency from its evocation of clearly identifiable tropes of women’s victimization. Tumbas notes that in addition to a witch at the stake and a battered woman, the work could be seen to evoke Joan of Arc (especially with Delimar’s short hair and the necklace with a cross that she wore around her neck). Joan of Arc is a significant reference point because she was both a victim and a hero, making Delimar into a kind of temporary heroic sculpture in a city dominated by sculptural representations of men as heroes and women as anonymous mothers, as I discussed above. Tumbas reads the work as juxtaposing the public display of violence against women with the banalities of an everyday setting, thereby making clear how demonization and violence meet outspoken women.60 Indeed, the images of the performance are especially jarring because of the lack of visible reaction on viewers’ faces. In one image, a trio of three young people stand chatting jovially just a few feet from Delimar, while two older women in the background stare casually at the performer (and photographer). Arguably, constitutive of the possibilities for these kinds of casual viewing was the way that the performance presented disturbing themes but also fostered a sense of its own

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citational quality. In this sense, the clear resonance of Delimar’s self-­presentation with existing visual vocabularies concerning women’s victimization and martyrdom let audiences approach it not necessarily as witnesses to violence but rather as readers of a semantic text that offered certain affects and questions they could take or leave. In this sense, while I agree with Tumbas that the work foregrounds the prevalence of violence against women in everyday life, it also sets up a highly complex kind of viewership in which audiences cannot simply acknowledge that violence but rather are cast as part of a culture in which a violated woman is one more trope to be perused in an urban space already saturated with meaning. Kitsch is thus crucial to the work both in terms of the representationally overdetermined character that Delimar plays and also as a diagnosis of city dwellers’ viewership. The performance depicts the latter as structured by habitual consumption of all sorts of content that makes it difficult to truly come to terms with disruptive or provocative stimuli. Passersby are thus audience members but also recruited into the work as performers, a part of its parable of how difficult it can be to communicate, even when present together in the same space.61 Moreover, though the imagery that Tied to a Tree materialized was certainly violent, it was also aestheticized via the connection to punk fashion I mentioned above and via the sexiness of Delimar’s overall self-­presentation. Indeed, exploring the thin line between the decorative and the violent was a key function of Delimar’s art of the 1980s. Kitsch, as it concerns both certain aesthetic styles and also modes of viewership, is the plane on which the violent and the decorative interact in her art. Understanding this symbiosis helps shed light on the modality of the works of that decade that employ materials such as tulle, fake flowers, lace, and candles that signify beauty or adornment in a cliché, highly gendered way, which Delimar often used in combination with photographs of herself wholly or partially naked (sometimes accompanied by her partners) (see Figure 4.8). On the one hand, Delimar’s use of these materials in both performances and collage works signals an unapologetic embrace of her feminine identity, which she also foregrounded textually in works such as I Love Cock (1980). At the same time, her sumptuous and over-­t he-­top use of such materials also highlights the kitschified nature of extant frameworks for representing femininity and their insufficiency for addressing women’s subjective experiences.62 The contiguity of Delimar’s engagements with violence and decoration is clear from the variety of performances she conducted over the course of 1985, which included Tied to a Tree just discussed but also, for example, To My White Love (see Plate 15), performed at Zagreb’s SC Gallery. In the latter, Delimar placed a large circle of white lace in the gallery, across which she distributed white and yellow paper flowers ranging from the size of teacups to over a foot wide. Diaphanous curtains draped from the ceiling, and a painted ceramic figurine of a boy dressed in white stood among the flowers. A ballerina in a white bodice and tutu pushed a

Figure 4.8. Vlasta Delimar, Untitled, 1983. Photo-­assemblage. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

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young girl of around seven years old on a white wooden swing that hung from the ceiling. Mezzosoprano Ljerka Žilavec sat rocking in a white rocking chair while singing music by Tommaso Giordani and Franz Schubert. While all this took place, Delimar, also dressed in white lace, crawled along the floor on her knees, creating a track through a white strip of sand leading from the gallery wall to the lace circle. The whole event lasted thirty minutes and took place for an audience of around fifty people.63 Tied to a Tree and To My White Love initially seem hugely divergent in terms of the experiences they offered their audiences. But recognizing that for Delimar kitsch involved an interconnection between the violent and the decorative lets you focus on similarities in terms of how they approached aesthetics, viewership, and gender. First, both works foreground stasis or inhibited movement. This is the basic premise of Tied to a Tree, which presents Delimar as if she has been forcibly immobilized, in the middle of a pedestrian zone where other people wander freely. In To My White Love, Delimar’s movement on her knees is slow and seemingly hindered. Moreover, the scene is populated with other female figures who can move in only certain specific ways: the singer who rocks back and forth in the chair, the ballerina whose shoes and tutu showcase a given type of highly trained movement but also prevent others (it would be hard to run away in pointe shoes), and the little girl in a fancy dress that makes her look doll-­like, pushed back and forth on the swing. Whereas Tied to a Tree asks viewers to imagine a scene of Delimar’s freedom being violently arrested, To My White Love presents a buildup of decoration that immobilizes the performers in a cloying spectacle. Arguably, both works address processes of sensory and semantic accumulation and their implications for viewership. Tied to a Tree, as I argued above, thematizes the difficulty of processing violent content when it is encountered in an urban environment already saturated with messaging. And To My White Love overloads the viewer with “aesthetic” objects that engulf its female performers, creating a sense of weight bearing down on them and stunting relationality. Each performance approaches accumulation differently depending on its context: Tied to a Tree presents a single striking image in a busy, full public space, where To My White Love fills up the space of the white-­ walled gallery with an excess of decoration. It can be tempting to read Delimar’s use of her own naked body in performance as breaking through this kind of buildup of kitschified representation to offer something fresh and disruptive. Miško Šuvaković argues that Delimar presents a “rough, genital body,” which is central to the artist’s staging of a confrontation between the politics of enjoyment and the politics of emancipation in her work (the latter taken to mean both feminist emancipation and the rhetorics of emancipation pertaining to socialist Yugoslavia and postsocialist Croatia).64 Suzana Marjanić agrees with Šuvaković about the artist’s use of her body, noting that Delimar’s “first choice . . . in relation to both performance art and actions is her own

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natural body, a body that has not been (re)designed to suit commercial beauty.” 65 While the nonidealized nature of Delimar’s body is certainly important to the performances, especially in her later works as she begins to age, Marina Gržinić is also onto something when she describes the artist’s nudity as “an expected ‘outfit’ when dealing with Delimar’s work.” 66 Grižinić’s formulation succinctly indicates how Delimar’s nudity not only reveals the specificity of her own body but also serves as a kind of costume or masquerade, a set of significations into which she steps when removing her clothes. Delimar’s early solo performance Transformation of Personality (1981) at the SC Gallery in Zagreb mentioned above has a compelling reversibility in terms of demonstrating these two valences of nudity. In this work, Delimar appeared on a simple catwalk first in her normal street clothes and then in various other outfits and wigs, ranging from sporty sweats to a bathing suit with heels, a long gauzelike cloak, and a giant hat. The last time that she walked out, she was naked. The performance might suggest a reading of that final nudity as one of jettisoning all the guises in which she had just presented herself, but it also proposes that viewers read the artist’s nudity as a kind of metaoutfit, or one more in an endless series of presentational possibilities. Delimar’s multilayered treatment of nudity was central to the performance To Martek and Meret Oppenheim (see Plate 16), one of several performances of the 1980s onward that were dedicated to a partner, friend, or historical figure. Delimar performed To Martek and Meret Oppenheim in three locations: at Galerija Koprivnica in the small city of Koprivnica in eastern Croatia in 1987, at Galerija PM in Zagreb in 1989, and at Fort Bokar in Dubrovnik in 1990. This repetition marks the piece as a pivot from Delimar’s earlier practice of enacting performances only once, to her work of the 1990s onward in which she often reperformed works in different sites and employed elements of reenactment, often in homage to or dialogue with other artists. For To Martek and Meret Oppenheim, Delimar lay on a table that had been draped with a black cloth, in a static spectacle that resonates with the inhibition of movement I discussed in Tied to a Tree and To My White Love. Across the artist’s naked body were draped pieces of meat, specifically cold cuts, sausages, and small, whole fish. The meat in the work referenced Oppenheim’s 1959 work Spring Feast, in which she served a banquet off the body of a naked woman who lay on a long table. Closer to home, it also invoked a 1985 action that Vlado Martek executed in Rijeka in 1985, in which he distributed flyers saying “Artists—­Eat Meat So You Can Better Hate the State.” The year 1985 was also when Delimar and Martek began a romantic relationship; they had a child together in 1988 and Martek appeared in several of Delimar’s photographic works of the 1980s and 1990s.67 Delimar’s double-­dedication of the work has several implications for its meaning. On the one hand, it marks an affinity with Oppenheim in a way that signals a feminist consciousness of women’s marginalization as artists within major modernist art movements and asserts solidarity across generations. On the other hand,

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by making the “meat” in Martek’s sarcastic statement into real meat, Delimar seems to offer a strikingly direct dig at the flippancy of his comment and the male privilege it takes for granted. Namely, in this performance she does not eat meat but rather clothes herself with it. Whereas Oppenheim’s works had an uncanny, subtly unsettling aspect, To Martek and Meret Oppenheim has a strong dimension of abjection through the way in which the pieces of meat are applied to Delimar’s flesh like clothing. At a sensory level, the work strongly evokes damp, uncomfortable contact between living and dead flesh, while also attributing to the artist’s body a meat-­like quality, exacerbated by her pose of lying passively exposed to the objectifying gaze of audience members. Delimar’s use of her own body in this sensorily intense spectacle brought attention to women’s bodily vulnerability in times of war. As Tumbas demonstrates, a rejection of the glorification of women as war heroes was a concern in Delimar’s practice from the early 1980s, as evidenced in the collage Women Is Not a Warrior of 1982, which placed photographic images of the artist’s vulva pierced with a long needle against a backdrop of black fabric.68 During the early 1990s she created self-­ portraits, such as Injustices (1992), that explicitly focused on the horrors of rape but also on the position of being a witness to war atrocities (see Figure 4.9). Her performances of the 1990s in collaboration with Milan Bandić continued to explore these themes, as in Conversation with a Warrior, or The Woman Has Disappeared of 2001 (a work to which I return in the book’s conclusion). Though To Martek and Meret Oppenheim was created before the beginning of the war in the Balkans, it has an eerie resonance with those events and with the rendering of ordinary citizens as “dead meat” in genocidal killings. Notably, the three performances of the work also had subtle differences: the first kept the meat largely on top of the artist’s body, while the second, in Zagreb, covered her more thoroughly down the sides of her limbs and onto the table, and the third, in Dubrovnik (a historically important site in terms of Croatian nationalist identity), employed the most meat of all, as if it had started to melt or migrate off the body and create an environment on the table around the artist. The cuts of meat in this performance are a provocative installment in Delimar’s practice of costuming and in the history of artists’ use of costumes in performance in the late twentieth century more broadly. The performance literally presents different layers of living and dead flesh, fusing the “outfit” of Delimar’s nudity into an amalgam of other fleshy surfaces. The meat drapes and partially conceals her body, but as literal pieces of other sentient bodies it also troubles her body’s integrity, stressing the way that sexist objectification and violence might reduce the female body to “meat.” The work also carries the vaguely troubling suggestion that Delimar is a human platter, off whom audience members might choose to eat a piece of meat. In her performances analyzed here, as well as in the works by O’Grady and Asco discussed above, costumes generate striking forms of public

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Figure 4.9. Vlasta Delimar, Injustices, 1992. Photo-­assemblage. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

address that may not directly demand participatory interaction but nevertheless open the possibility of various forms of nonnormative social interaction between the artists and their audiences, who might respond in enthusiastic, explosive, or affronted ways to the performances. They are one tool Delimar used to craft performances in which desire was constantly at issue, as she presented her body in enticing and disconcerting ways that posed questions about both her own desire and the viewer’s. In the same decade, Gotovac used costuming in his work in ways that were striking but also habitual, weaving themselves into the urban fabric as a routinized part of city life.

Gotovac’s Kitsch Personas Gotovac’s public performances of the 1980s onward had a distinctly joyful dimension. They were celebrations of kitsch culture and fundamentally also of Zagreb itself, with which Gotovac had a passionately affectionate relationship. In a 1979 text entitled “Total Portrait of the City of Zagreb,” Gotovac describes the city as a living being with “its own pulse, its own breath, its own nerves.” 69 He imagines it

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persisting into the twenty-­first and twenty-­second centuries, outliving the artist himself and eventually absorbing him and all its other previous inhabitants into the fabric of its being. Gotovac describes his desire to create a “total documentary film,” a “film without fiction,” that would film the city “like a jazz pianist spends hours plunking away at the keys of a piano . . . like a spider spins its web.” These descriptions are compelling not only for the way they posit a connection between individual human bodies and the corporeality of the city but also because of how they present Gotovac’s own agency as an artist through various analogies. The latter way of imagining his own activity as an artist parallels the way in which he presented himself in performance in numerous guises, using costumes to inhabit roles that enabled different kinds of intervention in the urban fabric. I read his performance personas, in this respect, not only as masquerades but as each a manifestation of a distinct dimension of the artist’s own emotions and character. Zora Cazi, Gotovac’s (eventual) ex-­w ife, described the artist after his death as “a public person in the complete sense of the term, an artist 24 hours a day who was probably just born like that.”70 Martek expressed a similar sentiment in his text on Gotovac, calling Gotovac a “100% artist” (as opposed to Martek’s own habitual self-­identification as a “20% artist”).71 Gotovac’s total immersion in art manifested not in a homogeneous or necessarily consistent public persona but rather in a love of presenting himself via different guises or lenses that addressed common themes but also genuinely enabled him to be different people in public space. Gotovac’s performances of the 1980s also drew heavily on kitsch types familiar to many people via movies and comics. But they combined kitsch’s powerful legibility with other types of meaning-­making that were not so transparent, such as juxtaposition of different elements, references that would not have been clear to most onlookers, and intentional alteration or debasement of Western kitsch icons. Gotovac’s most iconic public performance was the 1981 action Lying Naked on the Asphalt, Kissing the Asphalt (Zagreb, I Love You!), Homage to Howard Hawks’ Hatari! (1962). Often referred to simply as Zagreb, I Love You!, it is now part of the city’s self-­conceived legend to the extent that in 2013, a set of bronze footprints were set into the sidewalk in Ilica Street to commemorate the artwork. On November 13, 1981, Gotovac walked naked from number 8 Ilica east toward the Square of the Republic, where he prostrated himself on the pavement and kissed it, shouting, “Zagreb, I love you!!!” (“Zagreb, volim te!!!”) (see Figure 4.10). The performance began at noon and ended seven minutes later, when he was stopped by the police and escorted away for questioning (see Figure 4.11). It was in some respects similar to an action that took place in Belgrade in 1971 during the filming of Lazar Stojanović’s Plastic Jesus. Gotovac, who in that film plays a protagonist named Tom with several characteristics drawn from his own life, emerged from a car and ran a short distance down the street naked yelling, “I’m innocent!”

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Figure 4.10. Tomislav Gotovac, Lying Naked on the Asphalt, Kissing the Asphalt (Zagreb, I Love You!), Homage to Howard Hawks’ Hatari! (1962), 1981. Action. Courtesy of Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb; photograph by Ivan Posavec.

Documentation of that action indicates that, unlike in the 1981 performance, Gotovac really ran, eventually hopping into the safety of another parked car, as crowds of people stared after him.72 The scene was one of those extracted by the state during the censorship of the film, which ultimately also led to the director’s imprisonment for a year and to Gotovac being banned from graduating film school.73 Janevski claims that this nude sprint made Gotovac the country’s first-­ ever streaker.74 Andrej Mirčev argues that in Zagreb, I Love You!, Gotovac’s nudity established a radical tension between his apparently “natural/authentic” body and the bodies of passersby.75 Mirčev sees the work as posing questions about the relationship between the naked body and the public sphere and as broadly interrogating what kind of social experience the body can generate.76 Notably, Yugoslavia had a relatively liberal attitude toward nudity, with several nudist beaches that were illegal in neighboring Italy and, starting in the late 1960s, the wide availability of erotic magazines. However, for a man to appear naked in public city space was incredibly taboo, and Gotovac’s nudity would have been broadly shocking, not least

Figure 4.11. Tomislav Gotovac, Lying Naked on the Asphalt, Kissing the Asphalt (Zagreb, I Love You!), Homage to Howard Hawks’ Hatari! (1962), 1981. Action. Courtesy of Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb; photograph by Mio Vesović.

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because of how it highlighted the fact that everyone else on the street was naked underneath their clothes. Gotovac made this goal explicit in a 1997 interview with Branka Stipančić, where he asserted: “When one exposes his nakedness, it’s like saying to others: why do you have your clothes on? Take off your clothes and then we can compare.”77 Gotovac thus saw his nudity as establishing a challenge or contest with onlookers. This challenge was not simply a theoretical tenet of the action but also a pragmatic one, as Gotovac typically designed his public performances to last until the intervention of a third party, be it the police or someone else.78 The photographs of the work show that that it established plenty of relational potential: Gotovac is surrounded by curious crowds as people pass through busy noontime Ilica and Square of the Republic. In one image, they press almost close enough to touch him as he is led away by a police officer. At the same time as the performance had an affectively potent dimension that would have been striking to almost any onlooker, it also encompassed deep layers of reference that could only be accessed through conversation with Gotovac or in retrospect through writing surrounding the work. The work’s dedication to Hawks and nod to Hatari! opens a rich mine of reference that underpins the performance’s goals and its treatment of gender in important ways. Gotovac conceived the performance as a reenactment of the opening scene of the film, in which a group of hunters in two trucks track a black rhinoceros across a grassy plane, attempting to capture it and sell it to a zoo. It ultimately eludes their capture, and the film unfolds as a series of interpersonal and relationship dramas that then culminate in the capture of a different rhino at the end of the film. Gotovac explained to Stipančić how the various animals that appear in the film, including monkeys and a baby elephant, all symbolize different emotions, with the rhino standing for “a mature love passion” and “the rejection of the existence of any obstacle.”79 This association connects both to Gotovac’s love for Zagreb, which he loudly declared during the performance, and to the way in which the work represented the role of the artist as tenacious and unafraid to confront obstacles.80 Zagreb, I Love You! clearly depended for its bold execution on Gotovac’s male privilege. His gender and his tall, large stature were important for his safety in potential encounters with both onlookers and authorities as he moved through the street. Denegri refers to the specificity of Gotovac’s body, with his exceptionally large build and “striking” face, as a “ready-­made” within his performances, and indeed, those specificities shaped the meanings we can attribute to the works and their reception in their moment.81 By contrast, Delimar, a petite woman, conducted all her nude performances of the decade in the more controlled spaces of galleries or occasionally in semisecluded areas with friends.82 At the same time, the Hatari! scene that the performance referenced brought with it a complex treatment of gender that would have been present in the artist’s own associations, though not the experiences of onlookers.83 In the opening chase scene,

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a character from the all-­male group of hunters comments that the rhino “is a mean one,” while another quips, “This one’s got to be a female, she can’t make up her mind which way to go!” Gotovac said to Stipančić that for the performance he shaved his hair and face (though not the rest of his body) so that his “entire habitus recalled that fucked rhino.”84 In this sense, his nudity reveals his male-­ signifying body but is also secretly a kind of costume as a female rhino, whose sex in Hatari! is attributed within a patriarchal social context that revolves around stereotyped gender roles (stereotypes that are in ample evidence throughout the film). This association reveals strong parallels between this performance and Showing Elle, as both involve Gotovac publicly showcasing a gendered identity that is both strongly male but also inflected by a partial masquerade in a feminine role. In these works, the feminine enters Gotovac’s work via an appropriated template drawn from kitsch culture that may be spoofed, distorted, or even concealed in the performance itself. The artist thus presents himself under a valence of femininity but clearly retains his ability to shed it once the performance concludes. That fleeting or temporary nature is key to both works. Both Zagreb, I Love You! and Showing Elle are also centrally concerned with questions of pleasure as it comes into being between the artist’s exhibitionism and the audience’s interest in the public spectacle of his body. While Zagreb, I Love You! was characterized by a stark gulf between the experience it offered passerby audiences and the popular culture references that gave it meaning for the artist, Gotovac performed other actions in the early 1980s that made kitsch icons into the basis of potential interactions with viewers. Between 1981 and 1984, Gotovac conducted a weekly performance of selling student newspapers such as Polet and Studentski list on the central Square of the Republic. Over the course of 1984, he would do this wearing a different costume each week. Costumes included a Santa Claus outfit, a chimney sweep with ladder, a homemade Superman suit, a skull mask and gray business suit (see Figure 4.12), bandages on various parts of his body, including over his entire face, that made him look like a mummy but also like the victim of some horrible accident, and a costume of a communist shock worker holding a cartoonish hammer and sickle. These performances are some of the clearest examples of what Darko Šimičić describes as Gotovac’s conscious use of mass media to establish his status as an uncompromising artist.85 The activity of selling newspapers dressed in costume broke down the opposition between the spectacular and the everyday because Gotovac performed an unremarkable activity dressed in flamboyant costumes. As Gotovac’s predictable performance schedule intersected with the routines of people going about their regular lives in the city, the actions would ultimately have fostered an audience of repeat passersby familiar with him and his activity. Such viewers would be able to assess his respective actions and disguises relative to each other like a metaperformance, instead of viewing just one in isolation. Specifically, seeing Gotovac repeatedly in the same

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Figure 4.12. Tomislav Gotovac, Read Polet, 1984. Action on the Square of the Republic, Zagreb. Courtesy of Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb.

space would stress for regular passersby the changeability of his outfits, emphasizing the artist’s agency in putting on and taking off any given guise. Mirčev astutely remarks that in these 1984 performances, Gotovac’s costumes might be seen as a statement about the theatricality of the public sphere.86 The performances gravitated toward questions of work, inviting audiences to bear witness to “a spontaneous and contingent street theatre of fictionalized labor.”87 That focus on labor was arguably both conceptual and personal. Slobodan Šijan

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describes how, throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Gotovac experienced major ambivalence surrounding his own status as an internationally recognized artist who enjoyed middle-­class comfort and the ability to make work thanks to his wife’s financial resources but was not able to earn a living based on his art or to attract substantial institutional support in his hometown.88 Indeed, the first big show of Gotovac’s work was held in 1986 at DDT Gallery in Zagreb, fully three decades after he initially started making art and long after much younger artists, such as Sanja Iveković and Dalibor Martinis, had received shows at the more prominent City Gallery of Contemporary Art. That show remained open for only three days before being closed due to its inclusion of photographs of Gotovac naked, and he would not have another major exhibition until two years later when he showed a body of collages. Considering that context, you might read these performances as a manifestation of Gotovac’s sense that his art had a real home only in the street. Because he really was selling newspapers, but doing so in costume, his labor was real but also performed, and comical but also melancholy. The dual nature of labor as both real and performed was also visible in other works of the period, such as the 1981 Cleaning Public Spaces, where Gotovac went around the city wearing an apron with a dustpan and small broom attached to it, sweeping up garbage from the streets (see Figure 4.13). Labor was, of course, a central tenet of the Yugoslav socialist state, but it was simultaneously a fraught topic in the 1980s, when the country was suffering under huge foreign debt and inflation and has lost its charismatic leader Tito and chief economist Edvard Kardelj back-­to-­back in 1980 and 1981. Moreover, as Branislav Jakovljević convincingly argues, Yugoslavia had begun its displacement of the true primacy of the working subject following the student protests of 1968, ultimately developing a “managerial discourse” that paralleled that of the neoliberal capitalism that arose in Western countries in the same period.89 At the same time, Jakovljević shows, Yugoslavia’s ideology remained centered on a representational economy of labor in which a range of performances—­from mass spectacle to experimental art to the maneuvering of political leaders—­played a crucial role. In chapter 2, I discussed how notions of labor played out in Vlado Martek’s and Mladen Stilinović’s works with language in the 1970s and 1980s. That chapter drew out the material details of those works and the implications of those details for a critique of ideology. Similarly, the material choices Gotovac made in crafting costumes had huge consequences for how his masquerades read relative to the representational economy of labor. Gotovac’s costumes appeared always at a remove from the models they evoked, both through their homemade quality and through pastiche of unexpected elements onto existing characters. That homemade quality is evident especially in Gotovac’s Superman costume, which involved what was obviously a pair of men’s underwear worn over leggings. Gotovac also wore a wide-­

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Figure 4.13. Tomislav Gotovac, Cleaning Public Spaces, 1981. Action in central Zagreb. Courtesy of Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb.

necked shirt with the iconic S logo sewn onto the front and a cape that bunched up around his neck in a way that resembled drapery as much as a hero’s outfit. A 1984 photo of Gotovac in the costume shows his soft belly squishing gently over the belt attached to the underwear, a clear contrast to Superman’s ripped abs. Gotovac is bald and beardless and has his left arm raised to the sky in a gesture that mimics Superman getting ready to fly (see Figure 4.14). This image reflects Gotovac’s interest dating back to Showing Elle in juxtaposing the specificity of his own imperfect body with an idealized image, and, moreover, it shares with that work a focus on the complexities of reception. The photo shows Gotovac posed in front of a brutalist apartment block of the kind globally associated with socialist architecture. That setting contextualizes Gotovac as a specifically socialist Superman and creates an interesting contrast to Delimar’s This Was Me in 1980 When Comrade Tito Died. Both works show rigid bodily postures and rework or problematize them in different ways. While Delimar’s work shows subtle defiance and imperfect standing at attention, Gotovac points his arm and face toward the sky while

Figure 4.14. Tomislav Gotovac, Superman, 1984. Performance, Zagreb. Courtesy of Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb.

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making it obvious he will never fly, embodying an act of striving toward an un­ attainable goal. Notably, the homemade quality of his costume also foregrounds the performance as an act of reception, of fandom sprung from desire to emulate a popular model but that will never reproduce it perfectly. That receptive quality subtly stresses that Gotovac’s remove from Superman is bodily but also geopolitical, as Superman is such an icon of American popular culture. But Gotovac also transplants Superman into a socialist setting and thereby asserts ownership over the figure from a peripheral perspective. Gotovac once described himself as an American artist working in Zagreb, itself a performative rejection of the framing of small countries as “local” in a global art context but also an assertion of global ownership of American culture by someone who would not travel to the United States until he was in his sixties.90 He is Superman but also clearly not, both because of his own physicality and because of his agency, as an artist, in redirecting a kitsch icon into a network of approximations and layered references. Gotovac also wore a similar Superman costume for the event of November 9, 1984, in PM Gallery in which he showed a series of collages and “proclaimed” the beginning of Paranoia View Art (see Figure 4.15). The latter was effectively an ongoing framework elaborated over the late 1980s and early 1990s in which Gotovac conducted performances and amassed documentation and found imagery, with references including American pop culture, totalitarianism, Tito, broader Yugoslav socialism, concentration camp imagery, and BDSM. Within this framework Gotovac used “paranoia” as a concept for interrogating the nature of subjective experience and its fundamental destabilization of the boundary between lie and truth.91 Mobilized in this context, Superman becomes a figure not only of heroism but also of delusion, of an unfounded assertion of power that has the effect of calling into question the stability of subjecthood and history. In his costumes of this period, Gotovac often incorporated references to art as a kind of advertisement or branding. Examples include an armband that spelled ART vertically, with the A in a circle and positioned as the first letter of Anarchy, worn during his performance as a Charlie Chaplin-­esque chimney sweep. With its dual evocation of Chaplin and use of an armband to project a message in a way that is reminiscent of fascism, the costume calls to mind both the history of Nazism and its American representation in Chaplin’s 1940 film The Great Dictator. A circle around the A in the ART armband moreover recalled the circle around the C in the international symbol for copyright. Note that during these performances, Gotovac was selling newspapers such as Polet and Studentski list, a number of which included documentation of his own earlier art and also works that he created especially for those publications. Mirčev argues that the newspapers thus archived and mediated the artist’s own prior performances.92 In addition, Gotovac used the logos of the magazines as part of his costumes and props, for instance wearing a badge that read “Polet” on his chest while dressed as a socialist shock

Figure 4.15. Tomislav Gotovac, Paranoia View Art, 1984. Exhibition and action in PM Gallery, Zagreb. Courtesy of Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb.

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worker, pushing a cart with the same logo and the phrase “More flowers, less garbage” while dressed as a street cleaner, and holding a handwritten sign that read “Don’t smile, scream! Read Polet” in Cyrillic, while dressed in a Grim Reaper mask and business suit. These details present Gotovac’s activity as branded by the publications he sells. Gotovac’s performance of the artist as an advertiser for another entity, but also as someone who promotes his own brand of art practice, resonates with the work of other conceptualists who, from the 1960s onward, sought to address art’s relationship to the market by leveling it with corporate marketing or promotional material but in ironic and highly self-­reflexive ways. Rosalind Krauss describes how Marcel Broodthaers created works that took on the form of advertising or promotion of conceptual art itself, thereby critiquing conceptualism’s claim that its immateriality let it break free from the market by stressing how “the re­ doubling of art as theory delivers art . . . to exactly those sites whose function is promotion, and does so without what might be called a critical remainder.”93 In the same period, Canadian artists Ingrid and Iain Baxter established themselves as N.E. Thing Co., an entity that produced documentation, lists, and promotional materials that revolved around the existential dissolve of art into life. But Gotovac’s greatest common ground in terms of his branding of his own work may lie with another Canadian group, General Idea, which was active from 1968 to 1994 and combined a rigorously conceptual approach with a deep love of kitsch. General Idea framed themselves as producers of art discourse who manipulated the market and gallery systems while also being fully inside them and populated their practice with kitsch characters such as poodles, the Joker, and smiling babies recast to address both the condition of art as media-­channeled information and queer sexuality in the time of AIDS.94 Gotovac’s performance of selling news­ papers resonates in particular with General Idea’s FILE Magazine, a parody on LIFE Magazine, which included manifestos, correspondence, and documentation of the group’s projects. Gotovac’s and General Idea’s practices are distinct from those of Broodthaers and N.E. Thing Co. in that the former mix their interrogation of art’s ontology with a deep love of affects born of popular culture and specifically of film and television. They embrace a position of being overimplicated with the kitsch sources they cite and index their creators’ love of those sources alongside relentless deconstruction of them. The examples I have discussed here demonstrate how Gotovac’s performances of the 1980s engaged with kitsch to operate on two distinct levels: as spectacles legible in certain affectively potent ways to nonspecialist viewers in public spaces and as layered texts that were deeply referential to histories of film and popular culture. Across these works, Gotovac used the “found” or inherent quality of his own physique to push the boundaries of masquerade, on the one hand, and, on the other, to employ performance as an assertion of that which is already there,

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immanent to reality, and resistant to representation. His performances had dimensions of both vulnerability and defiance that stemmed from his acts of foregrounding his own strangeness and from their assertion of the desire to be seen, in all his specificity, in public.

Postsocialist Affects That desire to be seen as a specific individual is palpable in Delimar’s performance as well, shaping the texture of both artists’ oeuvres through the ways they juxtapose it against gendered types. Delimar’s and Gotovac’s acts of foregrounding their own specificity gained additional depth and meaning as they aged. I have discussed what Denegri describes as the “ready-­made” quality of Gotovac’s use of his own appearance in Showing Elle and Zagreb, I Love You! The work with which I began the chapter, Two Men and One Woman, draws its impact from the way that it displays the artists’ soft, aging, imperfect bodies to viewers but does so with a kind of calm neutrality that bespeaks intense comfort with those bodies. In this performance, one of Gotovac’s last before his death in 2010, he looks like a naked Santa Claus, with a big belly, white beard, and soft little button of a penis. Delimar’s outfit, in addition, worked to both showcase and denaturalize her nudity, as she sported black lipstick with a black brimmed hat, shoes, and jacket, which make her appear simultaneously naked and dressed up. Together, she, Gotovac, and Božić appeared in this work less like stereotypes of cutting-­edge performance artists than a trio of aging friends who had strolled off a nudist beach and onto the street. The way in which Delimar and Gotovac ask questions about themselves as erotic beings but also foreground the unidealized nature of their bodies distinguishes their work from that of their peers in the New Art Practice. Among their male associates in the Group of Six Authors, two main approaches to the body are evident. First, Željko Jerman, Sven Stilinović, and Fedor Vučemilović all demonstrated notable interest in their own youthful beauty—­for example, in Jerman’s My Year, 1977, which I discussed in chapter 3; in Stilinović’s Untitled (Bound Figure) of 1980, in which he appears shirtless with tape on his mouth and with his arms, legs, and chest tied in a pose that seems both submissive and defiant; or in Vučemilović’s lightly eroticized self-­portraiture of the 1970s. Notably, Jerman’s, Stilinović’s, and Vučemilović’s respective interests in picturing their own bodies in their work waned as they aged. By contrast to their focus on their own beauty, Mladen Stilinović displayed his body in a markedly de-­eroticized way, using an intensely deadpan facial expression and slumped posture to deflect desire from it, even in works such as Conversation with Freud: The Artist as His Own Complex (1982–­95), which includes images of multiple versions of the art-

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ist engaged in sexual activity with himself. In the Belgrade circle of the New Art Practice, Marina Abramović’s striking beauty arguably provided a foil that shaped the reception of her intense performances. However, her work is fundamentally different from Delimar’s and Gotovac’s in the sense that Abramović took careful steps from the 1990s onward to disguise the aging and imperfections of her body from public view, creating a body that acts like a preternatural archive of its own past youthfulness. The willingness of Delimar and Gotovac to make public the imperfections of their aging bodies leaves an intriguing legacy in terms of the intersection between nationalism and desire in the postsocialist period. Above, I discussed Tumbas’s argument that women artists offered new articulations of the Yugoslav national body and its prescribed roles for women, roles that were evident in the urban fabric itself through the kinds of sculptures that Pejić discusses. From the 1990s onward, Delimar and Gotovac both showcased bodies that had clearly been through a lot—­ aging, childbirth, illness—­while also still positioning those bodies as sites for the projection of fantasies of both political and aesthetic kitsch, from Delimar’s character in Conversation with a Warrior, or The Woman Has Disappeared of 1999–­2000, which I discuss in the book’s conclusion, to Gotovac’s reenactment of the poses of a female porn actor in photos taken by his wife in Foxy Mister (2002). In light of Tumbas’s statement about women artists resignifying the national body, Gotovac’s many acts of asserting a place for personal freedom and his own imperfect, taboo body in public space stand in interesting tension for me with the polarizing nationalism of some of his writings and works of the early 1990s. For example, for an exhibition and catalog titled For the Defense and Renewal of Croatia from 1991, when Zagreb suffered bombing by the Yugoslav army following Croatia’s declaration of independence, Gotovac contributed a modified version of his 1977 text work “I’ve Fucking Had It” (“Pun mi je kurac”) changed to read “I’ve Fucking Had It with Commies and Serb Nationalists” (“Pun mi je kurac komunarda i Srbenda”).95 Gotovac’s interest in paranoia and undermining straightforward truth statements with an emphasis on subjectivity and politics provides context for this work. But at the same time this language, in this moment, had a different status than some of the other taboo subject matter, such as porn and swearing, to which he was drawn. While Gotovac’s opposition to authority and his nonconformist attitude set him far apart from the ethos of Croatia’s rising nationalists of the time, this piece seems less like a creative reworking of powerful mass affects than like an amplification of them, especially given its appearance in a show with an overtly nationalist framing. Its language of nationalist polarization seems to neglect the incisive reflection on Gotovac’s own and his audiences’ desire that is the great strength of much of his work. Feeling overflows, leaving little room for viewers to position themselves in dynamic or imaginative ways relative to the artwork.

Figure 4.16. Vlasta Delimar, Product of Croatia, 2007. Photograph. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

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Gotovac eventually shifted away from such nationalist rhetoric. Artworks produced in the last decade of his life use the vulnerability and specificity of his own body to suggest an inclusive public sphere and forms of subjectivity that do not align easily with the nation, such as Two Men and One Woman with which I began the chapter. A work Delimar made in 2007, in which he participated, explicitly stages artists’ bodies relative to the construct of nationhood in ways that suggest the pluralism of how one might be interpellated by the nation. This series, Product of Croatia, shows images of Delimar and her friends at different ages, from a 1980s shot with Željko Jerman (who had died shortly before the work was made) to recent images. All are then labeled with the words hrvatski proizvod. Two of the images feature Gotovac, including one of him with his arm around Delimar’s waist, sitting in a chair in what looks like a banquet hall, beneath a crucifix on the wall. Another shows them together in a Zagreb park next to a modernist statue. She is naked with a hat, shoes, and jacket, and he wears a black sweater, dog tags, and sandals with big, white, baggy underwear pulled down to his knees. The title, Product of Croatia, labels these artists and their works as an export for the post­ socialist era, while also stating simply that they are in fact products of their environment. If these bodies are the nation, what kind of nation do they signify? They are certainly not bodies that can be remade into national heroes or that can or want to shed their particular histories. Instead, they offer an inclusive embrace of imperfection and unstable corporeality, “products of Croatia” that actively reject conformity to its normative gendered and religious modes of belonging. The modes of relationality that might proliferate in the public spaces of such a nation appear open-­ended, full of humor, desire, and possibility.

Conclusion Notes for the (Postsocialist) Present

In 2015, a comedic drama entitled Black-­and-­W hite World (Crno-­bijeli svijet) premiered on Croatian TV and ran for four seasons over six years, ending in 2021. The show’s subject matter is a mundane family drama, with stories following the children and adults in two intertwined families as they navigate work, adolescence, social life, and relationships. What distinguishes it is its setting: Zagreb from just before New Year’s 1980 into the early years of that decade, rendered in gorgeous period detail with high production values and a soundtrack of nostalgic music. The show’s title is taken from a 1980 song by the group Prljavo kazalište, which formed in 1977 in Zagreb and was Yugoslavia’s most famous homegrown punk band. But in addition to being a period reference, Black-­and-­W hite World is of course also a description of how present-­day viewers are invited to see the late seventies and early eighties through the lens of the show: as the object of pleasurable nostalgia, the last period of relative normalcy in a since-­eclipsed socialist world. Through presenting a world cast as exotically nostalgic and yet also closely proximate to the present, Black-­and-­W hite World lets viewers ask how distant the recent past really is. This is a question that historians of contemporary art ask constantly as we reflect on how to situate the history of the late twentieth century relative to the present condition of global contemporary art. Terry Smith argues that conceptualism has a special place in such deliberations. Smith writes that following its heyday around 1970, conceptualism both became canonized as a movement and “spread to become a tendency, a resonance within art practice that is nearly ubiquitous.”1 If conceptualism constitutes an enabling condition of global contemporary art broadly writ, then understanding the pathways of its evolution from “movement” to “tendency” in local art histories from around the world is key to grasping the nature of art’s contemporaneity. The history I have presented in this book sits at exactly this place between conceptualism proper and what comes after it, a fact reflected in the labeling of the Group of Six Authors and their cohort as “postconceptual” that often emerges in regional scholarship. In the case of Zagreb’s 1970s and early 1980s, one of the most salient things to come from this in-­between moment is an alternative history for the emergence of relational art that does not conform to the major narratives of those practices established 219

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in Western scholarship. These artists were too disillusioned to see art as fostering a “dialogical” ethics as articulated by Grant Kester or as undertaking the concrete social action key to Pablo Helguera’s theorization of “socially engaged art,” or even in the kind of avowal of structural interdependency and labor discussed by Shannon Jackson.2 And while the practices reflect Claire Bishop’s emphasis on self-­aware continuity with avant-­garde forms as opposed to Nicolas Bourriaud’s theorization of a definitive break between relational art and that older history, the art also complicates Bishop’s narrative.3 Namely, it provides a counterexample to her argument that artists under socialism turned toward audiences of trusted friends and colleagues for their participatory practices and created work that dissolved art into life. It combines moments of provocative challenge to audiences of the type that interest her with other instances of more vulnerable and disarming openness.4 The artists discussed in this book were characteristically ambivalent about the audience and its potential, neither totally cynical nor in love with the possibility of participant connection and viewer epiphany. Moreover, the works reflect on the real ways that a specific public sphere bears on subjectivity, and they understand ideological and commercial messaging as pervasive yet not totalizing, open to resignification and destabilization. And crucially, the relational quality of these practices—­the extent to which they implied possible interaction between artists and viewers or between audience members—­was situated relative to the artists’ bodies, which were directly present in performances and actions but also richly in evidence in the “warm” materiality of handmade art objects. An additional takeaway of this history for current understandings of contemporary art lies in the artists’ attitudes toward identity. This in turn raises the question of what genealogies of identity are central and marginalized within the construct of global contemporary art itself. Marina Gržinić argues that center-­ periphery relationships are still alive and well in discourses that proclaim the end of art world oppositions between “East” and “West.”5 In light of her argument, it is worth considering how dominant institutional and national imperatives continue to shape the notion of global contemporary art and what those imperatives make visible and invisible about the discursive functioning of identities and about identity differences and commonalities between artists. In this section, I consider this question from my own specific position as someone versed in both Yugoslav and North American experimental practices; these ideas thus represent my reflection on the comparative histories of these regions as those comparisons pertain to my scholarship and teaching. At the same time, there is a sense in which the United States, while not the only Western hegemon in global contemporary art, is a very prominent one, and so I see this comparison as a paradigmatic case study of contrast between a dominant history and a marginalized one. Two points of contrast between the Zagreb-­based artists and their American peers are especially salient: differences concerning the overt performance of ar-

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tistic identity and differences in the role of institutions via-­à-­v is discourses about identity. Concerning the former, at the end of chapter 1 I contrasted the Group of Six Authors’ performance of their public personas to the highly polished self-­ promotion of Joseph Kosuth as analyzed by Alexander Alberro. Kosuth’s slick performance as an artist with sunglasses and bleached hair embraced a dissolve of art into publicity and functioned as an addendum to artworks that were ever more dematerialized and harder to understand.6 By contrast, the Group of Six’s “doing” of their identities was really an undoing, an embrace of the lazy and slovenly that made the artist into a public figure distinguished by his loosening of aesthetic and behavioral norms. Gotovac, as I discussed, embraced a “branding” of his work as art, but via an eclectic and homemade aesthetic that highlighted the farcical nature of commodity exchange and emphasized the eccentric nature of the artist’s own undertaking. Second, the way in which all these artists saw being an artist as itself an elective identity category allied with the counterculture and separate from institutions constitutes a different lineage for understanding identity than developed in the United States in the late twentieth century. Namely, in American art and criticism from the period of Vietnam War activism through the 1980s and 1990s, artists and critics grappled with issues of race, gender, and class often in relation to questions about the coercive role of institutions. Discourses about identity and race were led by hard work on the part of American artists of color. Their decades-­long struggles ultimately produced major change in both the hiring and collecting practices of art institutions and educational institutions, as well as in the broader understanding of how intersectionality is an indispensable lens with which to assess the gains and limitations of 1960s and 1970s activism that had sought art-­world transformation along axes of gender and class. Crucially, the institutions relevant to debates about identity in the 1980s and 1990s encompassed not only art institutions and educational institutions but also the government itself, which was a topic of interest from artists such as Group Material and Dread Scott Tyler and itself became directly implicated with contemporary art during the culture wars debates starting in 1989.7 An important outcome of this period was to normalize the role of institutions as both a venue and a target of critique in debates about identity, via critical efforts to discern how institutions discriminated based on identity and whether discourses of multiculturalism stood to disrupt, or ultimately to consolidate, institutional power. In the United States, events of the 1950s and 1960s such as the civil rights movements and the Chicano Moratorium opened new possibilities for consideration of how America’s long histories of oppression based on race and ethnicity intersected with the fields of arts and culture. By contrast, Yugoslavs lived in a country whose notion of socialist multiculturalism depended on a delicately balanced acknowledgment and control of ethnic identities such as Croat, Serb, Bosniak, and Slovene.

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The Yugoslav state by necessity suppressed the possibility of drives for nationalist self-­determination to which such identifications might give rise. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia discussed nationalist particularism and “localism” as direct threats to the system starting in the early 1960s, and the decade saw ongoing tensions that revolved around the coimplication of demands for decentralizing economic reform and the desire on the part of some republics for more autonomy within the Yugoslav federation.8 In Croatia, direct support for a nationally Croa­ tian identity, language variant, and political agenda escalated greatly in the later part of the decade, with open expression of those sentiments in the press.9 This climate reached a head with the pivot of key members of the Croatian Communist Party leadership toward clear support for nationalism, ultimately culminating in the mass protests of the 1971 Croatian Spring that were fanned by the Croatian cultural association Matica hrvatska. The fallout included the direct repression of the movement in several ways, including the purging of tens of thousands of members of the Croatian Communist Party, the forced resignations of leaders, including Savka Dabčević-­Kučar and Miko Tripalo, the imprisonment of two to three thousand people for involvement in the events, and the shuttering of Matica hrvatska.10 Despite the emotional intensity of the Croatian Spring, John Lampe argues that, for much of the population, up until the economic and political crises of the 1980s, nationalist identities felt less pressing than “individual efforts to study and work in an expanding, modernizing economy.” The ways in which those efforts connected people to a wider world nurtured a sense of common Yugoslav identity and a sense of multiple or parallel identities as Croatian, as Yugoslav, and as European.11 As I discussed in relation to Tomislav Gotovac’s performances at the end of chapter 4, members of the Group of Six and their circle had complex, varied relationships to identifying as Croat versus Yugoslav, which shifted over time. Arguably a more important aspect of their self-­understanding as a cohort lay in their perception of living in a highly bureaucratic country and the challenges posed to artists who lacked formal art training or even secondary education. Neither Mladen Stilinović nor Željko Jerman finished high school; Gotovac was prevented from graduating film school due to censorship of a film in which he starred; Martek studied philosophy but never art. Those who did receive formal education at the Art Academy, including Demur and Delimar, experienced a huge gap between the ossified modernism of their training and the intensive aesthetic experimentation that came to define their own independent practices. The lack of an art degree had concrete downsides, such as the inability to join the Croatian Union of Visual Artists, and the Group of Six perceived themselves as disadvantaged in this respect compared to same-­age peers such as Sanja Iveković and Dalibor Martinis, who were formally trained and had greater access to local institutions. That changed because of efforts begun in 1979 by Goran Petercol and

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Damir Sokić, who advocated for the inclusion of artists without degrees and who worked in nontraditional media in the union. This meant those artists could access benefits, such as retirement pensions, and would have a devoted space for experimental practices: the Gallery of Expanded Media (PM Gallery), opened in 1981 in a building at Starčevićev trg 6 that held the union and two other gallery spaces.12 However, even prior to these changes, the highly interpersonally connected contexts of Zagreb and broader Yugoslavia were such that Group of Six members, Gotovac, and Delimar were still able to develop reputations as respected, visible practitioners of a very intellectual type of art. This dramatizes a difference with the American context, where recognized contributors to conceptualism and its descendants were almost entirely college-­educated. Even in the cases of trailblazing conceptual practitioners such as Senga Nengudi, Pope.L, or Carl Cheng, who were originally marginalized from conceptual histories because of their race and have only more recently gained recognition, it is hard to find American conceptualists who did not attend college.13 Moreover, educational institutions like the California College of the Arts were crucial organs for fostering conceptualism and its legacies.14 The result was a context much more structured not only by art institutions and the presence of the market and dealers, which had crucial bearing on conceptualism, but also by educational institutions, which often dovetail with museums to normalize the role of institutions writ large. The Yugoslav socialist state was itself a different kind of institution than existed in the West, because it was genuinely organized around values of equality, solidarity, and collectivity yet still reproduced forms of gendered, racial, and class inequality that shaped the lives of everyday people.15 Those conditions opened some opportunities and foreclosed others—­for example, in the country’s lack of a significant art market. While scholars including Jelena Vesić and Marko Ilić argue convincingly for the import of Student Cultural Centers to the New Art Practice, the forms of locality analyzed in this book show that the movement’s histories also unfolded in other spaces not structured by the state bureaucracy and accompanying power stakes. This possibility for a conceptualism that has points of contact with institutions but by no means revolves centrally around them prompts me to ask questions that provincialize my own art geography as a U.S.-­based, North American art historian. How has the triangulation of educational institutions and the market in forming American artistic and art historical ideas about identity contributed to shaping the authoritative accounts of global contemporary art that emanate from American exhibitions, degree programs, and university presses? To what extent does the bias toward education in late twentieth-­century and twenty-­ first-­century American conceptual and contemporary art shape that art’s relationship to domestic politics? How does the significance of locality differ in a country with rich institutions and a strong market, versus in parts of the world where those entities are less prominent? Was that difference a reason why locality and

224  Conclusion

networking have emerged so powerfully in histories of art in formerly socialist Europe, specifically? And finally, what are the similarities and differences between artistic efforts to fight corrosive ethnonationalism in the United States versus in Central and Eastern Europe, and how do those follow from different genealogies of art’s relationship to institutions and to identity? Artistic responses to the wars in the Balkans are of course crucial concerning the last question. I want to be clear that I do not see artists from that part of the world as all-­seeing sages concerning war or right-­w ing ascendence. Tomislav Gotovac’s temporary embrace of chauvinist anti-­Yugoslav discourses in the early 1990s, which I discussed at the end of chapter 4, demonstrates that artists’ responses to such situations can be problematic and shaped by their own emotional difficulty in coming to terms with contemporary events. But by and large, the artists discussed here have worked to critique the contraction of the public sphere around ethno­ nationalist discourses of identity and to imagine alternatives to it. Two important developments provide context for these responses: changes to the city of Zagreb itself and shifts in local and international relationships between conceptualism and expressionism over the course of the 1980s. The war in Croatia that started in 1991 brought changes to Zagreb’s public spaces. The postsocialist period inaugurated that year was characterized by the co-­optation and privatization of public spaces by neoliberal capital, in parallel to the disintegration of the socialist notion of the common good as embodied in sectors such as health care and education, which became the target of cuts and austerity measures.16 In Zagreb, the period reconfigured the relationship between public spaces and ideology. Streets and squares were renamed to index Croatian nationalist identity and erase the socialist past, the most iconic being the transformation of the central Square of the Republic back into Duke Josip Jelačić Square (Trg bana Josipa Jelačića), after the nineteenth-­century field lieutenant who asserted Croatian unity and sovereignty in the context of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire. James Nisbet has recently introduced the notion of “secondness” to articulate the implications of environmental change for site-­specific art and for land art in particular. Secondness captures three key dimensions of the way change mediates site: (1) material changes brought about through ecological shifts and the progression of time; (2) the impossibility of experiencing a given site outside cultural constructs, which are themselves always evolving; and (3) the perception, in the present, of events that have passed or may come to pass in the future.17 While land art is indeed conducive to considering the impact of environmental change and climate crisis on our ability to experience contemporary art, post­ socialist cities such as Zagreb dramatize how secondness is also brought about by ideological change. After the transition, Zagreb has been physically reshaped by

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changes such as the return and removal of public monuments, the construction of buildings designed to facilitate consumer capitalism, such as the mall attached to the city’s arena built in 2007–­8, and corruption and stifling of dissident culture on the part of the recent right-­w ing municipal government, which closed the vaunted Kino Europa in 2019 and in 2018 removed a beloved magnolia tree from a public square despite much outcry.18 While those changes altered the space of the city itself, changed street names dramatized shifting cultural constructs of national belonging but also intervened in people’s perceptions of the temporality of the city around them. Renaming streets does not immediately efface people’s memories of the old names but creates what I speculate is an experience of historical change, of shifting ideologies, that becomes palpable while navigating public space. Moreover, Jasenka Kodrnja’s research demonstrates that in the period of 1990–­2001, thirty-­eight female names were erased from Zagreb’s streets and squares, especially those of members of the communist People’s Liberation Struggle and antifascist movements of WWII. Despite the return of some women’s names to streets and ongoing grassroots efforts by activists such as Saša Šimpraga to return more, the overall number, especially of female historical figures or those who were politically active, has been substantially reduced since the socialist period.19 This dismantling of socialist equality at the level of public space itself has consequences for how people, especially women, are able to imagine themselves as subjects of the city and of the nation. Though less dramatically visible, changes to the city’s experimental art scene over the course of the 1980s also shaped the artists’ experiences of their context and their eventual responses to the war. Podroom Gallery closed in 1980 after the disintegration of the collaboration between Iveković, Martinis, the Group of Six, and others that had facilitated its operation, and activity by some of the same artists shifted to PM Gallery once it opened in 1981. Showing in PM was un­ compensated, and the posters and invitations were printed in Vlasta Delimar and Željko Jerman’s print workshop. In its earliest days, PM exhibited work by artists including those formerly associated with Podroom and others whose work corresponded to the Italian transavantgarde—­the movement, epitomized by Sandro Chia and Francesco Clemente, that, starting in the late 1970s, revived figuration and expressive painting as an explicit rejection of conceptualism. Zagreb’s correlate to the transavantgarde had a proportionately higher number of women than had the New Art Practice, including Breda Beban, Nina Ivančić, Marina Erzegović, and Edita Schubert. While some of these artists, such as Beban, began their careers in a more conceptual vein, using painting to analytical ends via abstraction and monochrome like Boris Demur, they ultimately embraced much higher-­impact color, scale, and imagery.20 Beban’s 1982 show Two Paintings at the City Gallery consisted of two wall-­size unstretched canvases with riotous botanical patterns,

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one showing a radio, a rifle, and a scene with a table set for tea, with a black cat and Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square on the wall. Beban’s reference to Malevich makes a self-­conscious connection to avant-­garde history, while the work also constitutes an embrace of the decorative and the feminine traditionally excluded from that history. Members of the Group of Six in turn took new directions in their own practices that critiqued the transavantgarde but arguably also attempted to assimilate dimensions of it into their own practices, creating forms of friction and encounter with their extant conceptual investments.21 The year 1984 was pivotal for those new directions, and it was also the year that the group published their last issue of the magazine Maj 75, a moment that curator and close associate Darko Šimičić considers to mark the end of their activities.22 Demur began his spiral paintings, works that he often created on a large scale and that would occupy him for the rest of his life. Part intensely corporeal expressive painting, part endlessly replicable tautology, the spirals feel like a figuration of movement that goes nowhere, inseparable on some level from the artist’s personal struggles with mental health and addiction later in life. In 1984 Martek began painting, creating intentionally crude figurative works that grappled with issues of national belonging, faith, and humanism. Sven Stilinović began creating paintings and prints of weapons and tanks, including a 1985 series entitled Bullet with a Halo, showing an upright bullet in a roughly rendered landscape with a golden halo, below which is written the phrase “When we’re scared, we shoot, and when we’re nostalgic, we make paintings.” Jerman, in 1984–85, made works that use photographic materials even more expressionistically than he had previously to create what were effectively paintings, into which he integrated emblems such as crosses and stars. Mladen Stilinović, in 1984, began his series Exploitation of the Dead, a group of around four hundred objects, many of which are small wooden panels mounted with found photographs of Kazimir Malevich on his deathbed, early Yugoslav work actions, state assemblies, and group gymnastics, combined with everyday objects such as spoons and alarm clocks and united by an overall black, red, and white color scheme. One of the most trenchant and complex treatments of history and nationhood to emerge from the late socialist period in Europe, Exploitation of the Dead eulogized Yugoslavia before it was officially over, embodying the strange, suspended nature of the country’s 1980s following the death of Tito, when it was obvious that things were coming apart but of course not clear to what extent they would so violently unravel.23 Compared to the art I have discussed throughout the book, the practices toward which the Group of Six turned in 1984 mark a stronger interest in aesthetic vocabularies traditionally associated with expression, whether representational or abstract. They also turn more toward what I might, for lack of a better word, describe as “craft,” though the artists constantly set that dimension in tension with other aspects of the work. Martek’s figurative paintings and Sven Stilinović’s

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bullets both have a kind of representational crudeness that itself becomes a commentary on the crudeness of the themes represented: armed violence and the subject as constituted in a matrix of nationalism, religion, and humanism. Mladen Stilinović’s Exploitation of the Dead is composed of objects much more carefully made than many of the works he produced in the 1970s, however they also foreground their own material specificity and imperfection as something that stands in the way of realizing utopian visions, whether avant-­garde aesthetic (in the history of the Russian avant-­garde the work references) or political (in terms of the history of Yugoslavia). In the group members’ works from 1984 onward, representation, polish, and overt expressionism feel like attempts to grapple with a sense of historical instability in the present by revisiting techniques the New Art Prac­tice had declared distinctly outmoded. In this respect, they resonate with the broader return of representation in global contemporary art of the 1980s but do so in a way that feels especially disillusioned, willing neither to accept their old/new visual vocabulary nor to return to the more innocent and enthusiastic iconoclasm of the 1970s. Some of the artists I have discussed in this book made work in the 1990s that explicitly thematized war trauma. A key example is Sven Stilinović’s Geometry of Bloodthirstiness, a performance that involved the artist butchering a lamb, of which he performed six different variations between 1993 and 2001. But a more pervasive focus can be found in works that grapple with the reconfigurations of the subject brought by a culture of ascendant ethnonationalism. I will conclude the book now through discussion of three works I find particularly eloquent in this respect and with meditations on how they address a postsocialist reality through adapting the modalities of unconventional intimacy and material imperfection that have been central to this book. In chapter 4, I discussed Dubravka Ugrešić’s argument that the kitsch of postsocialist nationalism has a flexible structure, in which symbols and images become stripped of their socialist futurity and return as emblems of ethnic nationalism, religious affiliation, and capitalist triumphalism.24 The resulting public sphere is one characterized by an uneven temporality in which fragments of different sociopolitical imaginaries persist in collective and individual experience, notwithstanding the new state’s ideological claims to represent a deeper, truer, older ethnic identity. The works I am about to discuss not only reflect a public sphere cacophonous with claims of authenticity but also use the expressive nature of art to foreground the tension between dominant vocabularies for subjectivity, on the one hand, and individual identity, thought, and experience, on the other. On a visit to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić’s apartment in 2017, I saw a painting by Stilinović I had not seen publicly exhibited. Painted on plain brown cardboard, it bears three iterations of the abbreviation HR, which stands for Hrvatska (“Croatia”) (see Plate 17). It also has the words slika (“painting”) and

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ponos (“pride”), which are juxtaposed over the largest HR, itself big enough to take up most of the cardboard. The whole thus reads as “Croatian Pride Painting,” with the “Croatia” echoing visually, and perhaps by implication also auditorily, throughout the work (I will use CROATIAN Pride Painting as the translation of the title to evoke someone yelling). In the bottom right of the cardboard is pasted a subtly uneven rectangle of black paper. As in much of Stilinović’s work, the colors are crucial in interpreting this piece. The text has alternating letters in red and white, evoking the red-­and-­white checked shield at the center of the Croatian coat of arms. Moreover, in Stilinović’s oeuvre white is associated with pain and death and red with the socialist state, context that invites you to read the words “Croatian Pride Painting” as rendered out of the remains of socialism plus death and pain. The black rectangle in the corner underscores this notion of death, as it has vaguely tomb-­like dimensions and specifically resembles the shape of the two red and black, grave-­sized rectangles that make up the artist’s artwork Pain of 1990. The black rectangle is also like a kind of vacuum of signification inserted into this surface overflowing with the assertion of Croatia. Stilinović painted the text in ragged yet hyperlegible block caps that are different from his freer-­form writing that appears in many other works. CROATIAN Pride Painting goes out of its way to proliferate the name of the nation, but it remains a crappy piece of cardboard with messily painted letters, deftly undercutting the pride it declares. Moreover, parts of the large HR cross through the two O’s in ponos, suggesting that they can also be read as slashed zeros and thus as a further statement of the nullity of Croatian nationalism. The work embodies the tactics of aesthetic and emotional deflation evident throughout Stilinović’s oeuvre, bringing them together into one of his most directly political commentaries on the discourse of postsocialist ethnonationalism. Whereas CROATIAN Pride Painting skewers the field of signs that defines postsocialist Croatia, key works by Delimar of the 1990s onward charted the way in which the militarized nationalist culture of the postsocialist period dictated rigid and dehumanizing gender roles. An important example was Conversation with a Warrior, or The Woman Has Disappeared (see Figure C.1), which Delimar performed in 1999–­2000 as her first work created in collaboration with Milan Božić and that also marked her first return to partner performance following the dissolution of her collaboration with Jerman in 1983.25 In this work, Božić appears in various military uniforms and also, at one point, naked, speaking a monologue about his life experience, including childhood memories and his service in the Croatian military during the wars of the 1990s. Delimar also appears in various costumes, including lacy lingerie and a hot-­pink suit with a curly black wig, and then also naked at some of the moments when Božić is naked. The two enact what Marian Mazzone describes as “courtly poses of male/female interaction” in which Božić kisses Delimar’s hand or kneels and ties her shoe.26 Delimar, in turn, appears to listen to,

Figure C.1. Vlasta Delimar and Milan Božić, Conversation with a Warrior, or The Woman Has Disappeared, 1999–­2000. Performance. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

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comfort, and support Božić. At times she mirrors his bodily positions, pressing the front of her body up against his as they kneel in a silhouette pose reminiscent of ancient Greek vase paintings of warriors. Delimar describes this work as a subversion of her own ego, and Mazzone interprets it as an unusual act of submission on her part, casting her in the roles of both mother and lover. Indeed, the work clearly invites an interpretation that Delimar as an individual woman “disappears” into the role of Woman, in which she is cast by an ethnonationalist culture that glorifies the solider as the epitome of both man and national subject. At the same time, the performance provides Božić with clear opportunities to cast off that position of hyperbolic masculinity through his nudity and his highly personal narrative. And though the performance casts Delimar in a seemingly subservient role, her participation is the structuring term of the performance. This is symbolically true, in that her acts of care and response enable Božić to make himself vulnerable. But it is also structurally true, in the sense that Božić had no prior art career and that Delimar’s reputation and extant performance practice enabled the work’s staging in an art venue, its documentation, and its reception. Moreover, the way in which both she and Božić take on and then cast off various costumes, including the “costume” of their own nudity, is directly connected to the performance vocabulary of her work of the 1980s and 1990s, which I analyzed in chapter 4.27 Arguably the performance’s most subversive dimension lies not only in how it makes gendered codes of ethnonationalist culture legible but in terms of how it positions those codes as part of an erotically charged encounter between Delimar and Božić, who are not rigidly bound to gendered signifiers but can deploy them fluidly at will. Delimar’s connection to a leftist alternative art scene and Božić’s status as a veteran, someone who in Croatian would be referred to as a “defender” (branitelj) of the Croatian homeland, assert the possibility that Croatia’s postwar culture can heal its factionalism and acknowledge the country’s traumatic recent past. Compared to the affectively intense spectacle of Conversation with a Warrior, or The Woman Has Disappeared, the pieces with which I will end are small and humble, so much so that they barely seem to rise to the threshold of finished artworks. Since the late 1970s, Vlado Martek has been making work in clay, including small unfired clay sculptures in which he embeds objects such as pencils, pencil sharpeners, paintbrushes, and fragments of mirror. These works resonate with the crudely figurative paintings Martek began in the 1980s. They are reminiscent of a child’s early attempts at artistic creation, connecting them to the theme of juvenility that, as I argued in chapter 2, ran throughout Martek’s work. Clay also bears strong associations with earth, which in turn connects to land as a nationalist concept of possession and belonging. Clay also connects directly to the body because of the way that the artist leaves in it the imprint of their hands. Martek’s little clay sculptures show visible fingerprints, and he explicitly uses the clay not just as a

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medium with which to mold but also as a medium in which to write. Some of these works consist of forms on which a word is written, such as a blobby, ultra-­crude figure with a fragment of mirror for its face and Man (čovjek) written on its belly, or a tiny house embedded with breadcrumbs (see Plate 18). But others are more like flattened tablets designed for writing, such as a rectangular work that reads Truth (istina) with a pencil stuck into the clay above it and a paintbrush beneath it. At the end of chapter 3, I discussed “The Only Contemporary Romantic Decree on Art,” which Martek and Jerman coauthored in 1979, in which they rejected cliché artistic expressions of universal concepts such as love and God but also, crucially, rejected attempts to dismiss those concepts or to distance artistic production from them.28 These small clay sculptures bear concepts such as “truth,” “man,” “home,” and “animal” in a way that their rough materiality seems barely to support, suggesting how the expression of those notions is both the task and the defeat of art. In 2017, photographer Boris Cvjetanović created a group of photos of these pieces.29 Cvjetanović was a close associate of the Group of Six and an important documentarian of the New Art Practice. Cvjetanović made the decision to photograph these works outdoors, on the windowsill of a building, and on the ground, amid dry, brown leaves. The aesthetic logic of this choice is clear, because the colors of the leaves and wooden window frames echo the gray-­brown of the unfired clay. The works seem fundamentally at home in this setting, which suits them better than the glass case in a white gallery where I viewed them earlier that same year. Cvjetanović’s images capture something about how these pieces have a nomadic quality. In what kind of space do they belong? Following a twentieth century in which deadly wars have been fought over notions of belonging and of what constitutes a fully human subject, what kind of shared space do they suggest? Long after conceptualism had disposed with the necessity that art be an object, Martek was compelled to produce these works that embody a basic expressive desire and that suggest the fragility of attempts to stake a definitive purchase on questions of home, truth, and humanity. They return to square one, committed to a notion of artistic practice that travels through concept to shed everything that makes it stably identifiable and then returns to the crumbs of expression, both cynical and hopeful about what art might become in the process. In these works by Martek and those by Stilinović and Delimar discussed above, conceptualism’s historical distance from expressivity opens up a space for conceptualism to return as an inadequate, problematized tendency. For that very reason, it can speak powerfully to the gap between the public sphere and interior subjectivity and to the challenges of negotiating that gap in the unfolding postsocialist present.

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Acknowledgments

There were at least a couple of points in the research and writing of this book when I asked myself if I was nuts to have undertaken it. To write about a history that had unfolded in a language in which I wasn’t fluent, already treated by such strong regional scholarship, in a country I couldn’t have found on a map until my midtwenties: it seemed ill-­advised, especially while immersed in bearing and caring for my kids, getting tenure, and adjusting to life in a new city. At one particularly demoralized moment, I remember talking to Erik Esse late in the evening, after our little son was in bed, and saying, “I don’t think I can do this.” He gave a well-­worn yet effective response, something along the lines of “You’re already doing it.” Especially because of such moments of doubt, I am overflowing with gratitude to the many, many people who offered me the support—­emotional, scholarly, and linguistic—­to be able to write this book. Before I met any of the artists or specialists in Yugoslav and Croatian art who were so formative in this process, the journey started with language teachers at the Sveučilišna škola hrvatskog jezika i kulture. Aida Korajac is one of the kindest and most patient people I know, and I benefited hugely from her rigorous but still light and fun approach in my first intensive course and subsequently in years of one-­on-­one tutoring. The very talented Anđel Starčević is a dear friend whose extensive coaching helped me appreciate the nuances of all languages more deeply than I had before. Marija Bošnjak was an incredible intro-­level teacher and also proofread the Croatian in this manuscript to make sure I got the spellings and diacritics right. Though I’ll never be fluent in this very difficult language, the ongoing process of engagement with it will bring me lifelong pleasure. As I look back on my early visits to Zagreb as a grad student, Janka Vukmir stands out as the most important and generous person to inaugurate me into research on the New Art Practice. When I had literally no idea what was going on, Janka took the time to tell me stories, to share materials, and to block in a basic model of late twentieth-­century Yugoslav art that provided crucial orientation. While Janka’s support was so important in the early phases, the completion of the project in its present form would have been totally impossible without Darko Šimičić. Darko is every art historian’s dream of a research contact: profoundly expert, exactingly precise, and hugely generous. His memory of Zagreb’s history of 233

234  Acknowledgments

the New Art Practice and his collection of artworks represent a crucial piece of cultural heritage of the moment under study in this book. I hugely value being able to reproduce artworks of ethical provenance from Darko’s collection and from those of Bojana Švertasek and Branka Stipančić, in addition to the institutional collections of the Muzej suvremene umjetnosti (MSU) and Kontakt. Thank you, moreover, to Darko, Bojana, and Branka for opening their homes to me over the course of several years for discussions and viewing artworks. Branka’s own histories of the New Art Practice are of the highest caliber, and I hope that my own book will honor the standards her scholarship has set for the field. At a visual level, this book would not have been able to do the art justice without the beautiful documentation images made by Boris Cvjetanović and the dynamic photos of the exhibitionactions made by Fedor Vučemilović. My interpretations of artworks in this book were in some cases powerfully shaped by meeting and speaking with the artists. Thank you, all of you, both living and dead, for your generous gifts of time, information, and images: Vlado Martek, Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Vlasta Delimar, Fedor Vučemilović, and Boris Demur. A special thanks to Fedor for taking me to meet Demur just a couple of weeks before Demur’s sudden death. Thank you also to the people who met and spoke with me about the New Art Practice from the early years of this project to the later ones: Ješa Denegri and Biljana Tomić, Miško Šuvaković, Jadranka Vinterhalter, and Dalibor Martinis. Jasna Jakšić at the MSU in Zagreb has also provided essential ongoing support throughout the project. Thanks to Saša Šimpraga for his incredible insights into the history of Zagreb and of course to Vjeran Pavlaković for consultation on regional history, as well as for putting the “fun” in “Balkans.” I am forever grateful to the colleagues in my subfield who provided feedback on the manuscript. Three people have been particularly important in supporting the book’s development: Ivana Bago, Jasmina Tumbas, and Branislav Jakovljević. Ivana’s rigorous and innovative scholarship has been an inspiration to me throughout the writing process, and her read of the manuscript was crucial to improving it. Jasmina is truly one of the most generous scholars I know. She cares deeply about her colleagues, her students, and the world, and she goes above and beyond to be helpful and supportive. I am so lucky that her own book, “I Am Jugoslovenka!,” came out as I was researching my chapter on Vlasta Delimar, as her thinking on the artist greatly developed my own analysis. Finally, Branislav’s Alienation Effects consolidated a new framework within which to understand Yugoslav art and performance. I’ve benefited hugely from it here and from his generous mentorship. Over the past decade, this work has also been shaped by conversations, exchanges, and collaborations with the following people, as well as inspired by their own scholarship: Brianne Cohen, Ivan Drpić, Melissa Geppert, Ksenya Gurshtein, Melissa Heer, Marko Ilić, Amelia Jones, Yelena Kalinsky, Nastasia Louveau, the late Armin

Acknowledgments  235

Medosch, Jamie Nisbet, Nicoletta Rousseva, Gwynn Shanks, Sami Siegelbaum, Deirdre Madeleine Smith, Milena Tomic, Bojana Videkanić, and Mechtild Widrich. In the late stages of manuscript completion, Rachel Haidu and Robert Bailey both offered me their incomparable expertise on histories of conceptualism and global contemporary art. Gordana Crnković provided an important last-­minute consultation about language. The School of Art + Art History + Design at the University of Washington has provided an incredible place for me to grow and thrive since I arrived here in 2015. Estelle and Stuart Lingo are the queen and king of hearts of the Division of Art History, whose years of hard work have been crucial in creating viable working conditions and a positive culture in our unit. Their mentorship has meant more to me than I can express here. During the past few years, I have also had the incredible privilege of supporting the hiring processes of a bumper crop of new colleagues: Juliet Sperling, Mimi Chusid, Jennifer Baez, and Caitlin Earley. Their presence has brought much vitality, intellectual stimulation, and friendship into my work life. In the rest of the school, I am especially thankful for connections with Rebecca Cummins, Ellen Garvens, Whitney Lynn, Sangram Majumdar, Rob Rhee, and Michael Swaine. Thanks to Jamie Walker for his support and mentorship and for the years of time and care he’s given to the School and to Julianna Jones and Greg Ruffing for their crucial roles in supporting faculty. On the wider campus, my Performance Studies Research Group provided feedback on the book’s material over the past several years. Thank you to Rob Rhee, Amanda Doxtater, Scott Magelssen, Jasmine Mahmoud, Olivia Gunn, Ellwood Wiggins, Daniela Rosner, Anne Searcy, and Stefka Mihaylova for those conversations. Other colleagues on campus and off make this a fun place to live and work, including Liora Halperin, Sasha Senderovich, Maggie Beneke, Johanna Gosse, and Catharina Manchanda. In terms of material support, this book wouldn’t be what it is without generous grants from the Graham Foundation, the Kontakt Collection/ERSTE Foundation, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and Dean of Arts and the School of Art + Art History + Design at the University of Washington. Thanks to Kathy Woodward and to everyone in my cohorts for the Second Book Fellowship and the Society of Scholars at the Simpson Center, who provided feedback and support as the project was approaching completion. Speaking of the book’s materiality, thank you to my editor, Pieter Martin, for bringing this manuscript to completion despite difficult and disruptive pandemic circumstances, as well as to Anne Carter, Eric Lundgren, and the other staff members at the University of Minnesota Press who supported the publication process. Thanks also to the people who gave me opportunities to speak about this work, through visiting lectures organized by Brianne Cohen at University of Colorado Boulder, Anna Rosensweig at the University of Rochester, Marcus DeSieno at Central Washington University, and Ross Elfline at Carleton College, as well as Rebecca Brown’s invitation to speak with her seminar at Johns

236  Acknowledgments

Figure A.1. The author lunches with Vlasta Delimar as part of Delimar’s performance Invitation to Socialize, summer 2014. Held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, the performance consisted of a simple makeshift stage and table that Delimar moved around the museum, where she would eat a meal with guests and talk to them about art. That summer, I made a date to interview her without knowing our conversation would be part of this performance and ended up folded into the relational encounter that constituted the event as well as the documentation of the work.

Hopkins. College Art Association panels organized by Aglaya Glebova and Samuel Johnson in 2022 and then Judith Rodenbeck in 2023 provided additional opportunities to share parts of the book. Thanks also to Rachel Merrill Moss, Margarita Kompelmakher, and Jacob Juntunen for including me in their American Society for Theatre Research working group in 2019. The panel titled “Communist Kitsch” that Milena Tomic and I cochaired at CAA in 2019 jump-­started my thinking about kitsch as it pertains to late socialist and postsocialist art histories, and I’m hugely grateful to her for that collaboration. I am very happy to have had an article based on chapter 3 published in ARTMargins, and I am grateful to Sven Spieker and the journal’s staff and readers for enabling that. Though I haven’t seen or spoken to him in several years apart from a few

Acknowledgments  237

emails, I am frequently aware of the incredible impact that Charles had on me in the transition from graduate school to adulthood. Charles provided an example of how to wear mastery and wisdom lightly, which I’ll cherish forever. Ingrid also gave me crucial support, especially in the first few years of my time in Seattle, in the period before my impostor syndrome (finally) eclipsed. Thank you also to Janaki Torrence, whose friendship has been such an important part of making Seattle feel like home, and to Lisa Harris, Rachel Colley, Vanessa Meadu, Andrea Gyenge, and other friends who are geographically far away but remain so close to my heart. I say all the time to Ruthie and to August, “How did I get so lucky to have a kid like you?” I have especially warm memories of a 2017 research trip to Europe when August was nine months old and he and I traveled there together first and then Erik joined us later, ending with a family trip to Tuscany. My dad, David Rounthwaite, came to meet me and August in the early part of that trip to babysit and to feed August excessive ice cream. Our time staying at a tennis club hotel in Hamburg during the Performance Studies international conference is one of my happiest memories of Dad. Two years later, he and my mum, Leith Hunter, came with me and August to Venice and drove to Zagreb via Ljubljana. While traveling that much with August when he was just under three years old was very difficult, I am incredibly grateful to my parents for all we got to see and do on that trip. These acknowledgments end where they began: with Erik. How did I get so lucky to have a husband like you? Erik is an amazing communicator who provides me with indispensable support in so many areas. I realized I really, really liked him within the first four or so minutes of our first date. As the long game that is life continues to unfold in front of and around us, I am forever grateful to be playing it with you.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Zagreb: Popis ulica i plan grada (Zagreb: Epoha, 1959); Ivan Raos, Zagreb: Führer Durch Die Stadt (Zagreb: Vjesnik, 1962). Zagreb’s largest flea market had moved from Heinzelova ulica to its present location at Hrelić in the southeast in the 1960s. Mirna Tkalčić Simetić, Hrelić–­antropologija prijepornog mjesta (Zagreb: Hrvatsko etnološko društvo, 2015), 24–­25. 2. Whereas the art collective IRWIN, in East Art Map, seeks to provide an authoritative genealogical mapping of artists in Central/Eastern Europe, I instead employ the map as a partial, contextually specific, and concretely material model that provides an imaginative route into those dimensions of my methodology. See IRWIN, East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe (London: Afterall, 2006). 3. The polycentric language known today as Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian/Montenegrin depending on the country or origin of someone speaking it was referred to in the earlier part of the Yugoslav period by two names: Serbo-­Croatian (srpskohrvatski) and Croatian-­ Serbian (hrvatskosrpski). Though the variant that puts Serbian first was the more common way of referring to the language, hrvatskosrpski was often used in Croatia because it named that republic’s variant first. From the early 1970s onwards, the language was referred to as either Croatian or Serbian. 4. Branislav Jakovljević, Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-­Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–­91 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 11–­12. 5. The group’s activities are thoroughly documented in the catalog for their 1997 retrospective, Janka Vukmir, ed., Grupa šestorice autora [Group of Six Authors] (Zagreb: Soros centar za suvremenu umjetnost, 1998). Exhibition-­action is the term now used in the literature. The alternative formulation action-­exhibition appears on a flyer for the September 1977 action at the Student Center in Zagreb, however exhibition-­action is how group members and historians of their work typically describe these events. I write “around twenty” because the number is slightly different depending on which events one includes; the integral Group of Six had twenty-­t wo actions together from 1975 to 1979 with some variation in who participated, but then another two were held in 1980 with only some of the members in conjunction with other artists. 6. The Non-­A ligned Movement was founded in Belgrade in 1961, following the 1956 conference in Bandung, Indonesia, that had been crucial to its conception. Its founding member nations were Yugoslavia, India, Egypt, Ghana, and Indonesia. For a thorough discussion of the relationship between the Non-­A ligned Movement and cultural production in Yugoslavia, see Bojana Videkanić, Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945–­1985 (Montreal and Kingston, Ontario: McGill-­Queens University Press, 2019). 7. For a comprehensive history of twentieth-­century Yugoslavia, see John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University 239

240  Notes to Introduction Press, 2000), 305–­7. On Black Wave cinema and its suppression, see Gal Kirn, Dubravka Sekulić, and Žiga Testen, eds., Surfing the Black: Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and Its Transgressive Moments (Masstricht, Netherlands: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012). On Praxis and its suppression, see Gerson Sher, Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). 8. Email correspondence with Branka Stipančić, August 10, 2019. 9. See, for example, Klara Kemp-­Welch’s discussion of the work of Endre Tot in response to conditions of surveillance in her chapter “Humor” in Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-­Totalitarian Rule, 1956–­1989 (London: I. B. Taurus, 2014), 141–84. 10. Matthew Jesse Jackson, The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-­Gardes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 108. 11. Radoslav Putar, “Izložba-­akcija šestorice,” Spot 7 (1975). 12. Before Delimar was romantically involved with either Jerman or Martek, another woman was involved with both men in succession: Branka Jurjević, who was married to Jerman and separated from him prior to the commencement of his partnership with Martek in 1977. Jurjević married Martek in 1979 and died in 1987. Delimar and Martek began their relationship in 1985 and had a daughter, Dolina, in 1988. 13. Interview with Vlado Martek, July 4, 2019, Zagreb. 14. Interview with Darko Šimičić, June 16, 2017, Zagreb. 15. Zdenka Badovinac et al., “Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe: Part II,” e-­flux 41 (Janu­ ary 2013): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/41/60238/conceptual-art-and-eastern-europe -part-ii/. This conversation was recorded in 2012. Part I was published in issue 40 in December 2012. 16. Marijan Susovski, ed., The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia 1966–­1978, English ed. (Zagreb: Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1978), 3. 17. Susovski, New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 3. 18. Susovski, 3. 19. There are arguably some parallels between Susovski’s framing here and that which Kynaston McShine developed for MoMA’s 1970 Information show, though Susovski’s formulation presents a much clearer and more specific analysis of the national and global conditions within which these practices should be understood. Granted, Information did not address a particular national history; for a comparison on that level, it is striking to look at the difference between Susovski’s catalog and the deeply depoliticized and nebulous framing of the 1979 Whitney Biennial (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979 Biennial Exhibition [New York: Whitney Museum, 1979]). The Ljubljana-­based Yugoslav collective OHO participated in Information. 20. For a now-­canonical definition of socialist modernism, see Ješa Denegri, “Inside or Outside ‘Socialist Modernism’? Radical Views on the Yugoslav Art Scene, 1950–­1970,” in Impossible Histories: Historic Avant-­Gardes, Neo-­Avant-­Gardes, and Post-­Avant-­Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–­1991, ed. Dubravka Đurić and Miško Šuvaković, 170–­208 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006). For a detailed exploration of how socialist modernism operated at the level of Yugoslav cultural policy, see Videkanić, Nonaligned Modernism. 21. Lippard revised this stance in the postface to a later edition of Six Years, where she writes: “Hopes that ‘conceptual art’ would be able to avoid the general commercialization, the destructively ‘progressive’ approach of modernism were for the most part unfounded.” Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1972; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 263. 22. Delimar’s work was the subject of a major retrospective and catalog at Zagreb’s Mu-

Notes to Introduction  241 seum of Contemporary Art in 2014. See Martina Munivrana and Vlasta Delimar, eds., Vlasta Delimar: To sam ja / This Is I (Zagreb: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2014). Recently, Jasmina Tumbas’s account of feminist art and performance in the former Yugoslavia has taken Delimar as one of its central protagonists, an ambivalent yet crucial progenitrix for feminist art in the region. Jasmina Tumbas, “I Am Jugoslovenka!” Feminist Performance Politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022). 23. Tumbas, I Am Jugoslovenka!, 46. Marko Ilić explores the regional variation in art practices and political openness in A Slow Burning Fire: The Rise of the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021), especially in chapter 2, devoted to Novi Sad’s Youth Tribune. 24. Jelena Vesić, “SKC (Student Cultural Center) as a Site of Performative (Self-­)Production: October 75—­Institution, Self-­Organization, First-­Person Speech, Collectivization,” Život umjetnosti 92 (2012): 30–­53. See also Jelena Vesić and Zorana Dojić, Political Practices of (Post)Yugoslav Art: Retrospective 01 (Belgrade: Prelom Kolektiv, 2010). 25. Videkanić, Nonaligned Modernism, ch. 3, “Nonaligned Modernism in the Making: Building Parallel Transnational Culture.” 26. Ilić, Slow Burning Fire, 172–­75. 27. “Ne, uopće. Ali može biti da su drugi ljudi bili svjesni. Mene politika osobno nije zanimala, a 74. sam se ja borila sa studijem tako da . . . ma čovjek zna da je recimo taj ustav donio to da se svaka republika de facto može odcijepiti.” Interview with Branka Stipančić, June 21, 2017, Zagreb. 28. Piotr Piotrowski, “How to Write a History of Central-­East European Art?” Third Text 23, no. 1 (January 2009): 5, 9–­14. 29. Denegri, “Inside or Outside ‘Socialist Modernism,’” in Đurić and Šuvaković, Impossible Histories, 171. 30. See Celia Hawkesworth, Zagreb: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 31. Boris Groys, “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” A-­я Unofficial Russian Art Revue 1 (1979): 4. 32. Groys, “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” 10. 33. Groys, 4. 34. Luis Camnitzer et al., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-­1980s (New York: Queens Museums of Art, 1999). 35. Stipančić, in her statement for the important 1979 Podroom exhibition Lines, writes that she selected visually similar works to fill the exhibition “to show the inadequacy of a reading based on form and to focus instead on more important consequences of the work: idea, motivation, the process of work constitution, its meaning, its function, i.e. the work as a specific system within the system of art and society.” Branka Stipančić, “Lines,” trans. Ivana Bago, republished at Parallel Chronologies, Tranzit, http://tranzit.org /exhibitionarchive/texts/branka-stipancic-lines/. 36. Jakovljević, Alienation Effects, 239. 37. Interview with Branka Stipančić, June 2017, Zagreb. 38. Mladen Stilinović, “In Praise of Laziness,” Moscow Art Magazine 22 (1998). The original text was written in 1993. 39. Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 7. 40. Ivana Bago, “Something to Think About: Exhibiting Valeurs of Visibility in Zagreb from 1961 to 1986,” republished at Parallel Chronologies, Tranzit, http://tranzit.org

242  Notes to Introduction /exhibitionarchive/essays/ivana-bago-something-to-think-about-exhibiting-valeurs-ofvisibility-in-zagreb-from-1961-to-1986/. 41. Davor Matičević, “The Zagreb Circle,” in Susovski, New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 20. 42. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (1974; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 54–­55. 43. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 55. 44. R. A. French and F. E. Ian Hamilton launch their 1979 volume The Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy by both citing the massive accumulation of urban experience under socialism in the 1970s and posing the book’s core object as an open-­ended question: “The basic question . . . is whether or not the socialist city is fundamentally different from the city in what may be called, for lack of a better term, capitalist societies.” R. A. French and F. E. Ian Hamilton, eds., The Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy (Chichester, N.Y.: John Wiley & Sons, 1979), 3. 45. For a summary of this debate, see Sonia Hirt, “Whatever Happened to the (Post)Socialist City?,” Cities 32 (2013): S29–­S30. 46. See Hirt, “Whatever Happened to the (Post)Socialist City?”; Eric Sheppard, “Socialist Cities?,” Urban Geography 21, no. 8 (2000): 758–­63. 47. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 73. 48. See David Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020). 49. Antoaneta Pasinović, “Teze za identifikaciju prostornih vrijednosti” [Theses for the identification of spatial values], in Antoaneta Pasinović: Izazov mišljenja o prostornom jedinstvu [The challenge of conceptualizing spatial unity], ed. Sandra Križić Roban (Zagreb: Institut za povijest umjetnosti, 2001), 138–­39, my translation. The citation in Croatian reads as follows: “Arhitektura trodimenzionalno obuhvaća svaku ljudsku radnju, međutim, istinski sadržaj arhitekture prostor jest aktualan tek kao ostvaranje mogućnosti za ozbiljenje bitno ljudskih sadržaja, koji korespondiraju tek s estetičko-­problematskom sferom prostora, tek s estetski pojmljenim prostorom kao odnosom boje, strukture i oblika. Preko estetičkog funkcioniranja ostvaruje se svaki izgrađivački, svaki istinski graditeljski akt arhitekture kao usavršavanje, dograđivanje čovjekovih bitno ljudskih svojstava, te se preko estetičkog učinka, preko prostorne vrijednosti mjeri svaka etika prostornog. Ono što je prostorno vrijedno, to je dobro i istinito u arhitekturi.” Note that Pasinović’s prose has a dense and contorted quality even in Croatian. 50. Vukmir, Grupa šestorice autora, 250. 51. SKCs provided exceptional leeway for artistic experimentation and for cultural dialogue that encompassed local, wider Yugoslav, and foreign participants, even as they were state-­funded and subject to surveillance and control. There is debate among scholars about the extent to which SKCs constituted genuinely open spaces of experimentation or enabled the state to neutralize critical art and thought. Miško Šuvaković describes SKCs as “reservations” that did not directly repress artists but enacted “a very delicate, careful, bureaucratically well performed centering, enclosing, and isolating.” Miško Šuvaković, “Students’ Cultural Centres as Reservations,” in SKC and Political Practices of Art, by Prelom kolektiv (Belgrade: Museum of Yugoslav History, 2008), 85. Jelena Vesić thoughtfully argues that instead of being a site of consolidation, the SKC was an “institution in movement” that enacted a “moving towards” that upset official and canonized forms of knowledge and even the concept of the gallery space as such. See Jelena Vesić, “SKC (Student Cultural Centre) as a Site of Performative (Self-­)Production October 75—­Institution, Self-­Organization, First-­ Person Speech, Collectivization,” Život umjetnosti 91 (2012): 30–­53. Ilić’s Slow Burning Fire

Notes to Chapter 1  243 is centrally focused on the SKCs, ultimately seeing them as incubators for innovation even as they were agencies of the state. 52. Ivana Bago, “The City as a Space of Plastic Happening: From Grand Proposals to Exceptional Gestures in the Art of the 1970s in Zagreb,” Journal of Urban History (2017): 10. 53. Janka Vukmir explicitly positions the possibilities and limitations of politicized art in the Group of Six’s moment relative to both the failure of the 1968 protests in Belgrade and the suppression of the Croatian Spring in 1971. Janka Vukmir, “Conceptual Co-­ existence,” in Vukmir, Grupa šestorice autora, 28. Concerning the Croatian Spring, John Lampe describes the Croatian complaints at this juncture as combining economic and regional grievances, as had the recent Slovenian unrest connected to funding for a highway construction project in 1969. Concerning Croatians’ perceptions of economic inequality, key was that revenue was expanding from tourism along the Croatian Adriatic costs, but profits lagged behind rates of investment and income from the tourist trade, leading some to overlook the industry’s own high costs and blame Belgrade banks for its lack of profitability. In terms of regional grievances, starting in the late 1960s the Croatian linguistic association Matica hrvatska was instrumental in pushing demands for recognition of Croatian as a language separate from Serbo-­Croatian and promoting rumors that Serbia was seeking to make tourist-­heavy Dalmatia into a republic or province separate from Croatia. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 305–­7. 54. On the question of censorship, see Ilić’s analysis of the Novi Sad Youth Tribune, “A Taster of Political Insult,” in Slow Burning Fire, 70–­112. Also note that director Lazar Stojanović was imprisoned following the 1971 release of his film Plastic Jesus, which edits together footage of Hitler and Tito in an apparent equation of Naziism and Yugoslav socialism. On repression of the Black Wave, see Gal Kirn, who argues that this film is of minimal artistic value in the context of the movement and that Stojanović’s arrest was entirely predictable based on his illegal editing of footage of Tito. Kirn, Sekulić, and Testen, Surfing the Black, 21–­22. 55. Ljubica Spaskovska, The Last Yugoslav Generation: The Rethinking of Youth Politics and Cultures in Late Socialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 11. Spaskovska notes that this was accompanied by a faith that even though the system needed to change, youth could work within it to accomplish those changes. 56. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5. 57. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 129, 138. 58. Yurchak, 157. 59. See Yurchak, ch. 3, “Ideology Inside Out: Ethics and Poetics.” 60. Jakovljević, Alienation Effects, 9, 33–­38. 61. Jakovljević, 217. 62. Susan Woodward, Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945–­1990 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 4, 12.

1. The Square Smiled 1. The basis of the chronology I employ in this chapter is the one assembled by Darko Šimičić and published in Janka Vukmir, Grupa šestorice autora [Group of Six Authors] (Zagreb: Soros centar za suvremenu umjetnost, 1998), 177–­302. 2. Branka Stipančić, “Akcija, atrakcija, a rijetkima i satisfakcija,” Omladinski tjednik 207 (November 11, 1975): 14. 3. This statement appears at the beginning of the first issue of Maj 75 (A) from 1978

244  Notes to Chapter 1 as part of a description of the magazine’s rationale, and a version of it is repeated in most other issues. 4. Cecilia Hawkesworth, Zagreb: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 73–­74. 5. Hawkesworth, Zagreb, 76–­81, 84–­87. 6. Bojana Cvejić and Ana Vujanović, Public Sphere by Performance (Belgrade: b_books, THK, and Akademija Press, 2012), 42–­43. 7. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, 91–­110 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 93. 8. De Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 95. 9. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 128. This parallel is valuable despite the differences between the status of experimental art in Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R., which had a formal system of artists employed in official roles that supported the state and an unofficial sphere of experimental art by turn ignored and repressed by the authorities. 10. “‘Akcija’ pod vedrim nebom,’” Večernji list, July 18, 1978, 6. 11. Martek assembled lists of reactions to both the 1975 and 1978 Square of the Republic actions. A combined list of the two was published in the H issue of Maj 75, from 1982. 12. This is not to say that reflection on aesthetic dimensions of city space was limited to works that took place in the literal streets. Throughout the decade, Zagreb’s Association of Architects had an active exhibition program, featuring shows such as a 1975 exhibition of the works of Zdenko Kolacio, an architect who created significant public monuments in the postwar period. “Citywide exhibition list for 1975,” HAZU Visual Archive of the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Zagreb, consulted June 2019. 13. Ivana Bago, “The City as a Space of Plastic Happening: From Grand Proposals to Exceptional Gestures in the Art of the 1970s in Zagreb,” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 1 (2018): 27–­28. 14. Maja Fowkes, The Green Bloc: Neo-­Avant-­Garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015), 124. 15. Bago, “City as a Space of Plastic Happening,” 29–­30. The work has since undergone various relocations and reconstructions before arriving in 2004 at its current spot in the busy Bogovićeva pedestrian street, where it stands today as Zagreb’s most recognizable contemporary art landmark. 16. Davor Matičević, Mogućnosti za 1971. (Zagreb: Galerija suvremene umjetnosti, 1971). 17. Bago, “City as a Space of Plastic Happening,” 36–­37. 18. Fowkes, Green Bloc, 111–­12. 19. Fowkes, 130–­32. 20. Kritovac’s photos of garbage were published in 1979 in the Zagreb-­based magazine Čovjek i prostor (no. 2). For a discussion of some of his projects and their long-­term implications for questions of public space in Zagreb, see Fedor Kritovac, Otkrivanje grada (Zagreb: ULUPUH, 2018). 21. File for Pismoslikarstvo, Student Center Gallery, 1977, HAZU Visual Archive of the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Zagreb. 22. Grupa šestorice autora, Izložbe-­akcije 1975–­1977 (Zagreb: CEFFT, 1977), 3. 23. Stipančić, “Akcija, atrakcija, a rijetkima i satisfakcija.” 24. Interview with Boris Demur and Fedor Vučemilović, May 24, 2014, Zagreb. 25. On the reforms and challenges of this period, see John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 276–­98.

Notes to Chapter 1  245 26. Branislav Jakovljević describes associated labor as an attempt to solidify the Party’s grasp on the upper management of enterprises, while nullifying workers’ political agency to organize among themselves in order to create new forms of community and decision-­ making. Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-­Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–­91 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 197–­98. 27. Mladen Stilinović, “Akcije na otvorenom prostoru,” Studentski list 1 (November 7, 1975), 8. 28. Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969),” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 991. 29. Yugoslavia’s New Art Practice displayed a notable tendency in which artists were often male, while many women made important careers as curators and critics, including Branka Stipančić, Biljana Tomić (whose husband was the critic Ješa Denegri), Nena Dimitrijević (née Baljković), and Dunja Blažević. A number of women artists also worked in collaborative duos with male partners, such as Jasna Tijardović and Zoran Popović, Marinela Koželj and Raša Todosijević, and Delimar and Jerman early on in her career. There were some important exceptions to these patterns: Sanja Iveković and Marina Abramović had important careers with renown and productivity that exceeded those of their male artistic partners, and Delimar’s work became increasingly independent over the 1980s, her contributions to performance history ultimately outstripping the significance of her collaborations with Jerman. But regardless of these exceptions, the overall pattern suggests that, despite the important progress made in Yugoslavia in terms of women’s liberation, the role of the artist remained a highly gendered category. For a discussion of the history of women’s empowerment and the barriers to it in Yugoslavia, see Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Jasmina Tumbas’s book “I Am Jugoslovenka!” Feminist Performance Politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022) provides a detailed history of how women and queer artists articulated politicized feminist aesthetics. 30. Nena Baljković, “Group of Six Artists,” in The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia: 1966–­1978, ed. Marijan Susovski (Zagreb: Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1978), 34; Nena Baljković, “Braco Dimitrijević–­Goran Trbuljak,” in Susovski, New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 29–­33. 31. On warmth, see Mladen Stilinović, interview with Tihomir Milovac, in Mladen Stilinović: Cinizam siromašnih [Cynicism of the poor], ed. Tihomir Milovac and Nada Beroš (Zagreb: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002), 15. On simple execution, Branka Stipančić and Alenka Gregorič, eds., Mladen Stilinović: Umjetnik radi 1973–­1983 / Artist at Work 1973–­1983 (Zagreb: self-­pub., 2010), 34. 32. Branka Stipančić, Mladen Stilinović, and Tihomor Milovac, Exploitation of the Dead (Zagreb: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007), 28, 34. 33. See, for example, Zdenka Badovinac, Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-­ Socialist Europe (New York: Independent Curators International, 2019). 34. Mladen Stilinović, “In Praise of Laziness,” Moscow Art Magazine 22 (1998). 35. Kontova quoted in Klara Kemp-­Welch, Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965–­1981 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019), 380. 36. László Beke, “Conceptual Tendencies in Eastern European Art,” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–­1980s, ed. Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 42. 37. Beke, “Conceptual Tendencies in Eastern European Art,” 51.

246  Notes to Chapter 1 38. The conversation that Zdenka Badovinac hosted in 2012 on the topic was demonstrative of the lack of consensus in this respect. Including Eda Čufer, Branka Stipančić, Boris Groys, Piotr Piotrowski, Cristina Freire, Charles Harrison, and Vít Havránek, it is rich and wide-­ranging. But beyond agreement about conceptualism’s reaction formation to modernism, it demonstrates Badovinac as a moderator struggling to establish even a basic definition of conceptual art that would suit everyone involved. Zdenka Badovinac et al., “Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe: Part I,” e-­flux 40 (December 2012): https://www.e -flux.com/journal/40/60277/conceptual-art-and-eastern-europe-part-i/; Zdenka Badovinac et al., “Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe: Part II,” e-­flux 41 (January 2013): https://www.e -flux.com/journal/41/60238/conceptual-art-and-eastern-europe-part-ii/. 39. Kemp-­Welch, Networking the Bloc, 364–­65. 40. Badovinac et al., “Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe: Part II.” 41. Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-­Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–­1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 316–­17. Kemp-­Welch’s Networking the Bloc demonstrates this proposition in detail. 42. Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, 318. 43. Marko Ilić, A Slow Burning Fire: The Rise of the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021), 25. 44. Tomaž Brejc, “OHO as an Artistic Phenomenon, 1966–­1971,” in Susovski, New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 15. 45. Germano Celant, “Arte Povera: Notes on a Guerrilla War,” originally published in Flash Art 5 (1967), available at https://flash---art.com/article/germano-celant-arte-povera -notes-on-a-guerrilla-war/, accessed August 4, 2021. On Arte Povera’s shifting relationship to Leftist politics and the student movement, see Nicholas Cullinan, “From Vietnam to Fiat-­ Nam: The Politics of Arte Povera,” October 124 (Spring 2008): 8–­30. 46. Interview with Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić, May 16, 2014, Zagreb. 47. Benjamin Buchloh, foreword to Arte Povera: Selections from the Sonnabend Collection (New York: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 2001), 7. 48. Germano Celant, “Arte Povera (1968),” in Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera, 1962–­1972, ed. Richard Flood and Francis Morris (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2001), 151. 49. Stilinović, “In Praise of Laziness.” 50. Celant, “Arte Povera (1968),” 151. 51. Tommaso Trini, “New Alphabet for Body and Matter (1968),” in Flood and Morris, Zero to Infinity, 161. 52. Celant, “Arte Povera (1968),” 153. 53. Rachel Haidu, The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers  1964–­1976 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), 52. 54. “Vrijeme, svjetlo, podloga i prostor sjedinjeni su u ovom radu kroz svako upisano crno slovo.” 55. Email correspondence with Ivana Bago, July 21, 2022. 56. Braco Dimitrijević and Goran Trbuljak, “Grupa penzioner Tihomir Simčić: Čovjek i čovjek stvaralac, vizija osjećanje, stvaranje i djelo,” Novine Galerije SC 12 (1969): 3. Note that the authorship of the works created by the Retiree Tihomir Simčić Group is disputed. While several authoritative art historians and critics believe this work to be collaborative, involving both Dimitrijević and Trbuljak, Dimitrijević has assertively claimed sole authorship of it at multiple points since the 1970s, arguing that Trbuljak was simply the photographer documenting the interventions. I would note that this kind of quest to assert individual attribution is highly ironic concerning art that revolved conceptually around deconstructing traditional authorship and stressing the aleatory nature of artistic creation.

Notes to Chapter 1  247 57. Yelena Kalinsky, “Drowning in Documents: Action, Documentation, and Factography in Early Work by the Collective Actions Group,” ARTMargins 2, no. 1 (2013): 86–­89. 58. Vlado Martek, “Prijedlog Galeriji suvremene umjetnosti, o izložbi-­a kciji na Trgu Republike, 17–­18.7.78,” Archive of the Institute for Contemporary Art, Zagreb. 59. Interview with Fedor Vučemilović, May 24, 2014, Zagreb. 60. In Gordana Brzović’s 2002 documentary film G6: Grupa šestorice autora, Mladen Stilinović makes an enigmatic connection between the group’s loose affiliation and the transition to postsocialism: “We were democrats, before all the changes.” As Marko Ilić emphasizes, this statement stresses the central role of plurality and tolerance in the group’s affiliation (Slow Burning Fire, 174). Yet, it is a strange statement in that it also might be read as aligning the Group of Six’s politics against socialism, which is likely not how it was intended, given Stilinović’s wider thought. 61. Interview with Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić, May 16, 2014, Zagreb. 62. Vukmir, Grupa šestorice autora, 185. 63. Ilić, Slow Burning Fire, 156; Branislav Dimitrijević, “Neke uvodne napomene o radu Gorana Đorđevića u periodu 1974–­1985, a posebno u vezi sa njegovim delovanjem u okviru beogradskog Studentskog kulturnog centra,” Prelom 5 (Spring/summer 2003): 151. 64. Interview with Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić, May 16, 2014, Zagreb. 65. Marko Ilić, “‘Made in Yugoslavia: Struggles with Self-­Management in the New Art Practice, 1964–­71,” ARTMargins 8, no. 1 (2019): 3–­4. 66. Interview with Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić, May 16, 2014, Zagreb. 67. Email correspondence with Darko Šimičić, July 25, 2022. 68. Interview with Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić, May 16, 2014, Zagreb; Ilić, Slow Burning Fire, 11. 69. Interview with Sven Stilinović, May 19, 2014, Zagreb. 70. Interview with Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić, May 16, 2014, Zagreb. 71. Martek, “Prijedlog Galeriji suvremene umjetnosti.” 72. “Komentari prolaznika sa Izložbi-akcija na Trgu republike, 25.10.1975. i 17–19.7.1978.,” Archive of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. 73. G6: Grupa šestorice autora, directed by Gordana Brzović with script by Kristina Leko (Croatian Film and Television, 2002), 90 minutes. 74. Interview with Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić, May 16, 2014, Zagreb. 75. Interview with Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić, May 16, 2014, Zagreb. 76. Interview with Fedor Vučemilović, May 24, 2014, Zagreb. 77. Vukmir, Grupa šestorice autora, 246. 78. Interview with Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić, May 16, 2014, Zagreb. 79. Interview with Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić, May 16, 2014, Zagreb. 80. Interview with Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić, May 16, 2014, Zagreb. 81. “Permit for exhibition-­action of July 31, 1977, from 4–­8 p.m. in the Neboder passage, issued by the Secretariat of the City of Zagreb,” Archive of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. 82. Interview with Boris Demur and Fedor Vučemilović, May 24, 2014, Zagreb. 83. Interview with Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić, May 16, 2014, Zagreb. 84. Interview with Vlado Martek, June 22, 2017, Zagreb. 85. Interview with Boris Demur and Fedor Vučemilović, May 24, 2014, Zagreb. 86. Interview with Sven Stilinović, May 19, 2014, Zagreb. 87. “Komentari prolaznika sa Izložbi-akcija na Trgu republike.” 88. Vlado Martek, typed description of Neboder passage exhibition-­action, January 6, 1978, Archive of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

248  Notes to Chapter 1 89. Jerzy Grotowski, “Towards a Poor Theatre,” in Towards a Poor Theatre, ed. Eugenio Barba, 19–­22 (New York: Routledge, 2002). 90. Stipančić, “Akcija, atrakcija, a rijetkima i satisfakcija,” 14. 91. These drawings at the site of the Jesuit Square action are visible in Mladen Stilinović’s filmic documentation. He and Branka Stipančić, in my interview with them in Zagreb, on May 16, 2014, discussed this viewer who scrubbed and took Martek’s glass. 92. Baljković, “Group of Six Artists,” 33. 93. Interview with Fedor Vučemilović, May 24, 2014, Zagreb. 94. Interviews with Sven Stilinović, May 19, 2014, Fedor Vučemilović, May 24, 2014, and Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić, May 16, 2014, all conducted in Zagreb. 95. Interview with Boris Demur and Fedor Vučemilović, May 24, 2014, Zagreb. Demur stated that he and his friends did not really listen to Yugoslav pop music and had a strong preference for U.K. and American pop. 96. Jakovljević, Alienation Effects, 240. 97. Untitled document about the exhibition-­action in Neboder passage, Vlado Martek, January 6, 1978, Archive of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. 98. “Komentari prolaznika sa Izložbi-­akcija na Trgu republike.” 99. Stilinović, “In Praise of Laziness.” 100. Susan Woodward, Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945–­1990 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 8–­9. 101. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment, 16. 102. Woodward, 367, 4, 12. 103. Woodward, 6. 104. Woodward, 191. 105. Woodward, 176–­7 7. 106. Woodward, 182. 107. Woodward, 191–­92. 108. Woodward, 203. 109. Ilić, Slow Burning Fire, 9. 110. Baljković, “Group of Six Artists,” 33. 111. Grupa šestorice autora, Izložbe-­akcije 1975–­1977. 112. “Komentari prolaznika sa Izložbi-­akcija na Trgu republike.” 113. Tom McDonough, “Situationist Space,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 257. 114. For a careful discussion of this work, Umjetnik radi, see Deirdre Madeleine Smith, “The Artist Works: An Imperfective Reading of Mladen Stilinović’s Artist at Work,” Art History 44, no. 5 (November 2021): 902–­21. 115. Hannes Grandits and Karin Taylor, eds., Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side: A History of Tourism in Socialism (1950s–­1980s) (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010), 20. 116. Thanks to Maryam Griffin for her comments on this point. 117. Grandits and Taylor, Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side, 3. 118. Grandits and Taylor, 9. 119. Vukmir, Grupa šestorice autora, 252. 120. As cited in Janka Vukmir, ed., Grupa šestorice autora [Group of Six Authors] (Zagreb: Soros centar za suvremenu umjetnost, 1998), 186. 121. Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 1. Alberro’s analysis has some remarkable resonances with Jon McKenzie’s arguments about the parallels between artistic, technological, and managerial performance in Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001). Jakovljević

Notes to Chapter 2  249 argues that McKenzie’s diagnosis of performance as a comprehensive paradigm that makes bodily action into the basis for all collectivity has relevance beyond the capitalist West and is pertinent to Yugoslavia, as well. Alienation Effects, 24–­25. 122. Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, 14–­15, 40–­41, 52. 123. Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 285–­86.

2. Written Assignments 1. Martek and Stilinović have been written about together in the context of discussions of the Group of Six Authors (e.g. Janka Vukmir, ed., Grupa šestorice autora [Group of Six Authors] [Zagreb: Soros centar za suvremenu umjetnost, 1998]). Observations about the differences between their oeuvres also periodically bob to the surface of Miško Šuvaković’s 2002 monograph Martek: Fatal Figures of the Artist (Zagreb: Meandar, 2002), and Branka Stipančić’s scholarship on both artists is also informed by a deep awareness of their interconnection (e.g., Personal Cuts: Art Scene in Zagreb from 1950 to Now [Zagreb: Kersch Offset with Les Presses du Réel, 2014]). However, the commonalities between their bodies of work merit a more explicit comparative analysis specifically concerning their use of language. Stipančić notes that an interest in language was at the basis of most of Stilinović’s early work. Branka Stipančić, ed., Mladen Stilinović: Nula iz vladanja [Zero for conduct] (Zagreb: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013), 36. 2. Whether Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian constitute separate languages or one pluricentric language is highly controversial in the region of the former Yugoslavia. An important analysis of the nationalist underpinnings of these debates, and argument for the linguistic validity of the pluricentric thesis, can be found in Snježana Kordić, Jezik i nacionalizam [Language and nationalism] (Zagreb: Durieux, 2010). For a recent analysis of the ideology of standardized language in Croatia and how it affects daily language use and instruction, see Anđel Starčević, Mate Kapović, and Daliborka Šarić, Jeziku je svejedno [Language could care less] (Zagreb: Sandorf, 2019). 3. Martek’s work resonates with the tendency toward contextually dependent opacity, which T. J. Demos argues is an important tactic of resistance for contemporary artists seeking to push back against the capitalist global art paradigm. Demos defines this opacity as “the reverse of transparency, . . . an obscurity that frustrates knowledge and that assigns to the represented a source of unknowability that is also . . . a sign of potentiality.” T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 145. 4. Stilinović’s act of dropping out of school was only a stepping stone to a life of rigorous intellectual pursuit led by his own interests and by those of his peers, including extensive exposure to both contemporary and historical art alongside his wife, Branka Stipančić. Stipančić states that she and Stilinović traveled widely to countries, including France and Germany, where they saw churches, frescos, and old masterpieces. Interview with Branka Stipančić, June 21, 2017, Zagreb. They also paid close attention to cultural events in Zagreb, not just in visual art but also in theater and music. Martina Kontošić, “Nismo čekali red” [We didn’t wait our turn; interview with Branka Stipančić], Kulturpunkt, December 21, 2018, https://www.kulturpunkt.hr/content/nismo-cekali-red?fbclid =IwAR0u06V4blaoQn6s6cWKu742EgD-PtiYaD6oGicAxvWZipxmit-uGOYPgHU. 5. This chapter, with its focus on questions of pedagogy and conceptualism, takes inspiration from the substantial body of literature that deals with pedagogy and social practice, though not primarily in relation to art under socialism. See Grant Kester, “Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public,” in Art, Activism,

250  Notes to Chapter 2 and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage, ed. Grant Kester, 103–­35 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998); Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011); Claire Bishop, “Pedagogic Projects,” in Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012), 241–­74. See my own contribution to this discussion in the chapter “The Pedagogical Subject of Participation,” in Adair Rounthwaite, Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 75–­111. 6. I draw here on the extraordinarily detailed account of these events that Dennison Rusinow provides in “Anatomy of a Student Revolt,” in Yugoslavia: Oblique Insights and Observations (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2008), 62–­104. 7. See Sabrina P. Ramet, “The Reform Crisis 1962–­1971,” in Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962–­91 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 81–­97. 8. John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 301; Branislav Jakovljević, Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-­Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–­91 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 196. 9. Jakovljević, Alienation Effects, 211–­24; Branislav Jakovljević, “Handworks: Yugoslav Gestural Culture and Performance Art,” in 1968–­1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change, eds. Claire Bishop and Marta Dziewańska (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 47. 10. In parallel terms, Ana Dević, in a 2007 text on Stilinović’s exhibition Vau-­vau (Woof woof), describes the work as “simultaneously capable of talking and being silent.” Dević, “He, He, He,” reprinted in Stipančić, Mladen Stilinović, 232. 11. Liz Kotz, Words to Be Look At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), 2. 12. Gerson Sher, Praxis: Marxist Criticism and Dissent in Socialist Yugoslavia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), xvii–­x viii. 13. This memory on the part of Mihaljević was conveyed to me in email correspondence with Branka Stipančić, July 27, 2022. 14. Sher, Praxis, 157, 170. 15. Sol LeWitt, in his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” writes right at the outset that “it is the objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry.” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 79. Lucy Lippard cites as an important precedent for some conceptualist practices the “cult of ‘neutrality’ in Minimalism, applied not only to the execution of objects but to the ferocious erasure of emotion and conventional notions of beauty.” Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1972; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), xiv. 16. Nataša Ilić, “An Artist Is Not to Follow the Tramway Tracks,” in Stipančić, Mladen Stilinović, 16. 17. Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 11. 18. Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved, 23. 19. Jakovljević, “Handworks,” 41–­42. 20. Jakovljević, Alienation Effects, 124–­26. 21. Rusinow, Yugoslavia, 64–­65. 22. Rusinow, 65. 23. Rusinow, 67.

Notes to Chapter 2  251 24. Rusinow, 67. 25. Rusinow, 77. 26. Rusinow, 95–­96. 27. Rusinow, 84. 28. Vukmir, Group of Six Authors, 257. 29. Vukmir, 283, 277. 30. Dimitrije Bašičević, ed., Grupa šestorice autora—­Akcije 1974–­77 (Zagreb: CEFFT, 1977), 4. 31. Mladen Stilinović, “In Praise of Laziness,” Moscow Art Magazine 22 (1998). 32. Mladen Stilinović, Crveno-­roza [Red-­pink] (Zagreb: Podrum, 1979). 33. Branka Stipančić and Alenka Gregorič, eds., Mladen Stilinović—­Umjetnik radi 1973–­1983 / Artist at Work 1973–­1983 (Zagreb: self-­pub., 2010), 31. 34. In 1977, for an exhibition at Zagreb’s City Gallery, Stilinović performed Blood Writing, in which he used his own blood to write phrases in a paper booklet, including “This is my blood,” “I bleed over this book,” and “Blood is not water,” stressing blood’s specific connection to a particular body and its lack of exchangeability. For a discussion of this work, see Jasna Jakšić, “Digitalizacija, arhiv i performans: www.digitizing-­ideas.hr,” Život umjetnosti 91 (2012): 103. 35. Lampe describes the increased urbanization of the Yugoslav population, and migration to Western Europe if no satisfactory jobs were available, as “creating a secular, Europeanized culture that did not fully owe its existence to the Communist regime.” Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 293. Igor Duda writes extensively about Yugoslavia’s consumer culture of the later twentieth century. See Igor Duda, Pronađeno blagostanje: Svakodnevni život i potrošačka kultura u Hrvatskoj 1970-­ih i 1980-­ih (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2014). 36. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 299. 37. Branka Stipančić, “Living Means Never Having to Attend Court (interview with Mladen Stilinović),” in 1 + 2 ≡, ed. Alejandra Labastida (Mexico City: Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, 2015), 56. 38. Stilinović, Crveno-­roza, n.p. 39. Jakovljević, Alienation Effects, 242. 40. Susan Woodward, Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945–­1990 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 84. In particular, they eliminated the unions’ ability to bargain for higher wages. 41. Ilić, “An Artist Is Not to Follow the Tramway Tracks,” 11. 42. The term white-­collar originated in the 1930s in the work of American writer Upton Sinclair, but its translation in Serbo-­Croatian was in use in Yugoslavia by this period. A case in point is that in 1979, the publishing house Naprijed put out Bijeli ovratnik, a Serbo-­ Croatian translation of C. Wright Mills’s White Collar: The American Middle Classes, a classic 1951 study of white-­collar labor. 43. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007). 44. Jakovljević, Alienation Effects, 210. 45. Kardelj as cited in Jakovljević, 209–­10. 46. “Osnovna samoupravna interesna zajednica za standard učenika i studenata Općine Županja,” Nacionalni arhivski informacijski sustav, accessed May 11, 2018, http:// arhinetarhiv.hr/details.aspx?ItemId=3_17720. 47. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 317. 48. This statement reflects my conversations with Branka Stipančić (June 21, 2017, Zagreb) and Vlado Martek (June 22, 2017, Zagreb).

252  Notes to Chapter 2 49. Igor Zabel, Mladen Stilinović (Ljubljana: Mala galerija/Moderna galerija, 1994), first page of unpaginated essay. 50. See my discussion of this dynamic in “Lazy Objects: Viewing Mladen Stilinović’s Exploitation of the Dead,” Tate Papers 30 (Autumn 2018): https://www.tate.org.uk/research /publications/tate-papers/30/rounthwaite-lazy-objects. See also Ivana Bago and Antonia Majača’s discussion of Stilinović’s decision to display works from that cycle in a workers’ canteen in the exhibition catalog Moving Forwards, Counting Backwards (Mexico City: MUAC Museum, 2012), 89. 51. Jakovljević, “Handworks,” 42–­43. 52. Kotz, Words to Be Looked At, 7. 53. Branka Stipančić, Poezija u akciji –­Poetry in Action (Zagreb: DELVE Institute for Duration, Location, and Variables, 2010), 31. 54. Interview with Vlado Martek, June 22, 2017, Zagreb. “To je moja glavna ideja da ja proširujem poeziju zato da ona da ne bi spavala u bibliotekama, u knjigama mrtva kao takva.” 55. On the centrality of sound for Monastyrski, see Boris Groys, “Listening to the Sounds,” in Andrei Monastyrski: Elementary Poetry, trans. Yelena Kalinsky and Brian Droitcoeur (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Press, 2019), vi. 56. Dubravka Đurić, “Elementary Processes in Poetry and a Redefined Field of Poetry,” in Vlado Martek: Konceptualistička poezija (1975–­1983) (Zagreb: Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, 2010), 92. 57. Stipančić, Poetry in Action, 36–­37. 58. The approximate date that the artist gave me for this work is 1976. Conversation with Vlado Martek, July 11, 2019, Rijeka, Croatia. 59. Thanks to Darko Šimičić for his thoughts on this point. 60. On Oiticica’s Bólides, see Irene Small, “Ready-­Constructible Color,” in Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 131–­80. Martek says he had no awareness of Oiticica until our discussion in Rijeka on July 11, 2019. 61. Stipančić, Poetry in Action, 33–­3 4. 62. Stipančić, 34. 63. Josip Depolo and Rene Bakalović, “Do kada će mame hraniti umjetnike,” Polet, January 31, 1979, 8. In Croatian the text reads: “Sve mirne građane ovog grada, pa tako i mene, prepadali su u drugoj polovini prošle godine imperativi napisani krajnje jednostavno crnim slovima na malim bijelim plakatima polijepljenim po gradu: ‘Čitajte Rimbauda,’ ‘Čitajte Majakovskog.’ Mislio sam da je to prvi zastrašujući akt neke fanatičke terorističke organizacije poludjelih profesora književnosti koji će nas kasnije žestokim represalijama prisiljavati da od svakog spomenutog pjesnika naučimo za početak po deset pjesmica.” 64. Interview with Vlado Martek, June 22, 2017, Zagreb. In Croatian: “Nije važno. Važno je da uopće se susretne sa takvim nagovorom, sa takvom agitacijom da se čita jedan autor. I da se u čovjeku stvori znatiželja, pa i kod onih polupismenih, pa koga vraga, tko je taj Rimbaud da bi ga trebalo čitati. Ja znam da, znate šta ono, vi bacite sjeme, kao što je Bog bacio sjeme. Neko padne u trnje, ne nikne, neko padne na kamen, ne nikne, neko padne u zemlju pa nikne.” 65. Interview with Vlado Martek, June 22, 2017, Zagreb. 66. On the cultural dimensions of the Illyrian movement of 1835–­1841, which focused on consolidating a single language that its proponents saw as a necessary basis for a unified South Slavic state, see Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 43–­4 4. 67. For a discussion of the codification of language as nationalist ideology, see Kordić, Jezik i nacionalizam; Starčević, Kapović, and Šarić, Jeziku je svejedno.

Notes to Chapter 2  253 68. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 305–­6. 69. “Biography,” Mladen Stilinović, accessed August 22, 2019, https://mladenstilinovic .com/bio/. 70. See the following anthology of poems: Vlado Pavletić, ed., Pjesnici Zagrebu [Poets to Zagreb] (Zagreb: Grafički zavod Hrvatske, 1965). 71. Šuvaković, Fatal Figures of the Artist, 186. 72. Vlado Martek, “Hirarhija simetrije,” in Akcije pisanja (Zagreb: Naklada MD and SCCA, 1997), 14–­15. 73. Martek, 14. 74. Martek, 14. 75. Šuvaković, Fatal Figures of the Artist, 227. 76. Nina Ožegović, “Političari su prazne lutke, pajaci koji su banke napunili slamom” [Interview with Vlado Martek], T-­Portal, March 18, 2015, https://www.tportal.hr/kultura /clanak/politicari-su-prazne-lutke-pajaci-koje-su-banke-napunile-slamom-20150305. 77. For a discussion of the shifting politics of Croatia’s recruitment of foreign students, see Peter Wright, “Between the Market and Solidarity: Commercializing Development Aid and International Higher Education in Socialist Yugoslavia,” Nationalities Papers 49, no. 3 (May 2021): 462–­82. 78. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 163f. 79. The latter was made as a gift for Darko Šimičić, when Šimičić still worked at a bank. Conversation with Darko Šimičić, June 25, 2019, Zagreb. 80. Stipančić, Poetry in Action, 37. 81. Stipančić, 32. 82. Thanks to Ivana Bago for her generous insight on these two points. 83. For a historical overview of artists’ publications in twentieth-­century Yugoslavia, see Darko Šimičić, “Avant-­Garde, Neo-­Avant-­Garde, and Post-­Avant-­Garde Magazines and Books,” in Impossible Histories: Historic Avant-­Gardes, Neo-­Avant-­Gardes, and Post-­Avant-­ Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–­1991, ed. Dubravka Đurić and Miško Šuvaković, 294-­330 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006). 84. Bago notes that though these two generations diverged in their political and aesthetic models of artistic creation, they shared a belief in the transformative power of the avant-­g arde. Ivana Bago, “The City as a Space of Plastic Happening: From Grand Proposals to Exceptional Gestures in the Art of the 1970s in Zagreb,” Journal of Urban History (2017): 9. 85. In “In Praise of Laziness,” Stilinović describes laziness as “the absence of movement and thought, dumb time—­total amnesia. It is also indifference, staring at nothing, non-­activity, impotence. It is sheer stupidity, a time of pain, of futile concentration.” He created numerous works on the topic of pain from the 1970s to the first decade of the 2000s, including white dice of 1977 with pain (bol) written on every surface in pencil. 86. In Croatian: “Dajem si rok predsadržaja da bih prošao kroz uvjete za suvremenu poeziju. U doba predpjevanja nalazim genezu imena iz anonimnosti.” 87. “Svjesno se povlačim iz pjesme / odričem se svih sadržaja poezije / koji nastaju iz jezika kao materijala rada / prihvaćam odgovornost da napišem pjesmu / predpjesnik.” 88. Sher, Praxis, 33. 89. Predrag Vranički, “On the Problem of Practice,” Praxis (international edition) 1 (1965): 43. 90. Jakovljević (Alienation Effects, 15–­16) provides an analysis of Marx’s argument in “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” (1844) that labor is the primary mode of

254  Notes to Chapter 2 alienation. For the original citation, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1975), 324. 91. See the discussion of this tendency in Sher, Praxis, 73–­79. 92. Milan Kangrga, “Smisao Marxove filozofije,” Praxis (Yugoslav edition) 3 (1967): 100. I use the English translation provided by Sher, Praxis, 81. 93. Jakovljević, Alienation Effects, 20–­21. 94. Jakovljević, 183–­86. 95. Jakovljević, 123–­24. 96. As Bojana Videkanić shows, the ideological position of children was produced especially through organized youth activities that were key sites for cementing Tito’s authority and singularity, creating a sort of omnipresence of the leader’s body via the performing bodies of youth. Bojana Videkanić, “First and Last Emperor: Representations of the President, Bodies of the Youth,” in Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, ed. Breda Luthar and Maruša Pušnik, 37–­38 (Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2010). 97. Stilinović, Crveno-­roza, n.p. 98. Videkanić provides an evocative description of traveling with her mother on a Sarajevo tram as a very young child and yelling, “There he is!” When asked, “Who?,” she replied, “Tito!,” to the amusement of everyone on board the tram. Videkanić reads this as an unconscious performance, on her part, of the ideological structure that encouraged Yugoslav citizens to perceive Tito’s body as ever-­present. “First and Last Emperor,” 37. 99. Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-­Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–­1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 430. 100. Notably, when shown in gallery settings, Martek prefers that the work be hung floating in space as opposed to up against a wall, which I speculate implies a more dynamic relation to space and bodies. Darko Šimičić, who owns the work, specifies that it must be displayed that way when on loan. Email correspondence with Darko Šimičić, July 22, 2022. 101. Interview with Vlado Martek, June 22, 2017, Zagreb. “Da, to je moja sudbina, ja čitav svijet, sve bih ja izverbalizirao, a to je . . . sve što su krajnosti nije dobro. U mladosti su krajnosti poželjne, u zrelom dobu ne.”

3. The Life and Death of the Trace 1. Željko Jerman and Darko Šimičić, Željko Jerman: My Year, 1977 (Zagreb: Meandar and SCCA, 1999), 7. 2. The centrality of this work to Jerman’s oeuvre is evidenced by the facts that he produced another iteration in 1997 and was making plans for a third, in 2007, at the time of his death in 2006. Email correspondence with Darko Šimičić, April 11, 2021. See Željko Jerman, Moja godina II (Zagreb: Studio Muzeja suvremene umjetnosti, 1998), exhibition catalog. 3. FOTOTOT is a neologism meaning “photodeath.” The title of the work is typically translated as “Identity Analysis” or “Exchange of Identity.” 4. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 77–­78. 5. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 14. 6. Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part 1 (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015), 96. 7. Carol Armstrong, “Cameraless,” in Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature, ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 94–­95. 8. Marijan Susovski, Nova umjetnička praksa 1966–­1978 (Zagreb: Gallery of Contempo-

Notes to Chapter 3  255 rary Art, 1978), exhibition catalog; published simultaneously in English as The New Artistic Practice in Yugoslavia 1966–­1978, trans. Vera Andrassy and Maša Marušić. 9. Sandra Križić Roban, Na drugi pogled: Pozicije suvremene hrvatske fotografije [At second glance: Positions of contemporary Croatian photography] (Zagreb: UPI 2M PLUS, 2010), 238. 10. Križić Roban, Na drugi pogled, 238. 11. As Leonida Kovač points out, this work denies originality both at the level of the textual statement and in its format as a poster. Leonida Kovač, “(Im)possible Photographs,” in Impossible Histories: Historic Avant-­Gardes, Neo-­Avant-­Gardes, and Post-­Avant-­Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–­1991, ed. Dubravka Đurić and Miško Šuvaković, 170–­208 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 288. On Trbuljak’s broader oeuvre, see also the recent major catalog, Goran Trbuljak and Tevž Logar, eds., Goran Trbuljak: Before and After Retrospective (Berlin: Gurgur Editions, 2018). 12. Ješa Denegri notes a division in this period between “the photography of photographers” and the “photography of artists.” Ješa Denegri, “A Note for Željko Jerman,” in Jerman, ed. Ješa Denegri and Tevž Logar (Ljubljana: Galerija Škuc, 2008), 20. CEFFT, though it had a conceptual orientation due to its leadership, showed work from both types of practitioners. 13. Goran Trbuljak also created some photogram works in the mid-­1970s, including prints made in 1975 by placing photo paper on the illuminated row numbers of the Student Center cinema. But he was less focused on experimenting formally with the photogram, as such, than were Dabac and Jerman. 14. Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos, Petar Dabac: Fotogrami (Zagreb: CEFFT, Galerija grada Zagreba, 1975). 15. See Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos, ed., Foto San Francisco (Zagreb: CEFFT, 1977). The catalog for Contemporary Polish Photography contains an interesting essay by Ursula Czartoryska in which she situates the slow start of contemporary photography in Poland as a consequence of the Holocaust. Czartoryska stresses the heterogeneity of the practices that eventually emerged there but argues that they are united by attempts to grapple with the relationship between the subjective and intentional qualities of photography and the found or self-­generating nature of its images: “whether one should rather surrender to the flow of events or the inertia of the registering material.” These concerns about photography’s subjective nature versus the primacy of its images as stand-­alone signifiers are ones that we can see played out in many other contexts, including the Yugoslav one, in this period. Czartoryska, untitled essay in Suvremena poljska fotografija, ed. Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos (Zagreb: CEFFT, 1977), n.p. 16. See Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos, ed., Borba u New Yorku (Zagreb: CEFFT, 1977), exhibition catalog. 17. Email correspondence with Zoran Popović, March 16, 2019. 18. Branka Stipančić describes this rich film program in an interview with Martina Kontošić, “Nismo čekali red” [We didn’t wait our turn], Kulturpunkt, December 21, 2018, https://www.kulturpunkt.hr/content/nismo-cekali-red?fbclid=IwAR0u06V4blaoQn6s6cW Ku742EgD-PtiYaD6oGicAxvWZipxmit-uGOYPgHU. 19. Željko Jerman: Subjective and Elementary Photographs, Photo and Photogram Paintings, 1970–­1995 (Zagreb: Moderna galerija, 1996), 41. Email correspondence with Darko Šimičić, July 22, 2022. 20. In an interview with Marina Viculin, Jerman described hating Dabac in his twenties but later coming to have great respect for his ability to capture atmosphere. Marina Viculin, “Sunce u Istri,” Start no. 574, January 19, 1991. In an interview with Jerman published in

256  Notes to Chapter 3 Pitanje in 1975, Nena Baljković positions Jerman’s creative destruction of photographic method as an alternative to both the social photography of the Zagreb School and its heirs and the fetishization of technique within “art photography.” Nena Baljković, “Željko Jerman: Fotografija kao vlastit trag,” Pitanje 7–­8 (1975). 21. Ješa Denegri discusses the importance of Putar in his text for the catalog Željko Jerman: Fotoslike (Zagreb: Galerija Društvenog doma Trešnjevka, 1986). Branka Hlevnjak also notes the importance of Putar in securing a place for Jerman’s work in contemporary art history. Branka Hlevnjak, “Na tragu homo dupleksa,” OKO 405 (September 24–­October 8, 1987). 22. “Subjective photography” designates the work from 1970 to 1974. Denegri describes these different stages evocatively in a 1978 review of an exhibition of Jerman’s work in the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade. He writes that they are forms of exploration or verification like a scientific progress, which rejects “existing propositions” for what and how art should be. Ješa Denegri, “Željko Jerman: Galerija Studentskog kulturnog centra,” Umetnost 57 (1978). See also Denegri, “Note for Željko Jerman,” 21. 23. Stojan Dimitrijević, “‘Nova fotografija’ i ne baš nove ideje” [New photography but not very new ideas], Život umjetnosti 21 (1974): 81. 24. Radoslav Putar, Željko Jerman: Subjektivna fotografija (Zagreb: CEFFT, 1975), exhibition catalog. “Željko Jerman nije prvi pokušao prijeći granice i savladati ograničenja klasične fotografije. Ali, u nas upravo je on to učinio najradikalnije i s najvećom mjerom uvjerenja u opravdanosti svoje namjere i načina. I učinio je to upravo u trenutku zastoja ili bar stabilizacije razvitka prometanja fotografije u našoj sredini.” 25. Damir Grubić, Željko Jerman: Elementarna fotografija 1974–­1984 (Zaprešić, Croatia: Galerija Narodnog sveučilišta, 1984), exhibition catalog. 26. Antun Maračić, Željko Jerman deset godina poslije (Zagreb: Galerija Forum and Kulturno informativni centar, 2016), exhibition catalog, 5. 27. The classic account of this centering can be found in Jonathan Crary’s discussion of mass cultural optical and precinematic devices in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). 28. Conversations with Darko Šimičić, June 25, 2019, Zagreb, and with Vlado Martek, July 4, 2019, Zagreb. Tevž Logar also writes that Jerman “flirted” with death and was fascinated with and unafraid of it. Tevž Logar, “Jerman,” in Denegri and Logar, Jerman, 11. 29. Viculin, “Sunce u Istri.” 30. Viculin. 31. Jerman wrote this short 1988 text for program #1 of Fotogalerija Novo Mesto, in Novo Mesto, Slovenia. It was originally published in Slovenian and English. 32. Hlevnjak describes Jerman as obsessed with “women, or more precisely the face behind which hides a secret life.” Branka Hlevnjak, Željko Jerman: Povratak pramediju (Zagreb: Galerija Događanja, 1989). 33. Jerman, text for Fotogalerija Novo Mesto. 34. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 77. 35. Barthes, 79. 36. Barthes, 14. Vlado Martek, in an essay on Jerman, does not mention Barthes but locates Die Photography! in relation to a similar structure of the photograph’s intimacy with both life and death. Vlado Martek, “Živjela fotografija” [Long live photography], in Neprilagođeni [Misfits] (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 2005), 56. 37. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 9. Looking at a photograph of his recently deceased mother when she was a child ultimately brings Barthes to a “way of resolving Death,” because he

Notes to Chapter 3  257 comes to see his mother as his own child, gaining a sense both of his own particularly and of the universality of the human race (72). 38. Radoslav Putar, “Željko Jerman,” in Željko Jerman: Early Works (Zagreb: Galerija Događanja, 1983). 39. Celia Hawkesworth, Zagreb: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 87–­88. 40. Denegri notes that Jerman’s works either have literal/metaphoric titles or simply dates; this is one of the latter. Denegri, Željko Jerman. 41. Jerman showed the first altered version of the found image, plus a photocopy of it further modified with sloppy red paint to read “Poster à la Jerman,” and the actual poster for his 1975 show Subjective Photography mounted together on a piece of board at the exhibition-­action in Jesuit Square on June 14 of that year. 42. Maračić, Željko Jerman. Šimičić also writes that opening the shop was an attempt, on Jerman’s part, to settle down. Darko Šimičić, “Jerman: One of the Group of Six,” in Denegri, Jerman, 50. 43. Experiments with digital photography began in the 1950s. In 1975, Steven Sasson of Kodak produced the first self-­contained digital camera, which weighed eight pounds and recorded images onto cassettes. The first consumer digital camera, the Dycam Model 1, became available worldwide in 1990. 44. Jeff Wall, “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” in Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 109. 45. See Silverman’s discussion of Wall in the chapter “Water in the Camera,” in Miracle of Analogy, 67–­85. 46. Vlado Martek, “Rococo Biographies,” in Janka Vukmir, ed., Grupa šestorice autora [Group of Six Authors] (Zagreb: Soros centar za suvremenu umjetnost, 1998), 10. 47. Viculin, “Sunce u Istri.” 48. Kipke, “Mašine za transformiranje energije” [Machines for the transformation of energy], Studentski list 825 (January 19, 1983). 49. Email correspondence with Darko Šimičić, July 22, 2022. 50. Željko Jerman’s personal diary, undated entry of late 1976, collection of Bojana Švertasek. 51. See the biography of Jerman in Željko Jerman: Subjective and Elementary Photographs, 41. 52. Email correspondence with Darko Šimičić, June 22, 2020. 53. Zdenko Rus, “Trace,” in Željko Jerman: Subjective and Elementary Photographs, 11. 54. Ješa Denegri, “To Exist, to Leave a Mark,” Museum of Avant-­Garde, https://www .avantgarde-museum.com/en/Ješa-denegri-postojati-ostavljati-trag-croatian~no6451/. In “A Note for Željko Jerman,” Denegri also describes the early work as “unaesthetic, informal and non-­formative” (21). 55. Interview with Vlasta Delimar, July 3, 2019, Zagreb. 56. M. Zorić [pseudonym for Zvonimir Milčec], “Hipik sa zanatskom firmom” [Hippie with a small business], Plavi vjesnik 85 (May 11, 1970): 10. 57. Zorić, “Hipik sa zanatskom firmom,” 10. 58. Šimičić, “Jerman,” 50. 59. Jason Eastman, “The Hegemonic Masculinity of the Rolling Stones and Where They Came to Rest,” in The Rolling Stones: Sociological Perspectives, ed. Helmut Staubmann (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2013), 175–­76. Note that at the same time as it carved out a new identity, that change cannot be considered antihegemonic in the sense that it relied

258  Notes to Chapter 3 both on the appropriation of Black American music and stereotyped gender performances on the part of both male performers and female fans. See Ian McPhedran’s discussion of these complexities in his dissertation “‘He’s So Fine’: Representations of Masculinity in Rock and Roll Culture from 1953–­1963” (PhD diss., University of Guelph, 2005). 60. Radina Vučetić, “Džuboks (Jukebox): The First Rock’n’Roll Magazine in Socialist Yugoslavia,” in Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, ed. Breda Luthar and Maruša Pušnik, 37–­38 (Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2010), 145. 61. Darko Šimičić, “Having Been There: Reading and Viewing of Željko Jerman’s My Year 1977,” in Željko Jerman: Moja godina 1977, ed. Darko Šimičić, 379–­83 (Zagreb: Institute for Contemporary Art, 1997), 379. 62. Šimičić, “Jerman,” 51. 63. Email correspondence with Darko Šimičić, July 22, 2022. 64. Antoaneta Pasinović, “Čovjekov stan dio je njegove sudbine” [Man’s apartment is a part of his destiny], in Izazov mišljenja o prostornom jedinstvu [The challenge of conceptualizing spatial unity], ed. Sandra Križić Roban (Zagreb: Institut za povijest umjetnosti, 2001), 123, my translation. “Tako organiziranje stana predstavlja organizaciju međuljudskih odnosa: njihovu sliku i njihovo oblikovanje kao (svakodnevno) zbivanje.” 65. Pasinović, “Čovjekov stan dio je njegove sudbine,” 123. 66. Email correspondence with Ivana Bago, July 22, 2022. 67. Zsófia Lóránd, “‘A Politically Non-­dangerous Revolution Is Not a Revolution’: Critical Readings of the Concept of Sexual Revolution by Yugoslav Feminists in the 1970s,” European Review of History 22, no. 1 (2015): 123. 68. Lóránd, “‘Politically Non-­dangerous Revolution,” 124–­25. 69. Jasmina Tumbas demonstrates how Kesić and Drakulić were able to exercise substantial agency despite pushback from their male editors and how art published in Start in 1979–­1980 treated questions of women’s sexuality, traditional morality, and the influence of mass media on women’s subjectivities in complex ways. Jasmina Tumbas, “I Am Jugoslovenka!” Feminist Performance Politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 64–­68. 70. Slavenka Drakulić, “Žena i seksualna revolucija” [Woman and the sexual revolution], Dometi 2, no. 12 (1980): 49. 71. Drakulić, “Žena i seksualna revolucija,” 50. “Prije svega seks se instrumentalizira, upotrebljava se i troši isključivo za ispunjenje lične sebične požude bez ostvarenja nekog istinskog kontakta među partnerima.” 72. Vladimir Maleković, “Foto-­k amerski dilitantizam,” Vjesnik, January 29, 1978. Maleković identifies the same supposedly problematic tendencies in the work of Sanja Iveković and Dalibor Martinis. 73. Thanks to Ivana Bago for her insight in this regard. 74. Interview with Vlasta Delimar, June 17, 2017, Zagreb. 75. Thanks to Pavle Levi for his insight about the slickness of Blow-­Up in contrast to Jerman’s work. 76. For a discussion of the work of Abramović and Ulay, see Marina Abramović, Dorine Mignot, and Ulay, eds., The Lovers (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1989); Thomas McEvilley, Art, Love, Friendship: Marina Abramović and Ulay, Together & Apart (Kingston, N.Y.: McPherson, 2010). Also see Charles Green, “Doppelgangers and the Third Force: The Artistic Collaborations of Gilbert & George and Marina Abramović/Ulay,” Art Journal 59, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 36–­45, in which Green argues that Abramović and Ulay’s works “crossed the

Notes to Chapter 3  259 limits of normal sensation and the boundaries of gender into unrepresentable experience of which the index was the enactment and presentation of extreme self-­absorption” (37). 77. See Jasmina Tumbas’s incisive analysis of the gendered dynamics of this performance in “Decision as Art: Performance in the Balkans,” in Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere: Event-­Based Art in Late Socialist Europe, ed. Katalin Cseh-­Varga and Adam Czirak, 184–­201 (London: Routledge, 2020), 187–­90. 78. Email correspondence with Darko Šimičić, July 22, 2022. 79. Mirjana Dugandžija, “Vlasta Delimar: Misli se da sam imala gomile ljubavnika, a imala sam tri muškarca u životu” [Vlasta Delimar: Everyone thinks I’ve had tons of lovers, but I’ve been with three men in my life], Jutarnji list, January 12, 2020, https://www.jutarnji .hr/kultura/art/vlasta-delimar-misli-se-da-sam-imala-gomile-ljubavnika-a-imala-sam-tri -muskarca-u-Životu/9844045. 80. Email correspondence with Ivana Bago, July 22, 2022. 81. Davor Matičević, ed., Vlasta Delimar and Željko Jerman: Vjenčanje [Wedding] (Zagreb: Galerije grada Zagreba, 1982), n.p. 82. Željko Jerman and Vlasta Delimar, Pokušaj poistovjećenja (performance) [Attempt at identification (performance)] (Belgrade: Galerija Srećna nova umetnost, SKC, 1980), n.p. 83. Jerman and Delimar, Pokušaj poistovjećenja, n.p. Croatian citation: “U svom radu bavimo se sa dva dijerencijalna aspekta sagledavanja egzistencijalnog. Prvi vid mogli bi ukratno defininirati kao—­samoanalizu uzajamnih odnosa, a drugi kao—­k ritiku društvenih konvencija. U prvom slučaju polazište je osobni egocentrizam; ustanovljenje svoga ja, bavljanje njime, znači—­svijest o svojem ja.’ Daljnja nadgradnja te vlastitosti je vezanost uz drugi ego—­‘svijest o zajedništvu’, ustanovljenje, bavljenje njome. Finalan epilog samoanalize uzajamnih odnosa je egzaktan zaključak da individua egzistira prvenstveno onda kada svoje bivstvovanje bazira na svojoj ličnosti.” 84. Maj 75 E, 1981, n.p. “Analiziramo i kritiziramo postojeće simbole prezentiranja spolova, od medicinskog znakovnog označavanja, kroz odjeću, do na zapadu uvriježenih pigmentnih simbola—­muške plave i ženske roza boje.” 85. For an analysis of the disciplinary function of police and medical photography, see John Tagg, Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). For a consideration of the relationship between discipline and ethnographic photography, see Tina Campt, “Striking Poses in a Tense Grammar: Stasis and the Frequency of Black Refusal,” in Listening to Images (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 47–­68. 86. Damir Grubić, “Performance taktilna komunikacija” [The performance ‘Tactile Communication’], Polet 158–­159 (1981): 30. 87. Interview with Vlasta Delimar, July 3, 2019, Zagreb. Delimar stresses that in this and in other iterations of the performance she conducted solo, the artists only touched particular audience members if those people seemed to invite it. 88. Damir Grubić, “Performance taktilna komunikacija,” 30. 89. See Amelia Jones’s important critique of the idea that performance directly communicates artists’ intentions in Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56 (Winter 1997): 13–­14, 17. 90. Vlasta Delimar, “I, Vlasta Delimar, the Rope-­Maker’s Daughter,” in To sam ja / This Is I: Vlasta Delimar, ed. Martina Munivrana (Zagreb: Museum of Contemporary Art and Domino, 2014), 14. 91. Interview with Vlasta Delimar, July 3, 2019, Zagreb. 92. Interview with Vlasta Delimar, July 3, 2019, Zagreb.

260  Notes to Chapter 3 93. Interview with Vlasta Delimar, July 3, 2019, Zagreb. 94. Delimar, “I, Vlasta Delimar,” 15. 95. Catherine Spencer, Beyond the Happening: Performance Art and the Politics of Communication (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2020), 187. 96. Barthes, Camera Lucida. See also Geoffrey Batchen, Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida” (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009); Carol Mavor, Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans Soleil, and Hiroshima Mon Amour (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). 97. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 10–­15. 98. See Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia”; Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ 28, no. 3 (September 2006): 1–­10; Jane Blocker, What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Mechtild Widrich, “Can Photographs Make It So? Repeated Outbreaks of Valie Export’s Genital Panic since 1969,” in Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, ed. Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield Jones, 89–­103 (Bristol: Intellect, 2012); Rebecca Schneider, “Solo, Solo, Solo,” in After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, ed. Gavin Butt, 23–­46 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). 99. Interview with Vlasta Delimar, July 3, 2019, Zagreb. 100. Ivana Bago, “The City as a Space of Plastic Happening: From Grand Proposals to Exceptional Gestures in the Art of the 1970s in Zagreb,” Journal of Urban History 44, no. 1 (2018): 35. 101. Željko Jerman and Vlado Martek, “Jedini suvremeni romantični ukaz umjetnosti” [The only contemporary romantic decree on art], Maj 75 C (1979), n.p. 102. Jerman and Martek, “Jedini suvremeni romantični ukaz umjetnosti,” n.p. 103. See Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-­Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 32–­45, 52. 104. Interview with Vlado Martek, June 22, 2017, Zagreb. 105. See Ivana Bago and Antonia Majača, Moving Forwards, Counting Backwards (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2012); Ivana Bago and Antonia Majača, “Can You Speak of This? Yes, I Can,” in Where Everything Is Yet to Happen (Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina: Protok Center for Visual Communications with Institute for Duration, Location, and Variables, 2009), exhibition catalog, chap. 1. 106. See an incisive critique of this tendency in Éva Forgács, “How the New Left Invented East-­European Art,” Centropa 3, no. 2 (May 2003): 93–­104. 107. Mladen Stilinović, “Tekst nogom” [Foot writing], in Tekstovi / Texts (Zagreb: self-­ pub., 2011), n.p.

4. Loving Kitsch 1. Patricia Kiš, “Tom Gotovac i Vlasta Delimar goli se prošetali Ilicom,” Jutarnji list, September 2, 2009, https://www.jutarnji.hr/kultura/art/tom-gotovac-i-vlasta-delimar-goli -se-prosetali-ilicom-2837825. The three artists appeared from different directions at the intersection of Ilica and Gundulić Streets, joined hands, walked together for around eight hundred feet to the Oktogon shopping arcade, and then parted ways. 2. Vlasta Delimar, Vlasta Delimar: To sam ja / This Is I, ed. Martina Munivrana (Zagreb: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2014), 27. On Božić’s experience as a veteran, see Suzana Marjanić, “Vlasta Delimar on A Woman Is a Woman Is a Woman . . . : The Auto/biographical Performances,” in Delimar, Vlasta Delimar, 48. 3. Kiš, “Tom Gotovac i Vlasta Delimar.” 4. Delimar, Vlasta Delimar, 7.

Notes to Chapter 4  261 5. Vlado Martek, “A Note on Tomislav Gotovac, a Bit Encrypted,” in Apsolutni umjetnik Antonio Gotovac Lauer / Absolute Artist Antonio Gotovac Lauer, by Vlasta Delimar and Milan Božić (Zagreb: Domino, 2012), 34. 6. Ana Janevski, “As Soon as I Open My Eyes I See a Film: Experiment in the Art of Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s,” in As Soon as I Open My Eyes I See a Film: Experiment in the Art of Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s, ed. Ana Janevski (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 35–­36. 7. Slobodan Šijan, Tomislav Gotovac: Life as a Film Experiment (Zagreb: Tomislav Gotovac Institute and Croatian Film Association, 2018), 20–­22. 8. Jasmina Tumbas, “I Am Jugoslovenka!” Feminist Performance Politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 61. 9. Tumbas notes that Delimar has been known to make antifeminist and homophobic statements in public (“I Am Jugoslovenka!,” 15, 172). This has also been reflected in my own experiences of conversations with the artist. At the same time, as Tumbas demonstrates throughout her book, Delimar deals trenchantly with questions of women’s pleasure and violence against women in ways that speak powerfully to core feminist concerns. 10. Bourriaud terms the space of the relational artwork a “micro-­utopia,” a formulation that has received heaps of critique from other scholars. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998; Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), 25. 11. Originally published in Želimir Koščević, “Modeli u zraku” [Models in the air], Moment 18 (April–­June 1990): 57–­58, with an excerpt translated in Branislava Anđelković and Branislav Dimitrijević, “The Final Decade: Art, Society, Trauma, and Normality,” in On Normality: Art in Serbia 1989–­2001, by Branislava Anđelković et al. (Belgrade: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005), 11. 12. Dragana Obradović, Writing the Yugoslav Wars: Literature, Postmodernism, and the Ethics of Representation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 67. 13. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 248. 14. Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being, 251. 15. Danilo Kiš, “Doba sumnje” [Era of suspicion], in Homo Poeticus, ed. Dimitrije Tasić (Belgrade: Beogradski izdavačko-­g rafički zavod, 1995), 286. 16. Dubravka Ugrešić, “Gingerbread Heart Culture,” in Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays (College Station: Penn State University Press, 1998), 53. Thanks to Milena Tomic for our discussion of this essay as part of the panel “Communist Kitsch” for the 2019 College Art Association Conference. 17. Ugrešić, “Gingerbread Heart Culture,” 51. 18. Ugrešić, 52–­53. 19. For a polar opposite contrast in terms of attitudes on the value of high versus mass culture, see Clement Greenberg’s 1939 essay “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch” and then “The Recovery of Kitsch” by scholar of Irish literature David Lloyd. Whereas Greenberg sees high culture as crucial to the defense of freedom against the fascist mass-­subjectification induced by kitsch, Lloyd argues that for migrant communities, kitsch becomes “the congealed memory of traumas too intimate and too profound to be lived over without stylization and attitude.” Where others see kitsch as a denial of the real, Lloyd reverses the terms to call it “popular culture’s indecorous revenge on aesthetic illusion.” Clement Greenberg, “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 3–­21; David Lloyd, “The Recovery of Kitsch,” in Ireland after History (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press/Field Day, 1999), 91.

262  Notes to Chapter 4 20. Greenberg’s classic model is one of the most rigid in terms of the relationship between a commodity object and its purported reception. When Greenberg states that kitsch “is mechanical and operates by formulas” and “changes according to style, but remains always the same,” he is finding sameness and a mechanical quality not only in the commodity objects themselves but also in the types of viewership they demand. Greenberg, “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch,” 10. 21. Umberto Eco, “The Structure of Bad Taste,” in The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 195. 22. Eco, “Structure of Bad Taste,” 181–­84. 23. Eco, 201. 24. Eco, 201–­6. 25. See Obradović’s discussion of Ugrešić’s approach in Writing the Yugoslav Wars, 85. 26. Marina Gržinić, “Vlasta Delimar,” in Munivrana, ed., Vlasta Delimar: To sam ja / This Is I, 181. 27. Tumbas, “I Am Jugoslovenka!”, 88. Tumbas draws this information from an interview she conducted with Delimar on June 12, 2019. 28. Bojana Videkanić, “First and Last Emperor: Representations of the President, Bodies of the Youth,” in Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia, ed. Breda Luthar and Maruša Pušnik (Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2010), 37–­38. 29. Videkanić, “First and Last Emperor,” 38. 30. Ješa Denegri, “The Individual Mythology of Tomislav Gotovac,” in Tomislav Gotovac: Čim ujutro otvorim oči, vidim film, ed. Aleksandar Battista Ilić and Diana Nenadić, 268–­76 (Zagreb: Croatian Film Association and Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003), 269. 31. Janevski, “As Soon as I Open My Eyes,” 29. 32. Goran Trbuljak and Hrvoje Turković, “It’s All a Movie: A Conversation with Tomislav Gotovac,” in Ilić and Nenadić, Tomislav Gotovac, 291. 33. Denegri, “Individual Mythology of Tomislav Gotovac,” 269. 34. Sandra Križić Roban, “A Slit through Photography: Innovative Strategies in Croatian Photography during the 1960s and 1970s,” photographies 11, no. 2–­3 (July 19, 2018): 215–­3 4, https://doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2018.1445019. 35. Trbuljak and Turković, “It’s All a Movie,” 291. Suzana Marjanić clarifies that the woman present was the photographer’s girlfriend. Suzana Marjanić, “Priroda (u) umjetnosti performansa,” Etnološka tribina 44, no. 37 (2014): 92. 36. Eco, “Structure of Bad Taste,” 185. 37. Branka Stipančić, “For Me, Reality Is Art: An Interview with Tomislav Gotovac,” M’ars: Časopis Moderne galerije Ljubljana 9, no. 3–­4 (1997): 16. 38. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 45–­46. 39. Denegri, “Individual Mythology of Tomislav Gotovac,” 268. 40. Trbuljak and Turković, “It’s All a Movie,” 291. 41. Each film in that series revolves around a planned spatial approach, what Turković calls a “principle of simple and clear reduction of procedures,” together with an embrace of chance (“Observation as Participation,” 277). The central role of jazz in the films, both through their soundtracks and their subtitle dedications to Duke Ellington (Straight Line), Count Basie (Circumference), and Art Blakey (Blue Rider) emphasize the conceptual centrality of the relationship between structure and chance. 42. Trbuljak and Turković, “It’s All a Movie,” 299. 43. Hrvoje Turković, “Observation as Participation,” in Ilić and Nenadić, Tomislav Gotovac, 278.

Notes to Chapter 4  263 44. Tomislav Gotovac, “Group Fun [1969],” DO IT, available at e-­flux, http://projects .e-flux.com/do_it/manuals/artists/g/G012/G012A_text.html. 45. Gotovac, “Group Fun.” 46. In a 1957 text presented to the founding conference of the Situationist International, Guy Debord describes the dérive as a “passionate uprooting,” a “new force” in the battle to combat the bourgeois “industrial sector of leisure” (i.e., television) that kept revolution from taking place. Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough, 30–­50 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 46. 47. Email correspondence with Vlasta Delimar, July 22, 2022. 48. Email correspondence with Vlasta Delimar, September 18, 2020. 49. Email correspondence with Vlasta Delimar, September 18, 2020. 50. Bojana Pejić, “Public Cuts,” in Sanja Iveković: Selected Works, by Sanja Iveković et al., 232–­45 (Barcelona: Fundació Antonio Tapiès, 2008), 283. 51. Pejić, “Public Cuts,” 240. 52. Sanja Horvatinčić, “Erased: On the Circularity of Misogyny [in] the Example of Female Representation in the Public Space of Zagreb,” in Back to the Square! Art, Activism, and Urban Research in Post-­Socialism, ed. Ivana Hanaček and Ana Kuleša, 90–­101 (Zagreb: Alta nova, Zemun, 2016), 95. Horvatinčić focuses her analysis on the postsocialist period, when such inequalities became worse because of the erasure of the names of women associated with socialist struggle from Zagreb’s streets. However, similar dynamics were extant in the socialist period, when Horvatinčić notes that the sculptures of female types perpetuated traditional gender roles despite the emancipation of women (95). 53. Tumbas, “I Am Jugoslovenka!,” 23. 54. During the socialist period, the vast majority of streets were named after men. Exceptions included streets named after Nada Dimić, Anka Butorac, and the sisters Rajka and Zdenka Baković. These street names were all changed after the end of the socialist period, but the name of the Prolaz sestara Baković was ultimately returned. Correspondence with Saša Šimpraga, February 7, 2022. 55. Tumbas, I Am Jugoslovenka!, 177. 56. Linda Burnham, Steven Durland, and Lewis MacAdams, “Art with a Chicano Accent,” High Performance 35 (1986): 51. 57. Lorraine O’Grady, “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1955 (1981),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–­2019, ed. Aruna D’Souza, 8–­10 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020), 9. 58. See Klara Kemp-­Welch’s discussion of Kovanda in her chapter “Reticence,” in Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-­Totalitarian Rule 1956–­1989 (London: I. B. Taurus, 2014), 185–­220. 59. Tumbas, “I Am Jugoslovenka!,” 76. 60. Tumbas, 177. 61. For wider discussions of the involvement of the audience as a visible dimension of the artwork, see Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience (Lebanon, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2012); Adair Rounthwaite, Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 62. Irena Bekić describes these materials in Delimar’s practice as referring to a “hyperbolized” or “carnivalized” femininity. Irena Bekić, “On Photography of (Some) Faces of Vlasta Delimar,” in Delimar, Vlasta Delimar, 146. 63. Email correspondence with Vlasta Delimar, September 18, 2020.

264  Notes to Chapter 4 64. Miško Šuvaković, Vlasta Delimar: Monografija performans (Zagreb: Areagrafika, 2003), 63. 65. Marjanić, “Vlasta Delimar on A Woman,” 47. 66. Gržinić, “Vlasta Delimar,” 178. 67. Delimar and Martek married officially in 1998 after living together for a decade and divorced in 2002. 68. Tumbas, “I Am Jugoslovenka!,” 88–­90. 69. Tomislav Gotovac, “Totalni portret grada Zagreba (1979),” More: A Museum of Refused and Unrealised Art Projects, http://www.moremuseum.org/omeka/exhibits/show /proposals-dreams-and-utopias-z/tomislav-gotovac--totalni-port. 70. Zora Cazi, “Ekskluzivno: Prvi intervju nakon smrti bivšeg supruga,” interview by Romina Peritz, Jutarnji list, December 3, 2013, https://www.jutarnji.hr/kultura/art /cuvarica-tomova-blaga-izmedu-njegova-privatnog-i-javnog-lica-nije-bilo-razlike.-bio-je -tezak-i-bio-je-senzacionalan-924683. 71. Vlado Martek, “Note on Tomislav Gotovac,” 34. 72. Amy Bryzgel, Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960, ed. Amelia Jones and Marsha Meskimmon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 126. 73. On the history and aesthetics of Plastic Jesus, see Gal Kirn, Dubravka Sekulić, and Žiga Testen, eds., Surfing the Black: Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and Its Transgressive Moments (Masstricht, Netherlands: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012), 21–­22. The authors argue that this film was a deliberate provocation because of its leveling of Tito and Hitler, and they find it to be of lower aesthetic quality than other Black Wave films whose creators were not as harshly punished. 74. Janevski, “As Soon as I Open My Eyes I See a Film,” 37. 75. Andrej Mirčev, “Performing the Proletarian Public Sphere: Gender and Labor in the Art of Tomislav Gotovac,” in Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere: Event-­Based Art in Late Socialist Europe, ed. Katalin Cseh-­Varga and Adam Czirak (New York: Routledge, 2016), 88. 76. Mirčev, “Performing the Proletarian Public Sphere,” 92. 77. Branka Stipančić, “For Me, Reality Is Art,” 21. 78. Stipančić, 20. 79. Stipančić, 18. 80. Stipančić, 18. 81. Denegri, “Individual Mythology of Tomislav Gotovac,” 273. 82. An example of the latter was Delimar’s action of painting the testicles of her male friends in Ball Painting of 1980, during which she and all the other participants were naked. The site of the performance on a nude beach at the seaside in Cres created a de facto semiprivate location for the work. 83. Hatari!, directed by Howard Hawks (Paramount Pictures, 1962), 157 min. 84. Stipančić, “For Me, Reality Is Art,” 18. 85. Darko Šimičić, “Institut Tomislav Gotovac,” Život umjetnosti 91, no. 1 (2012): 96. 86. Mirčev, “Performing the Proletarian Public Sphere,” 95. 87. Mirčev, 95. 88. Slobodan Šijan, Tomislav Gotovac: Life as a Film Experiment (Zagreb: Tomislav Gotovac Institute and Croatian Film Association, 2018), 159–­60. 89. Branislav Jakovljević, Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-­Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–­91 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 25–­26, 189. 90. Darko Vukov Colić, “Oduvijek sam bio američki umjetnik u Zagrebu, a oduvijek za mene je Zagreb bio New York!,” Globus, March 25, 1994, 28–­29.

Notes to Conclusion  265 91. On Paranoia View Art, see Darko Šimičić’s lecture “Tomislav Gotovac i Paranoia View Art,” galerija prozori, March 26, 2022, YouTube video, 48:28, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=6aYv3cNuM_g. 92. Mirčev, “Performing the Proletarian Public Sphere,” 95–­96. 93. Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-­Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 11–­14. 94. For an overview of General Idea’s practice, see the retrospective catalog General Idea: Haute Culture / A Retrospective, 1969–­1995 (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2011). Kirsten Olds provides an incisive account of General Idea’s work with reception in “Towards an Audience Vocabulary: General Idea’s Re-­routing of the Audience Feedback Loop,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 16, no. 1 (2020): 1–­16. 95. Feđa Vukić and Marijan Susovski, Za obranu i obnovu Hrvatske / For the Defense and Renewal of Croatia (Zagreb: Umjetnički paviljon u Zagrebu, 1991), 42.

Conclusion 1. Terry Smith, “One and Three Ideas: Conceptualism Before, During, and After Conceptual Art,” in Terry Smith and Robert Bailey, One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 139. 2. See Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (Bethesda, Md.: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011); Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011). 3. See Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012); Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998; Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002). 4. For Bishop’s take on participatory art under socialism, see “The Social under Socialism,” in Artificial Hells, 129–­62. 5. Gržinić quoted in Maja and Reuben Fowkes, “From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: Marina Gržinić in Conversation with Maja and Reuben Fowkes,” ARTMargins Online, October 9, 2012, https://artmargins.com/from-biopolitics-to-necropolitics-marina-grini-in -conversation-with-maja-and-reuben-fowkes/. 6. Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 14–­15, 40–­41, 52. 7. On the culture wars debates, see Richard Bolton, ed., Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts (New York: New Press, 1992). The prominence of institutions in identity debates in the United States is visible in many areas of practice, but especially so in work like Susan Cahan and Zoya Kocur’s development of multicultural curriculum in contemporary art. Susan Cahan and Zoya Kocur, Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and Routledge, 1996). Moreover, as Huey Copeland convincingly argues, the American institution of slavery and its legacy constituted a through line in the work of Black artists with practices as diverse as had Renée Green, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson. Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 8. Sabrina Ramet describes how in March 1962, the executive bureau of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia’s central committee held a closed session to discuss threats to the system, which included localism, chauvinism, and national particularism. In May of

266  Notes to Conclusion the same year, Josip Broz Tito gave a speech in Split warning about the dangers posed to Yugoslavia by each republic’s selfish focus on its own needs. Sabrina P. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962–­91 (1984; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 82. 9. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 108–­9. 10. Ramet, 131. 11. John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 300. 12. Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, “Galerija proširenih medija,” Digitizing Ideas, accessed April 19, 2022, https://digitizing-ideas.org/si/raziskuj/galerija-prosirenih -medija. In 1991, the building where PM was housed was occupied by right-­w ing paramilitary troops. Its former premises now house the Zagreb city library. 13. Nengudi obtained a bachelor’s in dance (1966) and a master’s in sculpture (1971) from California State University, Los Angeles; Pope.L received a bachelor’s from Montclair State University (1978) and a master of fine arts from Rutgers (1981); Cheng received both a bachelor’s and a master’s from UCLA (1963 and 1967). Even in the case of Los Angeles–­based collective Asco, in which member Patssi Valdez obtained a bachelor of fine arts from the Parsons School in Los Angeles (1985) but Willie Herrón dropped out of college twice, California State University, Los Angeles remained an important site of networking and exhibition for the group, as it was attended by two members (Gronk and Harry Gamboa Jr.) and hosted the group’s show Ascozilla in 1975. 14. Shannon Jackson demonstrates how, at the same time, the critical humanities tends to disavow the import of institutions and to take them for granted as entities that will never disappear. See the prologue and chapter 1 of Jackson, Social Works. 15. Sunnie Rucker-­Chang convincingly demonstrates how race is an overlooked yet crucial aspect of understanding Yugoslav society and Central and Eastern European socialism more broadly in this respect. See Sunnie Rucker-­Chang and Chelsi West Ohueri, “A Moment of Reckoning: Transcending Bias, Engaging Race, and Racial Formations in Slavic and East European Studies,” Slavic Review 80, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 216–­23; Sunnie Rucker-­Chang, “Mapping Blackness in Yugoslavia and Post-­Yugoslav Space,” Black Perspectives (blog), July 17, 2019, https://www.aaihs.org/mapping-blackness-in-yugoslavia-and-post-yugoslav -space/. On the complex status of gender equality in Yugoslavia, see Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 16. For a critique of the impacts of postsocialist privatization on the public sphere, see Srećko Horvat and Igor Štiks, eds., Welcome to the Desert of Post-­Socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia (London: Verso, 2015). 17. James Nisbet, Second Site (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2021), xx–­x xi. 18. Ana Vladisavljević, “Croatia Activists Denounce ‘Devastating’ Revamp of Popular Square,” Balkan Insight, October 4, 2018, https://balkaninsight.com/2018/10/04/arranging -zagreb-square-is-a-total-fraud-activists-said-10-04-2018/. 19. Jasenka Kodrnja, “Rodna/spolna hijerarhija javnog prostora, ili žene u nazivima ulica i trgova u RH” [The gender/sex-­related hierarchy of public space: Women in street and square names in the Republic of Croatia], in Rodno/spolno obilježavanje prostora i vremena, ed. Jasenka Kodrnja (Zagreb: Institute for Social Research, 2006), 86–­87, 99. 20. The 1989 Yugoslav Dokumenta in Sarajevo, a kind of final statement about the diversity and vitality of the country’s art scene, included representation of both these tendencies. In 2017, the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana partially restaged this important exhibition alongside documentation of its historical moment under the title The Heritage of 1989/Case Study: The Second Yugoslav Documents Exhibition.

Notes to Conclusion  267 21. The exception to this was Fedor Vučemilović, who in this decade moved away from art practice as such to focus on documentary photography and a career as a cinematographer. 22. Email correspondence with Darko Šimičić, July 22, 2022. 23. See Branka Stipančić and Tihomir Milovac, eds., Mladen Stilinović: Exploitation of the Dead (Zagreb: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007); Adair Rounthwaite, “Lazy Objects: Viewing Mladen Stilinović’s Exploitation of the Dead,” Tate Papers 30 (Autumn 2018), https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/30/rounthwaite-lazy-objects.  24. Dubravka Ugrešić, “Gingerbread Heart Culture,” in Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays (College Station: Penn State University Press, 1998), 51. 25. Marian Mazzone, “The Radical Body of Vlasta Delimar,” in Vlasta Delimar: To sam ja / This Is I, ed. Martina Munivrana (Zagreb: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2014), 165. 26. Mazzone, “Radical Body of Vlasta Delimar,” 165. 27. It is also connected to Delimar’s extant concern with how war victimizes women, as embodied by older works such as the 1982 collage Woman Is Not a Warrior. See Tumbas’s analysis of this work in Jasmina Tumbas, “I Am Jugoslovenka!” Feminist Performance Politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 88–­90. 28. This text appeared in the C issue of Maj 75 (1979). 29. Cvjetanović created these photos in response to a commission I gave him to document the works photographically, however the staging in this manner and the conceptual connection between artworks and landscape it implies were entirely his own inspiration.

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Index

Abramović, Marina, 12, 215, 245n29 Abramović, Marina and Ulay, 158 advertising, 211, 213 advertising pillars, 41, 42 agitations. See poetic agitations; poster agitations Alberro, Alexander, 74 alternative culture, Soviet, 22, 34 America. See United States of America Anselmo, Giovanni, 48; Untitled (Sculpture That Eats), 48–49 antiaesthetic tactics, 15–16 antihumanism, 79–80 Antonioni, Michelangelo, Blow-­Up, 144, 157 apartments, 152–53 appearance. See personal appearance architecture, 19–20, 35, 244n12. See also public space armbands, 211 Arte Povera, 48 art history, 167–68, 219–20 artists of color, 194, 221 art market, 11, 213 art viewing as labor, 89 Asco collective, 193–94; Walking Mural, 193, 194 aspiration, 115, 117 audiences: ambivalence toward, 220; appearance of, 63, 65; costuming, signal to, 194; engagement with, 19, 24, 55–56; individual experience of, 110; influence on works, 181; laughter of, 165; participation of, 189–90; police as, 60–61; reactions of, 34–35, 58, 61–62, 69, 71, 102, 195–96; for repeat performances, 206–7; socialism, under, 220; touching of, 162–63. See also passersby; public, role of Axell, Evelyne, 176–77

Bago, Ivana, 18, 20, 36, 54, 166–67 Bakalović, Rene, 97, 98 Baljković, Nena, 45, 62–63, 68 Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, 121, 123, 133–34, 166 Beban, Breda, 225–26 Beke, László, 46 Belgrade, 90; exhibition-­action (March 17, 1977), 81–83 Belgrade Student Cultural Center (SKC), 57, 85 Berger, John, 183 Berlant, Lauren, 75 bicycle wheel, 117–18 Bishop, Claire, 220 Black-­and-­W hite World (TV drama), 219 Black art, 194, 221 black color, 228 Black Wave cinema, 67 Blagojević-­A ranđelović, Petar, 184 Blažević, Dunja, 57 blood, 86, 105, 114, 251n34 bodies of artists, 16, 18, 90, 123. See also naked bodies books, 49–50, 104–12 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 174 Božić, Milan, 171–72; Conversation with a Warrior, or The Woman Has Disappeared, 228–30 branding, 211, 213, 221 Brejc, Tomaž, 48 Broodthaers, Marcel, 213; Pense-­Bete, 50 Brzović, Gordana, 58 Buchloh, Benjamin, 48 Canadian artists, 213 capitalist regimes, 9, 11, 74 carnivals, 194–95 269

270  Index Cazi, Zora, 202 Celant, Germano, 48 censorship, 57 Center for Photography, Film, and Tele­ vision (CEFFT), 125–27 Certeau, Michel de, “Walking in the City,” 34 chairs and tables, 102–4, Plate 8. See also Stilinović, Mladen, works: Submit to Public Debate Chaplin, Charlie, 211 City as a Space of Plastic Happening, The, 35–36 city spaces: in work of Delimar, 187–90, 191; in work of Gotovac, 186, 191. See also public space clay, 230–31 clothing, 195. See also costumes Collective Actions, 55–56 commodity forms, 102 commodity objects, 171, 175, 176, 182 commodity socialism, 11, 44, 87 communication, difficulty of, 124 communism, 22 conceptualism: in America, 223, 266n13; antihumanism of, 79–80; and exhibition-­actions, 43; feminist artists, 80; of the Group of Six, 74–75; introduction to, 10–11, 14–16; of My Year, 1977 (Jerman), 142; space and, 53; in twentieth-­century art, 219; warmth in, 45–48, 246n38. See also New Art Practice consequences of art, 168 contingent dependence, 48–50 cookies, heart-­shaped, 175 costumes: of Asco group, 193–94; of Delimar, 193, 195, 196, 199–200, 200–201, 230; of Gotovac, 206–7, 208–13; kitsch and, 192–93 courtyards, 153, 154 creativity, 79, 112–14 Croatian language, 77, 99, 239n3, 249n2 Croatian self-­determination, 22, 243n53 Croatian Spring, 20, 22, 36, 99, 222 Croatian Union of Visual Artists, 222–23 crowds, 7, 9 Cvejić, Bojana, 33 Cvjetanović, Boris, 155, 157, 231, Plate 18

Dabac, Petar, 125–26 Data (magazine), 48 death, fascination of Jerman with, 121, 123, 128, 133–34, 135–38, 140, Plate 11 Delimar, Vlasta, 171–201; appearance of, 63, 64; background, 172–73; city spaces in work of, 187–88, 191; collaboration with Jerman, 124, 158–66; costumes of, 193, 195, 196, 199, 200–201, 230; feminism and, 173–74; Group of Six Authors and, 2, 10, 240n12; kitsch, political, 177–79, 182–83, Plate 13; kitsch, public acts of, 191–201; kitsch in work of, 173, 174, 182–83, 196, 198; materials, choice of, 196–97; naked body, use of, 160–62, 171–72, 178–79, 183, 198–201, 214, 215, 230, Plate 12, Plate 13 (see also Delimar, Vlasta, works: This Was Me in 1980 When Comrade Tito Died); relationship with Jerman, 144, 153, 154, 155; significance of, 12, 245n29 Delimar, Vlasta, works: Conversation with a Warrior, or The Woman Has Dis­ appeared, 228–30; Injustices, 200–201; My Daily Visual Communication on the Relation Voćarska Street 5—­Kvaternik Square, 38, 186–88; Photos Left in Public Space, 188–89; Product of Croatia, 216–17; Reflect on Yourself Daily, 188–89; Self-­Communication, 189–90; This Was Me in 1980 When Comrade Tito Died, 177–79, 183, 209, Plate 13; Tied to a Tree, 193, 195–96, 198, Plate 14; To Martek and Meret Oppenheim, 199–200, Plate 16; To My White Love, 196, 198, Plate 15; Transformation of Personality, 179, 199; Two Men and One Woman, 171–72, 214; Untitled photo assemblage (1983), 196–97; Untitled photo collage (1979), 179–80; Visual Communication, 26, 38, 188; Women Is Not a Warrior, 200 Demur, Boris, 10, 50–51, 63, 153, 226; Changing the Position of Pebbles in the Hand, 50–51; Eto (There you have it), 29, 32, 41, 42, 43–44, 53, 60, 71; Fact, 57, Plate 3; Industrial Landscape, 5; My Street, 59; Time, Light, Support, and Space Are United in This Work…, 51–52

Index  271 Denegri, Ješa, 14, 143, 179, 184, 205, 213 Depolo, Josip, 97, 98 dérive, practice of, 69, 186 dictionaries, 99 Dimitrijević, Braco, 55, 246n56; Casual Passersby series, 30 documentation of performances, 166, 179 domestic spaces, 152–53, 154–55 Doors, the, 146 doors in the works of Jerman, 149, 151–52 Drakulić, Slavenka, 154 Duchamp, Marcel, 117–18 Đurić, Dubravka, 94 dynamic actions, 71. See also laziness Eastern Europe, conceptualism in, 46–47, 246n38 Eco, Umberto, 176, 182 education of artists, 222–23 elite intelligentsia, 62–63, 68 employment. See unemployment erasers, 94, 101–2, 111–12, 114, Plate 6 eroticism, 181, 182, 183 exhibition-­actions: as alternative to institutional exhibitions, 56–58; Belgrade (March 17, 1977), 81–83, 92; Belgrade Student Cultural Center (April 17–18, 1976), 57, 85; locations, choice of, 59, 62–63; Mošćenička Draga (June 26–27, 1976), 44, 45, 72–74; nature of, 2, 18, 29–30, 35; permit applications, 59–60; policing of, 60–61; public, role of, 54–55; responses to, 34–35, 58, 61–62, 69, 71; Sava River (May 11, 1975), 59, 69–70, 105, Plate 4; selection of works for, 39; social quality of, 56; textures of, 69–70; university settings, 81; Walk around Zagreb (May 19, 1976), 85, 117–19; Zagreb Faculty of Economy (April 2, 1979), 81; Zagreb Faculty of Philosophy (March 18, 1980), 81, 92, 101–2, 104, Plate 7; Zagreb Jesuit Square (June 14, 1975), 6, 53–54, 59; Zagreb Neboder passage (December 31, 1977), 60, 61–62, 65; Zagreb Square of the Republic (October 25, 1975), 29, 30–33, 39–43, 50, 51, 59, Plate 2; Zagreb Trg Republike (July 17–19, 1978), 58, 62 exhibitionism, 18

failure, 92, 96–97 fašnik festival, 194–95 feminism, 173–74 feminist artists, 80 festivals, 194–95 Fluxus instruction works, 105 found images and objects, 44, 103, 125, 138–39, 153, 226 Fowkes, Maja, 36 furniture. See chairs and tables garbage, 36 gay men, 63 gender, coding of, 158 gender and New Art Practice, 245n29 gender and subjectivity, 181, 182 gendered embodiment, 173, 183, 206 gendered labor, 165 gender nonnormativity, 193 gender relations, 154, 161, 162 General Idea, 213; FILE Magazine, 213 global contemporary art, 19, 219–20 Gorgona magazine, 125 Gotovac, Tomislav (Antonio Lauer), 172, 201–14; background, 171–73; branding of, 211, 213, 221; city spaces in work of, 186, 191; costumes, 206–7, 208–13; film and, 173, 184, 186; found objects, use of, 153; Group Fun, 186; Group of Six Authors and, 2, 10; kitsch in work of, 174, 182, 185–86; kitsch personas of, 201–14; labor of, 207–8; naked body, use of, 146, 178–83, 202–6, 214, 215; nationalist sentiment, 215, 217 Gotovac, Tomislav (Antonio Lauer), works: Belgrade film trilogy, 184, 185, 262n41; Cleaning Public Spaces, 208–9; “I’ve Fucking Had It” (“Pun mi je kurac”), 215; Paranoia View Art, 211–12; selling student newspapers performances, 206–8, 211; Showing Elle Magazine, 179, 181–82, 183, 206; Suitcase, 184–86; Superman, 208–11; Two Men and One Woman, 171–72, 214; Zagreb, I Love You!, 193, 202–6 Grandits, Hannes, 72 Grotowski, Jerzy, 62 Group of Six Authors (Grupa šestorice autora): appearance of, 63–64; artists, 2, 9–10, 239n5; body, approaches

272  Index to, 214; bonds between members, 56, 247n60; conceptualism of, 45–48; goal of, 56; postconceptualism of, 219–20; productivity, rejection of, 64–66; public space, use of, 20, 38–39, 56–58, 74; rejection of established models of art, 15; socialism, support for, 22; trans­ avantgarde, response to, 226–27. See also exhibition-­actions Groys, Boris, 14–15 Grubić, Damir, 127–28, 163 Grupa TOK (the FLOW Group), 36 Gržinić, Marina, 173–74, 177, 199, 220 guidebooks, 1–2, 7 Haidu, Rachel, 50 Hawkesworth, Cecilia, 135 Hawks, Howard, Hatari!, 205–6 heart-­shaped cookies, 175 heterosexual relationships, 165–66 hierarchy, questions of, 100 history of art, 167–68, 219–20 home, cultural, 110 homes, 152–53, 154–55 homosexual men, 63 Horvatinčić, Sanja, 192 Hripko, Ivica, 179 identity: artist, 111, 112; artistic, 24, 70–71, 221; gender, 162, 196, 206; in global contemporary art, 220; of Group of Six, 63–64, 69; in Yugoslavia, 6 Ilić, Marko, 57, 67 Ilić, Nataša, 79, 88 Illyrian movement, 99 instruction works, 105 International Workers’ Day, 37 intimacy: definitions of, 9, 14; exhibition-­ actions and, 35, 56, 75; in work of Jerman, 138, 155, 168; in work of Jerman and Delimar, 124, 161 Italian transavantgarde, 225–26 Iveković, Sanja, 12, 146, 153, 245n29; Tito’s Dress, 178 Jackson, Matthew Jesse, 9 Jakovljević, Branislav: on conservative reforms, 78; on labor economy, 208; on organization of labor, 88; on perfor-

mance and the political economy, 23; on performance projects, 90; on Praxis, 113–14; on rejection of established models of art, 15; on student unrest, 80; on the unproductive and useless, 65 Janevski, Ana, 179, 203 Jerman, Željko, 121–68; appearance of, 63, 64, 143, 146, 154–55; bodies, images of, 123–24; body, approaches to, 214; body of, 123; clock at Square of the Republic (October 25, 1975), 39, 40; collaboration with Delimar, 124, 158–66; context of early work, 124–27; death, fascination with, 121, 123, 128, 133–34, 135–38, 140, Plate 11; desire, subject and object of, 143–44; doors in the works of, 149, 151–52; film of, 127; intimacy, 155; Jesuit Square exhibition-­action (June 14, 1975), 6; and Branka Jurjević, 130–34; liquids, love of, 140; live performances, 158–66; Mošćenička Draga exhibition action, 72; outdoor images, 152, 153; photograms, 126; photographic techniques, 127–30, 134–35, 138, 141, 146–52, 226; photography-­as-­performance, 121, 123; popular culture and, 144, 146; portraiture, 138–39, 144; relationships, 10, 240n12; relationship with Delimar, 144, 153, 154, 155; romantic approach, 167, 231; Sava River exhibition action, 69–70, Plate 4; studio, 144; subjectivity and creative process, 153; violence in works, 138–39, 164–65 Jerman, Željko, works: The Beginning of the End, 130, 132–33; Branka and the Sea, 130–31; Counting While Enlarging, 128–29; Drop Dead, Photography!, 137–38, Plate 11; Experience of the Factory 1 and 2, 133–34; I Love You, 39; Intimate Inscription, 63–65, 71, 75; Intimate Slogans, 83; “Life -­not slogans” at Square of the Republic (October 25, 1975), 42; My Year, 1977, 121–22, 140–57; Self-­Portrait, 15–16, 17; 31. XII 1977 (December 31, 1977) from Recorded in Space and Time, 141, 143; This Is Not My World, 20–22, 57, 71, 166–67; Triptych, 149; Untitled friends at Mirogoj cemetery (c. 1974–75), 135–37; Untitled image of an infant (1972–73),

Index  273 130, Plate 10; Untitled photogram of skull (c. 1974–75), 126 Jerman, Željko and Vlasta Delimar, 158–66; Attempt at Identification, 160–62; De­ symbolization, 161–62, Plate 12; Invitation to Socialize, 163; Male and Female, 163–66; Tactile Communication, 162–63; Wedding, 158–60 Joan of Arc, 195 Joselit, David, 19 Jurjević, Branka, 130–34, 240n12 Just Above Midtown/Downtown (JAM) gallery, 194 juvenility, performance of, 78, 112, 114, 114–15 Kalinsky, Yelena, 55 Kangrga, Milan, 113 Kardelj, Edvard, 88 Kemp-­Welch, Klara, 46, 47 Kerdić, Ivo, Dora Krupićeva, 192 Kipke, Željko, 140 Kiš, Danilo, 175 kitsch: concepts of, 171, 174–77, 227; costumes and, 192–93; Delimar, in work of, 173, 174, 182–83, 196, 198; Delimar, political kitsch in work of, 177–79, Plate 13; Delimar, public acts of kitsch by, 191–201; Gotovac, in work of, 174, 182, 185–86; Gotovac, personas of, 201–14 Kontova, Helena, 46 Koščević, Želimir, 175 Kosuth, Joseph, 74, 221 Kotz, Liz, 78, 90 Kovanda, Jiří, 194 Kožarić, Ivan, Grounded Sun, 36, 244n15 Koželj, Marinela, 158 Krauss, Rosalind, 167, 213 Kritovac, Fedor, 36 Krleža, Miroslav, 70–71 Kršinić, Frano, Mother’s Game, 192 Kundera, Milan, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 175 KwieKulik, School, 55 labeling, 101 labor, art viewing as, 89 labor, gendered, 165

labor, nature of, 207–8 labor, organization of, 88–89 Lampe, John, 78, 222, 243n53 language: composition of, meditation on, 107–9; and ideology, 87, 105–7; in general, 90, 92; juvenility, performance of, 78, 112, 114–15; materiality of production, 112; subjectivity and, 104; teaching of, 105–6 languages, 4, 22, 77, 99, 239n3, 249n2 Lauer, Antonio. See Gotovac, Tomislav law enforcement, 60–61 laziness, 15–17, 46, 48, 65–66, 69–70, 71, 83, 221. See also dynamic actions learning, 77–78. See also pedagogy Lefebvre, Henri, 18, 19 leisure, 71–74 LeWitt, Sol, 43 Licitar heart (licitarsko srce), 175 Lippard, Lucy R., 11–12 liquids, 140 local art centers, 14 logos, 211 Lóránd, Zsófia, 153 Lublin, Lea, My Son, 165 magazines, 48, 125, 154, 213. See also women’s magazines Makavejev, Dušan: Man Is Not a Bird, 67; W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, 153 Maleković, Vladimir, 155 male privilege, 44, 205, 245n29 maps, 1–2, 3–4, 239n2 Maračić, Antun, 128, 138 Marjanić, Suzana, 198–99 Martek, Vlado, 92–110, 117–19; audience reactions, list of, 58, 61; books and, 104–5, 107–10; chairs and tables motif, 101–2, 103; conceptualism of, 79–80; on curators, 167; and Boris Demur, 41; on exhibition-­actions, 65; on Gotovac, 202; hierarchy, questions of, 100; on Jerman, 140; juvenility, performance of, 114; language of, 77; on militia members, 60; paintings, 226–27; poetic agitations, 96–98, 99; poetry, 72, 74, 92, 94; poster agitations, 101; praxis, problematization of, 115, 117; pre-­poetry, 94, 111–12; relationships, 10, 240n12; romantic

274  Index approach, 167, 231; unfired clay sculptures, 94, 96, 230–31 Martek, Vlado, works: Clay-­Blocked Book, 105; House, 101; I’m Not a Poet Because If I Wanted to I Could Be, 94–95; In Place of a Poem, 44, 45; Just Tell Me Please on Which Shelf to Place My Heart, 49–50; Preparation for Writing Poetry, 101–2, 104, Plate 7; Preserved Tools and Materials, 94, 114, Plate 6; Pride, 117–19; Read Branko Miljković’s Poems, 96–97; Sava River exhibition action, 105; Sonnet Cycle, 92–93; Tearing Banknotes, 72; untitled artist’s book (1981a), 107–9; untitled artist’s book (1981b), 109–10; Untitled clay and breadcrumbs (c. 1985–89), 231, Plate 18; Untitled clay with found objects (c. 1985–89), 94, 96; Walk around Zagreb (May 19, 1976), 117–19; Writing the Name (Tit), 101; Yes or No?, 105 Martek, Vlado and Mladen Stilinović, Bookwork, 110–12 Martinis, Dalibor, 153 Marx, Karl, 102 masculinity, 144, 193 mass culture, 176 mass mobilization, 20, 22 materiality, 47, 48, 50–51, 53 Matica hrvatska, 99 Matičević, Davor, 18, 36 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 96 Mazzone, Marian, 228, 230 meat, 199–200, Plate 16 medium, deconstruction of, 167 Meltzer, Eve, 16, 79–80 Mihaljević, Krsto, 79 militia, 60–61 Mirčev, Andrej, 203, 207, 211 Mirogoj cemetery, 135–37 modernism, 10, 99–100 Monastyrski, Andrei, 92, 94 money, 72, 74 Morrison, Jim, 146 Mošćenička Draga, 44, 45, 72–74 Moscow, 14, 55–56 multiculturalism, 12, 221 music, 63, 109–10, 144, 146

naked bodies: Delimar, use of, 160–62, 171–72, 178–79, 183, 198–201, 214, 215, 230, Plate 12, Plate 13; Gotovac, use of, 178–83, 202–6, 214, 215 naked bodies, works: Attempt at Identification (Jerman and Delimar), 160–61; Desymbolization (Jerman and Delimar), 161–62, Plate 12; Showing Elle Magazine (Gotovac), 179, 181–82, 183, 206; This Was Me in 1980 When Comrade Tito Died (Delimar), 178–79, 183, Plate 13; Two Men and One Woman (Božić, Delimar and Gotovac), 171–72, 214; Zagreb, I Love You! (Gotovac), 202–6 naming, 101 national body, women as, 192, 215 nationalism, 99, 175, 176, 215, 217, 222, 227–28 neorealism, 184–85, 186 N.E. Thing Co., 213 New Art Practice, 110, 124, 175, 245n29; alternatives to, 167; conceptualism and, 11, 15; Group of Six Authors and, 2; importance of, 12; male privilege of, 44; origins of, 67; privileging of politicized works, 167–68; public and, 55; social engagement, 23 Nisbet, James, 224 Non-­A ligned Movement, 4, 239n6 Novi Zagreb, 1, 59 objects, writing on, 101 Obradović, Dragana, 175 O’Grady, Lorraine, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1955, 194 OHO, 47–48 Oiticica, Hélio, Bólides, 94 Ono, Yoko, Blood Piece, 105 outsiderness, 22, 65, 74 pain, 110–11 painting on bodies, 160–62, Plate 12 partner performances, 124, 158–66 Pasinović, Antoaneta, 19–20, 152 passersby, 30, 39, 41, 43, 54–55, 62, 188. See also audiences pedagogy, 77–78, 87–88, 97–98 Pejić, Bojana, 191–92

Index  275 pencils, 92, 94–95, 111–12, 114, Plate 6 permit applications, 59–60, 96 personal appearance, 63–64, 195; of Jerman, 63, 64, 143, 146, 154–55 philosophy. See Praxis school philosophers photograms, 125–26 photography, 25, 38, 124–27, 140. See also Jerman, Željko: photographic techniques pink color, 87, 88, 89 Piotrowski, Piotr, 13–14, 47, 115 PM Gallery, 10, 162, 211–12, 223, 225 Podroom, 10, 160, 225 poetic agitations, 96–98, 99 poetry, 49–50, 72, 74, 92, 94. See also pre-­poetry Pogačnik, Marko, Plaster Casts of Bottles and Other Objects, 47–48 policing of exhibition actions, 60–61 political roles of artists, 99 politics, art and, 175 poor theater, 62 pop music, 63 Popović, Zoran: film of artists, 127; Struggle in New York, 126–27 popular culture, 144, 146 poster agitations, 101 postmedium condition, 167 poverty, aesthetic of, 46. See also Arte Povera praxis, problematization of, 115, 117 Praxis school philosophers, 79, 113–14 pre-­poetry, 94, 111–12 presence in time and space, 39, 41 productivity, rejection of, 64–65 public, role of, 54–56. See also audiences; exhibition-­actions: responses to; passersby public space: alternative to institutions, 56–58; behaviors in, 43; definitions of, 191; earliest art projects in public space, 35–38; experiences of, 9, 191; Group of Six Authors and, 6–7, 20, 38–39, 56–58, 74; ideological nature of, 43, 191; messaging, used for, 41–42, 74; performances in, 174; representation of women in, 192; subjectivity and, 19; of Zagreb,

18–20. See also architecture; city spaces; site specificity Putar, Radoslav, 9–10, 125, 127 Ramet, Sabrina P., 78 ready-­made, Gotovac as a, 205, 213 readymades, 50, 117–18 red color, 83–87, 228, Plate 17 regional art centers, 14 relational aesthetics, 174 relational implications, 174 relationality, 47, 55, 186, 188, 220 Retiree Tihomir Simčić Group, 55, 246n56 Roban, Sandra Križić, 125, 181 romantic approaches, 167, 231 Rus, Zdenko, 143 Rusinow, Dennison, 80–81 Sava River, 59, 69–70, 105, Plate 4 sculptures, public, 192 secondness, 224 self-­management socialism, 4, 67, 78–79, 113–14 self-­managing communities of interest (SIZ), 88–89 Serbo-­Croatian dictionary, 99 Serbo-­Croatian language, 77, 239n3, 249n2 sexual revolution, 153–54 Sherman, Cindy, Untitled Film Stills, 184 signage, 37–38, 188 Šijan, Slobodan, 173, 207–8 Silverman, Kaja, 123, 140 Šimičić, Darko, 144, 146, 206, 226 site specificity, 58–59 Situationist International, 69, 186 Smith, Terry, 219 social engagement, 23 socialism, Yugoslav, 12, 22, 23, 78–79, 221–22, 223. See also commodity socialism; self-­management socialism socialist city, 18–19 Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. See Yugoslavia socialist regimes, 6, 7, 9 sociological approach to the public, 54–55 Soviet alternative culture, 22, 34 Spaskovska, Ljubica, 22 spatial value, 19–20

276  Index Spencer, Catherine, 165 Sprinkle, Annie, 177 Start magazine, 154 state ideology, 7, 9, 13 state surveillance, 7 Stilinović, Marijan, 99 Stilinović, Mladen, 83–92, 102–7, 114–17; apartment, 153; art without consequences, 168; body, approaches to, 214–15; books and, 105–7; on censorship, 57; chairs and tables motif, 102–3; and color red, 83–87; colors and, 228; on conceptualism, 46, 48; conceptualism of, 79–80; and creativity, 79; education, 77, 249n4; on exhibition-­actions, 39, 43, 56, 57, 60; Group of Six Authors and, 10; Jesuit Square exhibition-­action (June 14, 1975), 6; juvenility, performance of, 114; and language, 87, 90, 92; on laziness, 15, 46, 48, 65–66; pornography, interest in, 44; praxis, problematization of, 115, 117; significance of, 12; and socialism, 79; writing in chalk, 59 Stilinović, Mladen, works: The Artist at Work, 69–70, 83; An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist, 46, 77; Auction of Red, 86; Black Chairs, 103–4, Plate 8; Blood Writing, 251n34; Conversation with Freud: The Artist as His Own Complex, 214–15; Cotton Pad Step, 54; CROATIAN Pride Painting, 227–28, Plate 17; For Dürer, 83–84; Employees Only, 67, 68; Exploitation of the Dead, 102–3, 115, 226, 227; From First Grade Primers, 105–7; Gifting Red, 86; Head, 104, Plate 9; Loneliness II, 7, 9, Plate 1; May 1st, 1975, 37–38; Me, You, Mine, Yours, 5; My Red, 86, 114; Nula iz vladanja (Zero for Conduct) retrospective, 77; pasted smiles at Square of the Republic (October 25, 1975), 29, 30, 43, 53, Plate 2; Red Paintings, 83–85; Red-­P ink, 115; St. Paul, 115–16; Submit to Public Debate, 87–88, 89–91, 102, Plate 5; Taken Out from the Crowd, 7, 8, 9; Walk around Zagreb (May 19, 1976), 85, 117 Stilinović, Mladen and Vlado Martek, Bookwork, 110–12 Stilinović, Sven, 10, 15, 58, 61, 214, 226–27;

Bullet with a Halo, 226; Geometry of Bloodthirstiness, 227; I’m so happy I have a tan, 72–73; site-­specific action with toilet paper (June 14, 1975), 53–54, 59; Untitled (Bound Figure) (1980), 214 Stipančić, Branka: apartment, 153; on conceptualism, 11; on failure to get a permit, 96; on material surface of writing, 105; on policing, 60; on pre-­poetry, 94; on public interaction, 59; on reading of art, 15, 241n35; on self-­management, 13; and Stilinović, 10; on using public space, 62 Stojanović, Lazar, Plastic Jesus, 202–3 St. Paul’s Cathedral, 115–16 street names, 192, 225, 263n54 Student Cultural Centers (SKC), 20, 57, 223, 242–43n51 student protests, 42, 78, 80–81, 86, 114 students, 63, 68–69, 102, Plate 7 subcultures, 195 subjectivity: aspiration and, 115, 117; gendering and, 181, 182; and intimacy, 9; of Jerman, 153, 155; performance and, 141; photography and, 25, 125, 140; public space and, 19 Superman costume, 208–12 surveillance, 57 Susovski, Marijan, 9–10, 11, 240n19 Šuvaković, Miško, 99–100, 198 tables. See chairs and tables Taylor, Karin, 72 teaching. See learning; pedagogy Tihomir Simčić Group. See Retiree Tihomir Simčić Group time, 64–66 Tito, Josip Broz, 177–78 Todosijević, Raša and Marinela Koželj, 158 Tomić, Biljana, 57 touch, 162–63 tourism, 71–74 tourist guides, 1–2, 7 trace-­leaving, 140 transavantgarde, 225–26 travel, 71–74 Trbuljak, Goran, 55, 125, 179, 184, 246n56, 255n13 Trini, Tommaso, 48

Index  277 Tumbas, Jasmina, 173, 177, 192, 195, 200 Turković, Hrvoje, 179, 184, 186 Ugrešić, Dubravka, 175, 176 Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen), 158 unemployment, 66–67 unfired clay sculptures, 94 uniforms, 195 union of artists, 222–23 United States of America, 220, 221, 223 university settings for exhibition-­actions, 81 urban space. See city spaces; public space Vaništa, Josip, 125 Videkanić, Bojana, 177 viewers. See audiences; passersby violence: in works, 138–39, 164–65; against women, 195–96 Visconti, Luchino, Obsession, 184–85 Vranički, Predrag, 113 Vučemilović, Fedor, 10, 38, 56, 59, 60, 63, 214, 267n21; My Mountains, 29, 33, 39, 41; Trash, 59 Vučetić, Radina, 146 Vujanović, Ana, 33 Wall, Jeff, 140 warmth in conceptualism, 46, 48, 74–75 war trauma, 227 weddings, 158–60 Westernization of Yugoslavia, 144, 146 white color, 88, 228, Plate 17 white masculinity, 144 women: feminist artists, 80; as the national body, 192, 215; and the New Art

Practice, 245n29; representation in public space, 192; streets named after, 192, 225, 263n54; victimization of, 195; violence against, 195–96. See also Delimar, Vlasta women’s magazines, 153–54; Showing Elle Magazine (Gotovac), 179, 181–82, 183, 206 Woodward, Susan, 66, 67 words, 78 workers, 67 workers’ councils, 87–88, 89 working-­class people, 63, 68–69 writing: action of, 102, 105–7, 114; on bodies, 160–62; on objects, 101 writing materials, 92, 94, 101–2, 111–12, 114, Plate 6 Yugoslavia, 2, 4, 6–7, 13, 223–25 Yurchak, Alexei, 22, 34 Zabel, Igor, 89 Zagreb: city spaces, 18–20; earliest art projects in public space, 35–38; exhibition-­ actions (see exhibition-­actions); Faculty of Philosophy, 63, 68–69; Gotovac on, 201–2; maps and guides, 1–2, 3–4, 239n1; Mirogoj cemetery, 135–37; poems about, 99; postsocialist period changes, 224–25; public sphere, 30, 33–34; salon (1971), 35–36 Zagreb City Gallery: Blood Writing (Stilinović), 251n34; Possibilities for 1971, 36 Zagreb Student Center: Exhibition of Shoes (1968), 47–48; Writing-­Painting (Pismoslikarstvo) (1977), 36–37

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Adair Rounthwaite is associate professor of art history at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York (Minnesota, 2017).

Plate 1. “Brotherhood” page from Mladen Stilinović, Loneliness II, 1975. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić.

Plate 2. Passersby watch Mladen Stilinović and Boris Demur install Stilinović’s work at the Group of Six Authors’ exhibition-­action on the Square of the Republic, Zagreb, October 25, 1975. Photograph by Fedor Vučemilović.

Plate 3. Boris Demur, Fact. Intervention during the Group of Six Authors’ visit to the Belgrade SKC (Student Cultural Center) for the April Meetings, April 17–­18, 1976. Photograph by Fedor Vučemilović.

Plate 4. Željko Jerman lying on a piece of photopaper for one hour to produce a body print at the Group of Six Authors’ first exhibition-­action, held in the bathing area by the Sava River, May 11, 1975. Photograph by Fedor Vučemilović.

Plate 5. Mladen Stilinović, Submit to Public Debate, 1980. Installation. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić.

Plate 6. Vlado Martek, Preserved Tools and Materials, 1976. Assemblage sculpture. Courtesy of the artist; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

Plate 7. Vlado Martek, Preparation for Writing Poetry, 1980. Action at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb. Courtesy of the artist; photograph of original color documentation by Boris Cvjetanović.

Plate 8. Mladen Stilinović, Black Chairs, 1985. Oil pastel on paper. Courtesy of Darko Šimičić; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

Plate 9. Mladen Stilinović, Head, 1983. Pastel and marker on cardboard. Courtesy of Darko Šimičić; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

Plate 10. Željko Jerman, Untitled, 1972–­7 3. Black-­and-­white photograph. Courtesy of Bojana Švertasek; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

Plate 11. Željko Jerman, Drop Dead, Photography!, 1972. Cameraless photograph with hand interventions. Courtesy of Bojana Švertasek; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

Plate 12. Vlasta Delimar and Željko Jerman, Desymbolization, 1980. Performance, island of Cres. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

Plate 13. Vlasta Delimar, This Was Me in 1980 When Comrade Tito Died, 1980. Photo-­performance. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

Plate 14. Vlasta Delimar, Tied to a Tree, 1985. Performance. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

Plate 15. Vlasta Delimar, To My White Love, 1985. Performance. City Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.

Plate 16. Vlasta Delimar, To Martek and Meret Oppenheim, 1987. Performance, Galerija Koprivnica. Also performed in Zagreb and Dubrovnik between 1987 and 1990. Courtesy of Vlasta Delimar.

Plate 17. Mladen Stilinović, CROATIAN Pride Painting, circa 2015. Paint and collage on cardboard. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.

Plate 18. Vlado Martek, Untitled, circa 1985–­89. Clay and breadcrumbs. Courtesy of Vlado Martek; photograph by Boris Cvjetanović.