Warsaw. At the start of June Joanna Mytkowska, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, which is currently under construction, announced the focus of her collection: Eastern Europe. This may astonish many, for after all this term is theoretically and politically outdated. Yet it is nonetheless a wise decision. It is of great interest to post-Socialist countries to work through their own national and local art history from the past 60 years. Considering how this is reflected in the art history of other countries in similar contexts is even more intriguing for broad critical reception and for the general public. After all, working through these archives may at times reveal imbroglios that explode the myths of local artistic communities, whereby some practices proudly celebrated as subversive achievements have to be seen as a calculated decision of the nomenklatura of the day, which necessitates a re-writing of some passages of avant-garde history.
Given its high-profile location on Defilad Square, which was severely damaged by bombing during the Second World War, the Museum of Modern Art is supposed to become part of the new city centre. The idea is that one third of the planned 35,000 square metres of floor area in the building – an L-shaped block by Swiss architect Christian Kerez – is to be rented out, whilst the remaining two-thirds will be used as an exhibition area and museum premises open to the public. At any rate it cannot compete with its imposing neighbour, Warsaw’s landmark Stalinist Palace of Culture. Unfortunately however faceless developer-driven architecture by various firms has already failed to seize the unique opportunity presented by this area and has created an equally faceless skyline around the Palace of Culture. When it comes to the actual work of the museum, Mytkowska has already notched up experience with formats such as this new building, for she has worked as a curator at the Centre Pompidou – which, by the way, is one of the few institutions in Western Europe that was an early adopter in collecting neo-avant-garde art from Eastern Europe and hence assumed a pioneering role in this domain.
The inaugural exhibition »As soon as I open my eyes I see a film« (quoting Tomislav Gotovac) – »Experiments in Yugoslavian Art from the 60s and 70s« – is therefore entirely consistent as an opening show here. It will be shown in the temporary museum, which is located on the ground level and first floor of a modernist residential building in the centre. The concept for the exhibition was devised by Ana Janevski, a young curator from Split with a strong interest in film and video, who lived in Paris until now. The exhibition is made up of twelve sequences arranged in a film-like structure in twelve rooms, set one after the other, created by Polish artist Monika Sosnowska.
Janevski’s concept is based on the thesis that subversive art and radical intellectualism grew out of engagement in small-scale institutional settings, for example the film clubs in Belgrade, Split and Zagreb in the early days, followed later by student cultural centres in Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana and Novi Sad. These inter-disciplinary loci of discussion and production created scope to develop specific artistic elaborations of problems and new artistic patterns of thought. This constituted a break with the modernist paradigms of official art. There is no simple answer to the question of whether the ruling apparatus merely tolerated these sites of subversion or accepted them as zones of freedom. What is clear is that the conceptual space of former Yugoslavia produced an atmosphere in which interactions between the various art centres proved to be productive, something which cannot be encapsulated within a national approach.
Whilst many committed individuals and institutions have provided considerable impetus in rendering these artists visible over the past ten years, there is still a great deal to be done in working through the activities of amateur film clubs in ex-Yugoslavia, the famous Zagreb Festival GEFF and indeed the films per se. Janevski has made an interesting selection of films for Warsaw, ranging from works by Mihovil Pansini, ideologist and promoter of anti-film, via Ivan Martinac and Ante Verzotti, right through to the Belgrade grand master Dusan Makavejev. Initial structural parallels to the local avant-garde emerge here: a similar evolution, which sparked a renewal of Polish conceptual and media art, emanated from the Lodz Film Club and its artists, Jozef Robakowski, Pawel Kwiek and Wojciech Bruszewski in 1970.
As soon as visitors open the door into the exhibition, they immediately find themselves in Tito’s Belgrade, in Nesa Paripovic’s 8mm film »1977 N.P.« and follow the artist as he runs effortlessly along an imaginary line through the city, keeping pace with his own rhythm and sensibility.
After the urban portrait, it’s back to the roots: the first break with Socialist state art came in the early 1950s from »New Tendencies«, a group of artists and art historians in search of new materials and forms, seeking a more scientific approach and looking to experiment, and which thus developed a programmatic approach based on Gestalt theory. Members of the »Exat Gruppe« explored a novel aesthetic of life and the quotidian, new scripts and signs were developed, along with an abstract architectural vernacular and geometric forms. The GORGONA group, which was also active in Zagreb from 1959 to 1966, was the first to break with the abstract and informal tendencies of post-war art. Artists Julije Knifer, Dimitrije Basicevic Mangelos, Ivan Kozaric and Josip Vanista proclaimed and practiced an anti-art: no-stories, no-art (Mangelos), anti-painting (Knifer).
After this historical passage, Janevski zooms in on the late 1960s: body-oriented actions and conceptual strategies developed by individual artists and groups are shown in photographic works or in videos. The Novi Sad scene is represented by the KOD Group (E-, KOD and Bosch+Bosch), which has not enjoyed broad critical reception to date and whose works, set in the terrain defined by linguistics, performances, process and conceptual art, strongly emphasise intertextuality and interdisciplinarity. The legendary black-and-white photo of the peristyle of Diocletian’s Palace in Split bathed in red light (1968) is also on display, apparently the first intervention in public space that stuck in art historical memory.
Various works by individual artists such as Marina Abramovic and Sanja Ivekovic, whose oeuvre is by now very well-known, are on display, whilst the show also encompasses Braco Dimitrijevic, Goran Trbuljak, Tomislav Gotovac, Slobodan Era Milivojevic and Balint Szombathy from Novi Sad, with his »Bauhaus« photographs from 1972, or Mladen Stilinovic, who deciphered ideological structures and revealed the totalitarianism of real existing socialism by assuming and recoding the matrix of its language and signifiers, for example in the work »1st May«. Over and over again however it is the filmic work shown in separate bays as a background that constitutes the pre- and sub-text of Janevski’s exhibition choreography.
The route visitors take through the exhibition ends with a question that is frequently posed outside the territory of ex-Yugoslavia: »What is art?«, which Rasa Todosijevic acted out (screaming) to his model Marinela Kozelj in 1978 in a kind of furious and forceful interrogation.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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