here - Nova misao

NOVA MISAO
Contents • • •
03
Signature – The Power of the Artistic
04
54th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, Pavilion Serbia – a Place of Utopia
Mirko Sebić
Živko Grozdanić
06
Raša Todosijević, Živko Grozdanić: Thank you, Raša Todosijević – a Grateful Serbia
Daniela Halda
16
The Ideology of Exhibitions – The Policy of Curators’ Practices and State Apparatuses
20
Venice Biennale and Vojvodinian Modern Art
Miško Šuvaković
Sava Stepanov
28
Nagy József: Clay/Dirt Dancer
Mirko Sebić
32
Vegel Laszlo: The Future is My Compass, the Past is My Whip
Gordana Draganić Nonin
36
Aleksandra Vrebalov: Stations of the Cross
Adrian Kranjčević and Mirko Sebić
40
Urban Andras: Theatre is the Poetry of Reality
Tijana Delić
44
Branka Parlić: Artistic Audacity in Action
48
Jasna Đuričić: Body is My Instrument
Adrian Kranjčević
Tijana Delić
52
Želimir Žilnik: From Communism to Capitalism and Back via the Fortress “Europe”
Mirko Sebić
56
Ladik Katalin: Living in the Sign of Scream
Danijela Halda
60
Boris Kovač: The Greatest Art is Being a Happy Man
Gordana Draganić Nonin
64
Lajkó Félix: Southern Wind on the Danube
Mirko Sebić
„NOVA MISAO” – Magazine of Contemporary Vojvodinan Culture
Founded by the Secretariat for Culture and Public Information
of the Government of Vojvodina
For the founder: Milorad Đurić, the Provincial Secretary for
Culture and Public Information
Publisher: IU „MISAO“, Novi Sad, Nikola Pašić 6
Special Edition
Circulation: 1000 copies
Telephone: ++ 381 (0) 21 424 972
Fax: ++ 381 (0) 21 424 972
E-mail: [email protected] , [email protected]
Web: www.novamisao.org
Editor in Chief: Mirko Sebić
Deputy Editor: Teodora Zrnić
Assistant to the Editor: Gordana Draganić Nonin
Editorial Board: Biljana Mickov, Tijana Delić, Tatjana Pejović,
dr Stevan Konstantinović
Proofreader: Andrew Wiesike
Style Editor: Andrew Wiesike
Translation: Nebojša Pajić
Photo Editor: Branko Stojanović, [email protected]
Art Director: Tatjana Dukić Počuč, [email protected]
Prepress: Vladimir Vatić
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Библиотека Матице српске, Нови Сад
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NOVA misao: časopis za savremenu kulturu Vojvodine /
glavni urednik Mirko Sebić. – 2009, br. 1 (jul)– . – Novi Sad:
IU „Misao”, 2009–. – Ilustr. ; 30 cm
Dvomesečno
ISSN 1821-2107
COBISS.SR-ID 241067527
Signa(ture)
The Power of the Artistic
Written by Mirko Sebić
W
as Stalin the most important product of the Russian artistic avantgarde? Were the concentration camps the invariable conclusion to traditional European art?
In his today already classic study The Theory of Avant-garde, the Italian
Philosopher Renato Poggioli is of the opinion that avant-gardism emanates from the belief in the natural and inevitable entropic nature of a
language (language in general, both spoken and visual, literary and any
other sort). The avant-garde art practice would, according to this formula,
be a strong reaction to the emptiness of our communication, a movement
against piling-up the empty blabbering, a movement advocating the
embodiment of new and more quality forms of communication. The
institutions of our communication and togetherness (meaning culture in
general) are becoming the degenerative factors of a language, they are
ossifying the movement and paralysing the mind, therefore a revolution
is necessary that will start from the artists (who else than those who are
on the outside, not in institutions), a revolution which shall destroy the
ossified institutions and take art to the “street”, into the romp of life and
thus save what might be saved, thereby rejuvenating the language and
shaping new forms.
It is interesting that those who dispute any importance given to avantgarde movements (by disputing primarily their aesthetic value) use precisely the same argument to attack those particular movements, claiming
that it is their radicalism which is guilty for the entropy of the language
and the chaos of negations that results in the collapse of all values. If we
want to ponder any of these arguments it is very important that we ask
ourselves the following: does art have any strength of its own, or is its
action, even when it seems powerful, nothing but a decoration of some
other forces that are not at first visible? If, however, art does possess some
sort of an autonomous strength, where does it draw from and what is
it by nature – is it an oppressive, totalitarian and slave-driving force or a
liberating and transformative one?
When answering these questions, the traditionalists will stand for art as
one autonomous field, from which all its force is drawn, and which should
be defended from attacks by the ‘outside’. It is clear that the difference
between art and reality is sharp and absolute, and that this difference has
been established by the aesthetic opinion. The aesthetic opinion is, in
this case, an autonomous sort of a judgment and is not to be reduced to
some other line of reasoning, or, God forbid, some other sort of practice.
Contrary to these attitudes, the avant-garde does not believe that art can
be defended, and, more importantly, does not believe that such a defense should even be organized. This, however, does not mean that the
avant-garde does not believe in art, but not in art that has behind it the
sacral idol of aesthetic opinion. This aesthetic and institutional skepticism
makes us ask ourselves what in the first place determines an artist in relation to the rest of the society, if not institutions?Maybe some specific sort
of creative practice? But who can be the judge of that, the one who by
that judgment should be constituted? We also observe the unbelievable
arbitrariness in which the artistic avant-gardes cannot be pondered upon
but only produced, and in this case sunk into the tissue of historical reality
in contrast to their own desire to transform this same tissue. It is obvious
that the power lies with the arbitrariness.
Whether Stalin was the most important product of the Russian artistic
avant-garde, we should ask ourselves together with Boris Grojs!
Whether the concentration camps were the invariable conclusion to traditional European art, we should ask ourselves together with Agamben!
How powerful is art, really?
54th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, Pavilion Serbia
A Place of Utopia
Written by Živko Grozdanić, Commissioner
Dragoljub Todosijević, in his project entitled Light and Darkness of Symbols, argues and problematizes,
amongst other things, the basic theme of the 54th Biennale ILLUMInations
4
T
he Serbian Pavilion, a physical place, or a paradigm of an unforgettable
history? The forming of any kind of judgement or opinion, beforehand,
regarding these two positions for the gallery space at the Giardini of
Venice, something not yet sufficiently known, which still awaits its thorough and critical examination, represents a serious and difficult task for
the commissioner.
The history of the Pavilion, since its construction in 1938, and the exhibition of art at the Venice Biennale, had always been a point of repressed
desires – national, religious, class related, as well as sincere art career
aspirations, primarily, in the former Yugoslavia, to nations (Serbs, Croats,
Slovenians, Macedonians...) that, as Yugoslavs, presented their artists at
the Biennale.
Today, Yugoslavia is a semantic remnant, based on unprovable claims
and false authorities of those that created it, guarded it, and, ultimately,
dismembered it. The Pavilion belongs to the Republic of Serbia now
and functions as an inherited sign that obliges the commissioner, as well
as the artist, “to fill it up, empty it, improve on it, add to it, and make it
comprehensible”.
Dragoljub Todosijević, in his project entitled Light and Darkness of Symbols,
argues and problematizes, amongst other things, the basic theme of the
54th Biennale ILLUMInations, conceived by Bice Curiger, its Artistic Director.
He simply ascertains that the Venice Biennale is “a crossroads, at which
politics, money, tourism, and, finally, art, all intersect”, thereby relaxing
Tintoretto, himself, a historical reference Bice Curiger takes up as a starting
point for the theme of the Biennale. The basis of the theme being the
historical reference to Tintoretto, whose dealings with light, both rational
and transcendent, can be viewed as important for the work of artists at
their national pavilions, especially in regards to the ecstatic role light
has in Tintoretto’s paintings, provoked Dragoljub Todosijević to “plant”
the magnificent art of Veronese, Bellini, Carpaccio in his first statement
regarding his election as a participant at the Mostra, in order to, thus,
deepen his relationship towards the Biennale itself, as well as the Serbian
Pavilion. Therefore, the artist emphasizes the broader contexts in which
his participation at the Biennale takes place, but, at the same time, opens
up the question of inheritance of the very history of the Pavilion which,
presently, belongs to the Republic of Serbia.
By titling the exhibition Light and Darkness of Symbols, through which he
examines the transformed relationship and perception of content and
form, as well as history, which, in itself, becomes form, Dragoljub Todosijević, particularly in his sculptural objects, draws attention to the highly
suspect mainstays in the history of ideas. The widespread presence of
particular ideas, and their firm stand in the globalized world, obliges the
commissioner and the artist to deconstruct all historical and national
symbols at the exhibition space of the Serbian Pavilion. Hence, the inherited
“utopia Yugoslavia”, as something which was forsaken, ensures its hidden
presence at the Serbian Pavilion- and Dragoljub Todosijević reminds us
of the twofold reading and understanding of the Pavilion, as well as the
term Yugoslav Pavilion, itself, in the same way that the notion of the
• • • Portrait of Dragoljub Raša Todosijević. Photo Marinela Koželj
A Place of Utopia! / N OVA MISAO
5
Greek word “utopia” can be “EU-topia”, i.e., “good place” or, alternatively,
“OU-topia” or “no place”. Utopia never became a reality, it descended into
darkness, as did countless other political ideas.
To the commissioner of the project, who, merely ostensibly, implements
the project through bureaucratic and procedural means, light represents a
term that signifies a segment of the electromagnetic spectrum of radiation
from the range of wavelengths visible to the naked eye. When it is expected
of the commissioner and the artist to make the Serbian Pavilion visible,
which, in itself, is a pleonasm, then each Gott liebt die Serben (God Loves
the Serbs) installation from the series of Todosijević’s works, exhibited in
dozens of the most prominent museums and galleries of the world, and
inspired by the attitudes of Gustave Courbet and Marcel Duchamp, guarantees that the works will be left to the interpretations of the viewers
N OVA MISAO / A Place of Utopia
beyond the usual ideological or religious content. Dragoljub Todosijević,
with these series of his works at the Serbian Pavilion, continues the
discourse on the fluctuation of meaning and interpretation of symbols,
as does, ultimately, the symbolic reading of the swastika invariably depend
on new historical circumstances and ideological matrixes. The ideology
of the exhibition is a set of open, entirely rational concepts, and their
explicit message will constitute itself in the relationships between the
expected and the unexpected, the acceptable and the unacceptable,
the public and the secret, between light and darkness, throughout the
duration of the Biennale. Dragoljub Todosijević’s Light and Darkness of
Symbols art project represents an endless map upon which the visitor can
proceed in all directions of the past and the future. 
Translated by Milana Vujkov
• • • Scratching the belly
Dragoljub Raša Todosijević and Živko Grozdanić Gera
Thank You, Raša Todosijević – a Grateful Serbia
Interviewed by Daniela Halda
I did all sorts of things: if I was not making objects, I was preparing performances, and if not that, then I was
drawing elementary paintings, designing environments, printing posters, experimenting with sound and morals
(mainly shouting and walling up radios), writing texts, recording video-tapes, drawing straight lines (on papers,
or walls of private flats, hotels, in European galleries and prominent museums), gave lectures (on myself and others
– more on myself than others), travelled or, simply, wasted my time, with pleasure, in endless discussions on art.
R
aša Todosijević’s short biography says: Born in Belgrade on 2 September
1945. Lives and works in Belgrade as an independent artist. Graduated at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1969. It is written courteously, deliberately, carefully, impersonally, in a clerical manner... walking that sensitive line
between the private and the public. On this occasion, could we go behind the
curtains to catch a glimpse of your private life- your ancestry, family genesis
and relationships, your childhood, early youth...?
Raša: Biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, lives of saints, hagiographies,
apocrypha, true confessions, famous quotes, letters, diaries, unpaid bills,
personal documents, valid or invented logia, marginal data, credible or
those entirely unreliable narratives on the adventures and the always
grim and heartbreaking but inspiring troubles in the lives of particular
artists certainly constitute too great a burden and, dare I say, cosmically
heavy load of all manner of materials that is, believe it or not, in its ruffled,
dubious persuasiveness, or obvious flimsiness – a monozygotic twin to
that perennially esteemed, prim, lofty, civil, academically chatty, and,
why in God’s name shy away from this, boring madam called the History
of Art. As times go by, I think we will, in the foreseeable future, become
Rabelaisian licentious witnesses of something that could be called, bombastically, and with a blast of fanfare from medieval walls, the forthcoming bankruptcy of that mundane and long-widowed lady, who is still,
with her nose held high, as you know, under the cape of smugness,
without a shred of intellectual credibility, wandering around and cruising
the bright lights of big cities and introducing herself, amongst the crowd,
respectfully, in a managerial fashion, under the names of Theory of Art,
Teorija Umentnosti, Kunsttheorie, Théorie de l’art, Теория искусства,
Teoria dell’Arte etc.
naked facts, of one’s own past. This is all fairy tales. Autobiographies are
written so future biographies could be forged and kept secret that, which,
in order to save one’s own skin, needs to be opportunely sidestepped.
The symbolic, as well as the real topography of my childhood most resembles a stellar map on which a skinny kid, a street pixie, with eyes
wide-open, describes his landmarks, as a sailor would, ones like: Šajkaška
Street, the yard at Šajkaška number 17, the thoroughly derelict Botanical
Gardens, 29th November, Cvijićeva Street number 115, the great and gorgeous Danube (no number), Profila, Jojkićev Dunavac, Kalemegdan with
its cold and mysterious dungeons, its deserted walls and a glorious
view of Sava, Danube and both War Islands, cinemas: “Drina”, “Braća
Stamenković”, “Balkan”, “Kozara”, “20th October”, “Jadran”, “Zvezda” (the
Cinematheque will arrive somewhat later on), then the Professors’ Colony,
the New Cemetery, Višnjica, Topčider, Bajlon Market, Palilula, Dorćol, Dušanova Street, Karaburma, both train stations (the Main one, and the tiny
one called Danube Station), the American Depot, an army/state security
However, let us return to your question. I will repeat the believe it or not
part; there is nothing more problematic than autobiographical confessions. Only the terminally naive will think it blasphemous to state that
someone out there could be highly mistrustful of the ostensibly unadulterated truths that a prominent person had uttered, bringing forth, to
light, to one’s esteemed readers, from the bottom one’s heart, humble in
spirit, inspired from above, as if on a silver platter, the details, not to say,
• • • Mother for Sale, 2001, installation, dimensions variable, Gallery of Modern Art, Budva
N OVA M I SAO / T ha n k Yo u , R aš a To d o sij ev i ć – a G r ate f u l S e r b i a
7
• • • Gott liebt die Serben, 1993, installation, dimensions variable, Private-Public,
Gallery of Contemporary Art, Pančevo
department store for the officer’s floozies at Masarikova Street, the Luna
Park at Tašmajdan etc. Each of the aforementioned toponyms is a galaxy
chock-full of innumerable associations; those names, by themselves,
precisely located, not in any old time, but in the dismal postwar one, do
not have to mean anything to some people, however, life itself, on the
famed Belgrade asphalt, is an abstraction. Asphalt is a metaphor of purity
here, on the other side of the cycle of nature. The city and its clear spatiotemporal details are a conditio sine qua non for abstract thought and the
basis of modern art. Let’s get this straight, potatoes and peppers are not
exchanged for salt, razors, matchsticks, petroleum, hairpins and shemagh
scarves here, but for currency, metal and paper, as it is, domestic or foreign,
an abstract medium for all kinds of actual trade.
For my fourth, or, perhaps, fifth birthday, my mother- guided by the intuition
of a true Delphic Sibyl- bought me two children’s books, two systems of
meaning; one book of Soviet-Russian-Slavic provenance was titled Katya
and the Little Bears, while the other one was called Pavle or Pale, Alone in
the World, of the Danish author Jens Sigsgaard. The Slavic-Communist
book talked of a harmless and awkwardly fairy tale-like world of forests in
which a small girl, the little Katya, becomes friends with stray bears, while
Jens, in 1942, narrates a dream- or, rather, creates a fiction- of a child that is
left alone in the World, in the middle of a big city, and who, in his absolute
loneliness, realizes that money, as such, has no meaning, that it is completely
meaningless if there are no people around. At the very end of the dream,
right before the morning awakening, Pavle or Pale throws the money in
the street sewer because he understood its relative meaning.
• In one place you say: Every man, every nation, every artist, can be perceived
and identified by the way they solve, in particular conditions, the question of
their own destiny, their own existence, and how they contemplate that existence. Can you draw a parallel between existence of the past and the existence
of the now?
A PAINTER AND AN ART CLINIC
I used to know a handsome painter that had a hole in his head. One could
judge, from afar, that the said hole was as wide and as deep as a rifle cartridge. And even though it has never been proved, malicious people say
that, as years went by, it grew larger and larger. It won’t go amiss if I casually mention an art critic here, as well. He had, as did the painter, a hole,
in the same place, almost of the same proportions. Whenever the two
would meet, the holes would, with no visible cause, as if by some mysterious command, just so, simultaneously, on their own accord, start whistling. The painter would then prick his ears up, the critic would too, and
they both would, hand in hand, enjoy themselves immensely, listening to
their holes whistle on.
Raša Todosijević, Belgrade, 1980.
Raša: In one of his thick, and, by all means, interesting books, Will Durant
says that it is not only important to succeed in reaching the New World,
the dreamt of Terra Nova, the splendor of the opulent Eldorado, Cipangu,
or America, but it is equally as important to return home from it alive and
well, and to rationalize this, and such a discovery, in a palpable way, on an
actual temporal plane. For example, Leif Ericson could have, five hundred
years before Christopher Columbus, arrived at the shores of the continent
that would later be named America- and let’s be benevolent in our faith
that this brave Scandinavian truly did disembark on the beaches of
Labrador- however, Ericson’s alleged discovery of the New World, or
whatever really happened at the time, did not carry any influence on the
life of Europeans of the day, and the future development of European
civilization- unless we include here the effects of one vague legend
tucked away in Iceland and the dark corners of Scandinavia. That’s the
essence of the story. At the end of the day, if we were to be malicious, it’s
not entirely clear if the said Ericson was the one who set foot on the
aforementioned shores of Labrador, or if it was done by his father, Erik
Thorvaldsson, better known as Erik the Red amongst the people. The story
of Leif Ericson and Christopher Columbus is a complicated metaphor and,
for the local populace, one quite difficult to digest, however, it should be,
if taken in properly, very instructive for all manner of cultural and political
flowers of the Balkans.
T ha n k Yo u , R aš a To d o sij ev i ć – a G r ate f u l S e r b i a / N OVA M I SAO
• • • The Sculpture, 2002, installation, dimensions variable, Museum of Contemporary Art, Beograd
catalepsy perpetually concealed by the grand and, according to life’s logic, unattainable ideological or national ideals.
• The emergence of conceptual art in Serbia has several interpretations, or
schools of thought, which explain their “narratives on conceptual art in Serbia”.
The question is based on epistemology, that is, the attempt at finding the starting point of understanding your generation, its artistic practice, but, most of all,
you, in this period of immediate post-World War Two reflexions, the communist
rule from 1944-1968, socialist realism, the conceptualization of the narrative,
the emotional, personal stories, fears, tensions, the suppression and nurturing
of authority of the then-regime. More precisely put, what is credited to you, as
well as to a few other members your generation, is your decisive break from the
continuity of meekness and obedience, and your taking a firm and uncompromising stand in the name of the subjective and individual, not only in terms of
art, but in the expressions of humanity and vitality, as well. In the spirit of 1968
activism you spoke out, boldly and defiantly, in your own first-person speech.
This, practically, meant a deflection from the artistic standards and criteria of
evaluation based on the principles of moderate “socialist modernism”, as well
as the rejection of formal academic art education. Are there any more hidden
points in this history that preoccupy you today as a “discourse of deflection”?
As a youth, I thought that, step by step, a kind of liberal socialism will bring
us closer to Europe, legally, technologically, culturally, and economically.
I believed that, following the logic of things, in its evolution, or by the
passage of time itself, Yugoslavia would unavoidably be integrated with
that which we will, much later on, call the European Union. That did not
happen.
A great many things have been written on the ex-Yugoslav regression. I
don’t think that what we are dealing with here is a resistance to trendiness, the inertia of lethargic provincialism, classic European decadence,
the denial of modern times, or, let’s say, some unadulterated Victorian
conservatism, a romantic longing for times long gone and their high
ideals, but, in the Balkans, devil knows why, we are talking about the
revived momentum of that unbridled and obviously criminalized vulgarity
wholeheartedly supported by the lower social strata, the church, the army,
the police, political coteries etc.
For me, as an artist, a young man that engaged in art in Belgrade, and
was also considering new horizons of possibilities in creation, the early
1970s were not a good time. A chronic lack of money, or, rather, a permanent lack of money, was not my sole trouble. The favoritism of cousins,
children, cousins of friends, the firm party brotherhoods of no-talent
communists, the bureaucracy of art associations, provincial arrogance,
hometown moronisms, false Bohemianism, isolationism of art circles and
naked egoism, thinly spread between Kalemegdan and Slavija, this is
what has been and what still remains to be a comprehensive, and, to this
day, a degrading and paralyzing self-opiate. From a mouse’s perspective,
and not managing to grasp the plane of the great discussion on art: the
story of individualism, of creative fantasy and a critical perception of the
world, the artist in Serbia easily identifies the chichi word art, a word with
multiple meanings, art with a capital A, Beaux-Arts, with the story of national history, and with that more-or-less adept craftsman-swindler-sycophant of an entirely pacified intellect, or an artist that tries his hardest to
be aesthetic spice to the hurry-scurried cobbler cake of communist-chauvinist rigidity. In brief: we are faced with a type of permanent spiritual
N OVA M I SAO / T ha n k Yo u , R aš a To d o sij ev i ć – a G r ate f u l S e r b i a
Raša: Nothing happens overnight. The summing up of experience, the
exchange of experience, traveling around the whole wide world, returning to Belgrade, and those intense friendships that started as early as
1963 and 1964. Every man has his micro-evolutions and micro-reversals.
At Lala Subotički’s I met Urkom Gergelj, who had to travel the long road
from the industrially polluted Vojlovica to Šumatovačka, every day. Neša
Paripović and Zoran Popović lived in my, or, rather, our neighborhood. All
of us wanted to enroll at the Academy of Fine Arts. And at that communal
Drawing and Sculpting Course in Šumatovačka Street number 122a, we
were mostly thought to draw so we could pass, without trepidation, the
entrance exam at the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts. It seemed to me to
be against common sense for a young man not to be able to express himself guided by his inner talent and the power of youthful buoyancy, and
to be subjected, even ahead of the potential enrollment at the Academy
• • • Was ist Kunst, Marinela Koželj?, 1978, performance, SKC, Beograd
• • • Liberty Restaurant, 1998, paint on the wall, 5x3,5m, Concordia, Vršac
than ideals, and the Belgrade collectors of today harbor a burning desire
for socialist art.
At my second or third year of studies I met Marina Abramović and Era
Milivojević. Era came from Užice; Marina lived on Makedonska Street, more
precisely, in the building near the “Grmeč” tavern. That’s how this small
informal circle of ours was, roughly, shaped.
If I were to exempt the Drangularijum exhibition here, which we will get
to three or four years later i.e. in 1971, the crucial disagreement between
our circle and the art or spirit of the times that we had encountered all
around us was not marked by some critical, explicit event. In the beginning we did not agree with thousands of minor and, seemingly, not that
noticeable everyday “details”. At the very beginnings, therefore, during
our studies at the Academy, there had been no evidence of any effort of
bypassing everything, opposing everything, and affirming, in front of
others, an already shaped aesthetic credo, a new artistic universe that
needed to be fought for. My resistance consisted of conscious slothfulness
as the only meaningful response to impossible conditions.
10
of Fine Arts, to narrow customs of a half-dead program of mixed-up
paradigms or, better said, slacker improvisations made out of all manner
of socialist twaddle, and those faded memories of the pedagogically
ambiguous equilibriums of Parisian courses and the ideals of the local
moonlighter studios from mythical, that is, not easily, or not at all, verifiable
days before the Second World War. Whatever anybody thinks about it,
this was, in essence, a hazy path called socialist modernism which had,
one way or another, courteously or impertinently, denied life to all its
alternatives and the plunging of an artist into the dark dungeons of
existence; you were either going to draw and think in the way that was
approved, according to the unwritten laws of the environment, or you
would not get a chance to enroll at the Academy. To make the irony
worse, upon completion of your studies, the admission into the Association
of Fine Art Artists was to proceed following the same customs, and under
the supervision of the same mediocrities that arbitrated on Academy
enrollment.
When we are talking about the mid-1960s everyone forgets about the
marginal but still vital remnants of the bourgeoisie that had, and this is
still going on today, vainly boasted their elevated conservatism, their
pathetic and anachronistic patriarchy, sweet Christian Orthodoxy, their
white, almost quisling, Russophile sentiments or Russophilia, and their
unctuous antipathy towards the socialist regime. However, according to the
logic of survival and the nature of pragmatic interests of homo sapiens,
that same bourgeoisie, in its impotent malaise, still, and this is hard to
believe, wholeheartedly embraced all the aesthetic standards and the
hierarchy of cultural authorities imposed by the new socialist system. This
remained thus to this very day, this grim 2011. In any case, life is stronger
It had not been so difficult, nor did it require much time to notice that my
professors were people of shoddy education. They were artists without
direction, aim, or any type of cultural apostolate. Their comprehension of
art had consisted of the kind of generic knowledge that could have easily
been found in any commercial picture-book on artists, epochs, styles etc.
Their “talent”, if we can actually call it thus, barely managed to reach
Belgrade city limits, but this did not hinder their self-adulation and the
constant use of the institution’s reputation- albeit a vague and culturally
bureaucratic reputation of the Academy of Fine Arts- as a halo in the shaping
of their local careers. Their intense promotion of the provincial man was
not instigated by love of rustic expression, forgotten childhoods, or that
socially tinted empathy towards young people, newcomers in the big
city, it was, rather, primarily, generous support of the patriarchally and
pigheadedly raised sycophants that had, in return, validated their professor’s
power, reputation, viewed them as father-figures, models of behavior,
patrons, successful artists that needed to be flattered, emulated, and whose
names were to be dropped around in order to make it in Belgrade through
this parochial hurly-burly. That’s why we all decided not to mention the
names of our professors in our future catalogues as we had wasted so
much time, in vain, studying with them.
Already, at the very start of my schooling, my previous, and, of course,
naive idealized notions and illusions on the Parnassian heights of the
Academy had plunged into the abyss of insipid reality.
At the time, the idea of New Art was more like a tendency- as much as that
was possible from the shortened Belgrade perspective of the late 1960s- of
thoroughly reviewing and interpreting the contemporary art phenomena,
in the world, as well as in Yugoslavia, and an opportunity for a young person
to challenge a system of jumbled values, a system that was cosily resting,
as a parasite, on the amalgam of ignorance, family ties, communist-party
brotherhoods, steadfast parochial blindness, conceit, theories of art, large
and small, ones that even an average connoisseur of art today would
heartily laugh at, or be embarrassed for, the surrogates of national pathos,
mythomania of the semi-literate hillbillies, and, above all, the boundless
T ha n k Yo u , R aš a To d o sij ev i ć – a G r ate f u l S e r b i a / N OVA M I SAO
• • • Untitled, 1998, installation, dimensions variable, Gallery of the Cultural Centre of Belgrade
and unconquerable sea of every day falsehoods. It would be suitable to
place here, in passing, the assumption that artistic activities defined by
the term artistic nomadism- which appeared in the mid-1970s- possibly
arising from the need, in regards to the globalization of cultural systems,
and petrified cultural institutions around 1968, to react not in the usual
manner, by inertia, with a stylistically consistent policy of repetition or variations of similar motifs, rather, with frequent and open change in media,
shifting the radius of the problem, creative approaches etc. In the broadest
sense, a more suitable general definition for New Art in Serbia, recognized
and defined by numerous titles, would be New Artistic Practice, rather
than problem orientated definitions as are Fluxus, Post-Object Art, Conceptual Art, Body Art, Land Art, Narrative Art, Video Art etc. I would prefer
to connect these terms with specific activities of particular artists or groups
of artists, than to make use of analogies derived from the experience of
earlier movements such as Pop Art, Hyperrealism, Neoconstructivism, Op
Art, Minimal Art, Hard Edge, New Figuration, Informel etc.
The beginnings of New Art in Yugoslavia can be found in the so-called
student, or, more precisely, marginal institutions, as far as the official cultural
policy was concerned, as were the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade, and,
in part, Belgrade Youth Centre, then the Youth Tribune in Novi Sad, the
Student Centre, the Podroom Gallery, and the Expanded Media Gallery in
Zagreb, and, finally, the Student Cultural Centre in Ljubljana. At the time,
these were the institutions that did not concern themselves too much with
formal exhibiting procedures as was the case with the so-called state
galleries, their proposals, waiting lists, established long-term programs,
plans, councils of experts, boards, juries, financial quotas and so on.
Drangularijum was the exhibition at the gallery of the Belgrade Student
Cultural Centre which had reshaped the profile and redirected further activity of that, at the time, entirely new institution, at Maršal Tito Street number
48. Dunja Blažević was the curator of the gallery, and Biljana Tomić, Jerko
Denegri i Bojana Pejić were her close associates. Everything else is history.
• When we speak of the background position of conceptual art in Serbia, it
would not go amiss to mention its so-called zero position in relation to the
positions of Croatia and Slovenia. Was this position an aggravating factor for
you?
11
Contrary to the example of Ljubljana and Zagreb, we had exhibited in
closed spaces at the Student Cultural Centre; we used bodies as material
or we depended upon our own egos. We believed that the body of the
artist, and his own ego, were the last and the definitive zone of freedom.
Be that as it may, in our immediate historical background, we did not recognize artists which could be our reference points, nor could we consider
any of them as our spiritual vanguard. Zenit, Ljubomir Micić, and the Serbian Dada were part of the past, far from the zone of the topical, so they
were as important to our creative work as was the rest of the historical
avant-garde, the European Dada etc.... Only with this type of comparison
of the processes that unfolded between Ljubljana, Zagreb and Belgrade
can the term “zero position” become clearer, however, it does not, at the
same time, exclude our direct links with European artists, including close
connections and, quite often, friendships, with the young artists of Zagreb
and Ljubljana, as well.
Raša: I think that this question is pretty cumbersome and ambiguous.
The Slovenian group OHO was, in part, directed towards working in nature, and, in part, probably due to the influence of David Nez who came
from America, it created works in the spirit of Land Art, and, finally, attempted experiments that most resembled living in hippy communes.
Questions for Živko Grozdanić Gera
Young Zagreb artists had the Exat 51 Group, then, the activities of New
Tendencies, and the Gorgon group, as their close and vivid cultural background. This constitutes one more reason why their earliest work was oriented towards interventions in city ambiances, preferring polyester, plastics,
lights, film, and, subsequently, video. The heritage of the Exat 51 Group and
the Gorgon group was not some distant historical legacy without a temporal
link and live protagonists, a legacy passed on through books or mediating
witness accounts, rather, these young artists had met the members of the
aforementioned groups, at the same time, and in the same city, witnessing
their exhibitions, manifestos, public appearances etc.
• What is quite noticeable in texts on Raša is a matrix that is generated, in
which a “poetics on conceptual art” is created- I am alluding to the romanticizing of the times spent at the SKC (Student Cultural Centre), of the “special”
generation (Dragoljub Todosijević, Marina Abramović, Slobodan Era Milivojević, Neša Paripović, Zoran Popović, Gergelj Urkom). This opinion is based on
a great amount of written material about a small number of art pieces, exhibitions, namely, of this generation’s relatively small production. Later on,
especially during the 1990s, when “fertile soil” has been created for this generation to present its political standpoints derived from the art and the atmosphere of the 1970s, it had, other than in Raša’s case, failed, it stayed silent, in
N OVA M I SAO / T ha n k Yo u , R aš a To d o sij ev i ć – a G r ate f u l S e r b i a
• • • Diary, 1971-2002, mixed media, dimensions variable, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade
this time period of thirty years, a prevailing number of artists of the new
artistic practice, in their productions, had remained “consistently disinterested” on the mechanisms that enabled the disintegration of a society that
was also called “the Yugoslav cultural area”, and, on several occasions, I
tried to reach a conclusion through the idea that such indifference was
based on an insufficient distance from the fine art narratives, that is to
say, from literary, metaphorical, aesthetic content that “concealed” itself
in the works of the protagonists of the new artistic practice.
A minor argument for this thesis could be the analysis of Marina Abramović’s
re-enacted performance dating from 1975- Lips of Thomas, enacted at the
Galerie Krinzinger in Innsbruck, and re-enacted, in 2005, in New York. The
new performance, its iconography and the introduced elements, opened
up a string of possibilities of a perhaps different reading of the works
enacted during the 1970s. It is exactly this introduction of new meanings
that argues for the readings of these works-performances to be read as
socio-modern in which Marina Abramović even celebrates, discretely, the
partisans and the communist system. The performance enacted in the
Guggenheim Museum, in 2005, in which Marina, of her own free will,
carves out a five-pointed star, underneath “silicone” breasts, on her own
belly, presents precisely the evidence that this is the new “voluntary suffering” of the so-called ideological repression in the name of communism.
After the new performances, and, after the wars of the 1990s, as well, we
have to read the performances of the 1970s in a different way, especially
because the artist had to know that she is in for a risk when she decided
to actualize precisely these works, or when she added new elements to
the performance, as were the partisan beret and army boots.
12
The engagement of each conceptual artist can exclusively be of a conceptual nature. It is a great mystery to me why and if Marina Abramović
exposed her body and her mind to the sharp and powerful cut inflicted
by a large surgical knife? Conceptual art can never be beautiful, and Marina Abramović can be beautiful without the silicone breasts as Aphrodite
cannot be beautiful with the sharp edges of a knife!?
other words, it changed its aggregate state, somehow, it evaporated. You do
not have to agree with this digression, however, why was a united front of
artists from Zagreb, Ljublana, Novi Sad, and Belgrade not created, why was
there no deflection from the regimes of the time in Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia,
from the horrible chauvinism, nationalism... There had even been some support of the regime, and talk of “the preservation of our beloved Yuga”. The invisibility of that generation in the period of the 1990s begs a different kind of
reading of the 1970s practice, that is- it indicates that in these works, after all,
aesthetics concealed itself, somewhere or other, it the manner of the “Alien”!
Gera: The question could be interpreted as an assumption that would be
very difficult to verify! However, the events that unfolded since the 1970s,
and, especially, after the 1980s, determined the events that brought into
question the reading of every segment of history, culture, and the practice of art, itself, across ex-YU, in the 1990s. The 1990s, in the history of
ex-YU, will be remembered as the years of the deconstruction of utopia,
or, better said, the years of destruction, fulcrums of which have been hidden somewhere, namely, the real reasons of why the disintegration of Yugoslav society had taken the toll of 200 thousand victims are unknown,
as well as how the displacement of over a million people from one place
to another had constituted ethnically cleansed territories... Therefore, in
In this construction, namely, in the manner of reading the activity of the
artist, with respect to their conceptual pedigree, as well as respect for the
works created in the 1970s, the engagement of the 1990s, in the context
of apocalyptic images, requires answers. Therefore, when we juxtapose
the works of the 1970s and the images of the war of the 1990s, we could
construct one, perhaps, ostensibly impossible discourse within which my
line of questioning seems justifiable. In a thus positioned context, the engagement of Dragoljub Todosijević had remained separate and distinct,
he did not discreetly relate to the heritage of the Yugoslav communist
system, within which, in the 1970s, he created works of an analytical
structure, rather, at the very beginning of the 1990s, he examined the
nature of this society the same way in which he examined the nature of a
work of art. In each of his works, as a hidden code, he constructed riddles
within which answers could be found regarding the disintegration of
ex-Yugoslavia. If his private, personal story is to be understood- the death of
his father, who was a partisan, and his life alongside his mother, Anđelija,
then the narrative structure that is tautologically conceptualized in his
stories within a private discourse is set as ironic in the sociological field,
or the field of 1990s history, boiling with dramatic images of war, exoduses, blood, murder, pillaging, inflation, clericalization...
T ha n k Yo u , R aš a To d o sij ev i ć – a G r ate f u l S e r b i a / N OVA M I SAO
Hence, Dragoljub Todosijević constructs a web of works that directly
accuse the communist regime, the crimes it has concealed from history,
the murders of tens of thousands of people after 1944, it points towards
its relations with the historically determined events of the disintegration
of Yugoslavia, especially the responsibility of the Serbian national corps,
political, cultural elites that were the chief protagonists of this history!
Dear friend,
On the palm of my right hand I have drawn a circle with a ball point pen.
Shortly afterwards, maybe a minute or two later, on that same palm, and
in the aforementioned circle, I wrote eleven letters:
• Raša’s early performances, according to their connotations, were, in essence,
political, or, more precisely put, they were based on the idea of the desacralization of the existing system of art- of the local moderate socialist modernism,
as well as the global system of art.
With his Edinburgh Statement, published in Belgrade on 21 April 1975, with
the subtitle Who makes profit from art and who gains from it honestly?, an
incredibly exhaustive and precise record of all manner of services, professions,
crafts, institutions, and individuals that profit from art, and live off the backs
of artists. Other than this performance, and the installations entitled Nulla
dies sine linea (Not A Day Without A Line), through the agency of irony, he
undermines and exposes to ridicule the power and the might of the system of
art. The contexts may be altered, however- within this field of conflict where
interests intersect- the fact remains that the system of art, as part of the global
economic system, became a profitable arena, the difference being that in the
current context artists profit from art, as well. How do you view this shift, and
is it in any way reproduced within the system of art in Serbia today?
13
I realize, staring at my palm, that I will not be able to send you that circle
or those letters, and regarding my hand, and the meaning of what I have
just done, we will maybe get to talk on some other occasion.
Raša Todosijević, A Circle On My Palm, Belgrade, 18 July, 1993
Gera: Thirty years down the line, all art is read differently, that is to say,
the piece that was once enacted continually undergoes the process of
constitution, and it is never entirely finished. This is also the case with the
practice of Raša Todosijević who realized dozens of works, texts, actions,
statements, performances during his career... They are transformed daily,
namely, they are charged with new perceptions of everyday existence,
contexts alter their meanings, their reflexions, and create a distinct, complicated live organism on which the material of social relations is being
deposited. Therefore, the work of Raša Todosijević is not, anymore, what
he wanted it to be when he created it, such a work becomes a social object
towards which society has particular obligations. The entire process unfolds
within a so-called system of art, whatever it may be.
In one such statement which Todosijević entitled the Edinburgh Statement,
the idea of irony is apparent, or a powerlessness towards the status of art
itself, as well as the function of the artist in society, or as reaction to the
failings of a system of art!? We must not forget that this sort of statement
was made on 21 April 1975 in Belgrade, hence, in the context of the atmosphere of Yugoslav socialism, self-management economy i.e. the communist
regime under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito. The activity of the artists
that dealt in “the art of the new artistic practice”, namely, the artists that
with their activity examined the very nature of art, its reflexion, language,
had unfolded in the fairly casual atmosphere of SKC in Belgrade. The Student Cultural Centre operated as a separate and special place which was
protected, autonomous, free from the political regime, the firm hand of
the Communist Party which did not pay attention to the production that
this generation of artists in the 1970s was realizing. With his Edinburgh
Statement Raša Todosijević undermined such a context, and in a fiercely
auto-reflexive way ironized his own position within such a history, as well.
Today, this text has a greater function than it did 36 years ago. This is the
• • • Decision as Art, 1973, performance, SKC, Beograd
N OVA M I SAO / T ha n k Yo u , R aš a To d o sij ev i ć – a G r ate f u l S e r b i a
• • • Gott liebt die Serben, 2000, installation, dimensions variableMuseum of Modern Art, Ljubljana
They represent subversions planted as “materialism of the chance encounter”, determined by coincidence without a source, without any special
meaning. Dragoljub Todosijević allows for the “chance encounter” to not
even happen! And precisely in this particular decision is the cynicism
concealed, but not of the artist, rather of the form which the artists constructs in daily life. The series of aforementioned pieces in public spaces
indicate towards the phenomenon of a work defining the connection of
“affects and perception”, where Todosijević’s subjectivity resides as an
accidental experience of the random bystander: as is the entire world
created from the tiny atom, so a complex combination of visual imagery
that propels the inner images of man is created from one statement of an
artist on a billboard, passing bus, a wall. The framework of such an art
is broad and activates the world of new signs, conclusions, and social
compositions. These types of messages relax history and everyday life.
14
kind of paradox which a work has, it functions in the social field today,
opens up problems of the functioning of art in society, and depicts the
powerlessness of the individual artist! It would be out of place to compare the art scenes in developed liberal societies with the art scenes in
countries that are still in the process of constituting elementary concepts,
even the concept of state, that is, it is impossible to compare these two
positions. The independent opinions of artists, critics, on the poor attitude
of the state towards their productions are legitimate, however, my personal opinion is that the artist has absolutely no right to expect any sort of
privilege from the state, especially from a state that now has a constitution
that defines it as capitalist society. In these circumstances, the activity of
the artists is equated with the activity of a farmer, or a sportsman. No
longer does the artist hold that biblical privileged position in time where
he is the intermediate between God and Man, rather, he must place himself
on a horizontal level with all other society’s protagonists. He has to act
the the same way as does an entrepreneur, he has to be both a politician
and a manager, a craftsman, a philosopher... he needs to examine his own
concept, and bring it, substantially, into question.
Whether cynicism is, equally, a defense, or if it is one and the same form,
will depend on the decision of the artist to keep it in the position of this
ambiguity. Dragoljub Todosijević does not permit the “formal beauty” to
dominate; on the contrary, he confronts it with the contents of society,
and with it, as such, as a work of art, the artist initiates the dialogue.
Therefore, the artist is aware that the essence of artistic creation lies in
the establishing of relations between subjects- in this case the subject is
to be found in constant conflict with society and its history!
• For this particular question I will make use of Raša’s commentary regarding
the theme of his presence at the Biennale: Light and Darkness of Symbols: A
series of works-installations under the common title Gott liebt die Serbien are,
• Raša used text as a medium, in this case allied with the visual image, in a
series of posters and billboards at the end of the 1990s, as well. As a reminder:
Murder, Serboranges, Sewage Flower, The Best Wine in Italy, Art is Dead,
Tomorrow is Monday, Mother for Sale, Despite the Economic Crisis... Utilizing
public space, by the virtue of the text/message, the artist endeavored to
awaken the sleeping voice of conscience in people. However, as this did not
occur, he circulated a series of thank yous to himself: Thank you, Raša Todosijević- a Grateful Serbia or Thank you, Raša Todosijević- Grateful Citizens of
Ljubljana, etc. Is cynicism a weapon or a means of defense? If it is both, what
sort of quality does this defense have, one that serves as an attack weapon?
Gera: The works with texts, namely, messages of an ironic content follow
that tradition in art which is based on communication in the public arena.
• • • Decision as Art, 1973, performance, SKC, Beograd
T ha n k Yo u , R aš a To d o sij ev i ć – a G r ate f u l S e r b i a / N OVA M I SAO
• • • Gott liebt die Serben, 2002, installation, dimensions variable, Museum of Contemporary Art, Beograd
actually, discussions on the changeability of the interpretation of symbols
and the conditioning of these changes by historical circumstances... Up to the
emergence of German Nazism, the swastika was considered to be an archaic
symbol of pre-Christian civilizations around the globe, from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, Ireland, Rome, South and North America, the Pacific,
Japan, China, Indonesia, India etc... nobody was paying any attention to this
symbol as a religious and decorative element of the polytheistic world slowly
disappearing from the historical stage. Since the moment it was used for
identification requirements of Nazi ideology and after all the horrors of the
Holocaust, our perception of the symbol has changed, although- truth be
told- its form has not altered at all.
15
For the first time, a work of art does not emit ideological and religious content,
but its meaning depends on the observer himself.
Gera: An answer to this question could be found if we consider it in the
context of the use of the term “culture” where it is seen as a sum of the
highest human achievements and values represented in the figure of the
“artist”, who, as a specially talented individual becomes an antithesis to
“history”, that is to say- in which he does not have the fear of the “masses”
that always assemble underneath a symbol and adds new meaning to it.
Dragoljub Todosijević’s standpoint is that the success of a work is measured by its openness to dialogue, discussion, the process which secures
the work in time and the manner of the relations that it has within the
system of culture.
Through the production of the series of works with the swastika Dragoljub
Todosijević establishes a fairly hostile attitude towards the public and the
society for which these works are intended. The appearance of the Gott
liebt die Serbien piece, at the beginning of the 1990s, namely, at the
very moment when Serbian society started to function according to the
dictates of the national narratives that were represented by Slobodan
Milošević, was determined by the atmosphere in Serbia under the rule of
Slobodan Milošević. The interpretations of the swastika symbol were
constantly altered until it was used in the time of Nazism. Since then, its
use is viewed solely as a sign of warning to societies that are slipping into
some form of national insanity.
If we consider this through the ideology of conceptual art, that does not
deal in forms, rather in concepts, reflexions on the swastika in the aftermath of German Nazism do not allow for it to be made into a bouquet of
violets or Donald Judd’s geometric form. Hence, works with the swastika
and Raša’s dealings with it to this very day, even at the Venice Biennale,
represent a tautological sequence which continues to indicate the presence
of various subtle and concealed national dangers.
The end of the 20th century has profoundly transformed the perception
of states, ethnic groups regarding their own past. Dragoljub Todosijević,
with great precision, pinpoints the necessity of rejecting the earlier versions of history and with his works with the swastika he seems to demand
the “acceleration of history” or require its democratization. The searing
recollections give plenty of space for the political elites in Serbia to utilize
the splendor and the misery of history, that is, to cleverly commercialize
the use of the past that becomes their own personal property. The events
N OVA M I SAO / T ha n k Yo u , R aš a To d o sij ev i ć – a G r ate f u l S e r b i a
of the 1990s attest to the fact that a hefty price was paid for the abolition
of the one-party system, however, the sobering up from the errors of
communism and the speedy uncritical introduction or return of capitalism
generated a incredible amount of crimes across the territory of ex-Yugoslavia that confronted a utopia with the reality of ethnic cleansing and
mass murder.
In this context, working with the swastika is not at all easy to communicate,
and it requires the adjustment of the image of the past to a new fund of
knowledge. Dragoljub Todosijević suggests that the function of symbols
is always different, but that its form is always the same!? If we agree with
such an observation then the non-analytical approach to the said symbol, without interest directed towards the present, as consequence,
opens up that other question, as well: why do people kill each other over
historically expounded pretensions? Therefore, questions without answers follow one another until the sequence can be finalized with the
question: how is one to deal with one’s own history in order to learn from
it? Confronted with the images of war, Todosijević offers difficult answers
with his swastika installations, ones that each individual must give by
emancipating their own relationship with history- in the literal sense of
the word, this would be the point of overcoming the past through ideas.
Dragoljub Todosijević is present on the domestic and international art
scene for a full four decades. He has given a famous, somewhat ironic,
but witty statement regarding his own work: I did all sorts of things: if I was
not making objects, I was preparing performances, and if not that, then I was
drawing elementary paintings, designing environments, printing posters, experimenting with sound and morals (mainly shouting and walling up radios),
writing texts, recording video-tapes, drawing straight lines (on papers, or
walls of private flats, hotels, in European galleries and prominent museums),
gave lectures (on myself and others – more on myself than others), travelled
or, simply, wasted my time, with pleasure, in endless discussions on art.
His commitment and dedication to art, as a result, brings forth a wholehearted and almost maniacal identification of art and existence, occasionally
at his own expense. 
Translated by Milana Vujkov
The Ideology of Exhibitions
The Policy of Curators’ Practices and State Apparatuses
Written by Miško Šuvaković
We are talking about Venetian choices from Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia, about specific cultural policies
that are intended to prove publicly that these states are opening towards the EU or towards the global post-media
languages of “dematerialised work” at the beginning of the second decade of the new century.
16
Ideology of an Exhibition (theoretical scheme)
The ideology of an exhibition is not a conglomerate of the oriented,
completely rationalised intentions of its organisers (curators, authors of
the concept, financiers, cultural workers, politicians or state apparatuses).
The ideology of an exhibition is the atmosphere of uncertainty that encompasses conceptualised and non-conceptualised capacities of an exhibition,
the decision making about what or who representative works and artists/
authors are, the cultural and social symbolisms, the concrete solutions for
how to present a work, and the uttered proclamations, yet also the neglecting or erasing of the non-fitting examples etc. The ideology of an exhibition is expressed through a cultural test of the project and its setting, i.e. of
the conceptual map of the selection, proposals, pointed out values, highlighted unsaid knowledge, censorships, the provoked effects of public and
unspoken tastes, presented professional excuses, the uncovering of desires
and ambitions, and the realisation of social functions that together build
some sort of acceptable reality for the exhibition, for the society and culture. In other words, the ideology of an exhibition or a family of exhibitions
is not just the hierarchy of (textual) messages that the authors (cultural bureaucrats, curators, artists) of the exhibition proclaim and project with their
introductory or follow-up texts, but also the difference between the intended and the non-intended, the acceptable and non-acceptable within
the relationship between the public and the unspoken realms of the society.
It is about an ideologically situated event of the aware and the unaware, i.e.
literal and fictional. The ideology of the exhibition is not the it thing that
is directly intended for acceptance by public opinion (doxa), but the it thing
that, and it is a paradox, forms doxa and presents its expression (a singular
example) in some sort of an exchange of “social values” and “social
powers”. The ideology of an exhibition is an event of symbolic capital
created through the presentation of a certain art project.
A Comparative discussion of grand European exhibitions
If we roughly compare completely different families of important international European exhibitions: the Venice Biennale, the Kassel documenta,
the traveling exhibition Manifesto, i.e. local and regional biennales 1, we
see completely different political presentations of the “reality” of art.
1
AiM International Biennale in Marakesh, Biennale in Bucharest, Bushwick Biennial
in New York, Nantes Biennale, Florence Biennale, Havana Biennale, Women Artists’
The Venice Biennale was established in the epoch of the revamping of
national modernist cultures into an international language of the grand
European, and then Euro-American Modernism. As early as 1895 the structure of the Biennale was “determined” as being a relationship of national
pavilions and international exhibition. The organisational structure of the
Biennale re-creates a moment in the initiation of the modernist art of the
twentieth century, and that means the transforming of national bourgeois
modernism into the international language of modernism. This re-creation
of the “primary” conversion of the modern (its special national feelings
and identities) into a hegemonic and unique international modernism is
the middle ‘voice’ (effect) of all the Biennale exhibitions, no matter how
disparate they have been from each other and no matter whether or
not they have projected a completely specific concrete aesthetic, poetic
or artistic problem of a given historical moment. The Venetian Biennale
has been completely marked by the dialectics of modernism (how ‘it’ was
presupposed by Hegel)
1. Thesis,
2. Antithesis and
3. Synthesis
The thesis is national modernism (individual, often ‘folklore’ or ‘hegemonic’
pavilions). The Antithesis is international modernism (grouped international exhibition or exhibitions; it is about norms or canons of the moment).
Synthesis is an exceptional individual work of an artist-individual (the
bearer of an award, or at the forefront of new events, creators who are above
their national horizon) who expresses his or her artistic i.e. creative, originality, geniality or greatness through a twisting away from the national
and into the international of great planetary modernism.
The Kassel documenta, as a family of exhibitions, was started after the
Second World War in 1955, when grand hegemonic modernism existed as
the dominant, ruling and all-encompassing culture of the contemporary
autonomy of art. documenta was also a part of a cultural policy of the new
Germany, which aimed for a ‘new post-war internationalism’ through cultural and artistic de-nazification. There were no national selections, but a
selection based on potential or of grand artists realised in the market who
Biennale in South Korea, Istanbul Biennale, Gvangju Biennale, Liverpool Biennale,
Moscow Biennale, Sao Paolo Biennale, Whitney Biennale
T h e Po lic y of Curato r s’ Pr ac tices and St ate App aratuses / N OVA MISAO
did not represent any particular nation directly, nor represent a culture,
nor even a movement or a style, but rather who transcended the ‘erased
traces’ of a movement and style through an expression of grand individual craftsmanship, inspiration, strength, transgression or acuteness of the
individual – the very artist-modernist. Such an artist would speak, i.e. act
in the language of recognizable international modernity: in the language
of the Parisian, New York, or some other hegemonic school that shows
itself as the sole source of the current art and the artistic. Such an artist is
the paradigmatic sample of a creator:
code of particularity of the idealism of art, which is born ‘from’ or ‘out of’
the transcending of the political and the historical into the artistic.
1. After nature – Jackson Pollock once said ‘I create what nature creates.’
Manifesto was something else entirely. Manifesto was called into being
by the explicit political request of the moment of change from the bloc
(binary Europe) into the post-bloc (heterogenic or pluralistic) Europe after
the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here we see three important but uncertain
requests:
2. After machines – artist Andy Warhol once said ‘I create like a machine.’
3. After the society – sculptor and performer Joseph Beuys who worked
and acted socially (social organism, social being: political animal).
documenta is a non-dialectic and non-historical exhibition. They are not
dialectic because they do not point to a twist, but to THAT – a present,
isolated and idealized force and power of the very artist individual or a sole
artistic masterpiece that surpasses its own context. They are non-historical
because they do not reconstruct history, but locate the moment (the
interval, segment, point, stitch) of history as an outstanding moment of
the appearance of an exceptional artist and his work (this could be seen
at documenta VII when the rising postmodern took over the extraordinariness of the subdued modern and made it possible for the ‘weak’,
‘soft’ or ‘plural’ subject of the postmodern to reconstitute after the strong
modernist subjects of the ruling art market). In other words, the weak
subject of the postmodern took over the effects of the strong subject and
annulled itself. For example, you need only compare the status makeovers
of Clemente or Kiefer with the grand masters of Western visual painting.
But this happens when new movements are promoted (documenta V with
the post-objective art) or when they stand for the ‘representations’ of
culture (documenta X). Even documenta X, which had promised both the
history of modernism and its culture as a policy, was led to the outstanding
History and dialectics are inscribed onto the synchronicity of the idealism. documenta X presented the turnover of the representations of the
political, social or cultural into the high aesthetic of arts that protect their
own autonomy and market particularity, even when explicitly advocating
politics, society and culture through a seemingly documented presentation of the European realities.
1. The request to make it possible to communicate (also politically) through
exhibitions, artistic and cultural exchanges between the historically separated (maybe incomparable) cultures of Eastern and Western Europe,
while also pointing to the relative relations of the margin and the centre
within the Western Europe as a paradigmatic sample;
2. The request to identify the identity (and identity is always a discursive
entity that is super-determined by culture) of the makeover of international high art into a transnational (multicultural) art after the fall of the
Berlin Wall (i.e. the moment when the postmodernisms of late capitalism,
West European retro-marginal cultures and post-socialism meet up in
the promise of an ‘open society’)
3. The request about the status of the art: that art is no longer offered as a
special (autonomous and ideal) sphere (context) of creation or production,
exchange and reception of artifacts (works of art). That the border line
between art and culture has already been crossed – thus allowing for the
family of exhibitions of the Manifesto not as a presentation of grand works
(masterpieces) of the current moment, but as the archiving (filing) of artifacts (traces, information, media re-coding) of the current culture, where art
is to be and is expected.
While the Venice Biennale has presented itself through a dialectic tension
between the national and the international and documenta through non-historicism and the anti-dialectics of the individual, the Manifesto was
conceived as an overview relationship of the arbitrary file boxes, or as a
relationship between the indexing and mapping of the opportunities to
present the local (specific, incomparable) culture with the discursive
machines and media capacities of the mass culture of late capitalism. Late
capitalism uses mechanisms of its presentation and showing to be inscribed
onto the false non-conflict state of advocating differences and divisions
between different cultures in Europe at the end of the 20th century.
It is important to highlight another characteristic difference between the
Venice Biennale, documenta and Manifesto i.e. the local and regional biennales compared to the international art market and the utilitarian requirements of national cultures. The Venice Biennale made it possible, at least,
to exclusively, symbolically and comparably present the formulations of
the national ‘cultural’ (national pavilions) and the international ‘market’
(grand international exhibitions) of modernism and post-modernism.
N OVA MISAO / T h e Po lic y of Curato r s’ Pr ac tices and St ate App aratuses
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18
documenta has always been an exhibition of international ‘market’ modernism and post-modernism. At documenta, the crucial verification of
artists has taken place, artists who from the local national culture or adolescence enter a high and greater world of international art and its gallery
and museum representation. To the contrary, Manifesta, with its family of
exhibitions, leads to an altogether new and unknown situation:
1. A high international second league has been created. This means that in
the political transformation from the international hegemony into the
multiculturalism of the globalization now in progress it was necessary to
create a ‘mobile’ and ‘open’ institution which would globally integrate:
a) young artists, b) artists from the marginalized Western European
cultures that are not ‘grand’ (‘grand’ as German, French, Italian and possibly Russian) and c) artists from the transitional, for a time, East-European cultures on the fringe
2. Causing an impact, or, at the very least, a disruption in the stable market
system of identification and existence of the grand Masters of modernism and post-modernism which have constituted the world of art or,
roughly said, the first master league; as if there is a new space created
in between the high autonomous art that builds the world of grand and
epochal pieces and the selected and projected art that advocates, and
3. Shows current interests of special cultures and their identities;
4. Actually, for the first time in the 20th century in Europe it happened that
the world (institutions, officials) of high autonomous art made and designed space for the creation of a utilitarian (with functions) art which
was other than it, not endangering itself in the process, but rather confirming itself in its exceptionality by providing itself, in a very controlled
and selective manner, with fresh blood (young or other artists) that make
it stronger, yet do not bring into question its existence.
Certain ideologies of the national cultural policies at the
54th Venice Biennale – selected examples of Serbia-Croatia-Montenegro and/or ‘Russia’
In the February issue of the American magazine Artforum, polemical letters
of Russian art critics Valentin Diakonov and Ekaterina Degot were published.
The controversy was over why at this year’s Biennale the Russian Pavilion is
presenting a retrospective of Andrei Monastirsky and the group Collective
Actions. The discussion was, above all, about the status of historically determined critical art in the times of neoliberal cultural hegemonies, and the
T h e Po lic y of Curato r s’ Pr ac tices and St ate App aratuses / N OVA MISAO
support that the presentation of Monastirsky received from the Stella Art
Foundation, and Igor Kesaev, a businessman, etc. etc. etc.
France, for example, is being represented by Christian Boltanski, who is a
link between the critical art and analytical art of the seventies and the
ecletctic auto-refferentiality of the eighties. It is by all means interesting
to notice that in the postmodern art of the eighties, we today recognize
mainly those approaches that were realized in non-painting techniques
in the plural field of behavior and media advocacy.
Romania, for example, is adopting a smart combination of historical and
present-time performance by presenting a work by Jon Grigoresku, Anetta
Mona Chisa and Lucia Tacova. This way the hybrid and fragmentary
history of performance becomes seemingly consistent and possibly even
developmental.
Croatia is being represented by the exceptional team of curators WHW,
which has realized the concept of ‘parallel’ realities by exposing documentation of the late Tomislav Gotovac, and the work of the theatre-dance-performance group BADco. This inter-media practice is completely in the
spirit of this time, when there are no firm boundaries between the artistic
disciplines and cultural productions. It is worth noting the phenomenon
of creating the cult of Tomislav Gotovac in the area of the former Yugoslavia.
Montenegro is being presented by one of the most important stars of
current international art, Marina Abramović. The introduction of Marina
Abramović into the curatorial-artistic discourses of transitional South-Eastern Europe represents a controversial return of Abramović to the
fictional homeland of her origin, and, at the same time, signifies the
opening of Montenegro towards the global discourse of art. This tension
is provocative, especially since Belgrade’s curatorial elite have never been
inclined to representing her work retrospectively within the Serbian cultural
context.
Serbia is being represented by Dragoljub Raša Todosijević, selected by
the Museum of Contemporary art of Vojvodina for his project Light and
Darkness of Symbols. This is one of the first examples of the decentralizing
of the official representation of Serbia internationally. To this point, it has
always been either the leftist or the rightist curatorial establishment who
represented Serbian art in Venice. Now the Museum from Novi Sad has
taken over this role. The author of these lines is hoping that in the Biennales
to come, institutions from Niš, Šabac, Čačak, Subotica or Kragujevac will be
given the opportunity to provide their vision of a national representation
of Serbian art on the international level.
These almost randomly selected examples point to a couple of considerations!
They point to the vitality of art in the years from the seventies to two
thousand. This vitality emanates, probably, from the fact that the artistic
practices of the seventies anticipated post-media and performing
practices that have become dominant modes of expression in the recent
millennial years. On the other hand, if we are talking about Venetian
choices from Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia, we are talking about specific
N OVA MISAO / T h e Po lic y of Curato r s’ Pr ac tices and St ate App aratuses
19
cultural policies that are intended to prove publicly that these states are
opening towards the EU or towards the global post-media languages of
“dematerialised work” at the beginning of the second decade of the new
century.
In the case of Serbia – it is by all means a double game. On the one hand,
the cultural politics of opening towards the West or the global discourse
on outward public issues, and on the other, there is, on the inner plain,
this ‘wall’ of the cultural system of authorities against post-media artistic
productions, and an inclination of an almost ‘ideologically motivated’
support for the national easel painting and pararomantic public sculpture, connected with the national literature mythology and a policy inner
claustrophobic identities. This double game still shows cracks in the cohesive effects of public policies, and this is certainly one of the functions
of contemporary art work.
Between the death in Venice and joie de vivre at the Venetian carnivals of
contemporary art, one can recognise challenges for the future planning
of the cultural and exhibiting policies not only of Serbia, but also of religion, as the frontal presentations of Gotovac (Croatia), Marina Abramović
(Montenegro) and Todosijević (Serbia) seem to point to the fact that we
have moved from ex-Yugoslavia into post-Yugoslavia, at least on the level
of presenting contemporary art.
Quotation
While the Venice Biennale has presented itself through a dialectic tension
between the national and the international and documenta through non-historicism and the anti-dialectics of the individual, the Manifesto was
conceived as an overview relationship of the arbitrary file boxes, or as a
relationship between the indexing and mapping of the opportunities to
present the local (specific, incomparable) culture with the discursive machines and media capacities of the mass culture of late capitalism. Late capitalism uses mechanisms of its presentation and showing to be inscribed
onto the false non-conflict state of advocating differences and divisions
between different cultures in Europe at the end of the 20th century. 
Venice Biennale and Vojvodinian Modern Art
Written by Sava Stepanov
20
Paja Jovanović (1907 and 1912)
Painter Paja Jovanović (b. Vršac, 1859, d. Vienna, 1957) was the first Serbian
artist who exhibited his work at the Venice Biennale. The first time he exhibited in Venice was in 1907, at the same time as Ivan Мeštrović, and the
second time in 1912. This was the ‘Prelude Period’ of the grand Venetian
exhibition, the time when artists came to this international festival byapplying individually, and only after having had their work either approved
by a jury, or having been directly invited by the Biennale’s General Secretary. That was how organisers used to build the reputation of the elite international salons of visual arts – until 1938, that is. This was the year when
separate national pavilions started functioning and the artists who exhibited were chosen by esteemed selectors from the countries’ participants.
Paja Jovanović was attractive to the Venetian selector because of his successful international activities and the awards he had won in European
capitals (Vienna, London, Munich, Paris). This young man left Vršac very
early: he was accepted into the Viennese Academy at the age of 16 (!), and
studied there thanks to a stipend from Matica Srpska. Very soon he formed
his academic realism and became a member of the Serbian Royal Academy
at the age of 29. Finally he settled down in Vienna, where he lived from
1875. At that time, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was an extremely powerful political conglomerate and taking place were dynamic processes of
systematic change, from the ideal bureaucratic feudalism towards a bourgeois industrial society, which could be seen at grand exhibitions where
Paja Jovanović regularly participated and won significant awards and recognition. He took part in the Budapest Millennium Exhibition (1886) and
the Vienna Expo (1898), where he earned a gold medal for his Cockfight, in
addition to another he received at the World Expo in Paris (1910) for his
painting Coronation of Dušan the Emperor. That same year he was given a
gold medal for his composition Wedding of Prince Feri IV to Elisabeth of
Habsburg, and won the first prize at the international exhibition in Buenos
Aires for the portrait Mrs. Kauffman. So, the moment he appeared at the
Venice Biennale, Pavle Jovanović was already a well-known artist, and
experienced at grand international exhibitions. Želimir Koščević, a noted
Zagreb art historian says the following in his study of the participation of
Yugoslav artists in Venetian exhibitions: In the artistic concept of fin de siècle, between academic realis m, historicism, secession symbolism and different
variations onpleinairism, Yugoslav artists at the Biennale, until 1914, were part
of the European artistic milieu.1 Koščević’s remark precisely defines the posi1
Želimir Koščević, Venecijanski biennale i jugoslavenska moderna umjetnost
1895-1988, GalerijegradaZagreba, Zagreb, 1988
tion Paja Јovanović held in European art of that time. At the same time, it
was a period when the Venice Biennale was searching intensively for an
adequate concept, trying to overcome the character of a salon exhibition.
Great efforts were made to bring in the works of the most important
painters of the time. Still, this did not go forward without hindrances,
asthe modernists’ followers found the changes slow and unconvincing.
Characteristic events at the Biennale happened between two of Jovanović’s
exhibitions in 1910. This was the year when Courbet, Renoir and Gustav Klimt,
the last on account of his explicit content, caused numerous reactions. At
the same time, the General Secretary Fradeletto removed Picasso’s painting
because he was afraid that such a novelty would cause negative reactions,
and Picasso’s work was not to appear in Giardino until 1948! Finally, in the
same year, 1910, the Italian futurists launched their “attack” on the Biennale, throwing protest leaflets all over St. Mark’s Square.
Obviously, none of these exciting events had an impact on Jovanović’s
work. In this sense, one should accept that those who examine Jovanović’s
art do not deal with his appearances at the Venice Biennale. Our esteemed
painter obviously belonged to a line in art, at the turn of the century,
which insisted on the artistic confirmation of the power of the state by
“illustrating” importantand adequate episodes from the history of nations
within the realm of monarchy. This is why Petar Petrović is completely
right when he describes Paja Jovanović’s artistic attitude: Aware that he
belonged to a modest number of internationally recognized Serbian painters,
he took upon himself the role of an artist who was supposed to justify the
national independence of Serbs within the Habsburg Monarchy.2
Lukács Gyelmis (1936)
Lukács Gyelmis (b. Subotica, 1899 – d. Budapest, 1979), was a painter who
exhibited his work in Venice in 1936. Gyelmis’ artistic biography is very
interesting – he exhibited in the Italian Pavilion in the selection of local
artists! Subotica daily Naplo reported regularly during December 1932
about his great exhibitions and successes in Italy by translating texts from
the Italian newspapers Il Popoloand La Sera.
Gyelmis arrived in Italy as a student – he had studied in Budapest under
Professor Gyula Rudnay from 1924 to 1926, before moving onto Florence,
where he graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in the class of Galileo
Chini. Gyelmis lived in Italy between 1929 and 1939. He painted prolifically
2
Petar Petrović, Paja Jovanović – Slike Balkana, Muzej Grada Beograda, Belgrade
2009.
Ve nice Biennale and Vojvo dinian Mo dern Ar t / N OVA MISAO
• • • Ivan Tabaković: Shadow and Sound, 1961
and hadnumerous individual exhibitions in Milan, Cremona, Genoa, Trento,
Verona, Rome, Paris, Turin, Rovereto, Brescia and Venice. As a result of
these exhibitions, Gyelmis became quite successful and following positive
reviews by art critics he became one of Italian participants of the 20th Venice
Biennale in 1936, invited by the then General Secretary, Antonio Mariani.
His work was presented in the Central Pavilion, which had been given to
the Italian artists at the previous Exhibition in 1936.
Thanks to the saved black and white reproductions3, we know which
paintings Gyelmis showed at that great international event. They were two
portraits, one a Young Worker (Giovane operaio) and one a Peasant Girl,
one semi-nude (Volutta), and one landscape (Paesaggioarcense).
21
The paintings of Lukács Gyelmis from that period were painted in decisive
strokes, many-layered with a lot of body, defined with a firm constructive
drawing, where still a visible contour line survives. The two portraits
presented in Venice, mildly stylised, with emphasised shadows and
characteristic facial expressions, clearly reflect socially engaged art.
It is interesting to mention that there were no Yugoslav representatives
at the Venice Biennale when Gyelmis exhibited in the Italian section. To
be clear, there were no Yugoslavs at the Biennale from 1932 to 1936.
Because of his long stay abroad (Hungary, Italy), Lukács Gyelmis was not
adequately promoted in Vojvodinian art. His earliest beginnings were
connected with his native Subotica. He first exhibited in the Subotica Town
Hall in 1932. However, upon his return from Italy, Gyelmish came to Novi
Sad just before the war and would maintain a studio there for a short
while4. In 1941 he presented his work at the Exhibition of Vojvodian Artists
where he was awarded a silver medal. After 1945, he was permanently
settled in Budapest. In 1969, in the City Museum in Subotica, thanks to
the engagement of art historian Béla Duranci, an exhibition of his work
was organised. It was a modest retrospective of 37 works created during
the period from 1932 to 1968. Duranci gave his concise and precise evaluation of Gyelmis’ artistic concept in the catalogue: Towns covered with
patina, sea, especially mountains, lush green mild slopes and snow-capped
peaks seduced the young man coming from the plain... Although he found
himself in Italy at the time when neoclassicism bloomed, his development is
dominated by French impressionism in a decorative sense and by the work of
Segantini. Persistent, gifted with a painter’s instinct, in the years between the
two wars, he modestly painted the canvases with unobtrusive shivery colours
encrusted into5 firmly composed forms.
tion, headed by count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, the President of the
Board and Antonio Maraini, who served as the General Secretary of the
Biennale. Between 1922 and 1938, the pavilions of Spain, Czechoslovakia,
the USA, Denmark, Poland, Austria and Greece were built, and Yugoslav
and Rumanian pavilions were built and opened in 1938.
Having been omitted from three consecutive exhibitions (in 1932, 1934,
and 1936), thanks to the initiative of Prince Pavle, Yugoslavia reappeared
at the 21st Venice Biennale in 1938. This happened during the period considered to be the final phase of the Biennale expansion and reorganiza-
Milan Kašanin, the first director of the Prince Pavle Museum in Belgrade,
was our first official selector for the Venice Biennale in 1938. He decided to
present five Yugoslav artists: Toma Rosandić, the sculptor; and Matija Jama,
Ljuba Babić, Milo Milunović and Petar Dobrović, all of whom were painters.
Our first selector attempted to present the artists who were amongst the best
in the country, but at the same time he wanted to show the continuum in the
development of our art in a wider historical context.6 From the review of our
appearance at the Biennale signed by I. Z. (probably architect Ivan Zdravković, who was a contributor to the Umetnički Pregled magazine) one can
clearly see what the exhibition looked like: The entire setup provides a pleasant
impression and completely illustrates the commissar’s main idea, because one
has a picture of the development of our visual arts from the times before the
war until today.7 The only artist presented who lived in Vojvodina, Petar
Dobrović had a selection of exceptional works displayed from his mature
colouristic-expressionist stage. Among them was a painting The Old
Harbour in Dubrovnik (1935), which is, by any account, one of the most
important paintings in all of Dobrović’s oeuvre. According to the reviews,
Dobrović was a much noticed author. The afore mentioned Zdravković
ended his review with a statement that their participation was well-noted
and was documented by many reviews published so far in foreign papers and
artistic magazines, where they praised the work of our artists. Finally, Umetnički
Pregled magazine provides interesting data, such asthe fact that the exhibition was visited by more than 200.000 visitors and that these artists sold
several of their paintings – Petar Dobrović sold only one portrait.8
3
6
4
7
Petar Dobrović
Duranci published the three reproductions of the Biennale exhibits in the Gyelmis’
Subotica Catalogue, although these paintings were not shown in the City Museum.
www.encikopediakiado.hu, 2010
5
Bela Duranci, foreword in the catalogue for the Lukács Gyelmis’ exhibition. City
Museum, Subotica, 21 Dec. 1969 – 4 Jan. 1970.
N OVA MISAO / Ve nice Biennale and Vojvo dinian Mo dern Ar t
Quoted from Kašanin’s editorial to the Biennale catalogue (translated from the
Italian language) taken from Koščević’s text mentioned above.
I.Z. XXI Međunarodna umetnička izložba u Veneciji, Umetnički pregled, no. 9,
(pp. 285-287), Belgrade, 1938
8
Umetnički pregled, No. 11, Belgrade, 1938
• • • Paja Jovanović: Girl in an Interior, 1912, oli on canvas, detail
paintings shown weresent on to Venice. Not long after his exhibition at the
Biennale and painting in Venice, Dobrović returned to Novi Sad in 1939 and
paintedwhile staying on a property in the country that belonged to Matica
Srpska. Not long after, Petar Dobrović died in Belgrade in 1942, after a heart
attack he sufferered in the lift of the apartment building where he lived,
having fled from a roundup organized by the occupation forces.
Ankica Oprešnik (1954)
In 1954, the walls of the Yugoslav Pavilion in Venice were exclusively dedicated to graphics. In his important study Grafika 1950–1980 (written in 1985),
Јеša Denegri says that after 1950, graphics fits into the processes of modernisation of Yugoslav art after a brief period of socialist realism. The period
from1950 to 1955 is a period of graphic restoration: the first educated graphic
artists arrived on the scene, the first individual and collective exhibitions were
organised, the first participation of Yugoslav authors at international exhibitions took place.10
22
The Yugoslav selector at the Venice Biennale in 1954 was the Slovenian art
historian Dr France Stele.11 His selection was basically a cross-section of the
then current Yugoslav graphics as a phenomenon very specific to that
moment. The list of participants was extensive and included: Rik Debenjak,
Božidar Jakac, France and Tone Kralj, Miha Maleš, France Mihalič, Marijan
Pogačnik, Mario Pregelj, Maksim Sedej from Slovenia; Petar Bibić, Vesna
Borčić, Zdenko Gradiš, DušanDžamonja, Zlatko Prica, Nikola Reiser, Josip
Restek, Josip Roca, Vilko Selan-Gliha, Vilim Svečnjak, Aleksandar Šivert from
Croatia and Stojan Ćelić, Boško Karanović, Mario Maskareli, Mirjana Mihać,
Ankica Oprešnik, Mihajlo Petrov, Božidar Prodanović, Mladen Srbinović,
Dragoslav Stojanović-Sip, Sreten Stojanović and Lazar Vujaklija from Serbia.
Dobrović spent some time in Venice during the Biennale exhibition together
with his wife Olga. During this time he painted several paintings with
Venetian motifs, amongst which are the famous Horses on St. Mark’s Church
and the exceptional motif St. Mark’s Square. These two pieces duly represent
the artist’s maturity, showing a potent colourist scheme and an authentic
modernist attitude.
Following Venice, Dobrović returned to Novi Sad, which was his ‘base’. He
had come there after leaving his native Pecs and Hungary, and had arrived
in Yugoslavia by 1919. At this time, he was already keeping his studio in Novi
Sad, in the building of the elementary school in St. Nichola’s churchyard.
That same year, he organized his individual exhibition (with Luj Čačinović)
before leaving for Paris. In 1921 he had his second Novi Sad individual exhibition, and that same year was elected President of the Executive Board of
the Serbian-Hungarian Baranja Republic. Horthy’s regime in Hungary had
sentenced Petar Dobrović to death in his absence, so he moved to Novi Sad
with his mother.9 He married Olga Hadži, a daughter of a prominent lawyer.
Between 1923 and 1925 he was a professor at the School of Art in Belgrade.
It is interesting to note that Dobrović’s Venetian episode was “framed” by
his stays in Novi Sad. A year before (1937), in the Hall of Matica Srpska, he
had organised his second to last individual exhibition, and a few of the
9
Vera Jovanović, Likovni krug Pavla Beljanskog, Okolnosti i ostvarenja, page 18,
Novi Sad, Tiski cvet, 2010
All told, 31 artists were presented, the scale totalling 227 graphic works.
The Yugoslav pavilion caught the public’s attention and the Slovenian
artist Franc Mihelič won the Venice Biennale Graphics Award for 1954!
Ankica Oprešnik, the artist from Novi Sad, played an important role in
Yugoslav artistic events, especially graphic events of the time. In the early
fifties of the 20th century, her work was black and white, expressive in
character and forever, in a lyrical way, dedicated to man and his existence.
The silent drama of her work is well composed through the relationship
of black and white surfaces, dark and light, with just a speck of discrete,
and indeed, softened colouristic accent. Ankica Oprešnik insists on the
impression of a certain “silent existence’ in complete harmony with nature.
Apart from that these graphics are characterised by a firm compositional
10
Ješa Denegri, Grafika 1950-1980, Jugoslovenska grafika 1950-1980, Jugoslovenska umetnost XX veka, Muzej savremene umetnosti, Belgrade, 1980.
France Stele, art historian (b. Tunjicenear Kamnik, 1886; d. Ljubljana, 1972). Student of Max Dvořák. Became PhD. in Vienna in 1912. He organised the conservation-protection service in Slovenia. He was one of the founders of the National
Gallery in Ljubljana; editor-in-chief of the DommiSvet magazine in Ljubljana. In
1938, he was given tenure in the Department for the History of Art at Ljubljana
University. He wrote articles and books about Slovenian, Yugoslav and European
art. Stele was one of the most important art historians in the former Yugoslavia. He
was a member of both the Slovenian and Yugoslav Academy of Art and Sciences.
He was also a Commissar of the Yugoslav Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1954.
11
Ve nice Biennale and Vojvo dinian Mo dern Ar t / N OVA MISAO
structure, accentuated with a clear and defined stylisation. Such simple and
reduced presentations (mainly portraits, group portrait compositions,
figures) have a discreet expressivity, intended by the artist to direct the
observer’s attention towards the effect of harmony, quietness and solemnity
(Miloš Arsić) of a graphics expression that is simultaneously purified and
poetically strong and convincing.
Ankica Oprešnik (b. Vitez, Bosnia& Herzegovina in 1919 – d. Novi Sad 2004)
was a young artist when she was selected for the Yugoslav graphics
selection at the Venice Biennale. She left an indelible mark on the history
of Vojvodinian, Serbian and Yugoslav graphics of the second half of the
20th century, and her creative years were spent in Novi Sad.
Ivan Tabaković (1968)
Two events dominated the ‘60s of the last century – the first one was
Gagarin’s journey into outer space in 1961, as a crowning achievement
in the advancement of science, and the other one was the peak of the
Cuban Missile Crisis and the powerful, worrying and extremely threatening
confrontation of the two opposing blocs. There were student protests all
over the world – the imbalance between human achievements and the
real situation in the world caused by the behaviour of the political establishment – these were the real reasons behind this global rebellion. All of
these events were also reflected inthe Biennale: there was no official
opening due to demonstrations on Venetian streets, demonstrations in
which the artists also participated. Paralleling the world crisis, the Biennale was having its own crisis, especially regarding its conception, which,
at one moment, bore the fruit of the most disparate political, ideological
and profit-driven compromises.
The selection of Yugoslav participation in the 34th Venice Biennale in 1968
was given to Štefka Cobelj12 who was then a curator in the Belgrade
Museum of Contemporary Art. She decided to send three artists to Venice
– Ivan Tabaković, Oto Logo and Miroslav Šutej. They were the artists whose
work was closest to the character of the world of progress and science,
and also to the new spaces of human knowledge.
During the late ‘60s of the last century, Ivan Tabaković, (b. Arad, Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Romania, 1898, d. Belgrade 1977) was working
on the painting of speculative contemplation. He is one of the artists
who are forever ready to ‘harmonize’ their art with the requirements of
the time. His overall oeuvre can be divided into three important stages.
The first is the Zagreb Stage, when Tabaković, was a member of the
Zemlja group dealt with characteristic engaged work. In the second,
Novi Sad stage he painted intimating scenes (still lives, landscapes); and
in his last stage – from the mid ‘50s until the end of his life, Tabaković
12
Štefka Cobelj (1923–1929), art historian. When she received her PhD on Art History
in 1965, she became a curator in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade,
where she worked until late 1972. She received her MA at the Faculty of Ethnology
and started working in ethnology. She was the director of Pokrajinski Muzej in
Ptuj (Slovenia). Upon retirement, she was sent to Somalia by the Institute for International, Scientific and Cultural and Educational co-operation, where she participated in the establishment of the National Museum in Mogadishu.
N OVA MISAO / Ve nice Biennale and Vojvo dinian Mo dern Ar t
experimented and searched, following a specific line from discrete popart work to paintings with metaphysical overtones. Actually, his work realises the Hegelian understanding of science and art as two expressive
forms born of the same necessity to interpret the world and life. Although he was obsessed with content-oriented philosophical and poetic
ideas and intentions, Tabaković did not at any moment deny the modernist concept of painting. Seemingly, it was exactly this bond between
the empirical approach to content and eloquent modernism which was
the basic reason why Štefka Cobelj decided to select Tabaković for the
Biennale in 1968.
Unfortunately, due to the exceptional situation and disorder both here
and elsewhere (student uprisings), and because of the strike in Venice,
the Yugoslav exhibition was not given a sufficient amount of attention
and respect. Miroslav Šutej is partially to blame, displaying solidarity with
the protesters by covering his work and “closing” access to his part of the
exhibition in our Pavilion.
Ljubomir Denković (1980)
In his essay, published in the catalogue of the 39th Venice Biennale, the
Yugoslav selector Zoran Kržišnik13 explains the reasons and concept behind
his choices: The invitation to present the art of the seventies in Yugoslavia at
the Venice Biennale is the opportunity to show the international audience an
artistic phenomenon which is particularly characteristic of the last decade,
when a new trend has emerged in Yugoslavia, a new alternative to creating
colossal artistic monumentsdedicated to freedom, one integrated in a landscaped and designed natural setting.14 All of this was presented in the Yugoslav Pavilion through the monumental ambient sculpting projects of
four artists – Bogdan Bogdanović, Dušan Džamonja, Slavko Tihec and Miodrag Živković. They presented small scale models of their monuments,
and blown-up photographs. Such an exhibition was well-prepared and
was different from other pavilions at the Biennale. In addition, in order to
complete the impression left by the monumental designs, which were
truly a special phenomenon of then contemporarysculpture, the monumental objects designed by Ljubomir Denković from Novi Sad and other
Yugoslav sculptors were shown in a slideshow.
Although little can be found about this exhibition in the literature, it is
very important to say that the exhibition was set up only a month after
13
Zoran Kržišnik, PhD (bŽirovnica, 1920, d. Ljubljana 2011) – esteemed Slovenian
and Yugoslav art critic and art historian. Graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Ljubljana, later on receiving his PhD. in 1947 he became the director of the
Ljubljana Modern Gallery and retired from the same position in 1986. Under his
management the Modern Gallery became a relevant institution with an impressive Yugoslav and international reputation. He was the founder of the Biennale
of Graphic Art in Ljubljana, a world-class event. For more than three decades he
was a selector of Yugoslav exhibitions a number of times and also a member of
juries around the world. Kržišnik was a respected essayist, author of many books
and art monographies. In his house in Selopri Žirovnica, he formed an impressive
selection of acclaimed artists from Slovenia and all over the world. He won many
awards and much acclaim.
14
Zoran Kržišnik, text in La Biennale – arte visivo 80, catalogogenerale, Venice,
1980
23
24
Josip Broz Tito died; if we want to understand and interpret this exhibition properly – this is a specific context we are dealing with here – then
we must realize the monuments celebrated the victims from the National
War of Liberation (1941–1945), the time during which the state had been
formed, a state which was now entering a post-Tito period. That is why
the issue of the ideological context was discretely addressed, along with
still unsaid suppositions and the foreboding premonitions of the future
political games. In this context, we should understand the text written by
the Ljubljana critic Aleksandar Basin, who wrote the following in the Sinteza magazine: What can we notice about the Yugoslav exhibition? It has not
been easy to prepare visitors to our Pavilion for the fact that the exhibition
shows a complete realisation of ideas using a photographic presentation of
the works by Stojan Batić, Drago Tršar, Vojin Bakić, Bogdan Bogdanović, Šime
Vulas, Alija Kučukalić, Jordan Grabulovski, Oto Logo, Ljubomir Denković and
Boško Kućanski, along with the models of the works by Dušan Džamonja and
Slavko Tihec, (who have been influential in the development of art in Yugoslavia in this seventh decade, and have already presented their work at the
Venice Biennale). Speaking only of the elements of authentic visual language,
we have wanted to present a historical line of the development of our historical monument sculptures, which implies logically that, under the auspices
of politics and ideology, monuments of exceptional artistic value have been
designed and realised.15
So, according to the exhibitors at the Biennale in 1980, was Novi Sad sculptor Ljubomir Denković, (Ljanik 1936) branded, the creator of a number of
important sculptural and architectural works in the seventies. The formative basis for all these monuments was Denkovic’s sculpture, fully plastic
in its effect and character. When he designed memorial monuments, he
translated his sculptures into monumental architectonic wholes16, and the
inside of them was functional space. Still the overall visual structure of his
sculptural monument solutions had to uncompromisingly maintainsculptural integrity. Actually, they were memorial monumental forms which
held within powerful symbolic and metaphorical messages.
Slobodan Kojić, Mladen Marinkov,
Borislava Prodanović-Nedeljković (1999)
At the exhibition of the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, the Commissary
of our exhibition was RadislavTrkulja, then the Director of the Belgrade
Museum of Contemporary Art. He decided to exhibit paintings by Todor
Stevanović from Belgrade, and sculptures from clay at the Kikinda Symposium of Terracotta Sculpture Terra made by the Vojvodinian artists Slobodan Kojić, Mladen Marinkov and Borislava Prodanović-Nedeljković, and
also works by two of our artists living abroad at the time Milorad Damnjanović (USA) and Marijana Gvozdenović (Italy).
15
Aleksandar Bassin, Beneški Bienale vlučisedmegadesetletja, Sinteza, Ljubljana,
No. 53/54, 1981, pp. 125-126. Apart from the quoted analysis of the exhibition,
Bassin corrects Kržišnik’s mistake and makes public the complete list of all the
participants at the Venice Biennale in Venice in 1980.
16
Denković cooperated with Novi Sad architects: With Sava Subotin on the Titov
Veles Memorial project in 1974, and with both Subotin and Milan Matović in
Grmeč 1976.
Trkulja’s selection was rather surprising, because it was the first time that
a Yugoslav artistic institution was presented along with the authors of
other work; Todor Stevanović17 – the Kikinda Symposium of Terracotta
Sculpture. The conceptual intention of the selector was to point to a true
or rooted artistic identity: the content of Stevanović’s painting was the
consequence of a deep dive into the abstruse world of folk wisdom, legends,
fortune-telling and magic, translated into a personalized, contemporary,
expressive linear-pictoral language, whilst the sculptures from Terra were
a certain form of materia prima, explicitly pointing to their historical and
geographical roots. The selector’s deciding upon the five vertical forms
pointed to the dignity of a particular existentialist understanding of the
world and art in the miserable times of the fatal nineties of the past century.
This insisting on reciprocity, of being both rooted in the past and yet part
of the modern identity, is understandable when we take into consideration that the exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 1999 was opened on
June 12 – only two days after the bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO had been
suspended.18
In any case, the 48th Venice Biennale hosted more participating Vojvodinian
artists at one time than any other. Each of these artists was represented
by one monumental terracotta sculpture (and this was the basic feature
of work at the Terra symposium), but with the sculptural establishment of
the vertical principle serving as the primary symbolic determination of
the ‘message’.
Slobodan Kojić’s19 work was set up at the front of our Pavilion. Kojić had
discovered the essence of terracotta – a construction material, a material
which is applied in construction and architecture. Also, this sculptor completely respected the triad of relations in sculpture – material-mass-space.
The material was honoured consistently, the mass was coherent and solid,
but most interesting was the relationship to space – the sculpture was
intended to be presented in a ‘central space’ but the artist dealt with the
space as a formative element. At a properly playful, expressive fracture of
this sculpture are openings that allow you to delve inside the form and
understand the expressive potential forming the space you’re seeing. This
sculpture made by Slobodan Kojić has multiple metaphorical meanings,
17
Todor Stevanović (b. Zaslužnje, 1937). Graduated from the Acaemy of Visual
Arts in Belgrade in the class of Professor Đorđe Andrejević Kun in 1963 and completed his post-graduate studies in 1987 under Professor Nedeljko Gvozdenović.
He started creating and exhibiting during the seventies of the last century. Stevanović has won many important awards and much acclaim. He primarily paints
but also deals with drawing, graphics, mosaic, art reviews, art theory, philosophy
and literature. He is a member of the Association of Visual Artists of Serbia, and UKS.
Stevanović is an associate of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences. Lives and
works in Belgrade.
18
The daily bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO lasted from March 24 to June 10,
1999. Around 2500 people were killed during the raids and the infrastructure of
the country, factories, schools, health institutions, media houses, and cultural
monuments were either devastated or severely damaged. Estimates of the overall damages are upward of 100 billion dollars.
19
Slobodan Kojić, (b. Kikinda1944). Graduated at the Sculpture Department at the
Academy of Visual Arts in Belgrade in 1971, in the class of Prof. Miodrag Popović.
He has exhibited since the early seventies. Kojić has taken part in many important international and Yugoslav events, where he has received numerous awards.
He is the founder and long-time manager of the Sculpture Symposium Terra in
Kikinda. He also held tenure at the Faculty of Visual Arts in Cetinje, Montenegro.
Ve nice Biennale and Vojvo dinian Mo dern Ar t / N OVA MISAO
• • • Mladen Marinkov
because the spectrum achieved through its visual effect is multi-fold –
through an association with the traditional village brick-stove, through
various architectural and construction accents, through the universal
principle of the vertical, through the effectual imbuement of the outward
and the inward spaces of the sculpture, and through the ideal conjunction of expressive and rationalistic accents so appropriate to the moment
of our nineties art and the atmosphere of the devastatingly fatal last decade
of the 20th century.20
The sculpture Tree, the Tower of Babel by Mladen Marinkov21 dominated
our pavilion through the overall measurement of its plasticity, and even
more with its height and verticality. Also its unusual name Tree, the Tower of
Babelinvokes wonder about an eternal existence beaten by winds (Tree),
and about man’s aspirations towards utter creative achievement (the
Tower of Babel). This conical form is also adorned with a furrowed spiral
that penetrates, leads the observer’s eye and concentration towards the
apex, towards the miraculous and promisingly protective landscape (or
maybe the tree crown) at the top, at a height – physical and spiritual. Mladen
Marinkov’s Venetian exhibit, in a way, summarises the artist’s overall
understanding of the sculpture. In his case, it is always created through
direct sculpting. The form is the consequence of the touch, grasp,
imprint. Even when he “tightens” the form, Marinkov does it so that the
hand-made origin of his sculpting act can be recognised. The artist feels
the material, and his sculptures are made of clay – especially the ones
sculpted during the eighties and the nineties of the last century – are
characterised by a certain inner potency. They are abstract and/or figurative creations that from within emit a suggestive formative tectonic strength
from the very core of this authentic sculptor’s mass, let alone the held
wealth of metaphorical and symbolical meanings.
Borislava Prodanović Nedeljković22 had also exploited the form of the pillar
for her Venetian exhibit set up in our Pavilion. Her piece is rationalistically
and constructively defined and arranged. The architectural quality of the
formative effect goes without saying, and this speaks of the recognising
20
Kojić’s sculpture was duly noted. Namely, the main selector of the Venice Biennale in 1999, Harald Szeemann invited Slobodan Kojić (and the Belgrade sculptor
Dragoslav Krnjajski) during the Biennale to take part in a large international exhibition dedicated to the anniversary of the Great Wall of China, where Szeemann
was also the main selector. Unfortunately, due to technical reasons (lack of money)
our artists did not go.
21
Mladen Marinkov (b. Novi Sad, 1947). Graduated at the Academy of Visual Arts
in Belgrade, Sculpture Department in 1973 in the class of Prof. Jovan Kratohvil.
Received his MA degree in 1974 with the same professor. Member of the Association of the Visual Artists of Serbia since 1974.Member of the Association of the
Visual Artists of Vojvodina since 1979. He worked in the Association of the Visual
Artists of Vojvodina in Novi Sad as the organisation secretary. Between 2003 and
2004 he served as the Director of the Gallery of Visual Art – Rajko Mamuzić Memorial. Marinkov has been working at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad as a visiting professor, teaching the subject Sculpting with Technology.
22
Borislava Prodanović Nedeljković (b. Novi Sad, 1948), graduated from the Sculpting Department (Prof. Jovan Kratohvil) of the Academy of Visual Arts in Belgrade
in 1974. She received her MA degree in 1976 under Professor Nikola Janković, and
has been a member of the Association of the Visual Artists of Serbia since 1975.
She has won many awards for her sculptures at important exhibitions. She has
tenure and has taught at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad since 1983.
N OVA MISAO / Ve nice Biennale and Vojvo dinian Mo dern Ar t
25
of the character of clay/earth/terracotta/ as material, as well as its traditional
utility. At the basis of her pillar is a square; the pillar-like form has been
sculpted from a several segments that were piled upon each other. Like
Mladen Marinkov’s sculpture, Borislava Prodanović Nedeljković’s pillar has
an intriguingly provocative name – Mother. The pillar as a sculpting apotheosis of a sort to celebrate Mother! Also, this artist has established the
original idea of terra mater. In the same manner, a powerful symbolism
emerges from the very material in the very way it was shaped – for there
is an old saying: the woman is the pillar of the house.23
It is interesting that the sculptures from Terra have never been returned
from the 48th Venice Biennale to Kikinda. Due to the negligence and lack
of responsibility of the Yugoslav authorities and the Ministry of Culture –
allegedly it was because of a lack of financial funds – these representative
pieces of our sculpting art were forcedly ‘given’ to Venice, where they have
been set in a park, while Slobodan Kojić’s sculpture was permanently
damaged during dismounting. 
23
It would be interesting to note that Marija Gvozdenović’s sculpture had the
same name. Gvozdenović is an artist who lived in Italy at the same time of the Biennale exhibition. In a touching interview she explains: ‘My sculpture is dedicated to
my mum, who is in Belgrade, now that the sculpture named after her has arrived in
Venice. She was a sculptress and this sculpture was inspired by her work, which I
used to watch in progress when I was a child. My sculpture is a monument to femininity, to the essence of femininity – in it there is a mother, and a woman, and a
coquette, and a fatal woman, and a tragic woman. It is interesting that Borislava
Nedeljković Prodanović and I were in Terra at the same time and that her piece
has a similar motive: it is called Mother. I think it is good that Trkulja invited us
both to Venice.’ (Sonja Ćirić, Rođendanski poklon, Vreme magazine, Belgrade, Issue
No. 440, 12 June 1999)
• • • Bogomil Karlavaris: Landscape over the Channel
Conversations from the Plain
(2009‒2011)
Nagy József A Dance Artist
To me, a plain is a natural element, just as water is to a fish. Here I feel alert, here I see things.
I am interested only in what is around us, I approach the natural elements in this plain. I am
already on good terms with ravens, and now I
will be communicating with European Rollers.
Ahead of me now is a period of systematic work
– a period of research and of understanding
the concrete natural elements of Pannonia.
Clay/Dirt Dancer
Interviewed by Mirko Sebić
Photo by Branko Stojanović
N
30
agy József was born in Kanjiža. In any other case this would be nothing but mere biographical data; in his case it was the first movement of a
personal poetical composition. On the plateau by the Tisa, a creature of
the lowlands is being heard. From his early childhood he drew, played instruments, took up wrestling in the local club, played chess with his
mates, wanted to become a painter and he was never interested in the
theatre. It was during his studies in Budapest that he unravelled a particular
world of dance, of stage movements. He quit his studies, went to Paris,
learned pantomime, took up Kinomichi, aikido, tai-chi, buot and contact
dance. Along the way he has worked with important choreographers and
dancers such as Sidoni Rochon, Mark Thomson, Catherine Diverse and
François Verret.
In 1986, he started his own dance troupe Theater Jel (“Jel” means sign in
Hungarian), their first show The Peking Duck is all about the fluctuation of
his childhood motifs and memories; his second show The Seven Hides of
the Rhinoceros is dedicated to his grandfather, to his dying, to be precise.
It was in 1988 in the Small Hall of the Serbian National Theatre, and we
were watching this performance completely dumbfounded by its powerful expression, by the illusionism of the dance, by the acrobatic wonderment; by his decanting bodies into things and things into bodies. From
that moment on to his latest show, Nagy has been drawing up chapters
from a particular mythological world, the chapters, as he puts it, of his
own cosmogony.
• What is the process of creating a show like? Does it differ depending on the
period? How do you select the motifs, inspiration, topics, and problems to use?
Nagy József: I never write a synopsis in advance. I haven’t got a clue, and
I have never had a clue about how the show I am about to put on will
look. I have some sort of a reminder, notes, some sketches. For me it is
quite enough to distance myself from the mere narrative and to try to
evoke exactly the thoughts and feelings that washed over me while I was
reading, because it is precisely this that we must pay attention to in the
process of a current creation. This is the important thing.
We can say that in the first eight years or so, from 1986 until, let’s say, ’94,
I was thematically into Vojvodinian authors – of course, I was reading
interesting authors like Oto Tolnai, Geza Csat, Oskar Vojnič. At the same
time were running shows like Peking Duck or The Seven Hides of a Rhinoceros, which delved into the world of local mythologies. The next period
started with Wozzeck, which was the first and last time I took a theatrical
script, and afterwards there were shows inspired by the authors of world
literature, again, selected solely by my taste and sensitivity as a reader.
These were shows based on Borges’, Beckett’s, Kafka’s, and Russel’s stories,
and now I am working on a show dedicated to James Joyce. It seems to
me that I am in a period of synthesis, in which all of my former tendencies
are intertwined in the process of my current work. I am continuing my
research into local issues, but this time I am also doing it from the point
of view of a visual artist, and I am continuing my research of literature
while working on improvisation as a methodology of how to create a play. I
spend a lot more time with musicians and we run through themes during
joint improvisations.
• You have worked with various musicians, from Gyorgy Szabados to Stevan
Kovač Tikmayer and Mezei Szilárd. What is it like when you work with musicians? Do you come to rehearsals with precisely designed pictures, do they
come with the already finished scores?
Nagy József: Musicians live in a world of their own, and they build it with
their own compositions. I opt for musicians whose sound world suits me.
These are composers whose music I have been listening to for years, and
it is the music that I know down to its most minute details. It is because of
this that the music is very close to me and I feel as if I’m inside it – as if I
have identified myself with it. I am not joining the creative process as
someone who is a mere listener, but a parallel creator. Then, I give this
music additional room and it starts to sound different, and it is at this moment of alternative sounding that the musicians start reacting differently
and a new piece is born.
At the same time, they are listening to the instructions and explanations
given to artists on the stage, in such a way that they are experiencing the
performance from within and not from without, as would be the case if
the music appeared after or before the very process of creating the show,
as if a grand illustration had taken place on the stage. In the process of
creating a show, I allow great freedom and leave a vast space for the creativity of all the participants on the stage, even to the musicians. This is
how gradually an abundance of material is created. Later, I just remove
the odd and ends, filter, and sort through details to keep the whole pure.
• Why did you only once turn to a theatrical script, when you did Wozzeck?
Nagy József: I have never needed to address theatrical literature. I have
always been interested in the authentic creative act, the completely autochthonous piece. I am not interested in having a dialogue with theatrical literature. A drama must come out of nothingness. It must be born
out of emptiness and silence. Wozzeck was interesting to me because I
had seen many versions of this piece on stage, and I had my own vision
of this piece, and I tried to stage it.
• On the other hand, you constantly stick to literary inspirations, directly or
indirectly. The list of authors from Vojvodina and around the world is very
long, and their writings have served as a starting point for your stage work.
Nagy József: Basically, it is very simple. I read a lot. I read poetry, fiction,
philosophy, scientific literature. I often read a couple of books at the same
time. Reading is my daily activity. It is, in a way, meditation, but also a dia-
Clay/ D i r t D a n ce r / N OVA M I SAO
logue with the authors, drawing close to them and listening to their ideas. The truth is that reading is something I spend most of my time doing,
and it may seem absurd, because onstage I never use words, or, I do not
use them in this logical and discursive sense. But what I try to find out
from the authors is how they create their worlds with a spoken language.
My language is the language of sound, picture and movement, so even if
I do use words or sentences in my show I use them as sound or as a secret
code like in casting spells, and not as a means of transferring certain logically and conceptually framed ideas. The principles of the creating and
building of my world differ completely from the discursive ones.
• Does that mean that words are inferior when compared to other languages?
Nagy József: They are not, if we are talking about poetry. It is something
completely different from essays or theatre scripts. Poetry is very important to me. I read poems every day. Poetry is like everyday prayer. I do not
doubt a word as much as I doubt the sufficiency of the discursive expression. Words cannot transfer everything. Much of it remains hidden. We
have to look behind the spoken or written languages. It is important to
find out what happens amongst words – something not quite articulated, something that is not transferred, some sort of fluidity of sense that is
constantly evasive; that constantly runs away, overcoming the words and
objects that carry them and denote them.
• How do you reach the collective expression of your shows, how does the
personal disappear and the Piece come to life?
Nagy József: Motives and ideas are everywhere around us. A man does
not invent anything new. It is about the capacity to perceive certain
things sharply and precisely, the ability to coordinate these impressions
and to place them in a single assemblage; the building of some sort of
structure which suits those impressions – this is how a piece achieves its
character. And only in such a way. So, what I do is make selections and
create room for something new to be born, and I take care that this room
is always ready to grasp the tendencies emerging from a joint effort. This
is an act of listening and hearing, and at certain unconscious moments
the decision to react to something that is, thanks to many interactions,
suddenly being born.
• Can one say that all of your shows are but phases of a grander creative event?
Nagy József: Yes. They are my research on the possibilities of creation.
They are all variations on a theme of conception and creation – how something is conceived and why it disappears.
• The relationship between a spoken language and body language. In some
of your shows you use dead languages – Latin, Ancient Greek in The Philosophers, even Sumerian. Why is that?
Nagy József: If languages are not utilised for communication, if they are
‘dead’; if nobody wants to convey messages, to address somebody and
to burden them with meanings, then the spoken word becomes a pure
musical layer. This gives me the opportunity to utilise a dancer as a complete performer, one who has been given the chance to influence with
his or her voice, and to stay outside of the one-dimensional meaning of
spoken language. 
N OVA M I SAO / Clay/ D i r t D a n ce r
31
Vegel Laszlo Author
Living in a net made of two languages, one
being a mother tongue and the other not a
foreign language but rather a language of
everyday life, is a blessing, because not everyone is given the opportunity to live in two
worlds at the same time. A language is a powerfulforce, and has the might of a dictator – and,
well, sometimes it allows itself to behave like
one.
The Future is My Compass, the Past is My Whip
Interviewed by Gordana Draganić Nonin
34
V
egel Laszlo was born in Srbobran (Szenttamas) in 1941, at the very
edge of the small town, in the farthest sidestreets. Since 1956, when he
started attending a grammar school in Novi Sad and moved into a dormitory, Novi Sad has become for him a city “Where life withinis difficult, but
life without is impossible”. He has walked its streets and plazas, and he
has written.
Aleksandar Tišma was the first in Yugoslavia to pay attention to his talent.
In 1970 he translated his first novel Memoirs of a Pimp (Memoirs of a Dropout) into the Serbian language.
Vegel has always insisted in his essays, in his work as a critic, and in all of
his public activities, that the key to a solution was not only in the hands
of politicians, that it was far more important to get acquainted with our
differences and to foster a culture of differences, to start a dialogue on all
levels, “a new social contract between the majority and the minority, one
in which each person has a feeling that they have made a contribution
towards it, not just somepoliticians on high.”
He has written numerous novels – the earliest of whichhe dares not take
in his hands, for his heroes lost their homeland in just a few short years.
He noted down the following in his diary, which he writes daily, a decade
ago: “The problem was not that I had wanted to change the world, but
that the world had wanted to change me, by force. Arrogantly, overbearingly, scornfully. Unfortunately, sometimes I challenged those attempts,
and very often I did it by stubbornly attempting to change at least one
sentence. This all led to more and more misunderstandings. I was understood neither by those who wanted to change the world, nor by those to
whom it had never occurred to do so.”
• You studied Hungarian Language and Literature at Novi Sad University and
Philosophy at Belgrade University, you were a member of the Új Symposion
editorial board, you worked as the editor of Novi Sad Tribina Mladih. What
was it that was so specific in the Novi Sad cultural scene of that time?
Vegel Laszlo: Spring winds were blowing in Novi Sad from ’56 to ’71. I
don’t want to embellish this time, because the system in power was basically non-democratic. However, apart from that, there was a lot of initiative,
naïveté and idealism. I lived in the belief that culture was very important,
that literature and creativity were important. Gradually I discovered both
the good and the bad. In the beginning it was very difficult to separate the
two. I witnessed the opening of Yugoslavia towards the West. I had the
chance to discover – to me it was completely new – Western civilization,
to get to know their culture, literature above all. Following the directives
of the state authorities we were led into Western modernisation without
democracy. However, from time to time, these same authorities were afraid
of what they had done, because this modernisation had led us towards
democracy, and for this reason they were repressive. The former political
elite would often destroy the very thing they had created, and in the end,
most of them impotently ran over to nationalism. But before that, there
hadbeen in Novi Sada certain collective memory of civil structure, the
legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which I see as some Novi Sad
melancholic eclecticism, and it had a very fruitful influence on me. This
is not only an idea, but a marked style as well. It is not so much a life in
itself, but a form – maybe more a form of art than of life. In the former
Yugoslavia, Novi Sad had for a very long time preserved a Danubian,
European equilibrium between the Balkans and Central Europe. I would
like to emphasise that the Danube is not only a river but also a culture. In
this lay the secret of Novi Sad’s uniqueness. When the nineties came,
it seemed to me that here, in this place, this precious heritage was disappearing and I alongwith it. Lately, however, I have noticed that this
feeling is being reawakened amongst young intellectuals, and I feel as if
I exist again, as if I have been reborn.
• When you published your first novel The Memoires of a Pimp (the Memoires
of a Dropout) in 1967, about the destiny of a group of young people who did
not wish to fit into the existing system and institutions, Aleksandar Tišma
wrote a review of the book, and later on, he translated the book into the
Serbian language. Tišma’s review was published in the Politika Daily in July
1968, during the summer of students’ discontent. The hero from your novel
Double Exposition called upon this very year as the only living memory, and
as an opportunity to change things. Why do you includethe student protests
of 1968 as one of the ten most important events in your life?
Vegel Laszlo: The Memoires of a Pimp (The Memoirs of a Dropout) is a
book of non-compliance, and a story about a world of lies. It was written
even before ’68, it was published in Új Symposion in 1966/67 in installments, so it in some way anticipated reality. This novel is connected to
Double Exposition, and both novels are connected to Paraenesis. All three
make up my „Novi Sad Trilogy“, which I started far back in the sixties. Each
novel is a continuation of the other, like concentric circles, and each story
is told using a different discursive strategy. The story in The Memoirs of a
Pimp (The Memoirs of a Dropout) is told in the first person singular, in
Double Exposition in the second person singular, and in Paraenesis in the
third person singular. And as time goes by, the circle of ripples grows
wider, and so time itself becomes one of “heroes” in this trilogy. The whole
T h e Fu ture is My Co mp ass, the Pas t is My W hip / N OVA MISAO
• • • Photo by Branko Stojanović
cycle ends with a crash of the system. It starts with unaware rebels, continues by demonstrating how absurd and tragicomic it is to rebel, and
ends in rubble.
• Among other things, you wrote about your bilingualism in Homeless
Essays. Using the English words ‘it’s terrible’ you initiated an inner drama.
What does living in two languages mean to you?
Vegel Laszlo: Living in a net made of two languages, one being a mother
tongue and the other not a foreign language but rather a language of
everyday life, is a blessing, because not everyone is given the opportunity
to live in two worlds at the same time. A language is a powerful force, and
has the might of a dictator – and, well, sometimes it allows itself to
behave like one. It is true that I write in the Hungarian language, since my
mother tongue is my homeland. It protects me and betrays me. It forms
me in every sense, in any place, publicly and privately. Not only do I write
in Hungarian, but I also dream most often in this language. Yet it is also true
that I live in both languages’ environments. To me this is a double-sided
mirror, because everything that exists has two names. Therefore, one can
ask the question; if all of this is true, what, then, am I? Do my languages
double-side me, too? Am I becoming some sort of fictitious, double, multi-folded shadow? A shadow of languages?
• In your essays you’ve written about Central Europe and its ‘homeless’ individual within. You have become a ‘bum who wanders among the boulders of
reality’ who never finds authenticity. Now,after more than a decade since the
fall of the Berlin Wall, what has Central Europe become?
Vegel Laszlo: Just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also afterward,
there had been a dream about Central Europe. Many naive and important
essays had been written about it. It was a cry of hope and utopia. I was
myself a little carried away with it, I believed in it, but the horrible wars in
the former Yugoslavia prevented me from joining this dominant Central
European discourse. Socialism was bust, capitalism was born. Ripples of
freedom werespreading further, but injustices were piling up and becoming, how shall I put it – democratically legitimate. We were taking steps
towards a new world, yet at the same time kicking up the old troubles
which had madeour lives miserable. Only now do wesee the ugly face of
this part of Europe. The nations of Central Eastern Europe are afraid of
themselves, but of others, too. More often than not they are afraid of
their neighbours. Still, they dream of far-away powers, which play with
them like cats do with mice. It is exactly now, when positive and slightly
euphoric hopes have died out, that we have the opportunity to recognise
N OVA MISAO / T h e Fu ture is My Co mp ass, the Pas t is My W hip
the horrid and exciting face of Central Europe and the Balkans, brimming
with reciprocal suspicion and hatred, and a wasted museum-like past. We
look like Paul Klee’s angels (I am referring to Walter Benjamin’s metaphor),
but the stormy times force us to fly towards the future, our spanned wings
pulled in two directions, our faces turned back over our shoulders towards a past, one which from afar you can see we think of with a terrible
trembling, but the time has come not only to reproduce, but to produce
a past that will suit our future. 
35
• • • Photo by Branko Stojanović
Aleksandra Vrebalov Composer
I believe that art makes sense if it connects us
to others and if it depicts our values and beliefs, our courageous determination in relation
to personal ideals and the issues of our time. It
is beautiful if it is ethical, regardless of whether
it is squalid and disturbing.
Stations of the Cross
Interviewed by Adrian Kranjčević and Mirko Sebić
38
A
leksandra Vrebalov was not there in the Novi Sad Synagogue on the
night of April 30, on that stormy night, when the celestial electricity was
tearing the sky with lightning. Her prior engagements had tied her firmly
to New York, where she lives, works and creates. Without a plan, the Novi
Sad premiere night of her “Stations” oratorio, took place without its author.
The dates for the event were rescheduled without a plan, the thundering
and lightning were unplanned, there were no plans to make an unsuccessful sound recording of the concert. What people usually expect of a piece
that deals with Christ’s suffering is a feeling of immortality and religious
elation, due to the victory of eternal life over death. Accident, when personified, is sometimes called the comedian, but does not usually rule such
religious ecstasy. But this was not about ordinary and conventional events.
And Stations certainly is not one. Suffering, chance and temptation that
have nothing predetermined within – this is the way of Man. The Way of
the Cross and the way of Man are criss-crossed and interwoven with the
art of Barnett Newman, Michael John Garces and Aleksandra Vrebalov. In
a small article titled Musique Réligeuse, published in 1937 on the first pages
of “Le Page musicale” magazine, Messiaen threw a glove before all composers who approached the religious in music from without, counting on
the effects of superficial sentiments. To him, as he said in his article, religion
was not comfort and a refuge, but a call for action. By using liturgical and
traditionally religious themes, music must be a revolutionary enterprise
or else it will remain but a mere decoration.
• Can you tell us what the preparation for the making of Stations was like?
How much did cooperation with the author of the poetic text mean to you as
a composer?
Aleksandra Vrebalov: In 2004, Michael Garces and I cooperated on the
New Dramatists project in New York during a period of a couple of intensive
weeks, when we finished a short vocal composition Canto Claro about
the political violence in Colombia. It was the first time that I had seen the
draft to Stations, read a couple of Garces’ dramatic texts and saw two of
his shows that were on in New York at the time. When an opportunity
arose for me to write a piece for choir, orchestra and soloists, on a humanistic topic, Michael’s text Stations was my first choice. It is based on
fourteen paintings of the same name by a New York abstract expressionist Barnett Newman. The text was only a raw draft, written in a rigorously
controlled, reduced language. It was more like a dotted network of meanings, a suggestion, than a narrative. Getting to know the original text
occurred in several stages – from reading and getting acquainted to the
rhythm and the meaning separated from the Newman’s paintings or
from Garces’ interpretation, to connecting the text to the Newman’s
paintings and iconography of the Christ’s Way, yet, not in details of each
individual Station, but as a whole, thus treating the Newman series as an
emotional atmosphere.. Newman himself had not chronologically followed the fourteen stages of Christ’s Way. In the phase that followed, I
organised words that defined the piece structurally, as well as the dramatic flow of each individual poem and cycle as a whole. The frequency
of certain words or the occurrence of a number of words in clusters in the
majority of Stations suggested the utilisation of the overtone series as a
basis for formal and harmonic structure. At that point Garces stepped in
again, with his revision of the text concerning my questions and suggestions. His dramatic texts are characterised by a specific obsessive, almost
violent rhythm close to declamation of text in hip-hop where words are
adjoined coming from different people on the stage, thus creating a
meaning – not in the individual, linear following of one person, but in the
continuity of the fragments heard from a number of sources.
Garces’ reciting of Stations defined the rhythm and intonation of the
phrases in the musical version of the piece. This was the time when I first
St ations of the Cross / N OVA MISAO
• • • Photo by Branko Stojanović
started writing the music material and it happened about half a year after
our initial communication about Stations.
• Such a piece as yours requires a synesthetic performance which will enable
the listener-observer-thinker to completely “enter” the very piece. Have you
got any special requirements or wishes regarding the performance?
Aleksandra Vrebalov: My basic requirement for the performers when
approaching the piece was to try to forget the supernatural and superhuman elements which are quite often an integral part of all religious
narratives, and to find the key to the piece in their own experiencing of
human suffering. Each tone should be performed in a technique that is
closest to a natural, the least stylised way of performing, and without any
emphasis on emotion and the beauty of the tone. The percussions, some
of which are not the usual orchestra instruments but those that have to
be collected from a construction site or a landfill, should be selected for the
rawness of their sound, not for the pleasantness. It is necessary to forget
the aesthetics and etiquette of the concert hall and to produce the piece
as an event, not as a performance; as a ritual in whicheach participant is
equally important, because all parts are of equal importance. The vocal
soloists do not have leading parts that are to be followed by the rest of
the ensemble. Their role is interactive instead, akin to triggers that initiate
events, or join in the events so as to influence their flow.
39
• What was the reaction of the audience and the critics after the premiere of
the “Stations” oratorio in the States?
Aleksandra Vrebalov: The piece had its premiere in Providence, Rhode
Island, on March 31, 2007 in the Blessed Sacrament Church, just before
Easter. This coincidence with the holiday that marks the events described
in Stations and the fact that the piece was performed in a place of worship
which has its own congregation induced a semi-religious atmosphere into
its world premiere. When the piece was finished, the audience remained
seated in silence and then, from this solemn, pregnant stillness everyone
rose to their feet and started applauding.
The most striking comment came from a priest who approached Garces
and me and said that very often when we celebrate Easter we adorn temples with flowers, eggs and chocolate bunnies and celebrate the victory
of eternal life over death, but we forget that this victory was preceded by
the hardest Way – Via Dolorosa, or Stations on the way to the cross; that
salvation makes sense only in the context of the victim and the suffering,
which have no place today in our commercialised religions. He said that
this piece had sent him back to the true spirit of Easter after many years.
This is an enormous compliment coming from a person whose territory
we stepped into, avoiding direct references to Christianity and leaving
this piece without the divine, supernatural act of resurrecting, without
salvation, without rewards – exactly the elements that are the promise
and purposeof religion.
• It seems that your works are specifically engaged and connected to certain
concrete problems. What is, in your opinion, responsible art?
Aleksandra Vrebalov: My work always leans on something that I am
personally occupied with, and the scope of issues ranges from the most
N OVA MISAO / St ations of the Cross
personal questions about the self-induced exile of a creator (as in Transparent Walls), to experimenting with the cultural identities of our region
(... hold me, neighbour, in this storm...), to being engaged in the problem of
environmental pollution (A dream of Mrs. Pilat). To me, creating is a means
to process the issues and pay attention to the issues that are, in my opinion, urgent and relevant, and to exchange the results of this process with
my surroundings. In this sense, a question of personal responsibility is
a question of connectedness to events and people of our time and of
being interwoven with the experiences of others. Art, of course, can go
without it all, but I am inspired by our mutual experience, I am affected
by someone else’s suffering; I am inspired by the beauty of the human
mind and the lives lived with awareness, whose purpose is to find ways
to ease each other’s existence. I believe that art makes sense if it connects
us to others and if it depicts our values and beliefs, our courageous
determination in relation to personal ideals and issues of our time. It is
beautiful if it is ethical, regardless of whether it is squalid and disturbing
– just think of Picasso’s Guernica, or Aleksandar Tišma’s The Use of Man.
And as much as creative work is a solitary enterprise and does not tolerate the public, the result of this work should be accessible to others and it
should push the frontiers towards a different, more humane world, of
which we can get a glimpse through creativity. And, to answer your question
– responsible art is art in whicha creator strives and manages to transpose the personal into the general and the universal, and the other way
around, where the creator pulsates with her time, tuning intothe direction
in which the human spirit moves, and offers her vision of the world out of
that necessity for change.
New York, 21 May, 2009 
• • • Photo by Branko Stojanović
Urban Andras Theatre Director
Theatre and art should neither be expected
to be pleasant forever nor to always represent
only what we want to see and hear. Sometimes
our impressions of a theatre performance
should be seen with a different set of eyes.
I believe that, when creating a theatre play,
it is important to be oriented towards music,
towards visual arts and we must leave behind
the idea that literature is our only support.
Theatre is a reality that reveals the real truth.
At least good theatre is.
Theatre is the Poetry of Reality
Interviewed by Tijana Delić
Photo by Edvárd Molnár
42
U
rban’s Andras plays have been particularly recognizable in recent
years as he has taken a step forward in approaching the way he directs.
His plays are new, provocative; they are introducing new theatrical forms
into our rather monotonous theatrical landscape. There is no repetition
in his directing, and his plays are somehow authentic aesthetic adventures. He approaches the text very openly. The play sometimes serves
only as a basic starting point or just as inspiration for an unconventional
directorial approach. The dilemmas of the time we live in have been
synthesized in Urban’s plays, which remain unique in spite of all the
differences in styles.
• The “Aiowa” theatrical troupe that you founded, and whose conception was
preceded by a theatrical and literary workshop in which you served as both
an actor and director, can be seen rather like an ideology and a specific
notion of the theatre. Looking at it from this perspective, and regarding
what you have created and experienced thus far, how close is the current
manifestation to the original concept?
Urban Andras: I created “Aiowa” with young people of my age when I was
only eighteen. It was supposed to be a concept where people supported
each other. Apart from plays such as “Dew” we were constantly involved
in activities, happenings and performances. Activity is probably the most
precise word for what we did. And it was always with theatrical elements.
“Aiowa” has performed many announced and unannounced actions in the
media and in public spaces or streets. Very quickly, we became noticed, as
if we were a group on the rise, and yet, we were into theatre. Still, I think
this was very important – and I think it is important even now; that here
was a group of clever young men and women who were not attached to
any particular tradition, i.e. who had not grown out of one. We did not
want to take after anyone, the theatre became a language we expressed
ourselves through, and some sort of existence. In its reckless, childish and
somewhat anarchistic manner “Aiowa” expressed its opinion about the
phenomenon of the artistic mafia by proclaiming a higher goal, a goal of
arming its members and seizing certain territories until a final victory.
Then, at the end of the eighties, we still did not know what lay ahead. The
cruelty we presented in our plays was not supposed to be an omen of
horrible times to come, as it was interpreted by some. I have always
thought that this sort of cruelty in art is true. I thought of it as the means,
as a knife directed towards oneself, that this conflict was leading towards
truthfulness, towards expressing some sort of truth. Of course, cruelty
was a pose, too. And it was a way of stirring up the murky waters of everyday life. Of course, I am still cruel, primarily to myself; I mean to say that I
persevere in creating the truth. Theatre is a reality that reveals the real
truth. At least good theatre is.
To me, theatre is, in a way, the poetry of reality. It is a conglomerate of true
real occurrences, actions, moments etc. It should be emphasized that this
is not the story of flesh and blood but something else altogether. Yet,
regardless of how serious we want to make things, it is clear that it is always
about show business. I mean, it is always about being liked, and there is
an intention to excite someone or entertain people. Of course, I say this
jokingly, but I mean it earnestly; it is also dangerous if you take yourself
too seriously. Yet, there is no frivolous art, so we have found ourselves in
this paradox.
When they say that my shows are engaged or political, I see this as the
shows dealing with reality, with what surrounds us, the personal, the social,
the political (and I don’t know politics). I believe that each show has its
task to fulfil, its own desire. I hope that the last sentence will not be a cue
for certain critics. All in all, I do not like to speak of what I had intended to
say with a certain show.
• As you had been saying, since 2006 you have been the Director of the Hungarian Town Theatre “Kosztolányi Dezső“ in Subotica. As someone who runs
T h eatre is the Po etr y of Realit y / N OVA MISAO
43
a theatrical house, you also have artistic responsibility. You are in a position
to use the repertoire to speak about artistic reality, pushing the borders of the
theatre by involving yourself in provocative activities, because you have said
yourself that you see the theatre as an illuminated space. How do you use the
repertoire to communicate with the audience and how would you define the
repertoire concept of the theatre?
Urban Andras: “Kosytolanyi” is a Hungarian theatre and the language of
a national minority is spoken there. This very fact is a cause for difficulties
and it creates certain problems which would not be there under different
circumstances. But being a minority, whether we want to admit it or not,
means a daily struggle to feel yourself at home where you are, in actuality,
at home.
I am not trying to justify the repertoire I create, or about which I decide,
by hiding behind quasi missions and calls. We are dealing with a theatre
which is part of Serbian culture and also a part of the overall Hungarian
culture. Sometimes it is nice to feel at home in both entities, but such
moments are rare. I think that this calls for a specific aspect of reality.
Contrary to what is usually believed, we are not really burdened with the
problems and frustrations typically ascribed to minorities. And I have the
right to be criticizing, not only self-criticizing.
The “Kosztolanyi” theatre works on three levels. It has its own production
– 3 to 4 premieres a year. In 2006 we initiated the project “Desiré’s Streetcar”,
which calls out for and takes on different projects from different regions
and whose aim is to present theatrical, literary and visual realities, which
would not otherwise be present here. The idea is to bring in interesting
and contemporary projects, whether they are about music, theatre or something else. It is certainly important to present a contemporary independent
and alternative Hungarian scene. In the beginning, the entire annual
programme was realised with the assistance of the Provincial Secretariat
for Culture. In spite of our quality and success, and our role as a gap-filler,
it is dubious whether things will go on as they used to. I am, however, an
optimist.
The third level is the “Desiré Central Station”
Five exceptional young actors and actresses make up the theatre’s
ensemble. They are the ones who carry our rather impressive repertoire.
N OVA MISAO / T h eatre is the Po etr y of Realit y
We must not forget that during a single month our actors play around
ten shows in Subotica and an additional three to four as guests in other
theatres. For the most part, the repertoire is based on my directions and
on my selections from various directors. Here, a man, or director, is more
important than the play. Mainly, our attempt is to realise a live theatre,
whether it is about the form of the show or of its contents. I am so far not
interested in theatre for theatre’s sake. Each and every show is connected
to the space of its origin; they are contemporary and communicate
in their own ways with a particular audience. When I am asked whom
are our shows made for, I answer that they are for all those who come
without prejudice. To be more precise, the shows are made for people
who do not come because they will receive ready-made answers when
asked what kind of theatre they need. For the most part that kind of audience wants a theatre that still does not exist. We want a theatre the form
of which we are unsure of. Now, I find it interesting when people react to
our work with prejudice. This has become a particular element of our
work. We have never wanted to be commercial. Theatres that suck up to
all sorts of audiences with their repertoire cannot free themselves from
their own commercial criteria, and as a result they end up being grabbed
by the balls, by the numerous mediocre audiences. I have never thought
it clever to perceive your own audience as fools who buy everything. We
try not to underestimate our audience and not to fool them. Luckily, we
have them. 
• • • Photo by Branko Stojanović
Branka Parlić Pianist
Below the photograph of a boy dressed up as
a girl, taken in Brighton in 1867, you can see a
calligraphic inscription by Eric Satie: “I was born
into this world very young at a time that was
very old.”
Artistic Audacity in Action
Interviewed by Adrian Kranjčević
46
E
ven today, Erik Satie’s oeuvre is regarded with suspicion, as if it
was the work of an eccentric who left behind a wardrobe with grey suits,
umbrellas and a heap of carefully inscribed notes packed in cigar boxes.
In the mid 20th century, John Cage discovered the great artistic courage
in Satie’s music, which has gone on to become one of the dominant forces
in the creation of contemporary art music. Branka Parlić is a pianist who
has only this “New Music” in her repertoire. Her interpretations and deep
understanding of this genre place her among the initiated (initiés).
During her twenty years working as an artist and presenting Satie’s and
New Music, Branka Parlić has inspired numerous artists of ours from the
fields of both classical and pop-rock music to listen to his work and the
work of other contemporary composers of minimalism and post-minimalism.
Branka Parlić: I became interested in “New Music” when I joined the
Ensemble for Alternative New Music and started working with them.
During my university years at the Music Academy in Belgrade, I used to
hang out with students from different departments, who had similar
interests and sensibilities, and so I was in a position to join the work of
this Ensemble. Along with me were other members of the ensemble who
also studied composition: Miroslav Miša Savić, Miodrag Lazarov Pashu,
Milimir Drašković, Vladimir Tošić, Dragan Ilić. And alongside them were
students from the Piano Department: Ksenija Zečević, Olgica Antić, Nada
Kolundžija, Anđelka Marjanović and others who were not permanent
members but would jump in when needed.
Our first concert in the Belgrade Student Centre, in now long ago 1979,
was not your everyday experience, neither for the audience nor for us
musicians. For the first time we played Miloš Raičković’s composition
Permutations, written in the minimalistic style, in front of a packed hall.
Although we had been apprehensive of how the audience might react,
our enthusiasm seemed to be contagious. The audience was delighted as
much as we were, because we were playing something completely new
and different.
This concert took place only a couple of years after the first occurrence of
this musical genre in America. Philip Glass’ first opera Einstein on the
Beach, which brought him world fame, was performed at BITEF festival
after its premiere in Avignon, and only a couple of months before it was
shown in the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Belgrade was then a host
to Philip Glass with his Ensemble and to Robert Wilson, the director of
the opera. Belgrade was truly part of the world in the seventies and
the eighties of the last century. That was around the time when a British
musicologist and composer Michael Nyman named this genre minimalism. Later on, Nyman started making compositions in this fashion, but he,
of course, introduced novelties typical of the British school. In 1979 we
had the pleasure of playing together with the Michael Nyman Ensemble
at the prestigious Music Biennale in Zagreb. From that point, Philip Glass
and other American minimalists did not allow the printing of their work
until the late 80s, so we only listened to them ‘from afar’, but could not
play them. Still, the members of the Ensemble, composers, wrote for us,
and somehow we got hold of American composer’s Robert Moran’s
composition, which we then played it at the Biennale.
• When you started your research in the field of Eric Satie’s music in 1986 as a
pianist and a piano teacher, very few people in Yugoslavia had heard about
this composer, except for a small circle of professional musicians. Were you
encouraged by any of them to perform and record this music and were there
any obstacles in the realisation of this goal?
Branka Parlić: I first heard the music of the controversial and eccentric
French composer Eric Satie in the cartoon Satiemania by Zdenko Gašparević, who was a member of the famous Zagreb School of Animated Films.
The very cartoon was fantastic, but its music was the big revelation for
• • • Photo by Nenad Ilić
Ar tis tic Au dacit y in Ac tion / N OVA MISAO
• • • Photo by Branko Stojanović
me. Soon my friend, then a young student of music, Mitar Subotić – Suba
(1963–1999) returned from Paris with Eric Satie’s piano scores. We were
discovering Satie together, and trying to pigeonhole him into one of the
music genres of the time. We realised that his music was not of the time it
was made, that it did not belong to any art genre – therefore it was original
and typical only of him. I have to say this because of your young readers,
that in the early eighties there was no internet and that it was not easy to
obtain the necessary information without the appropriate literature. Of
course, we found the literature in English and French some time later, after
we had already suspected (and we had been right) that Satie, being the
authentic music visionary that he was, had influenced and announced
major tendencies in art of the 20th century such as neoclassicism, surrealism,
Dadaism, performances, happenings, the Theatre of the Absurd, repetitiveness, minimalism, ambient music, and so on.
I was attracted to his music by how scaled down it was, simple and airy,
yet perhaps the greatest element of attraction for me was the complete
freedom in creativity he gave to the performer. Through humorous, very
often absurd instructions, he, in a way “communicates” with the pianist
but imposes no rules. As a pianist who graduated from the Music Academy, I was taught to be very careful and to properly understand all of the
instructions given by the author in his composition, while also respecting
the features of style to which a piece belongs. And then for the first time I
was introduced to music that belonged to no familiar genre, music where
the composer, by the manner in which the composition had been written, even encouraged me to liberate myself and create the sound as I believed it should sound. This is the reason why when we listen to Satie’s
music we find completely different interpretations, above all in regard to
the tempo, and then to the colour of the phrase, the atmosphere... During
the long gone seventies of the last century, there was a music production
unit at Radio Novi Sad and I knocked on their door and offered them this
interesting material which I had worked on with so much joy and devotion. I recorded in Studio M with Diana Eberst as a producer and that was
how the record Initiés was made, and the second time I recorded Satie’s
music was with Suba as a producer. Suba added different sound effects
on top of my second recording, and this composition, called Thanx Mr.
Rorschah – Ambient to Eric Satie’s Music, can be heard on his record called
Disillusioned. When we worked together on these recordings, neither Suba
nor I had any idea or plan to make a record – we simply recorded music
for Radio Novi Sad, and all of the recordings by the production team were
afterwards controlled by a commission, and then ended up in the radio
recordings library. Both recordings were made in 1986. At the time, Rendezvous with Music, a famous radio show, was celebrating 30 years on the
N OVA MISAO / Ar tis tic Au dacit y in Ac tion
air, and the producers of the show, Vitomir Simurdić, Anđelko Maletić and
Bogomir Mijatović decided to mark this event by publishing small, valuable editions, and included both my own and Suba’s records. Nobody had
dreamed of the extent to which Initiés would become hot merchandise
and how in such a short time Satie’s music would attract such large numbers of fans across all of Yugoslavia. Before that point, Satie had hardly been
heard of, even among people from the world of music, and information
on him had been reduced to a couple of lines in music history textbooks.
As the small and exclusive circulation soon sold out, PGP RTB from Belgrade printed another 500 records.
No, there were no obstacles. On the contrary, all of the producers, and
even the Head of the Music Department, musicologist Dušan Mihalek,
made an effort to promote the record in the best possible and most professional way. In 1988 I had three promotional concerts in Novi Sad, Belgrade and Ljubljana. It was the first record of Satie’s music in the former
Yugoslavia. Today this record is a collectors’ item, and Satie’s music, which
is well-known now, still attracts new fans. People often approach me after
a concert with the record in their hand and the story of how they got
hold of it, how they discovered Satie’s music, how much it has meant to
them. At the time of the record’s issue, Satie’s music inspired conceptual
artists like Miroslav Mandić and Balint Szombathy, who used it in their
work, and later on Feliks Pašić used the famous Gnossienne in Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening in the Yugoslav Dramatic Theatre in Belgrade. 
47
• • • Photo by Branko Stojanović
Jasna ¯Duricic
̌ ́ Actress
Theatre is a living art and is supposed to elevate
a man. I have been taught that only one person
in the audience is enough, one single man; as
Branko Pleša, my professor, used to say, to play
just for that one soul – the one who will understand, the one whom we touch with our play,
with our story... that is the play – one to one.
Body is My Instrument
Interviewed by Tijana Delić
Photo by Miomir Polzović
W
50
hat do you believe are objective examples of a justified investment in a
theatrical play? And when I say that, I mean financial, intellectual and artistic
investments.
212. They were also a step forward artistically. All of these plays I have
mentioned have justified all that has been invested in them, artistically
for the most part.
I would say that two types of plays dominate our theatrical reality: the
average ones and the bad ones. Making a good performance or a good
film is not an easy task, but it is not impossible and it cannot occur so
rarely that it becomes an isolated event. And when it does happen it lasts
for some time, but is not exploited in a good way. Rather, it is treated just
as mediocre or bad shows are treated. This starts with the question of
just how many times a production it is to be played, and continues with
the dilemma of whether or not it will go to important festivals, go on tour
as a guest performance, or stay put entirely. I do not see anybody making
an effort so that a great show might be seen by as many people as possible. Actually, when a good show is made, it is a big problem for our people because they do not know what to do with this good product. On the
other hand, an average show speaks and takes care of itself, because here
nothing is new for us, nothing has to be done. Luckily, this has not been
the case with Boat for Dolls. We have toured a lot and taken part in the
most significant European festivals. Conversely, this has not been the
case with Simeon the Foundling because, with the exception of the Novi
Sad audience, nobody has seen it. You may not like this play; it might be
too long, boring at times, but it certainly is not a show that you can see
anywhere or anytime. And I am not just speaking of Serbia, I am talking
about the entire region. In spite of this, the show has somehow not continued, it is not being played, because the theatre has no money to pay
the guest actors. In the meantime, all of the bad and mediocre shows are
alive and they are not expensive. The same thing happened to the shows
Travelling Theatre Šopalović and The Forest is Glowing, which I did in Atelje
• One gets an impression that such theatre is, in a way, isolated and closed.
What is today’s theatre open to, or what should it be open to?
Jasna Đuričić: To a man. To a human soul. In the sea of present-day
superficiality and fleeting impressions, everything is so aggressive and
invasive that the human soul is left behind. I constantly repeat this. It is all
about the external and this only encapsulates and hardens a man. The
theatre is a living art and is supposed to elevate a man. I often wonder
how the battle against film and video-games, against the internet, can
be won. With what approach? It must be with something contrary, with
something simple, directed toward a human being, toward a soul, toward
the inner self.
• One sometimes gets an impression that the audience is at times underestimated when actors try to utilise certain aesthetic or non-aesthetic means in
their acting. How do you see things?
Jasna Đuričić: The need to emphasize some things on the stage and to
highlight them is, in my book, to underestimate the audience. Overacting
or relying on stock gestures or mannerisms belongs to some other time.
The people of today learn from all sides, everything is available to them
and I believe that there is no need to do such things. All around us there
is, more than ever, primitivism and stupidity, yet I believe that the people
who go to the theatre are different and there is no need to serve them
banalities. I think that they understand a lot more than what people from
theatrical circles believe they do. The lack of professionalism on the stage
is another story altogether. I often hear ... oh, they will never notice... and I
am very sensitive to that. Any attempt to cheat people in the audience is
something that I cannot justify. I would not take such behaviour from a
shop assistant in my grocery. And I do not do it to others, because this
would mean underestimating the audience, i.e. the customers.
• How do you deal with the process of transforming into a character? Should
you express or downplay your personality onstage, or as Artaud would do,
negate yourself completely? The character lives its reality on the stage. And
off of it? How much of the character is the role itself and how much of the
character is you, and how difficult is if for you privately?
Jasna Đuričić: I believe that I have always had this energetic charge within me. I have already spoken of this before. Some things need to amalgamate; they need to happen within us, within me. It seems that this has all
happened, merged inside of me. Surely there are the years of work and
professional experience, the parts that I have played, but it is also my private maturity. I cannot forget my work and the roles I have been given, especially my work with Milena Marković and Tomi Janežić, and many other
B o d y is M y I ns tr u m e nt / N OVA M I SAO
high quality people who have come together in a single space. Sometimes
I think I am just lucky. This is a very different category of luck, though, because some actors think they are lucky for getting the chance to shoot a
TV series. For me, it is this other one – work and being one with quality
people. As for nullifying myself onstage, this is something I was taught at
school and it is an inalienable part of me. Since my graduation I have constantly been putting it into practice and it is no longer a problem for me.
The roles I play sway me from the inside. Forward and backward they go,
some making me see again, remember something I do not wish to remember; some making me close my eyes hard, and so on. My body is my
instrument. And I have nothing else. I express myself across myself. I am
asked ...was that you from the character or you from yourself?
51
I cannot be someone else – I am me. But I place myself into somebody
else’s circumstances. I am trying to see the world through your eyes, and
yet I cannot do it without mine. Sometimes this dive into a foreign world
is painful, but I have never been afraid of what harm it might do me. It all
started with the role of Olga in Murlin Murlo, when I felt that something,
that particular energetic and emotional charge. My late uncle Šaca, Stevan Šalajić, a great actor, was delighted with the show, but he told me ...
Jasna, you can’t go on like this... I asked him like what ... giving so much of
yourself, you’ll get sick. I understood nothing at the time, I still don’t
understand it now. This is because I believe that when I play this way, all
the way, I actually protect myself. This is my pledge and it is good for my
soul, like some sort of purification. I think that I am protected during the
two hours of whichever play I am in, and that the stage is my protected
space. And that is the truth for me.
• The heroine of the Boat for Dolls has an increased desire for emotions and
passion. I would like to ask you about that role, as you have been present in
different versions. How much did you negate yourself? Your heroine says that
she wants to be reborn. With your acting, every time anew, the audience feels
the paradoxical attractiveness of the character you play.
Jasna Đuričić: The reason why Boat for Dolls is so attractive is primarily
because of Milena Marković. Her text was more than inspiring for me and
I gave all of myself at every moment. It has been really a special experience for me. Above all the form is very open and this has liberated my
acting, an openness of form I delved into with Ana Tomović, the director
of the play. We found the perfect key. It is a story of an artist, and of
course this provoked me additionally. It forced me to give to the role
more of myself than I usually do. When my mother saw the show she said
... well, it is your entire life. Of course the story’s exact details are not connected to my private life, but there is a lot of the personal in it and my
mother has recognised it. An actor has to be attentive and give such
emotions to the character, because it intensifies the experiences of both
the actor and the audience and provides immense truthfulness.
• The role that you play in The Forest is Glowing is poetically close to the one
in the Boat for Dolls. The heroes both appear to have died a long time ago.
This world from the margins has come together and created a form of realistic
social structure. The could-have-been destinies of these anti-heroes are almost
grotesque. Yet the show is not destined to last.
N OVA M I SAO / B o d y is M y I ns tr u m e nt
Jasna Đuričić: As an actress on the stage I am responsible for conveying
the poetic expression in those lives in which there are no plans, no perspective, where awareness is dull with fatigue. These are people Milena
Marković portrays poetically in the fairytale a roadside bar. This is an excellent play that offers an unending analysis of the truth we see daily in the
streets. But Kokan Mladenović, Manager of Atelje 212 has taken the show
off the repertoire. It was the same with Travelling Theatre Šopalović. I am
sorry that young people are being denied an opportunity to see a play
like that, to learn something new. I do not understand it, because these
shows have taken a huge step forward in the theatrical life of this country.
If I have nothing against Hair, what should anyone have against The Forest
is Glowing or Travelling Theatre Šopalović? I suppose it is good if a variety
exists. Leave these shows for those who study directing and acting, who
find them fascinating, who should learn through watching them. But who
cares about this. Today, people think only about how to make profit. And
these two shows supposedly do not earn enough. There it is! 
• • • Photo by Branko Stojanović
Želimir Žilnik Film Director
We are living in a time when the new world of
film landscape is already here. American and
European films are minority cinematographers
today. Asia and Africa are where more and
more interesting films are being made. We
are witnessing the return to power of South-American, in particular, Brazilian, film.
From Communism to Capitalism and Back via the Fortress “Europe”
Interviewed by Mirko Sebić
54
A
uthorship is unimportant to Želimir Žilnik. Actually, authorship, asafundament of Western society, issomething that should be obliterated,
unmasked and thrown into mud. This act would be a meaningful act. But
what is this act? It is surely not the act of some mere craftsman’s self-gratifying reproduction, because craftsmanship is disgusting routine, a yarn
warped for exploitation. It is even the basisof this exploitation – for there
is no exploitation without the faith that something can always be done
well, and always in the same manner. Each Robinson uses craftsmanship
to cheat his Man Friday. And there’s the ideological rub – Robinson becomes a totalitarian. If we are, then to me weshould be only cineastes,
artists, active members of a global game of galleries, and tomorrow maybe a part of a museum setup thus slowly becoming a unique collection
of forgotten crafts. If, however, we are not any of these, what are we? If
we cannot be this, what can we be? Shall we try tobe a 28-year-old young
man, 72 kilos in weightand 167 centimetres tall, a lawyer by calling, who
was working on (black) film in 1971 as if it were his life? Shall we try to
become Želimir Žilnik? But this we have never tried, and what is worse,
never have we even bothered to ask who, actually, this Želimir Žilnik is. In
the vast sea of documents, archived interviews, photographs from film
shootings, cut-outs from court trials or notes from the so-called “ideological
commissions” (which take up 5 gigabytes of memory space on the DVD
that comes along with the book For an Idea Against the Status Quo, the
Analysis and Systematisation of Želimir Žilnik’s artistic oeuvre), we sense that
there is an authentic and continuous voice, a voice of uncompromising
questioning of all the “artificial paradises” of ideology, of all the narratives
of the great history, of all the scams that look like truth.
• The Old School of Capitalism had its premiere in September 2009 in the village of Turija, almost forty years after the premiere of your Early Works, in a
way bringing you back to the themes of the possibility and impossibility of
social revolutions. Can this be considered as some sort of conceptual continuation, or “second part”, of Early Works, or rathersome sort of “Late Works”?
Želimir Žilnik: It has been even more than forty years, because Early Works
had its premiere inearly March, 1969.
You are right when you say that it is possible to draw parallel lines. The
main idea is that we wondered back then, during that spring a long time
ago, how the proclamations and promises of socialism would endure the
brutal occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and the coun-
tries of the Warsaw Treaty which the arted Dubcek’s attempts to turn that
rigid socialism into “socialism with a human face”. And in the spring of
2009 a question is hovering above us: How is it that the establishment of
capitalism is not bringing with it the promised fruits – prosperity, employment for young professionals, an efficient and profitable economy? What
magic wand has turned the multi-party system into a multi-party dictatorship of overbearing, inexperienced and inefficient apparatchiks? How
is it that the obnoxious privileges of the communist ‘functioneers’ of yesteryearare nothing compared to the growing wealth of the privileged
businessmen, state contractors and many criminals who are well-connected with the democratic authorities.
Just as the old, the new film puts the story into a wider context. You can
see that I have mentioned explicitly the waves that are being broadcast
from both the American and the Russian sides towards the Balkan midgets.
Methodologically, the work was similar to a point: we follow a group that
leads the story, and not a single hero.
• Some familiar methods of your work are on display in the film, but on a
higher level, this time initiating events that have different repercussions today.
The young anarchic unionists who took part in your film have had serious
problems with the authorities, yet nobody denies the film as a product. Has
anything changed in the repressive state apparatuses?
Želimir Žilnik: The greatest change can be seen in the media reactions:
the first film caused quite a stir in the news papers, but there were also
serious texts written by film critics, even sociologists and political analysts
joined in. There has not been a single film review about the Old School
of Capitalism, even six months after its release. Since it wasshown abroad,
we can see that people are writing, and the entire March issue of Kino!,
thefilm magazine from Ljubljana, will be dedicated to this film. Here – utter
silence.
This is not about censorship or pressures. Simply put – the local film production has been devastated, due to the fact that nobody has established
a system for financing films and their public distribution. And this has
made writing about and evaluating films redundant.
We invited the anarchic unionists to partake because we had noticed that
they had published a magazine Direct Action, in which they analysed the
From Co mmunism to Capit alism and B ack via the Fo r tress “ Europ e” / N OVA MISAO
position of employees in cases of profit-oriented privatisations. I did not
expect such a quick reaction to the “Capitalist Casino”, for whose empty
spectacles we have been bombarded across the media. This reaction
reflects the number of young people interested in a leftist option.
55
We, the film crew and the employees in factories, had a good feeling
while about shooting their protests, as we met educated, interested and
courageous young people.
Unfortunately, when they staged their action in front of the Greek Embassy, for which some of them were detained six months duringpre-trial
proceedings, the film had already been shot and edited.
They had been unaware of the fact that their presence in the public eye
represented a provocation to the establishment, which was quite similar
to the provocation presented by students in 1968, and that the authorities
would make efforts to frighten and punish them “accordingly”. As it
always goes, someone will bend down and someone will gather additional
motivation and energy.
• Michael Wayne starts his study “Political Film” with an aphorism: “All films
are political, it’s just that they are not all political in the same way. ”In this
study he argues a thesis about the existence of a “third film way”, one contrary to Hollywood commercial film, but also opposed to artistic abstract film.
Do you think that there is hope today for such a third film way and where is
its future: In the East, the West, The south, among the Third World Countries?
Želimir Žilnik: Yes, of course. We are living in a time when the new world
of film landscape is already here. American and European films are minority cinematographers today. Asia and Africa are where more and more
interesting films are being made. We are witnessing the return to power
of South-American, in particular, Brazilian, film.
Last year I was in Slovakia at the Art Film Fest in Trenčianske Teplice. They
presented my Kenedi Hasani trilogy there. The town looks like Vrnjačka
Banja in Serbia, and the selection of films is exclusive, especially from the
third world, as is the homage programme which pays respects to great
film names. Last year’s was for Liv Ullmann and Omar Sharif.
I also was watching a series of ten ‘new Chinese films’.
Everything is different from the grandiose spectacles, shot in emperors’
palaces, the Great Wall of China, of this densely populated country. Under
the mask of communist ideology we are witnessing the rise of the most
successful, most profitable and the most brutal capitalism.
Let me mention a couple of titles: there is this saga of the lives of a few
young people, who hadparticipated in Tiananmen Square in 1989, then
afterwards were hiding in the province and later emigrated before returning to the wild capitalism of today. The director is Lou Ye and the film
is Summer Palace. The Post-modern Life of My Aunt, directed by Ann Hui, is
about women in different epochs of dramatic change. The Lost Gun, one
of the most effective satirical stories I have seen in recent years, is about
the life and problems of a policeman in a remote Chinese province. I was
watching these films and not leaving my seat.
The presenter of the films was a clever Chinese woman, Lisa Wen, who
speaks English well, and had ready answers for all the questions.
I approached her after the show. She told me that she was also the producer of half of the films in the selection. I asked her about the distribution. She said it was going better and better. She started five years ago,
investing a maximum of half a million dollars into a project, and now this
investment has risen to three million. The market is being developed, the
most successful films are seen by up to fifty million people. She speaks
with a scorn for great spectacles. She sees them as political marketing
and an embellishing of history.
She asked me what Iwas doing. I invited her to come the following day and
watch the three Kenedi films. After the films we sat to down tosome coffee.
‘You seem to be making films about minorities’, she said. ‘In China we have
dozens of minority groups. Many different languages, religions and customs. If you are interested, I invite you to do three films, to see how you
function. Each will be given half a million dollar budget. I watched her,
thensipped my coffee. I told her that, unfortunately, I did not have any
openings in the forthcoming five years. I did not tell her, but I grasped, the
following: we, from the olden world, cannot measure up to them. 
N OVA MISAO / From Co mmunism to Capit alism and B ack via the Fo r tress “ Europ e”
Ladik Katalin Multimedia Artist
A certain critical moment in our lives initiates
a cocooned and petrified scream within us.
It erupts from our innards like a volcano, and
we feel as if hell itself got free in us. Scream is
purgatory. Scream is rebellion. My reaction to
repression has become rebellion and escape
in advance. Some call it courage. I was surprised
to be considered brave when I felt desperate.
I did some things out of desperation, which
I probably would not have done if they had
left me alone.
Living in the Sign of Scream
Interviewed by Danijela Halda
L
58
adik Katalin was born in Novi Sad 25 October 1942. The scope of
her oeuvre includes literature, acting and creation and interpretation of
experimental sound compositions and radio plays, phonic and visual
poetry, happening, body art, performance, activities, mail-art...
In an attempt to present this extremely charismatic and provocative artist,
maybe it would be best to use what the artist said when asked how she
sees herself today.
• In order to see the difference between Katalin today and Katalin when she
was very young, I must first take a look inside of me and count what I believe
has remained there of my early youth. They are curiosity, I am still introvert,
I have a desire and capacity to become invisible, servility, avoidance of
conflict, occasionally I do want to be in the limelight, reliability, decisiveness, wish
for independence and fighting for it, waste of life energy, need for solitude,
fear of uncertainty; I still give a lot of importance to dreams, I am adventurous,
I fly in my dreams, I do not give up trying to find the so-called cosmic intelligence or the Almighty.
The differences are: I have become more patient and quieter, I am not afraid
of death nor of falling in love, I am less ashamed in intimate situations than
when I was young, I do not fake orgasms, more and more I dare say NO.
In the punishing cultures, patriarchal ones, it is quite common that women
artists are torn between the desire to be accepted and the love for their child
– regardless of whether it is a symbolic or her biological child. The old story –
women die mentally and spiritually because of their attempts to protect the
unaccepted child – and it can be art, their lover, spiritual life. A mother of a
different child has to have the endurance of a Sisyphus, scarier than a Cyclop
and be thick-skinned like a Caliban to confront such a culture. Whether she
wants it or not, a woman must be somewhat intrepid and forceful to succeed.
Which of the mentioned features were necessary in constituting your personality and artistic career?
Ladik Katalin: After my son was born I dedicated six years only to him,
marriage, housework and acting in Radio Novi Sad drama department. In
the meantime I finished a two-year drama education course in the Serbian
National Theatre. I had neither time nor strength to write poetry. I was
convinced that I had the right to be a mother, to raise my son and be an
authentic creator, mother of my pieces. When I was 28 I told myself that it
was about time I realized my creative wanting. However, I had to make a
choice – marriage or art. I selected art and a destiny of a single-mother.
Every attempt to realize the individuality of a woman in the domain of
creative work and own personality (that overcomes socially and morally
allowed norms) causes some sort of nervousness in that environment. If a
woman manages to ignore her environment even partially, the environ-
ment becomes nervous, shackles and punishes her. A woman should know
the psychology of masses, she needs to be ready for such a reaction, and
not give it too much attention. Unfortunately, I was not sufficiently ready
to such a fierce reaction in my closer and wider environment. Although I
was aware that my main task was to create, and that everything that was
happening around me was just a by-product of my work and all the brouhaha initiated by the people and the media wanting to satisfy their need
for sensation, I was often very tired and somewhat beaten by those events.
My other reaction to repression has turned into rebellion and escape
ahead. Some call it courage. I was surprised to be considered brave when
I felt desperate. I did some things out of desperation, which I probably
would not have done them had they left me be. A mother of a different
child has to have the endurance of a Sisyphus, scarier than a Cyclop and
thick-skinned like a Caliban to confront such a culture. Whether she wants
it or not, a woman must be somewhat intrepid and forceful to succeed.
Looking at it now, I probably gained the features of the woman-fighter.
• It seems to me that your poetry contains the sole essence of Ladik’s Katalin
soul. You started writing relatively early and you published your first collection almost anonymously, afraid of the reactions of the predominantly
male editorial board. There seems to be a constant conflict of the body as
something outward and the soul as a true manifestation of the self. Still, you
say: What kind of a man gives up the established formula and goes into the
unknown?
Ladik Katalin: To me, uniqueness of a man emanates from the won “predominance” in the evolution: “His task is to use up the history and to survive
at any cost.” In history, which I call a stucco drape in the same poem, the
son of man simply cannot bear the burden of religion, society and his
own soul alone. To ease the burden of the soul, the religion in the women’s world as a “rosary to call up little death”, which is the unequivocal
provocation of a forcefully stabilized patriarchal system. My ‘son of man’
is not cocooned, on the contrary. He travels, bears the burden of an inherited social convention, drags his roots and soul and runs away ahead
into the unknown.
• Your performances and verses are quite often inspired by archetypical,
magical, ritual, ambiental, mythical, religious, ethnological codes. What is
the function of these codes. Do you use them to criticize alienation of a highly
modernist culture and art?
Ladik Katalin: Just like a caveman wants to express the essence of his
being through song and rhythm, he attributes magical power to dance, I
identify with this caveman. Therefore you see the dance, rhythm, faith,
honesty, vulnerability and fear become the essence of my performances.
My words are decisive and harsh when I cast spells, curse or mourn. Béla
Living in the Si gn of Scream / N OVA MISAO
59
Gunda, PhD. wrote about my prose poems inspired with folklore in his
study called Folk Fairy-tales in the Hungarian Avant-garde Poetry, in the
literary magazine Új Symposion: by examining Ladik’s Katalin poetry, you
can see that the avant-garde poetry can integrate experiences from folk
poetry and folk art. However, she does it not by associating it with the atmosphere of the village gatherings, not by repeating old rhymes and stories, not by utilising the neo-folklore elements and skills, but by association of almost subliminally crystallised new facts, meanings and moods.
This small association characterises folk poetry – let us think just of the
world of folk-tales! Ladik Katalin does not imitate this world, she does not
walk down its paths, but based on the experienced she extends her creative perspectives and thus uncovers new worlds. The shores of the new
worlds are marked with the waves of the poem”. In this world of myth
and archetype I approached the decomposing of the poetry, its basic elements. I wrote “absurd” folk-tales about an enchanted dear who “does
not drink from a glass, but from a clear spring”. I think that this field still
N OVA MISAO / Living in the Si gn of Scream
has great capacities for poetry. And from the absurd world of folk fairytales it is only a step away to surrealism, pop art and happening.
• Starting from the idea that today there are no isolated and encapsulated
artistic movements, i.e. there is no art that is typical of one region or centre,
and that everything is part of global art network, do you think that you, as an
artist who was active in a specific cultural atmosphere, have contributed to
the better and clearer analysis of a historical period.
Ladik Katalin: I was not thinking about that at the time I started creating. It was normal and spontaneous to reflect the global in my isolated
artistic environment. In the beginning it was spontaneous, and later on I
took conscious care of some sort of feedback communication and reaction
with the cultural environment of the time. I have always been inspired by
the social and cultural atmosphere I live in, and I do not think about
whether I have contributed to a better and clearer analysis of a historical
period. It is not my task. 
• • • Photo by Branko Stojanović
Boris Kovač Composer
I am not interested in art that does not help us
become better, truer and richer. Across many
periods and stages, art has always been something through with I work on myself, and
the chronology of my work is basically the
chronology of my life. As I have changed, so
the pieces I have made have changed.
The Greatest Art is Being a Happy Man
Interviewed by Gordana Draganić Nonin
62
B
oris Kovač, composer, instrumentalist, multimedia artist. He writes
music for chamber ensembles which he rehearses and leads, and plays
woodwinds. His pieces have been performed either by himself or by others
more than 500 times at 250 festivals of contemporary music and theatre
in around 40 countries, on four continents. He has published 14 authored
CDs and one DVD. He has composed music for dozens of theatrical and
dance performances, and he has also worked on film and TV music production in Serbia, Slovenia, Austria, Germany and Hungary. He is the founder
of the Chamber Theatre of Music Ogledalo, he initiated the festival of current
music Interzone, the Academy of Fine Skills, Happy Man Institute, and he
runs workshops for New Music.
He received the Sterija Award for best music written for a theatre play in 2007
and the Award for best film music at the Cinema City film festival in 2008.
His CD albums have been ranked among the top 10 albums on the European Broadcast Union list (number two in August 2005) and The Last
Balkan Tango was included among the 50 essential world music albums
in the world according to Songlines, the London music magazine. He is a
free artist. Apart from the five years he spent abroad as a war émigré,
when he lived in Italy, Slovenia and Austria, he has lived and worked in
the village of Bukovac on Fruška Gora Mountain.
• You have divided your opus in three stages: Home, Road and Being. In your
Poetical Autobiography you wrote: I am building a House in which I am on
the Road to the Being. So, let us start from the foundation and your “Dream
of Origin”. You live in Bukovac, and you have often said that you love to stand
on top of Bukovac Hill, because when you turn south you see the Balkans and
the Orient, and when you turn northwest, you see Central Europe. To what
extent has Vojvodina predetermined who you are?
Boris Kovač: It is good that you remembered my title Dream of Origin. In
1988 my second LP Ritual Nova 2 came out. LP albums had two sides and
side A was called by this name, while side B had the inverted title: Origin
of a Dream. A man learns a lot about himself when he answers constructive
questions and at this moment I am becoming aware that this has been
one of the constant features in my work, which, due to a very perplexing
verisimilitude of styles, simply yearns for such permanent features. The
paradox, that which provokes creative dynamism, is one of the names
for this constant. By my origin, yes, my Vojvodinian origin, as a typical
‘byproduct’ of the situation here, my father being Hungarian and mother
Serbian, I had been predestined to carry this paradox in my veins and my
thoughts. Instead of easing my life and deciding on one half, I, in spite
of the trends, proudly call attention to my heterodoxy and can say that
being something in between a Catholic and Orthodox Christian I have
opted for Islam (and when I said that to the interviewer of Večernje Novosti
daily, she terminated the interview because she thought I was provoking
her). And then I just follow the creative logic of the paradox. Other people react in a manner similar to this journalist’s, the people who believe
that pure sounds are by themselves nicer and more valuable than the
mixed ones. When I say this, I opt “neither for Guča nor for Exit” and also
that the English rockers and brass bands from Dragačevo are more distant to me than the folk music from geographically far away Cape Verde.
And I was lucky to sense this before 1988, when I recorded the Dream of
Origin. I was interested in the origin, not in the sense of the family tree
and chronology (I am ashamed to admit how little I know my relatives)
but in the sense of ontology. A man can be placed somewhere by destiny,
there is a light over there, some fragrances, sounds. The Dream of Origin
starts with a movement called All Under the Sun: one afternoon in Bukovac
there was a wedding party with an accordion player, then there was a
summer shower, a pig was heard from one yard and a rafter of turkeys
from another, in the end I heard bells from the local church tower. This
line of events is the “history” that I am interested in and this is the root for
my music. Even today, when I feel as a stateless person in my own country,
due to a bad history of being insistent about whom is of what origin, of
which nation and from which family tree someone fell off, I have this freedom to dream of the Origin. And that is why both Dream of Origin and
the Origin of the Dream are ‘two faces of the same author’. This Dream
belongs to me and it is the only thing that cannot be taken from me by
those who always have better things to do than go for a hike in the Fruška
Gora hills and listen to the silence that gives birth to music. The silence is
the same here as it is on Cape Verde, where, to be honest, I have not
been, and why should I go there when I can listen to their music? Because
just as the silence there is the same as it is here, so is their nostalgia the
same feeling of mixed joy and sorrow that plays inside of us when we listen
to ... the silence.
• In Bukovac, in an authentic Vojvodinian house, you have a music studio;
Kachara MM Studio.
Boris Kovač: I have always been a do-it-yourself sort of person. The destiny that has set me where I am and the desire for freedom were the key
factors in me being such a person. And maybe it is something I inherited
– I placed my music studio where my forefathers used to make wine. I am
unaccustomed to big systems; home-made production suits my nature
best. I have been independent in producing my own records since 1979
when I got the equipment for my first music studio. I realised in time that
it does not pay to trust the institutions of the bureaucratic socialism of
T h e G reates t Ar t is B e ing a Happy Man / N OVA MISAO
63
former Yugoslavia. And when Yugoslavia popped like a bubble I was not
lost. I had already made connections with the outside world; my second
LP came out in London in 1988, behind me were many gigs abroad and I
had my own ‘production means’ i.e. recording equipment and I was a
trained sound recorder and producer. That was how I survived in Rome,
and later in Slovenia and Austria doing nothing but my line of work. The
closed, economical system made it possible for me. Even today, when we
are witnessing global crisis, I am surviving in the same way. I compose,
I organise the work of the orchestra, I record and produce. I deliver
finished products. I don’t mingle with politicians just so state institutions
finance me minimally, nothing serious could be done with that kind of
money and I would have given up a long time ago had I not had my own
closed production system.
• Is there a new phase in your creativity in sight?
Boris Kovač: I am finishing my new album called Catalogue of Memories.
We recorded it this winter in the synagogue and it is in the last phase of
N OVA MISAO / T h e G reates t Ar t is B e ing a Happy Man
postproduction. I see it as some sort of testament album, although I have
not planned to write my last will yet. In it I synthesise all the main lines of
my own musical authorship. This is where almost all of the languages I’ve
used intertwine as some sort of a kaleidoscope where some old themes
appear in a new context. This is my most mature piece of work and the
most successful production. Obviously, a time has come to synthesise
and reduce. While working on this material I learned that for me there are
three basic sources of music: contemplation, dance and ritual. Apart from
me, 13 great musicians from Novi Sad, Belgrade and Klagenfurt took part
in the recording. I will say all of their names with deep gratitude and thus
finish this interview: Aleksandra Krčmar, Slobodanka Stević, Siniša Mazalica, Svetlana Spajić, Jelena Filipović, Saša Panić, Vukašin Mišković, Ivana
Pavlović, Timea Kalmar, Jovanka Mazalica, Milan Nenin, Lav Kovač.
And the new phase? It will find me, if necessary. Contemplation, probably. To be a young pensioner, I have wanted this for a long time. But the
question is, will retirement want me? 
Lajkó Félix Musician
To me there is no difference – music composed
and written down, or improvised. Notation
is, at any rate, artificial; it arrived later. Music, I
suppose, was first. Actually, improvisation does
not exist, there is simply music, what you hear
and what you play.
Southern Wind on the Danube
Interviewed by Mirko Sebić
Photo by Branko Stojanović
66
L
ajkó Félix is a composer and musician from Pannonia / Vojvodina, born
on December 17, 1974 in the village of Kavilo, not far from Mali Iđoš, in the
Bačka Topola Municipality. He charismatically plays the violin and zither;
the string instruments traditionally played on this Plain. His composing is
strange, controversial. It is something that cannot be named, and those
who feel it call it music, and those without the feeling call it kitsch. But
music comes, though it is not invited. That is why Lajkó Félix never calls
what he is doing anything other than music.
During the dark, dark nineties of the last century in Serbia, bright news
started spreading about a strange violinist, a young man, some twenty
years old, whose band sounded and looked fairly gypsy-like, and whose
music was reminiscent of some horribly sped up mixture of Iva Bittová,
Bartók, Paganini, good Hungarian jazz, Transylvanian Hungarian music,
and so on and so on. To check out these rumours, and for the purpose of
organizing the Interzone 01 festival, I called Lajkó Félix on the phone. A
pleasant female voice asked me to hang on, I heard her calling to her son
in Hungarian. I could hear from afar somebody playing staccato on the
violin. The staccato increased in volume – somebody playing it was
approaching the telephone. Félix answered. While we were arranging
his gig in Novi Sad, the staccato never ceased. The conversation was no
reason to stop playing the violin.
Lajkó Félix: I was born in a village not far from Mali Iđoš, I went to nursery
school there, and later went on to elementary school. I think I was just
about to start first or second grade when I discovered mum’s records
(yes, black vinyl records) – actually mum used to play them on our gramophone. It was mainly classical music; Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Debussy,
and the like. I really loved it then and I started listening to the music. Of
course, at the time I did not play any instrument, I just listened to the
music very often and for long durations. After a while I wanted to take
up piano lessons. Of course, it was a very expensive instrument and my
parents did not have the money to buy one, and they would not have
had the money to pay for my piano lessons.
At the end of, I think, third grade, one of my friends was given a zither. I
saw it and I wanted to play the zither too. Then they bought me a zither
from the local retired postman Kálmán Kemives for some three thousand
dinars. He gave me the first zither lessons. As time went by I met other
zither players, some of whom played the instrument really well. I was
learning more and more about the zither and found out that there was a
zither maker in Budapest whose zithers were top notch. Tibor Gáts is his
name and he makes the best zithers in the world. Mother went to Budapest and bought one of his for me, and I still have it today and still play
on it. I started to practice more frequently and take part in competitions.
At Radio Novi Sad there was a regular annual competition of zither players
and I won it twice consecutively. Afterwards I became a student of Ferenc
Bosi, the greatest zither player, and attended summer camps with music
workshops organized for improving our skills. In the meantime I was listening to classical music more and more, but had started listening to
Hungarian music from Transylvania. However, there were no zithers there,
the string instruments prevailed. Since my parents saw that I was good at
music (I was already playing the zither really well), Mother asked what other
instrument I would like to play. We decided on the violin, because I could
use it in both classical and folk, as well as in any other, music.
After the zither it was almost impossible to get the right sound from the
violin instantly. I was frustrated about not being able to produce the
sound I wanted. I realized that I would have to practice a lot and so I did.
In a couple of years they took me to secondary music school, not to the
violin, but the theory department. I was taking private violin lessons and
I started learning to play the piano and I was studying the theory of music,
and then all of a sudden I realized that I did not have time for the only
thing I wanted and that was the violin. So I simply neglected everything
except the violin and the theory of music. It did not take long before they
kicked me out of school, this has already become a legend; that I was
thrown out of secondary music school.
• When and how did you start composing?
Lajkó Félix: Well, I started composing rather early, in secondary school. A
man has a vision, some sound- materials ringing in his head; it is like clay
or stone to a sculptor. You simply start moulding them, combining them.
The ideas come to you as sounds, tones. Some are worthless and usually
you forget them. But if they have some value to them, then something
comes out.
• At one point in your career people were declaring you a “rising star of world
music”.
Lajkó Félix: I have never believed in world music, and I have never aimed
for that genre in what I was doing nor in what I am doing now. I think that
the entire idea is absurd from the musical point of view. Of course, the “idea”
is to make a lot of money, primarily for the music industry. By the way,
S o u t h e r n W in d o n t h e D a n u b e / N OVA M I SAO
67
there is no such thing as “world music”. If by this you mean using music
motifs from different parts of the world and giving them a synthesiser
background, it is absurd. Those who know folk music know that it has to
be lived thoroughly, that it has to be rooted in the soil from which it
grows. Folk music comes from the country.
• Improvisations? Your attitude towards them?
To me there is no difference – music composed and written down, or improvised. Notation is, at any rate, artificial; it arrived later. Music, I suppose,
was first. Actually, improvisation does not exist, there is simply music,
what you hear and what you play.
• It was an interesting experiment, your recording music in the forests around
Palić Lake. Tell me, who thought of it?
Lajkó Félix: That was the period when I was spending a lot of time in cities:
Subotica, Budapest, Paris, Amsterdam etc. We were playing in cities all the
N OVA M I SAO / S o u t h e r n W in d o n t h e D a n u b e
time. I simply needed some sort of counterbalance. I missed meadows and
forests and the air. I had to strike some sort of balance in order to create
music. I cannot compose in a city. Cities are all noise and there is no music
in them. I had to make music for my new CD. Since I had some money, I
decided to invest it in equipment and co-finance an experiment such as
this. We took everything to the forest; a sound desk, a 32-channel tape
recorder, all of the equipment and 13 musicians. We set up a small camp
and started working. For ten days we played and lived together. I made a
mix on the spot. I added no effects. We caught accidental noises and
sounds, birds, the forest. When they heard the master recording in London, they said that such a recording could not be burned on a CD. They
said that the ear of a listener would not accept such a sound. I did not
worry too much about it. Then again, on the other hand, there were
sound engineers who said that this procedure might just start up a new
way of recording and reproducing sound, that it ought to be worked on. I
don’t know. I liked it.
August 2010. 