NM XXV 02.indd

Transcription

NM XXV 02.indd

NOVA MISAO
Contents
„NOVA MISAO” – Magazine of Contemporary Vojvodinan Culture
Founded by the Secretariat for Culture and Public Information of
the Government of Vojvodina
For the founder: Slaviša Grujić, the Provincial Secretary for
Culture and Public Information
Publisher: IU „MISAO“, Novi Sad, Nikola Pašić 6
Special Edition
03 If I Were a Comet | Mirko Sebić
04 There are no borders in culture! | Mirko Sebić
Circulation: 700 copies
Telephone: ++ 381 (0) 21 424 972
Fax: ++ 381 (0) 21 424 972
E-mail: [email protected] , [email protected]
Web: www.novamisao.org
06 Post 2015 Goals | Biljana Mickov
08 Conversations from the Plain |
12 Igor Antić: The Future of ArtCannot Be Foreseen | Mirko Sebić
16 Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer: Pannonian View That Sounds like a Secret | Adrian Kranjčević
20 Zoran Janjetov: All Those Wonderful Meek People, Comics Artists | Mirko Sebić,
Veljko Damjanović
24 Vida Ognjenović: Literature Savesthe Beauty of Life | Gordana Draganić Nonin
28 Rita Kinka: Sounds of the ImaginaryHalf of the Big Bell | Adrian Kranjčević
32 Mira Brtka: “DNA” as a Horizonof the Vojvodinian Plain | Gordana Draganić Nonin
38 Nikita Milivojević: The Theatre ConcernsUs Less and Less | Tijana Delić
44 Oto Tolnai: Love Geography | Gordana Draganić Nonin
50 Jovica Aćin: Translating Oneself froman Unknown Language | Gordana Draganić Nonin
54 Zoran Mulić: Music Comingfrom the Heart | Borko Hložan
58 Mira Banjac: Upright – My Lifeand My Approach to it | Gordana Draganić Nonin
62 Živko Grozdanić Gera: A Nuclear-powered Tank | Danijela Halda
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, Aleksandar Kamasi
Art Director: Tatjana Dukić Počuč, [email protected]
Prepress: Vladimir Vatić
66 Slobodan Tišma: The Allure of Fire | Nataša Gvozdenović
72 A World (without) Tenderness | Olivera Miok
73 About Writing the “Jewish Novel: ”A Little Speculation on the Examples of Judita Šalgo
and Joseph Roth | Silvia Dražić
78 Deconstruction of Fear in Ninety-five Bravuras | Sofija Košničar
CIP – Каталогизација у публикацији
Библиотека Матице српске, Нови Сад
008(497.113)
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
Signature
IF I WERE A COMET
Written by Mirko Sebić
C
an one understand the sense of tragic today, and truly grasp its
profoundness. It seems that in the world covered with catastrophes,
in the world that cannot see itself as a whole without lying to itself,
in the world that cannot see itself although observes through a limitless verisimilitude of pictures, there is no tragic. There is unhappiness, there is pain, everywhere but there is no feeling of tragic.
Our blindness observes.
Let us imagine one Cyclopean eye of Socrates’ staring at tragedy, the
eye which never experienced a flame of a wonderful ecstasy of artistic
fascination – imagine how this eye was deprived of the immense enjoyment of watching Dionysian abysses – and what did it have to look at
in the sublime and celebrated tragic art as Plato calls it? Something
pretty irrational, with causes that are as if without consequences and
with consequences that are without causes.
For Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy, Socrates is a Cyclopean figure,
an offspring of a squinting and deformed culture that emanates from
sophism and continues to this day in a rationalism shaded with God
and in an aggressive scientism, in the rule of poor mediation. The
problem is not in leaning on reason but in the need to erase
everything that is not reasonable as non-reason. Not only nothing
can be outside reason, but nothing can be other than reason itself.
Each question has its reply, and there is nothing outside of questions
and replies. Nietzsche rises against this sort of one-eyed blindness
of the Cyclopean arrogance, defending the tragic.
In 1873, Nietzsche writes a text called On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral
Sense and in this text he wrote as a young person he is asking a
question about the role of the intellect as a whole in this world.
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and
anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations which have
been enhanced, transposed and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory
to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that
this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without
sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
but metaphors for things – metaphors which correspond in no way to
the original entities.
Nietzsche is trying to tell us that to think it means to mediate, and
that to mediate means to necessary distort. The language is mere
agreement on signs, a totality of conventions, confirming what signs
would be valid in the future. A man-researcher, thinker of terms,
believing that he is stepping onto the terra firma of the language is,
actually levitating over the abyss of what people do on their whim,
far from the essence of things.
When Alice says to Humpty Dumpty: “The question is,... whether you
CAN make words mean so many different things.” She receives the
following reply “The question is, ... which is to be master – that’s all.”
And who is today the master of words? The media are the master.
Also, we should not forget what McLuhan said: Money is also a medium. And, as Franco Berardi Bifo said in an interview: money and
language have something in common – they are nothing and move
everything.
Nietzsche understood that by starting from Socrates, the visual field
of thinking has reduced significantly. That it has been reduced to
the hypertrophy of the term itself. In spite of his at the time still
underdeveloped argumentation and an implicit psychological vision,
his intuition hits the target.
It is about the eye, about the look which, being so lonely, becomes
blind. Looking blindly – the basic paradox. Because the tragic comes
from the gaze, but a different one. From the non-human look.
Socrates first looked at Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus for the first time as
a lonely individual. Since then the look has always been lonely, it
makes things untouchable. It necessarily excludes touch, smell,
taste... An eye is more important than skin, the palate or smell. Sobriety is more important than trance and ecstasy. We have become
what we are looking at – the untouchables.
Nervous stimulations in the eye become a picture, that is one mediation that Nietzsche sees as a metaphor, then this picture becomes
a word, with the use of voice. This is mediation, too, which does not
have a basis in the essence of matter. We are like a deaf man who,
having seen the distribution of sand shapes that vibration produces,
concludes that this is the sound.
In a strange fragment from the legacy, Helderlin would say: The sign
for itself is insignificant in the tragic – it has no effect, but it is seen essentially directly. Directly and without mediation. In Empedocles,
Helderlin’s never finished tragedy, a will to protrude into the Invisible
speaks out, it is a wish to make the look insignificant, to go straight
towards the Elements and to become one with them. The desire for
a turnover is the desire for the tragic originality. Just like Nietzsche,
Helderlin, too paid this desire for the turnover dearly and being covered with the veil of madness he wrote down the following:
We believe that we know something about the things themselves when
we speak of trees, colours, snow and flowers; and yet we possess nothing
Would I wish to be a comet? Yes. Because theirs is the speed of birds, they
flourish in fire and are as pure as children.
Slaviša Grujić, Vice-president of the Government of Vojvodina
and the Province Secretary for Culture and Public Information
There are no borders
in culture!
Interviewer: Mirko Sebić
The essence is to step out of our own territories, which we call Novi Sad,
Bačka, Vojvodina, South-eastern Europe – not in order to destroy them, but to
relegate them to insignificance, because they really are irrelevant for creativity
and culture which have no borders!
B
efore going to Pula (Croatia), where a Vojvodinian installation is to be opened at the 19th Festival of Books and Authors Book fair in Istria, we
are talking with Slaviša Grujić, the Vice-president
of the Vojvodinian Government, and the Provincial Secretary for Culture. It is December and the
end of 2013 is approaching, making it a perfect
opportunity to recapitulate some of the moves
from his cabinet in the past year and a half.
• How would you define Vojvodinian culture? What
is it after all? What is this phenomenon?
Slaviša Grujić: Culture in Vojvodina, as elsewhere,
follows situations and movements in society. Obviously, not everything is coming up roses and we
will hardly make a significant step forward. However, it does seem that there are certain results,
seeing as there are still many events in the cultural scene. This speaks about another phenomenon;
that when crisis hits, many people take up culture
and try to work in its fields. Of course, among the
events, festivals and gatherings of all sorts, one
can find things that could hardly be considered
“cultural,” but there are many quality programmes.
The task of the Secretariat is to try to balance the
story and filter the projects, to slowly decentralise
culture, to move from Novi Sad as a centre towards all parts of Vojvodina, but it is a difficult
process. This stems from the fact is that most
events are concentrated in Novi Sad, and this is
where most of requests for financing come from.
Redistributing the funds outside Novi Sad does
not mean that Novi Sad would be left with less;
that would be a bad move – on the contrary, it
means that we have to make efforts to procure
more funds and to prove that the projects elsewhere are really worthy of being supported. We
have been trying to move beyond Novi Sad and
be effective throughout Vojvodina, which is one
way of dealing with these issues. Another strategy
is turning towards a more substantial and more
fundamental assisting of the national communities via their cultural centres and via special programmes for national communities so as to highlight the diversity that Vojvodina is famous for.
Here our goal is to ensure that the activities of
national communities in culture are elevated to a
higher level. The third element that we are prioritising is to try and act regionally. This means that
we have been active in working with Serbian national communities across the region, supporting
the cultural life of Serbs in Romania, Croatia, Bosnia, and Hungary, while also aiming to develop
cultural cooperation with these neighbouring
countries. This is, after all, a natural connection,
and we have to communicate with each other; it
is a very European approach to cultural coopera-
tion. An additional focus of our efforts has been
to establish a higher degree of cooperation with
the republican centre; it is not normal for Belgrade
to not recognise Vojvodina and its cultural life, nor
is it normal for Vojvodina to shy away from other
parts of Serbia and cooperation on the cultural
level. Finally, there is the fostering of regional cooperation in a wider European context, where we
have forged strong relations with Italy, Austria and
Germany – connections which we intend to keep
on developing. As much as we have insisted on
quality productions here, it is also critically important to provide quality representation before
other cultures, and it is just as meaningful for
them to introduce themselves to us.
There is one basic principle – we support multiculturalism and multinational culture, but are not
a partner for extreme nationalistic projects, nor
do we engage in summoning up the ghosts of the
past. We are partners for everything that culture
brings with it. Culture improves the quality of our
lives, as well as our standard of life and mental
well-being.
4
Slaviša Grujić: I would like to begin with the Institute for the Culture of Vojvodina, whose task is
to make changes in this field – to be open towards
the nongovernment sector and realise principles
of the cultural politics we have been talking
about. They should introduce some new standards in the work of cultural institutions. For example, one such standard is to include creative economies in the work of our state cultural institutions
through programmes and cooperation with institutions that can offer creative projects, but which
can at the same make sure that some of these
funds are returned, thus creating an atmosphere
of self-sustainability for such projects.
When we speak of other institutions, such as the
Serbian National Theatre, for example, we work
in many directions. The Serbian National Theatre
is, of course, one of the most important institutions of culture, but it is also one prodigiously
large institution. First of all, we have to create conditions for quality in the workings of such an institution, and vast amounts of money are invested
to modernise the technology, to refurbish the
building. On the other hand, we support projects
that are supposed to bring people back to the
theatre, and, by doing so, lift the level of awareness about the importance of theatrical life not
only in Novi Sad but in the territory of Vojvodina
as a whole. We also support co-productions with
5
Slaviša Grujić: First of all, I have to say that nongovernmental organisations sometimes need a
bit of a reality check; they are often established
without having assessed the actual foundation of
their activities. Just to illustrate this, in the latest
competition there were 2600 applicants, representing 2600 separate ideas, each considered to
be the most important to their respective creators. Nobody can financially support that. And
here arises the issue of moderation, i.e. the criterion of how to proceed within measure. It seems
to me that these nongovernmental organisations
do not realise the purpose for which they may
have been established, and that is to advance the
cultural scene. It seems to me that a bottleneck is
being created which will not create quality but
entropy.
• When you speak about Vojvodinian culture outside
Vojvodina in an area where we are not well-known,
what do you usually say is particular about us?
Slaviša Grujić: I usually say that in spite of the
multitude of inherited differences in Vojvodina,
we do not see differences as borders and limitations. Vojvodinian culture does not see and does
not perceive boundaries. It is this openness that
is typically Vojvodinian. Our message is that
boundaries do not exist, i.e. that they are something external and unimportant, and that we can
communicate with the entire world literally without losing any of our particularities. The essence
is to step out of our own territories, which we call
Novi Sad, Bačka, Vojvodina, South-eastern Europe
– not in order to destroy them, but to relegate
them to insignificance, because they really are
irrelevant for creativity and culture which have no
borders! n
/
• These are some of the principles or guidelines of
cultural policy. You have a network of institutions,
public institutions through which you act. How do
you see their role? Do you believe that they should
change, that they should open up to the NGO
sector?
N OVA M I SAO
• How do you see the role of the NGO sector?
It is wonderful when a book fair begins in
such a charming and relaxed atmosphere.
It is wonderful when a book fair begins on
such a beautiful day. And it is beautiful
when a book fair begins in a city as beautiful as Pula. The atmosphere is, indeed,
fascinating and there are books everywhere, and nothing to distract us from
them. I came to our installation, the Vojvodinian installation, and it occurred to
me that it is Vojvodinian just by name.
Because borders in culture should not exist. Borders are something we impose on
ourselves but they are not there, actually.
So, this Vojvodinian installation could be
called by some other name since these
books here are intended for everyone. Yet
this installation is more than this; it represents those authors who will be guests at
the Fair, but also here are authors who will
not be present at the Fair in person. Instead their work is here. An excellent magazine is on exhibit here. I recommend it. It
is called Nova Misao. There is an article in
it about Igor Antić, son of Mika Antić, who
we mentioned not long ago, a conceptualist living in Paris – you will find articles
about Želimir Žilnik, Slobodan Tišma, Nikita Milivojević, Oto Tolnai, Mira Banjac and
many others. There are things to read and
see in this magazine.
What is it that we offer as Vojvodinians? We
offer you twenty-six nationalities living together, six official languages, Radio Television of Vojvodina – a unique television in
Europe which broadcasts its programme
in ten languages. And we are proud of this,
and telling you this brings me great satisfaction, especially in Pula, because this diversity is what joins us to you.
I thank you for your attention and wish you
to enjoy our installation, as you would all
of the others.
/
Still, I must add that in addition to taking care of
the oldest Serbian theatre, we care equally for the
local theatres and theatres of national communities in Vojvodinian towns.
Speech for the opening of the
Vojvodinian Installation at the
19th Book Fair in Istria, Croatia
Č A SO PIS Z A SAV R EM EN U K U LT U RU VOJ VO D I N E
theatres from around the region, which then promotes the work of the Serbian National Theatre;
one such example is the cooperation with the
Ulysses Theatre from Brioni.
Culture and Development
Post 2015 Goals
Razgovarala: Biljana Mickov
Culture is no longer without a powerful influence of development at
a global level. The networks are creating a new elite in the culture sector.
T
he plan which is made at the levels of the city,
the region and the republic represent a part of the
politics which has to be implemented and the
development of culture is a consensus between
the political actors on the stage. The plan always
has to be compliant with the present moment,
thus it has to be composed by experts. The environments, by which I mean the cities and the regions which do not manage the culture or do not
put it in a priority position,should be aware that
they are not making good decisions for the environment they live in. Culture is no longer without
a powerful influence of development at a global
level.
What is it that we can do? What is crucial is to realise that we have to change and accept the exchange of ideas and knowledge via networks. The
networks are creating a new elite in the culture
sector.
The UNESCO adopted the first declaration on cultural development (2001) and later the Convention on the cultural development (2005) – a convention was adopted which was later ratified in
the countries of the European Union. The culture
can no longer be seen as unimportant goods/commodity and the public sector can create special
mechanisms which will define its social value.
The context is now very different from the technological perspective all the way to the development of new systems. Nowadays, if we take a look
at the audio-visual sector, only film and TV are no
longer enough, there are new platforms such as
the Amazon, the Google, the Facebook… as a
consequence of this new context there is the development of cultural and creative industries in
public policies and making the Creative Europe
programme, for the 2014 – 2020 period.
The integration of the culture sector with all the
social segments, the only way to implement it is
the re-education of the people working in the
culture sector. The need to show the inter-sector
cooperation as a necessity and the culture as an
integral part of the public policies.
The creative processes are a necessity and they
have to be directed towards creating a good quality
lifestyle which integrally contains culture.
The directions of connecting:
- The implementation of the plan for culture
- Economy and urbanism to be connected with
the culture sector.
- Support the development of the creative industries.
- The attitudes of the local, regional authorities to
be set as primary.
- Permanent education of professionals and citizens.
- Keep the step up with technological innovations.
These elements are necessary for development.
Cultural organizations as well as the other sectors
of society are in a transition to the new system of
management, that is, more effective functioning.
Now is the time to think about new ways of func-
/ Jordi Pascual: Street Art Barcelona /
6
/ Biljana Mickov: New York City, Apple store, citizens and new technologies /
ence as well as the relations with the authorities
in order to define a management strategy which
will take them into the future.
Institutions run in such way have to evaluate both
their internal and external vision. Many institutions nowadays conduct their activities of internal
visions related to the artistic product. In the museums this internal vision has been made by the
curators who are occupied with the collections
and exhibitions in the museum. That option is no
longer enough, organizations have to focus the
actions and to be real players in the society for the
benefit of the citizens and to use the art as an
essence of the changes in a society.
By combining financial and intellectual resources
the museums do not have to act alone in the
times of crisis. The strategy of internationalization
has a positive influence on a museum’s business
model and it increases its own resources and
makes them financially sustainable. The point is
not to apologise for pubic cuts in culture, but to
make a longer perspective.
tioning and financial systems. The question arises
– can we save and at the same time improve the
quality of the offer in culture. How do we restructure the institutions of culture so that they can
function better and what is the actual role of a
manager in culture in terms of those structural
changes.
The cultural institutions have to ask themselves
several important questions. What is the value of
the cultural institution and why and who for does
the institution implement its activities? Does it
7
need relationships with other sectors and what
are the roles of technology and digitalization?
The cultural institutions have to ask
One of the ways of functioning is to use corporative management, cooperation is important for
the cultural sector, the competition and networking with other actors, public and private at the
same time.
What is the value of the cultural institution
The institutions of culture and organizations need
to evaluate the structure, the mission, finances,
activities within local communities and the audi-
themselves several important questions.
and why and who for does the institution
implement its activities? Does it need
relationships with other sectors and
what are the roles of technology
and digitalization?
N OVA M I SAO
/
Creating new models of functioning is necessary
so every institution and sector, with the help of
experts, has to find new systems so that their
work remains sustainable. n
Interesting business models are being developed
in the sector of culture. For example, electronic
books are a part of new activities such as digitalization, electronic distribution, and thus they are
becoming indisputably important players in the
chain of the publishing sector.
/
Museums are supposed to be brands with a good
quality contents no matter whether it comes to
the cultural heritage or the modern concept. The
business models have to be developed as shops
within the museums, tourism, digital approach.
All the measures can contribute to the stability of
museums’ operations and by doing so build the
institution itself.
/ Photo: Branko Stojanović /
People are sometimes puzzled by my interpretation
of situations they find themselves in and of
the reality they live in. I usually respond to them by
saying that what can be seen is a result, a work of
art that is only a part of this reality, probably not
the bit with which they are familiar. In my line of
work, it is never about the truth. I always allow
people to see a transformed picture, a fragment,
of what they call the truth. This is probably the
essence and the true meaning of my engagement.
Igor Antić, visual artist
The Future of Art
Cannot Be Foreseen
Interviewer: Mirko Sebić
Photo: Edvard Molnar
People are sometimes puzzled by my interpretation of situations they find
themselves in and of the reality they live in. I usually respond to them by
saying that what can be seen is a result, a work of art that is only a part of
this reality, probably not the bit with which they are familiar. In my line of
work, it is never about the truth. I always allow people to see a transformed
picture, a fragment, of what they call the truth. This is probably the essence
and the true meaning of my engagement.
I
gor Antić was born in Novi Sad in 1962. He
comes from a family of artists (his mother, Svetlana, is an artist of the applied arts, and his father,
Miroslav, a poet) and he grew up in the atmosphere of Petrovaradin Fortress. Before deciding
to devote himself to art, he had practiced judo,
becoming a black belt master at the age of fourteen. Parallel to this career in sport, he studied at
the Academy of Fine Arts in Novi Sad, after which
he went to Paris, where he spent one year advancing his skills in the class of Vladimir Veličković’s
class at the École nationale supérieure des BeauxArts. In 1991 he was admitted at the Institut des
Hautes études en arts plastiques, formed by the
then director of Centre Pompidou, Pontus Hultén.
As he states, this was the moment when his individual artistic path began.
His work has been shown at over a hundred exhibitions in Europe, America and Asia: to name but
a few – in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the
Arts and Sciences Laboratory in Moscow, in IASPIS
and the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, in
the Berlin’s and Bonn’s Kunsthalle, in the Museums
of Modern Art of Castellone and Osaka, at bien-
nales in Reno and Lion, in La Chambre Blanche in
Quebec, in The Living Art Museum in Reykjavik,
as well as in business schools, enterprises, supermarkets, graveyards, sports playgrounds and other
atypical places all around the world.
Igor Antic says that his work is based on the observing and understanding of others, and that he
is not interested in the virtuosity and sublime of
artistic procedures, but rather in the form and
ways of how to construct human views of the
world.
• What do you think is the key moment for “being an
artist in the world”, is this some sort of revealing
one’s own creative mechanism?
Igor Antic: It is much easier to speak of these exact creative mechanisms: the motivation of an
artist should be based on a fanatical belief that it
is necessary for the art to be present in people’s
lives. His work should start from the observation
of paradoxes and facts that make up everyday life,
then continue through the transformation of desires and emotions into ideas, and then proceed
through the transformation of these ideas into
materials and forms – in doing so, one initial abstract process is reduced to a mere technical action. If the artist’s ideas are clear, he can ask anyone to perform his work or piece. That is why it is
important to stop admiring this or that object and
start analysing the issues essential for the nature
of art. An artist should not want to be admired for
the results of his or her work, but should wish for
the achievements of his spirit to be appreciated.
Andrei Tarkovsky once said that there were a lot
more artists that he did not appreciate than ones
he did. “But if there weren’t the others,” he added,
“I would never do what I have been doing.” In my
opinion, what he says speaks volumes about the
meaning of the process of learning about art.
Maybe this will sound unusual to some, but the
fact is that I have been influenced and taught by
people such as Slavko Obadov, a judoist, trainers,
Konstantinidis and Mihailović, from the “Slavija”
club, artists from Petrovaradin Fortress, professors
of the Novi Sad Academy of Fine Arts like Katarina
Ambrozić or Bogdanka Poznanović, then, later in
Paris, by the artists Vladimir Veličković and Daniel
Buren, and the art historian Pontus Hultén. To
name all of these people from different worlds
and registers in one place may sound strange, but
it is very important to me. All of them were present at one stage or another of my development.
Each bit of experience, whatever it may have been
then, can be of use in a following stage of life, in
the next project we are to deal with. Knowledge
is accumulated and amalgamated into new forms,
12
Igor Antic: Displacement of people, i.e. forced
nomadism, is one of the burning issues of human-
VALUES
• In much of your work you have dealt with, and are
dealing with now, an analysis of the issue of values?
Igor Antic: Do values exist by themselves? This
question that I ask, opposing the elementary postulates of capitalism and economics in general, as
well as certain moral and philosophical concepts,
was the basis for a number of projects that I have
worked on in recent years. In the 2004 Pančevo
Biennale catalogue called Values, there is a text
that I wrote called “All Values Move Around Emptiness.” This text analyses different terms of values
and their meanings in our modern world and compares them to so-called archaic societies, whose
functioning follows a tradition based on the fundamental rule of maintaining the equilibrium of
the universe, so that tomorrow can be the same
13
/
NOMADISM
• At the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, you had a very
interesting event of criticism?
N OVA M I SAO
Igor Antic: From the very beginning of the war
and crisis in the former Yugoslavia, people abroad
often asked me questions like: “Why don’t artists
and intellectuals in Serbia react to what is happening in the country?” For a long time I did not know
how to react to such insanity, nor how a work of
art or an exhibition would change anything in the
ity. Nomadism has, due to circumstances, become
my way of life, my choice, partially because of the
nature of the work I do, partially as a result of the
conditions that I lived in. This way of life inspired
me to perform an illegal event at the opening of
the 48th Venice Biennale called Humanitarian. The
NATO bombing of Serbia had started a month
before the Biennale and the media constantly reported about the droves of refugees in Kosovo.
There were talks of humanitarian actions, humanitarian assistance, humanitarian concerts, even of
humanitarian war... Between two Venice Biennales, the national pavilions in Giardini had become illegally inhabited by the homeless and
refugees. These pavilions had an official status as
the cultural embassies of the member countries.
I came to Venice directly from Serbia and encountered the information that the Biennale had been
announced as a joyous celebration. The gap between these two realities was shocking and that
is why I tried to confront the two. During the three
days of opening, I illegally moved into the national
pavilions, and while the world crème-de-la-crème
of the art world was mingling about, I slept in the
pavilions, ate, wore my personal belongings. I had
on me dozens of plastic bags with the word “humanitarian” on them. I showed up there as a mobile work of art, an artist-refugee, a confrontation
to the exhibited pieces. Plastic bags are shapeless
objects which can be transformed into clothing
items, into a thing that marks a territory, into a
status symbol or a nomad’s travelling bag wherein he carries, both physically and symbolically, a
part of his past. My moving about amongst the
pavilions caused negative and aggressive reactions, even complete indifference.
/
• Do you think there is such a thing as a critical artist,
and can such a person have any realistic effect?
given circumstances. The form of my possible engagement was not completely clear to me, although I felt a great need to become active in this
issue. First, in 1994, in the middle of embargo, at
the Vršac Biennale, I thought of an exhibition,
which I organised and called Trans-Urgency, to
which I summoned seven artists from abroad. It
was the only such exhibition in the country that
year, and it was made complete by the arrival to
Vršac of the art critic Bonito-Oliva. It represented
our joint response to the state of isolation, cultural poverty and intolerance of all sorts. I believe it
was a very courageous move by all who were involved with the Biennale and especially our exhibition. It is interesting to mention that this project
of mine caused a sudden intolerance among one
circle of local critics, who probably thought that
an artist should not be stepping into the curator’s
line of work. Those who wanted to see could completely clearly recognize that my position had
nothing to do with what critics did and offered
here (in Serbia) at the time, that it was a completely different form of artistic engagement.
and they never vanish from our memory. As regards to my education, I learned most completely at the Institut des Hautes études en arts plastiques in Paris between 1991 and 1995, because,
there, at round tables I met many thinkers, so to
speak, people who think about the modern world:
the sociologist Bourdieu, the architect Renzo Piano, the directors Satyajit Ray, Raul Ruiz, Johan
van der Keuken and Pavel Lungin, the biochemist
Étienne-Émile Baulieu, the musician Maurizio
Kagel, the artists Hans Haacke, Michael Usher, Ilya
Kabakov, Nam Jun Paik and Rebecca Horn, the art
historians Benjamin Buhl and Harald Zeman, and
many others. The exchange of thought with these
people in a short period of time can propel you a
great deal. Among other things, I saw the Paris
Institut as a place of mutiny against the classical
academic system of education, because instead
of the professor-student relationship, there existed a principle of discussion amongst equals between young artists and significant figures of the
20th century.
ticity, uniqueness or originality; these criteria today still make up the basis for the system of evaluating art, especially in the field of law, although
they can be contrary to the very nature of the
work, the importance of which is based, above all,
on its innovation, on the particularity of the artistic procedure. By realising a work of art, a spectrum of possible, subjective and imagined values
are visualised before me. But it is a fact that the
result of that entire process, i.e. what remains of
it, is – doubt, ambiguity, no certainty. It is not my
wish to produce any value, nor to add to my own
value, nor to serve any imagined value, including
serving art, or to require from the art that it add
to its own value in regard to anything. Even worse
than that, I do not believe that all of my efforts can
“triumph” over nothingness. But such an attitude
like mine can be bothersome.
WHAT IS THE POINT OF
ENGAGING MYSELF
as it is today. In this equilibrium each “thing” has
its place, immeasurable and incomparable to others. The general presence of values in the minds
of these people makes any evaluation impossible,
and it is absurd to use the term values in archaic
societies. This lack of values is manifested as a form
of honouring the world. Contrary to this, our modern societies, called “civilised”, ascribe fundamental importance to the presence of values. The
word value, which should signify a higher quality
of our inner states, is used for things such as money,
gold and real estate. We speak of ethical, sentimental, mathematical, historical or calorie values.
What value should be given to the term value
when the Guggenheim Museum was for a while
one of the most significant cultural values of Las
Vegas, when human body parts can be worth up
to 200,000 Euros and when hearts in card games
is valued more than the ace of spades? Time is a
measurable value and a measure of value. Nikola
Tesla, a Serbian scientist, is seen as a national
value that has survived the test of time. One Tesla
is almost enough to measure the magnetic induction of the Earth. But 100 billion Teslas were not
sufficient to buy a loaf of bread in the time of galloping inflation in Serbia in 1993. During the last
war in the former Yugoslavia, when ethnic cleansing took many hundreds of thousands of lives,
numerous soldiers were promoted for their
moral values (courage, heroism, patriotism). On
the other hand, it is said that this conflict caused
a degradation of all the ethical, intellectual and
economic values. In our modern world, where
everything counts, from the number of sold
matches and buttons to the sum lost due to a tsunami, and where everything is organized according to a hierarchy, from Top 10 Serial Killers to ten
best world arts, the obsession with systematic
inventories is manifested as an axiological disease
of our epoch, deeply infected with the mercantile
virus. These different examples, briefly mentioned, prove that the idea of value can be seen
as an inducer of chaos and that values also operate in the fields of brutality, mediocrity, egotism
and oblivion. Values are not always of worth –
they are not what they should be.
Marcel Duchamp introduced humour and accident into metric systems, Robert Filiu created
tools for evaluating the very bases of creativity,
some other artists are interested in the measures
of human intentions or are trying to evaluate the
hidden sense of higher dimensions. The criteria,
again, that define the value of modern pieces of
art remain difficult to discern. Aesthetic evaluations and social acknowledgements take place in
the artistic field. Prices are formed, transactions
are realised in the art market. Certain stakeholders
of that market, such as collectors, gallerists, auction appraisers, experts, juries, art critics, speculators or investors, regulate the social and economical hierarchy of an artist and the works.
Contemporary artistic techniques and approaches
are perfectly capable of escaping the traditional
definitions of artistic values such as rarity, authen-
• What is the point of action in deeply divided spaces of commercial mercantile worlds?
Igor Antic: Ever since the seventies, art has begun to conquer territories which had until then
been traditionally considered the privileged
fields of other disciplines such as literature, philosophy, religion, science, economy and politics.
Visual arts have gained in importance, regarding
ways of seeing the world, expressing opinions or
making suggestions where other means had
been traditionally used. In that sense, art, which
we create today, is important to others, although
sometimes we are not fully aware of it. Artistic
engagement is a form of commitment to others,
which we voluntarily burden ourselves with, including all of its consequences. In any case, what
remains behind us are not just works of art – they
are our ideas, engagements, suggestions and
questions that we ask.
When I work, I sometimes have projects like
Maneuvre from 2000. During one working day, I
placed one original Andy Warhol’s Brilo box
among detergents in a Paris ATAC supermarket.
My idea was to make a radical and creative gesture in order to pose a few questions about mercantile speculations with works of art. The temporary transformation of a supermarket into an
exhibition area gave me a precise idea about the
role this symbol of Pop art has outside its museum
and historical context. By exhibiting this work of
art in a temple of consumerism, such as this supermarket is, I have created an inversion. The original
14
Brilo box was, actually, realised based on a design
of a cardboard package from a supermarket. My
project caused no unexpected effect. This precious and recognisable object we admire in a museum attracted no special attention in the banal
surrounding of a shopping mall. It even lost its
aura. Five years later, I sold the same Brilo box at
an action for a record price. Two years after that,
an entire series of Brilo boxes was removed from
the market after a large international scandal
which called into question its origin. These boxes
cannot be sold any longer. The entire story of
Andy Warhol’s Brilo boxes is the subject of one of
my video works called “Facts/consequences/hypotheses.” In it, the entire scandal is discussed
from a personal and anti-moralistic point of view.
15
N OVA M I SAO
/
seen today, in a slightly altered version, at www.
kiosquekiosk.free.fr .
This was about a programmed deterioration
which was meant to show how mechanisms of
control and censorship function on the Internet,
as well as about a certain form of journalism that
provides instant philosophy in its search for sensations and ever increasing circulation.
People are sometimes puzzled by my interpretation of situations they find themselves in and of
the reality they live in. I usually respond to them
by saying that what can be seen is a result, a work
of art that is only a part of this reality, probably not
the bit with which they are familiar. In my line of
work, it is never about the truth. I always allow
people to see a transformed picture, a fragment,
of what they call the truth. This is probably the
essence and the true meaning of my engagement.
I don’t think that in the future I will be radically
changing anything in my work, at least regarding
the principles of the work itself. Artistic maturing
is the opposite of ageing – one ages in cascades, in
jumping from a lap to a lap, while in art it is linear,
with barely noticeable movements upwards. In art
you cannot say more than one thing, although you
can vary the ways of saying it. The future of art
cannot be predicted. As soon as tomorrow, someone new can refute us or surprise us with the originality of his or her statements. The only thing I
know for sure is that I will still continue to explore
life situations, with all of their qualities and incoherencies, so that I may unravel the maximum
number of surprises of the artistic nature. n
I have also done similar gigs on this topic which
have lasted into the present day. In Montreal, for
example, in 2003, I started an internet newspaper,
the contents of which were put up in Clark Gallery
on an object similar to a kiosk. My newspapers
called Kiosquekiosk, was the forerunner blog
which did not exist as such. I sent an invitation to
all internet users to send their personal information about the announced conflict in Iraq. All of
the information, regardless of what is was about,
I published without censoring or restricting the
contents. In the beginning, the news and the
opinions people would send to me were objective
and appropriate, only to go wild and anarchic in
the reporting, with humour, pornography, severe
statements or personal feuds, grammatical mistakes and inconsistencies. I programmed the site
in such a way that it would go down simultaneously with the degradation of the situation in the
Gulf, so that with the slightest twitch of a mouse
or the keyboard, CIA or FBI pages would open.
Kiosquekiosk went totally wild in the end, and
the provider denied me access, but it can still be
/
In 1999-2000, I performed a totally different action, called Campaign, in an urban space in Paris.
At first, it was a joint effort including Mihael Milunović and myself in the metro in Paris, as a candidate duo for presidential elections, and then we
went our separate ways to do as each thought
best. On my side, I used street protests to present
one of my slogan-questions: “Does an individual
require chaos in society in order to behave suitably, or does one need order in society to become
a renegade?” This question was written on a
chair-banner that could be used in two ways. This
question was also my only conclusion regarding
the connection of art and politics, where each
attempt of artistic engagement around an organisation or realisation of political ideas necessarily
ends up as a political instrumentalisation of art.
The wind rises. We must try to live.
French proverb
Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer, composer
Pannonian View That
Sounds like a Secret
Interviewer: Adrian Kranjčević
The spiritual legacy of both western and eastern Christianity has always
interested me, and considering that one part of my family came from the western
side, and the other from the eastern (one of my great grandfathers was an
Orthodox priest, having graduated from the Seminary in Sremski Karlovci),
I have from the very beginning been listening to two versions of the same story,
and in my subconscious I created an understanding of all of these (not only
Christian) religious traditions. I would not go so far as to call myself a composer
of religious music (for I have never been one), but the hidden echoes of Gregorian
chorals and Orthodox chants have been built into many of my compositions.
D
escribing the concept of his aesthetic and
creative principles in working with a group of musicians, also his friends, Stevan Kovacs Tickmayer
(Novi Sad, 1963) stated the following on one oc-
casion in 1993 for the Novi Sad daily Nezavisni:
“With time I have realised that composing and
performing with my ensemble has perfect advantages. I have learned a lot at rehearsals and during
discussions on what we have achieved. This is very
important for me, because I cannot write music
for someone I have never met. To me music is a
sort of ritual and if I am a shaman, then I should
personally lure people into this ritual.”
Today a famous composer, multi-instrumentalist,
Improviser and essayist, Tickmayer graduated
from the Department of Composition at the Academy of Fine Arts in Novi Sad, in the class of Rudolf
Brucci. During his studies, in the 1980s, Tickmayer
founded his ensemble, Tickmayer Formatio, which
played featuring a variety of line-ups, depending
on the occasion. In the eighties Tickmayer was
also the initiator of a number of culture events and
one of the members of the editorial board of the
famous Uj Symposion monthly. Upon completing
his basic studies, he continued on to Holland’s
Royal Conservatory of the Hague, and afterwards
to Orleans in France, where he realised a number
of successful multimedia projects with Jozsef
Nagy, a dancer and choreographer.
His successful international career began when
he met, and later cooperated with, Gyergy Kurtag,
a Hungarian composer. This was the point when
Tickmayer came into contact with great names of
the music scene like Gidon Kremer, Martha Argerich and Yuri Bashmet, and then slowly, unpretentiously, he led them toward his Ritual.
• Improvisation seems to play an important role in
your work. However, it does not cross the line of into
disturbing the whole, as such, like free jazz or aleatoricism from the 1960s. How do you, as a composer-performer, see the role of improvisation in
contemporary music?
Tickmayer: Improvisation is essential, it has
preceded nearly all of my compositions and to me
it is a “composition” in real time. Many people
equate improvisation with jazz, which is only partially true, because jazz is not the only music where
improvisation plays a central role. While I really like
all the directions of classical jazz, improvisation is
still predictable in these musical directions: it develops in regard to the given harmonious structure. This was one of main reasons why I soon
turned to free jazz in my youth; this music was
incomparably less predictable and was dangerously approaching the aesthetics of the classical
avant-garde music of the 1960s. Some of Anthony
Braxton’s and Cecil Taylor’s recordings (composers
I still love and respect) would easily be earmarked
as contemporary classical music. Unfortunately,
there are but a few classical composers and instrumentalists who are capable of improvising something properly on any instrument (one of these
fascinating improvisationalists-composers is surely Terry Riley). Every time I practise piano, as a rule
18
19
/
In the eighties, a primal need to move on emerged
among demanding rock musicians. And so it happened that many of these musicians became
more flexible than their classical and jazz-playing
colleagues, turning to free improvisation in its
widest sense, to experimenting with what technology had to offer in studios with different mixings of genres, unthinkable until then. It was very
interesting to me to observe how these musicians,
liberated from all possible constraints, think and
realise their ideas. I found a great deal of inspiration in their ways of thinking, and realised that
music can be conceived using “detour” strategies.
While I was working on the album “Repetitive Selective Removal of One Protecting Group,” I tried
to see myself as someone who had never studied
music and to craft compositions on that album
following a different logic, the logic of, say, a
painter or an architect who sees the world around
himself primarily in his visual dimension. It was
one hell of a difficult process for me, when I did
not know how many times I had worked on bits
that had been finished, edited again, mixed ...and
yet again, I do not think I succeeded in quite
everything that I had imagined. I find very interesting the classical compositions of musicians
who come from the world of experimental rock
(e.g. Fred Frith) or from contemporary jazz music
Tickmayer: I would say that my personal relation
to this dichotomy is vital. It is not about this misconception, in which everyone is fascinated with
the “incredible position” of this country, which is
a link between the East and the West, and they
would all enslave us gladly if only they could (truth
be told, I have heard the same story in Greece,
Bulgaria, Romania and who knows where else).
No, it is about the history of my family and about
the heritage I inherited from it. Thank God, I grew
up in a truly ecumenical environment, where otherness was deeply respected and seen as a cultural treasure. I am a mixture of three nations (Hungarian, Serbian and, more removed, Austrian
heritages are mixed in my blood) and this was
constantly repeated in my family, and neighbourly relationships were praised, because our predecessors had experienced and seen all kinds of
things, so they knew well what it meant to kill and
slaughter in the name of some nation or religion.
The spiritual legacy of both western and eastern
Christianity has always interested me, and considering that one part of my family came from the
western side, and the other from the eastern (one
of my great grandfathers was an Orthodox priest,
having graduated from the Seminary in Sremski
Karlovci), I have from the very beginning been
listening to two versions of the same story, and in
my subconscious I created an understanding of
all of these (not only Christian) religious traditions.
We should not forget that religion in Europe, during the long centuries of its existence, has had a
tremendous impact on the development of the
culture of this continent (even when it played a
negative role, and thus led to the development of
opposing ideas). Of course, music has always
played a great role in these traditions and provided pearls of musical heritage, which have no
doubt had a great influence on me (Bach’s cantatas and passions are my spiritual food par excellence). Of course, I would not go so far as to call
myself a composer of religious music (for I have
never been one), but the hidden echoes of Gregorian chorals and Orthodox chants have been
built into many of my compositions. n
N OVA M I SAO
Just as every generation of composers probably
pays debts to their illusions, and in doing so
makes certain misconceptions, so I had a musical
mirage, so to speak. I wanted to somehow reconcile two opposing – totally irreconcilable – worlds.
I dreamt of an organic synthesis of composition
and improvisation, but not realised in a jazz manner, where one can easily notice the composed
(theme) bits from the others, where ensemble
members improvise to the same themes. Towards
this purpose, at the very conception of my ensemble, I regularly engaged jazz musicians, along with
classical ones, who were given charge of the parts
of compositions where improvisation (following
certain rules, after all) played a more important
role than strictly recorded material. Things functioned only halfway, and in time I came to the
conclusion that to reconcile these two opposing
musical philosophies, the only person who is capable is the composer himself, and that rarely can
one establish a collective improvisational understanding, in large part because many musicians
still see the solo as a cadenza which is there to
demonstrate the technical skills and virtuosity of
an individual. There are very few to whom you will
successfully explain how to improvise only the
structure of the composition, and not certain topics or motives. And thus, in the materials written
for my ensemble, improvisation was pushed aside
more and more, and later we played compositions
exclusively. I would use improvisation only at solo
performances, and to a lesser extent when composing. However, I became saturated with composing without improvisational templates, and so
improvisation returned and became indispensable again. I believe that only now, after so many
years, I can organically connect the composed
and improvised bits in my piano improvisations.
I still doubt that this would be easy to realise with
a smaller or a larger group of musicians.
• Amongst that which you have composed is EastWest Soundscapes, which was performed at the
Chamber Music Festival in Lockenhaus in 2009. We
have talked a lot about the East-West dichotomy.
What is your stance on representing this dichotomy
in music and what are the determinants that still
constitute these entities in this period of globalism?
/
I take with me something to record whatever I find
interesting or useable during the improvisation,
and it so happens that I later transcribe parts of my
own improvisations and hone them as needed.
Tickmayer: Not only have they been reflected in,
but they have become inseparable from, my musical self. I have always been interested in musicians who had no formal musical education. They
are no slaves to tradition, because it has never
been their starting point. These creative people
have had some completely different impulses and
needs to create, and, conceptually, they have often been far more interesting than the “big, educated heads.” Tradition and academism can sometimes generate a negative ballast when artistic
ideas are formed; blindly following them is generally a sign of insecurity and infertility, choosing
to use easy solutions and formulas that have been
offered to us thousands of times, well-trodden
paths, easy to walk along. When I say tradition in
music, I do not mean only the music from centuries before, because the avant-garde of the fifties
and the sixties has now become a traditional textbook matter at many musical institutions. Let us
not be fooled, avant-garde can also sound like
kitsch, just like any other sort of music, after all.
(Braxton, Roscoe, Mitchell), and I listen to them
with great curiosity. I think that without the experience and the working with musicians of such
proveniences, what I do today would definitely
not sound the way it does.
• On numerous occasions you have leaned towards
alternative musical directions, including jazz and
avant-garde rock, and cooperated with musicians
like Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, György Szabados, Iva
Bittova and others. Have these experiences in a later
period been reflected in your pieces of contemporary
music, and to what extent?
I have tried to create and maintain my world,
my environment, with content that I like and
people that I love. Trust me, this helps. It helped
a lot especially during the 1990s. I have always
been oriented towards pop culture, not as a form
of conscious resistance, but as something arising
out of a personal revolt against this artificial
division into pop culture, which is inherently
labelled less important, and some non-pop culture,
which is by default important and grand.
Zoran Janjetov, comics artist
All Those Wonderful Meek
People, Comics Artists
Interviewers: Mirko Sebić, Veljko Damjanović
I have tried to create and maintain my world, my environment, with content
that I like and people that I love. Trust me, this helps. It helped a lot especially
during the 1990s. I have always been oriented towards pop culture, not as a
form of conscious resistance, but as something arising out of a personal revolt
against this artificial division into pop culture, which is inherently labelled less
important, and some non-pop culture, which is by default important and grand.
W
hen in mid-April 2011, at the French Institute
in Belgrade, Alejandro Jodorowsky opened the
exhibition of comics by Zoran Janjetov, it was not
only a spectacular event for the local devotees of
comics, this brotherhood of aficionados, but a
step forward towards the core of wonders that is
the art of comics. Namely, Zoran Janjetov, Janja
(1961) who had been fascinated as a child by the
drawings of Jean Giraud Moebius and the extraordinary imagination of his comics, and who had
himself reached the status of an author, having
become a respected master equal to the masters
he had admired, was now standing to the right of
the father of comic strip magic, Alejandro Jodorowsky. It is impossible to describe the importance
of Janja’s work without understanding the rela-
tions which rule in this other, parallel world, for
not only do comics produce other worlds – they
are other worlds. This interview is an attempt to
put some light on the other.
MIRKO: What were your first fascinations? When did
you start doing comics?
It goes all the way back to early childhood; I believe
that I was four years old when I saw my first comic.
I must have seen them before, because there were
illustrated magazines with comic strips in them, but
I remember then, at four, seeing for the first time a
comic book displayed in a kiosk window. I remember the picture, the frame – in the foreground
of the front page was an elephant’s rear leg, and
I can’t remember what was in the background,
but it was the edition of comic books for children,
TULIPS. That was the moment I felt enchanted, and
thereafter I began my search and collecting of various oddities, some sort of “mole” phase which lasts
even to today. Of course, the most important thing
at the time was Disney and everything that came
with it, then French and Belgian comic books, Umpah-Pahs or Asterix and others, which are at the top
of all children’s fascinations. I have to say that to
me, being fascinated with comics is connected to
being fascinated with film and television – I see
them belonging to the same field.
MIRKO: The situation we had in the 1980s was really
interesting, not only did everyone read comic books,
but it seemed that many also drew them, so that in
that Yugoslavia we had a number of schools for comic book drawing – there even seems to be some sort
of comics tradition. One of dozens of local comics
artists is Andrija Maurović, whom you met in Zagreb.
In all of the cities in the former Yugoslavia, and, as
I later discovered, in all the cities of this planet
Earth, there is a group, sometimes larger and sometimes smaller, of people who love comics and similar things, and these similarities are bewildering,
and so the people are similar and it is really easy to
start communicating with them, without any effort.
There are no differences between people of this
sort, no obstacles and no barriers – they automatically find each other according to their affinities. I
was on the same frequency as similar comics lovers
from Belgrade because there were very few of
them, just as there were only a few of them in Novi
Sad, and then it is just natural, once you’ve spent a
certain amount of information and shared what
you can with one group, to seek out another, similar crowd in another city. It is simply natural curiosity that compels you to seek new possibilities to
find what interests you most, or what is the only
thing that interests you. By nature people from the
world of comics are prone to gathering various bits
22
I can tell you that I was really happy with it. This
was my favourite series. When they asked me if I
wanted to do John DiFool, it was as if they had
answered my question of what I would love to do.
Of course, I accepted it immediately.
VELJKO: When you started doing the series Technopriests you tried to change your drawing style
radically and to move away from your own work.
When we were supposed to start Technopriests
(Technopères), Jodorowsky, who had written the
Yes and no. I cannot be consistent enough that
the style of a serial can be so singularly defined. I
still haven’t learned to equalise the style and conceptual components. I have been working for only
twenty-five years (laughs). But this is the first album they let me colour digitally. This could have
happened with the previous album, Meta Baron
(La caste des Meta-Barons, written by Jodorowsky,
illustrated by Juan Gimenez. Zoran Janjetov
coloured some pages of this series), where I did a
couple of pages in digital colour, but Humanoids
had financial problems and could not pay for my
colouring, so they gave the job to a studio in Los
Angeles, which did a poor job. Because it was
more important to be on time than to be good.
With publishers it is always like that. Mind you,
they like prestigious projects, but the business
aspect is always more important, the true timing
of publishing an album, because of the distribution, advertising, etc. It is always more important
for things to be on time than to be good.
In this album, the black and white pages are the
fusion of what I want to be drawn before colour-
23
VELJKO: Luckily, the album can be found in Serbia.
The album came out thanks to my retrospective
exhibition at the French Institute in Belgrade (Respective, 15 April – 1 June). The French Institute paid
for the rights, System Comics published it. We were
actually thinking about whether to publish a catalogue or an album for the exhibition. We decided on
the album and I think it was a better solution. n
/
VELJKO: You are currently working on a new series
Ogregod. Have you managed to reach another level
of stylistic liberation?
ing is done, with a little more ornamentation of
the drawing so that it can look more attractive. In
some places there is a little bit more drawing than
the colouring requires, and a little bit more colouring than the drawing requires. I am still at the
beginning of this series, one album has come out
and I am still searching and questioning myself.
There were little technical issues, because the first
album was darker than I had wanted it to be. But
I am going to fix it in the next one. I have changed
the publisher, I am no longer with Humanoids, I
am with Delcourt, a huge publisher. They have ten
new issues a week, which is 520 albums a year, and
it is a huge production. Delcourt is the biggest
independent comic book publisher in France. The
treatment is different and many aspects seem to
be a lot more professional, but they do not put so
much effort into the placement of albums and
marketing. They just let titles fend for themselves
on the market. I am doing something that is better than the previous series, but it is less visible on
the market. Although, who cares, the series is ongoing – so far I know that there will be four albums, and if it starts well, there will be even more.
N OVA M I SAO
VELJKO: Your work in France. At the beginning you
were conditioned to continue the famous series
about John DiFool, but the story was now moved
back to the youth of the protagonist. You must
have had serious limitations there, because it was a
famous character.
Then they suggested that I draw the way I had
been drawing until then. I said I would not because I was bored with drawing this way. In this
seeking a new way to express myself, I made several mistakes that cost me dearly. I took the thinnest possible pens and started drawing the most
complicated drawings with the most complicated
patterns, thinnest lines and an immense multitude of details. The result was impressive but it
took a great deal of my time and nerves.
/
When I went to visit Maurović, I saw a grand master,
clever, lucid and humorous, who lives and acts as a
modest and extremely good person. His personality had no connection with the picture that was
presented in the public. With him I had the same
feeling as I have with other artists that he was one
of us, because, when you are an artist, it is absolutely unimportant how old you are, the age difference
means nothing, as if the type of creativity that we
share erases time barriers and gives us all timeless
experience. Jodorowsky has always claimed that
old age is a social category, and that, as such it does
not exist. Now, as I tour comics festivals around Europe and other continents, I meet artists who are
eighty years old or more, and mentally, spiritually,
they are just as I am, regardless of the fact that some
among them are my idols from my youth. They all
come from a world trapped in childhood, which
sincerely admires what it likes and perpetuates its
own fascinations no matter how odd or childish
they may seem. They are wonderful gentle people
who, when they sit around the table for a meal, talk
about who bought what toy, what comic they created, or where they bought a rare edition of this and
that comic book. It is a harmless world that does not
endanger the planet, except that it stands opposite
to all that is disgusting, pointless and evil.
story, suggested doing something I would love.
At the time I was in the middle of my house and
techno music phase and, luckily, in John DiFool
we had these techno priests and their cosmic
church which ran the cosmos. Jodorowsky understood my intimate attitude towards religious organisations as ideological devices used to manipulate, and he set the story in this manner, unmasking such institutions and presenting them as an
ominous, evil and greedy world bent on ruling
other people’s brains. I loved that. I loved that it
was science fiction that I did not have to deal with
historical research and studies. So I started drawing something I liked. I wanted the drawings to
be reduced to contour lines and to do all the other effects with colouring. But the board found it
sort of empty, and didn’t like it. To me, it was clean
and reduced, but the publisher thought it was
empty and would not attract an audience.
of information with regards to comics, and, what is
interesting, they are happy to share them with others who are interested in the field as well.
For some reason we refuse to realise that the
identity of a personality or a nation is not a steel
axis, but a product of various influences and
circumstances. Identity is somehow seen as a
fortress where we should isolate ourselves, but
people forget that modern man has extended his
means of communication to such unprecedented
dimensions that he barely has anywhere to be
isolated.
Vida Ognjenović, author and director
Literature Saves
the Beauty of Life
Interviewer: Gordana Draganić Nonin
For some reason we refuse to realise that the identity of a personality or a
nation is not a steel axis, but a product of various influences and circumstances.
Identity is somehow seen as a fortress where we should isolate ourselves, but
people forget that modern man has extended his means of communication
to such unprecedented dimensions that he barely has anywhere to be isolated.
N
A recently finished congress of PEN international, organized for the first time in Serbia, has shown
how large the power of words is in today’s world. A
declaration was composed which will defend, so to
speak, smaller languages and cultures that are disappearing, with a clear message that there is an
incredible power of language and culture in the
world compared to the miserable power of the mili-
tary, the banking sector, bureaucracy and governments. Could you speak about how important this
declaration is for world culture in general?
Vida Ognjenović: This declaration is important
because it is not self-gratifying, it has not emerged
from a barren cabinet theory, or from an even
more barren political correctness. This is a sharp
authors’ voice of protest caused by a piled-up dissatisfaction and mass pragmatism regarding improvements in language, culture and art. This
declaration says that the language of the human
race is a mosaic-like structure comprised of a
verisimilitude of linguistic variations, and that suffocating languages utilised by less dominant peoples, or homogenous groups, represents linguistic
imperialism. A language is the most perfect and
all-encompassing means of getting to know the
world and understanding it, hence its power. That
is why each abuse of a language, and they are
numerous and varying, in our time most often
political and religious, is the first step on the road
towards a dangerous cultural retardation, which
is fertile ground for manipulations and extortions
of all kinds.
In addition, the declaration states that sheer applicability should not be a factor of artistic value.
After all, creation and the utilisation of objects
around us should also be a matter of freedom of
choice.
• “Although we can hardly wait for premieres, I often
approach that day with a certain reluctance” was
what you wrote in your essay “Author and Director
in the Same Person” saying that for you, simply the
process of making a show, rehearsals with actors,
the period when the text “gets written into the time,
space, context, ideas and meanings”...
Vida Ognjenović: I admit that, for me, rehearsals
are the most attractive part of theatrical life. This
virtual source of a show, this place where reality
and imagination fight for supremacy, where ordinary things transform into the most extraordinary
phenomena from one rehearsal to another,
where, from a flat description in words, one can,
with the sensitive touch of an actor, evoke genuine, authentic emotions. Rehearsals are successful,
and I am repeating this for who knows what time,
when we reach the point at which our intellectual and emotional engagement is moved into
spaces outside of Descartes’ system. True rollicking, good rehearsals have something conspiring
in the way people gather around them. Interpersonal understanding at rehearsals is completely
26
Vida Ognjenović: The first big book, I mean with
many pages, that I read was an interesting novel,
Karik and Valya, translated from Russian – I cannot
remember the name of the writer. I was, I think,
six years old and it was at the end of the first grade
of elementary school. They had sent me to school
way too early, because they could not cope with
my hyperactivity, although they could not do so
at school either. Karik and Valya is a novel about
two children, a brother and a sister, who secretly
go into their grandfather’s laboratory and try out
his invention – shrinking dust. They take some of
the dust and go to the park to play. Soon after
they are reduced to the size of an ant, so that it
takes them a whole day and a good part of the
night to come back, overcoming difficult obstacles such as a thick forest of bushes, running away
from monsters, such as butterflies and avoiding
the skyscrapers that trees are. They see huge giants, their parents, and hear the deafening noise
of their parents calling out for them. They call
back in vain but they have to keep away from
them and other giants, their cousins and neigh-
27
Vida Ognjenović: To me, poetry is a reader’s literary feast. I am fascinated with how concise poetic statements are. For what a good verse encompasses, states and moves, you need pages of
prose explanations and descriptions. Someone
said that poetry is a universal language of the
world. I agree with that and add that poetry is the
language that is the path to understanding that
part of the world that cannot be told.
• At a time when few of our intellectuals spoke in
defence of basic human rights, morality and other
values, you were anything but silent. Ernesto Sabato,
the Argentinean author who was one of the great
authorities at a time of crucial importance for his
country, wrote that “an author must be an incorruptible witness of his times.” In your opinion, do
we today lack people whose word carries “weight”
in the public eye, who we can trust “without limitations?”
Vida Ognjenović: There are exceptional intellectuals among our contemporaries, but the public
does not seek out their analysis and evaluation.
Our society is moving towards a deep class segregation of only two classes: the poor and a few
supermillionaires who can buy power and various
other indulgences. Since only a very few intellectuals, not only here but also internationally, can
reach the upper class with their work, we remain
poor and contented that we have the freedom of
speech, although we know that what we say is
gone with the wind, while things go the way that
money determines. I believe that our future revolutionaries are still only watching, but...
• Your latest novel Birdwatcher, about a wise jester,
Vasa Lukić, or Vasja Ivanovič Kirov, is homage to oral
storytelling, but it is also a story about identity. Parallel to the story of his unusual family, the novel tells
the story of the history of Serbian railways. Have our
identities, since the long gone second half of the 19th
century, been criss-crossed like endless tracks?
Vida Ognjenović: Of course they have, but for
some reason, we refuse to realise that the identity of a personality or a nation is not a steel axis,
but a product of various influences and circumstances. Identity is somehow seen as a fortress
where we should isolate ourselves, but people
forget that modern man has extended his means
of communication to such unprecedented dimensions that he barely has anywhere to be isolated.
• “There is a constant game between life and literature, in the disguising of ordinary things into miracles, and sometimes one wins and sometimes another,” was the motto of the protagonist Kirov. Do
you support miracles?
Vida Ognjenović: Yes, I believe so. Talent is a miracle, and love is a miracle, and a little firefly is a
miracle – and a good verse too... n
/
• Can you remember the time in your childhood
when you recognised that literature is something
magnificent, art which one does not leave? Was it a
concrete book or some other experience?
• Are you fond of poetry? You have written an essay
titled “Defending Poetry” about a friend who is a
passionate reader and connoisseur of poetry. Yet, in
this essay, from the dialogue between the two of you,
it is obvious that you also have great knowledge on
the subject.
N OVA M I SAO
Vida Ognjenović: Maybe it was some sort of escape into some sort of otherness, into worlds
which I could examine and distribute. I was collecting and changing certain short stories that I
had published already. I finished a novel that had
been sleeping for years in notes. Obviously, I had
a dire need to be preoccupied with something
that was completely different from the everyday
routine at the time. Anyway, it was a time when
I was unemployed, so I had a lot of time on my
hands to work on manuscripts.
/
• During the 1990s, at the time when we felt the biggest consequences of the totalitarian regime and
when the war was raging all over the former Yugoslavia, your books of prose were published, first the
Poisonous Milk of the Dandelion, a collection of
stories, and the following year the novel The House
of Dead Fragrances. What did writing mean to you
during those years, artistic creation in the centre of
total devastation?”
bours, who could trample them at any moment.
The story ends well – the children come to the
grandfather’s lab, take a few drops of special liquid that reverses the effect of the dust, make their
folks happy and tell them the story of their unusual adventure. They describe to them the wonders they have seen, observing nature from up
close, and how little they have known about it. For
days after reading that book, I walked carefully,
on my tiptoes, over the grassy parts of our garden,
being very careful not to stomp on someone who
might have been reduced in size. My grandmother was afraid that I was showing the initial signs
of madness, so she tried to talk sense into me. She
did not know, poor soul, that my madness was
innate. That was the moment I realised that literature is something much grander and more beautiful than everything that was going on around
us, and this impression has never left me.
different form than any other. It takes place in a
specific jargon, most often incomprehensible to
someone who is not part of the conspiracy. I like
this mystical world of rehearsals, because nothing
there is prescribed until the end, nothing is foreseeable, nothing is for sure, and almost everything
is possible.
/ Photo: Srđan Doroški /
„When one looks at a piano from above, it reminds
us of a half of an oval big bell, and then we realise
that this realistic half represents the piano sound
which we hear in reality, and the other half, the
imaginary half, the imaginary part is the sound which
really does not exist but lives within the inner ear.
This is the aspect which helps us sing on the piano,
because the sound which in reality dissipates after
the tone is produced can be mentally extended and
amplified, and then connect with the oncoming tone.
Music is, actually, in the link between two tones, how
we listen to the lasting of the previous and how we
connect it to the beginning of the ensuing one...”
Rita Kinka, pianist
Sounds of the Imaginary
Half of the Big Bell
Interviewer: Adrian Kranjčević
”When one looks at a piano from above, it reminds us of a half of an oval
big bell, and then we realise that this realistic half represents the piano
sound which we hear in reality, and the other half, the imaginary half,
the imaginary part is the sound which really does not exist but lives within
the inner ear. This is the aspect which helps us sing on the piano, because
the sound which in reality dissipates after the tone is produced can be
mentally extended and amplified, and then connect with the oncoming
tone. Music is, actually, in the link between two tones, how we listen to
the lasting of the previous and how we connect it to the beginning of
the ensuing one...”
following her performance at the Queen Elizabeth
International Competition in Brussels in 1987. She
has recorded for radio and TV in all of the countries of the former Yugoslavia, in Italy, Austria,
Germany, Belgium, France, Russia, Estonia, the
Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, England, Greece, Spain, Israel, Canada, the
USA, Australia, and Taiwan, among others. PGP
Beograd published her LP of Bach and Schuman
compositions in 1989; Digital Media Production
from Brussels published a CD of her interpretations of compositions by Chopin, Schuman,
Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Mussorgsky, with production, distribution and promotional concerts in
the EU countries EU secured by the Women of
Europe Foundation. Rita Kinka is currently a tenured Professor of Piano and serves as Chief of the
Piano Department at the Academy of Fine Arts,
Novi Sad University.
• Apart from your very successful career as a concert
pianist, you are also intensively involved in pedagogical work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Novi Sad.
How does the piano sound “on the other side?”
Rita Kinka: I wouldn’t call it piano on the other
side. It is a process of imbuement, an exchange of
energies and ideas. I have always thought that a
professor can both receive from a student and the
student receives from him or her. Experience, but
also instinct, connected to music, compositions,
performance, becomes real only when it is verbalised, when it is passed on to another person. Also,
how much a student will motivate a professor to
“give” depends on the student himself (or herself).
F
ollowing her graduation from secondary music school, Rita Kinka (born in Subotica in 1962)
enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts, Novi Sad
University, in the class of Professor Evgeniy Timakin in 1977, afterwards proceeding to Moscow,
where she continued her studies in the class of
Professor Arbo Valdma, and graduating cum laude
in 1981. She pursued post-graduate studies at the
Faculty of Musical Arts, Belgrade University in the
class of Professor Dušan Trbojević, and at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Novi Sad, once again under Prof. Arbo Valdma. For her master studies accomplishments she was awarded the October
Award of the City of Belgrade for Highest Student
Achievement in 1983. She continued her education in 1988/99 at the Julliard School of Music in
New York, in the class of Prof. Gyorgy Sandor (Professional Studies Program), having won a grant
from the Gina Bachauer Foundation, which she
was awarded as the most promising young artist
30
The pedagogic process is a miracle; it has its laws,
but everyone must discover them from one’s own
experience. There is no universal advice, just as
there is not any for parenthood. Each student is a
unit to him or herself, and the most important
thing is that at the end of the pedagogical process, students become “improved versions of their
selves,” not just resemblances of their professors
as performers. We are here only to make it easier
for them on their path to knowledge, which they
would find themselves, but perhaps with greater
effort, and later.
31
• Being someone who has a very rich international
career, you must have received many offers to stay
and live and work abroad. What brings you back to
Novi Sad and Vojvodina?
Rita Kinka: Roots are a miracle; wherever you
may live outside your homeland, it could be a
prosperous environment, good for the development of your career, you have the feeling that you
are a stranger. You dream of the fragrances of
home, colours, friends’ smiles... at least I do, and
so, even though I lived for a year in America and
four years in Germany, I still say that it is best to
be home. Regardless of what is happening in our
country… I have always dreamed of living in Vojvodina, in Novi Sad, but also of travelling to other countries because of concerts, courses, and
this dream came true. Also, when one starts a
family, has children, it is important where these
children grow up.
• What would be your Credo?
Rita Kinka: Let us rely on ourselves, yet still be
open to all the beautiful impulses that surround
us. Let us play as who we are, open our souls and
all of the experience gathered in life and share it
with our listeners. Be a tiny speck in the creation
of the revival of the world, in the strengthening
of universal spirit. n
/
Rita Kinka: At the competition in 1987 I was in
the semi-finals and won the award of the Gina
Bachauer Foundation. That year I did not manage
to move on to the finals because of an injury; I
had tendonitis and pain in my arm while playing
in the semi-finals. I decided to try and improve
my position at the next competition, which takes
place every four years, and I had the opportunity
to do so in 1991. It was a difficult year, the beginning of the war and the fall of Yugoslavia. It was
exceptionally hard for me to concentrate on playing. Yet, strangely, everything went smoothly. I
played well and was passing from one stage to
another. The requirements at that competition
were very strict – about three hours of solo music,
two concerts with an orchestra and in the finals
the learning of a new piece, written especially for
the purpose of the competition, which is given
to the finalists a week before the performance.
There were twelve finalists and we were accommodated some fifteen kilometres away from
Brussels, in Waterloo, in the Queen’s chapel,
where the most talented students of the Royal
Conservatory of Brussels live during the school
year, exclusively post graduates. Each of us had
an apartment with a Steinway piano in the living
room, there was a bedroom and a bathroom. You
can imagine the intensity of work, learning a new
piece in just a week, not being able to communicate with anyone from the “outside world outside,” except with the journalists who were flocking around the doors, waiting for us to give them
interviews and statements. Still, they were unforgettable days, the time spent together with music and, of course, the relaxed chatting in the
evening at common tables. We had a big common room with two concert Steinway pianos,
where we performed our repertoire, where we
As the female pianist of highest distinction from
Europe, in the finals I won the financial award of
the European Parliament, the Prix du femmes
d’Europe, which also included the recording of
a compact disk, realised through Digital Media
Productions from Brussels two weeks after the
competition in a Radio Brussels studio. At the
time, in 1991, making a compact disc meant a
lot, as we still did not have that sort of production, so such a reference meant a great deal for
my professional career because I could send it
to various concert organisers and managers
worldwide.
N OVA M I SAO
• Please tell us about the circumstances that led up
to the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Competition in
Brussels and what your impressions were after you
received the award.
/
Rita Kinka: I play solely compositions that resonate with my spiritual being, where I can find
myself. I don’t have a favourite composer, because in each of them I find something outstandingly precious and timelessly beautiful, something that is universal. In different phases of my
working with the piano I had my favourite composers. In the beginning they were Tchaikovsky
and Schumann; later on they were Rachmaninoff
and Liszt, once I acquired the technical chops to
come to grips with their demanding compositions as a pianist. Still later, it was Bach. Of course,
compositions by Chopin, Debussy, but especially Schumann touch me deeply and I perform
them gladly. Having participated at The International Competition of 20th Century Piano Music
in Orleans, France in 1996, I significantly expanded my repertoire with compositions by Webern,
Schoenberg, Crumb, Ives, Messiaen and Ligeti,
and I gladly include them in my concert repertoire, as well as works by local composers, which
I play very often. I have been a frequent participant at the Composers’ Round Table in Opatija,
where I’ve played Ivan Jevtić, Vasilije Mokranjac,
Dejan Despić, Petar Bergamo, Marko Tajčević,
Josip Slavenski, Slavko Šuklar and others. I love
live contact with a composer, because through
communication, through their compositions, the
performer is under the impression that he or she
participates in the artistic process. It happened
to me that after playing a work to its composer,
he or she would adapt the piece, change it according to the impulse he or she had caught
while listening to me play it. It is an indescribably
wonderful experience. I love to combine thematic programmes, program music appeals to me,
so I’ve had solo appearances called “Music of the
Night,” “Music of Water,” “Travels,” etc. Of course,
those aren’t the real titles, but rather my feeling
connected to these pieces.
We were deeply impressed by the visit of the royal family, and I was touched by the care King
Boudewijn showed when he found out that I was
from Yugoslavia, expressing his fears for what was
happening in our country. He said: “I shall pray for
your country.” A year later, the king died and his
prayer remained unheard...
• What predispositions should pieces you put on your
repertoire have, and according to which criteria do
you base this selection?
accompanied each other – the piano concerts
and this new piece written by a young French
composer Patric Chalulot that was compulsory in
the finals.
The plain, the horizon and this flat line have always
inspired me. I may not have known it then when
I painted, but that is it. Now this film DNA that
I am making with my friend from Turkey is about
exactly this. Has the culture in which we grew up
influenced us? Yes, it has. Of course it has.
Interview: Mira Brtka
“DNA” as a Horizon
of the Vojvodinian Plain
Light should be drawn from one’s own soul, from the inner workings
a being.
D
irector, sculptress, painter, fashion designer,
Mira Brtka was born in Novi Banovci in 1930.
Everything that she has experienced can barely
be written in one interview, from running barefoot down the dusty streets of Banovci, or playing
with rags among Slovak women who were embroidering, to the latest Biennale in Venice where
she participated in the Red Suitcase project of her
colleague Dora Garcia in the Spanish Pavilion,
or the last day of March this year when the Brtka-Kresoja Foundation started working in Petrovaradin. Her energy has never left her, and
everything Mira Brtka does she does with an inner
flame which affects everything around her. Art
historians found her paintings important from the
beginning. After graduating from two art academies, studying film directing in Belgrade and
painting in Rome, Brtka was active in the very
important and influential art scene in Rome as a
protagonist of post-informal, geometric and minimalist tendencies. As early as 1964, she had individual exhibitions in the prestigious gallery Arflex,
just as she did a year later at the exhibition Forme
Presenti. Since its beginning, she has been a member of the international group Illumination. This
group was established by Japanese artist Nobuya
Abe and, in addition to Brtka, included the members, Marcia Hafif, two Italian painters – Paolo
Patelli and Aldo Schmidt, and the Belgrade painter Milena Čubraković, with whom she shared a
studio in Rome. She also took part in the Artideologia movement. Headquartered in Italy, the
rino and Rimini in 1965, Brtka represented Yugoslavia and cooperated directly with one of the
leading authorities in the theory of modern art,
Giulio Carlo Argan.
• Do the roots of your artistic gifts reach back to
childhood in Novi Banovci?
Mira Brtka: They surely do. As a little girl I always
played with rags. This is, probably, the reason why
I engaged in fashion later on. And around me, in
my childhood, there were always these Slovak
women, who were constantly doing things with
their hands – they embroidered, made ragdolls,
made wonderful pillowcases ... in fact, I was constantly surrounded with creativity, a wish to make
something new and pretty.
• And so you found yourself in Rome. How did you
come to enrol in their Academy of Visual Arts?
group’s roots go back to the Bureau for Preventive
Imagination, established in Rome in 1970, in which
she worked in collaboration with a group of artists, amongst whom were Bois, Christo, Pistoletto,
Richter, and others. At the International Symposium of Artists, Critics and Art Historians in San Ma-
Mira Brtka: In Rome I was working on a film.
Again, I had a lot of luck. I spoke Italian really well,
learning languages always came easy to me. Nikola Majdak, a cameraman from Belgrade, and I were
working on an animated film. We were collaborating on the first film of the Belgrade School of
Animation. He received the Ferania Award from
an Italian company, and then he, his wife Maria,
who was a journalist, and I went to Rome. The circumstances led me to stay there and take part in
34
35
My friend, the painter Milena Čubraković, whom
I had known back in Belgrade, and with whom I
was sharing a studio, was working on animated
film. I was engaged to draw background for a cartoon called The Thieving Magpie which was an
Oscar candidate. It was then that I went to the
Academy to see what I was going to do with painting. I cannot paint, not even the backgrounds, if I
don’t understand the purpose. I applied at the
Academy and they accepted me. Milena had already finished the Academy in Belgrade. She was
in the same class as Stojan Čelić. When I asked her
why they had admitted meat this Italian one, she
told me that they realised that I was this raw material with whom nobody had worked, who no-
• What were the circumstances that led you to meet
Abe, the Japanese artist who was the founder of the
Illumination group?
Mira Brtka: The idea was to change things, to go
towards the new. It was the time of revolutions,
and student uprisings and the time of flower power.
People were tired with the state of affairs in society and politics. Of course, this was all reflected
N OVA M I SAO
/
the film that was being shot at the time. Of course,
I had already met some Italian film folks, because
they were working in big co-productions in Belgrade. For example, in Belgrade I had been working with Antonioni. Antonioni was doing love
scenes in the film Storm. He was not directing the
entire film. He was only in charge of love scenes.
And so it happened that when I got to Rome with
the Majdaks, they invited me to work as an assistant director on the film, because their Italian colleague, who was working on the film, got sick.
I ended up working on a film with Pietro Germi,
who was, just as Fellini, a great name of Italian
cinematography. The main role in the film was
played by Claudia Cardinale.
While I was going to the Academy, we still worked
a bit on film. I worked with Roger Vadim on Barbarella. We were making mechanical dolls that
move, and after that we did a film with Carlo Rambaldi, who worked on E.T. later on. You know, back
then, we were all the same, we spent time together and worked. Later on he created the Extraterrestrial in the States and won an Oscar and everyone wrote about him. We spent time together
even after work. I remember once, we were shooting this film with Germi and we went afterwards
to a cafe where film people flocked. Fellini came
in and joined us. We all talked together. Later on
they asked me why I didn’t interview him, because
I had already published some interviews in the
NIN weekly. But, you know, to us it was all so different. Nobody was a star there. They were ordinary people doing their jobs. Important jobs.
/
body had taught, I had not followed anybody’s
influences. So, there you go, and today young
people work so hard before their entrance exams.
in art. We said – that which has been painted up
until now should not be continued with. Nature
should not be presented the way it has been before. Light should be drawn from one’s own soul,
from the inner workings of a being. Abe was saying that we should oppose what he called the
constant crisis, the fast life... Imagine what he
would say if he saw this speediness. We were in
the position counter to this endless crisis. That is
why he used the word Illumination, the French
word, of course, from Rimbaud’s poetry. In the
middle ages, the initial letter in books was written
largely and decorated, and in this decoration the
colour red, minium dominated, so that all of this
had more meaning. Abe thought and told us that
we, at the beginning of our artistic work, actually,
our initials, our spirit, should be seen, should be
processed, marked, read, so that we could get to
know ourselves.
• The group had, actually, one exhibition...
Mira Brtka: Yes, imagine that. It was in 1967 in
Rome. The plan was to have more exhibitions in
Italian cities, and then we were supposed to go to
36
know each other before. And to open a museum
of modern art in Banovci! Some puzzle pieces fall
into place. This museum is situated where I have
trod since I was little, on the very banks of the
Danube. I used to run around there barefoot in
the dust, I played in the sand, and now I have a
museum of modern art there. Unbelievable!
And yet, when I think of it now, it is not so strange.
I have always been inspired by the plain. Earlier,
when I had an exhibition in Belgrade in the Museum of Modern Art, they bought two of my
paintings, Horizon1 and Horizon 2. It can be interpreted that if you are occupied with various
things, then there are bound to be some coincidences, but I have a feeling that there is something in this spiritual sphere after all, which we are
not in a position to fully read. Something that
functions and works even without us knowing it.
We later say that it is religion, faith... Yes, this is all
well and necessary, but this is just what is on the
outside. Inside, however, something is constantly
pulsating and leading somewhere. Somehow, all
this keeps moving constantly. And it is a good
thing that this is so, isn’t it?
The plain, the horizon and this flat line have always inspired me. I may not have known it then
when I painted, but that is it. Now this film DNA
that I am making with my friend from Turkey is
about exactly this. Has the culture in which we
grew up influenced us? Yes, it has. Of course it has.
My friend Genjai Kasapci keeps using dots to
paint. Her paintings are like a mosaic, and at the
source of it is Byzantium, and I, once again, am
always painting lines. Flat. I remember how we
had a farmhouse in Banovci. As a child, I was always watching these farmsteads. Somewhere this
remains recorded. Like a code, our code, to which
we are connected. n
37
/
Mira Brtka: I have always been in my Pazova. But
I have also always travelled. This opportunity to
travel was of great importance to me, learning
new things, comparing things. During the making
Mira Brtka: That is also another strange thing.
When I used to come here to Novi Sad, this old
town just before the big city was beautiful. The
elongated houses, gates, roofs... all of it. Can you
imagine the coincidence that my father did his
military service in the very building in Petrovaradin where my Brtka-Kresoja Foundation is now
situated. Incredible! He used to be a scrivener and
he did his service here. Later on he became a notary in Novi Banovci, where I was born and spent
my childhood. Now there is another coincidence
– the Macura Museum has been opened there,
and I am now Vladimir’s friend, but we did not
N OVA M I SAO
• When did you return to Stara Pazova?
• How did you decide on Petrovaradin?
/
I have to tell you that Abe made it to Vojvodina.
He was in Stara Pazova, he drove around Vojvodina in a car. He was fascinated with Vojvodina. He
used to say: “Forget about Japanese gardens!” He
thought that the Japanese had already gone nuts
with those rational ideas. He much more felt and
loved this purity, the fact that things were toned
down in our plain. He said “This is my garden.” His
idea was to return to something pure, something
that had not been processed, to something primeval. He wanted his ashes to be thrown here,
onto the Vojvodinian fields. It may be interesting
to mention that he lived for a long while in Mongolia, he taught at the university there, and he
lived in the Indian city of Baroda. He had seen
many corners of the world, so it was not naive
when he said that Vojvodina was something
special.
of the film Sutjeska , I met my husband, Dragan,
who was working as an assistant on the film.
Somehow, things have changed since then. Still,
a woman is different from a man. We can be on
equal terms, but still, when a woman realises herself both as a mother and as a wife, she cannot
neglect her family for her work. I somehow did
everything parallel. I wanted both. I tried to make
both function. When tragedy struck, I survived. I
remained here to finish something for them,
something they haven’t finished. That was how
the Brtka-Kresoja Foundation came to life. I had a
studio in Rome, beautifully positioned, with a
view of the sea, but I decided to return here and
do all this in Petrovaradin.
Klagenfurt. It was all prepared, the catalogue and
all, but Abe died in his sleep one night before. And
there had been plans for the exhibition to go to
Japan. RAI even published a text about us which
announced the exhibition of the group in Japan.
None of this ended up happening.
A director can write all sorts of things in his CV,
bad shows, good shows, mediocre ones, successful,
unsuccessful, finished, unfinished, the ones he was
satisfied with and the ones others found more
satisfying than he. Anything and everything is there,
just as in life - fortunate and unfortunate things,
good decisions and mistakes. But what is most
important is that you are not ashamed of what you
have done. Everything else is less important.
Interview: Nikita Milivojević, director
The Theatre Concerns
Us Less and Less
Interviewer: Tijana Delić
I cannot remember who it was that said: “To be an artist means to be free,”
but he was right – the only thing is that, as a rule, it costs dearly.
N
ikita Milivojević is one of the leading theatrical directors in Serbia today, or, as Jovan Ćirilov
has put it: “Through the engagement of his plays,
he marked the nineties in Serbian theatre, and
with his daring and new reading of classics he led
it into the new century.” He is the winner of all the
important theatrical awards for directing in our
country; the Bojan Stupica Award, a number of
Sterija Awards for directing, BITEF awards, the
Critics’ Award of the theatrical magazine Scena, as
well as annual awards of the National Theatre in
Belgrade, the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, and the
Budva Town-Theatre, and many other awards at
festivals in Kragujevac, Vršac, Jagodina, Šabac,
and Novi Sad. His play Banović Strahinja was proclaimed the most important production of the
1990s in Serbian theatre according to a joint questionnaire of the theatrical critics of Serbia.
Since the year 2000 he has continued with his career abroad and directed in Greece, Sweden, the
USA, Slovenia, Macedonia, Turkey, Germany, Italy...
• The Globe Theatre in London probably seemed like
the most natural thing after showings of Winter Gardens in Venice, The Bridge on the Drina in Dusseldorfer Schauspielhaus, and “Dog Mother in Athens,
where many times you directed important shows,
some of which were declared culture events. The
impression this leaves is that, lately, you’ve been
realising more plays somewhere abroad than in
Serbia, whose culture you keep promoting, for,
wherever you go, you are a Serbian director.
Nikita Milivojević: Many wonderful things have
happened to me in those cities and countries, especially in Athens. That is great luck for a director,
and probably, so far, my most precious theatrical
baggage. For someone who is a Serbian director,
who comes from a small culture and environment,
it is something particularly important, and I believe that also for our country, all of this has not
been bad “marketing.” Still, all of this being away,
all these shows outside Serbia, were of essential
importance to me because, above all, they helped
me form myself somehow differently, to understand that I must constantly fight in a different
way. It forced me to always seek the solution on
the other side – to have to be in constant movement and not to expect anything from anyone!
The manager of a theatre in Athens once joked,
saying, “In your case, Nikita, it is not enough that
40
Nikita Milivojević: Generally speaking, there is
always something like “double responsibility,” for
any kind of “public performance” outside of one’s
own country. Of course, this is a particularly sen-
41
• When we say “it does not exist for them”, then we
are talking about all the people who work in culture
in Belgrade, Novi Sad...
Nikita Milivojević: In our small theatrical cosmos,
lobbyists rule, small “mafias” with power, and
who, on the one hand, hate each other and gossip,
while on the other, stick closely together and cooperate. The biggest number of those who run
theatrical life in Belgrade and Novi Sad (above all
in these two centres, because they are the largest,
although Belgrade has been dominating for decades) are products of these unfortunate circumstances we have been going through for a very
long time, because neither culture nor theatre
can be in more fortunate circumstances than the
/
of this, I have absolutely no illusions that anything
I do has any “weight” for those who deal with culture. It does not even exist for them.
N OVA M I SAO
/
• But when we put things on a global perspective,
you, as an individual, have promoted our culture,
our theatre, more than many other individuals.
sitive issue now because we have been slandered
as a nation for a long time, and when you say that
you come from Serbia, you say this, knowing in
advance that the impression this can cause may
still be very negative. So whatever you do outside
the country’s borders creates some sort of impression about Serbia, whether you like it or not. In
that sense, Djoković or Kusturica, for example, are
true miracles. However, I must admit that when
our politicians talk about this and say, for example,
how “sports and culture are our best ambassadors,” I switch the channel right away, because
they do not believe this at all, and they have no
idea what to do with the culture in this country
– in fact, it is their least interest! In all of this theatre is a very small, an almost unimportant frame
which gets smaller and smaller. In Europe, too, it
is less and less important, so that, generally speaking, the theatre is not doing well at all. Due to all
you make a good show, not even an excellent one,
you have always to make the best show, so that
we can call you back again.” And she was right. It
is immense pressure, but it also motivates me. It
has taught me to always be completely prepared.
I have no right to a mediocre show, because it
makes the forthcoming engagements questionable. Well now, it is good for me that over these
years I have been elsewhere rather than here, but,
at the same time, in our conditions and circumstances, this is always a double-edged sword.
society to which they belong. This means concretely that the criteria, tastes, and systems of
values, all of these, are being established by people who were given the chance to do so and who
have none of the above mentioned. But they have
managed to impose themselves upon the system
(the system was looking for exactly these types!),
and then they come together, following this “mercantile approach,” because that is how they think:
“I’ll do this for you, and you’ll do this for me, this
one is ours, this one isn’t; we need this one and
we don’t need this one.” As if we had all the time
in the world for their pointless games!? Because
of all of this the theatre is currently one very mentally polluted environment. I often meet people
who are “educated,” but they have no taste – they
cannot tell you what is important in one play and
what is not. From what they write, say, do, select,
award, praise, attack, you can clearly see what the
scope of their perspective is, how deeply they are
capable of analysing something. And here one
can recognise exactly what “level” someone is on.
Like in those video arcade games. You simply cannot reach some levels! You can see, understand,
feel only what you are able to! It is really funny
when you see how some people are arrogant locally (as in that verse, “carrying his vain stupidity
through a Thursday”), and are patronising beyond
any level of dignity.
• The result of all this is that you have worked in all
these various cities and countries and you have
never directed a play in the Serbian National Theatre, although you studied in Novi Sad, and you now
even teach here.
Nikita Milivojević: Well, it is somehow a part of
the same story. I would say that, actually, there is
nothing so unusual and awkward, I would be surprised if it were any different. Experience has
taught me that it has always been like that in this
country. I know directors who went through the
same thing, one way or another – from some of
them I even learned how to direct. And now I see
that some new, younger directors are going
through the same, or similar, situations. These are
all “small town” complexes. One friend from Macedonia recently told me this great thing: “You
know, Nikita, we are small, and we know it, but
you don’t, you still believe you are grand, and that
is your big problem.”
• All that we have talked about sounds and seems
like manipulative politics. Recently, you finished
Henry VI for the Globe. What can be “read” in this
show regarding today’s situation, since this is a story
about fighting for power.
Nikita Milivojević: There is a similar story in our
history, about Uroš the Weak, who, after the death
of his father, Dušan the Mighty, also could not
control the gentry around him, and so the state
fell apart. In that sense there is some sort of repetition in history. In all of this, of course, we have
our own specialties, and the English have theirs,
but the essence is the fight for power and it is
more or less the same story. This speaks, too, of
human nature – it tells us about the dark circle
which Shakespeare understood. Because of the
feeling that it is a circle, that history actually in
away “stays in one place,” we have nothing but a
round table on the stage in our show. This table
can represent the cycle of history, it can be King
Arthur’s round table or the round table of the
United Nations, with the EU stars all around. There
are many associations, but inside that table is the
entire Shakespearean story about the mechanism
of power, where new alliances are made, old ones
are ruined, there is setting up, lobbying, plotting.
New wars are begun at the round table. In each
new play, I always try afresh to find out what stage
language I have to speak. And I strive to make this
stage language imaginative, interesting, exciting
for the public, and, above all, so that it concerns
those who watch it. In Henry VI it all began with
the idea of the table...
• On a daily basis, what is your way to fight against
everything we have been talking about?
Nikita Milivojević: From everything we have
talked about, and there are many things, some-
42
they also pretend that everything we are talking
about does not even exist, that nobody sees it. It
turns out that we are quarrelling with a pot hole
in the road and not with the ones whose interest
it is to keep the pothole there. In the end I always
realise that in such situations I get angry with myself, for talking about these things and knowing
in advance that it makes no sense. Probably because all of this, I think that it is important that a
man should somehow learn how not to let all
these things on “on a daily basis” spoil his day!
During the past few years I have tried to do something in that sense. For example, I have physically
removed myself from this ‘hustle and bustle” and
into a more peaceful environment. In the vicinity
of Inđija I have a “ranch,” a vineyard, and when I
am in Serbia, I spend most of my time there. When
you reach your fifties it is not a bad thing to make
some sort of calculation: what is it that you really
need, what is it that you don’t need, who your
friends are, what you can do without and what
you can. In other words, you start seeing things
more in the sense of “net” rather than “gross.” A
director can write all sorts of things in his CV, bad
shows, good shows, mediocre ones, successful,
unsuccessful, finished, unfinished, the ones he
was satisfied with and the ones others found
more satisfying than he. Anything and everything
is there, just as in life – fortunate and unfortunate
things, good decisions and mistakes. But what is
most important is that you are not ashamed of
what you have done. Everything else is less important. And although the present does not give
us too many reasons for optimism, I still believe
that everything that is done earnestly remains
noted down somewhere, that it is not lost. There
is always someone who sees it and to whom it
means something. n
/
N OVA M I SAO
/
how it turns out that “on a daily basis” it is just
somehow really bad. I am under the impression
that our conversation is about this, and that you
can find a thousand things that can make you sad.
But I really am sure that many people would tell
you similar things, and that many would agree
that those who are doing best are sycophants,
hypocrites, criminals, that everything, absolutely
the entire society, is infected with politics, and
that politics and different political “games” have
made a horrible selection and turned us into a
corrupt society, bound together with personal
interests. They would tell you that we live insecure
lives, in the sense of not being able to plan any
sort of future – but we have more or less talked
about this. And then you somehow realise that
these are the things on which one segment of
society makes a profit! And that those within it
still enjoy everything that makes us so bitter, and
43
I believe that a man, who finds himself trapped
and closed in any country, has to seek the roads
that lead toward the exit of this enclosure. Deleuze
calls these roads that are exits “roads to refuge.”
I call those roads “exits to the sea.” Every poet
must have his exit to the sea. One must have
one’s own territorial waters.
Oto Tolnai, author
Love Geography
How did Oto Tolnai find his “roads of refuge?” How did he, from dead-end
railways, find deltas to his “love geography,” and how did the words “iron
curtain,” “azure,” and “Prokletije” mark his childhood just as the Tisa River did?
How did he find his Foreign Legion in literature, so that with its help “one can
swim out of all the traps life sets for you?” This we shall find out through this
interview taken in a “sandcastle” in Palić, in the author’s study, next to the
desk with shutters, “which are a part of a black iconostasis, of a dark, lonely
gondola.”
B
orn in Kanjiža in 1940, Oto Tolnai is a poet,
storyteller, playwright, essayist and art critic. Oto
Tolnai’s latest novel, Seashell, was published last
year, simultaneously by Forum in Hungarian, and
in Serbian by the Novi Sad Cultural Centre( translator: Arpad Vicko) as an edition in its Pocket Anagram series. This magnificent novel of the soul
symbolically announced the great comeback of
Tolnai to Novi Sad, the city that has most certainly marked his literary career.
cause he met this fascinating Vojvodinian poet in
the park of his native Kanjiža.
The seashell Abbazia, as if it has come down from
Cezanne’s painting Black Clock, the one which the
book’s protagonist watches on a lace on a cupboard through the bars on the bed, the same protagonist who has grown by the Tisa River and
whose “heart beats fast and (who) has to wear his
little coat buttoned up” because he is using this
buttoned-up coat to stay on the tree of growing
up while he is watching the local beauty, Nusika,
posing naked for a sculptor...the seashell will become one of the most beautiful literary metaphors.
This novel could only be written by a poet-jockey
in the Kosztolànyi style, one who denounces
everything so that everything could be his, who
in his life conducts the hygiene of suffering and
the mythology of pain, for whom objects are, just
as it was with Kosztolànyi, the gods that begot
him, the one for whom “prose is grass”.
• Why don’t you like interviews? In the book Lard
Poet you wrote that you feel then as if in “dire straits”,
and yet this is book of a couple of hundreds of pages
is some sort of a “novel-interview”.
Oto Tolnai: It seems that the equilibrium of my
power is different when I’m writing – perhaps with
these various other roads that go off into expanses, all the potential manipulations both with words
and with events. It seems that I need more space
for this. I don’t want to start talking right away, and
for that to follow just one line. I prefer to scatter
myself to various sides. Only that way can I advance, or regress even. That is Kutuzov’s complex
– to go only backwards. Only later did I learn that
my star sign is cancer, so naturally I move back-
At one time Oto Tolnai was the centre of a group
of Vojvodinian Hungarian authors while he served
as the Editor-in-Chief of the literary supplement
Symposion of the Új Symposion magazine. In the
nineties he also edited the Ex Symposion. He described what running the magazines meant to
him, despite the immense workload, and even
though he was taken to police for hearing, in his
novel-interview Lard Poet, which was the Book of
the Year in Hungary in 2005, and which was published two years later by the Zrenjanin Town Library. Oto Tolnai is the most prolific and versatile
author among the Vojvodinian Hungarians. He
became a member of the Hungarian Academy of
Literature and Art in 1998 and received the Hungarian grandest state award, the Kossuth Award,
in 2007. He has also been awarded in Serbia, but
his favourite is the Todor Manojlović Award, be-
46
/
• Why a lard poet?
47
Oto Tolnai: I had this great concept – working
with lard. Of course, it was connected to Kosztolànyi, who was born in Subotica, one of the
greatest Hungarian authors, who was socializing
with Thomas Mann. Mann wrote a foreword for
one of his books in which he spoke of Kosztolànyi
as a great hope of European literature. Desző Kosztolànyi has one story where he describes how
one evening he was walking down the streets of
Pest and in one shop window across the way he
saw Petofi’s bust. He thought that it was made of
marble because it was all white, but when he
crossed the street and got closer he saw that it
was a butcher’s window and that the bust was
Another thing was that when we started doing
the interview we put the microphone on a stool.
I noticed a number 13 on it, and this number
means a lot to me, so I started building the entire
interview on number 13: I live in sand castle number 13, my wife Jutka was born on the 13th, Beckett
and other artists also have a strange relationship
with this number.
• In your latest novel, Seashell, one of the important
moments is when the boy discovers the sea. Other
texts written of yours demonstrate that the sea is
truly important to you. When did you discover it?
N OVA M I SAO
Then it just so happened that my good friend, a
good poet from Hungary, Lajos Parti Nagy, came
to make an interview for a radio station and I
could not say no. This was broadcast on the radio
in instalments, and then people from a magazine
called in, wanting to publish it in instalments.
They published a number of them, which I had
already approved. In the end the publisher called
me wanting to publish this all in the form of a
book. Then I told myself: “OK, I’m going to do it
now and never again.” For years I was working on
that manuscript, interview transcripts – I was
working on it for 3 or 4 years, because I wanted to
find out what is the essence of this genre, I was
really interested in finding about what is hiding
in there. I wanted to see how I functioned in all of
sculpted from lard. To me it was a splendid metaphor, because Kosztolànyi was from Bačka. At
the time I was also interested in Beuys and he introduced lard as a material in sculpting. In Berlin
as well I saw rather immense lard sculptures in
museums.
/
this, and I thought that nobody would want to
interview me after that book, because I said so
much there.
wards, and I would love to do the same in the interview. I suffered so much earlier, and now I suffer
because of my problems with interviews.
Oto Tolnai: That story is connected to my father
who was a shopkeeper, and the world of his shop
was also exotic to me. The shop was filled with
colours and fragrances. Before the war they called
such shops colonial goods shops. And it was Africa to me. If there were no goods, there were
drawers filled with everything. I imagined that I
would become a shopkeeper, inherit the shop,
travel to Africa. Later, as I was reading more, I imagined that literature would be that travel, this
adventure with all of these colonial scents. And
then my father had to go to the seaside, and it
was a shock to me, because at that time nobody
was going to the seaside. And he got as far as
Dubrovnik and sent us a postcard from there,
which was blue. It was then that I discovered that
in Yugoslavia, the country in which we were living, there is a part of it which is entirely open to
the sea, and this fact occupied my mind completely. I kept seeing myself leaning with my back
against an iron curtain, and before me I saw the
Adriatic Sea. This picture gave me a great perspective, that I had this infinity. To me it meant
that I was not encased in the trap of the iron curtain because there was the blue sea somewhere
out there which shone fantastically.
There was another important moment in my
childhood when they repossessed our shop and
took my father to prison. They took him to Kosovo,
to the mountain Prokletije (The Damned Mountain), where the prisoners had to cut down Christmas trees. My brother, when I asked him, explained to me what it means to be damned. It was
a true endeavour when my mother, who had never travelled in her life, packed together ham and
bacon, made a big parcel, and went to visit him. I
wondered how she got to Prokletije at all. Even
today I do not know how she climbed that mountain on her weak legs and at her age. Many people
from Kanjiža were there. That was how my adventure with literature started. I have always imagined
it as a boat that carries you on voyages, to adventure, to infinity. With literature you can swim out
of all the traps that life sets you.
• Let us not slide easily over the word “azure.” You
wrote that you were relieved when you realised that
the word was of Arabic origin, and not French as you
had previously thought, and, had that been correct,
there would not have been any sense in writing poetry after Valery and Mallarme, when they have such
a word as “azure” in their language.
Oto Tolnai: I deeply respect Valery. I love his essay
“Mediterranean Inspirations.” Luckily, Kolja
Mićević translated fantastically all of his verses and
his “Notebooks.” I was mesmerised by Valery’s
poetry. And by Rene Char, and Mallarme, Henri
Michaux and Ponge – this whole group means a
great deal to me. I am very connected to these
writers even today. And azure is important to me
in their context, just as far away places and travels
are. I believe that Michaux is maybe the greatest
philosopher of the 20th century. I find his philosophy really close to mine. I think that people haven’t been reading him enough. Deleuze, referring to Foucault’s book on Michaux, speaks about
him in an interesting way. I believe that a man,
who finds himself trapped and closed in any country, has to seek the roads that lead toward the exit
of this enclosure. Deleuze calls these roads that
are exits “roads to refuge.” I call those roads “exits
to the sea.” Every poet must have his exit to the
sea. One must have one’s own territorial waters.
Later, when I was seriously dealing with literature, I constructed my own world, my own water
system, my geography. From the Tisa to the Adriatic Sea. It is absurd that I, who was born on the
Tisa and have spoken my entire life about the
Adriatic Sea, live by this lake, the little Palić,
which is also called the Bloody Lake. I have my
own water world, my system of waters, my geography. And so I touched the sea, maybe just
because of “azure” did I start early on to working
with the visual arts.
• You were involved with Symposion, later on Új Symposion. In your book Lard Poet you said that you
considered yourself to be the focal point of that
group. How much did the position of editor fulfil you,
and what were your criteria for publishing someone’s
work?
Oto Tolnai: We lived, our entire group, as if we
were magnetised. It was joint work, but also joint
living, great friendship. As Editor-in-Chief, when
I read a manuscript, if it “hit” me, I would feel that
magnetism, I would feel vibrations that shine.
That was what we required from literature, and
when we got this, we would be immensely happy. I remember, on one occasion, Katalin Ladik
sent us her poems. I always went to the office,
took envelopes from the in tray and went to
meet Domonkos in the pub. We opened the envelopes and read. And so we opened Katika’s
envelope, and I remember that, when I read the
first line, I shivered as if I had grabbed an electrified wire. I showed it to Domonkos and he immediately felt that she was one of us. Symposion
was then a supplement and we published her
poems right away, we had these two pages, and
she was in the middle, in the central position.
When we felt something like that, we would give
this person a central position in the supplement.
Later on we did it in the magazine too. We published many new names, a number of new generations. It was a completely new literature and
more than the half of these people remained in
literature.
48
• You left Novi Sad in the early 1990s and ended up
in Palić in the “sandcastle.” The places where you
used to live in, the streets and houses, have had a
special place in your poetics. In your novel Seashell,
it is your native Kanjiža. Before that you had published a book Cvećarska Street 3, which was your
address in the Telep part of Novi Sad for a long time.
In the novel Lard Poet you wrote a lot about Palić
49
When the war started I used to get sarcastic letters like: “there, you can have your seaside now,”
or “where is your sea now?” But the fact that one
country has created a few countries once again
provides a certain width. I do not feel that I have
lost any cultural horizons, because I still have the
same attitude towards the literature of those
countries and the arts that emanate from them.
I almost delve deeper into those arts than into
the art of Hungarian artists and painters. For example, Dragojević and Šalamun are just as important to me as some of the best Hungarian
poets are. n
/
N OVA M I SAO
Oto Tolnai: I imagined literature as something
belonging to the world, something adventurous
and infinite. I needed something as a counterpoint, so the local was important to me. One side
of me had to be anchored locally. My fundament
has always been this little world I lived in, and
which I processed rigorously and microscopically. In Novi Sad it was Cvećarska Street 3, which
was near a dead-end train railway. War was then
at hand here (in Serbia) and I felt as if I was in a
dead-end street, with no way out. As I studied
the sea when I was young and starting to work
on literature, I established as a category the delta, of a flowing into huge spaces. In Cvećarska
Street I became enclosed in my own world. But
I often went to that dead-end railway, at the end
of my street, where there was a junkyard -warehouse; like Šejka, who I knew, and who we had
published and translated, I started classifying
things. One day at this junkyard I found a train
schedule bound in a blue casing. I called it “The
Azure Express Schedule,” because I remembered
Klara Tolnai, a famous Hungarian actress who
had acted in the film Azure Express. I felt that if I
accepted that I was in a dead end street, if I started approaching everything there and classifying
things, then these things would start opening,
/
and this house, about the Bloody Lake you have
come to live nearby. How much do the places, and
spaces, you live in mean to you?
There were different periods. Kontz Istvan was
most important to us. That was when Vojvodinian
Hungarian literature became complex. The biggest problem with national minority literature is
(and the same is valid for political life) that it is
one-dimensional. It has one centre, one concept,
and then you become its slave. When I was starting to work in literature I felt as if I was enclosed
in something, the same as if you were physically
enclosed within a space. I could never stand such
a concept. I had to demolish, to explode it in order
to let various concepts show themselves. Today I
appreciate authors I would write about then in a
negative tone, whom I argued with, but I think
that it was important to change this, to destroy
this closed, one-sided model. Different literary
groups and streams must have their own space.
You can’t have everything under one roof. There
are not many national minority literatures which
are disparate, as is the case with Hungarian literature. It isn’t so big in numbers, but it is really varied and rich, which is its true value.
as if the estuaries would widen. Only then would
I have the capacity to engulf wider spaces. We
left Novi Sad and moved on to Palić, where my
Jutka is from. I thought I would continue writing
with a new, different concept, but we started
renovating this house that was made of slag,
which turns to sand easily when touched, and I
called it “sandcastle.” I enclosed myself within
this house as if it were a fortress where my wife
and I could live with many animals. I slowly started to examine the street where we lived and I
realised that it had a railway station on one end
and a cross called St. Orban’s Cross. St. Orban is
the patron saint of viticulturists. And there were
fewer and fewer trains at that station, and now
there is only one local train that comes by very
rarely, so this street and the railway are slowly
becoming dead-end, and I am, as it happens,
exactly at that point. At the other end of the
street is a graveyard and the big Palić Lake, which
is dead. Politicians are constantly lying to us that
they are doing something that they will do something about it, but the lake is in a horrible state.
There is also a little Palić Lake, also known as the
Bloody Lake. And, again, with the house made
of sand, the dead end railway and the lake, I have
built my own intimate topography. And yet I am
still building my, as Deleuze says, roads of refuge.
To make a dead-end railway become an estuary,
I have invested a lot of energy, during all those
years of getting to the sea via Hungary and finding my places there. When my poetry collection
was published in Slovenian, I asked if I could stay
in Ljubljana a bit longer. One part of the week I
spent in Piran where you can find excellent galleries, just as you can in Kopar, where my childhood friend, and my right hand man from the
time of Symposion, was the deputy mayor and I
spent time with him. And so, I managed to find
my escape to the seaside via Slovenia. And I
found my exit there. In Croatia we used to go to
Hvar, to a little town called Zavala, and in Montenegro to a place near Perast.
/ Photo: Aleksandar Kamasi /
When we take a book in our hands, it has to
intrigue us. Even when we are repelled by it, it can
capture us. I believe that my stories represent
some sort of search, but I don’t think that the
result of each search has to be something found.
Can we find the truth at all, and how many truths
there are? When we read, we are not seeking the
truth of that book, but something else – either
that it changes us, or that we enjoy it. Or both.
Jovica Aćin, author
Translating Oneself from
an Unknown Language
Photo: Aleksandar Kamasi
Without imagination a man cannot imagine what evil is. Only someone with
imagination can recognise evil. Imagination is also what keeps one from
doing evil. Nobody is immune to evil.
J
ovica Aćin, a storyteller and an essayist born
in Zrenjanin in 1946, stated, upon receiving the
Sreten Marić Award for his essays, that he lived his
essays. He was being awarded for his book Naked
Storyteller, published by the Literary Municipality
of Vršac. Last year, The Official Gazette publishing
house launched an edition of this book that has
been “yet further improved with additions,” in
which Aćin, the storyteller, follows his usual instincts, as he loves to “turn things inside-out.” And
so in the book you can read a story which will
actually be told to you by the very book The Ocean
Estuary itself. Yes, the collection of that name was
published last year by Geopoetika, but Aćin
thought: why must only he write, why can’t the
book of stories have something to say about its
author and itself?
Apart from the Sreten Marić Award for essays,
which are to him “a view of another from the
heart,” he has also received the following awards:
the Andrić Award, The Golden Sunflower Vital
Award, the Todor Manojlović, Dušan Vasiljev,
Stanislav Vinaver awards and others.
You do translations from English, French and German. How did you learn those languages, how did
you become proficient?
I learned the German language in Germany; the
Goethe Institute gave me a stipend. I generally
used stipends for study residences in France to
learn the French language. I learned English at the
Belgrade Institute for Languages and then for a
short time in London. Almost on my own. I did not
receive any assistance from local institutions. The
only assistance I received was from European
foundations. I love reading, so when I had read
everything I had wanted to read here in my native
country, I had nothing else to do but to read
books in other languages. This powerful need
naturally expanded my knowledge of languages.
• But translation is artistic activity to you, is it not?
Translating is by all means creative. In translating
a novel, it is as if you are writing it all anew in your
language. True, you have a blueprint before you.
But it is like you are the co-author of the original
text. I translated Kafka, but it seemed to me as if I
was writing together with him. I adore good translators because I read translations as if they are
originals in Serbian. For years I have been cooperating with one such translator. Her name is Aleksandra Mančić; she translated Cervantes’s Don
Quixote, and this translation is the latest and the
best translation of the book. She has also translated Julio Cortazar, one of the greatest authors of
the 20th century, but one who is very difficult to
translate. Translation is a sort of alchemy, mystique, a way of going out into the world and being
in the world. I would love to write a book which
would be a translation, actually. Maybe what I
write is a translation, because I translate myself
from an unknown language. In that regard, the
error margin can only be small. If I made too big
a mistake in such a translation I would feel it as if
I was damaging life. That is why the art of storytelling is linguistically precise like poetry, and it
requires the grandeur of a Romanesque history.
This is an art of quick moves, an art of delving and
reduction.
• Yet your books are, as Novica Tadić once put it regarding your Walks on the Roof with Kafka’s Drawings, always a bit of a surprise, always some sort of
a discovery; I would mention here Fortune-telling
from the Ash. You published this book about displacement and camps in 1993, and last year this
book was released in its third edition in Zagreb. Can
evil be defined?
Yes, that is one of my books which attracted the
most attention. And it deserves it because of the
topic. In it, you can find mixed elements of essays
and storytelling. Still, it is an essay, but a dramatic
one, just as what the book says is dramatic; it is
about survival in extreme conditions. Yes, it is also
about evil.
Without imagination a man cannot imagine what
evil is. Only someone with imagination can recognise evil. Imagination is also what keeps one
from doing evil. Nobody is immune to evil. This
line I was speaking about in the book Fortune-telling from the Ash is not the line that separates
things into classes, peoples, but is a line that goes
through our soul and our heart. Alexander
Solzhenitsyn knows this better than anyone
through his Gulag Archipelago. I published this
book as an editor-in-chief at a time when it was
banned in all of the countries of so-called real-socialism. This work of Solzhenitsyn is probably my
greatest endeavour as editor-in-chief. However,
my Fortune-telling from the Ash is different; it goes
52
I cannot remember when I last used the term
postmodern, nor can I remember that I have ever
seen myself as a postmodernist. I know something about it and I have recently replied to Aleksandar Gatalica, when he stated that I was the first
local postmodernist, that I am not, and that I actually don’t know. I have always cared about innovation, about thinking up the new in the text,
both regarding the contents and the form. And
then I came to understand the necessity of irony,
which in postmodernism had become more important and more expressive than ever before.
Irony can be discovering. It provides us with an
opportunity for different perspectives of the
world, of others and of the self.
But I have discovered it! In the end you will see
that the estuary is within us. [he laughs]
• The very book seems like a wondrous search and
the reader finds himself in a maze of stories which
lead him to the estuary, or, as you say it, toward one’s
self. You have said that “being able to be lost is a part
of the art of escapology.” What is, for you, reading,
writing, the book itself?
When we take a book in our hands, it has to intrigue us. Even when we are repelled by it, it can
53
• Precisely because of innovations in the text, your
toying with words, some people consider you our
first postmodern author. Do you see yourself that
way?
• And to this interview to a close; in one of your stories
from The Ocean Estuary you tell the story of a library
where people do not exchange books, but rather
books, bound to tables and desks, exchange people
who read them. Is there a book that you would be
willing to be bound to with unbreakable chains?
I change my answer to that question every ten
years. There is always such a book, and I would
love it to be the book of life, at least of my life. But
I do not love being bound with unbreakable
chains. Then I would feel as if I would die the next
day. I love reading, just as I love writing, that which
bolsters my feeling that I was born only yesterday,
and that of my own choosing. n
N OVA M I SAO
But enough about that book. I have recently finished a new one, Gospel of the Donkey, which can
be read both as an extension of my meanderings
and as a linked chain of new everyday wonders
which warm our hearts. Warm them, yet sometimes mercilessly burn them. I believe I will publish it in Novi Sad.
/
• As you have now mentioned “places far away,” your
latest book is probably dedicated to such places for
the most part. The publisher stated that it is “geopoetic” in the true sense. It is as if the stories in it follow
paths from here to the ocean. Its title, The Ocean
Estuary, which reminds us of the fact that the Atlantic Ocean was called just the Ocean, seems incredible, because, how is it that any ocean can have an
estuary?
capture us. I believe that my stories represent
some sort of search, but I don’t think that the result of each search has to be something found.
Can we find the truth at all, and how many truths
there are? When we read, we are not seeking the
truth of that book, but something else – either
that it changes us, or that we enjoy it. Or both. So,
this book is a searching. It would love to be such
a one as life itself is but a search... Regardless of
what the aim is, it is the search that is important.
The search is a part of life and those who write
actually point to the search. We cannot understand this life without searching. It is a very elusive
thing. Literature and art give us the magic of the
elusiveness of all the possible truths in life and
what we are in the world. What literature says cannot be thought of. It is not a philosophical topic.
It can only be told. I am trying to worry less about
the soul and more about the shapes. The forms of
that search are our legacy. This is what I myself
can leave behind and say: “I want to find a different form if it is possible.” One does not do it consciously, it is pure instinct. Art seeks a form that
will evoke our common quest.
deep into the issues of the meaning of things, of
the horrible, and into the issues of witnessing and
writing when everything that makes writing is
annulled. To cut the long story short, maybe we
are not in a position to define evil, because it can
change its essence and appearance from one moment to another, but it is not impossible for us to
learn how to do it harm.
Ah, that is a long story and cannot be told in a few
words. Yes, I do have two such books: the first one
with the famous Ljuba Popović and the other with
the relatively unknown graphic artist Milenko Miletić. With paintings I feel like a fish in water. Paintings have always inspired me and they bring me
a story. When I see a good painting I tell it: “Painting, talk to me!” And it does. Recently, it happened
to me with Cézanne s painting Afternoon in Naples. Because of it, and because of some other
things, I travelled to Naples. And to me this deadly city became irresistible. Now the story that
Cézanne told me, whose title is “Tell Me about It,”
appears in The Ocean Estuary.
/
• Apart from the various authors appearing in your
stories, other artists also emerge, painters. You have
even made joint bibliophile projects with painters.
What draws you to them?
A surprise factor is very important and can be very
effective in every composition. I really tried to give
a fine little surprise to my music, an interesting
musical twist, so that people can have a fine
sensation rather than be stressed. It is all about
highlighting the emotional tension in music
Zoran Mulić, composer
Music Coming
from the Heart
Interviewer: Borko Hložan
My process of thinking about a musical piece takes time, and when I feel that
the idea about the composition is ripe, the technical bit of writing music ends
quite soon. I cannot start working on a new piece until I feel a deep need to do it.
Z
oran Mulić, a composer from Novi Sad, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Department of
Composition and finished his master studies in the
class of the eminent composer and professor, Rudolf Bruči. After his graduation he started working
professionally, first in the Serbian National Theatre
and at the Academy of Fine Arts. After this, in 1984,
Mulić became the conductor of the Radio Novi Sad
Grand Tamburitza Orchestra, which he led for some
fifteen years, having made successful concerts and
tours and having written arrangements for the tamburitza orchestras and writing compositions for
them. After he finished working with the orchestra
he started working with top amateur Subotica Tamburitza Orchestra and had exceptional results both
locally and globally, among them, triumphant concerts at the International Music Festival in Nerpelt,
Belgium, and a very successful tour of Israel.
• What leads you and what are you aiming for when
you start writing a new piece?
I can never just sit down to write music, only to
write. There are many composers who have to sit
down and write something. I do things differently: my process of thinking about a musical piece
takes time, and when I feel that the idea about the
composition is ripe, the technical bit of writing
music ends quite soon. I cannot start working on
a new piece until I feel a deep need to do it. As for
my approach to composing, since I was born here,
in Vojvodina I have been trying to reconcile the
principles and achievements of contemporary
music and the inspiration emanating from the
tradition of this area.
• Such an approach has provided interesting results
and innovativeness, which stood out in your compositions for tamburitza orchestras. You had an unusual
way of using percussions, vocal sections which would
not be expected in that context. It seems that ever
since you were a student you aimed for experimenting
in the domain of form and musical expression.
A surprise factor is very important and can be very
effective in every composition. I really tried to give
a fine little surprise to my music, an interesting
musical twist, so that people can have a fine sensation rather than be stressed. It is all about highlighting the emotional tension in music. If I was
doing music for the ballet “Picker”, and it takes
place in Vojvodina, it seems most natural to insert
the sound of tamburitsa there. Of course, it is just
an obvious detail, en element that does not prevail here, but in the very musical foundation, certain motives are present from old folk songs, national dances, connected to this area here, but
they have been incorporated and hidden within
the musical tissue. The same goes for the ballet
“Forever Batchelor”, there is a moment when Šamika returns from abroad, from Italy, and they
stop him and ask him what he learned there, and
he says that he learned how to dance tarantella.
So if somebody wonders why tarantella was introduced to the ballet, this was the reason. I mean,
there is nothing more logical, if it is connected to
a dance, I took the recognisable Rossini’s tarantella, which I processed and composed a modern
version. The melodies are the same but as for the
harmony, it is completely bitonal or treated as
polytonal, so that tarantella has this completely
different dimension. When I was composing music for tamburitza, the “Through Time” composition, to be precise, the topic of which is actually a
return to the past, where music brings us back.
The composition starts from the twentieth century, and it is only normal that aleatoricism is used,
56
• Another key segment of your work as a composer
is writing music for the stage. How difficult it was for
you, as a composer, to adapt to particular requirements when writing ballet music?
Stage music is very delicate because a composer
has to work on a literary piece, on a libretto, which
defines what is going on the stage. That is why you
are limited as the author of the music and have
boundaries within which you have to move about.
But it is within that space that a composer has unlimited freedom to do anything. Of course, music
has to give a sound basis and to accompany what
is happening onstage. So when I was writing music for the “Picker”, where Maljčika appears in one
of the first scenes, where the music has to show
her character, you cannot write heavy music there.
You have to give music a certain character, to use
sound to show how lucid this protagonist is, but
also naive. So, within this frame, you have to create
music which will suit this character and libretto
57
• What are your plans for the future? Are you working
on some new pieces?
For the near future I have planned to do some important things in connection to the composition
and for conducting. In the first place, I started working again on a new composition of spiritual music.
I’ll go slowly and see where it leads, but I will surely in a forthcoming period finish a new piece of
spiritual music. Then, it is my great desire to do a
set of solo songs for the symphonic orchestra and
voice in the Roma language which will be finished
this year and which will be sung by my daughter
Ivana. And for a very long time I wanted to realise
my idea of twenty-five years – to write an opera.
Last September I found an exquisite libretto, so
now I am going through one period of pondering,
preparing and thinking of what to write. n
/
I have to say that people who lived in this area
during the past fifty to sixty years have been deprived of one sort of music – the spiritual music.
Everybody knows that many of the most important pieces of music written by famous composers
were church music pieces, and that the spiritual
music is one very important segment of art music,
if not the overwhelming one. And I don’t know
what happened here and how it happened, but
somehow, at one moment in my life I felt I had to
work on this sort of music to write a spiritual piece.
I just said that I belong to the people that was for
centuries pushed to the margins of society. Thanks
to the coincidences, and the fact that we live
where we live, in Novi Sad and Vojvodina, in the
environment where the Roma, Gypsies have a certain status in the society, above all thanks to the
efforts of a great Roma author, the late Trifun
Dimić, it happened so that divine service works
were translated into Roma. Fifteen years ago, a
liturgy in the Roma language was held in the Roma
language, which still was not complete – some
parts were sung in Roma, but most was sung in
Serbian. So this musical part was not done until
the end, and I felt deeply that I had to do this – to
N OVA M I SAO
Life carried me to the gate of the tamburitza orchestra and I have to be completely frank and say
that I was mesmerised by the colour of the sound.
Precisely for this I dedicated a good part of my
creativity to tamburitza music, working in this
field both as a conductor and a composer, so later
on I wrote many compositions for the tamburitza
orchestras. This was a long time ago, twenty-five
years ago, in 1984, and I immediately realised that
tamburitza music was at that time on the level of
national romanticism. My idea was to introduce
new techniques and composition elements into
tamburitza music. I started writing not knowing
where it would lead. So, I unconsciously introduced certain techniques into many compositions, which was great novelty in that sense. Those
elements were, of course, nothing new in classical
music, but in the domain of tamburitza music, it
was really something new.
• Two years ago your Liturgy was performed, as the
first piece of Orthodox Christian church music to the
text written in the Roma language.
write a complete liturgy in the Roma language.
And that was how I got to write the first complete
liturgy in the Roma language based on the books
of prayer translated by Trifun Dimić. I must say that
I was working on this liturgy for four to five years
because I was not strictly bound to deadlines. It
was more like, when I felt that the time had come
to write down a prayer that I had thought of in my
head, I would put it on paper. At that I could only
imagine that my liturgy be sung by the “Glinka”
choir from St. Peterburg. Circumstances and the
God’s will made it possible for me to get in touch
with this ensemble, through the kindness of Svetislav Nićetin who had good connections with this
choir, and they really did sing at the premiere of
my Liturgy in Almaška Church in Novi Sad on 12
October 2010 and everyone present said how
magnificent this music and spiritual event it was.
/
• A very important part of your overall oeuvre is music
for tamburitza. You did fantastic things with the Radio
Novi Sad Tamburitza Orchestra. You reached heights
with it in the history of tamburitza music. How do you
perceive the development of the music for tamburitza
and how do you perceive your part in it?
frames, and within it, you can use your means of
expression, whether it will be one or another type
of composition techniques, or whether it will be
based on harmonious relations, on melodious relations, how you will solve that, how you will show
her mischievous nature and desire to seduce
everybody, to be the focal point around which
everything evolves, depends on the composer.
which is a totally chaotic sound situation. Then we
go back to baroque and are met with calming
down and with the typical expressions of that period. But when I was writing this, I can say this
now, this symphonic poem “Omnia Vincit Amor”
or “Love Conquers Everything”, where, from a chaotic state in which I used certain serielle technique, I ended up in a pure major-minor system,
because you can’t speak about cluster structures
and sharp dissonances.
I always say: as long as I work I will be alive.
And if I don’t work I will wilt like a plant. That is
my destiny. Just work. If there is no theatre I will
do anything, just to keep on working. I don’t want
to relax. It is probably what gives me vitality,
even at this age.
Mira Banjac, actress
Upright – My Life
and My Approach to it
I love my audience. I have always respected the audience. I have always
stood before them like a soldier.
there very often, as if it were our own house. We
met very famous actors there. On one occasion I
met Simone Signoret. She was such an exceptional person! Her eyes were like iodine, she had two
double chins, but she was somebody, and that
radiated from her direction every moment. When
she appeared at the door, you knew it was somebody important.
• The BITEF theatre festival was also held in Atelje 212.
Mira Banjac: Yes, in this Atelje with this unimpressive little pub, really dowdy, but everyone came
there, the BITEF guests and the others. They all
came to that horrible place, it had a really special
atmosphere. These were wonderful years for me,
but I would not have had them, had it not been
for the previous 20 years in Novi Sad. Novi Sad is
my home port and I have to say that I do not feel
sorry for spending a single day here.
• To round-up the first Novi Sad period – you always
seem to point out that at that time things were extremely well-organised for artists. In what sense?
Y
ou live only when you work. At the celebration
of your anniversary, you were the happiest when you
saw the screenplay of Beli Lavovi that Lazar Ristovski
had brought for you.
Mira Banjac: I always say: as long as work I will be
alive. And if I don’t work I will wilt like a plant. That
is my destiny. Just work. When I moved from Belgrade to Novi Sad, they all said: “Oh, you’ve just
started doing films... if you go to Novi Sad it will
all stop.” I told them that it wouldn’t, because
work is where I am. And it was just like I said. I have
been working full throttle for all these twenty
years since I moved back to Novi Sad after that
Belgrade period of 28 years. I have worked at the
same pace, if not greater. If they need you, they
will find you even at a farmstead, but if not you
can live in the centre of the centre, and the phone
will not ring. This is simply the nature of our work
actors. It depends on need and is not something
that you can plan on.
• What were your experiences at the beginning of
your career?
Mira Banjac: For the first twenty years I did not
work in the film industry at all. At that time it was
lottery, as to whether you would play in a film. It
went without saying who the film actresses were
– Milena Dravić, Neda Arnerić, Božidarka Frajt –
they were the real film actresses. I was introduced
to film rather late, so I mastered the radio. We
worked a lot on the radio and it is a tremendous
medium for which I have great respect. The radio
taught me how to speak, how to speak well. And
this was really important to me throughout my
entire career. When I moved to Belgrade, everyone was wondering how it was that I did not have
the typical Vojvodinian drawl, since I came from
there. This was thanks to radio.
• Until 1981, the Serbian National Theatre was in the
building of the Scout’s Hall, where the Youth Theatre
is situated now.
Mira Banjac: At that time there was an excellent
cultural policy. The entire class, completely, would
go to a small theatre in Vojvodina and play there
for a year – to spend a year together. My class
spent a year in Sremska Mitrovica. This proved to
be a very good opportunity because we had a
chance to put into practice all the work that we
had learned in the state acting school. We should
Mira Banjac: That is true, and my entire career
before my move to Belgrade was marked by that
building. Even today I am very excited when I enter that building. When the new building was finished, I was already working for Atelje 212 theatre
in Belgrade. And so, I am not attached to the new
building, where the Serbian National Theatre is
now. I loved the old Building, and the old Ben Akiba Theatre, or the Novi Sad Theatre, as it is called
today.
• In the monograph that was edited by Zoran Maksimović, there is a very nice photograph of Mira
Trailović and you in Paris, and it is from that golden
period of Atelje 212. How important is that period
for you?
Mira Banjac: Very. I remember that we went to
Paris because Mira had established a friendship
with the L’Espace Pierre Cardin Theatre. It was a
wonderful house, with a theatre in the centre,
fashion shops below, and the purpose of the entire house was to promote art. We used to go
60
have stayed there for two years, but I married after a year and had a son, so the Serbian National
Theatre “took” me back to Novi Sad. That was the
time of decrees. However, they took care about
everything.
• The role of Marija in the series of the same title was
a really grand one. It is worth mentioning that you
were just beginning to work in Atelje 212, and Mira
Trailović let you go to film for eight months.
Mira Banjac: That is the grandeur of Mira Trailović.
Mira knew what popularity meant to an actor,
what film brings as a medium. She would let you
go, but if you had a play to do, you had to come
no matter where you were, from Mars if need be,
with a helicopter, whatever, she didn’t care. You
had to be there. I was shooting Marija for a year,
and the contract stated that I could not leave the
filming at all, as it was the main role. I didn’t even
go home for the holidays. Mira let me do Marija,
giving me a one-year unpaid leave. That was the
only way. And she still paid all the taxes and health
insurance for a year, which meant a lot. That was
her grandeur.
• And are you sorry about a role that you have never
played?
Mira Banjac: Yes, there is a role. Only one. That
is the character of Gospa Nola from the Chronicles of a Small Town Graveyard by Isidora Sekulić.
I remember that Mihiz wanted me to do it. He
was telling me to do it at the time, to get ready
for Gospa Nola. And I was reading that book, going deep into the character, getting ready. There
was not a single playwright who would touch
Isidora’s Chronicles. That is what I am sorry about.
I did play Isidora, a monodrama To Think or To
Live, and I was awarded for this role at the Monodrama Festival. I was not interested so much in
the literary Isidora per say, because they have
already been much talked about and are wellknown. No. Rather, I was interested in where Isidora the woman had hidden. I heard from Mihiz,
and he had been spending time with her, that
she, in her last days, used to write using an easel
that she kept in front of her and that she held her
feet in cold water so she would not fall asleep. I
had this scene in my monodrama. That was it – to
write until the last. I knew rather curious things
about her, about the woman who had hidden,
and who was deeply within herself a woman. I
wanted to peek into that depth, and find that
woman within her. And I managed. I found her
while I was reading her book A Book of Deep Devotion to Njegoš – this book hides such an Isidora.
I found out her feminine passions. They were
literary shaded, but those who could read between the lines could find them. I have read all
of her books. And I have also read the complete
works of Veljko Petrović’s and many of our other
writers. Now I want to read something by Svetlana Velmar Janković. I have this impulse to read
everything that she has written. n
/
N OVA M I SAO
/
• After 60 years in the business, what is your view on
popularity? The audience has always loved you, but
you have always pointed out that you appreciate the
audience for more than just this. You also called the
ceremony in the Serbian National Theatre “To Honour the Audience.”
Mira Banjac: Television creates careers for people
really quickly. It does not follow the step-by-step
procedure, as I have in my career. But television
also destroys careers with equal speed. Popularity comes and goes. You know what Isidora Sekulić
says – and I admire her a lot – she says:“popularity spoils fast.” It is a perishable good. You can become a star overnight, and then you are gone.
Popularity is something to watch out for, especially when you are young. Popularity should come
with time. In this case, popularity works for you.
Mine is such a type of popularity. I am popular
among ordinary folk. I love my audience. I have
always respected the audience. I have always
stood before them like a soldier. Regardless of
where I act – in Obrenovac or in some American
city. The person who comes to the theatre, the
one that has bought a ticket, one such man who
is worthy in the audience is worthy of my effort.
You cannot fool the audience, not even one that
is theatrically illiterate. They have feelings, they
know exactly what they are receiving and what
they are not.
61
Risk is a determinant. Risk is creativity that
constantly constructs and reconstructs an activity
whatever it may be; or producing objects, giving
interviews, setting up exhibitions, stating your
political views – all of these are risky.
Živko Grozdanić Gera, visual artist
A Nuclear-powered Tank
Interviewer: Danijela Halda
Art is a simple generic term which denotes a number of objects represented
within a story called the history of art. The artist can be everything within
that history, if he wishes so; he can be a sensitive entrepreneur, a politician
or a realiser. In such an interaction of the artist and history, the spaces of
his operating expand from the spaces of a secret intimacy to an
economising with ideas, money and career. His story of art, that is,
of the misunderstandings within it, is sometimes perceived too cautiously
by art theoreticians.
I
n speaking of your beginnings, you often mention pieces that were made in the 1980s, while you
were a student at the Academy of Visual Arts in Sarajevo. During that period you realised and presented a number of events in the spirit of “body art” and
analytical and primary painting. Why was that cycle
so important to you?
Živko Grozdanić: When I look back after all these
years at those events or works that I often called
“tautological exercises”, it is important to understand that I was at the time a student of the 3rd
and 4th year at the academy. It was a very early
period in my dealing with art, and there was this
danger that an evident naïveté or expression in
those events would be seen as a tightened form
of art with a modest knowledge of the processual
painting and conceptual art. However, these
events performed in Sarajevo, especially Not a
Single Day without a Fight, operate on the idea of
body art exclusively in understanding one’s own
artistic practice, on the experience of working
with hundreds of small bits of paper, items, everyday waste materials, markers on various foundations and materials, after which the term “body
art” is seen not as a form of working with the human body in processual art, but as a specific way
of life in the process of that life which is given
every day.
• Not a Single Day without a Fight originated in Sarajevo in 1983 as a number of actions whereupon
I use the same technology of starting a fight, a
conflict, or excess, mostly about unimportant
things, just as local gangs do. For 30 days I meticulously engineered conflicts that culminated in
fights in the streets, cafes, trams, green markets,
parks and at the Academy – one on one – completely aware of all the potential consequences
that might be coming after the finished fight, that
is – pain, wounds, police reports. In Sarajevo, tens
of incidents took place every day, fights between
groups which were conceptualised in a specific
way into an anecdote, i.e. a poetic memento to be
retold afterwards. This was how local heroes were
made, who enjoyed all the privileges of public life,
especially the privilege of being placed in history.
To me it was a challenge, to use the same technology of starting a fight, normally about meaningless things, and to re-formulate the fight into a
tautological activity, ignoring the aesthetic or
non-artistic aspects of everyday life.
• As early as the 1980s, with a group of works called
Reduction I, Reduction II, Reduction III, you be-
came indifferent in regard to terms taken from traditional art history. These were pieces where you
precisely defined the relation between the expression
of the material and the place where work comes to
life, i.e. the object which endured the action of
“painting.” Such a view of the function of a piece of
work emanated from a different reading of events
in the field called art history. The transfer from gestalt structures to tautological, analytical structures
was a fundament of all of your future pieces, continuing into the present day. It means that they were
created in an altered understanding of the very term
“art history,” i.e., they had a completely different
function. Your work went towards the realms of politics, culture, and science.
Živko Grozdanić: Pieces realised during the period of 1983-1987 indicated conceptual mental
consequences, i.e., they were pieces in the spirit
of analytical and primary painting which questioned the limits, character and function of a media picture, sculpture or installation. Such an understanding and interest in minimal art resulted
in the realisation that the entire history of art is an
undisturbed tautological sequence and that the
events and terms within this sequence are placed
there continually. Of course, locating my work on
such a line of history is impossible, but if I decipher concrete pieces, those which I called “Allegories”- things I worked on from 1994 – 2004 – it
is obvious that their theoretical potential and
character changes depending on the angle of
perspective, on the “differences” at the time they
were made.
• Many people cannot understand the idea, that is,
the position of the Allegorians. What is the aim of the
idea of the Allegorians, if you could explain this position a bit?
Živko Grozdanić: On one occasion I wrote that
the term “artist” can be linked to the name of
Živko Grozdanić only if Živko Grozdanić is viewed
through the artistic discipline of a sculptor of allegoric objects. Maybe it would be better if we
said that Živko Grozdanić is, actually, an Allegorian or that he is, maybe, an allegory of an artist.
The allegorised Živko Grozdanić was an artist first,
but after a long, arduous and, above all, difficult
political work he was forced to leave the term that
used to define him as an artist and to become an
Allegorian. An Allegorian is not an allegorist – an
artist who creates the allegory, or the one who
uses allegory. No, he is rather a person similar to
an anthropologist who explored the status of
terms used in culture and art in the mid-twenties
of the last century. In the traditional artistic system, the Allegorians’ values have not been com-
64
• Do you find your work too intuitive?
Živko Grozdanić: Of course – exactly this finding;
that work alongside culture and the public eye, is
actually building the aesthetic of the intuitive.
Every sensuality, or fantasy, that is possible in
everyone who thinks that this builds art is like
spreading a carpet that will lead one to aesthetics.
If there is a fear of sensuality, fantasy and the unconscious, then one must use sound reason or
logic. I have annulled many of my works of art
because of this sensual intuitive character which
leads me into danger; maybe, I should abandon
my entire production during these 30 years and
65
• What made you to initiate the Geramuseum project? Could you tell the story behind the project
Geramuseum?
Živko Grozdanić: The idea of Geramuseum is a
perfectly logical response, a reaction after leaving
the Museum of Modern Art of Vojvodina. Its name
originates from the manners and methods which
forced me to resign from the position of the head
of that institution. The theme of my future work
• Does this mean that you are returning to the concept of “exhibiting practice as a cultural and political
strategy?” And what does this concept mean at a
moment when Serbia has been given the green light
to join the EU?
Živko Grozdanić: I have never left this concept;
on the contrary, I believe that I will radicalise it
even further through the activities of Geramuseum, especially in regard to criticising the political
structures which still hang on to national aesthetics. Our society is moving towards mythologizing the European Union, just as Serbian society was being devastated by the myth model in
the early nineties. Dangers of a new Serbian
political expressionism are evident regardless of
this green light. I will still adhere to active participation in the constitution of new institutions, in
which Geramuseum will provide consulting services. At this moment I am working on forming
a Contemporary Gallery Vršac, which will open
in January 2014, and am providing professional
assistance to The Manual Company from Novi
Sad, which is working on establishing a theoretical platform to build their museum in Novi Sad.
Both projects are based on the concept of exhibiting practice as a cultural and political strategy
that can be understood in two ways: as a utopia
or as reality. The events to follow will lead us to
think that art can make “the petrified world speak,
sing and dance!” n
/
Živko Grozdanić: Risk is a determinant. Risk is
creativity that constantly constructs and reconstructs an activity whatever it may be; or producing objects, giving interviews, setting up exhibitions, stating your political views – all of these are
risky. What is definitive is the decision I have made
to question my production, which is not called
producing works of art any longer. The Allegorian
produces them, not the artist, and that is the key
feature for me. Following the already set matrices,
many theoreticians and people who write about
art put my entire oeuvre into the world of art, culture, and politics, and have drawn certain conclusions. However, I have separated all of the previous works from myself and now I am watching
them from a distance which is by no means comfortable, from the distance of the critic of my
spent history. I am not someone who propagates
theories that an artist is the source of his work. An
artist is but a conductor of the energy of the society, wherein this society is deeply set in the individual and determines him. When, for example, I
perform my work Meteor Shower or Made in China,
I verify relations within a society; I make clear the
essence of that society, not my artistic privilege.
The process of this interpretation has to be freed
of the self. Allegory is a discrete form of extended
sensibility or deepened knowledge. A work of art
is still that, basically, but now it is its reinterpretation that can be a fairy-tale or a fable. An allegory
is a riddle which frees the author from art, hiding
confusion or the contradictory issues that I am
obsessed with daily.
N OVA M I SAO
• The idea of redefining works is risky. Did you refer
to the majority of your works as allegorical objects
or rational objects because of this?
in Geramuseum is my art practice, but now in my
private space. The epistemological causes or
mechanisms of why neo-avant-garde artists start
to use painting techniques in Vojvodina will be
analysed, those very strange mechanisms of removing that which has theoretically already been
accepted in Vojvodinian culture will be highlighted, the practice of radical criticism will be established, which reaffirms the values of art theory
and the culture of contemporary western aesthetics
and philosophy, and, of course, everything that is
based on the affirmation of the visual in Vojvodinian
art and culture will be reacted to. The question of
ideology is always the key one, not because art is
always connected to ideology, but because the
Vojvodinian scene shows a constant model of promoting personal feelings. So, Geramuseum is a
place from where curators’ practices will be oriented towards the observer who understands
aesthetic processes as the ultimate issue in ethics.
The ethical and political dimension of future projects in Geramuseum will be the priority of all of
the participants, those who understand the role
of art, particularly those artists who are focused
on changes within the alienated post-socialist
society, culture and art.
/
It is easy to find the theoretical standpoints of
Allegorians in these nifty constructions if one
knows of the attitudes and works of Cage,
Duchamp, Deleuze, Croce or many others who
interpreted the principles of the spirit contrary to
the ideas of advancing towards a sublime heaven,
which will leave all earthly and human possessions behind. But I must conclude that from the
position of Allegorians I still struggle on a daily
basis with the intuition I have to control, and this
is possible only if I oppose each day the abstractions of my intellect.
redefine it, divide it to the oeuvre of intuitive and
the oeuvre of logical works. Maybe on this logically formulated side there will not be a single
piece. Still, I am not going to allow for one oeuvre
to be set into art history if it is expressive or intuitive. This model of intuitive artistic practices
is dominant today. It has been made popular
thanks to new capacities the Internet offers and
its endless virtual spaces filled with such art, i.e.
aesthetics.
pletely expressed, primarily because of an insufficient understanding of the artist-anthropologist
who had lonely, ascetically analysed values that
made sense and contexts of art and culture. If we
remove the term “artist” from the current contradictions in the world of art and culture, than we
have to replace him with an artist-anthropologist,
and if we don’t have him either, then we must
place an Allegorian in the position to realise this
difficult task. An Allegorian always works within
a world that he creates himself. This world is just
ostensibly a part of history and art. It is above all
just the world of an Allegorian; it can only be approached by him, and the existing system of evaluating art and culture cannot understand it. That
is why an Allegorian produces objects that are the
fruit of a strenuous physical and intellectual studying of contemporary social relations and situations in communities, the status of which is constantly illogically interweaving and multiplying.
An Allegorian does similar things to what conceptual artists did in the last century, those that
worked with ideas; he analyses his own ideas and
turns them into an allegoric presentation through
material. For an Allegorian, the idea is the material of artistic expression, but it is also the bunch of
material that hides the idea, and in this sense it
helps it to survive immersed in the form. This value of the Allegorians’ work is the same as for the
work of Joseph Kosuth.
Maybe this is my last interview. Why? Because
I have had it with lying. I have had it with this game
of uncovering and covering myself again. Every
interview is this – an attempt to show ourselves
in a certain way, to form our own character, i.e.,
to put on a mask and hide ourselves. This problem
of counterfeiting is the fundamental problem
of language.
Slobodan Tišma, author
The Allure of Fire
Interviewer: Nataša Gvozdenović
Photo: Aleksandar Kamasi
Without Eros there is no creation, he is older than all the gods, maybe even
than God himself. Subliming energy, its transposition and elevation, is in
the fundament of every creative act. It is a story as old as the world
I
t is my impression, when I look at what you
have created so far, that Bernardi’s Room was some
sort of a turning point, that it really possessed a different kind of transformation, of your inner self. How
do you perceive your developmental road? If we start
from the beginning?
Slobodan Tišma: I have to say that I am at the
threshold of some sort of transformation, but who
knows what sort, considering my age. Of course,
each transformation is some sort of an illusion, it
seems to us, or it seems to others that we change,
when in fact we are always the same; it is the indestructible “I” or “nobody,” which stands in the
non-existing centre of each human being. Maybe
this is my last interview. Why? Because I have had
it with lying. I have had it with this game of uncovering and covering myself again. Every interview is this – an attempt to show ourselves in a
certain way, to form our own character, i.e., to put
on a mask and hide ourselves. This problem of
counterfeiting is the fundamental problem of language. Gumeni Jovica Asasin knows it well, he has
written books on this problem. The more we try
to be honest, to open ourselves, the more we lie.
Such is the nature of language. Telling lies is the
only sin of the Ten Commandments which cannot
be avoided. It is even the greatest sin, worse than
murder; each murder is preceded by a lie, so that
the lie is the basic cause of evil, and as such it is
the cause of murder – the most horrible human
act. However, there is the diametrically opposite
opinion that murder, or suicide, is the utmost act
of liberation, thus an act of truth, “... and murder
cures all, it is the only truth.” This is a quotation
from The Diary of Charnoyevich. Behind it all there
stands, there thunders, this hatred towards a character, hatred of others, but also self-hatred, hatred
towards one’s own character, towards sameness,
identity, this dark instinct for self-destruction. Being someone with a name and surname is horrid.
And yet, not having a name is so boring and monotonous, maybe even scary. Symbolically, writing
is annulling, i.e., killing or suicide, it is the only
truth, but the truth is that there is no truth, so we
are left with being merciful, that is, with forgery,
to lie although this lie can lead, or does lead, to
the worst. But there are white lies, small lies, which
is the lying of the lying, some sort of travesty, and
this inflicts only light wounds, scratches, but it
does not lead to annulment, it just covers things
up. In a way, I do that, I write this way. I hurt others,
I hurt myself, but I do not kill. Is this comforting?
This is just superficial writing, the scribbling of
which I am babbling about. I am a scribbler, doodler, without an iota of false modesty. This is the
sad misconception in which I have been rotting
almost all of my artistic life. Nothing has changed
there, I think I was aware of it right away, at the
very beginning. But I have changed, I have tumbled, both as a human being and as an artist. My
first metamorphosis was in puberty, of course. I
had a very difficult experience, I was on the edge,
but I pulled through, somehow, without anyone’s
assistance. But this was a valuable experience.
When you are young you can withstand a lot. As
68
69
• About the fire necessary to write and the mystical
participation that allows entry into a different reality? About the thing for which one lives and, of
course, creates?
/
N OVA M I SAO
/
contrary, you are sustained by joy, because you
are young, you have nothing and you represent
nothing – just sheer joy without reason. Also, as
an artist I changed fields; I started at nine as a
poet, as a teenager I was into music, I started
learning the violin, then when I was in my twenties I went back to poetry, then I was a conceptualist, then a rock musician, then a punk musician,
then back to literature, briefly back to poetry and
then I ended up as a fiction porker. And these
changes are life-creating, refreshing and reincarnating. Of course it is not lucrative because
you are not respected; you are looked at as a jack
of all trades, someone who is not serious. But
why would you be respected, it is so simple and
tedious.
Gerard de Nerval said in his famous sonnet, or
rather thought: “My victories were twice over
Aheront.” And, indeed, after ten years or so I went
into another crisis and got out again, but this time
with someone’s help. I survived the discovery of
the other, the experience of difference at the edge
of a crevasse, that which is not me, but someone
else, completely strange to my own self. At first
the fear was immense, but I kept my composure
and rational, which saved me. I began to see the
world with different eyes. I think that this was the
moment when I was born as an artist. This experience, the temptation, helped me also to keep a
sense of independence from anything, and to act
this way in life. To function outside institutions, to
live on the margins, is a privilege. Of course it is
not easy, but there is always a way, as long as you
are not prone to melancholy or feelings of inferiority, or feeling resented, this immense stupidity
that most unrealised artists suffer from. On the
Slobodan Tišma: Without Eros there is no creation, he is older than all the gods, maybe even
than God himself. Subliming energy, its transposition and elevation, is in the fundament of every
creative act. It is a story as old as the world. The
all-imbuing fire is both creative and destroying.
Everything emanates from fire and will expire in
it. If there is no fire within you, you will never write
something exciting. But one should not play with
fire; it has two faces, it heats, but it scorches as
well, it gives light, but it also blinds. Why did Helderlin go mad? Why did Borges go blind? Apollo’s
arrows are dangerous, arrows forged by his brother on his father’s side, Hephaestus, the volcano.
Am I exaggerating? Are these cases appropriate?
Why is writing dangerous and dear? Or is it better
to say that writing used to be this way. I am just
scribbling, stealing a little, hoping that I will be
mildly punished, maybe even pardoned. This definition of “mystical participation” was taken from
science, from anthropology, was coined, I suppose, by Levy-Bruhl, but it is very convenient to
use when we try to define the communication
between the creator and the consumer, between
the author and the reader. One can ask a question:
what do we expect from literature? Is it to provide
us with knowledge, a bit of information, to satisfy
our curiosity? Of course this is not the aim of true
literature. And this is why Dan Brown and people
similar to him are bad writers, why Hubert Selby
is a true righter and Dan Brown is not, although
he could not care less about it. The aim of every
true literature is to offer us the original experience
of the author. But experience of what? Of anything! Of everything? (I am complicating now.
Things are now complicating dangerously.) Of
course the question is whether the reader will
reach the author. If he or she manages to live
through the original writer’s experience, to participate, then we have this “mystical participation,”
this encounter of the highest order, and this is the
greatest, the peak of enjoyment, the allure of fire.
Special finds special. But how can the uniqueness
of the creator’s experience be recognised? If we
take light, which is something general and which
is divided into the spectrum, we have basic colours, then complementary ones, which come
from mixing the basic colours, then each colour
has its shades, not one green colour is the same,
this specialisation goes ad infinitum. The creator
discovers this special shade of his or her experience that the consumer tries to recognise. For
example, this is the most we can get from one
Proust. But a consumer cannot guess the creator’s
shade as something absolutely special, he or she
can only draw closer and closer with this one
shade, so that they touch, and this would be that
“mystical participation.” So, this is a great similarity, but not identification. There has to be a speck
of difference. That is where the excitement lies. “A
big kiss is hanging in the air, which cannot come
forth, nor be appeased.” And that is all that is the
essence of an experience. But, maybe every reader just writes a new book, based on the template,
and so the reader has no communication with the
creator’s original experience; there is no “mystical
participation.” Perhaps as well there is not even
the creator’s original experience – there is nothing
behind the text – it is all just an empty superficial
game, which is sad. There is no creator nor is there
a consumer, there is just text. The world is without
its essence. And these are all insoluble things.
What is the truth? Still, this magic of the fire, of the
original light, “the gold of the universe,” that
which the ancient Persians used to call “Asha” can
be experienced anywhere and at any time, often
unexpectedly, you do not need any art; just a
glimpse of the oil stain on a parking lot can be
enough for you to feel the Joy of Eternity for no
reason. The stain, like the author, creates your experience. And that is the most one can feel. The
author is a stain on asphalt. The text is also the
stain. The reader is a joyous stain. An oil stain!
• Do you still see yourself as a writer from the margins? Is the margin still your authentic situation?
Slobodan Tišma: Well, it is. Being on the margin
is some internal sort of state. It is a state of being
humiliated and no awards can cure me of it. I am
intellectually and morally an inferior person, or
maybe it is better to use the term infernal. I am
ashamed of dealing with literature. I have always
been a bad student, I hardly finished my second-
ary school, I tried to study but it did not work. I am
not strong willed, I cannot conquer. I have never
managed to learn a foreign language, and I don’t
know how many I have tried to learn. I started
learning German when I was six and my teacher
was the famous late Tante Jelka Hadži, her house
is still there in Matica Srpska Street, and I was
learning German constantly until I was at the second year at the faculty, and I didn’t learn it. Simply,
I am not gifted to learn, to study. If I did the IQ test,
I don’t think it I would pass with flying colours. I
spent my youth, or, better yet, I wasted my youth,
on the street, in the part of Novi Sad called Liman,
in front of the supermarket in Fruškogorska Street.
I was a bum. My father, it seems to me, died when
he realised that I would amount to nothing, and
at the time I was into rock’n’roll. I have a bad conscious about this. Also, I am semi-literate, I do not
70
Slobodan Tišma: The Soft War should be read by
all whom I have hurt unintentionally, and without
malice, with my writing. To be comforted. One of
my acquaintances was upset because I had used
an unpleasant detail from his life, he threatened
to compose my portrait and hang it on Facebook
so that everyone could see what a scumbag I am.
I replied to him by suggesting that he’d better
write a novel about me. I am absolutely aware of
the fact that facts of life, if contextualised, have
nothing to do with a person, even if I literally used
his name. But he could be offended because I am
stating my opinion about him, I am criticising him,
sending him a message, but it is not my opinion
at all, and it is no message. Every creator is arrogant, as Nietzsche says, to die or to say. Of course,
the term “creator” in my case should be taken
pejoratively. When I write I have no scruples; if
something fits my needs, I will use it come rain or
come shine. The funny and the horrid things! An
editor of a literary magazine has, this spring, most
probably to position himself higher among my
old enemies, told lies about me in some horrid
daily newspaper, and that was, of course, some-
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N OVA M I SAO
• A Soft War or a Portrait of the Artist at the Threshold of His Old Age is the last thing you have published. Are you writing now?
thing entirely different. I reacted, but it was stupid. What do I have to explain to anyone? Everyone can think what they want, I couldn’t care less.
This piece, Soft War, came after Bernardi’s Room
and was published in the Starost periodical that
was edited by David Albahari and Srđan V. Tešin.
Arhipelag is the publisher. In this text , I presented
“myself” without any brakes, I have recapitulated
briefly my miserable life, the life of a coward, a
traitor, a conceited, an insufficiently talented artist who has come to the threshold of old age and
has not found God. It is also my good-bye to writing. I am not writing anything at the moment and
I will not write. I do not want to make a parade out
of this, because this decision is nothing significant. A small-town scribbler decided to abandon
literature, imagine that! Ha, ha, ha, ha! Some will
say – “Thank God!” This summer, a young lady
stopped me in the street. She said she is a descendant of the late Dr Branko Ilić. A doctor from
the Regional Hospital told her relatives that their
ancestor became a protagonist in a novel. However, when they read the novel they were deeply
disappointed with how he was represented. I told
her that the protagonist in Quatro Stagioni was Dr
Stevan Nerejlić, not Dr Branko Ilić. I also told her
that I had used some moments from his biography, but that it was not him. “Besides,” I told her,
“Why don’t you take the book again and read it a
bit more carefully and you will see that the doctor
is a positive character. Quite positive, in fact, regardless of the fact that he was performing abortions – somebody has to do it. The character of Dr
Nerejlić is a character who is showing us the last
man of the olden humanistic sort, the type of man
with essence, of which there are no more. Unfortunately. n
/
it is, however, invisible and uninteresting. When I
say this I do not refer to direct political engagement, only that by your very existence, you are a
political being; you have your own profile and you
act accordingly. And these rules also apply when
art is in question. You cannot simply write good
prose and then be appreciated by other authors
or other people in culture. You have to be present
in other ways, too – with the authority of your
personality, by expressing knowledge and power
in that literary space. Simply, you have to evaluate,
negate and confirm, be it through literary institutions, or independently through the media. Take
and compare, for example, me and Basara, or me
and Mihajlo Pantić. The fact that I received the NIN
award is some sort of precedent and has caused
misunderstandings. Many people did not understand how that came about and they cannot digest this fact, because I am not a serious enough
person, I have no power and I do not have the air
of trust about me, and some find me repulsive,
too. Above all I mean the Novi Sad environment,
but it is not any better in Belgrade. And another
thing is that they have not read a single line of
what I was writing. So, once on the margins, always on the margins. Long ears give you away.
But I have my audience. They are the people who
are on the same branches as I am. There are plenty of us.
know which words are written together and
which should be separate, I do not know where
to put a comma, or a semicolon. I console myself
in vain that Crnjanski did not either, and there are
all sorts of things I do not know when writing
properly is concerned. I am lucky that my wife is
a literature teacher and proof-reader, and then she
saves me. I never read much. I have developed a
habit of starting to read, but I can hardly keep
concentration and read more than twenty pages.
All in all, have I read ten books in my life? Well, you
cannot become a good writer by listening to classical music. “Look at this” – this is what a NIN
award winner tells you. Does it say something
about our present literary moment? All of my education has come from listening to the Radio Belgrade Three, that is my evening course university,
but it is all chaotic and insufficient, without a system, second-hand knowledge. I am some sort of
autodidact. Besides, I am horribly lazy, I don’t like
doing anything. It is totally unclear to me how I
managed to write those few booklets of fiction.
Sometimes it seems to me as if somebody else has
written them for me. I have already said somewhere that my case is the idea of a Rosicrucian
directed by Novalis. I have been instructed. I do
not consider myself a writer – I am maybe a pseudo-writer, or a post-writer, in the sense of a
post-office writer. I function only through e-mail;
I am not present in the realistic literary space. I do
not exist. And what is that then for me? Still, one
has to say that being on the margin is also a political position; a person on the margin is someone
who is pushed away to nowhere. And it is not
done by an individual, by a political opponent,
but by the society as a whole, the community that
excommunicates you for some reason. The society can recognise power at the start, or the lack
thereof, and they eliminate them from that game
in which everyone should participate, all those
who can have at least a minimum of power. Of
course, we know that power is there just as a constellation; outside the society there is no power,
and there are no subjects – if you belong nowhere, then you are nobody. That is so in the
world of animals, but also in human society. It was
like that in ancient Greece, and it is so today. I am
simply a man with no power, or a man with little
power, and in this sense I am not interesting to
“politicians” who prefer power, especially because
I try to ignore power with my attitude and my behaviour, which is unacceptable, and then you cannot approach “the table to be one of those at the
table.” You are looked at as a jerk. Everything has
its aesthetic dimension as well. This carries even
more weight – whether someone will like you or
not. Power is picturesque, spectacular; the lack of
A World (without) Tenderness
Slobodan Tišma, Bernardi’s Room, KCNS, 2011
Writen by Olivera Miok
”A
n error is something that occurs in relation to the ruling order, disturbs
it and is never a matter of coincidence [...] an error is mutiny, subversive activity [...] one should make errors, should disturb” says Pišta Petrović at the
end of the Tišma’s new novel Bernardi’s Room. He is the narrator who presents
himself as a mistake, as an infiltrator, “an example of refuse, human trash,”
but also as the Priest of tenderness. Actually the figure of this narrator, who
is the only developed character in the book, is maybe the greatest advantage
of the novel, the most significant novelty introduced by Тišma. He is at the
same time completely archetypal, hermaphroditic, but also modern, transgender, queer in all of his segments. He is a man who has just an “empty
space, emptiness” between his legs, who wants to be a woman but fails to
convince the psychiatrist to approve the surgery, because what he yearns
for is not another man, but a “pure, essential woman’s love,” which is a new
approach to which the capitalist system, personified in the psychiatrist with
his idea of a nuclear family, resists.
Using the first person narration, characterised by lyricism and a lack of events
(An impatient reader who wants to have a story right away could skip the
entire novel and read “Cheaps” – the last chapter, which serves as a synopsis;
Tišma’s excuse for the “sin” of not providing a story, yet it is proof that there
are events, if rudimentary, in the novel after all), as well as the employing of
the metaphor of the Ocean, through which we recognise the songwriter and
singer of Luna and La Strada, Tišma seduces the reader, leading him or her
to believe that here is the identity of both the author and narrator. However,
while the narrator is prone to thinking, but not learning, he is reduced to a
desire for enjoyment and survival, led by the irrational understanding of art;
Tišma reveals himself as a connoisseur of different theories from Benjamin
through feminism, Judith Butler, anarchism, Bob Black. In spite of the lyrical,
sometimes romantic wish to touch the very edge of the universe, to be immersed in the endless cold Ocean, Tišma’s novel is actually a conceptual
resistance to the illusion of democracy and capitalism – an invitation not to
act, to abandon the idea of private property and to introduce the idea of
giving, removing the borders of genders, to return to an aesthetic vision of
the world, up to a point caricatured by the capital letter AESTHETICS on the
hotel of the hippy-commune of the narrator’s mother , which is actually not
a hippy-commune; if it ever was, it was already but a lucrative project corresponding to the desire of modern man to run away from the system (village/
nature/the country) and return to (quasi)spirituality (the ritual of crucifixion).
“Between beauty and power, one should choose beauty [...] only beauty can
say the enchanting ‘yes’ which is, basically, the only definite comfort,” says
Tišma’s narrator. But this is not every beauty, but a modernist “uncomfortable,” reduced, abstract, musical beauty of Bernardi’s room, or the violet-blue
shell of a Mercedes wreck, which does not allow lulling and napping. This is
the moment of enchantment, the eternity, the city, the Ocean, the ride on
the edge of Cosmos. n
72
Our Places: An Essay
About Writing the “Jewish Novel:”
A Little Speculation on the Examples
of Judita Šalgo and Joseph Roth
Written by Silvia Dražić
Judita Šalgo the person wonders whether Judita Šalgo the author is
prompted by her Jewish identity to write a Jewish novel. Simultaneously, her
questioning goes one step further and asks whether the nature of this Jewish
identity perhaps imposes upon her the obligation to write a Jewish novel.
Joseph Roth writes about things to come, deeply aware of the dark future
that was to take place in Germany. Judita Šalgo, years after these events
had taken place, searches for delicate instruments that will make their
Judita Šalgo the person wonders whether Judita
Šalgo the author is prompted by her Jewish identity to write a Jewish novel. Simultaneously, her
questioning goes one step further and asks
whether the nature of this Jewish identity perhaps
imposes upon her the obligation to write a Jewish
novel. And it (the identity) is more in the not having than in the having; on the one hand as a confirmation of the attitude that a Jew becomes one
only through a look of another that denies him/
her, and on the other hand, as a consequence of
the recent history which annuls him/her as another. “Due to the nature of European, (Central-European) Jewishness”, and because of one’s only
Of course after WWII and the tragic gape cut into
the history of Western European civilisation, this
question is formulated with greater drama and
complexity than in the first half of the 20th century, when Joseph Roth’s literary writing oeuvre
began.
Joseph Roth writes about things to come, deeply
aware of the dark future that was to take place in
73
/
This is a question Judita Šalgo, a poetess and storyteller from Novi Sad, asked in her diary, wondering, constructing and deconstructing her own
identity. The question becomes especially delicate
when it has been displaced from a self-understanding Jewish tradition and directed towards
authors who, although Jews by origin, have not
been raised in the Jewish faith and tradition, or
who have given it up at one moment of their lives.
Do they still feel some sort of inner obligation
to write their “Jewish novel” during their writing
careers?
I
s every Jewish author obliged to write his or
her “Jewish novel?”
N OVA M I SAO
/
literary mediation possible.
Germany. Judita Šalgo, years after these events
had taken place, searches for delicate instruments
that will make their literary mediation possible.
Joseph Roth abandoned his Jewishness and for
the rest of his life he was a catholic. Judita Šalgo
never considered Jewishness to be the only, or
crucial, determinant of her own identity. Still, in
both cases this Jewishness, as some insurmountable extra load, although neither admitted nor
denied, remains in the body of their identifications. So this is this extra that is not effective, or
it never became so, although it is not, nor will it
be, exactly because it is not and it will not be; as
a phantom limb that hurts and when it is gone
requires its identification. And when it is about
Jewishness, there is always a game of hiding
going on.
destiny being Jewish identity, “it is expressed
more as an emptiness than fullness, more like a
doubt than certainty, more like absence than as
presence (Šalgo 2000: 130). Judita Šalgo was not
raised to be a Jew, nor did she partake in religious
rituals, nor did she speak any of the Jewish languages – Yiddish, Ivrit or Ladino. Still, Jewish destiny became part of her destiny. Loss, the empty
space as a paradigm of this destiny, has been written in her biography, Holocaust, My Jewish Destiny,
“They have tumbled over and made relative even
the basic connection that a child establishes with
both the outer and one’s own inner world: the
connection with a parent.” (Šalgo, 2000: 131) Her
Father, her sister Vera, many members of her extended family left empty outlines in the picture
of her early childhood. Even her mother was taken
away, thus placing Šalgo in the hands of her surrogate mother, whom she had to call by this name.
“If one’s mother can be changed, then everything
in the world can be changed, and so can I, and
everything that makes up my identity.” (Šalgo,
2000: 135) This is where her cautious attitude towards identity comes from. This is the reason for
the different approaches to identification, the
constructing and deconstructing of her own identity, rooting and uprooting become central topics
of her literary work. ”Program Homelessness” (Šalgo, 2000: 133) is not only the mode of her own
writing position, but the narrative for the nomadic, non-fixed, non-inhabited nature of her characters. Judita Šalgo calls it levitation, like a “freely
levitating intelligence” – a term she adopts from
Karl Mannheim,1 and by emptying it from all sociological connotation, she reduces it to a convincing and effective picture. Like Magritte’s
Golconda. It is in the deconceptualisation of this
philosophical and sociological term that Oto Tolnai finds the central metaphor of Judita Šalgo’s
text, the metaphor that “becomes the utopia”
(Tolnai 2008: 53). In this levitating manner, or with
this levitation, Judita Šalgo’s novels Skid Mark and
The Road to Birobijan both outline the measure of
her Jewish identity. From that position, between
the sky and the earth, as both life and death are
too verbose, she writes her “Jewish novel.” And
while it seems that this position warrants some
sort of security, it is still unable to confront the
question which cannot be omitted from Jewish
writing about Jewishness after the holocaust:
how to write about something, about which one
can only moan?
“After Auschwitz, nothing happened that denied
Auschwitz”, wrote Imre Kertesz. The “banality of
1
Mannheim is her first surname.
evil” has been denunciated and de-masked. But
how to save oneself on the other victimized side
from pathos and sentiment that would risk one’s
own banalizing to an excessive degree? Danilo Kiš,
Raymond Federman, Bruno Levi, Hose Semprum...
Like all of them, Judita Šalgo, too, searches for the
distance, for a step beyond, which will make the
looking back possible. “Irony, distance, could not
have been born between me and material, it came
from without, from the theoretical sphere, as a
lever that would lift some weight.” (Šalgo, 2012:
X) In her Skid Mark, the inner story, a hard, con-
74
75
Still, he found his inspiration for writing in the lifestyle, customs and toponyms of the former Galicia. What is more, the heroes of his numerous
stories and novels are Jews. And his novel Job, a
story about Menedel Zinger’s life, is a Jewish novel par excellence, not only for its heroes, its geographical location and the customs where the first
part of the novel is set, but because of its foundation; the mechanism this story follows is biblical.
It is, as the title undoubtedly suggests, the Old
Testament story of Job. Mendel Zinger, “pious,
god-fearing and ordinary, your everyday Jew,” like
Job, suffers many shortcomings and tragedies as
/
Maybe we can find and answer in the brilliant essay “Jews in Migration,” wherein Joseph Roth describes the life of East-European Jews in the first
half of the 20th century, following them in their
displacement, trying to preserve their dignity in
its entire dishevelled “otherness” compared to the
already tamed and assimilated West-European
Jews. It is in this text that Roth indicates what will
become the theoretical thought of the twentieth
century, formulated in questions of “the other”:
how is “the other” constituted? What are the cultural templates that stratify differences as differences of “the firsts” and “the others?” How, simply
by being different, does “the other” become the
other who is less worthy? And how does this otherness move through different social groups depending on the ratio of power? If otherness is
what follows Jews in each of their migrations and
settlings, and if it is something that they always
have to overcome, Roth addresses what constitutes otherness among the Jews themselves.
Every Jew has his other who is less powerful and
thus less worthy of himself. It is the eastern Jew
for the western one; they are the Ashkenazi for
the Sephardic Jews; it is a poor Christian to a poor
Jew, who is protected by the dignity of his faith
and education, and, finally, there are the most
Jewish Jews, the unrivalled ones, the blacks whom
Jews find upon their arrival to the states. One neutral term gets evaluative connotations. A similar
shift in meaning occurred with the term “the Balkans,” which was once just a neutral geographic
toponym, but by the end of the 20th century had
become pejorative. “We live in a world where people as such have not existed for some time, since
society discovered that discrimination is an excellent social tool for reciprocal killing without
N OVA M I SAO
The moving experience of not having a home, in
Judita Šalgo’s second novel The Road to Birobijan,
becomes the inner cohesive thread of the text: a
search for home, identity, history, salvation, remembrance or oblivion. While Skid Mark tells a
story of loss, of the “the Jewish destiny” (Aleksandar and Vera) discerned through a multifaceted
(theoretically and literally), fogged and prepared
visor, as only a reflection of the horrid head of
Medusa on Perseus’s shield, just as an outline, as
a “trace,” The Road to Birobijan cuts into the body
of “Jewish topics” seemingly more directly with
its selection of the toponym, which is nestled into
the very title of the novel as some mythical space.
Great searches, lost tribes, promised land. All of
the heroes in the novel, Leopold and Oscar Roth,
Nenad Mitrov, Dina Levin, Flora Gutman, Berta
Papnhajm, are on the road or are packing suitcases, their gazes fixed on Birobijan: “This constant
focal point and haven that is hiding from the
world is mentioned only by mistake and in a
dream.” (Šalgo 1997: 16) All of them are strangers
in their own home, they all have to leave, to step
out of their own selves which have never been
there. ”Being a Jew” as an order of nomadism
Why did Roth, who gave up on the Jewish faith,
write such an undoubtedly Jewish novel? Of
course, it is impossible to give a precise reply
to this question, but it is possible to speculate
upon it.
/
densed core, was set within a visual and purposefully artificial construction. It creates a levitation
space. And many things are possible within it. It is
even possible to live a life above and correct the
injustice inflicted by history: “I am writing out of
a need for justice. To create the one who was not
let to be born, to extend life to those from whom
it was taken away.” (Šalgo, 1987: 20)
Joseph Roth, the Austrian author and journalist,
was born at the end of the 19th century in Volinia,
a place that was once in the former Galicia of the
eastern end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He
had lightly mystified his biography, and now it is
believed that he was born either in Radzvilovo,
near Brodi, or in the village of Schwabi. When he
was thirteen or seventeen, sources are also quite
unclear about this, he abandoned his Jewish faith
and tradition and embraced Catholicism. Although he maintained that this took place by
chance, according to his biographical data, he
adhered to his choice until the end of his life. His
Austronostalgic Catholicism was formulated primarily in opposition to German Protestantism,
which seemed utterly dangerous in light of the
oncoming events, of which Roth was deeply
aware. “Finally, in Germany, the devil is hopping
around doing things to his liking as he has ever
since the times of Martin Luther. One straight line
runs from Luther, past Friedrich the Great, to Bismarck, to Hitler. Luther’s echo, which had been
rambling hither – thither, has finally found its consequent realisation in national-socialism.” (Roth
2011:150)
his faith is being tested on many levels. And he,
just as Job does, remains unshaken in his faith.
And when, near the end of the novel, defeated by
the merciless blows destiny has inflicted upon
him, he stops addressing God, being angry with
Him, he still cannot give up on Him completely.
Roth loves his Mendel Zinger and handles him and
his destiny in spite of the gargantuan misfortunes
he exposes them to, with great tenderness and
care. That is why, beside the seemingly realistic
setup, the straight-line narrative flow; this is an
almost romantic novel, with the trace of Old Testament legends and miracles that lead to catharsis in the end.
which is inscribed into their, always borrowed,
identity becomes a narrative that raises questions
about homelessness as man’s basic state. Birobijan is a place of hope, a haven, a lost home, a
place of remembering and a place of oblivion. “At
the moment when this story begins, the centre
of global oblivion is Birobijan” (Šalgo 1997: 16),
and “in times of great upheaval, when worlds fall
into the past, there is nothing else.” (Šalgo 1997:
16) They are all stuck in airless space between
history and projection, after all. It lands in the
novel only ostensibly; it “finds home” by finding
refuge in Birobijan. The utopian registry sucks out
its earthly contents. This historical space will become a place of utopian settlement and at the
same time a dystopian deconstruction of great
historical narratives about the Promised Land,
home and salvation.
bloodshed, since passports, and birth certificates,
and sometimes receipts for paid tax are no longer
formal documents but carry with them a social
status.” (Arent 2009: 25) Another, maybe even
more destructive side, of degrading and marginalising “the other” is that the other internalises the
status of the other and sees it as a natural and
necessary phenomenon. How can we respect ourselves when society does not acknowledge us and
marginalises us absolutely?
Roth’s position as an author, although analytically and descriptively objective, is intentionally engaged in this essay. He loves and respects the
East-European Jew, just as he does Mendel Zinger,
and will not shy away from showing this love as a
program in the text; “This book has not been written for readers who would hold it against the author for treating the subject of his writing with
love instead of with the ‘scientific objectivity’ –
otherwise known as boredom.” (Roth 2012: 169)
A part of the text describes Stetl, a small town in
Eastern Europe mostly populated by Jews, an environment from which Roth originated. He describes its geographical position, way of life, religious customs and differentiation, the educated
and “God’s Jews,” the Rabbis-miracle workers, the
social structure and even some elements of culture, musicians and Yiddish theatre. He describes
praying homes where Jews pray three times a day;
they pray and “smoke cigarettes and bad pipe
tobacco. They act as if they were in a casino. They
are not rare guests in God’s home, but are in their
own homes.” (Roth 2012: 186) They quarrel, yell,
moan, mutiny against god, complain about his
strictness; “They have a trial against God in a place
of God.” (Roth 2012: 186) “There is not a single
people who have such a relationship with God.
They are an old people and have known him for
a long time.” (Roth 2012: 186)
Maybe this novel, through Mendel Zinger’s
temptation, is also Roth’s unfinished dialogue
with the God he left. His right to talk to him. And
perhaps the warmth and respect that surround
the character of Mendel Zinger, in all of his simplicity, his uselessness, some would say his weakness, though it is rather his firmness of belief that
a man cannot understand God’s decisions, is all
an expression of some sort of nostalgia for the
simplicity of life dedicated to the faith which
Roth could not have. At this, one should not forget that in the face of the foreboding dark perspectives of utter social degradation, of being
cast out and of death, all of the exiled, the secular, the assimilated Jews “decided to be Jews
again.” (Roth 2102: 253) Because they were being
forced out of their homes, lands; they were killed
and forced to migrate, as Anna Arent writes, not
because of their political beliefs or something
that they had done, but because for what they
were. That is why Jewishness again becomes a
cohesive strength, the only stronghold to which
they can turn.
Joseph Roth died in 1939, and did not experience
the full blow of the horror that was starting in Germany and would go on to get hold of the entire
world, but he could clearly foresee all of its warning signs; “There is no advice, no consolation, no
hope. May it be clear that ‘racism’ knows no compromise. Millions of plebeians urgently need a few
hundreds of Jews, so that they would be given a
confirmation that they are better people.” (Roth
2012: 259)
Perhaps precisely because of this Roth gives the
decisive mission in mankind’s history to the Jews
and their God at the moment of their biggest
weakness. “I believe that Jews are people chosen
by God, that they gave God to humanity. As long
God’s name is spoken against, the mission of Jews
shall last. Providence gave Jews a difficult task to
show the world that the eternal laws of ethics, in
spite of all the pain and suffering, outlive force
and injustice. (Roth 2011: 151)
Also, writing about the need to write a Jewish
novel is driven by the semantics of the relation
between the root and the identity – the nation
and the territory. The reciprocal relationship of
these terms was thoroughly reformulated in the
20th century, and this reformulation loosened and
relativised their close connection. Different forms
of exiles and displacements, willing and unwilling
abandonment, imposed choices, runaways, and
economical and political migrations have marked
the 20th century. The general mobility of people
on the constant move, this nomadism, whether
as a personal choice, or as not having any other
choice, has created a “general state of homelessness” (E. Said) as a dynamic picture of a contemporary life. Truth be told, for Jews, with their long
history of pogroms behind them, the connection
of soil and identity has never been established
in a solid and invariable form. “The eeriness of
homelandlessness moans above the fields of
exile.” (Sebald 2012: 122)
Still, rooting remains, as Simone Vey would say,
one of the essential needs of the human soul.
“People are now... creating their home or homes
in the absence of a territorial and national basis,
not on the land they originate from, but through
their memories and claiming rights to the places
they cannot or do not want to inhabit physically.”
(Malkki 2009: 30) Home is moving to an imaginary
space, and even the places that do not exist any
longer can have the aura of authenticity. To Roth
this imaginary space that he reconstructs and
preserves through his memories is the former
Austro-Hungarian monarchy, or, to narrow it
down – Galicia. All of his characters yearn for a
homeland. Some even find it in various places: at
the bottom of the sea, near the Leviathan, as does
Nisen Pichenyik, or buried with the emperors
bust, as does Count Granz Zaver Morstin. Many
critics speak of Roth’s nostalgic orientation towards the past, about an almost sentimental urge
to preserve this past in its details, in the particular
sequences of private and everyday lives. One of
the modern definitions of “nostalgia,” according
to Svetlana Boym, is “sorrow induced by the impossibility of a mythical return, due to the loss of
an enchanted world which had clear boundaries
and values.” (Boym, 2005: 20) This world is constantly reconstructed through a reciprocal relationship of “personal memories and collective
memory.” (Boym, 2005: 20) It seems that Roth’s
sensitive ear for the political and historical environment, and for the ordinary man in his unique
individuality, follows this direction; that is, “the
symbolic saving a world which he knew in advance had been doomed”. (Sebald, 124) And this
is where Roth’s nostalgia becomes utopia. Utopia
which melancholically counts on its own doom.
Its map is the map of the Austro-Hungarian Em-
76
Finally, by bringing back to life his former homeland through his memory, Roth paradoxically acts
in harmony with the first order of the God he has
left. And it says: “Remember.” Exactly in the context of the Jewish tradition, memory plays a manifold role. On the one hand, it is based in his rela-
77
QUOTATIONS:
“People are now... creating their home or homes
in the absence of a territorial and national basis,
not on the land they originate from, but through
their memories and claiming rights to the places
they cannot or do not want to inhabit physically.
(Malkki 2009: 30) Home is moving to an imaginary
space, and even the places that do not exist any
longer can have the aura of authenticity.”
Finally, by bringing back to life his former homeland through his memory, Roth paradoxically acts
REFERENCES:
Arent, Hana, ”Mi izbeglice”, in Studije o Izbeglištvu,
Belgrade, Grupa 484, 2009, str. 11–27.
Bojm, Svetlana, Budućnost Nostalgije, Belgrade,
Geopoetika, 2005.
Rot, Jozef, Hotel Savoy, Novi Sad, Futura Publikacije, 2011.
Rot, Jozef, Jov. Jevreji u Migraciji, Novi Sad, Futura Publikacije, 2012.
Rot, Jozef, Levijatan, Novi Sad, Futura Publikacije, 2012.
Šalgo, Judita, Trag Kočenja, Novi Sad, Književna
Zajednica, 1987.
Šalgo, Judita, Put u Birobidžan, Belgrade, Stubovi
Kulture, 1997.
Šalgo, Judita, Jednokratni Eseji, Belgrade, Stubovi Kulture, 2000.
Šalgo, Judita, Hronika, Novi Sad, Studentski Kulturni Centar, 2007.
Šalgo, Judita, Radni Dnevnik, Novi Sad, Dnevnik,
Akademska Knjiga, 2012.
Tolnai, Oto, “Esej za Juditu: Papirizvor ili Lebdenje”, Rukovet, 2008, br. 5–6.
Vajnrih, Harald, Umetnost i Kritika Zaborava, Belgrade, 2008.
Sebald, V. G., ”Jedan Kadiš za Austriju – o Jozefu
Rotu”, in Rot, Jozef, Levijatan, Novi Sad, Futura Publikacije, 2012, str. 121–136.
/
Malki, Liza, “Nacionalna Geografija. Ukorenjivanje ljudi i Teritorijalizacija Nacionalnog Identiteta iz Ugla Teoretičara i Izbeglica”, in Studije
o Izbeglištvu, Belgrade, Grupa 484, 2009, str.
29–63.
N OVA M I SAO
Joseph Roth is looking back: he has lost his home;
he has lost his “earthly address”. Judita Šalgo is
seemingly looking ahead. But her future look is
burdened with the experience of the past. Nostalgia can be the “secular expression of a spiritual
desire, nostalgia for the absolute, for the home
which is simultaneously physical and spiritual.”
(Boym, 2005: 20) Undoubtedly, the heroes of The
Road to Birobijan are looking for such a home, are
seeking the space of authenticity, and Birobijan is
the metaphor which covers not only how pointless its finding can be, but also the necessity of
the constant search for it.
The general mobility of people on the constant
move, this nomadism, whether as a personal
choice, or as not having any other choice, has created a “general state of homelessness” (E. Said) as
a dynamic picture of a contemporary life. Truth
be told, for Jews, with their long history of pogroms behind them, the connection of soil and
identity has never been established in a solid and
invariable form. “The eeriness of homelandlessness moans above the fields of exile.” (Sebald
2012: 122) n
/
pire, just as for Judita Šalgo her utopia becomes
Birobijan. “Once there was a fatherland, the only
one, namely, for ‘people without a fatherland,’ it
is the only possible fatherland. That was the old
Monarchy. Now I am homeless, a man who has
lost his true homeland, an eternal wanderer.”
(Roth 2012: 105) Nostalgia turned to the past, or
“restorational nostalgia,” generally consists of
enlivening national symbols and myths, into
whose frames they place their dream of an ideal
society. Yet, Roth’s Austro-Hungarian nostalgia
does not have national paraphernalia. Quite the
contrary, Roth writes: “For the aim of the world is
definitely not to consist of ‘nations’ and ‘fatherlands,’ which, even if they wanted only to preserve their cultural uniquenesses, still would not
have the right to sacrifice a single human life.”
(Roth2012: 181)
in harmony with the first order of the God he has
left. And it says: “Remember.” Exactly in the context of the Jewish tradition, memory plays a manifold role. On the one hand, it is based in his relation to God; “Jewish memory is basically a memory of God.” (Weinrich 2008: 335)
tion to God; “Jewish memory is basically a memory of God.” (Weinrich 2008: 335) Forgetting
means forgetting God, and is forbidden and
punishable. On the other hand, as a collective
memory, it has kept the Jewish people, their religion and their culture as one, in spite of being
scattered for ages. “A forgetful Jew is not a Jew”
(Šalgo 2007: 90), wrote Judita Šalgo. However, has
not God, by allowing the holocaust, forgotten his
people? Has he not failed in this deal? After what
has happened, which is difficult to understand
not only rationally, but in any other way, and
which is even more difficult to reconstruct in a
narrative manner, the ratio of remembering and
forgetting becomes not only an ethical, but an
existential, issue: can one live, may one forget?
Thus it is no wonder that The Road to Birobijan
faces this issue in its final pages. Birobijan, a
mythical haven where all of the protagonists in
the novel wish to go, becomes the space where
forgetting and remembering exist at the same
time, where Mnemosyne and Leto rule equally;
“If there is any certainty, it is that Birobijan, the
country to which innocent daydreams were
turned, now swallows each memory, life, love.
Everything there is remembered and forgotten.
The duty of every Jew is to pay his debt to the
One-that-cannot-be-realised. Wherever he plants
a tree, at least one branch will become green in
Birobijan.”
Deconstruction of Fear in Ninety-five Bravuras
Zoran Gashi, CAMEO – Self-portrait of Fear in a Single Shot, Akademska knjiga, Novi Sad, 2011.
By Sofija Košničar
A
reverse path from metaphorically derived
meanings to their original source – Cameo1 guarantees an exciting, connotational, eventful and copious aesthetic journey through dialogue and encounters of different cultures, their sediments and
dregs. All seen through the prism of the author’s
introspective pilgrimage through the labyrinth of
his memories, intellectual habitus and personal
emotional experiences, like open wounds acquired
by his fateful belonging to different cultures and
traditions that shaped him. Writing this novel Gashi
notes that he is being transformed into a “vital dimension of reason […] that transmutes all that is
perceived and rooted into a fear that one constantly comes in and out of bearing wonder and sorrow”.
(p. 139) Memories have, Gashi claims, “awoken an
old curse. Is it possible? How to frame it? By genetic
mutation of the dead?” (p. 77) He concludes: “The
larvae of new graves are multiplying and they will
assign each person their plot.” (p. 128)
Analyzing the causes of cultural genesis Géza
Róheim writes: “We approach our human surroundings through personal occurrences of infantile fears
or the defensive mechanisms founded on those
fearful occurrences.”2 As the keynote of his research
Róheim points out that “the fear countering defense
mechanisms are the buildings blocks of culture and
that is why certain cultures are structurally similar
1
Eng. cameo, Srb – kameja, in its original meaning: an image in stone, a mono colored
image; from there originated a new meaning and name for specially crafted jewelry:
a precious engraved stone; finely carved relief on precious stone or nacre. Upon this
semantic field grew a new metaphorical semanteme: cameo role or cameo appearance, cameo for short, a very small but noticeable non-verbal appearance in a performance medium (film, TV, theatre, video games…). Such roles are usually assigned
to a famous person (movie directors, athletes, politicians, celebrity actors…). Directors known for cameo appearances in their films are Alfred Hitchcock (he played a
total of 42 such roles in his films), Peter Jackson, Martin Scorsese, Nikita Mikhalkov,
Stan Lee, Quentin Tarantino, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Tinto Brass, Sergio Leone,
Arnold Schwarzenegger…
2
Géza Róheim, The Origin and Function of Culture, translated by Branko Vučićević,
BIGZ, Belgrade, 1976. p. 99.
to specific types of neurosis.”3 Cameo bears witness
to the fact that people are shaped by the culture
they belong to and especially the fears modeled by
certain types of culture, shaping life itself, applying
boundaries on a wholly natural way of life. In fact,
“when defining the notion of culture, Lévi-Strauss underlines that where there are Rules there is Culture.” 4
Let us paraphrase Y.M. Lotman who points out that
for as long as “natural behavior” cannot have an opposing “incorrect” natural behavior, “cultured behavior” must consider at least two possibilities only one
of which is “correct”. The process of cultivation, as the
inevitable taming of human nature, appropriates
certain cultures which “bind” the individual to that
culture’s identity. It inevitably manipulates basic
emotions as well as natural existential fear; reshaping it into new forms of fear such as the fear of punishment and other phenomena by which fundamental humanity and its natural needs are foiled. Hence,
where there is culture there are “ocultivated” fears
shaped by the given culture. Such fears are vivisected by Gashi when creating Cameo: fears of man, cast
by fate onto the stage of life, man submerged into
the cultural jungle, fears shaped by culture. Thus
man becomes a creation as well as a victim of own
culture. His view of culture as violence and grit is
richly described by Gashi’s observations: “before I
submitted I was like a rock in deep mud” (p. 123),
then he concludes: “the son of an anarchist bears the
noise of life with difficulty.” (p. 129) Disillusioned by what modern “developed”
cultures allow a man Gashi points out that “consumerist society judges my
individuality” (p. 85), he markedly observes the phenomenon of carnivalization and notes that “we live in a civilization that entertains us and the mob is
on the surface […] dancing in all directions […]. Why do we wish for something
to look different than what’s in store for us?” (p.85) Gashi admits in defeat:
“when we start searching for control of man over culture from which he is
born […]” we most often realize “that it is an impossibility.” (p. 76)
3
Géza Róheim, op. cit. p. 103.
< Lotman, Yuri M. “Experiments in Culture Typology” Channel Three Radio Belgrade,
No. 4, autumn 1974, pp. 439-489, p. 444.
4
78
A contemporary texture, originally thought out and deconstructive, Cameo
can most closely be classified as a post-postmodern novel keeping in mind
the mingling of genres, the fragmented, associative and non-linear narrative
construction that absorbs other forms of expression (notes, miniature narrative, essay, intermedial quotability…). Intertextually designed structure in
constant dialogue with intermedial content: film, photography, artists and
their works, music, printed and other informative media, artistic and archival
documentation and material.
Gashi’s narrative method is based on deconstructing his own polyphonic
cultural identity. Non-linearly modeled narrative is reinforced by the author’s
skillful interweaving of intense memory fragments from life and fiction that
germinate over reality like “an undying year of life’s dreams and dreamworks”
(p. 131) Scene one – take ninety-five or ninety-five variations of the first and
only scene with fear as a leitmotif. A nightmare that occurs when fate assigns
the cameo role to a man with no choice and brands his life with fear. That is
Zoran Gashi’s Cameo. The first and only scene presented in ninety-five short
takes. Every new take is a fracture of thoughts and emotions deconstructing
the given notion that occupies the author’s thoughts drenched in fear and
unease. These takes remind us of “mosaics bursting underneath us. It will all
be swallowed by the powerful, labyrinthine eye sockets, for all eternity.” (p.
94) Wherever he is in his memories, wonderings, nightmares – upon Greek
landscapes, in Rome, Paris, on Montmartre “the ignoble hill of pleasure”(p.
62) in Warsaw with Mozart’s Requiem, with Palestrina and the Pope, inside a
tomb or by a Turkish grave, with films and film makers, literati and painters,
cosmic strings and arts, a music score, in the heart of the artifact, with doctors,
a prematurely deceased mother that he called out to “so the living would hear
but only the dead did” (p. 76), with an aunt he feared, erotic travails, an Austro-Hungarian soldier fatally wounded in Ukraine, with his great grandfather
of bey and princely ancestry who “ate snow” and died in the snow which is
why “taking after his great grandfather” Gashi’s “smile often freezes” (p. 137)
– wherever, then, Gashi is – the all present fear catches up to him in its multitude of forms all colored by cultural impositions with a perfidiously cultivated
fear of death as crowning witness to a helpless man caught in a cultural web.
“Death rituals have their own code: at the end you’re buried as food for yourself.” (p. 76) It is as if Gashi knows that “death will come and have […] eyes” of
fear as a playful reference to Paveze’s famous poetry collection.5 Gashi notes
the impossibility of satisfying his “need for a complete explanation of death
that is, one way or another inherent to his being […]” with a paradox – “via a
5
Cesare Pavese, Death Will Come and Have your Eyes, Reč i misao, Belgrade, 1972;
collection titled after a line of a Paveze poem>
79
deeply ingrained fear of death.” (p. 133) He reluctantly notes that “when we
start searching for control of man over culture from which he is born […]” we
most often realize “that it is an impossibility.” (p. 76) “Death rituals have their
own code: at the end you’re buried as food for yourself.” (p. 76)
The text is richly illustrated with non-verbal artistic and especially graphical
and photographic sequences which are engaged in an intimate and complementary dialogue with the author and the main body of text and have
an associative, bountiful correspondence with the recipients’ connotative
network and mental structure.
The novel ends with an external chronotopic framework which, in frames,
bears witness to the feel and atmosphere of the many places where Gashi
wrote his book all across our once shared homeland (Yugoslavia) and abroad,
in France, Germany, Austria…staying with friends, in art colonies, by the road;
immersed in the worlds of other artifacts, wondrous landscapes and mute
signs of nature, people and events on the edges of fear that shape a man’s
destiny.
Closing the covers of Zoran Gashi’s Cameo leaves off an impression that the
book’s title covers the entire semantic field of the word cameo which in conjuction with another fundamental notion, that of ocultivated fear, homogenizes the novelesque structure and at the same time points out the basic creative idea that fear is an important shaping mechanism that cultivates natural
humanity into a humanity that bears the identity of a given culture. n

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