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“Make It Happen, Comrade!” On the internationalization of the Croatian cultural scene since the 1960s by Branka Stipančić
Article on the exhibition “Freedom Is a Rare Bird” in “Springerin — Hefte für Gegenwartskunst”, published in issue 1 / 2013. How did the art scene in Yugoslavia operate? I would like to answer this question with the example of Zagreb in the 1960s. Yugoslavia was nonaligned and followed what was called the “third path” — designed neither as a market economy as in the West, nor as a Communist society as in the Soviet bloc. Rather, its targeted economic system was “self-government” and, within this limbo, culture always found a way out. To demonstrate that the people of Yugoslavia — as opposed to those in other Eastern European countries — did not simply permit themselves to
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s first appearance at the Music Biennale Zagreb, 1965 be cut off from the rest of the world, I would like to start by quoting the composer Milko Kelemen, founder of the International Music Biennial. “In the mid-1950s I lived in Darmstadt, where I worked and studied at the famous Darmstadt School. I first met Penderecki there. [...] When I returned to Zagreb in 1959, I came up with the idea for the biennial. I went to the then-mayor of Zagreb, Veceslav Holjevac, and told him I would like to organize a large festival. He did not even look up from his papers. It was only when I told him that, should this not suit him, I would stage the festival in Belgrade. He looked at me as if he had been bitten by a tarantula. ‘What is it you want to do, what do you want to do?’ he roared. ‘I can give you mountains of dinars, but not a single dollar.’ I asked him how I would be able to engage an opera from Germany, a ballet from Russia or an orchestra from America. But he just said, ‘Make it happen, Comrade!’ I knew exactly what I had to do. I began to negotiate with the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia was then something of a hub
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of world politics. I went to Furzeva, the Russian Minister of Culture at the time. I told her about the growing influence of America and the West in Yugoslavia, and that we needed the Leningrad Ballet and the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra in Zagreb. She agreed to this immediately. And I had to pay nothing.” Kelemen then traveled to the United States and visited the State Department in Washington. There he had several conversations in which he pointed out that Yugoslavia was being strongly influenced by Russia and that the Russians had already agreed to participate in the Zagreb Biennial. Kelemen also wanted the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra and the San Francisco Ballet to participate. He got everything he asked for from the Americans. “After I had won the Russians and Americans, the rest was a breeze. No wonder they later called me later the music diplomat,” said Kelemen in closing his report.
The soprano Martina Arroyo, a soloist at the opening of the third Music Biennale Zagreb, 1965 The Music Biennial (MB) was founded in 1961. Famous musicians and dancers from East and West came to Zagreb, something that occurred in very few countries during the Cold War. In the early 1960s, the Bolshoi Theatre and the Hamburg State Opera performed at the event; Igor Stravinsky participated, as did Mauricio Kagel, Luigi Nono, John Cage, Lukas Foss, Shostakovich, Witold Lutoslawski, Mstislav Rostropovich, Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, Pierre Schaeffer, Olivier Messiaen, and many others. An entire generation of avant-garde composers, including Ivo Malec and Dubravko Detoni, took part in the event. Many other major cultural institutions also emerged along the lines of “make it happen, comrade”. I will mention only a few here: The international exhibition series “New Tendencies” (1961—1976), the genre film festival (GEFF) (1963—1970) and the neo—avant-garde group, Gorgona (1959—1966). It seems as if, in the former Yugoslavia, we now have a corresponding art history thanks only to individuals who “made it happen” and despite the adverse economic circumstances and an underdeveloped art system.
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The first exhibition in the New Tendencies series was held in 1961 on the initiative of Brazilian artist Almir Mavignier, a resident of Germany at the time. Along with the curators of the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, he had the idea for an exhibition that would reflect the then current situation of contemporary art (primarily the canon of geometric abstraction, i.e. Neoconstructivist art). Most exhibition participants were Western artists like Piero Manzoni, the group ZERO, Manfredo Massironi, François Morellet, and Dieter Roth. The second exhibition in 1963 presented 58 artists, including Getulio Alviani, Enrico Castellani, Enzo Mari, Henk Peeters, the GRAV group, Julio Le Parc, Gruppo T, and Gianni Colomo. The number of participants in the third exhibition, held in 1965, doubled again. The vast majority of the works were pieces of visual and kinetic art. For the first time artists from the United States exhibited, as well as those from Eastern Europe. Artists from the Soviet Union included the group Dviženije; from Eastern Europe Imre Bak, Zdenek Sykora, and Miloš Urbášek. Almost half of the works presented in the fourth New Tendencies in 1969, which was dedicated to computer art, were from North America, and were mostly created by mathematicians, physicists, or engineers. The fifth exhibition in 1973 focused on Conceptual Art and included artists from America and other western countries, as well as from Eastern Europe (Štefan Bělohradský, Endre Tót, John Baldessari, Daniel Buren, and so forth). Based on the initiative of Mihovil Pansini, the genre film festival (GEFF), which took place from 1963 to 1970, was founded by members of the Cinema Club Zagreb (the Association of Amateur Filmmakers). The festival was dedicated to experimental film or so-called anti-film. In just a few years, the GEFF became an international event (at which American underground film was presented in 1970 under the theme of sexuality). The festival’s subtitle was “Sexuality as a Way to a New Humanism”. In contrast, the group Gorgona, active from 1959 to 1966, practiced various activities that broke with Modernism, which, in the former Yugoslavia, enjoyed a kind of official status. The group created concepts and projects, organized art activities, and so on. The first attempts of the dematerialization of the art object can be found in their work. For instance, in 1962, Josip Vaništa sent an invitation to 50 names taken from the mailing list of Studio G in Zagreb, upon which only the words “cordially invited” were printed. There was no mention of to what or why the recipients were invited. Art was rendered almost immaterial with this invitation. It consisted only of a text that formulated a simple idea: An invitation to nothing. Vaništa caricatured a social convention in order to transform it subversively into art. The artist made use of gallery practices only to then criticize them from within. This work navigated outside of the pictorial tradition and posed many questions about the context of galleries. It was simultaneously a confusing neo-Dadaist provocation and a conceptual action that posed philosophical questions about the what, the where, and the why.
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In 1964, Vaništa created a “painting” that he did not paint but, rather, only described in a text written on the canvas. Equipped with a great sensitivity for the intangible, he thus began to replace the visual through its verbal equivalent. Members of the group began sending each other literary quotes that expressed the state of their “Gorgon” community and they wished to share. The quotes sent by Vaništa attest to his preoccupation with Yves Klein, John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Alain RobbeGrillet, Lao Tzu, and others. Of central importance were thoughts expressing emptiness and insubstantiality. In reading these “Thoughts of the Month”, it becomes obvious how closely connected the group was to the international avant-garde. The art of Gorgona cannot be interpreted as a belated imitation of Western art (as was often done with art from the East). Rather, it was inspired by it as an equal. This connection is particularly evident in the group’s anti-journal, “Gorgona”, which was published from 1961 to 1966
Josip Stojanovi’c, first director of the Music Biennale Zagreb, Istria Concert Hall, 1961 Courtesy of Muzički Biennale Zagreb and Cantus Ltd., Zagreb in collaboration with Victor Vasarely, Harold Pinter, and Dieter Roth. Each issue was designed by a single artist. The consideration of the medium itself anticipated the emergence of artists’ books in the 1970s. Anti-journals by Piero Manzoni, Enzo Mari, and many others were planned but unfortunately never realized. Vaništa corresponded with Fontana, Rauschenberg, and others regarding participation. He placed an advertisement for “Gorgona” in the Dutch magazine “Null”, and his correspondence with Hans Sohm, Henk Peeters, and the New York bookseller George Witterborn (who introduced “Gorgona” into the MoMA) attest to the artist’s wish to reach his target audience. The Gorgonians developed an almost comprehensive artistic system. They managed to do this on their own, and, at a time when it was almost impossible to run a private enterprise in the country, they were able to operate a gallery in the middle of Zagreb. They found a way to do what they wanted and, thus, had “made it happen”, as mayor Holjevac had so beautifully said. They discovered a loophole in the system, hired a
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frame shop and organized exhibitions there in 1962 and 1963 (with members of Studio G, Morellet, Dorazio, and others). The members of Gorgona worked together with art historians and curators, such as Matko Meštrovic, Radoslav Putar, and Dimitrije Basicevic, thanks to whom they were exposed to the Gallery for Contemporary Art and the “New Tendencies” series, which was also manifested in the exhibition program. Some members of Gorgona were painters (Josip Vaništa, Julije Knifer, Marijan Jevšovar, Djuro Seder), others, such as Ivan Kozaric and Miljenko Horvat, were sculptors or architects. The group also included “associate members” from other art disciplines, such as music, theater and film, including Milko Kelemen (MB) or Mihovil Pansini (GEFF). The strength of Gorgona lay in its openness and links with the local and international art scene. Nevertheless, Vaništa once said that, in a world overflowing with ideology, the group’s members essentially strove for a normal and natural life. But how did society respond to Gorgona? The group’s actions found little resonance in the newspapers, but they were at least mentioned. A major national newspaper once spoke of Knifer’s issue of “Gorgona” on the joke page (his anti-journal consisted only of a blank leporello). At the time, the publication of private editions was banned in all Eastern European countries, and the police interrogated Vaništa, fortunately without serious consequences. Bozo Bek, the director of the Gallery of Contemporary Art, helped him by describing the “Gorgonier” as an “eccentric”. For all intents and purposes, the group maneuvered at the margins of society. Their effect, however, appears to have been harmless, in contrast to that of writers and filmmakers of the time. The group was tolerated by a society that neither valued nor supported it.
Members of the Gorgona group in Julije Knifer’s exhibition in the Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 1966 What are we to make of these important examples from today’s perspective? In Croatia, there is still no meaningful cultural policy, no “art system”, or even an art market that provides inspiration. Is the statement “make it happen” still valid, and, if so, to what end?
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The music biennial continues without interruption. Although it no longer enjoys the same significance as it did when John Cage crossed the boundaries of art, it remains a serious and respectable event. Purchases from the “New Tendencies” exhibitions formed the nucleus of the Gallery of Contemporary Art’s international collection, the only one of its kind in the former Yugoslavia. However, although this institution, now called the Museum of Contemporary Art, houses many relevant contemporary documents (letters, photographs, sound recordings, and more), it has failed to historicize this important art movement. Only recently did the museum publish a beautiful book about “New Tendencies”. A book about the GEFF was published in 1963. Since then, however, there have been no new studies. GEFF exerted a significant influence on experimental film, anti-film, and video art. Yet, to date our art historians have failed to conduct comparative studies on amateur and experimental film or on the visual arts of the second half of the twentieth century. The Museum of Contemporary Art seems relatively uninterested in exploring the actions of the Gorgona group, and Josip Vaništa’s archive is becoming increasingly scattered. In this regard, we have failed in our historical task.As in the past, in Croatia, too much still depends on individual initiative or lucky breaks and, certainly, no serious history of art can be written considering this background, and in this context. Branka Stipančić © All rights reserved. Springerin — Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, association “springerin”, Vienna.
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