The Outsider: Vladan Radovanović at Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art

Vladan Radovanović: Ahead of his Time and Beyond / Vladan Radovanović: Ispred vremena i izvan, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, March 28 – September 10, 2024

Ours is an age of inclusive, pluralistic categories. For the discipline of art history, this is evident in the commonplace use of terms like modernisms and global contemporary art. Capacious and limitless, these terms seek to dispel myths of quality and canonicity, to flatten hierarchies between centers and peripheries, and to resolve asymmetries between the local and the global with little more than the use of a prefix or a plural. The retrospective exhibition, Vladan Radovanović: Ahead of his Time and Beyond on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (MoCAB) this past summer (March 28 – September 10) does not set out to broaden the scope of global modernisms and global contemporary art, or to undermine these critical categories per se. Nevertheless, by virtue of the artwork and artistic sensibilities on display, the exhibition illuminates the limits of inclusivity and lays bare enduring frictions between the local and the global within the sphere of contemporary art.

Vladan Radovanović, Exhibition view, 2024. Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. Photograph by Nicoletta Rousseva.

A long-awaited retrospective of an artist not well known outside Serbia, Vladan Radovanović: Ahead of his Time and Beyond features some 200 artworks in nearly every media imaginable that span the artist’s six-decade long career (Radovanović was born in Belgrade, Serbia in 1932).(It must be emphasized that while Radovanović is not well known outside Serbia, he is very well known within the country. Still, the retrospective was eye-opening even to local audiences familiar with his work. At the opening night, Una Popović recalls conversations with Serbian artists and scholars who, even though they knew Radovanović well—particularly in his role as an avant-garde composer—were stunned by the scope of the art on display. “This is all Vladan?” Popović remembers people exclaiming as they scanned the museum’s galleries brimming with artworks spanning the artist’s career.) This includes painting, photography, sculpture, sound art, musical scores, poetry, drawings, etchings, collage, installations, video art, computer graphics, animation, and many other artworks that defy disciplinary categories, and have confounded curators tasked with cataloging art from the exhibition into the museum’s permanent collection. Radovanović is a prolific and immensely interdisciplinary artist with a body of work that, one assumes, ought to gel neatly with the pluralistic frameworks of our contemporary moment.(Radovanović prefers to describe his work as polymedial, not interdisciplinary or intermedial. “I personally, have always been drawn to the combination, and the relational creating of correlative and ‘diagonally’ non-correlative structural levels of the different arts,” Radovanović explains. “The fully integrated utilization of numerous media (asemantic) forms I have [designated] (in 1957) as POLYMEDIA. Introducing some of the sense that the polyphonic has in music, the prefix ‘poly’ does not only ensure the common time base to all of the media lines but also the more precise relationship of the media and their units.” Vladan Radovanović, “Art Synthesis,” in Vladan: Art Synthesis (Kragujevac, National Museum in Kragujevac, December 2005 – February 2006), exhibition catalog, p. 150.) But he is also an artist whose artwork resides stubbornly, and who at times positions himself willfully, outside of dominant art historical frameworks and cultural mores. With this contradiction at the forefront, the retrospective raises a simple but important question: in this era of compulsive inclusivity, what should we make of an artist who remains an outsider by design?

Vladan Radovanović, Exhibition view, 2024. Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. Photograph by Nicoletta Rousseva.

As if embracing this contradiction, the exhibition does not aim to rewrite canons or remedy the omission of the artist’s work from established histories of contemporary art. Neither does it set out to make Radovanović’s art particularly accessible to a wider international, and presumably English-speaking, audience. Indeed, while the text accompanying each work is translated into English, the absence of English-language information about the exhibition on the museum’s website inhibits a non-Serbian speaking audience from learning about the show prior to visiting the museum.(I do not raise this issue as a point of criticism per se, but I do think this omission is noteworthy for how it stands in contrast (even if only slightly) to the ethos of our era of globalization and thus further distinguishes Radovanović’s exhibition from the concurrent and widely-advertised show by Pistoletto.) To the former point, the lack of a full-length exhibition catalog that could generate additional scholarship about the artist’s work is notably missing (while a catalog was not published concurrent with the exhibition, a publication is in the works). With these factors in mind, the exhibition seems geared to a local audience of Serbian artists and intellectuals, many of whom knew Radovanović well. And its objective, while ambitious, appears to be more matter-of-fact.

Curators Saša Janjić and Una Popović(Saša Janjić, a freelance curator, developed the concept for the exhibition and worked on the retrospective with MoCAB’s senior curator, Una Popović) sought to actualize a retrospective that was 25 years in the making. In a case of unfortunate historical timing, an initial retrospective of Radovanović’s work was scheduled to open at MoCAB in March 1999 but was cancelled due to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The artist passed away in 2023 at the age of 90, less than a year before the opening of his long-awaited retrospective.(Many factors beyond the NATO bombing contributed to the retrospective’s delay, including changes in leadership and personnel at MoCAB, and the fact that the museum was closed for renovation for a decade from 2007 – 2017.) The intimate tone of the exhibition is certainly apt for a posthumous homage to a respected local artist. And yet, while walking through the museum’s top floor galleries, it’s hard to ignore the feeling that something bigger, even groundbreaking, is afoot.

For outsiders to Belgrade’s art scene and visitors unfamiliar with MoCAB, the lack of English-language information on the website is not the only obstacle to accessing the exhibition. The show itself is tucked away in the museum’s furthest galleries. To get to Vladan Radovanović: Ahead of his Time and Beyond, one must pass through MoCAB’s first, second, and third floor galleries featuring a widely-advertised summer blockbuster show by the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto (on display May 10 – September 16, 2024). Upon entering the museum’s upper levels, the mood changes completely. Pistoletto’s installations of bright neon signs and selfie-friendly mirrors give way to muted slate grey walls and the recorded sound of a church choir faintly audible from an adjacent gallery. Here, at the threshold between the two exhibitions, a shift from surface to substance becomes patently clear, as does Radovanović’s indifference—bordering on disdain—to passing art world trends and popular sensibilities.

The exhibition’s title captures this indifference. Unlike the English translation which uses the word “beyond,” the Serbian izvan casts Radovanović beyond time but also outside it. In his contribution to the catalog for the 2005 exhibition Vladan: Art Synthesis at the National Museum in Kragujevac, art historian Ješa Denegri emphasizes how the artist’s position as a trailblazer also makes him an outsider and lends a degree of isolation.(Again, it is a pity that an updated full-length catalog was not published together with the exhibition. One wonders how the reception of Radovanović’s work has changed among scholars in the nearly 20 years since the exhibition at the National Museum in Kragujevac.) He calls Radovanović samotnjak, a loner or lone wolf, but not in the tragic sense, the artist himself is careful to clarify.(Jerko Denegri, “The Plastic Art Creations of Vladan Radovanović,” in Vladan: Art Synthesis (Kragujevac, National Museum in Kragujevac, December 2005 – February 2006), exhibition catalog, p. 33.) Likewise, Popović describes Radovanović as “not a team artist,” meaning an artist out of step with the group-based practices that dominated Yugoslavia’s contemporary art scenes of the 1960s and 1970s.(Una Popović, in discussion with the author, June 2024.) On the one hand, these characterizations draw on the fact that Radovanović was roughly 10 years older than the artists who came of age after 1968 in Yugoslavia’s vibrant Student Cultural Center galleries, and also that he comes to visual art from a background in music. He studied at Belgrade’s Music Academy (graduating in 1957), and is widely regarded as one of Yugoslavia’s leading contemporary composers. On the other hand, however, such accounts allude, if only obliquely, to Radovanović’s challenging personality. He was a polymath and a perfectionist, deeply intellectual, self-absorbed, and obsessed with his craft.

From the first artworks in the show, viewers would be hard-pressed to characterize the artist as such. Entering the exhibition one encounters a freestanding oversized print of an artwork entitled Lažno penjanje (False Climbing) (1958) that is so large it straddles two galleries. This black and white photograph features two men, with Radovanović on the left, whose near-nude bodies strain to climb a sleek rock face, their eyes squinting in the bright sun. The artwork’s title is a pun that reveals what Radovanović self-critically describes as the work’s “naïve trick (naivna podvala).” Rotated at 90-degrees, the photograph captures not an actual moment of physical endurance, but rather the performance and imitation of one. As the men lay prone on the stone outcropping, the relaxed musculature of their backs and legs betrays this silly if simple illusion. While the humor of False Climbing might not be immediately apparent, unmistakable in the photograph—and in other photographs from the artist’s Mini činjenja (Mini-Actions) series, displayed on a nearby wall—is a sense of playfulness, experimentation, and joy as the young artist and his friends hang out at the seaside laughing, posing, and performing for the camera. The photograph, Asimetrični tereti (Asymmetric Weights) also from 1958, captures this mood particularly well. It depicts the artist and three friends on the same picturesque coastline, with two friends hoisted up in the arms of the other two laughing wildly and embracing sweetly.

Vladan Radovanović, photographs from the artist’s Mini činjenja (Mini-Actions) Series, 1958. Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. Photograph by Nicoletta Rousseva.

The exhibition deliberately begins with False Climbing and the artist’s Mini-Actions series precisely because these artworks function like linchpins. They foreground discrete themes in Radovanović’s oeuvre—humor, gesture, the body, and the self—and thus establish a focused framework for the retrospective, which is undeniably helpful for viewers seeking a through thread in the artist’s vastly intermedial work. But these artworks also serve another, more subtly critical, purpose.

For viewers familiar with Yugoslav contemporary art, the photographs likely recall the artwork of Tomislav Gotovac, particularly his performances Showing Elle and Breathing the Air both from 1962, which are widely regarded as precursors to performance art in the region and to the work of internationally renowned artists like Marina Abramović. The joy apparent in Gotovac and Radovanović’s photographs is undeniably similar. So to is their natural setting, which situates these bodily experiments in a space somewhat removed from the strictures of urban life, and the exuberance each artist conveys as they engage in unassuming moments of exploration and play.(Of course, there are also significant differences between Gotovac and Radovanović’s early experiments with performance art. Gotovac’s artwork—including Showing Elle and Breathing Air—usually contains an element of the erotic which is largely absent from Radovanović’s work. I am grateful to Una Popović for underscoring this distinction.)

While it might seem pedantic, the fact that Radovanović’s Mini Actions predate Gotovac’s work by four years matters. This chronology positions Radovanović’s experiments with photography, the body, and performance art ahead of the work of his peers and thus rewrites a significant part of contemporary art history in the region. While the exhibition’s wall text doesn’t elaborate upon Radovanović’s vanguard role in Yugoslav histories of contemporary art, the monumental scale and central placement of False Climbing affirms its importance and kicks off the exhibition with a tacit yet unmissable intervention.(Curator Saša Janjić speaks specifically about Radovanović as a proto-conceptual artist and as among the first avant-garde artists in Serbia following the Second World War in a Serbian-language interview on an episode of the RTS (Radio-televizija Srbije) program Art zona dedicated to the MSUB retrospective. The episode can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5lC1nSBObE.)

This opening foray into humor, the body, and performance art also lays the groundwork for the adjacent gallery, which explores Radovanović’s engagement with tactile art or what he called Tacilism (Taktilizam), a term he coined and began using in 1956, allegedly unaware of the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti’s manifesto of Tactilism published in 1921.(Dejan Đorić, “The Founder of the Serbian Avantgarde,” in Vladan: Art Synthesis, p. 13.) Alongside dozens of the artist’s early works, this room includes photographs of Radovanović sculpting and interacting with Taktizon 10, an artwork displayed at the inaugural 1957 exhibition of the Mediala group, of which Radovanović was a founding member. The sculpture consists of smooth gypsum and a small patch of fur, evoking a sensual body and pubis. With a replica Taktizon 10 that viewers can touch and interact with featured within the exhibition, the gentle curves, shallow grooves, and recesses invite one to run their hands along the artwork’s surface or slip an arm through its arc and opening.

Vladan Radovanović, Exhibition view, 2024. Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. Photograph by Nicoletta Rousseva.

Another highlight in this gallery is Fijotanbl (1957), a performance that seeks to untether meaning from verbal sound in a manner reminiscent of Dadaist poetry and Zaum all the while syncing together gesture, voice, and body. The work is presented as a series of three photographs that capture Radovanović’s efforts to link the sounds “fijo” “tan” and “bl” with corresponding hand gestures, as well as a rarely seen video recording of the performance from 1957.

As one proceeds through the exhibition, the next gallery builds on the artist’s interest in uniting not only aural and visual elements but textual as well. Here, viewers are introduced to Radovanović’s concept of the Vocovisual. In the 1960s and 1970s the artist experimented with the neologisms “Image-Meaning-Sound” and “Verbo-Voco-Visual” before finally settling on “Vocovisual” toward the middle of the 1970s. Boldly, if hubristically, he theorized the concept as a means to reframe histories of art and creative expression across millennia. “In the 1970s,” Radovanović explains,

I began to view the possibility of establishing the Vocovisual as an art form that has been in existence for over two millennia…Along with the aural and the visual, this art genre or form, may also include the tactile, kinetic, gestural and the spatial… My particular Vocovisual poetics, as a form of synthesis of everything that may be actualized from the history of the Vocovisual, is not equated with the entire field of that art form or genre, but naturally, it is permeated by the same polymediality and designativity that permeates the entire realm of Vocovisual Art.(Vladan Radovanović, “Art Synthesis,” in Vladan: Art Synthesis, p. 152.)

To give form to this theory of artistic and poetic synthesis, Radovanović began experimenting with multidimensional forms and artworks that unfold across space. On view in the gallery are hexahedrons covered in image and text, and objects such as Progresija i Dogled (Progression and Field-Glasses) (1975), that combine text and image in a spatial, interactive form. A series of rectangular planes suspended from the ceiling, each with a small window-like perforation, Progression and Field-Glasses invites viewers to move around and between the floating planes and peer through the cutout openings. Each plane features a word such as, okno, soba, zvezda, praznina (porthole, room, star, emptiness): words that adorn the hovering planes as if pieces of a poem that alternately await viewer completion and resist outside understanding. Peering through the openings, one rarely sees another word or an additional opening to encourage movement and cohesion in the work. Visible instead is little more than an impervious white surface.

On the opposite end of this gallery are Radovanović’s more recent artworks, created following the collapse of socialism in Yugoslavia and the wars of the 1990s. This includes multimedia sculpture Molitveni doručak pod okriljem Belog Anđela (Prayer Breakfast Under the White Angel’s Wings) (2004), the source of the sound heard upon entering the exhibition. The acrylic sculpture is quite large, nearly three meters tall, and features a backlit, silhouetted angel set within a blue apse. Across from the figure rests a low table with an empty chalice and ciborium. This artwork is a clear reference to a 13^th century fresco of the so-called “White Angel” (Beli anđeo) from Mileševa monastery in southwest Serbia, a site of great cultural significance to Serbia’s Orthodox community. Radovanović’s reference to this holy site is, however, hardly uncritical. The absent silhouetted angel, the schlocky plastic materials, and the title’s allusion to the practice of politicians attending prayer breakfast—which began during the Milošević regime—speak to the cheapening of religion, the conflation of politics and faith following the collapse of socialism, and the cynical appropriation of religious iconography as a form of propaganda.

To the left of White Angel are drawings and paintings from the 1980s and 1990s done in a figurative style. These include Vokovizuelni omaž Matkoviću (Vocovisual Homage to Matković) and Vokovizuelni omaž Ešeru (Vocovisual Homage to Escher) from 1988 and 1998, respectively. Both paintings are tongue-in-cheek homages to influential artists whose work Radovanović seeks to not simply venerate, but indeed to metabolize. This desire finds an analog in the cigarette smoke that winds its way through the painting dedicated to conceptual artist Slavko Matković, becoming first a poem, then a substance digested, then a thread upon which to pull. Radovanović’s return to realism is thus less a response to the socialist realism of the early twentieth century then it is in line with the history of surrealism. Paintings like these expand the realm of the real and evoke the artist’s longstanding interest in dreamscapes and unconscious states.

In the final gallery, large spheres hang from the ceiling, while circular collages adorn the walls like colorful roulette wheels or illustrated cogs baring the directive “rotate!” as is the case with the artwork Okreni! (Rotate!) from 1983. For Radovanović, the sphere—like a smooth-edged hexahedron, fluid, cyclical, and ever revolving—embodied something of his lifelong effort to synthesize diverse media and modes of creative expression into a singular whole.

Over in the far corner of this gallery is another series of photographs of the artist performing Fijotanbl. This time, however, Radovanović is older, in his late 40s. He returns to the artwork again, as he so often did throughout his life, tweaking and perfecting details, rarely satisfied with the final result, always seeking a greater level of innovation, perfection, and discovery.(To this point about dissatisfaction and perfectionism, one can recall the artist’s self-critical remark about False Climbing’s “naïve trick.”) “The closest thing to absolute creation and at the same time the most difficult thing to achieve,” the artist maintains, “is to discover the novel in the genre of expressive means, in the approach to art or to venture outside of it.”(Ibid., p. 143.)

The retrospective at MoCAB demonstrates the ways in which Radovanović defined his artistic practice as a relentless search for what lies just beyond art itself. From this limit, and from the perspective of the outsider looking in, he created a mode of artistic synthesis grounded in materiality, the body, and the self. How might contemporary histories of art account for this elegant rhyming of the body, and its multisensorial faculties, with art as a multidisciplinary form of expression? One can continue the endless proliferation of art historical categories and narratives that make the discipline more nebulous and indistinct. But it seems to me that Radovanović’s artwork calls for something else entirely: for a rethinking of the category of art, not in a geographically expansive manner, but in an intuitive and innately humanist mode, a synthesis, he might call it, that foregrounds creative expression and re-centers human experience.

So, to return to the initial question: in our era of compulsive inclusivity, what to make of an artist who remains an outsider by design? To an extent, the value of Radovanović’s artwork, and of the artist’s belated retrospective at MoCAB, lies in the way it frustrates the dominant paradigms of contemporary art history’. His artwork brings to light contradictions and impossible questions that impel one to delineate the limits of contemporary art, and to then go beyond, seeking not an endless and multifarious terrain but an integrated and elementary form of creative synthesis.