Intimate Encounters: Performance Art in Zagreb
Adair Rounthwaite, This is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024), 296 pp.
The city of Zagreb occupies a special place on the map of East European performance art. The streets of that city served as the canvas for performance artists for several decades, from the walking meetings of the Gorgona Group (active 1959-1966) to the exhibition-actions of the Group of Six Authors and public interventions by Goran Trbuljak and Braco Dmitrijevic in the 1970s to iconic performances by Sanja Ivekovic (Triangle, 1979), Tomislav Gotovac and Vlasta Delimar in the 1980s, and Bozidar Jurjevic (Eclipse, 2007). Much like Pavlina Morganova’s A Walk Through Action Prague: Action, Performance Happening, 1949-1989 – a tribute to the performance art that took place on the streets of Prague – Adair Rounthwaite’s recent publication, This is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb is, then, a long-awaited and much-needed guide to Zagreb and its particular art scene.
This is Not My World is Rountwaithe’s second book. Her first, Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2017. With an expertise in performance and participatory art, she made an impressive leap into the scholarship of East European art history by learning Croatian in order to do primary research and interviews for the book. Hers is the latest in a growing collection of focused studies on the performative and conceptual art of the former Yugoslavia, for example, Anja Foerschner’s recently published Female Art and Agency in Yugoslavia, 1971–2001 (Bloomsbury, 2024), and Marko Ilic’s A Slow Burning Fire: The Rise of the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia (MIT Press, 2021), both of which focus on artists in Serbia, the former through a feminist lens. Also in this category, Jasmina Tumbas’s “I am Jugoslovenka!”: Feminist performance politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism (Manchester University Press, 2022) provides a more expansive look, analyzing a range of women and queer artists from the former Yugoslavia. Rounthwaite’s book is a welcome addition to this collection with its tight focus on not just Croatia, but the city of Zagreb, which is often overshadowed by studies of the vibrant Serbian artistic scene of the 1970s, centered around the Student Cultural Center, or Slovenia and its dynamic countercultural scene in the 1980s, including Neue Slovenische Kunst (NSK) and Laibach.
The book consists of four chapters, the first focusing on the exhibition-actions and other works by The Group of Six Authors, which consisted of Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Vlado Martek, Željko Jerman, Boris Demur, Fedor Vučemilović. These artists staged exhibitions in public spaces, mainly in Zagreb, from 1975-1981, which enabled them to engage with a wider audience than those who regularly frequent museums. Chapter 2 looks closer at the solo work of two members of the Group of Six Authors, Mladen Stilinović, whose humorous and cynical work focuses on social critique, and Vlado Martek, whose work focuses on the visualization of poetry. Chapter 3 looks at the experimental photography of Željko Jerman, ending with his collaborations with Vlasta Delimar, a performance artist active since the late 1970s, whose work centers on the body and the intimate relations between men and women, as well as female pleasure. Delimar and her counterpart Tomislav Gotovac, a filmmaker and performance artist, are the focus of the fourth and final chapter.
In a field saturated with literature that looks at artistic production in East-Central Europe through the lens of ideology, the author proposes the term intimacy as a foundation for the book and for each of the case studies. For Rounthwaite, intimacy “denotes a kind of familiarity typically born of physical closeness,” (p. 14) and is, therefore, connected with perceptions of space. This physical closeness is witnessed between the artworks and the spaces they inhabit, between artworks and viewers, and between artists and viewers. It can also be found in “the capacity of a city to signify, through its urban fabric, proximity and belonging to regional, national and transnational contexts.” (p. 14)
Indeed, the artists discussed are all artists for whom intimacy with one another and with the audience is a key component of their performances, whether subtle or overt. Rounthwaite uses the term in the way that Boris Groys conceived of Moscow Conceptualism as “romantic,” opposing the work to the seriousness of officialdom. In particular, Rounthwaite explores the tension between the intimacy of artistic expression and the political aspects of the public sphere under socialism. For example, The Group of Six Authors staged exhibition-actions across the city as a way of getting closer to a more general public, in contrast to the bland and impersonal ideological messages plastered across city squares in the form of banners and announcements. Like the Wanderers in Russia in the 19th century, they brought their art to the people. Their exhibition-actions were typical of performance art at the time in that the artists set up their work in public spaces — a courtyard, a city square, a public beach. The works on display were crudely made, often on paper or cardboard (in fact most of the material works did not survive), not academically refined art that one would find in the galleries. The art was really just a means to engage the public in conversation about art. Rather than presenting the public with a finished painting, the artwork was the conversation itself. Rounthwaite also uses intimacy to explore the concept and constitution of public space within the socialist bloc, and how it relates to perceptions of that space. In particular, she looks at the ways in which space, in the socialist period, facilitated the creation of social relations yet also provided a frame for political messaging. In her words, “socialist and capitalist regimes have compelled different performances of compliance and made different performances and experiences of noncompliance possible” (9). As such, she is interested in the noncompliance of these artists and their viewers in the public spaces of the socialist city.
Pushing these concepts further, the author challenges the notion of conceptual and performative works as dematerializing the artwork and proposes that these works offer “a fanning out and reactivation of the artwork’s materiality to create a series of relays between work, body and context.” (pp. 17-18) In fact, we know that the exploration of conceptual and performance art in the region was not a move to escape commodification or the creation of objects. So, how then can we understand the use of these genres in the context of socialist Yugoslavia? The author places the artworks discussed at the intersection of conceptual, performance, and socially engaged art, a refreshing approach that sees these artworks as crossing, rather than adhering to, these boundaries and complicates the long-held assumptions about these genres. Rounthwaite demonstrates, through her analysis of these art works, how conceptual art can engage in relational aesthetics, and that performance and socially engaged art can engage with materiality.
Rounthwaite frames the discussion of space through the writings of Henri Lefebvre and architect and critic Antoaneta Pasinovic, both of whom wrote about how the use of space could augment the possibilities for human subjectivity—something at the heart of the participatory and public performance art discussed in this volume. For Pasinovic, architecture functions “ethically” when it enables the “unfolding” of human potential. (p. 20) Rounthwaite argues that these ideas resonate with The Group of Six Authors and their peers, the central focus of this book, whose work sought to “realize new forms of potential through works in public space.” (p. 20) According to the author, their forms of “artistic sociality…constituted zones that opened other understandings of public and personal relationality.” (p. 23) Invoking architectural theory in relation to this discussion of space recalls the work of other performance artists in the region, notably Polish artists KwieKulik, who developed their performative practice in the architecture studio of Oskar Hansen. In examining the public actions by the Group of Six Authors in the context of the space in which they were executed, and therefore constituted, Rounthwaite demonstrates how these works convey they complexity of everyday life in “actually existing socialism.” She argues these artists sought “to trouble the logic of representation through messy conceptual artworks…[that]…addressed public space as a realm populated by multiple conflicting messages that included state propaganda, the commercialism germane to Yugoslav market socialism, and the personal interventions and creativity of city dwellers themselves.” (p. 34)
In Chapter 1, Rounthwaite looks at public space as not only ideologically charged in providing a space for messaging to the public, but also a phenomenon that shapes human interaction within it. Focusing on the use of language in the works of the Group of Six Authors and their interactive nature, the author examines them through the lens of Conceptual Art, a genre whose understanding has been expanded in recent years to take into account practices outside of Western European and North American art. Rounthwaite postulates an interesting understanding of the brand of conceptualism in The Group of Six Author’s work as not the cold, dispassionate language of ideas, but—given its examination of words and language—something that is highly personal and intimate. Indeed, this is similar to other engagements with Conceptual Art in the region, for example in the work of Natalia LL, which combined the cool analytic language of conceptualism with intimate, personal experiences (for example, her Permanent Measure of Time, 1970). This chapter offers a close reading of the work of these artists and places them within the broader concept of Global Conceptualism. Uniquely, it also situates them with a very material approach to artistic creation, one diametrically opposed to the dematerialization of Conceptual Art—Arte Povera. Rounthwaite notes the Group of Six Authors’ similar focus on the materials and materiality of the objects they created.
Continuing her exploration of intimacy, Rounthwaite analyzes the work of Mladen Stilinović and Vlado Martek in Chapter 2. Both artists share an interest in language in their work, and here Rounthwaite focuses on the notion of pedagogy and the manner in which institutions shape language, which in turn shapes our understanding of the world. Similar to the Group of Six Authors’ investigations of the complex nature of public space, Stilinović and Martek explore the multitude of messages Yugoslav citizens were bombarded with on a daily basis in the 1970s and 1980s, from the packaging and advertising of consumer goods to political messaging. In her analysis, Rounthwaite examines the ways in which Stilinović and Martek exploit the failure of institutions to form subjects through language and pedagogy, and how art can “materialize a more independent and also less dependable subject who is alone in their experience despite the fact that ideology’s universalizing statements ring with a painful familiarity.” (p. 92) Through close encounters in space and through language, the work of the Stilinović, Martek, and the Group of Six Authors provides an alternative to the state’s approach to constituting a homogenized, universal Yugoslav socialist subject, focusing instead on individual expression.
Chapter 3 looks at the photographic works of Željko Jerman, arguing that for him, the photographic development process was a “performative act.” (p. 121) Indeed, the relationship between photography and performance is complex, particularly the relationship between photographic documentation and the live act. As it pertains to these works, the creation of the photograph is the performative act, similar to Vito Acconci’s Blinks (1969), in which each snap of the shutter takes place when the artist blinks his eyes. Acconci’s piece was used as a key example by performance theorist Philip Auslander in constructing his theories on the documentation of performance art, arguing that performance art is only experienced through its documentation. It would have been interesting, then, to see this unique analysis of Jerman’s work discussed in relation to Auslander’s ideas regarding the relationship between performance and photography, and how these works might expand or contradict Auslander’s theories.
This chapter ends with a discussion of Jerman’s collaboration with Vlasta Delimar. They were artistic and romantic partners for a period of time, having married in 1978 and then again in 1982, with each wedding constituting a performance, perhaps the ultimate demonstration of the relationship between personal intimacy and the institution of the state. For Jerman and Delimar, this intimacy exists at intersection of the individual socialist subject and the official bodies of the state apparatus.
Chapter 4 continues to analyze Delimar’s work, but here turns its focus on her collaborations with Tomislav Gotovac. Perhaps the most notable and most discussed aspect of these artists’ work is their penchant for performing naked in public places, which for them, expressed the ultimate act of intimacy and demonstration of love with not only the audience but the people of Zagreb. Their performances were also acts of “noncompliance” with the rules of public decency that places restrictions on the body in public space, an attempt to limit the experience of intimacy with others. Rounthwaite chooses a unique angle to frame the discussion of their work by focusing on their “career-long engagement with the notion of kitsch,” (p. 171) This is perhaps a discussion that might extend to all of the artists in this monograph. Given their varying levels of education, formal artistic training, and engagement (or lack thereof) with the professional aspects of making art, these artists share a certain naïve eccentricity that produces an almost unintentional shared aesthetic. Rounthwaite discusses these shared backgrounds briefly in the book’s conclusion, but more could have been made of this in relation to their approach to art making, especially with regard to the concept of ”laziness,” a central tenet of Stilinović’s work and to a certain extent that of The Group of Six Authors as a whole. Stilinović’s 1993 essay “In Praise of Laziness” credited the laziness of Eastern European artists, operating outside the system of market capitalism, with producing interesting art. In relation to Routhwaite’s book’s overarching thematic frames of intimacy, language, and pedagogy, can we discern a shared aesthetic among these artists who did not experience formal training or experienced deliberate exclusion from various institutions? For example, Gotovac was prevented from graduating from film school and Delimar was denied membership to the Croatian Association of Visual Artists.
Further to this point, the notion of class is also often overlooked in discussions of art from the region, perhaps because of the ambition to build a classless society. But education, class, and societal status did have a profound impact on artists in this region, in terms of which artists received attention or exhibitions. Rounthwaite mentions the important role that curator Dunja Blazevic played in the Student Culture Center (SKC) in Belgrade. As the daughter of a prominent member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, this position of privilege enabled her to pursue a progressive artistic program at SKC, promoting the work of experimental artists. Many of the artists in This is Not My World came from working-class, as opposed to intellectual or elite, backgrounds. To what extent did their shared backgrounds shape these artists’ relationships to the state and to their approaches to art making within it?
There are brief and unique moments where gender is addressed in this book, for example, in discussing the exhibition-actions by the Group of Six Authors the author notes the “authorial positions of male privilege indexed in these works [which] were also reflected in all six group members’ ability to navigate public space without fear of gendered violence or discrimination.” (p. 44) This aspect of these actions has been completely overlooked until now. While Rounthwaite did include discussion of the distinction between Gotovac’s and Delimar’s gendered bodies in public space, it seems a missed opportunity not to discuss the gendered dynamics of Delimar, as a female, working individually and collaboratively with her body, naked and otherwise, navigating the public space of the city and the socialist state, in comparison to the male bodies of The Group of Six occupying public spaces in their exhibition-actions. While Delimar is emphatic that her work is not feminist, that her focus is liberation for all human beings, one cannot help but wonder how the privileged male positions of The Group of Six Authors, fully clothed, compare with the body of Delimar, often naked or exposed, navigating some of these same spaces?
That said, Rounthwaite’s tight focus on the notion and navigation of space and the tension with the intimacy created (or not) by the artists and their audiences in Zagreb offers a unique perspective on this understudied work. It is refreshing to see The Group of Six Authors receive substantial treatment given that they have often been overshadowed by their peers in other academic studies and exhibition projects. And it is great to see Zagreb find its rightful place on the map of important locales for the history of performance art in Eastern Europe.
