[i]Wir wären gut anstatt so roh,
doch die Verhältnisse, sie sind nicht so![/i]
(Berthold Brecht, Threepenny Opera)

»Standing with his back to the audience and in front of a microphone into which, in various tones and intonations, he whispered, shouted, ranted, screamed, pleaded, begged, simply asked the same question over and over again - Was ist Kunst? - while facing a hand-written backdrop on which the same words were boldly written, and against which a silent woman (Marinela Kozelj) sat impassively facing the audience and a man stood with a black cloth over his head and shoulders tied with a rope around his neck. The action lasted some twenty-five minutes until Todosijevic was exhausted and his deep, husky, powerful voice could barely be heard. It was excruciating to watch, to hear, to witness.«

This is how Kristine Stiles describes the performance »Was ist Kunst?« in Vienna in 1977, which was one of many versions of Todosijevic's »Was ist Kunst?« project. Documentary photos of this event - as well as video footage of another version that is kept in the collection of the Belgrade MOCA (in which we see a close-up of Marinela Kozelj's face being pushed and harassed by the artist's hand while he shouts »Was ist Kunst?« from off-screen) - is on display in this museum as a part of the big retrospective exhibition of this crucial artist. The retrospective traces, discovers and reconstructs Todosijevic's activities, starting from the early 70s, when he was a part of an informal group of artists associated with activities of the Students' Cultural Centre (SKC) in Belgrade, which promoted »new artistic practice« in Serbia (and was also a significant international venue for radical conceptualism), and going up to his more recent projects, including the seminal Gott liebt die Serben series, which he started in the late 80s. The exhibition is thoroughly curated by Dejan Sretenovic, who has recently also written a book on the artist's work.

It was with his »Was ist Kunst?« project that Rasa Todosijevic reflected not only the local situation with regard to the rise and fall of »new artistic practice,« but also the overall conclusion of a legendary era that started with groundbreaking propositions, including the one by Kosuth that says: »Art as an Idea as an Idea«. Todosijevic was the artist who made a break with the certain sense of pathos that encapsulated the »new art practice« when its initial radical impulse reached the point of no return. In the second half of the 70s, the ideological ground of this artistic challenge generally split into two directions: either into calls to abandon exhibiting as such and to turn to strictly ideological issues, or into exploring further analytical and often minimalist tendencies of that project. Rasa Todosijevic had a particular, more cynical nerve, and the above-mentioned sense of disillusionment was for him fuel for future edgy and challenging works that brought him into the 80s and influenced many projects on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia, including the Neue Slowenische Kunst collective. »Was ist Kunst?« used some traditional artistic matrices, such as dialectics between the artist and his model (who is »naturally« female) and between the intention and the interpretation of artistic achievements; its crucial accomplishment lies in the way it investigates politics of art (not political art) by focusing upon a weakness in interpreting art that breeds agitated behaviour, intimidation and arrogance. If conceptual art began with heroic definitions such as Kosuth's, it ended with one tormenting question: »Was ist Kunst?«. Pronounced in German, of course, because what other language evokes a totalitarian legacy in such an unmistakable way?

The emergence of the Students' Cultural Centre in Belgrade is a result of students' protests in 1968. As one way of pacifying the young generation's growing dissatisfaction with forms of authority within the Socialist system, which had increasingly shown cracks in its economic system as well as in the fragile harmony of national identities, students were given a cultural venue in order to channel their political dissatisfaction through marginal cultural experimentation. The SKC opened in 1971, and that very same year a couple of exhibitions were organised that gathered young emerging artists. From these, an informal group of six arose that included Marina Abramovic, Nesa Paripovic, Rasa Todosijevic, Zoran Popovic, Gergely Urkom and Era Milivojevic. Most of them had already been friends during their student years in the late 60s, and had already entered into full confrontation with the academic system. Zoran Popovic later summed up the artistic and political situation in which they found themselves, which was characterised by two tendencies. On the one hand there was a demand that art in the revolutionary society should be socially beneficial within a general obligation to build socialism, and on the other a demand that art should have only one real obligation: that of exclusively researching formal issues of artistic practice. »As a generation emerging on the art scene, we found ourselves between two ostensibly opposed thoughts that were both socially established,« says Popovic. In other words, this generation of artists was the first to recognise various dissident formations in Serbian society as integral, almost constitutive aspects of governing structures. This generation of artists was the first to start to think about relations between art and politics in the third way; and in a sense this whole artistic event signified a first form of cultural critique coming from left-wing positions (although many protagonists would not declare themselves as »left-wing«), advocating fundamental changes in the social role of artists and the inclusion of real life in art.

For Rasa Todosijevic, the communist bureaucratic apparatus that dictated the mediocritical status quo in art academies and in the public discourse on art was no more important as a target of attack than the bourgeois legacy of pre-WW2 academic standards, which were equally influential in the professional and public cultural discourse of the Tito era. These standards he labelled as »pompier,« evoking the reactionary art of the Restoration epoch in France, and became involved in notorious clashes at the Belgrade Art Academy, which is still known for its conservative attitudes and glorifications of canonical figures of Modernism such as Pablo Picasso, who was very often an emblematic figure for Todosijevic's critical work. During the 70s he also challenged the international art system with texts and statements, including his well-known Edinburgh Statement from 1975, which bears the subtitle: »Who makes a profit on art, and who gains from it honestly?« The text lists everyone involved in art business, from »carpenters who make frames, wooden structural supports, etc.« and »those producing and selling drugs, sanitary supplies, alcohol, contraceptives, cigarettes and sporting goods to artists,« all the way to »philosophers writing about art, yet never really understanding« and »organisers of funds given as one-month or one-year or hundred-year scholarships to lackeys, bootlickers, and to wealthier children and solid epigones.« As he put it in another text entitled »Art and Revolution,« which was printed in the publication that played a key role in the attempt to ideologically define the »new artistic practice,« October '75, »in ethical, political and social clashes, art sharpens and underlines its meaning«.

However, one must be very careful about the ideological positioning of Todosijevic's activities. One can easily be trapped into identifying Todosijevic as yet another type of dissident artist, a typical product of real-socialism that is now celebrated because one has an idealised image of the likes of Vaclav Havel in one's mind. To talk about dissidents in Tito's Yugoslavia means also to think about the privileged few whose anti-communist resistance became an integral part of the system. Todosijevic entered a narrow line of »left-wing deviationists« who presented a more serious threat to the Communist Party nomenclature then the right-wing reactionaries. In the history of Tito's Yugoslavia, it appears that the official apparatus was more severe in disciplining its left-wing factions than its bourgeois opponents. For Todosijevic - also because of the fact that he was never formally a part of any political platform - this meant he received none of the public status that was granted sooner or later to dissident artists, if not before, then under Milosevic. This retrospective makes Todosijevic's work fully visible for the Serbian and the international audience, but the question of the social position of his project still remains open.

The exhibition firstly includes documents of performances carried out by Todosijevic during the SKC years. Although they did not have any straightforward intention to shock or to push the body to the very limits, as did Marina Abramovic's performances of that time, some actions did involve masochistic impulses, but always combined with sadistic ones. These impulses were not on the side of the »community« as in some of Abramovic's performances (e.g. Rhythm 5), but on the side of the very self of the artist and his »creative« act. As Sretenovic points out, Todosijevic directed his aggression towards other protagonists or objects of his performances, not provoking any emphatic reaction from the audience. In »Water Drinking« (1974) he drank 26 glasses of water while attempting to harmonise the rhythm of swallowing with the rhythm of the breathing of the dying fish taken out of the very same water from which he drank. The carp died whilst the artist vomited over the tablecloth, under which there was some violet pigment that, activated by the vomit, eventually dyed the entire fabric. As opposed to »dissident« forms of artistic protest, Todosijevic does not rely on »communicative clichés« that would endow the whole event and its elements with symbolic meaning aimed at some form of active criticism. We may invest our social disillusionment in the artistic act, but we are not granted any humanist pathos in the process. In Todosijevic's »Decision as Art « (1973), another fish dies whilst he is occupied with the absurd process of colouring a fig tree. With these performances it is not only that social relations are laid bare: the very act of artistic behaviour is devoid of any socially authorised role that is recognised as a »healthy or well-disposed« form of criticism. In both ideological and »therapeutic« terms, Todosijevic now appears much closer to both Althusserian and Lacanian positions than once seemed to be the case and was usually assumed in interpretations of his work. His artistic acts do not promise that one will feel better, but that one will feel worse, in order to articulate truth. In addition, he always links micro-procedures of ideology as parts of the ideological big Other (Academy, State, Nation, ArtÖ) in which the interpellation originates. Finally, when his artistic method is discussed, each element of his installations or performances is sustained only in its topological relations to other elements, and not to any discourse other than a structurally artistic one: as Todosijevic would say, to interpret his works one needs exactly the same amount of time and consideration as he needed to conceive them.

In this sense, during the 70s he carried out projects that address some myths of artistic autonomy, but precisely by perverting this modernist »mission.« His »elementary paintings« are presented in one section of the show, as well as the documentation of the project he started in 1976 under the title »Not a Day without a Line«. The quintessential artistic »move,« drawing a line on any available surface (gallery walls, hotel rooms, private apartments, notebooks, printed books, etc.), aims at producing an index of artistic presence by mimicking the academic ritual of »hand exercise« and multiplying it in a mechanical fashion that gradually creates a surplus of alienated labour. Many of his works from the 1980s are focused upon certain artistic myths, contrasting them with the local ideological ambience of the transition period marked by crumbling Titoism and emerging nationalism and fascism in Serbia and other parts of ex-Yugoslavia. He produced some works (sculptures) by attempting to imitate »art for the market«, and directing it - as was brilliantly perceived by one of the greatest admirers and supporters of his work, Slavko Timotijevic - at »a whole lot of local mannerists who have the habit of imitating the success of their idols in order to become successful, as well as at an audience that is fascinated mostly by that direct link to the idol«.

Finally, it is surely with his »Gott Liebt die Serben« project, started in the late 80s, that Todosijevic intervened directly in the very discursive tissue of political tumult in Serbia that brought us war in the 1990s. The project involved different manifestations: inverted totalitarian symbols adapted to different conditions of display and using different elements in installations (suitcases, cupboards, chairs, blackboards), appearing in drawings and watercolours, sculptures, on copies of front pages of art magazines, on bottle labels, etc. All have the same title, usually boldly displayed: »Gott Liebt die Serben«. What we are dealing with here is most definitely a fundamental capture of the quintessential ideological enunciation of the Serbian nationalistic project, but again spoken in German, which furnishes it both with glimpses of totalitarian legacy and, more importantly, with a sense of displacement that creates a rupture within the discourse itself. Again, this title may be seen through the Lacanian notion of enunciation: a specific act performed by »I« that actually confirms that language comes from the Other, and that the idea of »I« being the master of his/her discourse is only an illusion. This enunciation, its duplicity, characterises the psychotic language of the Serbian nationalistic project, and any other project of the kind. In more recent works that inherit this strategy, another enunciation appears that served as the title of this retrospective show: »Thank you, Rasa Todosijevic!«, an enunciation through which the grateful citizens of cities that hosted Todosijevic, (Berlin, Ljubljana, Graz...) express their exaggerated gratitude to Rasa, the artistic bastard.

 

 

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