Zoran Popović
Gestural Speech of Joseph Beuys
8mm film, regular, colour, 18fps digitally remastered
15’ 55”
edition 2/5 (5+2AP)
1973/2016
The film was edited in 1973, when it was also shown in Student Cultural Centre; it was shown several more times during the 1970s, after which the author forgets about the film, the ways of art leading him elsewhere.
However, editor at the “Menjačnica (Exchange Office)” Gallery of the Goethe Institute started a programme of exhibitions in 2016 (which has continuously been going on to date, for full five years), with the idea of presenting the work of the artists who in any way collaborated with German artists or created work that in any way interacts with German arts and culture. I remembered then that I had at a certain point recorded a not inconsiderable series of black-and-white photos and colour slides, as well as the mentioned film. For this occasion, I accepted the job and digitally postproduced this film. I re-edited it, added several frame sequences, and recorded instrumentals for musical background, which was Richard Wagner’s. This digital version of the film was made in 2016 from the material recorded in 1973.
The premiere of the digital version of the film was in the Goethe Institute on 3 March 2016, as part of the exhibition Document as a Work of Art: Gestural Speech of Joseph Beuys, Film and Photography by Zoran Popović, 1973 (Edinburgh Art Festival). “Menjačnica” Gallery of the Goethe Institute in Belgrade.
Zoran Popović, artist
In the “Menjačnica” Gallery of the Goethe Institute, the artist exclusively presented the film and photographs made in 1973, when he recorded the twelve-hour lecture of the world-renowned German artist Joseph Beuys at Edinburgh Art Festival, where he himself had an exhibition. At Edinburgh Art Festival in 1973, in the Eight Yugoslav Artists exhibition organised in the Richard Demarco Gallery, Popović presented his graphics and slide projections of his two performances, previously put on in Belgrade (the Axioms performance, put on in the Student Cultural Centre gallery in September 1972, and the photo performance Hiding behind Sally Holman, made in Tašmajdan park in June 1973).
At the mentioned festival, as part of the Richard Demarco Gallery’s programme, which was presented on 19 August 1973 in the Melville College theatre, Marina Abramović, Gergelj Urkom, Raša Todosijević, and Zoran Popović each presented their performances on the same stage at the same time.
In the same location, on 20 August 1973, Popović used an 18mm camera to record Joseph Beuys’s performance: Twelve Hour Lecture: A Homage to Anacharsis Cloots (Anachrasis Cloots, Prussian nobleman, born in the vicinity of the German town Kleve, was an important figure in the French Revolution and a member of the French Parliament from 1792 to 1794). Popović’s fifteen-minute film focuses on the bodily and gestural speech of Joseph Beuys. Popović complemented the film with music, which additionally emphasises the aesthetic and reduces the pragmatic interest in Beuys’s action, and also establishes the difference between fomal transfer of contents and bodily shape of communication. Beuys’s lecture and Popović’s film are two extremes that operate effectively as a whole.
Apart from this film, the Goethe Institute Gallery also exhibited some 30 photos, colour and black-and-white, of smaller and larger formats, whose content corresponds to the film, while the photos are additionally interesting as a document because the faces in the audience are those of the Belgrade art scene of the time: Biljana Tomić’s, Raša Todosijević’s, Gera Urkom’s, Neša Paripović’s, Marina Abramović’s, Jasna Tijardović’s, Nuša’s and Srečo Dragan’s, Irina Subotić’s, Žika’s and Sanja Gligorijević’s, Tom Marioni’s (an artist, writer, and curator who founded the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco in 1970).
In addition to the obvious documentary quality, this work dedicated to Beuys also has a way of pointing out different affinities of Popović’s narratives, from the biographical to the analytical and theoretical ones, and indirectly relating the times, manners, influences, and exchanges within the art practice of the period.
Una Popović
© Cultural Centre of Belgrade, the October Salon Collection and the artist
Purchase agreement: III-5-300/22.10.2021.
Inventory No. 1708
Photo: video frame, courtesy of the artist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Zoran Popović (1944, Belgrade, Serbia) has been present on the Serbian and former Yugoslav scene for more than forty years, and his role has also been rather prominent in relevant international art events (to which the artist’s detailed biography and bibliography testify). The following general information from his rich artistic biography should particularly be emphasised. He was a member of the historic group of six artists who in the early 1970s brought the ideas and actions of the so-called new art practice to Belgrade, effecting one of the greatest transformations in understanding the language of art and the means of artistic expression. In this context, Popović is the author of a series of seminal pioneer works, such as the first artist film – the 1968 Head/Circle, as well as a whole system of drawings, photographs, posters, installations, and performances, titled Axioms (1971-1973).
During his stay in New York, in 1974 he made personal and professional contact with core representatives of the American conceptual art; he took part in the happenings they organised and collaborated with The Fox journal (1975). His stay in New York is documented by the socially-engaged auteur film Struggle in New York (1976), which is an anthological piece of conceptual art in Serbia and worldwide. He participated in numerous presentations of contemporary Yugoslav art abroad (Edinburgh, Vienna, Warsaw, Modena, Dortmund, Berlin, Brussels, Luxembourg, Rome, Genoa, etc.) as well as in the 1977 Paris Youth Biennale. His work was featured in the retrospective exhibition New Art in Serbia from 1970 to 1980, organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1983, the same year in which he also staged a solo exhibition titled New Iconoduly in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened a new stage and initiated a whole series of ideas and achievements that has to date been growing and developing. He deals with theoretical work and exhibition organisation; he is active in the cultural and artistic life of his community. He took part in the highly significant international exhibition in Bonn in 1994, during which the suggestion was made that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East-European and West-European art scenes should be merged (Europa – Europa Das Jahrhunderet Der Avantgarde In Mitel und OstEuropa/Europe – Europe, One Hundred Years of Avant-Garde in Central and Eastern Europe), and his work was also featured in René Block’s 2003 exhibition In den Schluchten des Balkan, in the Fridericianum in Kassel. His contributions and papers dealing with his work can be found in numerous publications in the country and abroad, among which the most significant include Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) and Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader – Anthology (Tate Publishing with Afterall, London, 2007), which contain his text “For Self-Management Art.” The second edition of this book, published in Portuguese and English in Sao Paolo, was intended for Brasil and Latin America. He is the winner of several coveted awards, including the “Sedam sekretara SKOJ-a” (“Seven Secretaries of the Union of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia”), which was of great importance in the Yugoslav context (Zagreb, 1973); 31st October Salon award for drawing (Belgrade, 1990); the Branko Vučićević Award (Belgrade, 2019). He is a member of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia.
(The author’s narrative biography written by Jerko Ješa Denegri)
Želimir Žilnik
The Bankruptcy Estate Dossier
digitally remastered TV series
3 x 30 min
edition 1/3
2008 – 2018
Part of the work was exhibited at the 50th October Salon Circumstance in 2009.
With this documentary series, the Playground production completes the story of a failed privatisation of two companies from Zrenjanin: using ŠINVOZ and BEKO as examples, it actualises the attitude of society as a whole towards the processes of economic transformation and opens a public dispute on the social consequences of this transformation.
Combining documentary recordings of labour strike, video archives, and statements from experts in different social studies such as economics (economists and economic media analysts) or workers’ rights (trade union representatives, legal experts, labour psychologists) as well as from the representatives of state bodies and institutions competent for the privatisation process, crime and corruption fight, social dialogue initiation – we try to reach the answer to the question: Why the position and rights of workers are seldom talked about?
Realisation and research team:
Dragan Gmizić, Dragan Kolarov, Csaba Polgár, Vuk Vukmirović, Saša Srećković
Director: Želimir Žilnik
Producer: Sarita Matijević
© Belgrade Cultural Centre, the October Salon Collection, and the artist
Purchase agreement: III-5-291/18.10.2021.
Inventory number: 1706
Photo: video frame, courtesy of the artist
Selected bibliography:
50th October Salon, Circumstance. Belgrade Cultural Centre, 2009.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Želimir Žilnik (1942, Niš, Yugoslavia) is an artist-filmmaker from Novi Sad, Serbia. In his highly prolific career, Žilnik has made over 50 feature and short films, which have been exhibited internationally at film festivals including Berlin, Toronto, Rotterdam, Moscow and Oberhausen. From the late 60s, his socially engaged films in former Yugoslavia earned him accolades, but also censorship in the 70s and the 90s for his unflinching criticism of the government apparatus. His power to observe and unleash compelling narratives out of the lives of ordinary people is the common thread throughout his work.
Recently, Žilnik has been the subject of major career retrospectives at Kunsthalle Wien, 2020/21; Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019; Cinemateca Argentina, 2018; Mar del Plata Int. Film Festival, 2017; Anthology Film Archive, New York & Harvard Film Archive, 2017 etc.
His work has been featured in programs of art galleries, museums and art institutes around the world (Documenta, Kassel, Germany; Venice Biennale, Italy; ICA London, UK; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA; MUMOK, Vienna, Austria; MACBA, Spain; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico, etc.).
www.zilnikzelimir.net
Vladan Radovanović
Around
book-sheet music, colour photographs; video
30 х 21 cm, 20 pages; 4′
1984-2021
Around is a vocovisual work recorded as a video in 1984. Centro Videoarte from Ferrara had commissioned this work with the purpose of participating in the Immagine e suono Festival in Ferrara, in February 1984.
The whole work “revolves” around the English word around. The number of segments of the work corresponds to the number of letters/sounds of the word. Each segment deals vocally and visually with each letter and sound of the word. For the purpose of creating the work, the artist manufactured all the props from cardboard and personally performed all the movements and sounds that were planned. Each segment brings a variation to the interpretations of the letter that is “revolving.” The last letter, “d,” is placed in front of a mirror, whereby the letter “g” is formed above “d,” which the voice actualises as “god.” Vladan Radovanović had suggested the vocovisual as a multi-media genre of art, which in addition to the sound, visual, and spatial elements can also include the kinetic and tactile, always with the corresponding meaning. The work encompasses all the sound and visual phenomena, movements, and poetics, from glossolalia and rhopalic verse, through carmina figurate, to concrete, kinetic, visual, and sound “poetry.”
© Belgrade Cultural Centre, the October Salon Collection, and the artist
Purchase agreement: III-5-299/22.10.2021.
Inventory number: 1709
Photo: video frame, courtesy of the artist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Vladan Radovanović (1932, Belgrade, Serbia) graduated in Composition from the Belgrade Music Academy, under the mentorship of professor Milenko Živković. With three other artists he founded Mediala in 1958 and left it in 1959. He initiated the foundation of the Electronic Studio at Radio Belgrade, which he managed from 1972 to 1999. In 1993, he proposed a project and founded the SINTUM open group. In 2000, he proposed the establishment of the Multimedia Art programme at postgraduate interdisciplinary studies of the University of Arts in Belgrade.
He does research and creative work in 10 fields. Since 1953, he has been recording and drawing dreams. Since 1954, he has been involved in character-meaning-sound, later vocovisual and proto-conceptual projectism. In 1955, he introduced the concept of action (similar to the later concept of performances). That same year, he also introduced minimalism or reductionism into music, and between 1958 and 1959 he developed cosmically sacral hyper-polyphony. Since 1956 he has been conducting research in tactilism. Since 1957, he has been developing the polymedium (later renamed into synaesthetic art), ideograms, and body work (similar to later body art). Since 1958 he has nurtured semi-abstract structuralism in visual arts.
As regards the purely technological development, he has been making tape music since 1960, pure electronic music since 1966, computer music since 1977, and computer graphics since 1988.