The poster for Gotovac's Point Blank exhibit show photographs of his performances in 1994. On the back, the artist's words reveal a reverence for narrative film and an insightful perspective on his work and life as an artist and filmmaker.
Tomislav Gotovac, artist and filmmaker, died at 63 on June 25, 2010. In January of 1994, he presented an installation and performance work, Point Blank, at Franklin Furnace as part of a residency in New York funded by ArtsLink. During his time in New York, he made a vivid impression on Franklin Furnace staff and his audience. Though little recognized outside his native Croatia, Gotovac was an important performance artist and filmmaker, particularly significant to Eastern Europe’s avant-garde.
He was best known for his politically charged work, much of which addressed his experience of oppression in Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia. In 1996 he worked on his only collaboration, with Aleksandar Battista Ilic and Ivana Keser, on a performance piece they entitled Weekend Art: Hallelujah the Hill. The three artists went for a series of walks in the seemingly idyllic Croatian mountains near Zagreb, an area nonetheless troubled by its recent violent history in the Bosnian War. Photographs recording the weekend outings show Ilic, Gotovac, and Keser experiencing what might be called bourgeois leisure (one reminding me of Henri Cartier-Bresson’ photograph of a grassy French picnic). The photographs exist somewhere between weekend snapshots and iconic family photographs, with a hint of travel journalism. The distribution of postcards of the images presents a subtle criticism of Croatian life, the freedom to leisure, and the meaning of a weekend outing in a country with such a painful recent history of oppression.
In his own performance pieces, Gotovac’s criticism was more overt. Most impressively, and perhaps most notoriously, he used his own body to express freedom—both as a protest and as a demand. While Eastern Europe was stripped of its political and artistic freedoms, Gotovac used his naked body, voluntarily stripped of clothing, to embody those very freedoms.
In “Sickle and Hammer and Red Star” from the Point Blank installation and performances exhibit at Franklin Furnace in 1994, Tomislav Gotovac—fully clothed, but in Communist uniform—used parody to re-conceive a totalitarian dictator (much resembling Tito) as a filmic performance. “24 Images per sec.” further explored the relationship between filmmaking and performance art, paying tribute to avant-garde filmmakers. “Shooting Piece/Sniper Peace” restaged a violence familiar to the artist’s native Croatia, forming new concepts of the experience of political oppression. As Martha Wilson wrote in the press release for the show, “Gotovac deals with his three major themes: totalitarian symbols, cinematic ions, and the former Yugoslavia.” In fact, interestingly enough, he dedicated the exhibit to Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers, geniuses of parody and farce.
Unsurprisingly for a man who has a tendency for stripping naked in public, Gotovac had a real talent for comedy, and his ability to use farcical performance to engage in often-politically-rebellious thought earned him, from the point of view of some, the title of the most important Croatian avant-garde artist of his time, a title he may never have fully adopted. In a constant assertion of his political, personal, and artistic freedom, Gotovac remained truly individual, and as such generally avoided defining himself or his work according to art movements or contexts. To be sure, his work was both historical and political, but he also proclaimed: “I think politics doesn’t exist anymore; the only thing left is aesthetics!” And, as his “aesthetics” should suggest to us, while we may be tempted to categorize him as a conceptual artist, or even a performance artist, Gotovac’s discomfort with those categorizations further confirm our suspicions that the use of these terms is often flawed. As he said in an interview with the Croatian Kontura magazine, “I have nothing in common with the real avant-garde principles. I am a terrible traditionalist. It just bothers me that people don’t have the faintest idea what art really is, and this is the fault of critics and their conceptual fabrications...I can’t really differentiate life and art. It is all the same for me, maybe because it is my big problem.”
It would be a shame to forget that, while images of Gotovac as a Tito-style dictator with a red star on his forehead and as a streaker proclaiming his freedom in the streets of Zagreb are perhaps the most vivid, he worked in a variety of mediums and styles. He worked in collage, composed an astutely funny instruction-style written piece I stumbled upon, and, of course, was a passionate filmmaker.
For the poster of the “Point Blank” exhibit at Franklin Furnace in 1994, Gotovac wrote: “Observation becomes a rhythm, a life in itself, with its light-whiteness and its dark-blackness, and a tempo that fills the rhythm of light and dark with silences and sounds /noises/ ." This perspective seems to typify a quintessential (and quintessentially revolutionary) 20th century perspective. Gotovac worked as both a filmmaker—film being the apotheosis of 20th century visual obsession—and an artist of nude and politically rebellious happenings and performances. Ultimately, the former profession may be a better lens through which to understand Gotovac’s work. While his work as a filmmaker may be less familiar to us at Franklin Furnace, even his most conventional film tastes have influenced his far-from conventional approaches to performance art.
He said of himself in his interview with Kontura magazine: “Tomislav Gotovac always imagines himself as film director who would like to direct in many fields of art and life.”
-Hannah Garner, student intern summer 2010
He was best known for his politically charged work, much of which addressed his experience of oppression in Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia. In 1996 he worked on his only collaboration, with Aleksandar Battista Ilic and Ivana Keser, on a performance piece they entitled Weekend Art: Hallelujah the Hill. The three artists went for a series of walks in the seemingly idyllic Croatian mountains near Zagreb, an area nonetheless troubled by its recent violent history in the Bosnian War. Photographs recording the weekend outings show Ilic, Gotovac, and Keser experiencing what might be called bourgeois leisure (one reminding me of Henri Cartier-Bresson’ photograph of a grassy French picnic). The photographs exist somewhere between weekend snapshots and iconic family photographs, with a hint of travel journalism. The distribution of postcards of the images presents a subtle criticism of Croatian life, the freedom to leisure, and the meaning of a weekend outing in a country with such a painful recent history of oppression.
In his own performance pieces, Gotovac’s criticism was more overt. Most impressively, and perhaps most notoriously, he used his own body to express freedom—both as a protest and as a demand. While Eastern Europe was stripped of its political and artistic freedoms, Gotovac used his naked body, voluntarily stripped of clothing, to embody those very freedoms.
In “Sickle and Hammer and Red Star” from the Point Blank installation and performances exhibit at Franklin Furnace in 1994, Tomislav Gotovac—fully clothed, but in Communist uniform—used parody to re-conceive a totalitarian dictator (much resembling Tito) as a filmic performance. “24 Images per sec.” further explored the relationship between filmmaking and performance art, paying tribute to avant-garde filmmakers. “Shooting Piece/Sniper Peace” restaged a violence familiar to the artist’s native Croatia, forming new concepts of the experience of political oppression. As Martha Wilson wrote in the press release for the show, “Gotovac deals with his three major themes: totalitarian symbols, cinematic ions, and the former Yugoslavia.” In fact, interestingly enough, he dedicated the exhibit to Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers, geniuses of parody and farce.
Unsurprisingly for a man who has a tendency for stripping naked in public, Gotovac had a real talent for comedy, and his ability to use farcical performance to engage in often-politically-rebellious thought earned him, from the point of view of some, the title of the most important Croatian avant-garde artist of his time, a title he may never have fully adopted. In a constant assertion of his political, personal, and artistic freedom, Gotovac remained truly individual, and as such generally avoided defining himself or his work according to art movements or contexts. To be sure, his work was both historical and political, but he also proclaimed: “I think politics doesn’t exist anymore; the only thing left is aesthetics!” And, as his “aesthetics” should suggest to us, while we may be tempted to categorize him as a conceptual artist, or even a performance artist, Gotovac’s discomfort with those categorizations further confirm our suspicions that the use of these terms is often flawed. As he said in an interview with the Croatian Kontura magazine, “I have nothing in common with the real avant-garde principles. I am a terrible traditionalist. It just bothers me that people don’t have the faintest idea what art really is, and this is the fault of critics and their conceptual fabrications...I can’t really differentiate life and art. It is all the same for me, maybe because it is my big problem.”
It would be a shame to forget that, while images of Gotovac as a Tito-style dictator with a red star on his forehead and as a streaker proclaiming his freedom in the streets of Zagreb are perhaps the most vivid, he worked in a variety of mediums and styles. He worked in collage, composed an astutely funny instruction-style written piece I stumbled upon, and, of course, was a passionate filmmaker.
For the poster of the “Point Blank” exhibit at Franklin Furnace in 1994, Gotovac wrote: “Observation becomes a rhythm, a life in itself, with its light-whiteness and its dark-blackness, and a tempo that fills the rhythm of light and dark with silences and sounds /noises/ ." This perspective seems to typify a quintessential (and quintessentially revolutionary) 20th century perspective. Gotovac worked as both a filmmaker—film being the apotheosis of 20th century visual obsession—and an artist of nude and politically rebellious happenings and performances. Ultimately, the former profession may be a better lens through which to understand Gotovac’s work. While his work as a filmmaker may be less familiar to us at Franklin Furnace, even his most conventional film tastes have influenced his far-from conventional approaches to performance art.
He said of himself in his interview with Kontura magazine: “Tomislav Gotovac always imagines himself as film director who would like to direct in many fields of art and life.”
-Hannah Garner, student intern summer 2010
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