Senior Archivist at Franklin Furnace Michael Katchen remembers a dinner party in his home at which Gotovac performed I Am My Own Dog, during his residency with Franklin Furnace in 1994:
“The staff of Franklin Furnace would socialize all the time with Tomislav. So I wanted to make a dinner for him. [...] It could have been his birthday, because there are two little cakes in one of the pictures [I took]. So we were all eating, we knew he wanted to do this performance and I had said okay. He prearranged everything while I was cooking dinner all day. It was a really well planned out performance. Obviously it wasn’t exactly choreographed; he improvised a lot. He got up at the dinner table and took off his clothes and just started performing.
He stood up and crawled around on all fours, walking himself [with a dog leash]. That’s what the title was: I Am My Own Dog. A lot is up to interpretation: [the concept of] control over yourself, this whole thing about Tito, and Tito’s control over the country [Yugoslavia]. There were Serbs and Croatians there [at the dinner party]. So the performance was very politically loaded.
From my feeling, that was true performance, because he’s not getting paid, it’s not announced, it’s not a huge happening. It’s not one of those things today, where it has to be documented; [performance art] is a commodity now. [...] And again, it was just a different time, performance art is not like that anymore. That’s kind of the difference, between the people who feel [really compelled to perform] and [...] hyper-conscious art-making.”
In Kontura magazine's interview with Tomislav, Goran Blagus remarked on the potency of the artist's dog metaphor. He wrote, of Gotovac's Franklin Furnace exhibit: "As with his former projects, this exhibition tried to expose conditions of life in totalitarian systems and [...] ironically warned of dangers that threaten a man when the society turns him in to a dog."
-Hannah Garner, student intern summer 2010
“The staff of Franklin Furnace would socialize all the time with Tomislav. So I wanted to make a dinner for him. [...] It could have been his birthday, because there are two little cakes in one of the pictures [I took]. So we were all eating, we knew he wanted to do this performance and I had said okay. He prearranged everything while I was cooking dinner all day. It was a really well planned out performance. Obviously it wasn’t exactly choreographed; he improvised a lot. He got up at the dinner table and took off his clothes and just started performing.
He stood up and crawled around on all fours, walking himself [with a dog leash]. That’s what the title was: I Am My Own Dog. A lot is up to interpretation: [the concept of] control over yourself, this whole thing about Tito, and Tito’s control over the country [Yugoslavia]. There were Serbs and Croatians there [at the dinner party]. So the performance was very politically loaded.
From my feeling, that was true performance, because he’s not getting paid, it’s not announced, it’s not a huge happening. It’s not one of those things today, where it has to be documented; [performance art] is a commodity now. [...] And again, it was just a different time, performance art is not like that anymore. That’s kind of the difference, between the people who feel [really compelled to perform] and [...] hyper-conscious art-making.”
In Kontura magazine's interview with Tomislav, Goran Blagus remarked on the potency of the artist's dog metaphor. He wrote, of Gotovac's Franklin Furnace exhibit: "As with his former projects, this exhibition tried to expose conditions of life in totalitarian systems and [...] ironically warned of dangers that threaten a man when the society turns him in to a dog."
-Hannah Garner, student intern summer 2010
That was an unforgettable performance and indeed made an impact like few others. To me, Tomislav honestly lived and embodied his art. But rather than using that for solipsism, he lived his art to transcend and make public his political and social environment. I'm sorry for his loss.
ReplyDeleteI would LOVE to see photos from that performance if Mr. Katchen could be persuaded to post them!