POLYGON
FOR RECOGNITION (Summary of essays on Serbian)
Central European aspects of Vojvodina's avant-garde movements from
1920 - 2000:
Border Phenomenon, Phenomenon of Borders
Exhibition held in the Modern Art Museum in Novi Sad (September
2002),
and in Hall of Modern Art Museum in Belgrade (October 2002)
This
is an essay about monographic exhibition which included period of
eighty years in the 20th century, as well as the art in Vojvodina
in the context of middle Europe's cultural map. In the complex line
of artistic results and documents, authors intended to
re-examine political acceptations of the relation towards assigned
space without administrative borders - and, therefore, re-examining
creative expressions that redefine the relation towards a marginal
region, such as Vojvodina was in the last century: not so much as
the provincial area in Serbia and former Yugoslavia, but as the space
for amplified reactivation of different atmospheres' relations and
for the testing of liberal approaches. The issue here is the search
for geographical space where a specific culture exists. It is about
having an active relationship with realities in life through different
periods and their artistic contributions, as Miško Šuvakovic and Darko
Šimcic clearly emphasize in their joint preface for collected essays.
There they discuss autonomous expressions of spirit and individual
knowledge "in political, religious, ethnic, cultural, and artistic
sense".
Starting with questions about the meaning of border and distinguishing
which areas, provinces, or just topographical areas' connections Vojvodina
contains at the start of 21st century, organizers of this exhibition
and its monograph - among others, Dragomir Ugren as the custodian,
and, not the least, Nebojša Milenkovic and Suzana Vuksanovic Soleša
as writers of texts; Ješa Denegri, Dubravka Đuric and Marija Cindori
as the authors of monographic texts - attempt to redefine the avant-garde
culture of Vojvodina, for this is an actual question, aroused through
different historical sections in present-day multicultural expressions.
Thesis about re-questioning the culture's past subjects itself to
modern theories of conscious spaces and times, which, in the corpus
of culture studies, or even more intensive in some global examples,
emphasize the questions of identity, ethnical characteristics, survival,
and differences in genre and in all of the physical components Vojvodina
possesses. If we presume - as everybody does - that this region includes
different micro-cultural systems, created by Serbian, Hungarian, Croatian,
Bunjevac, Russine, Rome, German and Jew cultural milieus, we find
that these models' interactions, being a paradoxical link between
the reticence and comprehension of opened fluctuations, exist on imagined
map of historical consequences of our cultural past, being different
toponyms for places and small areas, as aspects of modernistic avant-gardes
and relations between bigger towns and cities - Vienna and Budapest
having advantage. Alongside with chosen discoveries how avant-garde,
violation, and individual contemplation result in fine arts, we should
also include the stimulus given by various kinds of patterns including
expressionism, echo of Dadaism from Subotica and Novi Sad, individual
examples of enformelle from late fifties painting style and from various
lines of artistic evolution in the last three decades. In this domain,
developed system of harmonic connections with neo-avant-garde textualism,
performances in artistic groups and echoes of liberal emancipations
aroused after 1968, directs itself towards the development of expression
and appearance of conceptual art, in group examples as well as in
individual presentations. Bravely and without sketching, this collection
also presents examples of arrangements and exhibitions which came
after and exist in our time - all the way from the phenomenon of mapping
the artist's identity in her performance, trough revelation of geometric
and cryptic hideout in neoconceptualism, to the praxis which uses
the condition of society to create examples for cynical grasp over
the existence, region and disintegrated socialistic Yugoslavia, in
the full swing of years in which nationalists woken and jeopardized
the existence itself.
In the shattered order of history, in Vojvodina's art praxis during
the last thirty years, we can find several flourishing examples as
well as persistent devotion of some artists; such are Slavko Matkovic,
Katalin Ladik, Miroslav Mandic, and Balint Szombaty. According to
useful periodisations and persevered examples taken from Vojvodina's
creative past, we could made a fusion of reality and comprehensions
of reality, which originated in some heads and helped them to understand
civilization of faraway epoch exclusively in their animistic - whether
expressive or closed - language mode. In this way, we can translate
expressionism and creative directions between two asylums, which move
away from existing regulations for presenting nature and great centers'
history, into echoes of expression and cubism in opuses of Konjovic,
Šumanovic, Ivan Radovic and Arpad Balaš. However, in that way we could
offer smaller distance with poetic feeling of crisis and absurd, resembling
influence of German "New Reality" and painter's reflections
of uncomfortableness and terrifying social and moral issues.
The range of an exhibition where represented art or influence impress
fascinating bindings, from period after the First World War until
the melancholic culminations of cynicism and Vojvodina's isolation
in the nineties. Some of the approaches towards interpretation have
put together cause and consequential results. Such are "The Šid
Trio": Sava Šumanovic - Ilija Bosilj - Mangelos, or conceptual
artistic praxis, developing mainly in Novi Sad. Interventions in the
domain of "Land art" (Laslo Kerekeš), as well as questions
of identity developed from pioneer days of Katalin Ladik to the end
of sixties, continued its exploring attitudes through their nineties'
manifestation in the domain of pararitual self-questionings of Milica
Mrda Kuzmanov, who glorifies questions of feminine identity and centering
of body politics through widely open provocative exhibitions oriented
towards the time of crisis and breakdowns. Here we also include activity
within analytic way of painting and the geometric consistence of the
group "Verbum Program" and painter Dragomir Ugren, and also
the results of the newest political art in Vojvodina, where, together
with active artist Balint Szombaty who creates performances in galleries
but also sheds his own blood while lying on the hospital bed, under
the flag of former Socialistic Federative Republic of Yugoslavia,
there are also ironic works, that include heavy mechanization, created
by Zvonimir Santrac and Živko Grozdanic from Vršac and by "Absolute"
artistic association from Novi Sad. Relation towards the negation
of existence and terrifying reality is shown by examples of using
wars' allegory and ephemerality. Such is Santrac's Balkan Train, realistic
composition of used mechanization of horrors and threats placed on
an auxiliary gauge, and Grozdanic's arte povera installations that
use heavy metal, heavy materials or spilt blood and testicles from
the slaughterhouse. They are made liable to view in a didactic way:
these locations, preserved works and the cases sat aside from oblivion
and indifference, all enclose faraway as well as immediate past, together
with the peculiar context of Vojvodina's surroundings.
Nikola
Šuica
