PERSONAL EXPERIMENT IN ART

The great HISTORY of the past is exposed as rational cunning which was not to be exposed if it were to remain efficient: an active self-hypnotic myth. This secret is blurted out today and has no effect. Perhaps HISTORY was just a fairy tale about a powerful force of reality which lasted as long as it took recipients of the tale to be persuaded to become themselves subjects of its plot and weave their personal histories into the HISTORY. Peter Sloterdijk, Kopernikanische Mobilmachung und Ptolemische Abrstung (emph. S.V.) Subversion is the ability not to engage oneself in the large process of development and contribution to the general progress founded on the marginalisation of human values and aims distinct only by their appearance. Uro Djuri, Stevan Marku, Autonomism Manifesto

compulsory alternative and simulated mainstream

According to Nelson Goodman, art is one of the ways to assemble the world through its re-description. For those of the artistic community who remained in Yugoslavia during the war, inflation and the caving in of all cultural institutions, but kept their distance from the channels of power distribution, art presented the only remaining way to give the world they belonged to a satisfactory form, sense and meaning. Their position in the structure of social relations can be described as a compulsory alternative created by the mutual effort for the preservation of the freedom of artistic expression, in opposition to the simulated mainstream attached to the sources of economic and political power and engaged in the reproduction of the logic of its functioning, but in the sphere of culture. The art which in state institutions figures as a mainstream and completely dominates the media sphere, actually is a simulacrum, because it represents neither the real nor the false picture of Yugoslav or Serbian cultural policy, but is used to hide the fact that there is no cultural policy at all. Instead of art, but under its guise, operate the strategies of power and ideological state apparatus. The mainstream simulacrum has all the characteristics of the populist wave which had deluged every sphere of public life: anti-modernism, anti-individualism, anti-intelectualism, wisps of national metaphysics and mythology, resistance to anything international, lack of irony and humour, etc. Although there were attempts at interpretation in a purely artistic context, as in the catalogue of the Slikarstvo prizora exhibition (Painting the Sight, 1996), and at its legitimating through clichd talks on the postmodern restoring of dignity to painting, and revival of the sight, it actually represents only a frozen form of resistance to advancements in pictorial language, sufficiently readable to successfully divert from the current directions of contemporary art, occupying its institutional and media space. Everything this simulacrum cannot absorb is therefore marginalised. The networks of professionally committed artists, critics and gallery owners are compelled to become alternative, simultaneously obstructed by UN sanctions and the previously described production of simulacra. Being financially and institutionally restricted, these networks cannot be organised into an art system, and according to Dejan Sretenovi not even into autonomous scene, but only into singular art community as a form of compulsory and informal union, just in order to survivei. The strategy that safeguards such survival is one of active escapism (Lidija Mereniks term), the creation of parallel fictional reality and quite personal histories, though these would not have been created if there was no cause in the existential reality which sometimes outdid the fiction itself. ii

resistance strategies

On the forming of the above mentioned divisions in the sphere of fine arts production, the decisive effect was the change of political paradigm in the circles of political oligarchy, which according to its needs and interests recruits people engaged in the culture sphere to work in state and para-state institutions. While the eighties were the time of postmodernism in art, the nineties are the period of its introduction into the political sphere. In the eighties postmodern strategies were used in the approach to the art history heritage, while in the nineties they became here the manipulative means of micropolitics in the institutional domain. For instance, in the following manner: relying upon meta-narrative of any kind is renounced, on any rational foundation of decisions or acts, there is no need for the universalised principles of legitimacy. Every foundation of authority is considered mystical, while the founding act itself is an act of violenceiii, thereby every act of violence could be pronounced the founding act. Let us consider as typical the dismissal of the director of the Belgrade Muzej savremene umetnosti (Museum of Contemporary Art) in January 1993 - the authority of the director, installed in the chair of his predecessor removed under police threat, was established by a bare act of obscene violation of procedure of any kind, thus ignoring the legitimacy problem of any such replacement as well as the competency of the new director (this being his first institutional appointment of any kind) to execute the designated function. However, it is possible that for his intended task the expert competency in the domain of fine arts was not just unnecessary, but even superfluous. The purpose of his appointment was not, like in the times before the collapse of the Berlin wall, to increase the degree of domination in the evaluation process of fine art production in order to impose certain stylistic preferences in accordance with certain social ideals, but the decrement of the evaluating process as such, so that from this institutional position simulacrums, travestied forms of the revived phantasm of the Serbian mythological past instead of contemporary art could be displayed to the public.iv The state institutions of the nineties in the fields of culture and media are thus no longer structured by the model of ossified modernist institutions that suppress a particular type of art which then becomes alternative, they are machines for simulacrum production v that do not impose a particular mainstream, but by their products conceal the fact that such a thing does not exist. Mainstreams resistance to simulacrum such as the one we are faced with in this case is possible not only by a series of critical attacks, but only through work on the constitution of completely different space, independent of official institutions, where an art system, functional in the context of world production, could be built - pluralist and open for entirely heterogeneous expressions, providing that they are founded in fine art language - thus taking art production out of the ghetto where it is produced now, into a wider cultural area. The directions in independent production during these years were moving along this course, forming an outline that could conditionally be called an independent scenevi. Due to the enormous energy invested by the artists and critics in the professionalising of their work, it functions through a small number of galleries and several professional magazines. Of course, it is deprived of any real market, a wider access to the media which cover the whole country and not just local regions (Belgrade, Novi Sad, Vrac etc.), as well as of greater circulation of artists across the Yugoslav border in both directions.

establishing the independent scene

The initial form of resistance to the xenophobic closure of the official Serbian cultural scene and its use for political purposes, meant for a relevant number of artists and critics their full dedication to the problems of art itself and an effort to organise themselves on strictly professional basis vii. The world produced by ideological state apparatusviii is contested by the personal worlds created through artistic, critical and theoretical production. As a symbolic aspect of the opening of a new social sphere where an independent scene was to continue developing we can consider the project Privatno-javno (Private-Public), carried out during 1992-1993 in the homes of the Todorovi family in Podgorica, the Tomi family in Belgrade and then in the Belgrade SKC Gallery and VLV Gallery in Novi Sad. On the one hand, this sphere was, at the beginning, completely separated from the space of the wider public colonized by marketing conscious dabblers and geniuses, those who well understand the functioning of the new turbo scene ix, as well as from the highest official cultural institutions, and was created through the almost private exchange of texts, exhibitions of work and friendships within the framework of a small community of art devotees. On the other hand, it was, in a distinct way, continuously connected with art systems outside Yugoslav borders,

being for the Western art world one of those rare spheres of our public scene that could participate in some intercultural exchange. However, more and more groups, movements and individuals, as well as more magazines, art workshops and seminars began to operate within this sphere. During 1993 Urbazona - a movement for the new art and rocknroll scene - began its activities, as did Led Art (Ice Art) - frozen art; and the exhibition Rane devedesete - jugoslovenska umetnika scena (Yugoslav Art Scene in the Early Nineties) was organised. Since 1994 a series of informal exhibitions have been held in the office of Radio B92 editor in chief, later named Pogled na zid (A Look at the Wall). Prvi jugoslovenski bijenale mladih (The First Yugoslav Biennial of Young Artists) was instituted, and so the basic outline of the new independent scene was created. In it were included art groups which had already been active for some time, such as UG FIA (since 1989), KART (since 1990), Apsolutno skulpturalno (1991), and Grupa Mondrian (since 1992). A particularly relevant segment of the budding scene was the production of printed matter - books, magazines, catalogues. It was practically starting from scratch, because inflation and the disastrous policy of the Ministry of Culture (which now partly finances only one art magazine) resulted in the disappearance of every relevant art magazine before this scene was even constituted, while for book publishing there was no interest whatsoever. During 1993, as aspects of the renewal of Moment, the art magazine that marked the eighties, two magazines of entirely different conceptions, Projekat and New Moment were initiated. They would subsequently establish two competing paradigms of opinions within/about art, and define the poles of the new independent scene. A year before first Limpossible, the photography magazine was issued; a year later, in 1994, Kvadart - a magazine for design and media; Zlatno oko, a magazine for visual culture, and Vreme umetnosti, a monthly art supplement of the weekly newsmagazine Vreme, as well as Akcelerator, a random publication on architecture; since 1995 Transkatalog (TheoryRadicalisms-Art) has been published. The books relevant for this period were: Beograd: osamdesete by Lidija Merenik, Fragmenti: ezdesete - devedesete; Umetnici iz Vojvodine by Jerko Denegri, two books of interviews with artists by Zoran L. Boovi, and somewhat later Art in Yugoslavia 1992-1995 by Dejan Sretenovi and Lidija Merenik, and Autoportreti Nee Paripovia by Miko uvakovi were also published. Unlike the casual, informal eighties about which there are almost no collections of written material, except the above mentioned book by L. Merenik, the nineties are already well documented in remarkably professional publications; the quality of texts on art in them exceeds the standard of those written in previous decades, while the design and layout reach world standards x. The protagonists of our contemporary art scene compensate for the lack of intense contact with a large audience, media and international scene, as well as with highest state cultural institutions by creating maximised professional production as material for the future explorers of Serbian and international art, hoping that the importance of this scene will one day also be re-evaluated socially and not just in narrow expert circles, hence gaining the place it deserves in the cultural framework of this country. Therefore this scene has rather absurd characteristics: on one hand are the norms of high professionalism, on the other are social marginalisation, existential danger, even the almost total anonymity of some protagonists. As Uro Djuri vividly expressed it: The Belgrade art scene is a cluster of extremely talented unfortunates collected in one place, highly concentrated, heterogeneously talented. No money, no distribution, a town full of printing houses incapable of producing a catalogue unless one stands behind their backs with an uzi after providing five bottles of marc to humour the workers. Blot in geography. xi

theoretical and contextual propositions for the origin of autonomism

As stated previously, the independent scene was instigated as an informal non-institutional framework for an extremely heterogeneous artistic production linked by only two distinctions: to distance itself from the ruling ideological machinery and to strive for the preservation and development of free artistic expression. For such a way the leading protagonists of the same scene, who were the artists, curators, critics, theorists of almost totally incompatible directions and preferences in media, concepts, styles and poetics, created a condition which was not quite appropriately named by the local critics, who adopted Habermas syntagm, new vastness (die Neue Unbersichtlichkeit). The use of this term does somewhat denote the entropic condition of a non hierarchic scene comprised of individual-enthusiasts, the scene like this one, which just in that particular aspect slips past Habermas comprehension and the contextual use he

assumed for this term, linked to mature European democracies with a rich and highly profiled cultural scene, which has been liberating itself for the last fifteen years from the Enlightenment heritage. As far as the local (independent) scene is concerned, not only is it wanting in the context Habermas presumes, but also in any already given context which would for those who acquiesce provide relevant art production. That is, relevant art production is possible here only in a reality entirely parallel to the social, political and institutional one, burdened with catastrophic complex xii and auto destructive potentials. The true role of the scene, as well as of its authors, is the creation of such parallel reality. During the past few years, along with the establishment of the scene, three ways of cognitive mapping and conceiving of that scene have differentiated themselves, three congruent types of exhibitions, publications and general thought on art created here have crystalised, just as have the chronicling and interpretation of the scene. The vastness of the scene is thus mastered by: 1) the principle of general inclusion, 2) historical periodization, and 3) a choice based on some general theoretical hypotheses. The first type of strategy was realised in exhibitions such as: Art Vrt (Art Garden) and Pogled na zid (A Look at the Wall), in general Radio B92 productions, and to some extent in the SKC Gallery; the second, in the type of exhibitions such as: Rane devedesete - jugoslovenska umetnika scena (The Yugoslav Art Scene in the Early Nineties), Prvi and Drugi Jugoslovenski bijenale mladih (First and Second Yugoslav Biennial of Young Artists), Rezime (Summary), and in publications connected with the magazine Projekat, and the third one in exhibitions of the type: Scene pogleda (The Gaze Scenes), Soba sa mapama (Map Room), Hijatusi modernizma i postmodernizma (Hiatuses of Modernism and Post Modernism), and in publications connected with New Moment magazine. The first type of exhibitions presented quite exhaustive surveys of the scene related to the urban milieu and established a curator as the organiser; the second type presented surveys of the generation of artists in the nineties, and a curator was instituted as art historian; the third type assembled the artists who could visually demonstrate certain theoretical hypotheses and a curator was inaugurated as art theorist. Due to their involvement in the interwoven meanings produced by these three perspectives, the individuals, groups and movements attained relatively stable positions within the scene framework. Alongside the space creating processes for the establishing of independent scene were instigated the processes of its survey, mapping and theoretical structuring, which created considerable tension among the artists, who were to a great extent led by the principles of aesthetically inspired anarchism xiii. As this scene mostly consists of that segment of the artistic community which does not observe the logic of institutions not generated by it (such as various groups and movements) and cannot control their functioning, there are constant mild shiftings, slippages, fractures and breaks in the process of the scene stabilisation. The cross-overs of Zoran Naskovski, Ivan Ili and Asocijacija Apsolutno from the domain of one theoretical paradigm into a completely different one, and the beginning of autonomism as a movement can be cited as examples. The territory which was assigned to Uro Djuri and Stevan Marku in this process of the structural stabilization of the scene, is related to urban folklore, popular culture, alternative, underground, paraliterature; it was made easier by the biography of Djuri as rnr musician, radio reporter, DJ, actor and comics translator, and also by the recognizable image of both artists as themes of their own works, which play with the bordering of art and life, factual and fictional, borrowed and created, experienced and simulated, media image and ones own reflection - seducing us to superficially identify the presented and the presenter. The Autonomism Manifesto (Manifest autonomizma) was written in February and March 1994, first published as an independent publication and later in the catalogue apropos the exhibition held in Savremena galerija Centra za kulturu Olga Petrov, Panevo, in June 1995. It was an attempt to deterritorialise art which now has the attribute autonomist, to liberate it from the imposed referential framework of the social and media status of the artists, from the highlighted subculture contexts which were favoured in its interpretation, and from the reduction of the potential of its meaning on any kind of narrative. Stevan Marku expressed it like this: Autonomism is the work of Uro Djuri. It was created to reduce to a minimum the eventual shallow stories about our painting. The Manifesto is not a programme and does not purport to essentially change something in art, because such attempts bring about aesthetic radicalisation, that is art products which are the image of their own death. And so it is not avant-garde either, we consider ourselves classics.xiv

looping of the two classics of serbian painting

Having chosen figurative, iconographic expression, Djuri and Marku at the same time acquiesce that their activity in the domain of art is mediated through many accepted patterns of representation, appropriated form the history of art and used as material for the demonstration of pure production of autonomous personality, and by working upon them materialise the authors phantasms, dreams, fantasies and obsessions, bound by their own aesthetic and ethical codes. Using the entire surrounding iconosphere quite freely, they neither quote nor paraphrase its segments, but repeat them, re-producing them in their paintings, albeit in quite an intimate context. Their painting is, therefore, connected both to historically given patterns and to presented subject matter, but at the same time free of any aspirations for adequate representation, primarily guided by the principle of the commitment of the entire authors personality to its production, modifying the representation by the rules, but also by the accidental aspects of its constitution. As Jadranka Toli noted in her text Tri stava o slikarstvu autonomizma (Three Propositions on Autonomist Paining), the painting of Djuri and Marku does not derive its authenticity from the context it is inspired by, but achieves it by answering the surroundings, by establishing contact with them. Context is only scenery where the symbolic constituting of a possible reality is happening, where personal principle can be expressed to the full, visually materialising all the authors experiences, such as confessions, fantasies, frustrations, dreams, acquaintances, intellect and the author himself as the central figure of this subject matter.xv Personal principle, spelled out in the Autonomism Manifesto as the sum of all factors conducted by the author in the creation of the work, specified as the major principle of autonomism, thus allows neither participation in the casting of roles on the (art) scene nor its reduction into any of its already codified theoretical frames. Instead, it finds its sustenance in the permanent re-creation and re-description of its deeply personal and autonomous relationship with every context imposed as relevant, referential or in any way interesting. That personal and autonomous attitude is not legitimated in the works through presented subject matter, but in the way iconographic details are re-shaped, even appropriated as a totality, or created as scenes by the projection of ones own phantasms and obsessions. That is why, when Djuri is concerned, the transition - from the urban genre scene or parasocial fiction/fantasy, via neo-supermatist figurative intimism, to Non-objective autonomism: White cross on white surface (Bespredmetni autonomizam: Beli krst na beloj osnovi), painted in Djuris specific impasto, is the act of repeating the Russian - this time as a personal - experiment in art. The Autonomism Manifesto itself is also based on the repetition of the spirit of Zenitism Manifestoes, partly initiated by the thesis of Ljubomir Mici (a Serbian avant-garde poet and artist from the twenties and thirties) published in their prologue, which asserts that The fundamental mistake is to analyse the Manifesto instead of interpreting or reproducing it and then directly calls for action: Do it!. The act of repeating the Zenitist proclamation of ones own existence in the art world is at the same time an act of referring to the only almost completely authentic and autonomous segment of the history of Serbian contemporary art, the rare sample of local production which was not also parochial. However, this act does not aspire to become involved in disputes on the history of Serbian contemporary art, but to interpret its chosen segment by including it in the parallel autonomist reality, in a manner homologous to the one which introduces into that world the mountains of Milica Tomi, the factories of Janez Bernik, Phantom and Spiderman, as well as the images/characters of the autonomists themselves, their friends and the things from the surrounding space or from that reached through imagination. In the catalogue apropos the exhibition held in Savremena galerija Centra za kulturu Olga Petrov in Panevo (June 1995), the Autonomism Manifesto was expanded by another remarkable text, the previously mentioned Tri stava o slikarstvu autonomizma by Jadranka Toli. Following completely the logic of the Manifesto it interprets, her text acquires the form of a new manifesto, seriously committed to the removal of ideological deposits in the interpretation of the work of these two autonomists. At the same time it provides a precise formal, semantic and contextual analysis of their mutually interwoven opuses, introducing a new vein of writing about the autonomists into domestic criticism. That mode perceives and respects the conceptual background of their approach to painting, interpreting their work as a text out of which we are able to read complex entwined relationships of personal fantasies, dreams, ideas and obsessions against the background of given social, cultural, media and theoretic context as well as the

context of local and international scene. Ms. Toli, of course, considers them the classics of Serbian painting, describing their looping (breathtaking flight) though the world of art in the following manner: 1) The looping of the two painters erases every imprecision and mystification in their expressive language. 2) The looping of the two painters is based on their knowledge of the history of art, classical literature and contemporary subculture phenomena. 3) The looping of the two painters advocates the aestheticism of everyones personality.

from work to text - entrapping the local code

In the catalogue from Djuris first exhibition in the Galerija Doma omladine (December 1993 - January 1994) the reproductions of the works, apart from minimal data, were accompanied only with the following note: I do not want any texts. I do not intend to display my life. I can just lounge about staring at my digital clock, for no particular reason, and watch the figures go by. There is absolutely nothing that could move me out of that state. At the time of this exhibition we had the highest ever noted inflation (soaring 3% per hour)xvi, war raged few hundred kilometres away, while in the nearby districts frequent power cuts turned off the digital clock displays and at these moments awakened us from the state of absolute melancholy and dwelling in some projected worlds. Almost no one on the independent scene then wanted to talk through their work about their life, but rather to escape from it into the realm of art. Through the strategy of active escapism parallel art worlds were built, where parallel lives were lived, where the most important thing was professional ethics and the ethics of responsibility towards not some wider social collective, but to the small art community the independent scene was based upon. The paintings exhibited then already comprised their own interpretation. Mostly self-portraits, they were actually representations of the authors image as the character playing the role of an urban hero with all the attributes asserting his dignity: shaven head, cowboy boots, leather jacket, electric guitar, etc., executed in the manner of a rulers portrait and adorned with frames that indicated the majestic importance of the framed. Representation of the authors character is always placed outdoors, with a distinctive background divided into the surface that denotes ground, and the surface that denotes sky, often clouded; he is sometimes postured like an rnr star (Autoportret sa Les Polom na arobnom bregu /Self-Portrait With Les Paul on the Magic Mountain, or Autoportret sa fender telekasterom iz 62 /Self-Portrait with Fender Telecaster 62), sometimes as a national hero (Konjaniki autoportret /Cavalryman Self-Portrait) or the communist leader (Autoportret sa korejskim suncem /Self-Portrait with Korean Sun), etc. Beside the characters of his friends, the authors character is sometimes accompanied by superheroes, for example Phantom or Spiderman, representing the symbols of ultimate individuality, independence, superhuman, hypertrophied strength and power; sometimes his character is also presented in a pose of a flying superhero, obviously Superman. All the elements of Djuris painted scenes cited so far, are not treated mimetically, but by their meaning, that is they do not depict some other imaginary reality, but constitute singular rhetorics of power which suggest the possibility of creating alternative realities where the power will be redistributed in such a way that individual potential can be developed to the full. As these paintings create quite specific visual language, a distinctive visual text, in Djuris opinion they do not require any additional verbalised text, certainly not some kind of explanatory meta-narrative. The Autonomism Manifesto originated as a result of an altered optics, the outcome of the art criticism that in these works only saw the represented subject matter, as the critics insisted on interpretation of its referential content as corresponding to authors personal life. The Autonomism Manifesto was made as an attempt to induce in criticism a turn from a perceptual approach to this kind of painting, as well as a move towards considering it in the light of the art of sign, the art of discourse. The represented subculture imaginarium, revealing by its perceptual vision the authors attachment to a specific cultural and social domain, in this way becomes included into the material for certain rhetorical operations. And these rhetorical operations are more the virtues of high, rather than popular art because, as Arthur Danto says: it is not at all difficult to find rhetorical aspects in the most exalted art, and it may just be one of the main offices of art less to represent the world than to represent it in such a way as to cause us to view it with a certain attitude and with a special vision xvii. The Jadranka Toli text which follows and reinterprets the Autonomism Manifesto in this sense emphasizes the emancipating component of Djuris (and Markus) art. Seen as the instances of the art of sign, these

works cease to be works of aesthetic nature enclosed within itself, and become a visual text that enters into various intertextual relations with numerous signifying cultural and social currents, thus also being socially committed, albeit not in a direct, banal, easily readable way. As Djuri often remarks, the search for ones own expression in painting was for him directly connected with the search for a basic code of local culture (by analysis of its highest achievements), as well as for the articulation through its application. This code is constituted in his works as radically individualist, antitraditional, autonomist, which is actually the optics quite reverse from the one imposed by the insight into vast art production. The text written through his works is written by the mediation of that code, and by its materialisation.

author/subject in Djuris painting of figurative presign

According to Roland Barthes, a work is always directly or indirectly determined by the outside world, by the sequence of the preceding works it would follow, and by belonging to a particular author, being signified by his paternal signature. A work always represents the signified and that is why it is enclosed within itself and, unlike the text, is delivered to the consumers appropriating gaze. The text is characterised by the endless shifting away of the signified, and also by the plural structure which the author has completely vanished from, while the potential consumer usually gets entrapped in its polisemic game. However, as Barthes remarks: it is not that the author cannot come back into the Text, into his text; however, he can only do so as a guest, so to speak. If the author is a novelist, he inscribes himself in his text as one of his characters, as another figure sewn into the rug; his signature is no longer privileged and paternal, the locus of genuine truth, but rather ludicrous. He becomes a paper author: his life is no longer the origin of his fables, but a fable that runs concurrently with his work xviii. After the postmodern painting of the new representation xix which had introduced the paradigm of palimpsest into our scene by treating the field of a paining as a space where contents of highly heterogeneous origin entwine creating a specific textual fabric, monumental intimism xx shifted the emphasis precisely to the investigation of the modus of introducing the authors character into the textual network of the painting. Figurative painting of the eighties was based upon unified international neoexpressionist canon, introduced here primarily via Italian transavant-garde experience, and appeared on the local scene concurrent with the development of new wave in music, directly participating both in the global artistic scene and the wider (sub)cultural movements in the country. It thus enabled its proponents to apply the structuralist thesis of the death of the author xxi, to open their works to a proliferation of meanings, and to transform them into texts involved into a multitude of intertextual relations with signifying currents already present in the surrounding social and cultural context, or evoked from collective memory or art history, thus replacing the function of the author with the function of the juncture, a network point where cross sections of these signifying currents meet. The language of those artists whose expression becomes dominant in our figurative painting of the nineties was to a great extent the outcome of building on the experience of the new representation painters, subduing their typical expressivity, and assembling intimate spaces for the inscribing of highly personal and subjective notions of their immediate environment, mostly reduced to a close circle of friends, occasionally to some urban characters or phantasmal projections of possible (quite often desired) reality, where the author, or someone close to him, appears as the central character. The strong expressivity, typical for the past decade, was now replaced with something more sophisticated, more contemplative and a lot more subjective xxii. At the same time, the intimate subject matters of these painterly scenes are monumentalised, raised to the level of urban icons of a restless, insecure, deficient and dangerous age, where once established networks are undone, once familiar contexts are becoming alien, distant and unreachable, separated by the glass cage walls we are imprisoned in by sanctions, the inner blockade imposed by the ruling regime and a torrent of populism - icons of the age of advancing scepticism where our work can only legitimate us to ourselves and the inner circle of friends, accomplices in the symbolic annulment of the surrounding world xxiii. Monumental intimism is a syntagm which by itself sounds like a paradox, particularly if linked to the cult of individual and subjectivexxiv, but by that very paradox it has succeeded in genuinely reflecting not just the fundamental expressive quality of an informal group of artists xxv, but the very nature of the only way they can legitimate their work in the context in which they live. If such a context presumes state institutions imporous for the highest artistic achievements, and therefore the verification of their value by the official

establishment, this moreover means being sequestered from art directions on the global scene and prevented from participation at the most important world art manifestations xxvi. As it also means the absence of the market which would range the artists by the prices their works reach, with quite a marginal role of art critics in wider social, even cultural spheres and a completely undeveloped theoretical scene the only remaining solution is to revert to oneself, to ones immediate actual and imaginary environment and to the creation of a personal, intimate, subjective, individual, autonomous world where ones personal engagement in the art sphere can be tested and verified. By the strategy of active escapism, retreating into art created worlds, one is actually searching for a referential system where classical artistic values, totally suppressed by the flood of populist kitsch on the wide cultural scene, will be recognised, and the works embodying them adequately treated. Besides, these parallel worlds are becoming filled with the hypertrophied signs of the artists Self as a champion and exponent of the ethic and aesthetic code from which his production originates. The paradoxical pictorial relationship between the intimist haven and over-emphasized sights of opulence, pleasure and power is, in fact, a mirror image of the situation where the most valid works of art (and thus most powerful) exist only on the margins of general social taste in remarkable art ghettoes, being legitimate only there. Autonomist painting has, in that circle of art events, taken the process of writing the author/subject into the textual network of a painting the furthest. Through self-portrait as Djuris and Markus privileged expressive form of their own personal principle, the author/subject is introduced into the painting through the principle Barthes proclaimed - as the protagonist in the narratives which are sometimes quite legible and sometimes entangled to an almost inextricable extent. Markus sights are mostly surrealist, phantasmagoric, located in barren landscapes of weird shapes and saturated colours, while the central character is almost always the somewhat transformed character of the author appearing as silenus, satyr, Spiderman, convict, or some hybrid creature surrounded with beings - hypnagogic creatures that might be representing mediators between the cited authors character and the real world. Other distinctive features in the representation of the authors character are rigid posture, missing hands and an intense expressive gaze. His paintings are done with lacquer finish, calm brush strokes, a direct opposite to Djuris accentuated impasto, and their rich expressiveness is symbolically mediated. Djuri, however, usually represents himself in some role - as the greatest Serbian painter, Superman, rnr star, tough street guy, not transforming his character (image), but giving it attributes of power and positioning it in attitudes typical for those in power (there is a series of his self-portraits as cavalryman, or small fliers representing him in a flight above suprematist plains, Milica Tomis mountains and/or Janez Berniks factories, etc.). Compared to those of Marku, Djuris self-portraits are less accentuated by their expressive dimension but more by their conceptual one, leaning towards the idea of personality projected as idea mediator, which Djuri describes like this: Placing myself in a position of leading character I avoid uncertainties or excuses as if some other character was expounding the ideas. One becomes the iconographic representation of ones own structure of thinking, the most obvious and most authentic. xxvii Djuri introduces his character into his paintings as the spaces where possible reality is located, using it as a metonymic transmitter of ideas, fancies, fantasies, desires and fears, building his own mythology supported by historically established forms and representational schemata of the attributes of greatness, dignity and the power of represented characters, as well as still non-canonised equivalents of these forms and schemata in contemporary culture. Weather he appears surrounded by embodiments of energy energisers - (Phantom, Superman, Spiderman, Fender Telecaster, phallus, lightning, etc.) xxviii or alone, represented as communist leader or national hero, the authors character always appears with a particular symbolic mandatexxix that activates the visual meanings of the painting, makes them performatory and opens the structure of the work towards the structure of the text. The way Djuri handles this type of representation reveals a strong conceptual basis which makes the figurative represented on the painting functional, placing it in the service of expression and materialisation of his personal principle. xxx

personal use of history

A subject that returns into the painting is no longer a subject of history, at least not of one written in capital letters. If, as Sloterdijk writes, HISTORY was just a fairy tale about a powerful force of reality which lasted as long as it took recipients of the tale to be persuaded to become themselves subjects of its plot and weave their personal histories into the HISTORYxxxi, it is understandable that in the age of radical distrust in enlightenment fairy tales, there are not enough volunteers for the avant-garde march towards

historically designated goals, that the historical dimension of art is left to some anonymous material social currents a subject cannot be protagonist of, but only interpreter. The totalizing course of modern art which laboured to pronounce as anachronism and reject everything it could not absorb, now is fractalised, subjected to perspectivism of the gaze and delivered as material to numerous side interpretations, which relate to that established within canons of the twentieth century modern like sparrows chirp to the wise hooting of the Hegelian owl. Actually, the fact of a subjects returning into the painting no longer as the subject of history does not also mean that it cannot be the interpretative agent of historical heritage and of the creation of language games which are staging a particular course of history. The subject is leaning on historicism as the only legitimate historical awareness after the end of the myth about the everlasting victorious march of HISTORY, being fully conscious that one must resist the temptation of thinking that once you have found a way to subsume your predecessors under a general idea you have thereby done something more than found a redescription of them - a redescription which has proved useful for your own processes of selfcreation.xxxii While the Western world is experiencing the end of the large social mechanism for mass mobilisation towards ideologically defined collective goals in the political sphere, hence inducing a series of theories about the end of history and the final domination of one (liberal-democratic) model of society, art plunges into a vast simultaneity of historical perspectives that within its framework somewhat revives the paradigm of history that prevailed until XVIII century as a repository for exemplary stories which supposedly can tell us something about the recurring features of human affairs and thus feed the anthropological curiosity for patterns of human behaviour, xxxiii at the same time preserving the later established meaning of history as more experienced than physically measured time and a medium for the process of individuation. This, for classical historiography hybrid composite, post-modern amalgamate which also comprises pre-modern allegorical models and modernist potential for individuation, determined by the context which renounces universalised perspective or even any kind of great narratives, gives the reactivated, redefined subject entirely free play with historically established forms of representation, and also their utilisation for quite personal purposes (development, individuation, expression, etc.) which need not be built into the process of general development and progress. By renouncing the universalistic perspective, the field of history (and historical) essentially refracts through two possible optics - individualist or ethnocentric, being observed as a medium for individuation of a collective (ethnic communities; whether formal or informal communities of artists), or ones own personality, that is its artistic expression. As artistic paradigms that clearly define these two views of history, on the territory of former Yugoslavia developed Neue SlowenischeKunst (including the group of designers with name that quite vividly describes their position regarding this issue - New Collectivism) xxxiv and autonomism, both concurrently reflecting cultural paradigms most appropriate for the local code (Slovene and Serbian). However, in the formal-pictorial sense, historicism constitutive for both paradigms was realised by a model rather different from the one abundantly present in works of the postmodernist painting of the eighties, such as Transavant-garde, Neue Wilde or Heftige Malerai etc., as it leaned more on the experience of avant-garde painters at the beginning of this century who during the twenties, thirties, even forties began to develop some kind of neoclassical, figurative painting, quite often a selfportrait relocated into mystical and temporally distant spaces. Late works of Francis Picabia, Gino Severini, Carlo Carra, Christian Schad and Alexander Rodchenko are plastic examples of such painting, although the most rewarding material for comparison in this context can be discerned in the late opus of Kasimir Malevich, for its conceptual clarity and artistic value, as well as for its abrupt transition and, finally, because both Neue Slowenische Kunst and Autonomists (i.e. Uro Djuri) directly refer to some of his key works, quoting and reproducing them. We can even consider their mode of revitalisation of iconic models constructed by Russian experiment in art, primarily by Kasimir Malevich, as a reference, which clearly points out a wide and complex mixture of differences in these paradigms through divergence of fundamental actions, motives and aims in the treatment of historical heritage in their environment. That process is presented as a programmed and conceptually determined art strategy, which in NSK was in the service of a retrograde attempt to discover and evaluate history anew, to return the power to institutions and conventions, as well as to diminish the distance between artistic expression and the collective consensusxxxv in order to create an art simulacrum that would also speak out of Slovenian collective being and establish eternal permanent values striving for the entirety of legal normative, while in Djuris work it has the role of self-building and self-confirmation of the autonomous creative personality, engaged in the constitution of total supremacy of artistic expression.

NSK takes the heritage of Russian avant-garde movements as one of the starting points for reinvestigating the correlation of art, politics, ideology, totalitarianism, state control and questions of individualism and collectivism. Concentrating on the historical model of expedient and successful assimilation of avant-garde movements by the totalitarian regimes, NSK has been working in various media on the symbolic repetition of this traumatic experience, from the standpoint that striving of avantgarde for the creation of art communities as autonomous social organisms where the unimpaired individuality of each participant is a myth, and that actually the phantasm of each avant-gardist is to become a state artist in the service of the collective one belongs to. Malevichs work is in this context used in several ways: as material for the eclectic composite of Nazi-kunst iconographic details, socialistic realism, Slovenian folk art, Orthodox icon painting of the late Middle ages, technological-futurist utopias and the contemporary popular culture, blended with visual heritage of the historical avant-gardes xxxvi. It is then also used as an epitome for the constitution of NSK country in time, designated as a unique suprematist body and, finally, as a model for the demonstration of their thesis on the impossibility of creating a non-engaged, non-ideological and non-political art independent of totality of material social currents in the environment from which it originated. Unlike NSK, Uro Djuri entered his interpretation of expressive models of Russian avant-garde through the examination of figurative in late Malevich, the compatibility of its structural principles with basic postulates of his own painting, subsequently colonising with his subject matters other spaces opened by that artist, all the way to White cross on white surface, developing at the same time the idea stated in the Autonomism Manifesto that the initial painting of autonomism is self-portrait, while the ultimate one is deprived of any representation but not of meaning, that is, formally deprived of subject matter but not of content. Non-objective autonomism: White cross on white surface thus emerges as Djuris visual, contextual and conceptual transfiguration of Malevichs work, attaining its own appearance of the one into his own code translated suprematist iconxxxvii, the role of an autonomist symbol and sense of the nonobjective mediator of subjective expressive potential. Changing White cross on white surface into one of the ultimate points in the transformation process of a subject introduced into the domain of pictorial field, includes a developed elaboration of the demiurge concept of creation, deeply rooted in the fundamental of Malevichs poetics, most clearly expressed verbally by statements in the text Ja sam poetak... (I am the beginning...), where Malevich declares: I am the beginning of the world because the worlds are created in my mind xxxviii. Therefore, Djuri begins from Malevichs I, redefining and reshaping it from an exemplary subject of future white humanity xxxix into the egocentric subject of postmodern time, free of the pressure of universalised horizons, an auteur subject who alone, according to highly personal preferences, produces the normative criteria of his own actions, while by doing it tries, as Coleridge required from the artist, to create public taste by which he will be accordingly evaluated. The Uro Djuri autonomist project is realised through the building of a context where Malevichs beliefs, such as When I Say Me I Assume Manxl neither have their function nor their real meaning any more, but are being replaced by sentences about the crucial role of the personal principle that comprises just these irreducible features of the actual authors personality with all his phantasms, dreams, frustrations and projections, as well as conditions of the environment in which he lives and works by using its symbolic codes. Unlike Malevichs anthropocentrism as a product of an ideology that replaces God the Creator with a transcendental subject whose mind conceives everything, makes it operative and maintains it, we have the egocentrism of an actual empirical subject whose productive power is tied to the sublimation of deep personal experience, with evident distance towards every abstract generalisation. Non-objective autonomism: White cross on white surface in this context does not function as recurrent experience of iconoclastic establishing of the new beginning of painting, purified of everything that is conditioned by actual contexts, but as the inscribing of trace, the authors own seal on the already totally codified work executed to the level of symbol, appropriation of the symbols meanings and its use for the purpose of monumentalising his own production. The concept of The First Exhibition of New Serbian Art (Prva izloba nove srpske umetnosti) followed out of this process, which on the other hand represents the answer by simulation to the widespread simulation, that is, the project of inaugural promotion of ones own personal symbolic construct into an act of realisation of collective phantasm in the symbolically most powerful artistic context, the 47th Venice Biennial. The First Exhibition of New Serbian Art was promoted on the poster written in Serbian, English, German and Italian with big black and white reproductions of Uro Djuris work (Non-objective autonomism: White cross on white surface made in salient and thick impasto, characteristic for him, 41x41 cm), and Tanja

Ostojis (Stanje belog /State of White/, a square made out of white marble dust on the base of white marble block, 25x25x15 cm), with a phantom location of the exhibition: Palazzo Casa Nova, Via Moana Suprema 92, Venezia. The whole exhibition project was, of course, realised only through a poster put up all over Venice during the 47th Biennial, as a manifold reflection of the strategy of cultural activity paradigmatic for the environment it represents on the international scene xli. A paraphrase of the title Erste Russische Kunstausstellung, held in Berlin in 1922, points to a vacant place within the structure of Serbian cultural offering, permanently divided into a number of heterogeneous and highly singular directions, mutually exclusive, auto-destructive, opposed to tradition, depending on the power of individuals who activate them, and liable to ideological manipulation. The place of the First Exhibition of New Serbian Art is always a vacant place, a place of impotence to produce a compact and coherent exhibition proposal that could be shown at any world art manifestation, a phantasm that can only be realised through simulation. In that sense this simulacrum of great national cultural promotion has a role of point de captionxlii, connecting phantasmatic projections about a capital project that would include the most relevant fine art achievements of its time on a local level with actual ruling politics of simulacrum production, pointing to the only remaining road for successful changes in the institutional position of outstanding art in a home context. It is, of course, the road leaning on the principle of simulacrum preceding the event, using strategies similar to those which helped establish the NSK Art State in time. The Art State projected and realised in the Neue Slowenische Kunst production xliii accomplished the symbolic aspect of the existence of one cultural-paraethnic entity xliv as abstract organism, a suprematist body placed in actual social and political space, concentrating like a (living) sculpture body temperature, spirit and activity of its membersxlv, thus also realising to the full extent collective phantasms deeply rooted in the subconscious of the protagonists of the Slovenian cultural community, defining the basic code of the local context and inducing real changes in social and political space where it is installed. Actually, since the mid-eighties, IRWIN artists have stated that they do not have any critical disposition towards the state and consider themselves not only state artists, but the state itself. Today, when they have their own metaphysical state and the full support of the cultural institutions of the new Slovenian state, New Collectivism is fully established as a recognizable matrix of Slovenian cultural production. So this is, when both cases of the NSK state and The First Exhibition of New Serbian Art are concerned, a matter of appropriation and over-interpretation, as well as one of simulation and history production. Historically provided forms of representation are appropriated, their meaning is over- and re-interpreted, a new cultural product is simulated, and by its introduction into the world of art produced the changes which, when written down, become history. The first step of such an operation is based on the principles of post-historic eclecticism, which is, by NSK, defined as organismic, while with the autonomists it could be defined as anarchic, partly classified under the following conclusion by Buchloh: This carnival of eclecticism, this theatrical spectacle, this window-dressing of self-quotation becomes transparent as a masquerade of alienation from history, a return of the repressed in cultural costume. It is essential to the functioning of historicism and its static view of history that it assembles the various fragments of historical recollection and incantation according to the degree of projection and identification that these images of the past will provide for the needs of the present.xlvi If everything had ended at this first step the latent critical impact of the quoted passage would have quite justified the function. However, what Buchloh, like most left-oriented advocates of modernist history of art overlooks, is the insight into the possibility of creative development of the principle which could by itself be defined as a mechanical tool for legitimating any such present state of things through highly valued established forms of representation from the past, and accused as befitting to be used to display the wealth and power of the social group that has appropriated them.xlvii This development occurs at the second step, which presumes the production of the model by which reality is to be organised, and the charting of the road for some possible history. In the case of NSK, who by their work and statements define art as a phantasm that requires diplomacy, pronouncing the collective as its source, and politics as the highest art, this model actually represents the sights/scenes of the uninterrupted flux of every conveyer of meaning present in their culture and the permanent composing of these conveyers into organic entities, united by the outlines of the metaphysical NSK state, while history is the sequence of forms shaped by these entities. Autonomists, who place personal principle as the supreme principle of Autonomism, and understand their paintings as a miracle of personal heroism and of some rather unpleasant, unnamed, but tenaciously present things, organise monumental scenes of their own greatness and success as their reality model, while in place of history, they establish a nonhierarchic sequence of expression forms of their personal principle. For example, observing the path from

Two Greatest Serbian Painters in Looping (Dva najvea srpska slikara u briuem letu) to painting made six years later with almost the same subject matter, Murder or Two Greatest Serbian Painters Subdued by Their Greatness (Ubistvo ili dva najvea srpska slikara umirena svojom veliinom), or even to the series of Suprematist Plains (Suprematistike ravnice), respectively the painting named Non-objective autonomism: White cross on white surface, we can see how a possible reality on Djuris paintings is transformed by a gradual reduction of the represented and how he goes through his own personal artistic development through all stages of Russian Experiment in Art, entering into codes ranging from Larionovs primitivism to the socialist realism of Kuzma Petrov Vodkin, expressing by them his personal principle. The final outcome is history, which is actually a trace of the process of individuation. In NSK it was individuation of collective, where one functions anonymously, as the collective takes the role of subject of historical process, while in Autonomists it was individuation of one to any other entity irreducible personality that simply overlapped at the time of Djuris and Markus conjoined work. xlviii Therefore, the personal history, the personal experiment in art.

Stevan Vukovi

NOTES

Dejan Sretenovi, Umetnost u zatvorenom drutvu, in: Art in Yugoslavia 1992-1995, published by Centar za savremenu umetnost (Belgrade: Fond za otvoreno drutvo, 1996), p. 14.
ii

Lidija Merenik, No wave: 1992-1995, ibid, p. 30.

iii

Cf.: Jacques Derrida, Sila zakona; mistini temelj autoriteta (Novi Sad: 1995), especially p. 21: No discourse can justify or secure the role of meta-language in regard to the performance of a standard language or in regard to its favoured interpretation... As origin, the establishment and foundation of the authority as well as the position of law, according to definition, may rely on themselves, they are just violence without foundation. In the context of the logic of Serbian and Yugoslav institutions this connotes a very simple thing: the lack of any established compulsory rules and permanently established criteria, as well as the tactics of placing one in front of a fait accompli justified only by itself. In the former, Communist and totalitarian political system, clearly opposed to any democratic procedures, every institutional decision had some legal or at least ideological justification; in this postcommunist, authoritarian, post-totalitarian society which insists on the formal (but not substantial) features of democracy, even the decisions in evident discord with formal democratic principles are given legitimacy just by pure media propaganda.
iv

Communism came to its epochal end with the collapse of the Berlin wall, so that those who served it in Serbia when it was alive have lost their master, and today are assiduously striving to impose an imitation of the past as political rule, thus turning Serbia into an imitation of life. - from an interview with Zoran Gavri, Simulakrumi u savremenoj umetnosti, supplement Vreme umetnosti, no. 1, in weekly magazine Vreme no. 204 (Belgrade: September 19, 1994), p. 8.
v

See: Dejan Sretenovi, U carstvu simulakruma, preface to the catalogue of the Peta godinja izloba Studija B (Od aprila do aprila), (Belgrade: 1994); note in particular the following: If paramilitary formations are operating on the battlefield, then para-artistic and para-critical formations are operating in the field of culture, and behind their show business rhetorics and populist orientation the evil spirit of the social imaginary can be easily recognised. As under the camouflage uniforms in the war zone one cannot distinguish military and paramilitary formations, thus these para-artists disguise themselves as artists, posing on the show-biz scene like artists, simulating artistic behaviour. Like any simulation, this newly composed one with its overacting and caricaturing poses shows that these simulators actually have no idea what art is. They are just fulfilling our parochial horizon of expectations, as by its logic there is between folk music star and a painter a sign of equality because they are both entertainers packaged in the same media wrapping.
vi

Contrary to D. Sretenovis standpoint expounded in text in n.1, I somehow have the impression that one can already talk about a scene and not just art community. Independent art production here already has as its framework a singular world of art, and although it does not have attributes of an art system, it is sufficient enough to support the basic functions which a scene must realise. See catalogue from Drugi jugoslovenski bijenale mladih (Vrac: 1996). vii By the numerous examples from history of modernism it is known that art responds to particular critical times and moments of crisis in two characteristic ways. The first is an emphasized advocacy of the autonomy of art, of its inviolability to any pressure and surrounding events; the second one is the engagement of art and artists for and against political options. In present circumstances the second solution did not happen here, at least not in an aspect of artistic relevant events and results, by Jerko Denegri, Umetnost u oskudnom vremenu, art magazine Projekat, no. 3, (Novi Sad: 1994) p. 13.
viii

According to Louis Althusser the apparatuses that support a particular system of power are partly repressive (government, administration, police, court, prisons, etc.), and partly ideological (religion, family, legal system, political system, unions, media and culture). By the weakening of the totalitarian communist regime in Yugoslavia and its conversion into an authoritarian, quasi-democratic form, the repressive machinery is increasingly replaced by an ideological one, which is so reinforced that even under the conditions of the total dysfunction of repressive apparatus (army collapse at the front, police incapable of coping with demonstrators even by extreme force) they manage to retain an image of a stable and powerful system for a large amount of the population. The basic principle of ideological state apparatus is the creation of an imaginary relationship with actual social events and problems, thus annulling their value.
ix

An expression of Mileta Prodanovi in, Rasap kriterijuma u likovnim umetnosti ma, magazine Dijalog, p. 50 (Belgrade: 1995).

Particularly outstanding are works by Borut Vild (for example catalogues of exhibitions Scene pogleda and Soba s mapama) and Bata Krgovi (catalogue of the 19th Memorijal Nadede Petrovi).
xi

Zoran Eri, Uporedni intervju sa Uroem Djuriem i Stevanom Markuom, magazine Eterna (Belgrade: 1994), p. 40.
xii

In: Dejan Sretenovi, Umetnost u zatvorenom drutvu, in Art in Yugoslavia 1992-1995 (Belgrade: 1996), p. 12.
xiii xiv

Jrgen Habermas term in: Filozofski diskurs moderne (Zagreb: 1988), p. 10.

Zoran Eri, Uporedni intervju sa Uroem Djuriem i Stevanom Markuom, Eterna, ibid., p. 38.
xv xvi

Uro Djuri and Stevan Marku, in: Autonomism Manifesto.

See: Mladjan Dinki, Ekonomija destrukcije (Belgrade: 1996).

xvii xviii

Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, p. 167.

Roland Barthes, From Work to Text, in Jopuse V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in PostStructuralist Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U. P., 1979).
xix

See on this practice in painting: Lidija Merenik, Beograd: osamdesete (Novi Sad: 1995).
xx

A syntagm introduced by Nikola uica as a characteristic of the painting of Uro Djuri, Jasmina Kali, Stevan Marku, Dimitrije Peci, Milica Tomi, Selena Vickovi and Ljiljana Vrani in text Primeri monumentalnog intimizma, catalogue of the exhibition Jedna slika aktuelnog beogradskog slikarstva (Belgrade: 1993), held in Brussels and Antverpen 1992, afterwards in Belgrade 1993.
xxi

See: Michael Foucault, What is an Author in The Foucault Reader (New York: 1984) p. 101-121. According to this text, the death of an author is a consequence of realisation that the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. He thus loses his elevated role of creator and can survive only as organising principle who objectifies the text and compresses it in the frame of a work.
xxii

Jerko Denegri wrote about the differences in expression between these two generations of figurative painters in: Genius loci, catalogue of the exhibition Jedna slika aktuelnog beogradskog slikarstva; also Zoran Eri in: Pojave u figurativnom slikarstvu devedesetih, a paper read at the symposium held during the Prvi jugoslovenski bijenale mladih exhibition (Vrac: 1994). All symposium papers were published in visual culture magazine Zlatno oko, no. 1 (Novi Sad: 1994).
xxiii

See untitled text by Lidija Merenik, magazine Projekat, no. 3 (Novi Sad: 1994), p. 14, particularly: Or, in other words, the cult of individual approach to the artistic excludes the need for programme and system. A sceptical look into the real world increases the distance of that art from its actual environment - thereby at certain moment the isolation is understood as an advantage in the course of building ones artistic autonomy.
xxiv

Miko uvakovi in Kritika kritike, magazine Projekat, no. 4, (Novi Sad: 1994), pp. 97-99, criticizes the use of the concept of individual(ism) in the context of directions in art arising out of the postmodern art of the eighties and incorporated into the register connected with postmodern theory: The answer, which would follow the way of postmodern rhizomatic paths amidst appearing and disappearing worlds of art, is this: There is no individual, there are representations, ideas, mimesises, reconstructions or models of individuality, subjectivity or rationalism at places where one would expect traditional individualism. Postmodernism begins with the death of the author or an observation of an individuum or subjectivity as mimesis or collage or simulation or construction of hypotheses. However, monumental intimism returns the subject into a painting, although perhaps in discord with accepted attitudes related to postmodern strategies, pronouncing the participation in the world of art as the individual act. It can be viewed as a product of sudden discontinuity with the art climate of the eighties and all its social preconditions, as a kind of defense mechanism against the implosion of all social institutions.

xxv

Beside the works of cited painters, under that syntagm the works in terracotta by Dragana Ili, or some mosaics by Dragana Kneevi might belong.
xxvi

The exhibition of recent Belgrade paintings Jedna slika aktuelnog beogradskog slikarstva was opened in Brussels, in the EEC Palace on the very day UN sanctions, which included cultural exchange, were imposed against Yugoslavia, and so the exhibition was not open to the general public but only for those working in the building. Afterwards (in spite of the sanctions) the exhibition was presented in a private gallery in Antverpen, due only to the owners enthusiasm. During the next few years our artists only rarely exhibited out of Yugoslavia and mostly in private arrangements. In previously cited Art in Yugoslavia 1992-1995 there is the detailed chronology of this period.
xxvii

Interview in: Zoran L. Boovi (ed.), Likovna umetnost osamdesetih i devedesetih u Beogradu - Razgovori (Belgrade: 1996), p. 46.
xxviii

Beings of Power or Energisers (elements of subject matter in Djuris paintings), in a text by Danijela Pureevi on his works in the catalogue of the Pogled na zid 1994-1996 exhibition (Belgrade: B92, 1996), p. 2425.
xxix

Syntagm symbolic mandate was often used by Jacques Lacan and later by his numerous successors. In his Seminaire I (Paris: 1975, p. 307) he wrote: ...when someone says - and when he says it, he is also in the function of certain systems of symbolic relationship - when he says I am the king it means he has not simply accepted a certain function. The meaning of all his previous psychological qualifications suddenly changes. This also gives his passions, his intentions and his stupidity completely different meaning. The very fact that the king is concerned transforms all functions into kings functions. In Djuris painting of intimate contents and contemplative-expressive execution, the game of symbolic mandates is taken over by leading characters and mostly by the authors character, thus transferring the weight of the represented to a completely new level, which functions just by using the gap between symbolic and real order, so that it can write complex visual text touching the dreams, desires and fantasies of the author, as well as social, institutional and professional directions present in the context where the author acts, skilfully balancing between the two mentioned orders and giving full importance to the symbolic, without the error of equating it with the real.
xxx

See in Danijela Pureevi (ibid., p. 24-25) how Djuri himself clearly establishes this: ...Nobody understood the point of such painting. I use figuration like Duchamp used ready-made. I use figuration ambiguously. And I am not a figurative painter. I am a pure conceptualist.
xxxi

Peter Sloterdijk, Kopernikanische Mobilmachung und Ptolemische Abrstung (in Serbian translation: Kopernikanska mobilizacija i ptolomejsko razoruanje, Novi Sad: 1988), p. 19.
xxxii

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: 1989), p. 107.

xxxiii

Jrgen Habermas, Coping With Contingencies, a paper read at the symposium and published in the collection Debating the state of philosophy (London: 1996), p. 6.
xxxiv

Neue Slowenische Kunst is the big art collective founded in Slovenia (at that time one of the Yugoslav federal republics) in 1984. It is comprised of the music group Laibach (actually active since 1980), art group IRWIN, theatre group Noordung (former Sester Scipion, i.e. Rdei Pilot), The Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy, group for video and film projects Retrovision, and already mentioned Novi Kolektivizam Dizajn Studio. As one of its official poetical-political convictions this group entity proclaims also this: Neue Slowenische Kunst is based on the principle of conscious abandoning of personal taste, judgments, conviction... free depersonalisation, the willing adoption of the role of ideology, the unmasking and recapitulation of the postmodernism regime...
xxxv

The official statement made by IRWIN art group within NSK quoted from Charles Stephens, Theres Blood Running from the Old Wound; The Prophetic Vision of Neue Slowenische Kunst in Edinburgh Review, June 1988, p. 157.
xxxvi

Malevichs Black cross on white appears on an NSK poster, on the arm ribbon of a teddy bear placed before a photograph of the industrial part of some mittel Europa city, as part of the scenery at Laibach concerts; it is also on the movement logo, combined with Christian, ideological totalitarian and industrial symbols. Malevichs

later figurative works are directly cited by paintings like Suprematist Sower (Suprematistiki seja, 1986), executed in neoexpressionist manner.
xxxvii

I painted the bared icons of my time... royal child... writes Kasimir Severinovich Malevich in a 1918 letter. See W.S. Simons, Malevichs Black Square: The Icon Unmasked, 61st Annual Meeting of the College Art Association of America (New York: 1973), and Szimon Bojko, Introduction to Malevichs Letters, in: Von der Flache zum Raum, Russland 1916-1924 (Koln: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1974).
xxxviii

Ja sam poetak... (I Am the Beginning) is Malevichs text written around 1915, published in the selection of his papers edited and with a preface by Slobodan Mijukovi, Kazimir Maljevi; Suprematizam Bespredmetnost; Tekstovi, Dokumenti, Tumaenja (Belgrade: 1980).
xxxix

The consciousness of white humanity is non-objective, free of all desire tomove toward any ideal or concrete salvation, says Boris Groys in Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton: 1992), p. 16. In Malevichs original interpretation this syntagm tends to induce a vision of humanity free from the burden of history and all limitations of the objective world, engulfed in the vision of total nothingness as the ultimate reality of all things.
xl xli

I am the beginning... in Slobodan Mijukovi, ibid., p. 1.

Out of numerous examples of simulacrum production by Serbian cultural institutions, most illustrative for this was the promotional campaign called More Beautiful With Culture (Lepe je sa kulturom) carried out by The Ministry of Culture, Republic of Serbia in 1995, exclusively by advertising (posters, TV advertising clips) with no actual investments in cultural production. The assumed intentions of the campaigns authors was to create a milieu for production and induce conscious need for cultural products, whereas direct financial investment in their actual production was not even considered.
xlii

For a definition and the role of the point de caption see Slavoj iek, Birokratija i uivanje, p. 39: Point de caption is therefore an intervention of the new signifier, which in fact does not introduce any new meaning. According to Lacan, it is a signifier without the signified - but, as such, it brings about a wondrous metamorphosis of the entire field of signifying thus redefining its readability; see also Lacan in Seminaire III, p. 303: This metamorphosis belongs to the order of signifier as such. No accumulation, no congruence, no sum of signifiers can legitimate it.
xliii

It is defined as the state in time, a metaphysical state without territory or borders, a spiritual state. It has its own currency, postal stamps, issues passports and since 1992 opens embassies and consulates all over the world as creative institutions of temporary character, where concerts, discussions, exhibitions and project presentations take place. The first embassies were opened in Moscow, Gent and Berlin, and consulates in Florence and Umag.
xliv

elimir Koevi, IRWIN, in magazine Moment, no. 8 (Belgrade: 1987), cites the affirmation of folk/national culture as one of their three basic principles, beside retro-principle and the principle of emphasized eclecticism, illustrating it by their stance on the effort for the re-afirmation of Slovenian culture in monumentalspectacular manner and their aspiration to establish the continuity of the Slovenian past and its traumatic experience as the only horizon of the future. The prefix para- here serves to emphasise the simulated character of their cultural produce.
xlv

From the speech made by the NSK representative at the opening ceremony of the NSK embassy in Moscow 1992.
xlvi

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression; Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting, in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (Boston: 1986), p. 118.
xlvii xlviii

Ibid., p. 120.

Jovan Despotovis thesis on the overlapping of artistic expressions to the point of mutually indiscernible work of these two artists in a particular period, expounded in the catalogue from Rezime exhibition (Belgrade: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1996), can be expanded into a thesis on the overlapping of their auteur personalities.