Abstract

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Towards the Reinterpretation of the 1980s in Yugoslavia. Research in Dragana (Jovanović) Žarevac’s Performance Archive

Documentation and archives on performance and other ephemeral artistic practices represent a topic that has been much debated in recent decades by researchers and art theoreticians. Today, when we speak about performance as a process of ‘transformation’ ¹ which envisions an exchange between artistic practice and scientific analysis, many contemporary scholars ² in Western academic discourse who deal with theory of performance mostly advocate for the importance of ‘performance material traces’ and tend to refute Peggy Phelan’s assertions that ‘performance’s only life is in the present’. ³ While discussions on this topic continue in the academic community, and while the slow-moving museum system is adapting to new methodologies of performance documentation and preservation, much of the archive concerning performance art done by Yugoslav and Serbian artists within the rich Students’ Culture Centre (SKC) programme during the 1970s and 1980s awaits its historicisation, or will unfortunately disappear forever. The New Art Practice ⁴ of 1970s perceived through the period of activity of the ‘first generation of artists’ ⁵ gathered around the SKC underwent a certain historicisation, though apparently not ever enough. While the art of the 1980s remains insufficiently clarified, it was mostly presented through the gradual abandonment of the New Art Practice principles, as well as through a revival of painting and art object, and influenced by the Transavantgarde, Neo-Expressionism or by the New Wave in the field of music, film and television. Local researchers have not done enough to exhaustively process the entire historical period of the SKC from the early 1970s to the 1990s, when this institution’s programme was relevant not only within national setting but also internationally, and which, today, 50 years after the establishment of this institution, requires urgent multidisciplinary and intersectional approach by experts of various kinds. The concept of the art programme at the SKC Gallery during the 1970s, and also the 1980s emphasised the social dimension of art and supported the expressive strategies of the authors who aspired to the artist’s ‘first-person speech’, which included body language, gestures and artistic behaviour, performance, and so on. A participant of the scene, the art historian, critic and at that time curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Ješa Denegri, stated for Radio Belgrade 2 ⁶ in an interview on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the SKC:

Programme editors at SKC were familiar with world art practices and not only followed them, but were part of those practices
– they were often on the front-scene of these events or brought the actors of these events to our milieu, and not just artists, but also the critics who were important at the time […] and that had to lead to a change, not only in the current programme but in the understanding and critical interpretation of art.

Circumstances, and the nature of dematerialised art practice lent a hand to the internationalisation of the SKC programme, because
it was no longer necessary to finance expensive transport for works of art, it was sufficient that the artist comes in person and performs.
What of these ephemeral art practices remains today in private and institutional archives? How much do we know about them?

Attitude towards documenting, archiving and preserving performance

Today, we are aware of the fact that performance has no other way to be historicised than through documentation, which allows generations of researchers to analyse and historicise it, ⁷ but in the past, in the moment of performing such an artistic practice, there was no clear awareness of the need for documenting and archiving performances. Ješa Denegri also talks in the above-mentioned interview about the attitude of the local museum institutions at that time towards documenting, preserving and acquiring such art:

The museum was relatively open to events on the stage in the Yugoslavian space. … but imagine now one institution that had
settled its programme mechanisms … which, when the issue of acquisition arose, could not simply say what, let alone take a decision to allocate funds for some phenomena that confused even the people who worked professionally in those institutions. […] At that time, it was not clear what was the work of art there, whether it was the moment of the act itself or whether it was what remained recorded as a photo, film or video document. ⁸

There was no clear differentiation between the ‘live’ artistic act and the technologically mediated performance documentation itself, while
about the documentation of the preparatory process − artefacts such as drawings, notes, scores, scripts, synopses − was not even thought of. That was left to the care, or neglect of the artists themselves. The SKC archive which kept photos, catalogues and posters has only been partially processed, but it has not yet been digitised. Art works by a number of the artists from the 1970s were collated in the early 2000s within the framework of certain exhibitions ⁹ or owing to the interest of local and foreign experts, collectors and institutions; archives and documentation were also searched for within the artists’ personal archives, within the SKC Archive and the like. Whether we will have access to any such archive depends on the nature of the artists themselves and their way of curating their own archive. The attitude towards the documentation of these ephemeral artistic expressions was partially established by certain artists, for example by Marina Abramović, as the artist whose work will be discussed in this essay, Dragana (Jovanović) Žarevac ¹⁰ testifies herself.

The 1980s from a different angle

In the mid-1970s, the stimulating atmosphere at the SKC gave birth to the Second Generation ¹¹ of artists, which brought together young, academically educated artists, along with those who had been educated in the technical and natural sciences, in the fields of linguistics and contemporary philosophy. They were connected by a mental, conceptual and analytical approach to art. Their work is situated in the interspace between sound, music, performance, language and analytical drawing, but it should be underlined that the decade of the 1980s brought individualism in artistic practices to the stage, so that a typical representative of the decade cannot be clearly established. Unfortunately, in all the reviews-by-decades of the 1980s Belgrade scene, ¹² the professional community has mostly followed the formally educated artists who accepted the ‘big change’ and who embraced ‘new painting’ or ‘new sculpture’. What also made it difficult to adequately monitor the SKC Second Generation artists’ production locally is the fact that a large number of them emigrated from the country in the second half of the 1980s, or early 1990s, including Dragana (Jovanović) Žarevac, Zoran Belić Wiess, Paja Stanković, Maja Savić, Jelena Mišević, Miloš Raičković, Miodrag Lazarov Pashu, and others It is especially noticeable that, during the 1970s and 1980s on the SKC scene, as well as in other New Art Practice sights, there were very few women artists who expressed themselves through performance, body art and other innovative forms of artistic expression. The First generation produced only one woman – Marina Abramović, and in the Second Generation there was a small number of female protagonists, some of whom joined the ‘new painting’ in the early 1980s, some emigrated, some ceased practicing art, and some unfortunately died. ¹³

In her early phase, Žarevac was, according to her interests and expression, nearest to the young composers of minimal music from the
group Opus 4 ¹⁴ and with Miroslav Miša Savić, ¹⁵ with whom she collaborated on several compositions and performances, and who was also the editor of the Music Programme at the SKC (1975–1995). She followed the work of composer Miloš Raičković, collaborated with artists Zoran Belić Weiss, Paja Stanković, and among women artists, she had the closest relations with the violinist Jelena Mišević and with Maja Savić (member of Group 143). This group of artists from the 1980s, whose expression consists of highly analytical works based on sound, performance, minimal art and minimal music, has not received adequate historicisation to date, and unfortunately it is completely unknown in what condition the individual personal archives of artists are, and how far it will be possible to reconstruct the art events on the SKC scene in that period.

This paper attempts to highlight the urgent need to study the performance documentation archives from 1980s in Yugoslavia; not
only are they under-researched as such, but that kind of research and publishing the archives of artists from that period could also challenge the worn-out canonical narrative according to which the decade belonged solely to the ‘new painting’. By revealing and focusing on the individual archives of the artists who at the end of the 1970s and during the 1980s were dedicated to performance art or minimal music, it will be possible to discern the continuity between the conceptual art practices of the early 1970s and performance practice during the 1980s that was further developed through media art − video art, electronic music, installations − and remained associated with the ideas of the New Art Practice. Žarevac’s artistic opus is precisely such an example − from meditative music/sound performance to video art, without abandoning the standpoints of the New Art Practice representatives.

Individual practices in the 1980s – Žarevac’s performances

This essay focuses on Žarevac’s performance art practice from her early Belgrade phase (1979–1988), and whose archives could also open up a new topic, along with observing the side connections of art with language, linguistics, ancient traditions, philosophy, minimal music, sound experiments and other forms of multimedia. Žarevac moved into the art-world with sound performances in the SKC in 1979. Since the 1990s, experts have seen her solely as a video artist, known for performing at the Centre for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe. However, her early Belgrade phase related to performance has been omitted. More than fifteen solo or in-pair performances ¹⁶ were per formed in galleries at SKC Belgrade, SC Zagreb, ŠKUC Ljubljana, Biennale of Youth – Rijeka, Hamburg (Boris Nieslony’s Artists Centre), Düsseldorf (Klaus Rinke’s class). Her performances were staged in the most important galleries in Yugoslavia, those which founded and promoted New Art Practice, outside of the high modernism and postmodernism mainstream art scene. At the end of the 1980s, she moved to Paris and her ‘French phase’ video art begins in 1989. Subsequent study residencies abroad, international awards and acknowledgments contributed to the full affirmation of her video art practice, which resulted in this artist being presented in the most important world institutions, namely, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Tate Modern London, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and in other significant galleries, museums and festivals.

Research into Žarevac’s performance practice is not possible without insight into the artist’s archive, which is not extensive, but which has
been carefully kept and organised. The essay is one of a series of different working methods I use, in collaboration with the artist, seeking to contextualise Žarevac’s art practice and thus contribute to clarifying the art movements on the local scene in the 1980s. In addition to working with the archive, participating in the production of this artist’s re-performances, curating her exhibitions and conducting public talks with her at the invitation of various galleries and museums, trying to point out the importance of researching the archives of the artists working around the SKC in the 1980s, I claim that each individual archive bears the potential to generate new knowledge and redefine the attitude towards the 1980s, seen solely as the emergence of eclectic postmodernism, the turn from the conceptual to a market-driven negation of conceptual and post-conceptual art, and the revival of traditional media.

Žarevac’s initiation

Research into Žarevac’s archive, as well as numerous interviews with the artist, has helped to discover and clarify the various influences on which the conceptual foundation of her artistic expression was formed, as well as the socio-cultural climate in which she worked. She spent the period from 1976 to 1988 in the SKC, first as a member of the audience, and then as a participant in numerous programmes. In the period of her artistic development, numerous artists who performed at the SKC and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, had an important influence on Žarevac. In the process of her explorations of the possibilities of perceiving reality through the dimension of specific spiritual states, she was marked by particular influences of philosophical-theoretical thought and practice by artists such as Marko Pogačnik, Katalin Ladik or Joseph Beuys, as well as other Fluxus and Minimal artists, and particularly La Monte Young and the other composers gathered in the Fluxus movement as well.

A music education (1964−1978) in piano, flute and solo singing, led her towards sound and the use of the voice. Simultaneously with her
studies of Spanish and English language and literature at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade (1979−1984), she studied Sanskrit and Vedic grammar at the Institute for Foreign Languages, Belgrade (1977−1982) and at the Deccan College, Pune, India (1978), which significantly shaped her artistic expression. As a foreign languages student, she often assisted in translating various texts for the visual arts department at SKC, and for a while she also officially worked as an assistant to the music programme editor Miroslav Miša Savić at the SKC. That is where she had an opportunity, translating texts on land art, minimal art, post-minimal art ¹⁷ and minimal music, to become acquainted with the work of John Cage, La Monte Young as well as with work by Joseph Beuys, Robert Morris and others. As she witnessed the lectures by the Slovenian artist Marko Pogačnik ¹⁸, a member of the OHO group (1965–1971) and the Šempas community (1971–1979), which he held in SKC in 1981 and 1983, she was particularly influenced by the basic paradigm formed by Pogačnik that underlies his work, expressed as ‘Art of Life – Life of Art’. She was open to his thesis on anthropocentrism, stating that ‘beings and phenomena of the world are autonomous and not dependent on human control, and that the anthropocentric approach to life is outdated according to the cosmic cycles that move the universe’. Fascinated by the study of Sanskrit with the famous professor Radmilo K. Stojanović, discovering a new view of the world and life, Žarevac found significant references for her work in the opus of La Monte Young, American composer and Fluxus member who studied classical Indian singing, living according to the Vedic canon, and who incorporated semantic elements of shamanic rituals and Indian music into his minimalist works. In contact with his work, ¹⁹ On the connection with Cage and La Monte Young, it can be seen in the preserved SKC editions, such as the catalogue and collection of texts Nova/Minimalna muzika, ed. by Miša Savić (Belgrade: SKC, 1977), where translations of texts by Michael Nyman, John Cage, Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Miloš Raičković, and interviews with Phil Glass and
La Monte Young, were also published. [/ref] she discovers possible methods of combining Vedic knowledge, Sanskrit, musical education and contemporary art, i.e. a thing she has always strived for − uniting the knowledge of ancient traditions and contemporary expression.

Also, in the second half of the 1970s, numerous other events and personalities had an important influence on Žarevac, such as the work
by John Cage seen at the exhibition Music, Sound, Language, Theatre: John Cage, Tom Marioni, Robert Barry, Joan Jonas: Etchings from Crown Point Press ²⁰ in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1981. Avant-garde and experimental music has been institutionally rooted in Yugoslavia since the 1960s, within a network of cultural institutions such as the Youth Tribune (Tribina mladih) in Novi Sad (the site of numerous of Katalin Ladik’s performances), in Belgrade at the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF) and in Music Department in SKC, and also in Zagreb at the The Zagreb Music Biennales. Marina Abramović influenced Žarevac with her body liberating performances, but Katalin Ladik also did, with her performances in Belgrade in the 1970s, ²¹ and moreover with the relation between the body, voice, text and sound, as well as with the vocal-shamanic elements of the performance, which was greatly important for the later expression in Žarevac’s performances. According to the artist herself, she learned about the world’s authors of minimal and experimental music in the SKC editorial office, and later, when she lived in Europe, she listened to them all live: La Monte Young, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass in Paris, and Cage’s music concerts in Germany.

Broadly educated, surrounded by composers and students of mathematics, electrical engineering and philosophy within the Second
Generation, Žarevac prepared her analytical drawings, notations and presentation of her first performances. She dedicated herself to analytically structured sound performance, sound installations and composing minimalist music. The uniqueness of her performances, situated in a synergistic interspace of music, language and the visual, is reflected in the use of instruments, sound and voice, while her ideas and concepts are firmly based on the starting points of the 1960s ‘heroic era’ of performance art and the aspiration to become liberated from the conservatism of rationalist and technocratic Western culture through a return to primordial vibrations and Eastern civilisations − ancient teachings, language and ritual.

‘Embodied Archive’ – work with Žarevac’s early performances archive

Žarevac devotedly kept her own performance archive (as well as video works archive): preparatory notes, sketches, texts, notations and synopses, which preceded the enactment of a certain performance, and, concerning the other types of documentation, such as photography or video recording of the performance, it depended on the institution in which the performance was completed. So, for some performances, only a single or no photographs have been preserved, and some, again, have dozens of photographs. It should be emphasised that not all potential sources have been exhausted, and that research of the photo-archive continues. Žarevac has built her relationship with the archive over time, becoming more and more systematic in its organisation. Also, the archive was collected
for a practical reason – to apply for membership in The Association of Fine Artists of Serbia (ULUS), as well as in France in La Maison des Artistes, in order to provide her with the status of an independent artist.

The research of Žarevac’s performance archive, which began in 2017, led the curator-artist duo ²² to produce a video re-performance. The three performances from the early phase Flautaum ²³ 23, Flauta8 ²⁴ and Nodus Vitae ²⁵ were staged again, four decades later, at the same places where the performances were originally performed (SKC Gallery Belgrade, ŠKUC Gallery Ljubljana), this time for ‘the eye of the camera’, respecting the ‘neutral visual code’. Žarevac’s early performances were conceived as a ‘meditative space with duration’ or ‘infinite being in time’. ²⁶ She declares:

In my performances, I closed myself in a kind of concentrated action, at the same time giving the audience an opportunity to close themselves in some kind of their own meditation or make contact with themselves. ²⁷

Advocating equivalence between art and life, Žarevac in her performance enables the audience to live new experiences and insights, which
is the result of her great familiarity with world cultures, ethnographies and knowledge of ancient civilisations: Egyptian mythology, Indian
philosophy, history and para-history of medieval Europe, Christian and Oriental kinds of vocal performance in prayer-chanting and other songs, of Indian tribes’ beliefs in South America and the like.

The performance Fields of Change (1988) is the last performance she showed at SKC Belgrade before leaving for Paris in 1988, which at the same time represents a seminal point of junction between two media in her work − performance and video. The philosophy of the dematerialisation of the art object found an ideal continuation of the art practice in forms of action, behaviour, happening and performance through the ephemeral medium of video. The ‘first-person speech’ existing in Žarevac’s performance was translated into the field of video art, much like the practices of other women artists in Yugoslavia – Viktorija Vesna Bulajić, Vesna Tokin, Sanja Iveković, Nuša Dragan, Marina Gržinić, Breda Beban and others.

Conclusion

Conversations with the artist, recorded during the production of video re-performances in the SKC and ŠKUC and ‘reviving’ the archives by performing ‘live’ for the narrow circle of the crew recording the performance, significantly helped me understand Žarevac’s meditative performance. The production of the video re-performances made the professional public take interest in getting to know her early art practice, so that in 2021 she held two exhibitions: ‘Memory of the Body. Memory of the Object’ (‘Memorija tela, memorija predmeta’) at the Gallery of the Goethe Institute in Belgrade, as part of the programme dedicated to Joseph Beuys and Klaus Rinke, and the exhibition ‘Expanded Presence – Embodied Archive’ (‘Prošireno prisustvo – Otelovljeni arhiv’) at the Gallery-Legacy Milica Zorić and Rodoljub Čolaković – Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, curated by Slađana Petrović Varagić and Miroslav Karić. Within both of these exhibitions, the artist and the curators dealt with performances and early video works archives. The exhibition Expanded Presence
− Embodied Archive, in addition to the early performance archive, also presented a production of video re-performances as ‘embodied historiography’ that enables the recognition of the constative and performative function of re-performing, while from my perspective, this deeply introspective process of re-experience produces a new work of art – performance archive > re-performance > re-performance as footage for a new artwork > video installation as ‘embodied archive’ in a new context. Work with the archive of the artist Dragana Žarevac, exhibitions, accompanying programmes, encouraged the interest of local professionals in the art scene of the 1980s in discovering another character of this heterogeneous decade. Work with her performance archive is not described and analysed in depth in this paper, it is given as a case study, which seeks to confirm that there is an urgent need to do systematic research of the performances archives and ephemeral art practices of artists who were active in the 1980s in the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade, which will significantly contribute to the better critical reception of this art, redefining the image of the art scene of this decade through observation of the continuity between conceptual practices of the 1970s and performances involving video and media art during the next decade.

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Slađana Petrović Varagić