Notes on education in art as personal/ public activity in Belgrade art scene in the 70s, by Jasna Tijardović
Posted on | July 12, 2011 | No Comments
Jasna Tijardović in discussion with Art and Language, Skc, Belgrade 1976
Jasna Tijardović’ text is part of a long-term research on art museums education in the former Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s, initiated by REC. It was also presented at the international summer school for art educators in Ljubljana, Moderna galerija, June 2011.
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I had alredy ’emancipated’ my education on art as one to be connected to ’life and art’ when I started to work as a curator in the education program at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (1975-1990). I indetified personaly with ’work in process’ betwen these two facts and applied to education since the end of the sixties and the whole decade of seventies. ’Relation between work and daily activity has became more intimate’ were also facts of my ’points of departure,’ as Antonio Negri said to mark the date of forty year anniversary of 1968 (1968- 2008), expressing the ideas of that period of time as a shift between ’paid work and liberation of work’.
These relations between ’daily activity’ as ’art activity,’ and as ’intimate/personal’ and ’private/public activity,’ were interwoven into passages of changes, as consequences of one representing the other. In some way, my activity started in close proximity to the artististic practices of Zoran Popovic, who already realized the heterogenty of art activity as the cognitive everyday process that move us forward. A week or two after the student protests in June in Belgrade University 1968, Zoran and I both went to England ’for vacation’ instead of going to the Adriatic see, where we ‘worked hard ’ and Zoran made his artists films as his/ ours everyday life/art events. In some way it also reflected a relationship to feminism, althought not programmed as such but culturally coded as one related to encouraging more engagement of women in new art scene.
The decade of change in Belgrade was especiallly pronouced in the period from 1965-1975, beginning with the opening of The Museum of Contemporary Art in 1965, serving as the most visibl sign of modernisation of socialist modernism.The art scene alredy has overcome the modernism’s retoric of heroic expresionism in painting and moved toward art as comunication that not exclusively belong to apstract/figurativ simplified distributions of meaning. The production of the ’sixties decade’ developed interactiv dialog with public/consumers of arts that formed the conditions for subjectivity on both sides as not the art as ’mute’, apstract superstructure of social order.
The seventies decade turned out to be one of the most difficult times since the State ideology of self-management started to control all forms of intelectual freedom. Such symbolic/social order as the general courses in culture production have been oposed by the artist who rejected negativly decorative production of objects.Those opositions in fact referred to the reality that there was no guarrantee of freedom to work out ideas, to have a job, to support investigations and art/intelectul productions, as well as lacking any programs to develop new visual compentency in media/culture research.
The art production turned towards new directions from the time The Student Cultural Centre opened in 1971 and for the whole decade of seventies, becaming an alternative to the status quo, an avant-garde space without ’academic protocol’, turned to new experimental practices, famously known as ’conceptualism,’ based in both activities of the artist and those of the art critics. The group of artist that made up the Belgrade scene were Marina Abramović, Era Milivojević, Neša Paripović, Zoran Popović, Raša Todosijević, Gera Urkom. In the period from 1971-1973, these artists worked together to create a series of group/individual exhibitions and performances. After such one performance, titled as ART EVENT in the Edinburgh Art festival (organised by Richard Demarco gallery) in 1973, Zoran and I decided to go to New York in 1974.
This year (1974) of exceptional experience was also the time when we lectured on ’New Art In Serbia/Yugoslavia’ at famous schools and universities in NY and the US, such as The Cooper Union School of Arts, The Visuel School of Art, Iawo City University, Witney Museum of Indepedent Stady Program, etc, establishing close contacts with artist there. During this time, we also began a cooperative and productive relationship with the Art and Languge group, as well as the editors of the publication of The FOX, with whom we colaborated. During our second stay in NY in 1976, Zoran made the film ’Struggle in New York-Borba u Njujorku’ (both of us produced the film; title is in English and Serbian language; 1976, black and white, 16 mm), in which he filmed the artists talking/performing about the socio-political background of art.
All the facts I mentioned above prepared me to work in The Centre for Visual Culture and Information from 1975 onward, representing the Museum education program. The change of the name signalled a strategy to overcome the oldfashioned pedagogy of the Musem to a education of ’… visual culture and information’. Its program showed an adaptive responsibility, one that reflected the changes in the art/culture epistema, for its ideas marked a turn toward public auditorium rather than to profesionals , to the exteriority instead of interiority of the Museum that was governed by values of the local and so called Yugoslav modernism of the avant-garde exhibited exsclusively in paintings.
The ’Centre…’ promised the posibility of more individual and collaborative practices on the visual arts, as well as different subjects that could partake in the program. On one side, it practiced strong protocol of everyday administrative duties that embraced the politics of self-management that somehow reflected the popular democratic slogan on both sides of West and East, served as Art to the People: as a service for education for the general public, such as schools, students and working class people, guiding them through exhibitions and permanent collection of Yugoslav art; organized the travelling exhibtions in working collectives or in other centres in Serbia out of Belgrade. Doing all those services , we managed (curators than worked in education programs) to project and mediate the new art production in the Museum, which we did in seminars/lectures or any other way we could realize. I made a number of exbitions that were related to my ’conceptual’ and other backgrounds, finding a balance between the interests of the Museum and my own in order to mediate the new artistic productions. I did exhibitions/promoted in the Museum or in the Salon of the Museum gallery in Belgrade: lectures as well as editions of translated texts from The Fox (with the texts of Mel Ramsden, Ian Burn, Michael Corris, Andrew Menard, the last two have lectured in the Museum). Than followed the film exhibition Anti-film, 1963-1964/1965-1970; Films by artists; Film as document of Art work (international films shows, with Slobodan Šijan and Nebojša Pajkić and Zoran Popović, 1976; Posters/works of Artists, international exhibiton, 1978; New Art Practice as the text on artist M. Abramović, E. Milivojevic, N. Paripović, Z.Popovic, R. Todosijevic, G. Urkom (edited by Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 1977; Artist texts on Art, (Museum of Contemporary art, Belgrade1983, etc, etc).
From period of 1990-2000 I was working as curator of New media (photography, film, video) in the Museum and work today as free lancer.
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