The old fairground is one of the quietest places in the city on Monday morning. I pass under the Branko Bridge. On the other side, a metropolitan beehive is waking up. Here, on the promenade by the Sava, every now and then a sports enthusiast slips by. Although it is early, the sun is already merciless. Behind the National Class restaurant, I cross the street and approach the Museum of Contemporary Art. It is one of the buildings that I have always liked.
They say that the shape of the building was modeled on a polymorphic crystal, made of six cubes with cut corners. White marble and glass. The project by architects Ivan Antić and Ivanka Raspopović, for which they were awarded the Belgrade October Award on the opening day of the Museum in 1965, still looks contemporary, its harmonious and radical modernism seems to refuse to grow old.
The sculpture park of Yugoslav artists around the Museum is at the same time a tribute to a country and a cultural space that has been fragmented.
First of all, I am interested in the figure of a humanoid that resembles an alien. I get closer and find that it is an artwork by Matija Vuković from 1962 called "The Miner". This Serbian sculptor really left a recognizable mark with his sculptures in many places I've been to. I remember his works from Vrnjačka Banja, or from Kragujevac - there his sculpture was placed at the place from where Tito's first relay started.
A little further on, I am drawn to two unusual sculptures. I understand that about seventy years ago, after the break with the doctrine of socialist realism, avant-garde practices developed in an amazingly luxurious way, precisely in sculpture.
Ivan Sabolić created his Koritarka in the period from 1957 to 1960. I know that a koritar is a man who makes troughs, and that it is probably necessary to explain to the new generation what a trough is. But that doesn't matter to these Coritars. They are so stylized that they look like beings from another planet, and not like women wearing troughs on their heads.
I remember that Sabolić is the author of the most famous monument in Tuzla, which was erected in honor of the Husina miners and their rebellion. That's how a strong thematic connection between Vuković and Sabolić emerged that morning, visible probably only to me.
There were other interesting works around the Museum, but this morning I decided to see it from the inside. Five exhibition levels connected by stairs await me there. The reconstruction of this architectural gem took an unusually long time - from 2008 to 2017.
The porter asks me to wait, the colleague who lets visitors into the Museum is not yet at the counter. No one anywhere. I ask the porter if I am the only visitor. He says there are two more upstairs.
The building is bathed in light that comes through the large windows. I immediately feel the good energy of this place. A lady who knows what is worth looking at today is also arriving. The exhibition of Mikelandjelo Pistolet "Preventive Peace", and the level above a review of the creations of the proto-conceptualist Vladan Radovanović.
The formula of creation
Michelangelo Pistoletto turned ninety last summer. The rich artistic life of the Italian action, conceptual artist and art theorist is summarized in the Belgrade exhibition "Preventive Peace". I came face to face with his most famous work right after climbing the first staircase in the Museum.
The artifact I found belongs to the most famous works of the artistic direction called Arte Povera - poor or miserable art. It was created at the end of the seventies of the last century in the north of Italy. Artists began to use banal, everyday materials and objects.
The cult work "Venus of Rags" made the name of Michelangelo Pistoletto world famous. The goddess Venus in front of a mountain of discarded clothes - the installation is more and more current. Classic beauty in a civilization that is suffocating in its own waste.
Pistoleto is the son of a restorer from Turin, and from an early age he was exposed to fine craftsmanship and knowledge of artistic techniques. But he chose an unusual path. His self-portraits were a combination of different materials, offset printing, photography or collage on steel plates that were actually mirrors.
Speaking of collages - we all imagine them as a flat surface on which the artist combines different materials.
However, Pistoleto shows us that this does not have to be the case.
Since the end of the sixties, the artist has been working with spherical collages made of newspapers. Rolling a ball made of newsprint through the streets of Turin, which was performed in 1967, became famous.
The Belgrade ball was made especially for this exhibition from Belgrade printed products. Three meters in diameter, not intended for rolling. Although the spitted streets of Belgrade, decorated with dog excrement, would be the ideal path for the artist's newspaper ball. Only then would it become essentially true.
Michelangelo Pistoletto came up with the "Formula of Creation" in his theoretical work. He derived it from the mathematical symbol for infinity. That eight turned on its side is recognizable in several of his works at the exhibition.
I find the symbol as a kind of tarpaulin chandelier or as a pattern on a carpet. I return to the table where the "Creation Formula" is displayed. Art in search of such a formula inevitably takes on a metaphysical character.
The path from the mathematical symbol for infinity to the modified Formula of Creation took the artist around the world. In the early stages, from 2021, it was exhibited in Bologna, Shanghai, Ljubljana and other places. The artist developed this work in dialogue with scientist Guido Toneli. An explanation of the Formula is playing on the screen below the board. I'm not sure I fully understand it. But it doesn't matter. It's comforting that it exists.
The musician as a proto-conceptualist
I am climbing from Pistolet's world to the world of Vladan Radovanović. He was born about half a year before the Italian artist, and he died last year. His importance for contemporary Yugoslav art has grown from decade to decade since the 1960s. At the same time, Radovanović had a formal musical education, which probably helped him to see the world differently from his colleagues who were educated at art academies.
After graduating in composition from the Academy of Music in Belgrade, he taught at a music school until the beginning of the seventies. Already in 1958, together with several other artists, he founded the group Mediala, which he left in 1969. He founded and managed the Electronic Studio of Radio Belgrade. He has been experimenting with tape music since 1961, five years later he became a pioneer of experimental electronic music in our country, he has been using computers since 1976.
However, his dream of creating synesthetic art, which would engage all the senses, also leads him to the visual arts. It started with recording dreams, ideas, ideas that do not resemble previous artistic practice. He visualized some of the dreams.
Radovanović himself says that the year 1953 was crucial for him, when he stepped out of the usual way of thinking about art. The so-called projectism established by Radovanović included mental research. In a way, the idea has become more important than the realization, which is a kind of illustration of the idea. One of the theorists of conceptualism, Miško Šuvaković, called this approach protoconceptual art - conceptualism that appeared thirteen years before its actual appearance on the international level.
At the same time, he coined the term "vocovisual" which implies a visual, sound, kinetic, spatial medium combined with language and symbols. Later, he transformed all that into computer graphics.
Radovanović called the sounds that can be heard in the Museum while visiting the exhibition metamusic. He also created objects that can be touched - touch zones and tactile zones. His unusually fruitful search for an artistic practice that does not want to be ordinary art has yielded results in several fields. Vladan Radovanović is probably one of the few artists who have been awarded both in the fields of art, music and literature. He saw himself neither as a writer, nor as a composer, nor as a visual artist. Already as a creator who organizes the interpenetration of all these activities. If you compare the dates of the appearance of his works and ideas and what was happening on the world avant-garde art scene, it is clear that this man was always one step ahead of his time.
The artist's video, which explains some of his basic thoughts about words, messages, shapes, sounds and their interrelationship, ends with a picture of a telegram in which he writes: ALL WORDS SPENT STOP WRITING STOP STOP BREATHING STOP WITH STOP.
The telegram was signed with VLADAN.
Towards the end of his active creative period, Radovanović creates an installation called "Prayer breakfast under the auspices of the White Angel".
This work, accompanied by a suitable sound curtain, is actually an answer to the question of what the mystique of an avant-garde artist can look like.
The white angel, as a creation in the mature age of this artist, includes religious aesthetics, but transforms it in an avant-garde key.
I am once again descending from Radovanović's world into the world that Michelangelo Pistoletto has been building for decades.
What makes the Museum of Contemporary Art a unique point on the artistic map of Belgrade is the possibility of dialogue between separate artistic universes. And that dialogue happens in the eye of the beholder.
Before I leave the Museum, I decide to go through an object that is placed in various places in the Museum. Pistoleto exhibited seven "Doors" in Belgrade. He called them "Sign of Art". Intersection of two triangles in which the human body is inscribed. Next to it is the explanation that it "suggests at the same time the presence and absence of the artist".
I walked through that sign, down the stairs and out into the hot August Monday. As I walk through the deserted park, I see a man and a woman talking animatedly in sign language on a bench in the deep shade. Vladan and Michelangelo would probably like that. All that's left for me is to go home and write this down, so as to ensure my own simultaneous presence and absence in the text I'm signing.
Bonus video:
