croatian pavilion at the 60TH
international art exhibition
la biennale di venezia
vlatka horvat
by the means at hand
april 20
november 24
2024
croatian pavilion at the 60TH
international art exhibition
la biennale di venezia
vlatka horvat
by the means at hand
What does it mean to do something by employing the means at hand, as the title of Vlatka Horvat’s project suggests? If I wanted to write this text in such a way, would this be an easy task? Could I simply bend over slightly and lazily reach out toward the next thing that presents itself, the nearest cue that flashes its random signal at my exhausted mind? Or maybe it is the exhausted body; I am never sure what comes first. And what does come first? What is this thing at hand, and who’s going to hand it to me?
Now I sound like a stereotypical lonesome writer with no friends, no one to lend a hand or point to something handy. It is true, I am a bit jealous of all the colleagues and friends who will take part in the execution of the artist’s work, who will take photos of their hands, the same hands that will make the drawings and make sure they get safely to Venice, where they will become part of an installation that maps out the economic, social and geopolitical relations underpinning the project. But I am also relieved because, as a writer, I insist on being left alone so that I can nurture in secret my yearning for collective action, usually mediated by my longstanding commitment to researching the history of socialist Yugoslavia and its abandoned promises of equality and solidarity. In fact, I cannot even think about Horvat’s project without thinking, too, of some hallmark products of Yugoslav culture that promoted collective ingenuity.
The 1976 children’s film Vlak u snijegu (The Train in the Snow), for example, tells the story of a group of rural children whose train gets stuck in snow on its way back from the city of Zagreb. Grown-ups prove useless in resolving the situation, as the children self-organize, collect and redistribute the remaining food resources, and use their bare hands to clear out the snow and free the train. The sung and rhymed refrain at the film’s end sends out a clear message about the invincible power of joined—versus selfish and privatizing—hands: “Kad se male ruke slože, sve se može, sve se može” (When little hands unite, anything is possible, anything is possible).
Even if Horvat is not one of those artists invested in the reopened archives of the history of Yugoslavia and, more generally, socialism, her project for the Croatian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale activates some of the core principles inherent in the political and artistic avant-gardes of the twentieth century: transnationalism, self-organization, alternative economies, responsible use (and reuse) of resources, the defetishization of art. It revives the neo-avant-garde strategies tested by artists and curators during the 1960s and ’70s, when they attempted to transform the bourgeois institution of culture, to democratize art and free it from its dependence on national(ist) state building and the capitalist market. Ironic scholarly evaluations of this era have proposed that Conceptual artists—contrary to slogans about the dematerialization of art—never really wished to get rid of the commodity status of art and the art market.[i] This may (or may not) hold true in the West, but in Yugoslavia artists, critics and curators took the promises and premises of the “new art” seriously, which often led to disappointment, followed by boycotts or even abandonments of art.
Curator Želimir Koščević, for example, refused in 1972 to show in Zagreb the traveling exhibition of mail art, which premiered at the 1971 Paris Biennale, exhibiting instead only the unopened crate in which the works arrived, together with a statement against the further commodification and biennalization of Conceptual art.[ii] In 1979, Belgrade artist Goran Đorđević tried to initiate an international strike of artists but received mostly jaded responses, some labeling his idea as naive.[iii]A more unusual strike—one against artists—was launched by Zagreb curator Ida Biard in 1976, when she informed a group of artists that her Galerie des Locataires (Tenants’ Gallery), an independent space based in Biard’s rented Paris apartment, would no longer collaborate with the alleged Conceptualist avant-garde because they had succumbed to the lure of money and the art market.[iv]
Until the declaration of a strike, Tenants’ Gallery operated almost completely outside the system of existing art institutions, using Biard’s own living space and the streets as exhibition venues and international post-office boxes as a means for the transport of ideas and art. As many of the artists she had worked with—including Daniel Buren, Annette Messager, and Christian Boltanski—achieved institutional and commercial success, the labor and enthusiasm invested in creating an autonomous network for the production and distribution of art seemed to have only contributed to the mainstreaming of what had appeared to be avant-garde and transformative practices.
Expectations of a different turn of events could be labeled as naive, and this naïveté related to what could be called a specific Yugoslav position shared by the protagonists of these boycotts and strikes. Just as Yugoslavia tried to build its own brand of socialism by embracing a form of market economy that included Western capital, products, and aid, Yugoslav Conceptual artists embraced the postwar neo-avant-garde trends emerging in the West while ignoring—at least initially—their constituent and historical links to bourgeois art history and the capitalist market and expecting them to fit in with the different institutional structures and radically different visions of the role of art in socialist society. In his work Sunday Painting, 1974, which humorously merged Conceptualist practice with the folkloric tradition of naive painting, Zagreb-based artist Goran Trbuljak came up with the term “naive Conceptual artist,” which could be expanded to theorize this “Yugoslav” contradiction as a kind of naive Conceptualism.
The irresolvable dialectic between the naive and Conceptual—to lazily reach out to a text I have already written—marks the opposite poles of the beginning and end of art; it marries “a childish belief in the magic powers of art” with “the hangover of the morning after, the languid sobriety and distanced superiority of knowing it all, a been-there-done-that-ness, an already-seen-that-ness, an it-is-what-it-is-ness,” an intellectualist deconstruction of art’s impotence that “cannot tolerate anything but meta-positions, art as the definition of art.”[v] Similarly, Branislav Dimitrijević interprets Đorđević’s international strike of artists as an act of both agony and anarchy in which Đorđević is simultaneously self-ironic and consciously naive, never even expecting the strike to succeed while at the same time organizing it with full conviction.[vi]
This oxymoronic naive-Conceptualist structure, however, not only is constitutive of the practices of Conceptual artists in Yugoslavia during the 1970s, but could be said to mark the situation in which art practitioners who still choose to inherit the radical ideas of the past find themselves today. Everything has been seen and heard, the exuberant flapping of yet another pair of wings followed by their desperate, crackling burn. On the planet drowning behind the illusory backsplash of human genius and historical progress, we still call upon the same old “progressive” art to save the day and praise artists who heed the call. We identify the lesser evil of maintaining the same old institutions we know our avant-garde ancestors wished to burn. Would giving up on this naive-Conceptual insistence, and the claim that art does indeed hold a limited power and significance in at least some people’s lives, amount to a healthy reality check or just pure cynicism?
Horvat’s project makes me think about these questions precisely because it seems to be devoid of any cynicism. It embraces the heritage of naive Conceptualism—being aware of the limits of art yet insisting on its continued social value—which is not endemic to socialist Yugoslavia but which nonetheless emerged with a particularly clear outline precisely there. Like Biard in her rented Paris apartment in the early 1970s (where she lived as a Yugoslav immigrant), Horvat in By the Means at Hand takes on the role of a tenant, merging life and work while maintaining her daily presence at the exhibition space, tending to people and objects that find their temporary place there. Also like Biard, she uses alternative networks to bring these people and objects together in a temporary home, while gesturing toward their originary homelessness and, by extension, a world in which we are all no more than tenants, even if the law tries to convince us that we are owners (or, in the case of artistic labor, authors). And while the project’s title—or, rather, my opportunistic reading of it at the beginning of this text—gives the impression that all of this is just playful, handy, and easy, the realization of By the Means at Hand necessitates an ongoing commitment to a labor of attention, affection, and care. The kind of work that our societies depend upon but that is rarely acknowledged or rewarded: “maintenance art,” as artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles aptly called it, a genre historically assigned to women. Biard’s Galerie des Locataires was again another example of this.
Biard did this work while creating a self-organized, transnational, autonomous space, avoiding the reach of both the state and the market, as well as high visibility and the (art) crowd. Horvat, by contrast, takes an even greater leap of faith by choosing to do this work at the national pavilion of the Venice Biennale—an antiquated institution whose skeleton can be examined to find proof of almost everything that is wrong with the world today, not least the reaffirmation of geopolitical borders, war, and nationalism. There is more than some irony in this, as there is in the accidental fact that the artist’s last name itself—Horvat, an older version of Hrvat, which is Croatian for “Croat”—is a form of national representation, marking her simultaneously as an “ideal” representative of Croatia, where she no longer lives, and as a foreigner in her current home of London. But all these ironies and contradictions are, again, countered by the genuine attempt to test the possibility of doing this kind of project in the place that seems the most unfit for it. It remains to be seen what monstrous and wondrous stuff comes out of it all!
[i] Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 4.
[ii] See Ivana Bago, “Dematerialization and Politicization of the Exhibition: Curation as Institutional Critique in Yugoslavia during the 1960s and 1970s,“ Museum and Curatorial Studies Review 2, no. 1 (2014): 8–37.
[iii] See Branislav Dimitrijević, “Attitudes Against Art: Goran Đorđević until 1985,” in Subjektívne histórie. Seba-historizácia ako umelecká prax v stredovýchodnej Európe (Subjective Histories. Self-historicisation as Artistic Practice in Central-East Europe), ed. Daniel Grúň (Bratislava, Slovakia: VEDA, 2020).
[iv] See Ivana Bago, “A Window and a Basement: Negotiating Hospitality At La Galerie Des Locataires and Podroom—the Working Community of Artists,” ARTMargins 1, nos. 2–3 (2012): 116–46.
[v] Ivana Bago, “Mono. Looking. Glass. Door. Hole: Naive Conceptual Artist as the Gatekeeper of Art,” in Goran Trbuljak: Before and After Retrospective, ed. Tevž Logar (Berlin: gurgur editions, 2018), 216.
[vi] Branislav Dimitrijević, “(Ne)mogući umetnik. O nestvaralačkim istraživanjima G.Đ.” ([Im]possible artist. On non-creative research by G.Đ.), in Protiv umetnosti. Goran Đorđević: kopije 1979–1985 (Against Art. Goran Đorđević: Copies 1979–1985), eds. Jelena Vesić, Branislav Dimitrijević, and Dejan Sretenović (Belgrade, Serbia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2014), 44.
Ivana Bago is an independent scholar, writer, and curator based in Zagreb. She holds a PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from Duke University and is the co-founder (with Antonia Majaca) of Delve | Institute for Duration, Location and Variables. Her writings on (post)Yugoslav art, contemporary art and theory have been published in academic journals and exhibition catalogues, as well as magazines such as e-flux journal and Artforum. She is on the editorial board of the journal ARTMargins. She has given invited lectures in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; American University Beirut; Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm; and the Royal College of Art in London. She has taught at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb, and WHW Akademija. She is the recipient of the Igor Zabel Award Grant for 2020. Her curatorial projects include “Moving Forwards, Counting Backwards,” at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City; “Where Everything is Yet to Happen,” for the Spaport Biennale in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina; “The Orange Dog and Other Tales,” at Kontejner in Zagreb; “Stalking with Stories,” at Apexart in New York City; and “Meeting Points: Documents in the Making 1968-1982” as part of “Works of Heart (1970-2023),” Sanja Iveković’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. She is currently developing a research and publishing project on Iveković’s work and personal archive, as well as working on her book manuscript Yugoslav Aesthetics: Monuments to History’s Bare Bones, 1908-2018.