Trough the few of the upcoming texts I was planning to thematize the exhibitions, projects and research related to the project Political Practices of [post-] Yugoslav Art, which I described briefly in one of my previous posts.
Curator and art historian Dunja Blažević, who used to run the gallery of Student's Cultural Centre in Belgrade during 70s, profiling it as the space open for art experiments, new media and critical perspectives, in 1981 initiates the collaboration with Radio Television Belgrade public service broadcast company. This collaboration soon develops into the regular monthly show under the title "TV Gallery", broadcasted over Yugoslav TV network in between 1984 and 1991.
"TV Gallery" is one of the most ambitious case studies of the PPYUART research. The project initiators – curatorial collective WHW from Zagreb, new media centre kuda.org from Novi Sad, SCCA/pro.ba from Sarajevo, and Prelom Kolektiv – have organized the exhibition which was premiered in Zagreb in December last year. It was followed by the series of discussions and publishing the newspapers.TV GALLERY was presented yesterday in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Novi Sad. Kuda.org hosted of the exhibition, while I moderated panel discussion, preceding the opening. We decided to test the basic hypothesis behind PPYUART and to question the relations between the official, governmental cultural concepts in the Socialist Yugoslavia and critical work of the 'organized margin', institutionally formed after '68. Dunja Blažević, at the times the program editor of the Gallery of Student's Cultural Centre [SKC] - Belgrade, together with the artists, critics, filmmakers, theorists and activists gathered around SKC, was the part of that alternative scene.
Among the panelists were art historian and critic Branislav Dimitrijević, editor-in-chief of Prelom Journal - Dušan Grlja, Dalibor Martinis - Zagreb based artist, significant protagonist of the early video-art experiments in Yugoslavia and, of course, Dunja Blažević - currently the directress of the SCCA/pro.ba - Sarajevo.
"TV Gallery" represents a significant document of the interdisciplinary and socially engaged artistic and curatorial practices, which until today remained the unprecedented model of showing and debating cultural initiatives at public television. The concept of the modernist public television and its openness towards such an artistic and intellectual experiments was the important discussion-line of both panels, in Zagreb as well as in Novi Sad. The "TV Gallery" shows were dedicated to the widely defined notion of contemporary art – from historical avant-gardes to the so-called 'new artistic practices', video art experiments, comic production, design and literature. It didn't have any genre and time limitations imposed by the structure of the regular TV program.
Dunja Blažević describes the public television as the 'natural' environment for showing video, which, as a difference from the museums and galleries, offers wider possibilities for distribution and provides the access to art for the potentially much larger audience. This media-specific environment also opens up the space for different kinds of intervention into the very core of the public of the televised infosphere. Dunja's approach to the "TV Gallery" was a two-fold: it was at the same time a showroom, but also the informational, educative and debating program. As the curator of the project and especially in terms of its artistic tendencies, Dunja was inspired by the project of the same name, initiated by artist and filmmaker Gerry Schum at German public television in 1968. Schum's concept was negation of the television as the place where art should be reviewed or represented, for him it was rather the place where art is happening in real time. Gerry Schum's concept of "Television Gallery" was meant to produce art exclusively for the medium of TV and in that sense he collaborated with numerous artists engaged in the sphere of conceptual art, land art, process art and new media artistic experiments [Dennis Oppenheim, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Serra, Gilbert & George, Daniel Buren, Joseph Beuys, Mario Merz, Robert Smithson etc.]. Dunja's approach was less radical in the terms of production, but equally challenging in the terms of changing the traditional views on what the art is and how it is represented and debated in the given social moment.
Inside the first TV Gallery serial was premierly shown famous documentary movie 'Art in Revolution' by British-German film director Lutz Becker. The film was dedicated to the Soviet Avant-garde art and was considered to be controversial on the both sides of the Wall. It had difficulties to be publicly presented in the West but also in the SSSR itself. 'Art in Revolution' presents Lutz Becker's view on Camilla Gray's research trips around Soviet Union during the sixties. She collects the material for the future book 'Russian Art Experiment' - the first comprehensive art-historical analysis of the social and cultural circumstances under which Soviet Avant-garde appeared. Until then, no foreigner had the opportunity to get in the archives and depots of museums where original artworks and related documents were stored. The publishing of the book 'The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922', in 1962, has radically changed art-historical landscape of European art, and the book was tremendously influential to the formation of neo-avantgarde movements during 60s and 70s in Europe and US, but also in the former Yugoslavia. Soon after publishing the book Camilla Gray dies (she was 33 years old).
Our reasons for making the exhibition about the TV show from the second half of the 80s are multiple, and equally concerned the very media (media of TV and media of gallery) as much as the content of the show, which aimed to present various relationships of the cultural practices within what we call today "the époque of decadent Yugoslav socialism" of the 80s. The emergence of TV Gallery in this context is also linked to the development of the art during 70s and 80s, which features the ideas of the democratization of reception and production of contemporary art, abandoning the traditional artistic spaces, tactical use of media, participation, collectivity, change of the status of the author, etc.
TV Gallery is also interesting as the symptom of not only the cultural and artistic scene of Yugoslavia of that period, but of the public television too, as well as the society and the State in which such projects were possible. The preserved recordings of TV Gallery can be also observed as the material remnants of one ideology, which clearly shows how much such an experiment is not imaginable in the contemporary media space of public television of today. Today, TV Gallery will be evaluated as formally and contentually elitist, non-commercial and not interesting to the general public. From this originates a slightly paradoxical fact that TV shows like this one can return to us only through the 'enclosed' and 'contemplative' white cube setting of the gallery. In the world of Big Brother and programmed social oblivion, the "outdated" media space of the gallery re-confirms as the one of the rare spaces of the freedom to experiment.
A slightly different account on the project, related to the exhibition opening in Zagreb in December last year, you can read
here. It was written by our collaborator Branka Ćurčić from kuda.org, who occasionally works as the correspondent for eipcp_transform web journal.
LabforCulture jest inicjatywą partnerską Europejskiej Fundacji Kultury. LabforCulture jest wdzięczna swoim fundatorom za wsparcie
