Tomislav Gotovac

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Bio

Tomislav Gotovac
(1937, Sombor / YU (RS) – 2010, Zagreb / HR)

Tomislav Gotovac was one of the most significant Croatian artists, active in various media, including performance art, film, photography and body art. Born in Vojvodina, he moved at the age of 4 to Zagreb where he spent the most of his life. He was interested in film from his early childhood spending it watching classics in Zagreb’s cinemas and became fascinated by the relation of film and real life; the conflict and combination of reality and fiction. After studying film directing in Belgrade, Gotovac made his first experimental films, aiming to create works which freed viewers from automated perception. He envisioned a synthesis between film and real life, as manifested in his famous statement, “When I open my eyes in the morning, I see a film.”

Gotovac also gained cult status from purposely shocking Zagreb’s civic environment. He persisted the identification of art and life, especially his own life, and that creativity is the extension of the artist’s existence. Gotovac provoked the socialist state by enacting simple everyday tasks, such as an artist begging, cleaning city squares, performing public haircuts. He, at once, confronted a state built on mass docility, and asserted his difference amid hard-line social conformity, when he marched naked and kissed the asphalt in the centre of Zagreb in his action Zagreb, I Love You!, in 1981. His works offer a perceptive view of the official politics of power, gender roles, and the paradoxes inherent in the structure of society. Gotovac was frequently brought to the police and questioned, although he was never jailed, because it was questionable whether the breach of bourgeois moral norms such as nakedness in public was anti-social behaviour or not.

Source:

Aleksandar Battista Ilic & Diana Nenadic, Tomislav Gotovac, Zagreb , 2003
monoskop.org/Tomislav_Gotovac
Podrucje zastoja / Standstill, Zagreb, Avant-garde Research Institute, 2011
Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe. Cologne: Walter König, 2009.
at.moma.org

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Gotovac and the Collages

Tomislav Gotovac created his first experimental and structural films in the early 1960s. In 1964 Gotovac performed in Belgrade three actions and made three avant-garde films in relations to them: Straight Line (Stevens-Duke), Circle (Joutkevitč-Count) and film Blue Rider (Godard-Art). Straight Line, as was the other films of the series, depicts everyday activities involving the street and moving within public space through a tramway’s speed. During the 60s, Gotovac applied editing principles to his visual arts practice, creating Dadaist collages based on themes in his everyday life. These collages can be interpreted as intimate diaries consisting of different objects chosen to reflect through art something completely banal otherwise. In the case of the present collage, razor blade packaging, cigarette boxes, banana stickers, wrapping paper from a well-known Zagreb department store (Na-Ma) or drawing paperbook cover (Blok) show together, as personal relics, a “realistic imprint” of the artist’s life.

World News

1964 in the World

The United Stated gets involved in the war in Vietnam, which ends approximately a decade later.
After getting rid of Nikita Khruschev, Leonid Brezhnev takes the position as the general secretary of the CPSU
The first Chinese nuclear explosion.
The new Elizabeth Bridge is inaugurated in Budapest (designed by Pál Sávoly).
Nobel Prize for Martin Luther King and Jean-Paul Sartre: the latter refuses his award due to his belief about the author.
Nelson Mandela is sentenced to life in prison in South Africa. He is freed in 1990.
The song titled ”I Want To Hold Your Hand” by The Beatles is top of the charts in America, starting the ‘British invasion’ in music.
Life sentence is abolished in the United Kingdom.
The first Ford Mustang is produced.
Historical visit of John Paul IV in Jordan and Israel: he is the first Catholic leader to visit the Holy Land.
The first self-service supermarket of Hungary opens in Dorog.

Art Life

Events in Art History from 1964

The 1964 Venice Biennial brings American pop art to Europe: Robert Rauschenbergnek wins the grand prix of the biennial. Apart from him, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg represent the genre. At the same time, the gallery owners Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend organise a pop art exhibition at the American embassy in Votol, San Gregorio, as a manifestation of America’s fascination with pop art. Rauschenberg’s award caused controversy among the members of the international jury, some of them mentioned ”cultural colonisation”. The sensationalist media frenzy around pop art left the other exhibitions in the shadow.

Design, Lifestyle

5.design_gotovac This Ina coffee service created by Lubomir Tomaszewszki was manufactured by Ćmielów Porcelain in 1964; one set is to be found in the National Museum of Warsaw, Poland.

„In 1956, Lubomir Tomaszewszki, a scupltor employed by the Institute of Industrial Design in Warsaw, was commissioned to investigate the ideal ergonomic forms for tea and coffee sets, a typical brief. […] The resulting designs for the Ina (1961) [combined] shell and tear-like forms, his organic cups and pots, in a monochrome glaze, achieved the spare plasticity which many leading designers on both sides of the East-West divide sought in the late 1950s. Tomaszewszki’s designs were widely reproduced in the popular press, but the designer was keen to assert the utility of his seductive design. […] Tomaszewszki’s abstract aesthetics were also a rebuttal of the taste for pseudo-luxury and pseudo-vernaculism characteristic of the Stalin years.”

Source: Cold War Modern Design 1945-1970, ed.: David Crowley, Jane Pavitt, 2008