Anonymous Authors, Nameless Heroes, Unknown ...

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Anonymous Authors, Nameless Heroes, Unknown Histories (A Local Historical Overview of the Strategies and Motifs of the Variable) Ana Peraica Then perhaps the subject returns, not as illusion, but as fiction. A certain pleasure is derived from a way of imagining oneself as individual, of inventing a final rarest fiction: the fictive identity. — Roland Barthes, 1973

The unknown, unnamed and anonymous are the pseudo-someones. They cannot be identified as someone in particular, because they may also be many. The only thing they cannot be is no one. But still, they’re closer to being no one than to anyone in particular. Through their intervention in the historical axis they mask what is opposite, the process of becoming known (famous), through the opposite process, that I would name ‘dis-identification’ (disintegration of identity in all the ways of its production; political, social, cultural, psychological …). Most of the agents of history are unnamed. They write it, or history is written on them, though history doesn’t write them in particular, except in terms of the ‘mass’ or the ‘crowd’. In that sense, this is a homage to a mass society in which some creative individuals, not willing to identify themselves, are hidden. The theme of this essay, in Barthesian terms, is the birth of the continuity of reading at the expense of the author and the history of the author in general. This piece is trying to go deeper in terms of ‘the proper name’, ‘the institution of the author’, ‘authority’ than just using these terms as narrative cliché. The discussion on the author in Western theory is extended, though not so much investigated in practical terms, in the art itself (except for several examples that might be mentioned before the ‘neoistic’ practice of the 1980s). But even before this discussion the topic was Ana Peraica

already explored in depth practically in Eastern Europe. It had a certain success in the time of the partisans — the graffiti authors with the underlining action of hiding their own or their comrades’ identities. In a variety of ways, the practice of the antiauthor was introduced — starting with the copyright problem (samizdats, tamizdats) and the use of pseudonyms to avoid censorship. But it wasn’t only unofficial history that used a ‘soft’ definition of the author. Official history also practiced this. It was less about a pure use of the pseudonym and more a recipe for an artistic/political practice. There is an intrinsic relation between the name and politics. The former was the necessary background for the arts from 1945, whether or not this was admitted in the artwork itself. Since the recent laws on authorial rights were passed, copyright has suddenly replaced the copyright-less principle. According to Croatia’s postsocialist law on authorial rights (Authorial Work and the Author of the Penal Law, 1991), not only is the practice of falsification prohibited, but also that of pseudo-speech, a category under which some wellknown artists from the not-so-distant 1980s would fall, including the Belgrade Malevich (Djordjević) and the ‘Virus’ project of Svebor Kranjc (Krantz). At this point the histories of the illegal and the legal merge, providing grounds for an interpretation that would be unfamiliar to Western European chronology, a relationship which is usually found to be comparatively synchronous, but with a constant delay of inventions of styles. Josip Seissel or Jo Klek (a pseudonym Seissel used between 1922 and 1925 when he belonged to the Zenitist movement) fig. 7

The digressions of history (including art history) are 163

most commonly written in the footnotes. In contrast to the famous footnotes of Derrida, which remain curiosities in their own right, reading annotations of artworks can sometimes produce distortions in the interpretations of the main text. The annotation, ‘Josip Seissel, or Jo Klek, in the company of Bozidar Tušek and some other people, with one stone on his head and the other in his hand’ (Vjesnik July , ) accompanying a photograph of a happening at Brela beach, Croatia in the summer of , is a pure biographical curiosity, a kind of blind footnote. The author of the text illustrated by the photograph is art historian Josip Depolo who claims it was the first happening in world history, one that took place even before the appearance of the concept in art itself. But following radical Barthesian methods, we can dispute Depolo’s interpretation of happening — the photograph can’t speak of more than the tactical description of the happening, indicated through; ‘swimmers, stone on the head, stone in the hand’, any more than it can the traditional game of Dalmatinska Zagora ‘stone from the shoulder’. It could be the indication of the same game, which is still not happening in the photograph at all. In concern to the protagonist, following the annotation, two historical axes are intertwined — one terminated, while the other one is invented from foreground to background and attached to the interpretation. Namely, the artist, a Zenitist (futurist), was the author of the first national abstract painting Pafama 1921, a sort of ‘Great Nude’ of Croatian art, under the pseudonym Jo Klek, but the painting had no impact until the rediscovery of abstraction after 1951. Seissel therefore usually occupies that paradoxical place in history reserved for dreamers and geniuses, either a lonely protomodernist, making himself a loner for a whole period, or being attached to the work thirty years later by exat, the movement that institutionalised abstraction in local history. But even then, he is not a prototype, but an avant-garde artist, since the movement itself was more influenced by the dynamics of the international art scene. So, Josip Seissel as a protagonist of history is sliding between different points of historical narration. Paradoxically his story, if not written biographically, ends up at a later time where it hangs as a warning that something had already happened. But still, the question might be asked: did Shakespeare invent Bacon, or was it vice versa? Or 164

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perhaps it was another author who invented both. The fact of the existence of Jo Klek is realised through his relation to famous alter-identities of Jacques Durand (as Pierre Dupont) and Stendhal (as Henri Beyle), according to the relation of the author to the genre. Authorisation is done under different names, so we can repeatedly distinguish the ‘proper name’ from the ‘name of the author’, the first being the one that ‘moves from the interior of a discourse to the real person outside who produced it’ while the second ‘remains on the outline of texts — separating one from the other, defining their form, and characterising their means of existence.’ (Foucault) There is the chain of ‘proper name’ equalling ‘the name of the author’, which again is ‘the author of the name of the author’ being the same as the ‘proper name’ but filling the other function (Josip Seissel and ‘Josip Seissel’ as the author of Jo Klek). The situation is more obvious on the biographical axis, where through the use of a pseudonym Jo Klek actually doubles the story, creating a kind of pseudo-history. The question is always: is the use of a pseudonym actually the result of a wish to make another story that is not limited by time — a story that has no logical beginning or end points, a story with some deeper psychological roots? The fabrication of a new persona, a pseudo-persona, may also, as a second point, suggest some interesting (and broader) investigations with respect to schizo-analysis, as proposed by Guattari, the pseudonym representing the historical point of a social splitting. In this case it is a gap between the bio-story (biography) and artefactualstory (arti-graphy), the real and the official history. This paradox may be of great use in realising the nature of photography, the real ‘death mask’ (Barthes, Sontag) or the death mask of the real. The face in the photograph functions as a signature, an imprint of the real that cannot be Jo Klek for sure, as he had no face, only the architect Josip Seissel. Even the stone itself has a more obvious relation to architecture, in this sense, than to his abstract painting. For an analysis of this work the double biography must be taken into account, otherwise the radical consequences of the possible act might be omitted — the escape from the inside of one’s own self, a kind of Socratic womb giving birth to the irrational, normative ‘daimonion’ — the noninstitutionalised rule (or the unlawful norm itself). The relations of the architect to the Dada-movement, and of the painter to exat 51 are beyond doubt, but

mutual references to the name and the avatar are also interesting, as one has influenced the architecture in direct continuation, while the other is painting, after a period of being forgotten. The fictional author, whom the real one (b. 1904 — d. 1987) gave a date of birth, did not actually have a narrative end. Andrija Maurović or ‘The Old Tomcat’ fig. 2

From this time on it is a challenge to re-define social realism, which in practice is usually meant as a bad form of realistic painting, although actually its own programme is drawn on a broader base of social engagement and modernist demands with a successful history. Among the best examples one may mention the work of Andrija Maurović. Twice arrested for partisan activities, ‘Red Maurović’ became a biographical prototype of the post-revolutionary artist, and therefore fit the needs of society, as he made dogma visible. Starting with Postcards from the Battlefield, made immediately after the war, he proceeded with other commissions. Those, like the later kitsch paintings of natural motifs or cataclysms, made no headway into the history of the beaux arts. What’s more, he was expelled from the professional societies. In that sense, he had almost the same biographical status as those anonymous artists making images of unknown partisans at the crossroads of many villages and cities. But Maurović entered history not through the main gate of establishment art, i.e. painting, but through the popular genre of the comic book. There are two unavoidable points of reception for this genre in the territory of ex-Yugoslavia — Maurović’s The Old Tomcat (in terms of the mode of production) and Alan Ford (in terms of actual reading). Their ongoing reception presents changes in the popular representation of heroes that has a particular relation to history, invented and distorted in all of them in such a way that it forms a nice curve around official history, which suffered from the same delusions. But just as mythomanic (inventing myth, lying) stories have a relationship to mythology, so do histrionics (inventing history, falsification) have a relationship with history. This is also obvious in the relationship of the work’s author towards his own character, which uncovers a mythomanic delusion. While Alan Ford Ana Peraica

was drawn under the generic historical identity designated by the term ‘Magnus’ (a medieval signature: ‘Magnus pictor fecit’ — ‘Done by a great artist’), and therefore explored the long history of the pseudonym, Maurović was a pure inversion of this position. While Roberto Raviola, alias Magnus, hid behind the signature of a skilful, a-historical but still unknown author, Maurović filled out his own character to create an avatar. In this way he became one of the most prominent examples of Proust’s reverse positioning of biography and work. Biographical information recounts how he used to call himself by the name of his most famous work, The Old Tomcat, so one of his wishes was to have that name carved on his gravestone, experimenting to the end with fictional biography. Furthermore, feeling the necessity to merge with his character, Maurović let his beard and moustache grow to become more similar to his own invention: ‘The Old Tomcat’ was from the first moment an old man, since I created him that way. Then, slowly, I was ageing too. Aren’t the ways of humans strange; I created ‘The Old Tomcat’ so — in the end — I became ‘The Old Tomcat’. That’s what happens when someone delves in the depth of a human soul!

But the paradox is still more complex. The scenario wasn’t written by Maurović, but the journalist Franjo M. Fuis (under the pseudonym Fra Mu Fu). Dimitrije Bašičević as Mangelos Manifestos (Zagreb 1978) fig. 98, fig. 103

The appearance of the artist called Mangelos, later indentified as art historian Dimitrije Bašičević, can be connected, in the context of comparative art history, to the ‘second modern’ period introduced in Croatia by the Gorgona group. In this particular case there is a close relationship between Mangelos and the Gorgona group in the first modern period, similar to the one formed between Duchamp and Broodthaers. In that sense Mangelos’s antecedent was Jo Klek. The similarities are obvious. The modernist application of the pseudonym, as illustrated in the division between Seissel and his alter ego, Klek, is clear, coupled with a rationalist approach to architecture and the irrationalist means of ‘art’ 165

production. In Mangelos’s case, the work is coherent and consistent, with the theoretical work of the art historian Bašičević logically supplementing the artwork of Mangelos. There is only a formal separation. And it is precisely this formality, which provides the grounds for the appearance of the alter-author. The alternative ego exists, but becomes a unique solution provided by the second modern movement to the problem of totality in the first one. Namely, because the formal prohibition to cross the meta-artistic breach (based on an ethical norm being foisted as the law itself) is set from the outside of art production. This is in contrast to the inner contradictions of the activities of Seissel / Klek. In Mangelos’s case the application of the pseudonym becomes a resolution. While Seissel bridges the mental barrier of modern premises by using two different axes (the rationalist inductive and irrationalist deductive methods), Mangelos crosses the formal border of this prohibition by using the illegal ground. It is therefore a histrionic move, a rhetorical entanglement with history. The series of Manifestos 1978, written by Mangelos on a school chalk-board, the most interesting of which might be The Manifesto on ‘ α’, also demonstrate the solution of the second-modern movement. The texts themselves aren’t programmatic, but poetic. The Manifesto on ‘ α’ enters the domain of the double flow, again bridging two different realities, the cosmic and the particular (or the general and the specific), in which the dissolution of the algebraic problem of α, (being an ordinary dog, a canus simplex) also refers to the algebraic problem of Duchamp (art as ‘x’), but introducing a new variable — the proper name (again) and the context of its application. A metonymy which functions as the translation of ‘α’ into a grand historical being, also functions as the file named Bašičević and his avatar Mangelos. Alpha, as it is written on the board, ‘The one that is legally forbidden access to the possibility of further evolution’, draws us back to a discussion of the relations between the biological (and biography) to the artificial (and arti-graphy) in history. In that sense it appears in the same way that Derrida writes about the naming of God: ‘As reference to just what name supposes to name beyond itself, the nameable beyond the name, the unnameable nameable.’ As it is what is one of ‘there where it is impossible to go. Over there, towards the name, towards the beyond of the name.’ It is in precisely this way that the variable (of both ‘α’ 166

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and the name of Mangelos) functions. Red Peristil and Red Peristil Urban intervention, Split, 11 January 1968 fig. 48

Four youngsters are in front of the city café with their heads down. The citizens are prepared for the attack, a lynching. In front the group is washing the street, as seen on the photograph, which is the only document. It was during the night in January 1968, when a group of young artists that can be identified though the photo (P. Dulčić, S. Sumić, R. Djapić and D. Dokić) turned the main square of the Roman Palace red. Because of the assumed political context, the artists were hunted for days, and attacked in most of the newspapers. Only one art historian stood in their defence (Cvito Fisković). It was only years later, after the show Mogućnosti ’71 (Possiblities ’71), that even the most reactionary theorists realised that urban interventions could be accepted as an art genre. By the time the work was recognised, most of the authors, whose real names were known only to a circle of friends, had died or vanished and a revision of information was no longer possible. Since then, history has been totally inverted — with the event happening before the moment of recognition, instead of dis-identification in the face of the law or of a public lynching, we witness a hyperidentification with the protagonists. Progressively, with each retelling, more people are attached to the assumed list of artists (who were only half-identified in the press). The story grew in two directions; along the paths of immediate local history and of official art history. In the end a total of thirty protagonists were mentioned. But the lists didn’t match. One list was characterised by elements of the urban Mediterranean macho milieu, and in that context drew reference to the lives of famous prostitutes, pimps and night creatures, while the other was inhabited by careerists, mystics and spiritualists. Still, in the determinants of the style (proper name — author — the author of the author which is a proper name) some of the major mythologists could be traced — Vladimir Dodig Trokut, whose anti-museum is a logical continuation of the practice of the Red Peristil, and Želimir Kipke, who attached some mystic elements to the story. The group was named after the artwork, and there were even fractions invented within the group. All attempts were made to provide authorisation. This

tale is a history of attempts to synchronize two subhistories: the sub-histories of the proper name and the name of the author. Here the proper name, in contrast to earlier examples, is far more important. Proper names were added, while the name of the author was invented. While both were specified, and named, the author of both remained under-cover, but his style was obvious, as both the names and the authors were derived from the first authorial discourse, which was now internalised. On the one side a profession, which mystifies the proper names of the authors (or name — style, bureaucracy), while on the other, the nameless mass inventing its own artists through the production of an urban myth. Until the twentieth century, the history of unauthorised works (stories, folk tales, folk songs, etc.) had been one in which stories following an aural tradition came into the city (this transition is illustrated by Giovanni Boccaccio, who transferred popular tales into a narrative structure — ten friends telling ten stories). The author problem grew out of a need to professionalise the activity of authorship and in this new context the author was no longer unknown, but was still unidentified. Anyone could appear under the name of Homer, Hermes Trismegistus, and furthermore, many of them could be uncovered. The resurrection of the author from the work carries into art history a need to address the problem of the mythological practices that remained following the passage of art into the era of the post-mythological. Red Peristil has no more or less a relation to the author than the Holy Scripture has to the saints to whom it is attributed. The actual authors — the acknowledged authors and the attributed authors — form three distinct spheres. Based predominantly on the reading of the author from the scripture, which produced nonsense out of factual possibilities, just as biographical figures later continued on within the discourse of modernism. Unfortunately or fortunately, it became a social practice — the reconstruction of the author, as in a crime story, produced the possibility of its creation inside an urban mass society hungry for a new dogmatic discourse. To analyse this problem, notions of the ‘proper name’ and the ‘author’ aren’t sufficient. Through Foucault’s theory of the interdependence of discourse and the ‘initiator of the discourse’, who in fact is the author, we might conclude that a group was selfinvented, or were not the original authors, based on Ana Peraica

both the criteria of the production of the author from the authorial discourse and the consequence of the coherency (homogeneity, filiations, reciprocal explanation, authenticity, common utilitarianism). The discourse may invent the author, only becoming quasi-discursive, as the consequence of the discourse, not the first persona. Then the style also becomes discursive, as the discourse is emancipated and selfgenerative, or dynamic, in this way supporting the authorial function that is filled by a plurality of egos. The model produced is similar to the one Foucault derives from grammatology and narrative: In a mathematical treatise, the ego who indicates the circumstances of composition in the preface is not identical, either in terms of his position or his function, to the ‘I’ who concludes a demonstration within the body of the text. The former implies a unique individual who, at a given time and place, succeeded in completing a project, whereas the latter indicates an instance and plan of demonstration that anyone could perform provided the same set of axioms, preliminary operations, and an identical set of symbols were used. It is also possible to locate the third ego: one who speaks of the goals of his investigations, the obstacles encountered, its results, and the problems yet to be solved, and this ‘I’ would function in a field of existing or future mathematical discourses … The ‘author-function’ in such discourses operates so as to effect the simultaneous dispersion of the three egos.

The questions Foucault asks are contrary to the ones that had as their goal a classic identification, rather they are attempting to find the modules that govern the formation of discourse, interested not in its heroes but in issues: who is controlling it, which places are given to the possible subjects, or who can fulfill the various purposes of subjects. In short, as he noted: ‘what matter who’s speaking?’ (‘What does it matter who’s speaking’?). Svebor Krantz ‘Zagreb Virus’, 22nd Salon of Youth, Zagreb 1990 fig. 150

In the same manner that R. Mutt managed to enter 167

that salon in 1917, Svebor Krantz (‘Zagreb Virus’) managed to enter the 22nd Salon of Youth in Zagreb in 1990. This exhibition was ‘unofficially’ conceived as one where ‘anything goes’, but at the same time the imagined ideal of ‘no jury — no prices — no commercial tricks’, wasn’t followed — as was also the case in the show that refused that fountain. If Duchamp’s intervention amounted to the institution of institutional practice, the work of the young artist Svebor Krantz was an attempt to demystify its own failure. Namely, the artist used different works to apply to the 22nd Salon of Youth under many names (Zvonko Cuker, Goranka Matić, Mario Matić, Sven Mraz, Aldo Prpić, Ante Soldo, Blanka Sekulić, Duško Trifunović, etc.). In contrast to R. Mutt, they were accepted. In the accompanying brochure the artist summarised his activity: All basic conditions which establish a work of art have to be simulated to ensure access to the programme through its system of defence (the jury). It is to simulate authorship (individuality, personal data), form (e.g. a bit of paint on canvas) and the so-called spirit of the work (which boils down to a psychological identification with various trends or other popular intellectual clichés) … At the moment when the virus gained enough ‘quality’ to pass through its access, it was chosen to participate in the exhibition of equally valid works of art. At this point, identification of the virus and the other works degrades the last ones a lot. It is actually the criteria of choice and quality, which are declining and therefore the works of art have to lose the honour of being ‘chosen’.

It may seem that the author himself mixed up the notion of authorship belonging to the author, with the notion of the biographical ‘proper name’, a mix-up which continues within the context of a critique of institutional art practices. His reference to new media with the metaphor of a computer virus capable of hiding behind files, and even arriving from known senders, is interesting. A lot of theory in the 1980s and 1990s has been concerned with a form of remote communication that produces the effect of a multiple person (in situ) but which also allows a kind of manipulation through avatars 168

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(S. Turkle, S. Stone and others), but this development was routinely presented in a negative light. The positive view was only provided by followers of neoism, a movement that emerged during the 1980s and reached its peak in the 1990s. The neoists introduced strategies of multiple names or multiple personas behind a single name, enlarging on the subjects of authorship and the author. One of the most famous examples of using such a practice, especially related to forgery, was Luther Blissett’s plagiaristic work — the fake Hakim Bey (the ‘real’ Hakim Bey is also a figure writing under a pseudonym). The work of Svebor Krantz also falls under this anti-ethical aesthetic. There is still one question of consistency to be solved — it’s not so much a matter of how one can be a ‘singular plural’ but rather a question of how much there is which is inseparable from the singular — the plurality of quality. Feral Tribune fig. 167

The logic of one history may approve the other. It is unbelievable to those dealing with the different branches of history: playing either a fool or an artist or both may cover the political speech under the legal status of the madness of an ‘art piece’. Then using the freedom of arts in rigid times arriving as foolishness at the maximum, which at the same time crosses the legal possibility of speech, and therefore falls under a completely different legal status. Many modernist artists have tested this marginal position of the art world against the political stage, playing with ‘innocence’ within the frames of the white rooms of madhouses and the white cube of the gallery or museum. The magazine Feral Tribune, which during the 1990s was one of the rare free media voices in Croatia (remember this was at a time when Croatian artists made shows paraphrased as ‘Art against War’ and ‘My Bleeding Country’, and organised pathetic societies to fight with paintbrushes, uncritically accepting the political conditions produced by such gestures). Feral Tribune was produced under the conditions of the strict press controls of war-time, in which usually the only free space or non-censured space is the non-textual expression. ‘Grand history’ is a verbal chain, and the hyper-textualisation of laws was introduced by bureaucracy — a domain that hardly included visual documents (except through

Bertillion’s invention of id photography). The magazine, in the daily newspaper format, was publishing texts and photo-comments, the latter usually being more radical, deconstructing the discourse of the Other formed within war-time. This was already practiced in photomontage, as it emerged as a genre in the modern period. Photomontage developed as a political vehicle, not only for John Heartfield but also other German modernists such as Hannah Höch, as well as for Russian constructivists (Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, etc.), who used this method for propaganda purposes. More recently the American artist Martha Rosler made anti-Vietnam War montages, and later Peter Kennard applied this method against the Cold War of the 1980s. But photomontage as a genre founded on the popular motif of the caricature also appeared during times of oppression (for example in fanzines in Russia and Argentina). But the difference between Feral Tribune and the ancestors I mentioned above is the type of humour used — no longer a soft humour, but a sarcastic black humour similar to the one that the group rt Markt used in its rogue sites against George w. Bush, or in their initiative named Barbie Doll Liberation. The cover page of the Feral Tribune was one of the most reprinted in the history of journalism. Its unique intervention in the political field makes it not so much an artwork as the art sortie of the decade. Sanja Iveković GEN XX Media interventions in magazines — Arkzin, Zaposlena, Frakcija, Kruh i ruže and Kontura 1997 ‒ 8 fig. 205

Sanja Iveković’s GEN XX, People’s Heroines is a series of fashion photographs of women titled with the names of national heroes. Partisans with short statements on the way they were persecuted, directly connected not only to the problems of women (as anonymous agents of civilisation before the birth of emancipatory movements), but also to heroes. Through a fusion of the composite image the original advertisement is transformed into its opposite: a death certificate. In the context of feminist groups, some would recognise that the foundations of this work is the Antifascist Women’s Front (afž), the first anti-erotic women’s group in Yugoslavia (working on the equality Ana Peraica

of the sexes, and consequently succeeding in desexualising the image of the woman), which was founded during World War 11 and continued its political work throughout the post-war period. The main question is whether art and the image of the face and their roles in society identify a person. A series of heroes whose names were ubiquitous during socialist times (Nada Dimić, Dragica Končar, etc.), as most people in the 1990s were unaware of the historical role of the person identified with these names, are contrasted in a series of fashion photographs. In this way two histories of women are balanced with the problems created by a passive object and an active intervening agent, both serving history, and in so doing becoming forgettable, describing two points of historical anonymity. The author publishes work in magazines, which is unsigned, thus this becomes the third example of a presentation of anonymity. The author is both the object of an erotic act of intervening and of a modernist understanding of the analysis of the work and of the author as the intervening agent in a cultural body. This merges the two contradictory positions, of being both the subject and object. The relation of the name to the unnamed — the name of the unknown — and the name of the one that is referring to both unnamed and unknown becomes complex. There is a similar complexity in the argument Foucault develops when analysing Magritte’s work, Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Here it is not playing with names but rather with notions of the unknown. Authorship and identification, two ‘who’s’ aren’t connected, though in ordinary grammar they both appear in the nominative, as subjects. They split the function of the proper name as the subject and object. The general xenophobia of socialism, where nn (None Named) becomes the main conspirator against which the annual militant practice of war is exercised (nnni: ‘ništa nas ne smije iznenaditi’ — ‘nothing should surprise us’), was also the subject of other works by Sanja Iveković, referring to the paranoia of post-socialist times, indeed, any reference to the socialist past. Already since her classic Trokut 1979, in which she was masturbating while reading a book on political resistance and drinking whisky, whilst Yugoslavian president Tito was passing through the streets, Iveković was meeting state paranoia. Another example mentioned by Sanja Iveković in one conversation is related to a totally hilarious attempt by the inhabitants of the street of the ‘Unknown Heroine’ in Zagreb to change its name. This happened at a time 169

when the names of many public places were being revised, because the inhabitants assumed that the unknown heroine might be a partisan heroine. This was also the subject of a work by Slaven Tolj titled Pissed Off by the Square … (shown in Gallery pm in Zagreb in 1999), in which the building of the Gallery placed on the square that changed its name with each government was surrounded with detonation mines. This was an intervention in a building that had changed its name, along with the square on which the building is situated. The work dealt with political nominalism, with the absurdity of authority in a way similar to the practice of Humpty Dumpty concerning the explanation of meaning and name. Anonymous Author and ‘The Manager’ Urban intervention, Split, 11 January 1998 and media installation, 33rd Zagreb Salon of Arts, Zagreb 1998 fig. 211

History can move in a curvilinear direction and rehears itself again. Thirty years later someone painted Peristil again, but this time in black. A pitiable note was left. Among the many careerists that wanted to officially annotate the myth of Red Peristil, the mayor’s office of the city of Split received two official applications to cover the Peristil again (one with animal blood, the other with red paint) as homage to the group. Neither of these requests was approved, but a few years earlier a covering of green carpet was legally allowed. Finally, a round black version appeared, but illegally. The square was painted with a black circle in the middle. Though logically invoking Malevich’s rhetorics of the red and black, it was actually more reminiscent of Stella’s less geometric approach. The square was painted in a rush. The artist escaped, wasn’t caught and remains unknown. Once again, a discussion developed, but this time informed art historians and critics reacted positively, as if trying to clear their conscience for the lynching of the protagonists of the Red Peristil. City leaders, on the other hand, reacted negatively, as of course black, the colour used for nationalist uniforms in World War 11, was this time recalled in the times of post-war post-socialism. It all happened as a reworking of history. Again the arguments lasted for days, and many of the artists were called in for police interviews. In the end documentation of the whole polemical exercise was entered into the 33rd Zagreb Salon, receiving an 170

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award. The work received the third prize and was submitted anonymously — thus fulfilling the aim of Goran Trbuljak when he asked the galleries to participate in the Anonymous Artist project. The anonymous author was then identified, at least by the jury, and the ‘superstition of names’ of the institutional art world was re-activated as soon as the originators identified themselves. Since there was a threat that the one who collected the award would be prosecuted, the prize was not collected by ‘him’ but by ‘him as his own manager’, though everyone knew it was the same person. This person, being neutral, appearing only as a representative, was out of the reach of any law referring to the material damage to the monument. The author was covered, at the same time de-authorising the work, and therefore not legally responsible. Whether or not the anonymous should assume his identity once the action is prosecuted, is more of an ethical than aesthetic decision, still in the context of activism quite crucial. Following the case of Alexander Brener’s arrest for his intervention exacted upon Malevich’s painting, around the same time; the author of the author (or the proper name) showed cowardice in the sense of historical bravery, as he remained anonymous and escaped justice. So, the difference between the Red Peristil and the Black one was in taking up the legal aspect of the authorship of the act of vandalism. Namely, the vanished author of Black Peristil (or his ‘manager’ appearing at the prizegiving ceremony at the Salon of Youth) didn’t accept the legal consequences of the intervention, as his ‘ancestors’ of the original had done. They paid the legal fee of 50dm as punishment for their act (that was the equivalent of two days in prison at that time). At the end of the nineteenth century an obvious paradox emerged in the making of any law on authorship. This centres on the fact that it refers not to the proper name, but to the author, who may not actually be guilty, because she or he is not a real person. Rather it is the person behind the author that is guilty. This paradox is actually a consequence of the longer history of the split between the religious and social status of the artist, which intensified in the twentieth century: In our culture … discourse was not originally a thing, a product, or a possession, but an action situated in a bipolar field of the sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious

and blasphemous. — Foucault

The schizoid split of the author (this time not a split of the self) produced a new paradigm of the author: the representative of the author (the artist-manager as a post-industrial, global multi-mediated phenomenon in the institutional history of art) in contrast to the anonymous relation of the author. Finally, if something could be blamed, according to both copyright and authorship laws, it would be an intervention in the meaning of the original work, the Red Peristil. The paradox of this situation, not only because of the painting but also the method, is an inversion of Dambek’s movie Master’s Game 1997, that elaborates on the ethical problem of one who paints over the work of another, becoming angry once it is done to him. A Tree without an Author Urban intervention, work in progress at the entrance to the Split Civil Hospital, 1990s fig. 225

An intervention exacted upon a tree might introduce another question — that of the curator as author, applying a theory in the name of art, and as an alibi of quasi-distribution. One could chose an art piece in a regular method or proclaim one to be analysed in the context of art. For more than a decade pieces of chewing gum have been stuck to a tree, covering it from the top to the bottom, indicating not only the passers-by but also the types of gums available on the post-socialist market and ways of communication — i.e. exploring ways of writing messages. The basis for the explanation is to be found between two definitions of the artwork: institutional modernist theory claiming ‘everything is art’ (if in a known context) and the altruistic postmodern definition claiming ‘everyone is an artist’. The first of these may be called the ‘dilemma of the artwork’, of everyone in particular, and the second, ‘the dilemma of the author’, of everyone in general (Foucault). Between these two positions the question should be asked: if by everything we mean ‘something’ or ‘anything’, and if by ‘everyone’ do we mean ‘everyone in particular’ (some unnamed ones) or ‘everyone in general’ (anyone). In the given example of the tree intervention, Ana Peraica

‘the dilemma of the artwork’ can be resolved in a detailed theoretical pseudo-analysis (justifying the ‘art as art’) that would conclude that chewing gum couldn’t be anything other than a politically incorrect anti-global (or anti-American if signs are taken literally: tree, chewing gum) alternative expression, and therefore art, of anonymous mass. The ‘dilemma of the author’ may be rescued in the continuity of the ‘author’, whose work appears with completely impossible chronology in different locations, being translocated by the anonymous mass that has no need to identify itself, on the other location. Appearing as ‘arty’ (or ‘art-ish’) and having a pseudo-biographical continuity, this tree may be seen as art. But the first dilemma, a certain ‘curse’ of the ‘white cube’, leads to a precisely inverted situation from the one that art practice tried to establish — the criteria of quality. Anartism (the negation of art at all) was not concerned with the problem of authorship. At the same time the second dilemma produces an authorised quality question; as Thierry de Duve once asked: Why would a democratic grouping of free individuals produce art of ipso facto inferior quality to that which has been screened by the trained eye of a dealer less interested in commerce than in purist aesthetics?

Furthermore, outside of the institutional and optimistic ontology present within two border definitions of the modern (proto- and post-), another question arises: the definition of the act alone that is artistic. The problem, in the end, is which would be the author of the author. In recent history this place was also opened to another branch of authors — the curators. Being outside of the institutional and optimistic ontology both present in border definitions of modern (proto- and post-) the definition of an act as artistic, which does not ask if something was at all thought as an artistic act (both definitions do), the problem becomes the inauguration of the art from the outside. Finally, this is the resolution of Mangelos’s dilemma: a pure authority of the author, at a certain point passed on to curators, deciding who is the author, not the artist. The condition of art has become more than a cognitive author-related issue, it has become literally political, depending on authority rights being taken further than the rights of the author. The cognitive explanation of art, the awareness of the creation, as to 171

what is meant to be art vanishes in front of what is accepted as art. It arrives at the point where no art existed, although there were artefacts produced, as was the case in the early drawings and paintings labelled ‘art’ by a later profiled discipline — art history. This doesn’t mean it fell into a post-historic hole, though, since history still moves without the authors. The question would be if the power of authority (in this deliberate choice) was practiced without a required critical aspect. For this example, I may conclude (at least for this historical point) by invoking the modernist theory that announced the process of de-iconization of the author after her or his ‘death’ as Barthes has written. That process represents the necessary drawing back to the magic loop of the history of art into anonymity, the last chapter of which was written with the neoistic use of the name as a social construct for many individuals. The point from which neither the author can be read through the work, or the work through the author, is the point where the author becomes a symbol. This is the point where one is able to talk, not programmatically, about changes in the authors’ positions through time.

— J. Derrida, On the Name, Stanford University Press,

Stanford 1993

— Nena Dimitrijević, ‘Manifesti na školskoj ploci

Dimitrija Bašičevića — Mangelosa’, in Umetnost no 60:



July – August 1978

— Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, MIT Press,

Cambridge 1996

— Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Language,

Counter-Memory, Practice,Blackwell Publishers,



Oxford 1977

— Robert Frank, ‘Tko ne želi zbirku vrijednu desetke

milijuna eura?’, in Novi List, 12 July 2003

— Gerard Genette, ‘Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation’,

in R. Macksey and M. Sprinker (eds.), Literature, Culture,



Theory, Vol. 20, Cambridge University Press,



Cambridge 1997

— Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, ‘The First Positive

Task of Schizo-Analysis’, in The Guattari Reader,



Blackwell Publishers, Oxford 1996

— Stewart Home, Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis, AK Press,

Edinburgh and London 1995

— Vedran Horvat, ‘Izgubio prednost: Prvi hrvatski

antimuzej bit će u Austriji ili Njemačkoj’, in Vjesnik,



Zagreb 19 August 1999

— Sue Curry Jansens, Censorship: The Knot that

Binds Power and Knowledge, Oxford University Press,



Oxford 1991

— Suzana Marjanić, ‘Mistički poligoni & akcije

transcendencije’, in Zarez, 19 December 2002, pp. 94 – 5

— Ljubomir Micić, Ivan Goll and Boško Tokin, ‘The

The text on the project Pensioner Tihomir Simcic is not available because of disparate resources that may lead not only to historical misunderstandings, but also to legal prohibitions. It is better not to have a history than another historical mistake.



Zenithist Manifesto’, in T. O. Benson and E. Forgacs (eds.),



Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-



Gardes, 1910 – 1930, MIT Press, Cambridge 2002

— Central Eastern European Avant-Gardes, Exchange and

Transformation 1910 – 1930 (exh. cat.), Los Angeles County



Museum of Art, Los Angeles 1921

— Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘Six authors in pursuit of

The Searchers’, in Screen, Vol. 17, no 1

Works Referenced and Cited

— Ana Peraica, ‘From Photomontage to Digital Sabotage’, in

— Svebor Krantz, Zagreb Virus, Rijksakademie Van



The Issues in the Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics,



Beeldende Kunsten/Svebor Krantz Production,



August 2001, pp. 91 – 8



Amsterdam 1990

— Arnulf Rainer and Peter Weiermair, Arnulf Rainer:

— Roland Barthes, The Pleasure Of The Text, Hill and Wang,





— Branka Stipančić, Goran Trbuljak, Biblioteka Opus,

New York 1975

retrospettiva 1948 – 2000, Hopefulmonster, Turin 2001

— R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, Fontana, London 1977



— Timothy O. Benson (ed.), A Sourcebook of Central European

— Branka Stipančić (ed.), Mangelos (exh. cat.), Museum of





Avant-Garde, MIT Press, Cambridge 2002

Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti, Zagreb 1996 Contemporary Arts, Zagreb 1990

— Nada Beroš, ‘Taming of the Dark — Body and the Beast’, in

— Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing,





A-R-C, issue 2, July 2000

Free Press, Glencoe 1952, p. 204

— Ernst Bloch and Ronald Taylor, Aesthetics and Politics,

— Slaven Sumić, Pave Dulčić (eds.), Red Peristil 1968 – 1998,





NLB, London 1977

— Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe:

the Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, MIT Press,



Cambridge 2000

— John M. Burke, The Death And Return Of The Author:

Criticism And Subjectivity In Barthes, Foucault And



Derrida, University of Edinburgh Press, Edinburgh 1998

— John Caughie, Theories of Authorship, Routledge, London

and New York 1981

— Jacques Derrida, Khora, Éditions Galilée, Paris 1993

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Muzej Grada Splita, Split 1998

From left to right and top to bottom:

Josip Seissel/Jo Klek Untitled 1949 Andrija Maurović The Old Tomcat est. 1937 Dimitrije Bašičević-Mangelos Manifest on ‘ α’ 1978 Red Peristil Group Red Peristil 1968 Aldo Prpić/Svebor Krantz Untitled from the series Zagreb Virus 1990 Feral Tribune Did we fight for that? 1993 Sanja Iveković Gen XX — Dragica Končar 1997 – 8 Anonymous Author and ‘The Manager’ Untitled 1998 A Tree without an Author urban intervention by the citizens of Split 1990s

Ana Peraica

173