[1]Translator’s Note: In 1893 Jakob Wiehler founded a company selling Gobelin embroidery patterns and yarns via catalog. Although no longer owned by the Wiehler family, the company that bears their name continues to flourish in Germany and many parts of Eastern Europe, not least Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria.
[2]www.stvaram.com
[3]Translator’s Note: RTCG refers to the Montenegrin state broadcaster, Radio Televizija Crna Gora. Crna Gora literally means “Black Mountain”—or Montenegro.
[4]www.draganrajsic.org/10.html
[5]Michel Thevoz, “The Strange Hell of Beauty,” in Darger, The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum 2001.
[6]Ibid.
[7]Responding to a critic who had dared suggest that contemporary visual art was illiterate, Tracy Emin — an established and canonized contemporary artist — replied, “So what if I’m illiterate! I still have the right to a voice!” Although she herself belongs to the art world’s elite, Tracy Emin spat out a sentence that sounds like the revolutionary slogan of a new artistic epoch.
[8]The canonization of outsider art today occurs within traditional institutions such as museums (the Museum of Everything recently opened in London, providing a roof for outsider artists), but also in non-traditional spaces such as fandoms, blogs, virtual communities, and associations. Groups brought together out of a shared interest in popular culture are, however, often anything but “popular.” A member of the virtual union of World of Warcraft gamers claims that joining the union is “as tough as getting into Harvard.”
[9]Lawrence Weschler, “David Hockney’s iPhone Passion,” The New York Review of Books, October 22–November 4, 2009.
7. KARAOKE WRITING
Masters and Amateurs
Every time I come across a story on contemporary artists whose work uses anonymous human bodies I think of communist “bodygrams,” the stadium crowds whose collected bodies would form and “write” messages of love and devotion to their leaders. Interestingly, for western observers these “bodygrams,” communist body art, were, more than anything else, both crown proof of totalitarianism and first-class material for mockery. It’s also interesting that for the democratically orientated citizens of these communist countries, “bodygrams” were, more than anything else, the triggers of frustration, rage, and shame at living in such absurd regimes.
In August of 2009 Nic Green brought her “theatrical exploration of modern feminism” to the Edinburgh stage, inviting ordinary, anonymous women, all volunteers, to appear naked. “Such a life-affirming thing to do” is how one of the women described the experience. At this time, Anthony Gormley was staging his “living sculptures” project One and Other, in which 2,400 volunteers each spent an hour alone on a plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. Having gotten it into his head that a sculpture had to be naked, Simon, a fifty-year-old, had to be removed by organizers. Later he explained that the event had been a turning point in his life. (“This event will serve to symbolize the beginning of a new age for me — I always wanted to be a sculpture”). Simon is a wannabe, a karaoke-man, and Gormley’s project gave him the chance to “sing his song,” experience a moment of internal emancipation, and make a dream come true.
Parallel to the Yugoslav communist culture of “bodygrams,” Yugoslav actress and poet Katalin Ladik offered sophisticated examinations of the visual, phonetic, and gestural possibilities of poetry, appearing either naked or semi-naked. She never encountered censorship. Unfortunately, like many other conceptualist artists (among them body artists), she is today half-forgotten. Today, “translation” is required in order for the post-Yugoslav generations (young Croats, Serbs, and others whose parents were Yugoslavs) to understand that in the “communist darkness” a whole set of alternative practices also existed. Marina Abramović, then a Yugoslav, carved a star into her naked stomach with a razor. In the western art market, and in the context of body art at the time, the star was seen as a communist star, which it probably was. Abramović’s sadomasochistic performance had a context, a reason and political charge for which no “translation” was necessary. Everyone understood what was going on.
Cultural dynamics unfold and develop in the paradoxes between the expected and unexpected, the translatable and untranslatable, the “read” and “unread,” in the misunderstandings between sender and addressee, and in the errors of “translation” into a new language and new context. This was also true of Yugoslav cultural dynamics in the time of “Titoism.” With the affirmation of “workers, peasants and the honest intelligentsia,” a place within these dynamics was also found for amateur literature. The world of “outsiders”—amateur poets, bearers of oral traditions, gusle players, “living newspapers” (reciters of political events in traditional decasyllables), cranks, literati, epitaphists, the lot — was given wings. It was, however, largely thanks to established writers and filmmakers such as Želimir Žilnik, Dušan Makavejev, and Slobodan ijan that this “underground” amateur literary activity was given its due. Exemplary in this regard is Moma Dimić’s documentary novel The Backwoods Citizen ( umski građanin) about Radoš Terzić, an eccentric, a Marxist, an amateur poet, and the author of the poem “How I Am Systematically Destroyed by Idiots” (“Kako sam sistematski uništen od idiota”). Terzić later sued his “portrayer,” the court proceedings providing light relief for many. Together with Dimić, in 1983 Slobodan ijan made a film about Terzić, taking his amateur poem as the movie’s title.
Wanting in on the joke, the media would from time to time deliberately hype an amateur writer. As an exemplar of catastrophically poor literature, Miloš Jovančević’s slim volume The Male Virgin (Nevini muškarac) briefly enjoyed cult-status among the culturati. Today it seems an early forerunner of “bizarro fiction.” A number of amateur efforts such as the lathe operator Stanoje Ćebić’s Why I Became An Ox (Zašto sam postao Vo) achieved well-deserved recognition, their rough and ready vernaculars rattling the terminally moribund sinecures of “established” literature.
The writer Milovan Danojlić conscientiously read his way through an enormous pile of amateur literary production, the end result of which was the novel How Dobrislav Ran across Yugoslavia (Kako je Dobrislav protrčao kroz Jugoslaviju, 1977), a highlight of its time and paean to the glory of amateur literature. Danojlić considers the efforts of his hero, an amateur poet, with respect, empathy, and tenderness, relativizing the borders and hierarchies established between amateurs, outsiders, and losers on the one hand, and the established artist on the other. At the same time, Danojlić’s book was also a “textbook,” showing us that there is no difference in the mechanism that moves the hand to pick up a pen — the differences lie in the execution, in the work itself.