EXAT 51
EXAT 51 – Context and Continuity: A shift towards Gorgona, New Tendencies, and New Artistic Practice
First of all, we should definitely mention that the cultural and artistic scene in Croatia (and partly in Yugoslavia) knew almost everything about EXAT 51(1) during the period of its activity.The group acted publicly and it proclaimed its positions and manifestos publicly.(2) Exat was widely discussed from the very beginning, i.e. from its establishment in 1951 onwards. At the time and later on, it was talked about, often provoking harsh outcries and derogatory comments, but also praise and admiration.The group’s members advocated a synthesis of all the arts and architecture as a new plastic unity, and they promoted the equality of the applied and the so-called fine arts. »The result of artistic synthesis is to unite all influences of function, from technical to psychological, and to consolidate them in a single integral expression, a plastic organism.«(3) Such synthesis was possible only by establishing a new plastic language close to abstract art, or, more precisely, to geometric abstraction.With this, the group created a fierce divide in opinion among the section of the public interested in culture. It is remarkable that this division happened between the left(4) intelligentsia and artists(5) – the community which the Exat members themselves belonged to – who were programmatically (even ideologically) inclined towards the young socialist structure of society and utopian ideals. Or rather, many believed in utopia insofar as it presented a good, even an excellent tool to achieve social change and transform an unfair »bourgeois« society into a »socialist« society with the same rights and opportunities for all.
In the following, we will highlight the social and political trends inYugoslavia in the 1950s that had a major influence on the direction of its development in the course of the ensuing two decades. In view of the fact that the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia lasted from 1945 to 1991, one may ask why only two decades will be examined here instead of four. In the 1950s, and especially in the 1960s, the economic and social events at large modernized the country that was transformed from a run-down rural economy into a very modern industrial economy, at least by the standards of the time.With regard to social develop- ments and the economic status that was achieved(6), the country greatly distinguished itself from the Eastern European states in theWarsaw Pact.
These fell under the influence and political administration of the Soviet Union after the 1945Yalta Conference. In 1948, the Yugoslav political elite managed to put up resistance by refusing the Resolution of the Communist Information Bureau by which Stalin tried to force the leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito in particular, to join theWarsaw Pact and accede to Soviet domination.The two decades of progress ended due to the political events of 1971 and the strengthening of national politics.This resulted in a demand for greater economic independence for the republics and the transition from a federal into a confederate state system. However, the party and, at the same time, state authorities, who wanted to keep their privileges and power, put an end to the political changes and thus to the further development of the economy. In 1974, the new Constitution was introduced, opening up the possibility for the republics to become independent. From that time on until the 1990s, the state gradually, almost imperceptibly, dissolved.These processes not only led to the independence of the republics, but also to the brutal military aggression and armed conflicts of the 1990s.
This essay will attempt to draw a continuous line between the phenomena in the visual arts of the 1950s, 1960s, and the 1970s. Despite their formal heterogeneity, they continued to advocate precisely the Exat position with regard to the defence of abstract art, experimentation and research in the visual arts, design, and architecture. For the early 1950s, that meant the defence of artistic and social freedom. Such efforts were defended even by those who did not consider abstract art valuable or significant in terms of aesthetics.They defended them primarily against the proponents of communist dogma and against those who saw art as a means to promote radical ideological narratives.(7)
Although Exat’s views were based on the ideology of the socialist left (as well as communism(8)), their artistic activities primarily dealt with the popularization of modernist international principles.The group had inherited these principles directly from the Croatian modernists of the 1920s and 1930s, or indirectly from their role-models in European pre-Nazi, i.e. pre-Stalin art and architecture. European totalitarian ideologies – National Socialism and Fascism on the one hand and Stalinism on the other – banished modernism and the avant-garde from the mid-1930s onwards and during the war, particularly those movements which had developed on the basis of the left political ideas of the October Revolution in Russia (the Russian avant-garde) or of the Weimar Republic in Germany (Bauhaus). Such movements were designated in Russia as anti-establishment, formalist, and even bourgeois art or, in Germany, as degenerate art. This is why Exat artists were determined to re-introduce geometric abstract art as a »radical non-representative vocabulary«(9) in response to Socialist realism, academism, bourgeois culture and the art of forgotten modernism.These practices were dominant not only in local artistic movements but also in major parts of post-war Europe(10). For the Exat members, a modernist vocabulary was the only appropriate language to articulate, at that time, liberal ideas and to suggest the possibility of social utopias.
On the whole, there were only a few EXAT 51 exhibitions. Picelj, Rašica, Srnec, and Kristl presented their paintings for the first time at an exhibition at the CroatianArchitects’Association in Zagreb in 1953.(11)This brought the topic of abstract art into public discourse.The exhibition can thus be regarded as crucial for all the developments in the visual arts in the ensuing three decades. The Exat architects were only getting ready for their most significant projects, which were mostly created in the second half of the 1950s and the early 1960s, in particular after 1956, the year in which the group formally stopped its joint appearances.The pinnacle of the period was definitely 1958, whenVjenceslav Richter designed the Yugoslav Pavilion for the World's Fair Expo in Brussels and again co-operated with Picelj and Srnec. but also with several other visual artists.
Around that time, the Gorgona group was founded in Zagreb. It was a new group consisting of visual artists who initiated their informal group actions in 1959.These actions and their characteristics were labelled as proto-conceptual only in the new millennium.(12) In terms of understanding the role of art in social reality, the members of the group(13) held different, almost opposing views from those of Exat.The Exat members saw art as a tool to change society’s (collective) awareness by offering the high aesthetic criteria required by geometric abstract art. Gorgona’s members, quite to the contrary, were moving away from society and its protocols.They viewed individuality instead of collectivity as the only measure of freedom. Similar to the philosophy of the absurd, Gorgona is a valuable example of post-war escapism which marked certain European and international artists and groups from that period (Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, Zero). Nevertheless, from today’s perspective, Gorgona inherited Exat’s achievements in the fight for personal and artistic freedom but also continued on the path towards formal experimentation.While Exat’s members supported the social dimension of art, Gorgona’s members negated classical forms of art as well as the status of artworks, and supported the affirmation of new non-artistic fields, such as actions, happenings, mail art, photography, minimal art, etc.(14)
At around the same time as Gorgona, the movement NewTendencies was launched in the Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1961. Conceived as a completely open experimental platform in search of new artistic discourse, it was much closer to the philosophy of Exat than Gorgona.At the initiative of the German-Brazilian artist Almir Mavignier, supported by the critic Matko Meštrovic ́ and Ivan Picelj, it began as a place of gathering to share new and pioneering phenomena in the art world. Always in search of something »new«, it changed its focus over the years, which, in view of the active involvement of Exat members(15) and the curators of the Gallery of Contemporary Art – Božo Bek, Boris Kelemen, Radoslav Putar, and Matko Meštrovic ́ – as program ideologists of the exhibitions, made it possible for the EXAT 51 ideas to be more easily implemented and explored, as opposed to the early 1950s period. A total of ve exhibitions until 1973 gathered the members of geometric, optical, kinetic, lumino-kinetic, and later cybernetic tendencies in art.The social and economic transformations in the 1960s, and especially the developments in science and technology, resulted in a new exhibition policy of New Tendencies.This change involved the exploration of new media and communication, of television as a new democratic means to transmit information (in word and image), and, above all, of cybernetics as an expansion of man’s cognitive eld as well as of computers as creative machines.(16) From 1968 to 1972, the Galleries of the City of Zagreb (i.e. the Gallery of Contemporary Art) published nine issues of the magazine BIT International with a series of theoretical texts that dealt with new visual, media, and communication practices.This piece of information is important when examining Exat’s continuous exploration of the synthesis of various fields of art (even of the sciences). In this case, however, it was rather an inverted procedure: an expansion of art outside its dominant field.
In the wake of the global changes that occurred in the late 1960s and the revolutionary year 1968, young artists appeared on the Yugoslavian art scene who transitioned into the social eld because they felt a great potential for the democratization of art and its processes.The critics lumped all these phenomena together under the term »New Artistic Practice«(17), and a new generation of artists emerged in the art world of Ljubljana, Zagreb, Novi Sad, and Belgrade, very often organized into different collectives, such as the OHO Group, Grupa PenzionerTihomir Simcˇic ́ (PensionerTihomir Simcˇic ́ Group), GroupTOK, Crveni Peristil (Red Peristyle), Bosch+Bosch,A3, Group 143,Verbum program, Grupa šestorice autora (Group of Six Authors), etc.Thus, they opened the door for the critical practices of art itself, for institutional paradigms, and the political system. Despite the fact that they sought to achieve their aims through other methods, their approach to social reality was similar to Exat’s idea of democratizing the language of communication by means of the vocabulary of geometric abstraction.Their closeness to the experiments of New Tendencies, and indirectly the influence of the pioneer spirit of the magazine BIT International, made this new generation more receptive to placing the new media, photography, lm, and video, and particularly graphic design on an equal level. The artists of EXAT 51, Picelj and Srnec, were the ones who paved the way for graphic design in Croatia as we know it today.Their graphic designs for magazines in the 1950s, Arhitektura (Srnec / Picelj) and Svijet (Srnec), and especially Picelj’s poster designs in the 1950s and 1960s, served as the starting point for generations of designers in the decades to follow.When we examine the artists from the generation of the »New Artistic Practice«, such as Boris Buc ́an, Dalibor Martinis, Sanja Ivekovic ́, GoranTrbuljak, Željko Borcˇic ́, etc., it becomes apparent that it was they who synthesized several disciplines and experiences of the so-called fine arts with design, photography, and video.
The philosophy of EXAT 51, conveyed by the work of its members, was present for six decades in the field of the visual arts, architecture, design, social and professional activism, and we can trace the group’s influence on the Croatian and international art scene. It seemed more important here to single out the period from 1950 to 1970 for two reasons: back then, there were much closer ties to the positive social movements, and social reality enjoyed true formative bene ts from Exat’s initial principle of the synthesis of different creative practices.
Tihomir Milovac, 2017
See for the related notes and images the publication EXAT 5, Experimental Atelier 51, Synthesis of the Arts in Post-War Yugoslavia
Published by Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Kettler Verlag, 2017
In the following, we will highlight the social and political trends inYugoslavia in the 1950s that had a major influence on the direction of its development in the course of the ensuing two decades. In view of the fact that the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia lasted from 1945 to 1991, one may ask why only two decades will be examined here instead of four. In the 1950s, and especially in the 1960s, the economic and social events at large modernized the country that was transformed from a run-down rural economy into a very modern industrial economy, at least by the standards of the time.With regard to social develop- ments and the economic status that was achieved(6), the country greatly distinguished itself from the Eastern European states in theWarsaw Pact.
These fell under the influence and political administration of the Soviet Union after the 1945Yalta Conference. In 1948, the Yugoslav political elite managed to put up resistance by refusing the Resolution of the Communist Information Bureau by which Stalin tried to force the leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito in particular, to join theWarsaw Pact and accede to Soviet domination.The two decades of progress ended due to the political events of 1971 and the strengthening of national politics.This resulted in a demand for greater economic independence for the republics and the transition from a federal into a confederate state system. However, the party and, at the same time, state authorities, who wanted to keep their privileges and power, put an end to the political changes and thus to the further development of the economy. In 1974, the new Constitution was introduced, opening up the possibility for the republics to become independent. From that time on until the 1990s, the state gradually, almost imperceptibly, dissolved.These processes not only led to the independence of the republics, but also to the brutal military aggression and armed conflicts of the 1990s.
This essay will attempt to draw a continuous line between the phenomena in the visual arts of the 1950s, 1960s, and the 1970s. Despite their formal heterogeneity, they continued to advocate precisely the Exat position with regard to the defence of abstract art, experimentation and research in the visual arts, design, and architecture. For the early 1950s, that meant the defence of artistic and social freedom. Such efforts were defended even by those who did not consider abstract art valuable or significant in terms of aesthetics.They defended them primarily against the proponents of communist dogma and against those who saw art as a means to promote radical ideological narratives.(7)
Although Exat’s views were based on the ideology of the socialist left (as well as communism(8)), their artistic activities primarily dealt with the popularization of modernist international principles.The group had inherited these principles directly from the Croatian modernists of the 1920s and 1930s, or indirectly from their role-models in European pre-Nazi, i.e. pre-Stalin art and architecture. European totalitarian ideologies – National Socialism and Fascism on the one hand and Stalinism on the other – banished modernism and the avant-garde from the mid-1930s onwards and during the war, particularly those movements which had developed on the basis of the left political ideas of the October Revolution in Russia (the Russian avant-garde) or of the Weimar Republic in Germany (Bauhaus). Such movements were designated in Russia as anti-establishment, formalist, and even bourgeois art or, in Germany, as degenerate art. This is why Exat artists were determined to re-introduce geometric abstract art as a »radical non-representative vocabulary«(9) in response to Socialist realism, academism, bourgeois culture and the art of forgotten modernism.These practices were dominant not only in local artistic movements but also in major parts of post-war Europe(10). For the Exat members, a modernist vocabulary was the only appropriate language to articulate, at that time, liberal ideas and to suggest the possibility of social utopias.
On the whole, there were only a few EXAT 51 exhibitions. Picelj, Rašica, Srnec, and Kristl presented their paintings for the first time at an exhibition at the CroatianArchitects’Association in Zagreb in 1953.(11)This brought the topic of abstract art into public discourse.The exhibition can thus be regarded as crucial for all the developments in the visual arts in the ensuing three decades. The Exat architects were only getting ready for their most significant projects, which were mostly created in the second half of the 1950s and the early 1960s, in particular after 1956, the year in which the group formally stopped its joint appearances.The pinnacle of the period was definitely 1958, whenVjenceslav Richter designed the Yugoslav Pavilion for the World's Fair Expo in Brussels and again co-operated with Picelj and Srnec. but also with several other visual artists.
Around that time, the Gorgona group was founded in Zagreb. It was a new group consisting of visual artists who initiated their informal group actions in 1959.These actions and their characteristics were labelled as proto-conceptual only in the new millennium.(12) In terms of understanding the role of art in social reality, the members of the group(13) held different, almost opposing views from those of Exat.The Exat members saw art as a tool to change society’s (collective) awareness by offering the high aesthetic criteria required by geometric abstract art. Gorgona’s members, quite to the contrary, were moving away from society and its protocols.They viewed individuality instead of collectivity as the only measure of freedom. Similar to the philosophy of the absurd, Gorgona is a valuable example of post-war escapism which marked certain European and international artists and groups from that period (Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, Zero). Nevertheless, from today’s perspective, Gorgona inherited Exat’s achievements in the fight for personal and artistic freedom but also continued on the path towards formal experimentation.While Exat’s members supported the social dimension of art, Gorgona’s members negated classical forms of art as well as the status of artworks, and supported the affirmation of new non-artistic fields, such as actions, happenings, mail art, photography, minimal art, etc.(14)
At around the same time as Gorgona, the movement NewTendencies was launched in the Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1961. Conceived as a completely open experimental platform in search of new artistic discourse, it was much closer to the philosophy of Exat than Gorgona.At the initiative of the German-Brazilian artist Almir Mavignier, supported by the critic Matko Meštrovic ́ and Ivan Picelj, it began as a place of gathering to share new and pioneering phenomena in the art world. Always in search of something »new«, it changed its focus over the years, which, in view of the active involvement of Exat members(15) and the curators of the Gallery of Contemporary Art – Božo Bek, Boris Kelemen, Radoslav Putar, and Matko Meštrovic ́ – as program ideologists of the exhibitions, made it possible for the EXAT 51 ideas to be more easily implemented and explored, as opposed to the early 1950s period. A total of ve exhibitions until 1973 gathered the members of geometric, optical, kinetic, lumino-kinetic, and later cybernetic tendencies in art.The social and economic transformations in the 1960s, and especially the developments in science and technology, resulted in a new exhibition policy of New Tendencies.This change involved the exploration of new media and communication, of television as a new democratic means to transmit information (in word and image), and, above all, of cybernetics as an expansion of man’s cognitive eld as well as of computers as creative machines.(16) From 1968 to 1972, the Galleries of the City of Zagreb (i.e. the Gallery of Contemporary Art) published nine issues of the magazine BIT International with a series of theoretical texts that dealt with new visual, media, and communication practices.This piece of information is important when examining Exat’s continuous exploration of the synthesis of various fields of art (even of the sciences). In this case, however, it was rather an inverted procedure: an expansion of art outside its dominant field.
In the wake of the global changes that occurred in the late 1960s and the revolutionary year 1968, young artists appeared on the Yugoslavian art scene who transitioned into the social eld because they felt a great potential for the democratization of art and its processes.The critics lumped all these phenomena together under the term »New Artistic Practice«(17), and a new generation of artists emerged in the art world of Ljubljana, Zagreb, Novi Sad, and Belgrade, very often organized into different collectives, such as the OHO Group, Grupa PenzionerTihomir Simcˇic ́ (PensionerTihomir Simcˇic ́ Group), GroupTOK, Crveni Peristil (Red Peristyle), Bosch+Bosch,A3, Group 143,Verbum program, Grupa šestorice autora (Group of Six Authors), etc.Thus, they opened the door for the critical practices of art itself, for institutional paradigms, and the political system. Despite the fact that they sought to achieve their aims through other methods, their approach to social reality was similar to Exat’s idea of democratizing the language of communication by means of the vocabulary of geometric abstraction.Their closeness to the experiments of New Tendencies, and indirectly the influence of the pioneer spirit of the magazine BIT International, made this new generation more receptive to placing the new media, photography, lm, and video, and particularly graphic design on an equal level. The artists of EXAT 51, Picelj and Srnec, were the ones who paved the way for graphic design in Croatia as we know it today.Their graphic designs for magazines in the 1950s, Arhitektura (Srnec / Picelj) and Svijet (Srnec), and especially Picelj’s poster designs in the 1950s and 1960s, served as the starting point for generations of designers in the decades to follow.When we examine the artists from the generation of the »New Artistic Practice«, such as Boris Buc ́an, Dalibor Martinis, Sanja Ivekovic ́, GoranTrbuljak, Željko Borcˇic ́, etc., it becomes apparent that it was they who synthesized several disciplines and experiences of the so-called fine arts with design, photography, and video.
The philosophy of EXAT 51, conveyed by the work of its members, was present for six decades in the field of the visual arts, architecture, design, social and professional activism, and we can trace the group’s influence on the Croatian and international art scene. It seemed more important here to single out the period from 1950 to 1970 for two reasons: back then, there were much closer ties to the positive social movements, and social reality enjoyed true formative bene ts from Exat’s initial principle of the synthesis of different creative practices.
Tihomir Milovac, 2017
See for the related notes and images the publication EXAT 5, Experimental Atelier 51, Synthesis of the Arts in Post-War Yugoslavia
Published by Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Kettler Verlag, 2017
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