Zoran Popović
As one of the leading protagonists of New Art Practice, a Yugoslav blend of conceptualism and avant-garde, Zoran Popović’s own practice included films, actions, concrete poetry, installations, and textual interventions. He was active within the circles of conceptual artists tied to the Students’ Cultural Center (SKC) during the late 1970s. He is also associated with the Signalist group of concrete and visual poets, as a member of which he exhibited his early typographic poetry works. “Axioms,” first performed in 1971, was his landmark conceptual artwork that examined the limits of speech acts.
His works, which pushed the boundaries of expression and language and criticized the institutional framework of artistic practices, have since evolved into a genre of activist art that is critical of larger institutions. This development has its own history, not to be traced in politics alone. Formal implications of Axioms in terms of contradictions between structures and subjectivity and between program and indeterminacy related primarily to art’s status. The aim of this work, which employed eight basic sign-concepts, was to indicate that the language of art is the perlocutionary act, giving directions and then negotiating its forms. Before the backdrop of the colossal changes taking place in the Yugoslav self-management system, Popović was active in a vibrant international network of political conceptualists. Orbiting around Art & Language practice, the Yugoslav branch of this network was active in alternative youth culture spaces like SKC as well as in the official contemporary art museums in Zagreb and Belgrade. “Oktobar 1975” was a landmark event for the Yugoslav brand of political conceptualism at which Popović read his text entitled “For Self-Management Art.” This event coincided with a visit to Belgrade by three members of the Art & Language group’s New York section who edited the journal “The Fox,” where Popović co-published the essay “A Note on Art in Yugoslavia” (The Fox # 1, 1975) together with Jasna Tijardović. Together with the Yugoslav conceptual artists, the visiting Art & Language members worked on models of speech that would enable both a critique of bureaucratic structures in art and an attack on global cultural imperialism. Popović’s collaboration with Art & Language began earlier, during his first visit to New York in 1974. As he interpreted it retrospectively in a late-1980s interview, this engagement provided him with theoretical and formal devices for “direct political speech,” enabling him to experiment with art and politics. S.Bo.
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