Goran Đorđević

“I believe that in the current situation, it is only justifiable to organize or support, according to concrete circumstances, those activities within the art system that effect its real diversion.”¹ Two years later, Đorđević corroborated his position by calling upon other artists to join his “International Artists’ Strike” in 1979.

The attempt to organize the strike was, to be sure, doomed to fail. Đorđević received responses from around forty artists—and the majority expressed their reserve, though some responses were positive. Together, these responses represent a valuable “tapestry” of artistic positions at that pivotal moment. The strike’s “failure” moved him to reconsider his strategy, and January 1980 saw him hold his first exhibition of copies—entitled “Against Art”—at the SKC. The invitations to the show contained the following statement: “The works shown at this exhibition are not works of art. They are only attitudes toward art. More precisely, they are attitudes against art.” He displayed a series of copies of his own juvenile and pretentious painting “The Harbinger of the Apocalypse” as well as his “Short History of Art,” which consisted of drawings made after reproductions of various canonized works from Beuys to the Altamira cave. His “discovery” of the copy became a strategy via which to act against art, only this time employing the means of art itself —and he subsequently discovered that a copy could be more interesting and meaningful than its original. He also raised a series of other questions including that of whether the copies of, say, Mondrian or Malevich were abstract or representational. And: Is this exhibition an art exhibition or an anthropological exhibition about specimens of art found in Western art history?

In 1982–83, he received a Fulbright scholarship in order to continue his studies in electrical engineering and computing. He thus spent a year at the Visible Language Workshop at MIT, where he wrote a computer program that produced copies of Malevich and Mondrian. While at MIT, he regularly travelled to New York, where he acquainted himself with the alternative art scene on the Lower East Side and with the growing artistic trend of Appropriation Art. In 1984, he exhibited his copies alongside the rephotographs of Walker Evans by Sherrie Levine, months before she painted her own copies “After Kasimir Malevich.” Seeing how it was intensively promoted as a critique of modernist myths of originality, authorship, and innovation, Appropriation Art could be associated with Đorđević’s work. But its origin, its operational logic, its social and economic context, and its placement on the art market did differ significantly from those of Đorđević. This may have provoked his decision to entirely abandon his own authorship. Sometime during the summer of 1985, his name disappeared from the art scene—and ever since then, there has been no further work of art signed as having been created by him. However, many subsequent events including and involving a series of exhibitions, some para-institutions, and some contemporary re-appearances of Malevich, Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein and Porter McCray are still associated with Đorđević’s work under his own name. B.D.