|
Željko Jerman Was Here One night in the fall of 1974, Boris Demur, Željko Jerman and Vlado Martek staged an exhibition-action on the elevated train tracks above Savaska Street in Zagreb, Croatia. This action was the first of a decade-long series of subversive activities by these and three other Croatian artists collectively known as the Group of Six. Encouraged by the dissenting tumult of May 1968 in Western Europe, the Group of Six published an unofficial magazine, Maj ’75, and attempted to undermine governmental standards by improvised public performances such as selling money at half its value or painting the tri-colored Yugoslavian flag in monochrome. Preferring not to limit themselves to a manifesto, the artists employed disparate media in their individual work and collaborated on multiple public performances provoking political awareness and protest against the authoritarian Yugoslav regime. One of Jerman’s earliest actions involved plastering a sheet on the front façade of the state-funded Studenski Kulturni Centar (Student’s Cultural Center) with the words “This is not my world.” Primarily a photographer, Jerman reiterated this public political ferment into his work of self-portraiture. He was concerned with asserting a strong individuality and self-consciousness against the strictly regulated Croatian society. An early exhibition in 1977 at Nova galerija (the New Gallery) entitled “I Leave A Trace” presented a cycle of self-portraits distorted by multiple exposures, chemically induced blurring, and scrawled handwriting. “My Year”, a 1978 exhibition, recorded each day of 1977 by a photograph featuring Jerman and a short caption. The entries range from declarations, (“I reject absolutely the social exploitation of the concepts of love, romance, art”), to banalities (“I don’t remember taking this photograph”) and humorous aphorisms (“I adore animals (almost all) I hate people (almost all)”). Jerman is not trying to capture a personal existential crisis here, but to document the intimate and unique moments of his everyday life. “My Year” amounts to a prolific testimony of Jerman’s individuality and physical presence. The camera apparatus captures the light that Jerman’s body reflects in a specific moment, the resulting image existing as an indexical mark temporally and spatially. The photograph as self-portrait is thus doubled; it is both an actual trace and visual representation by the inherent properties of the photographic medium. While photographs can characteristically be reproduced ad infinitum, Jerman makes sure to retain his work’s distinctiveness by inscribing a date or smudging its surface. The repetition of his image and words along the gallery walls parallels the fixed, technical method of photographic capture and production while using a private, unique narrative to evade its mechanical tedium. And although the purposeful transgression of standard photographic development was not artistically groundbreaking, it was certainly a militant statement of inimitability at that time, contributing to the crescendo of dissent by the Croatian avant-gardes. The impetus to lay bare his artistic hand by physically violating traditional aesthetic boundaries has nothing to do with chance or the unconscious. Jerman claims the personal intensity of his work exhibits the “primary desire of the artist” to “record his existence in time and space, thus affirming not just himself but mankind in general.” However, it is important to distinguish between his individualism and an expression of narcissism. Jerman maintains that to successfully express the desire to impress a singular mark, the art document has to be “fundamentally subjective, intimate…among the general loss of identity and individuality and the alienation of man from man in a technocratic, consumer reality.” As necessarily personal, intimacy constructs an irreproducible and identifying moment. The intimate action, he writes, “is not an extremist, self-centered, narcissistic outrage, nor does it serve as a mask for creative dilettantism (the commercial production of intimist artistic and spiritual kitsch)” but rather that “the stress on the intimate functions as a relevant means of self-affirmation.” In light of his political vigilance, self-affirmation becomes a kind of rebellion, importing a valuable social dimension to his artistic statement. “Elementarna fotografia,” or elementary photography, comprised a group of works concurrent to the self-portrait series. Produced without a camera or enlarger, Jerman would allow photographic materials, such as the developer and fixer, to mingle and collude on photosensitive paper ground, often later etched with phrases such as “I don’t want to develop you!” and “Down with photography!” Their haphazard construction and palpable materiality engages in a clear dialogue with the abstract expressionist action painters. He contends that active artistic performance is “based on the consciousness of existence” and that such a consciousness “needs to leave a trace/record.” This acute awareness of his need to leave personal evidence differentiates his work from the spontaneous abstract expressionist gesture which aimed to capture raw expression. His erosion of the traditional visual aesthetics of photography was motivated not so much by a need to concretize artistic consciousness, but rather the awareness that this consciousness desired to be preserved and documented. Jerman holds onto the drive to materially solidify his existence through the destructive irregularity of his photographic method, an aggression that he believes “does not forsake the ‘construction’ of the basic idea of what the result should be.” As with his self-portrait series, these elementary photographs cannot evade social meaning. The deeply personalized approach of leaving a trace functions as a greater political commentary on the socialist state: Jerman’s stamp of identity illustrated the absence of differentiation amidst compliance. The demarcation of his existence through a copious, consciously subjective record resonates with the human compulsion to make a mark and reveals its suppression. In the 1970s, photography had not yet been used by the Croatian avant-gardes in the service of disparaging communist society. As critic Antun Maracic points out, what makes Jerman unique is his employment of unconventional photographic techniques as a vehicle for this critique. The focus on individuality in cultural rebellion connects Jerman’s photography to the ideological motivations of his public performances, which protested against the state’s tentacled control over personal liberties. In one such performance, “The Wedding,” Jerman and his girlfriend Vlasta Delimar enacted the Roman Catholic act of marriage in a socialist state while recording it through photographs. Physically participating in all the motions, from the signing of legal papers to the white gown and flowers, Jerman again infuses a personal expression with social contingency. While they attest to exploring the “self-analysis of mutual relations, relations between the sexes, the possibility to communicate with our contemporaries,” Jerman and Delimar insist that their actions “must also be viewed from the social and psychological aspect, because they reflect our criticisms of conventions.” Marriage, a custom at once intimate and ordained by the state, encapsulates Jerman’s program of artistic performance: the trace is left not only by Jerman, but by the whole of his fellow passive Croatians. American artists of the seventies might have concerned themselves with challenging the institutional boundaries of the museum or the alienation produced by consumer culture, but a strident opposition to customs, such as marriage, did not carry the same political weight in the “free world.” While social engagement is a mainstay of most avant-garde practice, Croatian artists in the 1970s, including Jerman, used a specifically individualist approach to these political ends. His photography brandishes its mirror like a sword, piercing through state hegemony and reflecting the condition of its people.
|