Reading time
36 min
Because of the long reading time, it might be more energy efficient to print this out and read it on paper
To share this contribution please copy the url below

Across Mangelos’s Landscape

 

In her essay art historian Leonida Kovač revisits the work of Mangelos, the alter ego of Dimitrije Bašičević, longtime curator of Zagreb City Galleries and what was to become the museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (MSU). As Kovač writes Mangelos ‘generated a multidimensional field in which artistic production interfered with a completely noncanonical, performative art-writing practice’. The essay is accompanied by extensive images of Mangelos’s artist’s books and works, coming from private and public collections, as well as the collection of L’Internationale partner MSU.

In June 2011, twenty-four years after Mangelos’s death,1 art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman visited the site where the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi extermination camp had been in operation from 1940 to 1945. In July of the same year, he wrote a text entitled Bark and published it in the form of a book that also contained several black-and-white photographs he had personally taken in the landscape of death. The text begins as follows:

I placed three small pieces of bark on a sheet of paper and looked. I looked, with the idea that looking would perhaps help me to read something that had never been written. I looked upon the three small strips of bark as the three letters of a script preceding all alphabets. Or perhaps as the beginning of a letter – but to whom? I notice that I’ve spontaneously arranged them on the blank

paper in the direction of my written language. Each ‘letter’ starts on the left, where I dug my nails into the tree trunk to strip the bark away.2

The bark was stripped away from a birch, a tree after whose name in German, Birke, the landscape of death in southern Poland had been named. In its format, Didi-Huberman’s Bark is reminiscent of numerous works made by Mangelos between 1949 and his death in 1987, which today are referred to by the generic term ‘artist’s book’.

In his 1990 book Devant l’image, translated into English as Confronting Images (and groundbreaking within the discipline of art history), Didi-Huberman questioned ‘the tone of certainty that prevails so often in the beautiful discipline of the history of art’.3 He asked:

What obscure or triumphant reasons, what morbid anxieties or maniacal exaltations can have brought the history of art to adopt such a tone, such a rhetoric of certainty? How did such a closure of the visible onto the legible and of all this onto intelligible knowledge manage – and with such seeming self-evidence – to constitute itself? … In short, the said ‘specific knowledge of art’ ended up imposing its own specific form of discourse on its object, at the risk of inventing artificial boundaries for its object – an object dispossessed of its own specific deployment or unfolding. So the seeming self-evidence and the tone of certainty that this knowledge imposes are understandable: all it looks for in art are answers that are already given by its discursive problematic.4

Dimitrije Bašičević, an art historian by education whose alter ego was the artist Mangelos, not only abolished in his work the imaginary boundaries of the objects of ‘kunsthistorical’ interest,5 but above all generated a multidimensional field in which artistic production interfered with a completely noncanonical, performative art-writing practice. A longtime curator of the Zagreb City Galleries, later to become today’s Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Bašičević was also one of the most lucid theorists and critics of visual arts in former Yugoslavia, whose own resistant scepticism regarding the ‘specific knowledge of art’ and its hegemonic discourse, with its tone of self-

evidence and self-sufficiency, was not only the reason why, in 1955, the Croatian Association of Visual Artists published a pamphlet demanding a ban on the public activity of the then-young critic Bašičević, but also the groundwork for Mangelos’s noart.6

Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos: Documents d'un éxperiment, artist book, 1954, courtesy of Mario Bruketa

Mangelos’s self-denying artistic activity, which, while barely presented to the public during his lifetime, has attracted considerable attention on the international contemporary art scene over the past two decades and is increasingly the subject of curatorial and academic interest, mainly due to many years of systematic research, publication and exhibition by the art historian and curator Branka Stipančić.7 In the scholarly literature on Mangelos, biographical data are scanty. One learns that he was born in 1921 into a family of farmers in the Syrmian town of Šid, and that he attended high school in Sremska Mitrovica and Sremski Karlovci. After the establishment in 1941, under the tutelage of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, of the Ustasha regime and the Independent State of Croatia which included Syrmia within its borders, Dimitrije Bašićević ‘took refuge in Vienna together with his father and younger brother, where between 1942 and 1944 he studied art history and philosophy’.8 Austria, which had been annexed to the Third Reich in 1938, was a safer place for the Bašićević as ethnic Serbs than the Independent State of Croatia, where they fell under the Ustashas’ extended application of racial laws. In a text written by Bašićević’s brother Vojin, one finds information that in Šid, their father Ilija and his two sons had been ‘sentenced to death by a mobile martial court’, which means that they were hostages on a list that ‘basically meant a death sentence without a specific time of execution’.9 The list also included Sava Šumanović, a painter from the same town who was shot dead by the Ustashas in August 1942 and whose work would be the subject of Dimitrije Bašičević’s doctoral dissertation, defended in 1957 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. According to Mangelos’s brother, their own diligent and apolitical father was ‘first maltreated by the Ustashas and then almost destroyed by the Communists,’10 who declared him a kulak and took away his land.

save