Sanja Ivekovic

Marilyn Monroe as an Artistic Icon.  The Consecration of her Artistic Persona within ‘High Culture’ and the Migration of her Symbol in Eastern Europe through the Art of Sanja Iveković, Natalia LL and Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe .


What does live of Marilyn Monroe's artistic persona in art history, and which relation does her ineffability as an artistic presence have in relation to Western iconic imaginary?
This paper analyses the iconography of the American actress mediated by the artistic practices of contemporary artists Sanja Iveković, Natalia LL and Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, after analysing earlier artistic homages provided by Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol. The study can be useful especially for those who have interests about cultural history, gender and feminist issues in relation to Western art and post-1960s contemporary art in Eastern Europe and Russia.

The text proposes a comparative reading of two self-organized projects of the 1970s, Podroom - the Working Community of Artists, founded in 1978 by a group of artists in Zagreb, and La Galerie des Locataires, founded in 1972 in Paris by art historian Ida Biard. The analysis addresses the issue of work/labor as one of the key preoccupations of both projects, situating it within the theoretical perspectives that define the crisis of Fordist labor in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as its resolution in the transition to the post-Fordist era with its emphasis on immaterial labor, keeping in mind the specificities this transition implied in the context of Western capitalism and socialist self-management in Yugoslavia. Since confronting these questions in the examples of the two discussed projects involved primarily a search for autonomous and non-servile spaces for art, work and life they are examined here within an overarching conceptual framework of hospitality as discussed by Jacques Derrida.

The two-day conference in response to the proposal for 'Monument to Revolution (After Mies)' by Sanja Ivekovic and the exhibition 'Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein!' at the daadgalerie. HAU - Hebbel am Ufer, July3 -  4, gathering artists, philosophers, historians, psychoanalysts, historians of architecture and art, as well as political and cultural theorists, including Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Boris Buden, Ekaterina Degot, Andrew Herscher, Ralf Hoffrogge, Sanja Iveković, Sami Khatib, Gal Kirn, Susanne Leeb, Bojana Pejić, Gerald Raunig, Branimir Stojanović, Thomas Thiele, Milica Tomic, Jelena Vesić, Siegbert Wolf, and Ross Wolfe.

The conference was conceived as an open forum departing from Iveković’s proposal to re-create the “Monument to Revolution” – a memorial dedicated to Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and the revolutionaries of the January 1919 uprising. Commissioned by the German Communist Party, the monument was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, built in 1926 in Berlin, and destroyed by the Nazis nine years later. As a response to the proposal, the gathering does not necessarily celebrate the idea of the reconstruction of the monument, nor discuss Iveković’s project per se. Rather, it is intended to develop as a forum for assessing the complicated relation between the notions of “revolution” and “commemoration.” The very notion of the “monument to revolution” will thus be called into question: is it a contradiction in terms or, indeed, a revolutionary matter? Recognizing the multiplicity of interdependencies in the formation of political memory, we wish to create a space in which diverse actants – people and things, objects and subjects – start to speak and acquire the capacity to productively both encourage and challenge each other. Ultimately, such a forum of memorial recompositioning could be understood as a monument itself, or as a continuously expanding base for the impossible monument.

The following text/timeline is an expanded version (and occasionally a re-interpretation) of existing chronological accounts of the history surrounding the building in Zagreb known as the Meštrović Pavilion. Built in 1938 as an exhibition venue, in the dynamic rhythm of the changing political regimes, the building later changed its shape and function several times – as well as its name. The shorter version of this illustrated timeline appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition The Salon of Revolution, curated by the authors, which took place in the Pavilion in October 2008; the exhibition concept was concerned in part with the history (and future) of the building. For The Renaming Machine, we expanded the timeline to include also the history and symbolism of the square on which the building is situated, as well as selected art and curatorial projects that have, in recent decades, found a point of reference either in the “seductively” turbulent course of the Pavilion’s history or in its more prosaic present.

This text is an experiment in “performative writing” that in the end became the starting point of the Removed From the Crowd project. It is conceptualised as an open form that is rebuilt and transformed through its each iteration. Initiated and first published(under a different title) in Život umjetnosti / Life of Art Magazine 83, Zagreb, 2008, spe-cial issue Issue-ing the Revolution, of which we were guest-editors, it represents a collage of fragments of our ongoing comparative research and reading of the phenomena of the artistic, curatorial and intellectual practices of the 1960s and 1970s. The basic narrative of the text is opened up with a number of secondary associations, textual fragments, images, and a soundtrack score, that sometimes figure as found footage, as evidence, and sometimes only as interim but potentially revealing bypaths through which the chance, unpredictability and the idea of a non-programmatic action itself is emancipated. Its second iteration was published in Political Practice of (Post-)Yugoslav Art, edited by Zorana Dojić and Jelena Vesić, Belgrade: Prelom collective, 2010 and finally in Removed from the Crowd: Unexpected Encounters I, eds. I. Bago, A. Majača with Vesna Vuković, Zagreb: BLOK/DeLVe, 2011, with several alterations and additions. (IB & AM)

"(...)It would be tempting to conclude that what the manifesto was for the avant-garde,  the artist agreement/contract was for conceptual art(...)

The genealogy of the manifesto in the arts can be traced back to political proclamations – documents which put forth an agenda of certain political programs and goals. This is not surprising as artists and intellectuals have been increasingly involved in political affairs since the 19th century. Agitating for political/artistic claims was therefore a natural process embraced by avant-garde artists who arguably inaugurated the use of manifestos in the arts. Art manifestos have become so important that the avant-garde was canonized largely relying on the self-identification scriptural practices of different artistic groups expressing their programs and goals. For example, Alfred Barr’s famous 1936 diagram for the MoMA exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art,” which presented the development of modern art in the West, singled out several early modernist and avant-garde movements, at least half of which were self-identified groups around their respective manifestos.
Even though they were developed from the rhetoric of social and political agitation, the proclamations espoused in art manifestos have been largely embraced by the art world – perhaps as a consequence of their straightforward way of address. Indeed, art manifestos have come to be more commonly perceived as art ephemera or as art works in and of themselves, rather than operative ideas to be put into practice in order to achieve certain goals. To be sure the manifesto reflects individual or group agendas of what the art world and even the world is and what it should become, often using agitational rhetoric to prescribe future developments. 
Approximately at the same time as the art manifesto emerged, a different type of textual promotion of artistic practices arose in the context of the Russian avant-garde. In line with the ideals of the 1917 Russian revolution, Kazimir Malevich drafted one of the earliest documents dealing with artists rights entitled “Deklaratsiya prav khudozhnika: Zhizn’ khudozhnika” (Artists Rights Declaration: The Artist’s Life) published in Anarchya (Anarchy) in June 1918. Oriented towards art as labor and artists as workers, Malevich’s text defines artistic practice in the context of the legal and economic frameworks at play after the art work leaves the possession of its producer. This type of agreement, even though in many ways similarly utopian in its goals as the art manifesto, was nonetheless grounded in a
legal rhetoric. "

Izložba «Biseri revolucije» je, prema riječima kustosice i autorice, svojevrsna mini retrospektiva. Ako u obzir uzmemo da obuhvaća radove u vremenskom rasponu od 36 godine, gotovo čitavo umjetničko djelovanje Sanje Iveković, ta se kvalifikacija nikako ne može izbjeći. Činjenica da je to prva njezina izložba takve namjere i takvog opsega u matičnoj zemlji također puno toga govori, ali to zaslužuje zaseban prilogu okviru puno šire analize nacionalne kulturne i institucionalne politike. Za početak osvrnut ćemo se na sâm format: retrospektivu. Tradicija nas uči da je retrospektiva pregled nečega što je prošlo, u slučaju izložbe to je prikaz djelā jednoga razdoblja, škole, skupine, stila ili životno djelo pojedinoga umjetnika, u širokom rasponu. U slučaju Sanje Iveković, koja kroz čitavu svoju umjetničku karijeru propituje vlastiti položaj-sebe kao žene, kao umjetnice i kao aktivne građanke, nimalo ne iznenađuje da retrospektiva odustaje od zatvorenog pregleda, ma koliko obuhvatan bio i koliko historijski zanimljiv, i postaje aktivni pogled unatrag: takav koji traži izglede za budućnost...

Cet essai critique est consacré au premier volet de la Documenta 14 qui s’est ouvert le 8 avril 2017 à Athènes. Il s’attache à souligner comment, dans contexte européen de crispation identitaire, « Learning from Athens » entend rebattre les cartes des politiques des corps en vigueur. Articulant la faillite des représentations collectives à celle des représentativités politiques, cette édition cherche à déjouer imaginaires intercommunautaires qui, à travers la Grèce, se chargent de produire une figure exotique et minoritaire dont s’emparer, pour la stigmatiser, la protéger ou s’y projeter. Aussi, cet article propose d’étudier les manières dont les structures athéniennes qui abritent la Documenta ont tâché de se constituer en espaces d’agentivité et d’action sur le corps collectif.