“Tomislav Gotovac: Crisis Anticipator”, the main publication of the retrospective exhibition “Crisis Anticipator – Don’t ask where we’re going”, will be presented on Monday, 20 November at 5 PM in the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, where the exhibition is also located. The book will be presented by editors Miško Šuvaković, Darko Šimičić, Ksenija Orelj and Nataša Šuković, authors Suzana Marjanić, Boris Ružić, Diana Nenadić and Marija Katalinić, and RIJEKA 2020 CEO Emina Višnić on behalf of the co-publisher.
The books is a result of a collaboration between custodians, critics, art historians, theoreticians and artists, which is indicative of the complexity and interdisciplinarity of Gotovac’s work on film, performances, photography and painting during socialism, post-socialism, transition and the start of the global crisis.
The book focuses on the critical, custodial and theoretical levels of presenting and interpreting Gotovac’s life and work. It aims to showcase his artistic career as the anticipation of contemporary artistic, cultural and social changes from the stability of the 1960s to the contemporary society facing a global and European crisis. That is how Tomislav Gotovac can be presented from a historic and anticipatory perspective.
The texts are organised in four units. The first unit is Memory: Power of the Artist, focusing on individual memories about Tomislav Gotovac through a historicisation of his work in the context of Croatian and international neo-avantgarde. The second unit is Film: Experimental and/or Anti-Film, presenting research on Gotovac’s original work on film, in a hybrid field of fascination with American film, experimental film and anti-film. The third unit: In Between: Tactical Postmedia, follows the development of Gotovac’s artistic work in the space in between different media and artistic practices such as collage, interventions, performances and appropriation. The final unit, Reconstructed Subject: World Image Conspiracy presents the affective nature of Gotovac’s life and artistic work, from a completely intimate act to the mythologisation of his own life and human existence in a world of hidden and revealed political, sexual and artistic conspiracies.
The book presentation is going to include discussions on Tomislav Gotovac’s art, memories about him and his worlds, the nature of experimental film and antifilm, tactical postmedia within the scope of different disciplines in art, as well as the reconstruction of Gotovac’s conspiracy-oriented worldviews.
Photo: Égalite, fratérnité, libérté, jebali te (pad Bastilje)
