AGORA8 :: ISSUE # 1 :: RASA TODOSIJEVIC

'The art that celebrates the victory abandons the fight'

Rasa Todosijevic is a defining figure of the Yugoslav Avant-Garde that rose to prominence in the 1970's. From his seminal 'Was ist Kunst?' actions beginning in 1976 in which he touched and slapped and smeared the face of a female assistant while demanding an answer to his interrogation, ('What is Art?'), to his texts on art, 'Edinburgh Statement - Who Profits from Art, and Who Gains From it Honestly?' (1975), and through the Installation series 'Gott liebt die Serben' (God Loves the Serbs) of the 1980's and 1990's he has consistently challenged the role and responsibility of the artist and demanded contextual engagement in art. Offering existence as material he systematically juxtaposes authoritarianism and nationalism with the paradoxical subjectivity of the individual and social group.

Employing vusual codes that often are disorientating, alarming, disturbing and uncanny, Todosijevic creates corridors of perception wherein it is uncertain whether the walls are closing in or the body has become obese from moral and cultural sloth. Confrontation becomes physically directed in the 'Gott liebt die Serben' Happening when tables are laid out in swastika form and the (gallery) visitors are invited to dine and drink to an audio background of nationalist songs. Mythologising himself through the paradox of nationalism and the cult of all great leader saviours he bears the slogan "Thank You, Rasa Todosijevic' on wine labels and notices beside his work.

Employing strategies similar to Art and Language to simultaneously tilt and stabilise a vision of the precarious Heimat the works assault on many levels. Often Todosijevic animates the swastika through a placement of objects of the more ordinary and domestic - bottles, suitcases, chairs, wardrobes. To merely see the work as an appropriation of the symbols and rhetoric of totalitarianism is to belittle the discourse and miss the point. (The swastika's own Slavic history stems from the early Middle Ages when it was named after the God Swarog.) In many ways the work asks us to look deeper not only into history but at social conditions, mental welfare, and the culture industries, and to investigate the poliitical interests of the institutions that construct them. Todosijevic himself can appear rather bemused by the attention and analysis his swarzyca brings about, proposing that it has “more to do with Duchamp than politics”. Nonetheless the work does catapult us into some kind of vortex where it is possible to belie our own histories and imbue our own unique experiences with inhabitation of the contemporary spectacle. With Todosijevic this side effect is as much a critique of recent and historical art production and the institutions that formulate cultural agendas as it is of xenophobia or totalitarianism. This then leads to consideration of how utopian art movements themselves have been appropriated by political ideologies.

Despite the great majority of his work being destroyed or disassembled and disregarded by art institutions he is widely credited as being a major inspiration behind the Slovenian art scene that heralded some of the most surprising and challenging work in Laibach and NSK, much of whose work was to bear Todosijevic's motif 'Was ist Kunst?'.