Untitled
/7
- Untitled
- 1971–1981/2018
- 40 sheets with typewritten sentences, 20 in Croatian and 20 in English
- 29,7 × 21 cm
I started writing the simple one-line sentences, typed on a typewriter, almost at the bottom of a vertically inserted A4 paper, sometime in ’71. Even earlier; I had used a typewriter as the easiest way to visually formulate work, sentences, that were supposed to describe, as simply as possible, the photograph placed above, in the empty space of the paper. My handwriting was bad, illegible, and my printed letters were uneven in size and seemed sloppy. Besides that, and most importantly, I did not want to have any form of personal expression in those works. Rather, the intent was that this unartistic approach would best explain to the viewer the very idea that I was presenting. I left these papers without the photographs for economic reasons. The texts written mainly referred to the perception of viewing or art. They were intended for people on the street or visitors of galleries and museums. The sentence would very often start with: “this paper…” or “this work…” For example, some of my favorite sentences were: “this work is worth $1000 on Mondays and Fridays on other days nothing” or “all the occupants of this house are smart and fair.” The first text was left hanging in a gallery in Belgrade for years, while the other for only a few days on the door of a building in downtown Zagreb. I had displayed the first such texts already in ’71 at the Paris Youth Biennale and later at many other manifestations. I would often hectograph or photocopy one of those sentences in a hundred or more copies and leave them for exhibition visitors to take home with them if they wanted to. I soon started noticing that many artists had similar formulations, admittedly, handwritten on larger formats or also on A4. By then, I had already started to perceive this as an academicism that I privately referred to as “this-is-ism,” from the most common first word in those works: “This work…” I continued to write the sentences in the same way until sometime in the early ‘80s. G.T.