Exercice d'un artiste
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- Exercice d'un artiste
- 1976
- artist book, ink on paper
- 30 x 21 cm
Goran Trbuljak started working on his cycle "Excercice d'un artiste," [An Artist's Exercise] in 1972 during his stay in Paris (hence the name in French), first on graph paper and then in school notebooks for arithmetics. He used a pencil to put dots right in the middle of squares. The conceptual artist who, at that time based his work on realization of ideas by means of street actions, texts and photos, plays wittily with the idea of 'praise to a hand' in the sense that his pursuit of perfectionism and everyday practice of exercising his hand and eye should help him become a better artist. He started doing “Exercises“ at the very beginning of his artistic career and he still does them. Unlike his work “The Perimeter Test of the Visual Field“ (1970), whose performance he left to his doctor, “Exercises“ are a lasting, manual, lifelong project, just as it corresponds to the idea. The artist's books are important part of Trbuljak's work. Along with the hand-made ones, he also had many others printed, including “An Artist's Notes“ and “The Unpublished Pages from an Artist's Notes“ (1978) – collections of incomprehensible and illegible “texts“ and “reflections on art“ – that also ironize conventional notions of the creation of art history. There is also a self-irony because the artist is an active player in the game. B.S.