Paysage de la Mort
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- Paysage de la Mort
- 1971-1977
- tempera on chipboard
- 140 x 122 cm
Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos belonged to a wartime generation that grew up in times of occupation, violence, poverty, concentration camps and moral collapse, a generation whose schooling had to be interrupted and was only to continue after the Second World War. It is difficult to determine exactly when and how Mangelos began working, because his activities were kept strictly private until the mid-1960s. In “Introduction to No-art” (1980), he wrote about his beginnings, claiming that his “no-art” evolved from the landscapes of death he inscribed in his notebooks during the Second World War. (…) “there was a time when people were dying but there were no ideas … in this time of dying, the books smelled of death too, and reading smelled of dying. the books did not agree with that which was left of breathing, so you could hear the rustling of their paper lies in the silence of steps disappearing into death. I leafed through the notes I made in my youth. what I heard was only the rustling of pages covered with empty words. in confusion I began to record death between the lines. deaths. whenever I heard the news about neighbors, friends, cousins, acquaintances going away never to return, I would mark it in black ink, a black ink stain between the lines, without thinking, without purpose, without explanation …later I put the same inscription on all those anonymous graves. paysage de la mort.” Mangelos repeated some of his works later on in his career; these renditions are mostly in smaller formats. His work “Paysage de la mort” [Landscape of Death] is among the very few exceptions. B.S.