Slavko Matković
Slavko Matković, founder of the neo-avant-garde art group Bosch and Bosch, was one of the most important innovators in Serbian art during the second half of the 20th century. Matković intertwined the spaces and interspaces of art, at the same time exploring and examining the border areas between art and that which is outside of art. He worked in the genres of visual, concrete, and typographic poetry, interventions in open space, urban environments, texts, conceptual art, projects, actions, performance art, new (anti-narrative) comics, book art, conceptual painting, auteur film, mail art, and tape
text art, as well as in art theory and literature. Though manifested externally in the visual sense, these actions had their primary function in the mental sphere (art-as-philosophy). In his numerous projects and actions of the early 1970s, Matković pursued the ideal according to which the artist’s participation in the execution of his work should be barely visible and one should practice art as one’s intimate history. He researched the current logical status of an idea in art—being not an idea that would necessarily have to be realized. As an artist, he tried to establish a new, autonomous system of communication and signification, one bereft of any explicitly manifested intention or aim to mean/signify anything: the work is there and implies nothing but its own existence. In his case, the language of art and language-as-art are mutually conditional and interconnected to an extent that one is hardly able to determine their meeting points. Matković soon came to the conclusion that every realization of an idea ends up in direct opposition to the conceptualist principle of the idea as the work. His growing doubts regarding the purposefulness of pursuing art were most explicitly expressed in his decision to publish—using the first-person singular strategy of artistic voicing—a commercial ad in the German daily newspaper Hartzburger Zeitung of 26 November 1974. It read: “Ich bin Künstler Slavko Matković.” [I am artist Slavko Matković.] From the late 1970s until the artist’s death in 1994, the gap between Matković’s art and his life grew wider by the day, with his position growing increasingly precarious and dramatic (including ideas of self-destruction as well as the consumption of immense quantities of alcohol). Matković, torn by depression and personal crises, almost entirely gave up exhibiting his art in public and instead opted for transcendental conceptualism, an esoteric art form that he practiced by himself or among an extremely limited circle of close friends. In the case of Slavko Matković, identifying works with the personality of the artist provides compelling confirmation of the thesis that (artistic) consistency sometimes comes at a high price indeed. N.M.
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