Grupa KÔD

“Student” in Belgrade). The initial members of the group were Slavko Bogdanović, Janez Kocijančić, Miroslav Mandić, Mirko Radojičićz and Slobodan Tišma. Kocijančić left the group after a few months, while Predrag Vranešević joined it following his departure. They were all in their early twenties—students of literature, philosophy, law, and architecture, none of them with any academic training in visual art. The group also collaborated with artists from other places in Yugoslavia—primarily with OHO, Goran Trbuljak, and Braco Dimitrijević from Zagreb. Their founding was triggered primarily by the Slovenian group OHO, who in 1969 staged an exhibition and a series of public actions in Novi Sad. However, the activities of KÔD could be also interpreted in light of the general political and cultural climate in Yugoslavia that followed the student protests of 1968, particularly in the context of strong leftist criticism of Yugoslavia’s socialist system—which, in the 1960s, underwent liberal economic reforms. The position of KÔD favored further development of the concept of socialist self-management and was critical of both the dogmatic hardliners and the liberal reformers in the Communist Party, who ultimately orchestrated a final backlash against this leftist opposition. The stance and overall public behavior of KÔD is linked to the notion of “ruthless criticism of all that exists” introduced by the Praxis philosopher Gajo Petrović in accordance with what Marx wrote in his letter to Ruge: “If constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.”Although the authorities managed to derail the outcome of the protests rather than fully suppress them, the period between 1968 and 1972 was one of the most prominent creative periods in socialist Yugoslavia in terms of alternative culture. Some official institutions established to support the culture of the young generations began playing host to radical, alternative, and experimental approaches. In Novi Sad, such an institution was the Tribina mladih (Youth Tribune), where KÔD had their first appearance in April 1970 with a “spatial intervention” that employed nails and strings. During the same month, they realized their first intervention in the urban space, entitled “Kocka” (The Cube), which involved the suspension of a large rectangular metal construction between two residential buildings in Novi Sad using nylon strings. In May and June of 1970, they realized a series of ad hoc actions and performances on public transportation and in the streets: repetitive crossing of a street at a marked crosswalk, loud discussion about a handrail in a public bus, performances in front of a major department store, painting of trees, etc. At the invitation of Tribina mladih’s program coordinator Judita Šalgo, they also organized seven para-theatrical “visual-acoustic” actions there under the collective title of “Zglob” (Hinge): neo-dadaist and Fluxus-influenced performances with simple props (mirrors, balls, canvas, a chainsaw, etc.). In July 1970, the group also realized their first land art works on the site of Tjentište, a memorial park dedicated to one of the most famous battles in Yugoslavia during World War II. In October, the group participated in the “Public Lesson of Art” along the Danube in Novi Sad where they realized a series of works combining concrete poetry and land art (marking the surrounding grass with the word “Grass”, placing the Styrofoam word “Danube” on the river to float, etc.). In November of 1970, Janez Kocijančič organized the “environment” “Restoran kod KÔD” (Restaurant at KÔD), which consisted of a number of chairs and tables placed in a major pedestrian square in Novi Sad. Tables were set with plates, cutlery, bottles, ashtrays and other restaurant “inventory”, all painted in grey. The members of the group installed and left the setting to observe at distance how passers-by would react to the environment. January 1971 saw the group change its operational structure, deciding to conceptualize its activities as monthly propositions. The sub-groups “January” and “February” were the only iterations of this modus operandi. The group February issued an “Open Letter to the Yugoslav Public,” which triggered a nervous response from the authorities. This letter asserted that a strong-arm policy, absolute bureaucratization, the monopoly of a few in positions of authority from which they drew material and political power, and the disqualification of new phenomena in culture were all prevailing and thus both hindering the democratization of culture and upholding a climate of fear. The letter was sent to the most prominent state and party functionaries, institutions, and the media. It is viewed as the first instance, followed by other provocative statements and texts, that resulted in court trials of Mandić and Bogdanović. Mandić would be the first to be given a 9-month prison sentence for the text “ A Poem on a Film”, published in the Hungarian language journal Új Symposion in March of 1972. In May of that same year, Bogdanović was sentenced to 8 months in prison for “inciting resentment amongst the citizens” in his text “Poem of the Underground Youth Tribune of Novi Sad,” published in the Belgrade journal Student in 1971. After serving their prison sentences, the members of the group engaged in some occasional “underground” activities but soon continued on in various directions. Mandić later carried out his durational performance “The Rose of Wandering”, during which he walked the length of the circumference of the globe; Vranešević founded the popular new wave band Laboratorija zvuka (Laboratory of sound) in the late 1970s; and Tišma became an acclaimed novelist and poet as well as the founder of two influential post-punk bands in the 1980s: La Strada and Luna. Radojičić was mostly involved in literary criticism, while Bogdanović became a lawyer and departed from artistic practice until the mid-1990s. B.D.