Mladen Stilinović was a self-taught artist who began actively producing work in the 1970s in Zagreb. In May 1975, he and his colleagues formed the “Group of Six Artists,” whose aim was to create art for a wider range of viewers than the traditional gallery-installed works attracted, and to get closer to and interact more with these viewers. The group exhibited in nontraditional venues, such as in public squares and courtyards, and even on the beach. They called what they did “exhibition-actions,” with both the exhibition component and the ensuing discussion between the artists and viewers integral to the work. A similar performative thread runs through Stilinović’s solo pursuits, not only in his actions and performances, but also in his two-dimensional photographic and installation work.

Cotton Pad Step (1975) is a performative object/performance that demonstrates this desire to interact with and thus involve the general public, as opposed to only the art-going public, in the artwork. Stilinović placed a large piece of cotton on the sidewalk, so that passersby had to either step on it or over it, thus either altering their path or making an imprint on the artwork. The artist documented the piece in photographs, then compiled them into a book, something he also did with 1st May 1975, which documented Yugoslavia’s May 1st celebrations in 1975. In addition to recording political billboards as well as posters, advertisements, and flyers hanging in shop windows, the photographs in 1st May 1975 document a love note—from the artist to his partner, the art historian Branka Stepančič—in which, across two banners strung high above the street, he announced “Ado Voli Stipu” (“Ado loves Stipu”) and its reverse, “Stipa Voli Adu” ( “Stipa loves Adu”). The juxtaposition of the official political messages with a range of more personal ones evokes the human level on which state-sponsored socialism was experienced.

A similar photographic performance, documented in book form and displayed in accordion style to resemble a storyboard, was The Foot-Bread Relationship (1977), which functions as a metaphor for the power struggles implicit in all relationships. The images in this work show a person swinging his leg back and then kicking a piece of bread, which breaks apart when it hits a wall. The larger, stronger subject inevitably dominates the smaller, weaker one. Stilinović presented this piece in 1979 at the exhibition Works and Words at the de Appel Gallery in Amsterdam. After a performance entitled Discussion on Language and Power, in which the artist gave a speech in Croatian—which he insisted not be translated—he placed a piece of bread on the floor and proceeded to swing his leg back, as if to kick it, but then stopped. He then exhibited the accordion book of photographs of the “original” performance, demonstrating the lack of necessity for the live performance once documentation of it exists. His speech, like The Foot-Bread Relationship, is about power and dominance—the power and dominance of the Western/English–speaking art world over less visible regions, such as Eastern Europe, and over artists who do not speak English. In 1992, Stilinović famously codified this view in a now-iconic banner that reads An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist.

The artist produced a number of accordion-style books that suggest the sequence of a film or the temporal aspect of the images. In Hairdressers (1975), the artist captured a slice of the everyday visual culture of Yugoslavia at the time, documenting a range of hairstyles on offer by local hairdressers, represented by drawings or graphic representations visible in shop windows and magazines.

A further exploration of power and hegemony can be seen in Exploitation of the Dead (1984–90) in which the artist analyzed and appropriated past styles and artworks by Russian avant-garde and Socialist Realist artists. By copying the work of these dead artists, and presenting it as his own, he exploits what he considered to be dead signs, in that they no longer convey meaning, or at least not the meanings intended in the originals.

For this self-trained artist, no source was off limits, be it the everyday material and visual culture that surrounded him or the institutional canon of art history. The artist who showed himself “at work” sleeping, in the photographic performance and series of eight photographs Artist at Work from 1978, represents the Duchampian thinker and flaneur, contemplating, dreaming, and strolling the streets in search of material. It is this performative strand that ran through his life that continues to live on in his performative photographs, inspiring the reader to flip through the images and thus engage with them, and their meaning, for him- or herself.

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Artists have been reliant on photography and video cameras to document live works of art, or performance art, most consistently since its emergence in the 1960s as a fully fledged genre. There are numerous debates regarding the essence of performance art. For Peggy Phelan, the live event takes primacy. As she states, “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.”¹For Philip Auslander, however, a work of art becomes a performance the moment is it performed for the camera. For him, “The act of documenting an event as a performance is what constitutes it as such.”²

Auslander and Phelan were writing primarily about Western artists—such as Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke, and Yves Klein—within whose work are numerous examples of performances that were staged in front of a camera as opposed to a live audience. In the former Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, however, in many cases, artists performed for the camera out of necessity, as the restrictions of various political regimes prohibited any kind of public display or performance on the streets.

The 1970s were a challenging time for artists in Czechoslovakia. Following the liberalization of the 1960s, and the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, which brought the Prague Spring to an end, the government sought to bring Czechoslovakia back in accord with the Soviet party line; what followed was a period referred to as “Normalization.” There were consequences for artistic transgressions, including expulsion from the state artist’s union, and so artists contained their experimental activity by sharing it only with close and trusted friends, in private spaces—for example, in the basement of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, where one artist (Petr Štembera [b. 1945]) worked as a night watchman, or the countryside, which was less subject to surveillance than the city.

Czech artist Jiří Kovanda (b. 1953) found another solution, however, producing Minimalist actions on the streets of Prague, which were either captured by the camera, or simply recorded in a note written by the artist. He managed to execute
these actions in public because they were barely perceptible as works of art; in most cases, only he and his photographer were aware of the artistic work taking place. And it was only the artist’s photographic documentation that framed the actions, demarcating them as art.

For example, in one of Kovanda’s first public actions, xxx 19 November 1976. Prague, Václavské náměstí, which has become iconic in reproductions, the artist stood immobile on the sidewalk, facing the oncoming pedestrians with his arms outstretched as if being crucified. When asked how he managed to complete such an action, he commented that it lasted only for a few brief seconds, long enough for his photographer Pavel Tuc to snap the picture.³

Kovanda quite rigorously and consistently documented his actions by dedicating a sheet of paper to each one, titling and dating it, and sometimes including a short description, photograph, or series of photographs. Nowadays, these documents have acquired monetary value, however in the Communist period, they simply served practical purposes: they functioned as evidence that the performances had taken place, and were used to show others the performance, after the fact.

In Contact (September 3, 1977), Kovanda walked down Spálená and Vodičkova streets in the center of Prague, casually bumping into other pedestrians as he went; his photographer was positioned strategically across the street to capture the physical exchange between artist and passersby. Of course, to the unaware bystander, this action appeared to be nothing more than the everyday occurrence of a clumsy individual’s stumbling into those passing him on the street, an event not warranting anything other than a discrete apology. Kovanda’s gestures, however, echo those of the secret police—which were already taking place on the streets—the photographing of everyday life through surveillance. In Contact, he placed himself in the position of the surveilled, by co-opting a friend to play the role of the secret police and to document those with whom Kovanda interacted.

Though it is possible to read these performances through a political lens, the artist explains that his personal motivation for carrying out many of these performances
was to overcome his own personal shyness. In his performances, he does so through interactions, attempted meetings, and eye contact with innocent bystanders on the street.

The artistic atmosphere in Bucharest under Nicolai Ceauşescu was not dissimilar to that in Prague in the 1970s. Artists such as Ion Grigorescu (b. 1945) and Geta Brătescu (b. 1926) took refuge in their studios, creating performances that were usually only witnessed by a photographic lens.

Art critic Ileana Pintilie has described Grigorescu as using the camera as an audience, or witness to his actions, which are performed in his studio or the countryside. Writing about his film Male and Female (1976), she states, “If this film was not necessarily conceived for public presentation—which seems obvious—then the artist must have ascribed such a role to the video camera, to the lens which should record the image and which becomes a ‘partner’ of his explorations, a sort of ‘accomplice’ of his most intimate thoughts and states of excitement, mental and physical.”⁴ Because his performances took place in the privacy of his studio in Communist Romania, they were largely unknown in the wider Romanian context, or even artistic context, and have only recently begun to gain recognition and visibility. Consequently, the photographic and filmic documentation of these works has been crucial in preserving this unique piece of art history.

But the artist had other reasons for co-opting the camera in his performances, for using it mainly as a tool of experiment, such as in manufacturing impossible scenes. One can witness this in Boxing (1977), in which the artist created a doubleexposed filmic image of himself boxing with himself. And in Dialogue with President Ceauşescu (1978), he uses the camera and the double-exposed image to create something even more impossible—a conversation or interview in which the artist, as himself, questions the leader of his country, whom he also plays, but wearing a Ceauşescu mask. Although confined to his studio, in these instances, the performance for the camera was not only the result of necessity, owing to the ociopolitical situation, but also a vehicle that enabled him to create fictitious scenes and dialogues.

For Grigorescu’s colleague Geta Brătescu, the studio was a sanctuary, and it was through this space that the artist defined herself. The studio even features as a
character in some of her performances. The photographic performance Towards White (Self-Portrait in Seven Sequences) (1975) consists of seven closeup photographs of the artist’s face. The artist gradually covered her face with cellophane, so that by the final image, the viewer sees only a white square, a blank canvas—resulting in the artist’s literally disappearing into, or merging with, her work. A subsequent and similar piece, Toward White (1975), comprises nine photographs, each documenting the gradual papering over of her studio which, by the end of the series, is entirely white, with the artist covered in a costume of white paper, with white paint on her hands and face. In the final frame of this performance, the artist has become one with her studio, the space of her creation. About this precious space, she said: “Whenever I try to make philosophical speculations I experience embarrassment, the wince of the amateur. I save myself by repeating to myself that everything I say originates in my studio, the artist’s studio.”Geta Brătescu, quoted in ⁵ Just as with Grigorescu, her studio is not a space of confinement, but rather a place of freedom, and the lack of ability to perform publicly does not limit the artist. Instead, the photographic lens enables artistic experiment to take place.

Croatian artist Tomislav Gotovac (1937–2010) created his first semi-public happening, Showing Elle, in 1962. This was a photographic performance on the Slemje mountain outside of Zagreb. On the snow-covered mountain, he removed his shirt and thumbed through a copy of Elle magazine, showing some of the layouts to the camera. In one image from the performance, the artist shows an underwear advertisement, the female model as semi-nude as the artist. Gotovac created a doubling of objectification, as he makes himself the object of the photograph in the same manner that the woman in the advertisement has been reified. Two years earlier, however, in 1960, the artist created a series of five photographic performances reminiscent of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series, in which he dressed up and pretended to be an actor in a French film. Although not categorized as a performance, the piece, entitled Heads (1981), functions as an early instantiation of performativity, not to mention a surprising precursor to Sherman’s work of nearly twenty years later.

Gotovac, who was first and foremost a filmmaker, is known to have said that when he opened his eyes in the morning, he saw a film. Rather than seeing the images that document his performances as photographs, one could think of them as film stills, or of the performance that is life. Unlike in Romania or Czechoslovakia, public street performance was common in Yugoslavia, and Gotovac himself enacted many performances in which he walked naked through the streets of Zagreb. His performances for the camera, however, are just that—performances that could only
be conveyed by being captured through the lens. For artists across Central and Eastern Europe, where the possibility to perform in public spaces varied from country to country, the camera offered a guaranteed witness to performative activity, not only enabling and facilitating artistic experiment, but also preserving it for posterity. It also opened up new venues for creativity, regardless of the limitations placed on artists and the public space.

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