Digital images copyright The Museum of Modern Art. Photos courtesy Imaging and Visual Resources Department, MoMA.

The post From the MoMA Archives: Works and Materials by OHO Group appeared first on post.

1970: Intercontinental Group Project America-Europe and beyond

In February of 1970, partly in preparation for Information, which was scheduled to open in July, Nez and Matanović traveled to New York. The trip became an occasion for creating works dealing with the ultimate invisible (and putative) force—telepathy. Recorded only through a set of diagrams, the Intercontinental Group Project America-Europe speaks to OHO’s growing interest in completely merging art and life, in exploring its own internal dynamics, and in the immaterial or non-tangible outcomes of the artistic process.

Created in two versions, Intercontinental Group Project America-Europe asked, when Nez and Matanović were in New York and Pogačnik and Šalamun in Ljubljana, whether telepathic connection was possible. In Pogačnik’s version of the project, the four OHO members drew lines into identical paper grids at the same time; in Matanović’s version, illustrated here, each of the four, at the same time, recorded the position of a match dropped onto a sheet of paper while looking into the sun. Examining the diagrammed results of both projects suggests for the most part that the four men did not have telepathic abilities, though occasional coincidences do leave some room for doubt. Ultimately, whether the results of their actions on two continents are similar is beside the point—the design of the project ensured that OHO members were thinking of each other at the same time, in effect transcending their separation across space and time zones. Even if this project did not produce actual telepathic transmission of information, it activated a sense of powerful connection, a kind of emotional telepathy.

Three more OHO artifacts from 1970 included in Information document the group’s further retreat into nature and shift toward shaping and visualizing its internal identity and dynamics. Pogačnik’s Project OHO offered a series of progressively more complex diagrams based on the group’s name, which located the group within its own cosmology and envisioned complex interrelationships between its members.¹ A map documenting the locations of the ephemeral actions and installations OHO created in the Zarica Valley in May of 1970 relates the artists’ works to the locations of older sacred sites, ranging from a Neolithic settlement to a medieval church; the map thus superimposes the mental mapping of time over the physical mapping of space. In one of the mapped projects, Andraž Šalamun’s Night, Bow and Flaming Arrows, four participants communicated across a river (two on each bank) by shooting flaming arrows either vertically or horizontally in a predetermined sequence. This work, along with several others of the mapped Zarica Valley projects, prefigured the so-called schooling that the group undertook in the summer of 1970, moving even further from the creation of documentable artistic projects and devising daytime and nighttime exercises meant, according to Pogačnik, to find a way of “working both with the body and with spiritual dimensions” and “to develop an art that would enable people to come to know themselves and experience the profound dimensions of space at the same time.”²

Chronologically, the last photographs in the MoMA Archives are the sequence in which the group members posed with Walter de Maria in August 1970. OHO members had long been interested in permutation as a conceptual premise, and this group of five photographs shows the different possible combinations of four people that can be derived from a group of five. The photographs are more significant, however, because they mark a key moment of choice in OHO’s thinking about its future. As Pogačnik has put it: “The group consciously and deliberately self-abolished, to enable the transition to the next creative stage. The alternative we considered for a while was entering the international art scene professionally. When Walter de Maria came to Kranj to visit Marika and me, he tried to talk us into that, on the grounds that we could rank high, as it were, among conceptual groups internationally. In the end, though, we decided on a completely different step, based on our group spiritual schooling.”³ Comparing the reminiscences of all four of the former OHO members paints a more complicated picture of why the artists parted ways—the reason Pogačnik mentions coincided with Yugoslav art officials’ refusal to help the group show internationally, even as the interests of the still very young group members began to diverge, with three of the four unwilling to dedicate themselves to founding a commune.⁴

The group’s decision to disband in order to find ways to merge art and life more fully can be seen as yet another facet of its belonging to the global Conceptualist tradition. That decision can be compared, for instance, to the exit from the art world in 1972 of Seth Siegelaub, the godfather of New York Conceptualism, or the departures in the late sixties and early seventies documented in the 2004 exhibition Kurze Karrieren (Short Careers) at Vienna’s MUMOK, in which several of the artists represented (including OHO) left art behind because of their unwillingness to participate in the art market, fit into institutional constraints, or participate in activities that lacked direct social impact.

OHO’s work as an artist collective had an important impact on Yugoslav culture at the time and resonates in Slovene culture up to the present day. Even though the group ultimately retreated into nature and the inward-looking utopia of a commune (such inwardness being a common fate of many attempts at utopia in postwar Eastern European art), it was able to create in a crucial historical moment and despite limited means, both physical and discursive spaces of free expression that could occupy anything from a newspaper page to a public park. In these spaces, the group was able to bring into a public arena intellectual tensions that replicated, in miniature, the tensions between political engagement and withdrawal, systematicity and chaos, irony and deep spirituality, and obsession with and distrust of language, that were happening within the global art scene on a much larger scale.⁵ Finally, OHO influenced the generation that followed it, including the artists associated with the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade, which became another important space for the production of “new artistic practice, the dematerialization of the art object, post-objective art, the art of behavior, and new-media art…that stemmed from the art of rejection from the end of 1960s.”⁶ There is also deep inspiration to be found in the group members’ willingness to take OHO’s lessons outside the art world and to apply them to such mergings of art and life as community-building projects (Matanović), art therapy combined with continued visual art practice (Nez), and earth-healing (Pogačnik). Indeed, of the four members of the group, only Andraz Šalamun returned entirely to the traditional medium of painting after OHO. The artists’ later stories are not, of course, part of the Information archive, but the archive remains invaluable for understanding what came next.

This is the third and final part of a multi-section essay on OHO Group. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. It will be complemented by images of newly digitized materials by OHO Group from the MoMA Archives as well as the first English translation of the 1969 interview between OHO Group members Milenko Matanović and Tomaž Šalamun. Read the interview here.

The post Part 3: The OHO Group,”Information,” and Global Conceptualism avant la lettre appeared first on post.

1969: Summer Projects

1968 brought changes to the OHO circle. With Pogačnik gone for a year of obligatory military service, other members shifted their attention to performances in urban spaces, notably Ljubljana’s centrally located Zvezda Park. It was there, at the end of December, that three members performed Triglav, one of the group’s most iconic works—a witty visual pun on the name of Slovenia’s tallest peak, which means “three-headed.” Against the background of the snowy park, Milenko Matanović, David Nez, and Drago Dellabernardina stuck their heads through a black tarp and became the three-headed mountain, eliciting quizzical and bemused responses from passersby.

Though the “social dimension” of this and similar works that Matanović invoked in a 1969 interview (recently translated into English for post), was not explicitly spelled out, it was certainly related to the idea that artists should claim public space as their own, as an important way of contesting official power. This sentiment, which resonated around the globe, was also captured by McShine in his introduction to the Information catalog: “The material presented by the artists is considerably varied, and also spirited, if not rebellious —which is not very surprising, considering the general social, political, and economic crises that are almost universal phenomena of 1970. . . . It may seem too inappropriate, if not absurd, to get up in the morning, walk into a room, and apply dabs of paint from a little tube to a square of canvas. What can you as a young artist do that seems relevant and meaningful?”¹

For OHO, in the summer of 1969, following the group’s transformation into a more tightly-knit collective and forays into exhibition-making, the answer to McShine’s question lay in continuing to explore ways of working outside of traditional gallery spaces.² The series of Summer Projects that were the result of these efforts and are so richly documented in the MoMA Archives are a testament to this period of intensive experimentation. With Pogačnik’s return that spring, the collective was re-formed into its most stable configuration—four members that included Pogačnik, Nez, Matanović, and Andraž Šalamun.³

 Together, they began to work extensively, first in natural spaces within Ljubljana and then progressively further into the countryside. According to Pogačnik, this decision, much like the group’s other key choices, was shaped partly by its members’ aesthetic interests and partly by political exigencies. Though cultural production in Yugoslavia was not as restricted as it was in Warsaw Pact countries, artists were constantly aware of potential repercussions and the whims of the authorities. Further, in culturally conservative Slovenia, with Tomaž Šalamun’s departure from his curatorial post at Moderna Galerija, no venue would exhibit OHO, making the move into nature logistically sensible.⁴

Within Ljubljana, the group explored the creative possibilities of everyday public space, as in Matanović’s Snake, a work in which the artist tied together sticks with string and then lowered them into the Ljubljanica river running beneath his window to reveal an otherwise invisible current.⁵ In a companion piece, Paper Path,⁶ he used a very large roll of blank newsprint to highlight the gentle rolling of a hilly landscape just outside the city. (Here, too, it is worth noting, that the choice of materials was dictated by practical concerns as much as aesthetic preferences—the artists were buying their own supplies and working with tiny budgets, and they thus opted for inexpensive materials).⁷ If in Snake and Paper Path, Matanović drew attention to easy-to-miss natural phenomena, in other works, he ever so gently and temporarily altered the landscape. Using rolls of the same type of blank newsprint, he made Waves in Zvezda Park by tying two strings to trees and draping the paper over them;⁸ in one of his most iconic works, Wheat and Rope, he used a piece of rope, which was tied to a stick stuck in the ground, to bend stalks of wheat into a temporary line in the field.⁹

In her recent book The Green Bloc: Neo-Avant-Garde Art and Ecology under Socialism, Maja Fowkes persuasively links OHO’s Summer Projects and subsequent works with the rise of an environmentalist consciousness in the late 1960s’ counterculture.¹⁰ In a work as seemingly simple as Wheat and Rope, Fowkes sees an exploration of an attitude toward nature that, inspired by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, embeds man non-disruptively in his environment, presenting an alternative to an alienated and technophilic stance towards nature as a limitless resource to be exploited.¹¹

 Fowkes’s larger argument is borne out by OHO members’ biographies following the dissolution of the group: both Matanović and Nez spent time at the eco-conscious Findhorn community in Scotland while Pogačnik, until 1979, ran the commune that he and fellow OHO members founded in the Slovene village of Šempas.

Overlapping the environmentalist concerns of OHO’s works, however, is their existence within the constellation of late-1960s aesthetic practices. To try to assign a precise definition or term for these and other OHO works is to miss the point that individual pieces were part of ongoing experimentation, the process of which was more important than the end results. OHO’s practice, like many discussed on post and represented in Transmissions, was a living answer to Klara Kemp-Welch’s question in her essay published on post: “What happens when pedagogy, poetry, sculpture, and sociability bleed into one another, and categories such as Conceptual art, Happenings, or performance art are undone?” McShine, too, seems to have been aware of the futility of assigning labels and identifying influences when he curated Information. As he wrote in the catalog that accompanied the exhibition, “An intellectual climate that embraces Marcel Duchamp, Ad Reinhardt, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, the I Ching, the Beatles, Claude Lévi-Strauss, John Cage, Yves Klein, Herbert Marcuse, Ludwig Wittgenstein and theories of information and leisure inevitably adds to the already complex situation.”¹² Several of the influences McShine mentions were directly relevant to OHO: the group’s early reist work, for example, playfully responded to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in its resistance to linguistic abstraction, while many later works, particularly those that celebrated countercultural, antiestablishment attitudes, followed in the spirit of Herbert Marcuse’s 1969 New Left manifesto, An Essay on Liberation, with OHO films often featuring Rolling Stones soundtracks as a manifestation of the group’s affinity with the counterculture.

Nevertheless, the term transcendental conceptualism, which Tomaž Brejc created to characterize OHO’s late work, is insightful—both in terms of understanding the group’s interests and expanding the definition of Conceptualism as it applies to a variety of artistic practices around the world.¹³ Here, rereading McShine is again helpful, for he too seems to have chafed at the definition of Conceptualism as it was understood by its New York exponents, particularly Joseph Kosuth: “The art cannot afford to be provincial, or to exist only within its own history, or to continue to be, perhaps, only a commentary on art. An alternative has been to extend the idea of art, to renew the definition, and to think beyond the traditional categories—painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, film, theater, music, dance, and poetry.”¹⁴

The impulse to work across and outside traditional media was certainly true of OHO, but even more importantly, the group operated within what we might now understand as a broader definition of a global Conceptualism whose main principle was to make invisible forces – be they natural, social, cosmological, interpersonal, or internal to the art world – visible.

In some cases, such as in Matanović’s Snake and Paper Path, natural forces were made visible through the work. In others, such as in Pogačnik’s Family of fire, air and water, the work exposed both natural forces and human ways of structuring the understanding of such forces. Taking as his starting point the elements that the ancient Greeks described as the basic building blocks of the world (earth, air, fire, and water), Pogačnik created a series of works that showed relationships between the elements in both static and dynamic modes. Illustrated here is Water-Water Dynamic, in which a clear plastic tube filled with pigment was placed in a riverbed facing upstream, causing the pigment to expose the rapidity and direction of the current as it dissolved and moved in the opposite direction.¹⁵ Recorded on film, the footage is accompanied by a diagram (that quintessentially Conceptualist mode of expression), also included in the film, that schematizes the setup of the experiment.¹⁶ At the same time, the use of a premodern system of knowledge as a starting point further highlights the tension between the sight of the entropic natural phenomenon and the human imposition of order onto it. In the end, Pogačnik’s work makes both more visible.

Nez, an American student studying art in Ljubljana, who became a member of OHO in 1968, similarly turned to issues of the visible and the invisible in his Summer Projects works. In pieces inspired by the work of Robert Smithson, such as Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1-9) from 1969, Nez exposed the limits of the photographic process, using mirrors placed in different configurations within the landscape to reflect that which would otherwise have been outside the shot.¹⁷ The mirrors also break up the landscape they depict, reminding the viewer of the inescapable fact that every photograph is a more or less random fragment of reality. In another work untitled work, Nez pursued an exercise in perspective distortion. He explained: “I laid out a large trapezoid using wooden sticks on a field and photographed the shape from a specific viewpoint creating the illusion of a rectangle. This is reinforced by its alignment to the rectangular format of the camera viewfinder and resulting photographic print. The piece was intended as a sort of conceptual joke exploring the ambiguity of perspective and the tendency of the camera to flatten out three-dimensional space to a two-dimensional picture plane.”¹⁸

This is the second part of a multi-section essay on OHO Group. Read Part 1 here. It is complemented by images of newly digitized materials by OHO Group from the MoMA Archives as well as the first English translation of the 1969 interview between OHO Group members Milenko Matanović and Tomaž Šalamun. Read the interview here.

Marko Pogačnik: “When I came back from doing compulsory military service in the spring of 1969, the situation with OHO was fairly critical. The early stage, the OHO Movement, had drawn to a close; the initial enthusiasm and drive were gone. On the other hand, there was the excellent exhibition Great-Grandfathers, which David Nez, Milenko Matanović, and Andraž and Tomaž Šalamun had staged in Zagreb, shifting in this way the focus of artistic creativity to visual art, partly inspired by the avant-garde art of the time, such as Arte Povera. There was even the idea that such activities should be separated from OHO. I was opposed to this; I believed that the philosophy underpinning OHO was too good to be replaced by art tendencies of the moment. In the end, it was David Nez who arrived at the decision with characteristic American pragmatism: that we should be the OHO Group, since OHO already existed as a familiar term. In its final form the group, comprised of David Nez, Milenko Matanović, Andraž Šalamun, and myself, took shape in the summer of 1969.” See Beti Žerovc, “The OHO Files”: Interview with Marko Pogačnik.” Art Margins Online (24 August 2011). 

Milenko Matanović: “Initially we created informal opportunities for sharing our individual work. My recollection is that the group didn’t come together until the first exhibit—I think at the Gallery of Modern Art in Ljubljana—and we had to get organized. I do not recall who made the selections of artists. Marko was the front man and I think that he negotiated the exhibit. I simply recall that I was invited and that we very quickly received invitations to exhibits in Maribor and Zagreb and the group became more formed with each invitation. The core group was Marko, Andraž, and myself, and later David. Tomaž Šalamun drifted in and out of visual art. Poetry was his main expression and he got involved on several occasions, but not on an ongoing basis. I think his art was a visual extension of his poetry, while for the rest of us it quickly became the main focus.” See Beti Žerovc, “The OHO Files”: Interview with Milenko Matanović.” Art Margins Online (24 August 2011).

The post Part 2: The OHO Group, “Information,” and Global Conceptualism avant la lettre appeared first on post.

Permission to republish this interview has been generously granted by Milenko Matanović and Metka Krašovec.

Though his engagement with OHO was short-lived, Tomaž Šalamun played an important role in shaping the group’s artistic trajectory. A poet who had traveled extensively through Western Europe, spent time in Rome with the artists of the Italian Arte Povera, and was working as a curator at Ljubljana’s Moderna Galerija, Šalamun encouraged OHO to congeal by 1969 into a more tightly knit collective of four members (Milenko Matanović, David Nez, Tomaž Šalamun, and Tomaž’s brother, Andraž).¹ The Pradedje exhibition in Zagreb marked this moment of transition; the catalog of this exhibition was one of the first things that Taja Vidmar sent Kynaston McShine.² The installations captured in it (made of bricks, hay, plastic, and an entire salvaged roof) reflect the influence of Arte Povera, combined with a desire to affront and scandalize the museum-going audience. As David Nez has put it, “There was lots of fun and positive energy, that’s what kept us going. There was also the adrenaline rush of pushing the boundaries and being outrageous.³

This “interview” captures the outrageousness particularly well. Tomaž Šalamun’s litanies of insults and self-aggrandizing epithets reveal his insistence on having the freedom to say whatever he wanted, which got him in trouble in 1964 when he was briefly imprisoned following the publication of his first poem. According to Matthew Rohrer, “Šalamun …single-handedly ushered in a postmodern exuberance into Slovenian and…Yugoslavian poetry,” combining the “classic seriousness” of the European Modernist tradition with “thumbing his nose at everything, including himself.”⁴

One sees such tension between deference and irreverence towards Art and Culture in the professionally produced Zagreb catalog, where Šalamun and Matanović’s transcribed conversation followed jargon-heavy essays – the critical apparatus necessary to legitimize an artistic practice. One also sees this tension in the unorthodox dialogue itself, which oscillates widely between visions of grandeur on the one hand and “impostor syndrome” anxiety on the other. It also moves between the poles of playfulness and genuine concern with the purpose of one’s activity, as when Šalamun declares, “inside me lies the entire european tradition, i exhibit brick and hay.” Matanović is the more earnest of the two speakers, and his allusion to the Triglav performance (discussed in Part 2 of “The OHO Group, “Information,” and Global Conceptualism avant la lettre”) points to concern with the social impact of OHO’s work: “i’ll exhibit outside, my work has a social dimension…the social dimension is that triglav mountain is in a park.”

— Ksenya Gurshtein

an interview
with milenko matanović
and tomaž šalamun

The post OHO Group Members’ Newly Translated 1969 text: “An Interview with Milenko Matanović and Tomaž Šalamun” appeared first on post.

In the summer of 1969, while traveling in Germany, MoMA curator Kynaston McShine met Taja Vidmar, an art history student from Ljubljana who was working at the Nuremberg Kunsthalle.¹ McShine was busy preparing Information, which would be MoMA’s big summer show the following year. It was his accidental encounter with Vidmar that accounts for the inclusion of the OHO artists’ group, the only artistic entity from the state socialist part of Europe to be represented in this germinal exhibition that aimed to capture what was a global phenomenon, or, as MoMA put it in the press release for the show, “an international report on recent activity of young artists.”²

Following their meeting, a correspondence ensued between McShine, Vidmar, and a third participant, a young Slovene art historian (and Vidmar’s husband), Tomaž Brejc.³ Brejc was OHO’s first chronicler and its ardent promoter, and thanks to his efforts and those of various OHO members, the MoMA archives contain excellent holdings of vintage photographic documentation of the group’s ephemeral work, available in few places outside of Slovenia, where the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana has the authoritative collection and archive, all of which has been recently digitized.

Even in Ljubljana, an uninitiated visitor to the Moderna Galerija may have a hard time figuring out the possible meanings of and relationships between the often cryptic or esoteric works that were created by what was a shifting group of participants (in the brief but intensely creative period of OHO’s existence, its membership fluctuated from a pair of high school friends to an expanded circle made up of writers, visual artists, theorists, and an amateur filmmaker to a group of four members focused on visual art) working across a broad range of media (including printed matter, drawings, objects, films, urban performances, exhibition installations, land art projects, and ultimately experiments in the dynamics of communal life and art). In MoMA’s recent exhibition Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980, OHO was represented by photographic documentation of works done in nature, which warrant contextualization, particularly because the Information archive mainly represents the last two years of the group’s existence—1969 and 1970—when McShine was putting together his exhibition. Virtually nothing in the archive tells about OHO’s complex earlier history, which began in 1966.⁴

1967: Book with a Ring

The need to contextualize OHO begins with the group’s name—a neologism derived from the Slovene words for “eye” (oko) and “ear” (uho)—which first appeared as the name of a self-published book by Marko Pogačnik and Iztok Geister in 1966.5 Only one object in the Information archive, Pogačnik’s Book with a Ring (1967), dates to the pre-1969 period.⁵One of a group of multiples produced, starting in 1966, as part of OHO Editions, it hints at the variety of formats with which OHO experimented during its short existence as a larger movement and later as an artist collective, which disbanded by early 1971.

In her essay for post, Klara Kemp-Welch notes: “Many of the proposals gathered in the exhibition Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 conquered new species of spaces for personal or collective investigation. So much so that artists’ propositions often fostered new forms of agency by repurposing and occupying new spaces.” Kemp-Welch turns, in particular, to observations about space made by the French writer Georges Perec, “for whom the space of the page is perhaps the creative space par excellence.” She cites Perec’s observation that “there are few events which don’t leave a written trace… At one time or another, almost everything passes through a sheet of paper… on which… one or another of the miscellaneous elements that comprise the everydayness of life comes to be inscribed.”⁶

For OHO, these observations on the importance of pages are particularly relevant and go beyond the group’s heavy reliance on photographic documentation and subsequent use of diagrams. From its earliest days, as evidenced by OHO Editions, publishing in the broadest sense of the word was central to the group’s output, which up until 1968, largely consisted of idiosyncratic printed matter (including books, cards, and even labels that could be affixed to matchboxes) as well as journal and newspaper publications (including everything from drawings and comic strips to experimental poetry and theoretical texts).⁷

This interest in language and text was partly practical – the self-published OHO Editions did not require official support and were less likely to face official prohibitions. They also reached much wider audiences than unique art objects. The various pages on which OHO spread its ideas thus created a far bigger discursive space than the group would have been able to conjure had it begun as the smaller visual art collective that it would eventually become.⁸

Just as importantly, experiments with language allowed OHO members to introduce their audience to the philosophy of reism. Derived from the Latin res, meaning “thing,” reism’s philosophical task is to imagine new relationships between humans and everyday objects, between readers and text. In these anti-utilitarian relationships, objects would be liberated from having to be useful, and text from having to have meaning. As Marko Pogačnik has put it in an interview for ArtMargins Online, reism “demands that objects, and generally all entities, should be liberated of human appropriation in terms of purpose, function, sense, etc.” Though this line of working, like almost everything in OHO’s practice (except its constant propensity for experimentation), did not last long, it resulted in a group of striking works that includes Book with a Ring. Closely related to Marko Pogačnik’s earlier Item Book (1966), both objects embody OHO’s paradoxical relationship with language, with holes acting as basic units of a “text” that visualizes both the yearning for the complete (literal) transparency of language and the possibility that it is nothing but a string of (again literally) empty signifiers.⁹ In Book with a Ring, moreover, even the traditional codex structure of books, a utilitarian convention, is brought into question as the sequencing of the “pages” is left entirely to the viewer. Here, “language” obtains an obviously spatial dimension, which helps to shift the viewer’s expectations; the act of “reading” becomes focused not on the conveyance of content but rather on the open-minded and undirected encounter with the unfamiliar.

This is the first part of a multi-section essay on OHO Group that were released on post over a few weeks. It is complemented by images of newly digitized materials by OHO Group from the MoMA Archives as well as the first English translation of the 1969 interview between OHO Group members Milenko Matanović and Tomaž Šalamun.

The post Part 1: The OHO Group, “Information,” and Global Conceptualism avant la lettre appeared first on post.