Dejan Marković

oil painting, wooden frame, air-conditioned box, thermal insulation glass, security guard, two video cameras, air conditioning unit, three LED bulbs, video and text, 2018

The intervention two-hour tabula rasa – aimed at reinserting Mangelos’s claim for anti-art within the institutional framework of the competition for Young Visual Artist Award – allowed me to juxtapose the musealization – and neutralization – of his generation’s resistance with the position of young artists struggling to succeed in today’s precarious and competitive economy. The four-week long production process involved research on Mangelos, a search for a masterpiece and negotiations for its loan from private collectors, the City Museum Abteiberg, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, as well as its installation, exhibition and dismantling in the Remont Gallery.

Exhibited for two hours only, the original artwork produced two opposite situations, marked by its presence and its absence, impacting the gallery’s temperature, light and security conditions and thus whimsically affecting the economic and symbolic capital of the finalists’ exhibition on site. At a time of seemingly unprecedented global inclusivity, exhibiting Mangelos called attention to the ongoing commodification of the positions of resistance, as well as to the ubiquitous dynamics of constant (de-)valuation with which artists are confronted in the art field.

The work ‘Tabula rasa (1951-1956)’ by D.B.Mangelos was kindly loaned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade.

At the exhibition of the finalists of the ‘Mangelos’ award, I exhibited a work of Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos realized before he turned 35. For the first time, for two hours, Mangelos’s original work was displayed together with artists who were competing under his name. The oil on hardwood titled ‘Tabula rasa’ was dated between 1951-1956, the period the artist declared to be his fifth phase of life, marked by a crisis in the completion of his PhD in Art History, his active engagement in art criticism and publishing as well as in cultural institutions, but also by his questioning of the established artistic narratives. At that time, he also started to develop concepts of anti-art and to produce series of drawings and paintings such as ‘anti-poeses’, ‘anti-peintures’, ‘tabula rasa’, ‘paysages’, ‘alphabet’ and ‘phytagora’. Through the exhibiting activities begun in his late forties, this piece retroactively became an important artwork.

My intervention dva sata tabula rasa / two-hour tabula rasa – aimed at reinserting Mangelos’s claim for anti-art within the institutional frame- work of the competition – allowed me to juxtapose the musealization
– and neutralization – of his generation’s resistance with the position of young artists struggling to succeed in today’s precarious and com- petitive economy. The four-week long production process involved a research on Mangelos, a search for a masterpiece and negotiations for its loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, as well as its installation, exhibition and dismantling in the Remont Gallery.

Exhibited for two hours only, the original art piece produced two oppo- site situations, marked by its presence and its absence, impacting the gallery’s temperature, light and security conditions and thus whimsical- ly affecting the economic and symbolic capital of the finalists’ exhibi- tion on site. At a time of seemingly unprecedented global inclusivity, exhibiting Mangelos called attention to the ongoing commodification of the positions of resistance, as well as to the ubiquitous dynamics of constant (de-)valuation artists are confronted with in the art field.

Catalog: Marković, Dejan, two-hour tabula rasa, in Remont, “Mangelos – Young Visual Artists Awards 2018”, Belgrade 2018

Many thanks to: Ivana Bašičević Antić, Nada Beroš, Ana Bogdanović, Mark Borgan, Đorđe Branković, Maria Bremer, Nenad Carević, Ješa Denegri, Nenad Đurić, Zoran Erić, Jasna Jakšić, Miroslav Karić, Antun Maračić, Dijana Marković, Aleksandar Marković, Svetlana Mitić, Slobodan Nakarada, Ksenija Pavlinić Tomašegović, Aleksandar Popović, Tihana Puc, Michael Punzengruber, Darka Radosavljević Vasiljević, Felicia Rappe, Dubravka Sekulić, Darko Simičić, Dejan Sretenović, Branka Stipančić, Marinko Sudac, Biljana Šipetić, Biljana Tomić, Milica Tomić, Zdenko Tonković, Goran Trbuljak, Petra Vugrinec.