KONTAKT Belgrade featured a selection of artworks purchased since Erste Bank Group resumed its collecting activities in 2004. The works shown in the exhibition reflect the political and historical transformations that have taken place in Europe since the 1960s, as well as the importance of art before the backdrop of current cultural, social, and economic developments taking place in Central, Southeastern and Eastern Europe. One of the collection’s aims consists in bringing works from the region into contact with each other as a way of formulating a broader and hitherto non-existent shared historical context, allowing the works to appear and be interpreted in a new light.

With the presentation of a special selection of the collection as well as the new acquisitions in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, the artworks obtained a re-appraisal and referential framing in one of the contexts they have been made. Milica Tomić’s Portrait of My Mother, for example, traces the way through Belgrade to her mother’s home and thereby focuses on historical traumas such as the NATO bombing in 1999. Sanja Iveković’s Triangle takes president’s Tito’s visit in Zagreb in1979 as the starting point for reflections on decorum and national security measures, while Heinz Gappmayr produced the Serbian analogy of a text piece he had developed specifically for Erste Bank. Moreover, it was a special opportunity to present the collection in one of the only museums of contemporary art which was built in Eastern Europe in the 1960s in the tradition of the modernist movement prevailing at that time. The latter is also visible in a number of artists from former Yugoslavia whose artworks are in line with the conceptual movements of the time and present in both collections, such as the work of Julije Knifer or Raša Todosijević.

Linking the thematic concepts of the art collection and the architecture of the building, the architects Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch produced an intervention which follows the architectural geometry of the building. Four stage-set like constructions provide access to the interiors through little aisles in-between the back walls of the cubes and the inner walls of the building. These four main spaces of the exhibition also define the four major themes of the collection: the formalist approach to modernist structures, the redefinition of material in space, issues of the political and the public as well as matters of the body and its medial representations. With the presentation of the collection in Belgrade, KONTAKT demonstrates the significance of both the local infrastructure and its cultural heritage, which is linked to artistic masterpieces of the region and the social transformations of the last 50 years.


Imprint:

Exhibition
Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade

Director (Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade):
Branislava Anđelković
Board - Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Bank Group:
Boris Marte, Wolfgang Schopf
Art Advisory Committee: Silvia Eiblmayr, Georg Schöllhammer, Jiří Ševčík, Branka Stipančić, Adam Szymczyk
Curators: Walter Seidl, Jiří Ševčík, Branka Stipančić
Production (Erste Bank-Group): Andrea Brbaklić, Sonja Konakov, Vladimir Todorović, Susanne Schaller, Walter Seidl, Cornelia Stellwag-Carion
Press: Ana Nikitović
Exhibition architecture: Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch
Exhibition set-up: Olli Aigner & Team
Coordination: Zoran Erić

Paweł Althamer
Heimrad Bäcker
Walter Benjamin
Cezary Bodzianowski
Josef Dabernig
Carola Dertnig
VALIE EXPORT
Stano Filko
Heinz Gappmayr
Gorgona
Tomislav Gotovac
Ion Grigorescu
Tibor Hajas
IRWIN
Sanja Iveković
Šejla Kamerić
Julije Knifer
Július Koller
Jiří Kovanda
Edward Krasiński
Katalin Ladik
Karel Malich
Vlado Martek
Dalibor Martinis
Natalia LL
OHO
Roman Ondák
Tanja Ostojić
Mladen Stilinović
Raša Todosijević
Milica Tomić
Peter Weibel
Heimo Zobernig

The Sava and the White Cube
Georg Schöllhammer

With their display for the Belgrade presentation of the Art Collection of Erste Bank Group, Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch created an imaginative space which ingenuously follows the logic of presented art.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, an important component of New Belgrade, was opened on the left bank of the Sava River in 1965. Ivan Antić and Ivanka Raspopović had designed this manifesto–like building in the spirit of international structuralism, following the CIAM Conference of 1959, which had brought together the most important positions of the European modernist avant–garde. It was a masterpiece for the self–image of socialist Yugoslavia and the third way, which the multi–ethnic state had rhetorically assumed between the blocs towards such significant modernist architecture. The design even develops sculpture and pattern within itself as a free sequence of rooms, a museum made up of a path and space with visual connections between the floors and to the exterior (to historical Belgrade on the opposite bank). It was an ideal mantle for the spatial fantasies of modernist art, particularly the sculpture of those years, which more and more also became the state art in Titoist Yugoslavia. And to bring it into connection as a place with more open display requirements of modern painting, this building forms, so to speak, the counter thesis to the art of those of the avant–garde beyond the Iron Curtain and in Austria and Yugoslavia who were critical of modernism, who were to be presented in the Erste Bank Group exhibition.

In its historical references, this was the complex starting point that presented itself to Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch for the design of a display for the Kontakt collection in Belgrade. An ideologically outdated architecture, which is nevertheless strongly and rhetorically present which had also seen better days from a conservation point of view, and the two remained—monolithic in its gestures and totalitarian in its basic structural concept. A collection had to be integrated into it, which in its significant parts stands in contradiction to structuralism and the abstraction of high modernism that the building embodies. A collection which places works which have only gradually been taken into the western canon in a conceptual tradition and which—because of their contextual and local position among other things—have the potential to question it radically. It is a collection representing artists who critically faced the various modernisms of their local contexts from the 1960s.

In the first presentation of the collection it was the motif of the wall, which divided and structured one of the large side halls of a standard floor of the Vienna Museum of Modern Art, which operated both as a metaphor for avant–garde development at the time, divided into blocs, and as an ideal picture presentation surface for the often small formats— the intimacy due to the opportunities for public presentation and production. The location for this was a building with a rhetorically only apparently informal exhibition architecture, which in its use of material and space—monumentally excessive in its mantle and its interior economically and rationally following the product logic of an office building— is derived from a neutrally conceived investment architecture of the 1990s. This wall was duplicated by an oversized surface on the floor designed as a presentation table, so to speak a wall laid in the room, a wall lying on the floor on which a parade of objects which were able to evolve from such diverse, logical aesthetic and production connections as Yugoslavia of the late 60s, Bratislava of the same period and Prague of the leaden 70s. A polylogue rich in lines of sight arose between the lying and the standing wall, the side cabinets with media works and the work groups arranged loosely in the space at the walls of the museum. The neutral spatial logic of the unspecified cube which the Vienna museum presents strategically foiled this staging and created a stage rich in references for the presentation of otherness and the parallel development of artistic avant-gardes in Eastern and Southeastern Europe which was able to develop pictorially beyond practiced post–war writing of history which western museums often imagine as still unbroken.

For the presentation in Belgrade and at a historical moment that may have felt claustrophobic for many of the former Belgrade proponents of the new art practice of the 1970s who are represented in the collection, Six/Petritsch chose a contrary strategy: the precariousness of their arrangement lies in the inversion of the museum. The display concept takes the contrary historical position, like a parasite in its own house, so to speak, to the exemplary model of a structural architecture that allows open viewing relationships. Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch answer the question of a Belgrade perspective on art from the area of the former Warsaw Pact and Austria by denying an open view. In this exhibition architecture, the modernist opposite of a white cube—a spatial continuum clearly defined through viewing and relationship axes, such as the Belgrade building—is almost barricaded from the inside by four 1:1 models of white cubes. In the structure of the standard floor of the building they force themselves narrowly against the walls of the exhibition rooms like boxes set up as a second opposing frame and reverse and center the fluid lines of sight, also directed to the outside, of those passing through, which was favored by the design of the 60s. The new stage boxes made of white-painted chipboard held together with wooden bolts whose floors, made of the same painted chipboard, are raised above the level of the museum floor and which the visitor sometimes first reaches via new, long corridors which arise between the parasitical structure and the original construction, create a neutrality almost without context in which the works of the collection are placed in relationship to each other almost like chamber pieces—intimacy instead of agora and public appearance. Also the good view to the outside, with which the museum brings together the old and the new city, is broken and the views over the city appear as commentaries of critical picture constructions.

The dividing lines are sharp, the interferences large. At the same time this intervention by Six/Petritsch also expresses the borders between paradigms. Criticism finds its expression itself in the construction of the display without having to trouble post–modern metaphorics or sidestep into neo–modern neutrality. The historical transition between the two forms of display is an image for the interrupted and discontinuous history of the avant–gardes that the collection brings together and thus enters a formal dialogue with the art, which follows parallel developments. With this paraphrase of the western white cube Six/Petritsch have not only placed an image for the attack which art started upon it in the spaces in the grid structure of a building of high modernism. The corridors between the substance of the old building and the intervention of the display then almost become a symbol for cultural difference and translate the perspectives of the collection into an architectonic abstraction. In this way the real space of the museum is transformed into a metaphorical space and the real space of the display—that of the white cube used in the exhibition architecture of high modernism — suddenly becomes a theoretical space.



Museum of our Modern Times
Ljiljana Blagojević

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, designed by the Belgrade architects Ivan Antić and Ivanka Raspopović, was opened to the public on October 20th, 1965, five years after the project was awarded first prize in an open architecture competition. According to the first curator of the museum, Miodrag B. Protić, the building was severely criticized publicly during its construction. It was said, for example, that the building resembled a ‘barn’ or a ‘shack on stilts’ and that construction would be halted due to its ugliness. When in 1963 Slobodan Penezić, the President of the Government of Serbia at the time, requested that the Government approve funding for marble facing of the building, stone flooring in the hall, and oak parquet flooring in the exhibition space, he based his argument for the request on the general opinion that it was, as he put it, “a clearly ugly construction.” Therefore, reasoned Penezić, it is “better to pay (for expensive materials) than for us to later be blamed (for its ugliness).” When the President of the Government characterized the Museum of Contemporary Art as a “clearly ugly construction,” nobody could have known that it was exactly this building that would come to be known as one of the rare creations which will be almost unequivocally considered the most important architectural work of the period. It is obvious, however, that to those in the midst of it, it was a blind field of vision, as Le Corbusier says, of “eyes that do not see,” or actually that do not differentiate the clearly ugly from contemporary architecture, and in fact, do not see what it is that makes the architecture of the Museum of Contemporary Art contemporary, and neither ugly nor beautiful. The positioning of works in the context of the specific social and political situation of the time was the central theme in the theory and practice of art and architecture in post–war Yugoslavia. Despite the almost synonymous use of the terms ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary,’ and the endeavor to break with the paradigm of Western modernism, the main foothold of the position is the relevance of the modern work to the concrete contemporariness of the societal development of socialist Yugoslavia. The question of contemporariness is in fact deeply tied to the question of socialism, understood not as a utopia, but through the work itself, here and now. Because of this, the contemporary practice and theory of socialism and the cultures of socialism are posited in opposition to modernism, which is seen as the new tradition of the developed West. So, with the rejection of the dominant paradigms of socialist realism and the modern international style, in the search for the politics of the socialist culture the most important actor in the emancipation of the Yugoslavian cultural model is the recognition of its own cultural contemporariness and the resulting authorization of contemporariness as the height and totality of the concept, which negates every partial concept of style, historicism, nationalism, and aestheticism. The key position in this politics of culture, finally based on the concept of contemporariness, is taken by two institutions established in the late 1950s— the Museum of Revolution of the People and Nations of Yugoslavia, built by the Croatian architect Vjenceslav Richter (architectural competition of 1961; construction stopped in 1981) and the Modern Gallery, which was what the Museum of Modern Art was initially called. Both of these institutions were conceptualized as museums of a new essence and character, with collections that in addition to documenting the recent history and 20th century art history of the people of Yugoslavia, also illustrated current practices in politics and art as central to their programmatic plan. The collection of the Museum of Revolution was conceptualized to show items and documents that relate to the history of the workers‘ movement, the war and revolution for the peoples‘ freedom, as well as the development of the self–governing socialist community. The contemporary political practice of self–governing socialism, therefore, becomes the element of the tenet, the lens of contemporariness, through which recent history comes into focus. Through the founding of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the following was adopted: “the conclusion that the Modern Gallery should represent the story of the development of our contemporary art from its inception to today, with the strongest and longest accent on its current aspect; that that story should be complete, historically accurate and objective; that it, because of that, is not treated either as ‘modernist’ nor as ‘realistic’ but as it in fact was and actually is: the function of the gallery is to present every important movement and every vital creative personality possible.” The concept of a museum oriented toward the present was also the deciding pragmatic reason for the founding of the Modern Gallery, since precisely this specific quality made it fundamentally different from all existing museum institutions. I would also like to emphasize that even though the orientation toward the present as a foundation presupposes an ideologically charged understanding of the socialist reality as the supra–historical, this type of conception actually also implies the concept of the atemporal with its potential for continuous actualization. Lastly, but not at all least important, the Museum of Revolution and the Modern Gallery were directed toward the whole of the Yugoslav culture and political space, since in them it was possible to highlight that which is generally Yugoslav, but also that which comes from the individual cultures and nationalities that make up the whole. In accordance with these goals and conceptions that were put forward, it could be said for both of these institutions that they were in fact museums of contemporary Yugoslavia and its political culture at the time. And in line with the idea of New Belgrade as an extra–territory of the Yugoslavian Federation, and more importantly, as a contemporary city, both institutions were to be housed in purpose–specific, new contemporary buildings in precisely that new city which was built in that same contemporary time.
Conceptually dislocated outside of the historical and national context and physically placed outside of the traditional urban context, both institutions are actually, besides being conceptualized as atemporal, also truly non–contextual. In this series of events, and after twenty years of political indecisiveness, the construction of the Museum of Revolution was finally halted in 1981, and with this, it seems, so was the initial idea of the contemporary culture of politics. The politics of culture, on the other hand, was realized in its entire expression through the building of the Museum of Contemporary Art. As the only realization of contemporary architecture of its period, the Museum of Contemporary Art became a constitutive part of the contemporary city. The fundamental re–evaluation and redefinition of the central spirit and character of architectural modernity, from the position of modernistic discourse, was anticipated with this one building. Through the clear design of the architect, based on atemporal laws of proportionality and a complex plan for the interior organization of space, the architecture of the Museum confirms the definitive drift from the dilemma of modernism versus realism of the post-war period. The importance of the architect’s conception of the Museum of Modern Art is that in it a step was made toward the understanding of the lawfulness of the architectural work, outside of the determinants of a specific direction or style. Architectural criticism from the period recognizes exactly this aspect of the new building; Oliver Minić wrote “the building is by form completely abstract …more glass formed by mathematical laws, cold but beautiful with its transcendental forms.” Unlike a traditional museum, in which the visitor walks through a series of individual rooms, or separated museum spaces, the interior of the Museum of Contemporary Art is based on the simultaneous experience of different spatial entities and on the principles of an open plan and free flow of modern architecture. It realizes the principle that Le Corbusier calls promenade architecturale, by which the interior of the Museum is not experienced from one fixed point, but through the movement and change in position of the observer. The experience of the space is therefore variable, since the comprehension of the whole changes based on the path of movement and the placement of exhibits. The observer him/herself is also a dynamic part of the exhibit in this space, displayed for view, a participant in the manifestation of contemporary art. But, the new conception of the interior space again becomes an object of controversy. At a time when the public and politicians have finally accepted contemporary architecture, artists do not accept the simultaneous experience of several spatial entities of the interior, which, as they claim, prevents complete concentration on the artistic work. The painter Leonid Šejka, who is a trained architect, says that he becomes agoraphobic in the Museum, and that in it he feels as if he is at some sort of crossroads. The criticism directed toward the problem of contemplation of individual sculptures or paintings, however, did not take into consideration the changes that were already at the time heralded by contemporary artistic practice. The transparency of the modern space of the Museum of Contemporary Art provoked fear among some contemporaries, above all, fear of facing the change in practice of contemporary art and the experience of the contemporary space. This contemporary space in the interior of the Museum tests the very nature of the experience of private and public space in a new cultural institution. The specific quality of the architecture of this building can be found in the very fact that it acts, to paraphrase what Adrian Forty wrote about the new way of comprehending the character of post-war modern architecture, as a leader for specific forms of social experience. This aspect is of key importance in understanding the Museum of Contemporary Art: when we look at its unique interior space as a place of social interaction. With the principle of the open flow of space that was employed, the non–hierarchical organization of its equally valued exhibit spaces, and the absence of any type of commanding spatial authority gives every individual, artist and visitor the ability to, like everyone else, freely be in possession of the public space of the building. In the case of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the proprietor of the space is in fact always every subject in the space, and the owner of this building is none other than the patron.

Please contact cornelia.stellwag-carion@erstegroup.com to receive a copy of the catalogue for this exhibition