DOUBLE, INVISIBLE, HAND-MADE, EXPERIMENTAL: BOOKS AND MAGAZINES AS WORKS OF CONCEPTUAL ARTISTS FROM FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

Abstract

ABSTRACT______Examining artists’ publications is one of the rare ways of learning about the almost invisible conceptual practice that developed from the end of the 1960s to the early 1980s in former Yugoslavia. Recently, the value of the preserved remaining copies has increased. At the time of their creation, however, magazines and books as works of artists were distributed to friends and fellow artists, while the public seldom knew about them. Limited runs, manual production, and/or photocopying all contributed to the fragility of this material, which nonetheless bears important knowledge about one of the most interesting periods of postwar contemporary art in Yugoslavia. From the anti-magazine Gorgona, a medium for the exchange of thoughts distributed to a very limited audience, to the principles of appropriation, collage, and other neo-avantgarde procedures that stem from ethical attitudes and the deconstruction of reality presented in the artists’ magazine May 75, these authors produced their books and magazines by hand, pasting original works onto sheets or treating them as a ground on which they directly intervened in different ways.