> contents / Yugoslavian Networkers: Towards the Open World on an Unpaved Super Highway / John Held, Jr. /

The following material, reflecting over twenty years of mail art networking activity in the Baltic region, is drawn from the archives of Picasso Gaglione, who has been communicating through the post with artists from the area since the early seventies, and John Held, Jr., who visited Beograd and Novi Sad in 1989 and 1994, and met many of the networkers under discussion.

In addition, The Stamp Art Gallery issued a call for current materials early in 1996. Reflecting the current situation, contributions arrived from Germany and Switzerland, as well as Serbia and Slovenia, an acknowledgement of the displacement of the people and the re-mapping of the region.

Yugoslavian mail artists have played an important role in the networking experience for over twenty years. Creative exchange with international artists helped keep the lines of communication open for young intellectuals in Eastern Europe while living under repressive political institutions. Although their travel was restricted, through the postal system they were able to establish strong links to the worldwide artistic community.

The first mail art show took place in Yugoslavia in 1973 at the Students Culture Centre in Beograd. The show was first organized in Paris for the Seventh Youth Biennial. This began a wave of activity in the area, which has continued to increase across the region to this day.

The early seventies were marked by the publication of important periodicals linking Yugoslavian artists with their Western contemporaries. This activity was considered subversive in a society whose creative output was dominated by Writers and Artists Unions, whose membership strictly conformed to the political climate of the day.

We should note here what Geza Perneczky in his book The Magazine Network: The Trends of Alternative Art in the Light of Their Periodicals 1968-1988, has to say about the periodicals of the Yugoslavian underground art scene.

Yugoslavia was also a hotbed of artistic conspiracy out of which a number of underground magazines were published during these years. The first such magazine was issued by Dusan Bilejic in Belgrade in 1971. Entitled Neauroart, it was meant to manifest its destructive nature by appearing in an ever decreasing number of copies. The publication was but an accumulation of paper sheets, silk slips and assorted tiny objects. It looked like a provocative book-object. Its publication was suspended pretty soon, and so the editors could never reach their targeted 'zero-copy' issue.

The other conspiratorial experiment also dates from 1971. Launched in Novi Sad , the editors for this publication borrowed the title L.H.O.O.Q. from Marcel Duchamp's famous mustachioed imitation of the Mona Lisa. Editors Bogdanovic and Mandic usually printed their magazine on the pages of other legal publications. This 'cuckoos egg approach' was motivated by the editors' conviction that they'd never ever have the chance to publish an independent paper. The outcome of this 'priacy' was that the authorities banned the catering journal which gave L.H.O.O.Q. its piggyback ride. For all these hardships, the editors managed to publish a dozen issues. Meanwhile, Balint Szombathy launched a new experiment. Under the title Underground-Elevator, he published a 'magazine' which in fact was a sandpaper sheet folded in half. Szombathy's day came only upon the publication of a 30-copy assembling periodical by one of his friends, Vojislav Despotov, who borrowed the sandpaper sheets for use as covers for the latter's new magazine.

Pesmos was the title of Despotov's publication, which in fact was the first Yugoslav underground periodical to offer some reading material. Alongside the texts, Pesmos also carried visual poetry, photographs and conceptual works. Succeeding Pismos was Slavko Matkovic's paper, Kontaktor. A comparable anthology was also published in 1972-1973 by Balint Szombathy and Attila Csernik under the title Mixed Up Underground.

In fact, the history of these publications may very well remind the readers of the heroic days of the avantgarde movement. However, the intertwined motifs of illegality and a teen-age thirst for adventures did indeed spark off assembling as an independent and home-grown genre in Yugoslavia.

One the most important assembling magazines produced in Yugoslavia at this time was Westeast, compiled by Franci Zagoricnik. This was an early example of a magazine that collected original works by various artists and compiled the contributions under one combined work. Westeast attracted a number of foreign contributors, which made it an import focal point for the emerging international artistic network. The focus was often on visual poetry. Number 17, published in July-August 1979, was produced in 300 copies and included the works of Cavellini (Italy), Gaglione (USA), John Furnival (England), Timm Ulrichs (Germany), Robert Rehfield (East Germany) and Ulises Carrion (Holland). Yugoslavian contributors, who also appear in this present work, included Katalin Ladik, Slavko Matkovic, and Balint Szombathy.

Miroljub Todorovic was the editor of Signal, which has recently resumed publication after a twenty year hiatus. The last previously published Signal (8/9) was distributed in January 1973. Numbers 1, 2/3, and 8/9 included the contributions of Raoul Hausmann, Marina Abramovic, On Kawara, Sol Lewitt (USA), Richard Kostelanetz (USA), Julien Blaine (France), Klaus Peter Dencker (Germany), Michele Perfetti (Italy), Klaus Groh (Germany), Augusto de Campos, Clemente Padin (Uruguay), Adriano Spatola (Italy), Arrigo Lora Totino, Sarenco, Guillermo Deisler (Chile), John Furnival (England), Paul de Vree, Bob Cobbing (England), and others.

Total was another important mail art magazine, edited by Nenad Bogdanovic, which began publication in 1984. One of his most interesting issues was composed of works by Soviet artists, who were just entering the mail art network. In recent years Bogdanovic has been involved in an ongoing Networking Gallery project, in which he allows his body to function as an open space for the intervention of various international artists. He is one of the most active Yugoslavian networkers still participating in the international scene.

This tradition of independent magazine publication has been constant throughout mail art history of Yugoslavia and continues to this day. Perhaps the best known and longest running such publication is Open World, edited by Dobrica Kamperelic of Beograd, who began publishing this info-zine in 1985.

The format of Open World has remained constant. Four double sided and folded sheets are collaged and then xeroxed with a plethora of information on mail art shows, projects, photographs of performances, images from the network, rubber stamp impressions, news and network gossip. It remains the best source of networking news over a ten year period in the entire mail art circuit.

Each issue of Open World contains a brief introduction. It is in this personal prologue to the networking information that one can trace the deterioration of worsening tensions in the former Yugoslavia, and the resulting printed and social activism manifested by the artists involved in the conflict.

Among the most active Yugoslavian networkers during this period of crises is Alexander Jovanovich, who began to edit the magazine Cage to dramatize the unfairness of the cultural embargo placed against the Serbian people by the United Nations. Many of the other artists represented in this work, including Andrej Tisma, Sandor Gogolyk, Njaradi Vlado, and Dobrica Kamperelic, contributed to Cage magazine and participated in the associated actions protesting the cultural embargo.

Andrej Tisma, a long time mail artist and art critic for the Novi Sad newspaper, has called this enforced isolation of the Yugoslavian artist a "civilization gangrene," which "has the same effect as stopping the bloodstream on any part of the body, which after a while causes gangrene and sepsis of the entire organism." Tisma is one of the most prolific writers of mail art theory. His collected writings were the subject of a Stamp Art Gallery publication earlier in 1996.

It is this open communication that the Yugoslavian networkers fought so hard to insure while laboring under the cultural embargo placed on their country, which makes their actions of critical importance to others involved in the alternative arts. As a non-commercial artform, mail art is directed away from the marketplace and towards the free-flow of information among different cultures. The actions of the Yugoslavian networkers have paved a road available, yet often bypassed, to the international artistic community.

Sandor Gogolyk has put together an impressive body of work during this period. He has expressed his concern for open communication in performances and in the creation of artist postage stampsheets. He is one of several artists in this publication that currently reside in Odzaci, including Nenad Bogdanovic, Jaroslav Supek, and Alexandar Jovanovic.

Vlado Njaradi is another Yugoslavian artist, who has participated in the anti-embargo actions. He was the organizer for the mail art project, No Embargo for Arts, which started in May 1994, at the second anniversary of the imposition of the cultural embargo against Yugoslavia by the United Nations. The material received for the exhibition was displayed at the Golden Eye Gallery in Novi Sad, after the suspension of the embargo. He is also the creator of rubber stamps, artist postage stamps, and graphics in support of the anti-embargo actions. Most recently Nuaradi is curating the project 66666, which has attracted the participation of 140 artists from 19 countries.

During this time of crises in the Balkans, it was not only Serbian artists that were affected by the war. Svjetlana Mimica, a Croat living in Split, started her mail art activities in 1989, and has edited several mail art zines, including Light of the he-Art and Serious Intentions. In a difficult time the challenges are great. Even mailing a letter or receiving one is a problem.

Mimica has written that when she mails letters,

I have to bring it, opened to the officer and to explain what I send and why...I know they'll read it when I go out, not in the same post-office, but spies who work only on opening the letters. When I started with mail art, every letter I received has been wildly opened, the same with my letters abroad... Even now, but only if I write to some new person or some new person writes to me. I receive opened letters or something missing...stamp or some invitation...I can't color envelopes, if I do it, post-office wouldn't receive it, they don't like to receive stickered (with stickers) letters and if I put a rubber stamp they treat it as an official letter...

Ivan Jelincic Merlin is another Croatian mail artist. Formerly living in Zagreb, now he lives in Germany. It is revealing that his letter to me in 1988, which is reproduced in the present work, speaks of "empty acquaintances" and "agitated silence," conditions which precipitated tensions in the region.

Darko Vulic first wrote to me while he was living in Sarajevo in 1994. The letter was forwarded by the United Nations. Now Vulic is living in Basel, Switzerland, with his wife Sabine. He is a graphic artist of significant power.

Milena Tomanovic is represented in our catalog with a letter addressed to me in 1993 asking for assistance in contacting some sympathetic people in Greece, where she was planning to move. She was a correspondent, like myself, of Anines Macadam, from Buenos Aires, Argentina. In desperate times, the mail art network became a lifeline of hope.

Predrag Popovic Pedja has written,

What is mail art for me? It's a form of communication with people from different countries and cultures. I don't like to say I'm an artist, I'd rather say I'm into mail art (network). I am one man in the net with other people. In former Yugoslavia, communication was missing and war started.

In 1979 Goran Dordevic was seeking replies to the question of the practicality of an artist strike. He received statements from many well-known artists such as Hans Haacke, Carl Andre, Sol Lewitt, and Vito Acconci, and Lawrence Weiner, professional artists who expressed doubts about the strike's realization.

Dordevic wrote that,

The idea of the international artists strike is under present circumstances probably a utopia. However, as the processes of institutionalization of art activities are being successfully applied even to the most radical art projects, there is a possibility that this idea could one day become an actual alternative.

To make art in the circumstances of war becomes a meaningless activity unless the artist applies his knowledge of the creative process to problem solving, which can directly apply to the realities of the people he is in contact with. Under such conditions, it's better to give up art and get iinvolved with life.

During the war years in Yugoslavia, the art strike was acted out, because the mail artists of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Slovenia all had to confront a greater terror then ever faced before. They did not sell art to raise money for military supplies. They participated in group actions instead of individual exhibitions. For the most part, they were united in their belief that communication could overcome differences. This is a lesson they learned from their experiences in mail art, and which they tried to apply to a country in crisis.

The galvanizing factor of the period was the imposition of a cultural embargo - an artist strike placed upon the Serbs by the United Nations. Many foreign mail artists supported the networkers of Yugoslavia, because they knew that no good could come from isolation. The fight for an open world is the path to a new era in international relations. The networkers of Yugoslavia, under repression and in war, have been an example to all who seek a connected world at peace with itself.

Copyright © by John Held Jr. - Johnheldjr@aol.com