Et In Barbaria
Ego
The exhibition »Et in Barbaria Ego« in the Meštrović
Pavilion, home of the Croatian Artists Association in
Zagreb, is the first step taken with the aim of
acquainting the general public with the Milivoj Bijelić
project of the same name. Since the 1980s, this
one-of-a-kind native of Zagreb has been a resident of
Dusseldorf. The exhibition, accompanied by two
simultaneous exhibitions in the Josip Račić Gallery
entitled U-zor [combining the meanings of model, U and
gaze] and Oče-vid [Oh father, sight, eyewitness] in
Galerija Canvas, where a selection of works from the
painting, printmaking and photographic oeuvre of this
artist is presented, with a focus on the new, is an
additional segment in the work of Bijelić in the last
three years. He is here adding to his art work a broader
dimension, one that includes reflections about the
experiences of art current since the 1990s, known as
institutional criticism, art in public space and art as a
service activity, all the way to community-based art and
condition art. But rather than referring to similarities
with these phenomena, Bijelić’s project reveals a
divergence from them, which is particularly evident in
the very specific place for the project √ Bribir,
Dalmatia, Croatia, with its distinctive topology and
history, which by chance determines to an extent
Bijelić’s biography, thus implying issues about the
relations of the personal and the collective or
territorial destiny, and also giving rising to new
considerations about what it is that creates and
determines the contemporary culture industry in general,
about (anti-)globalisation and the influence of
corporations, about the autonomy and context of the
system of art.
Et in
Barbaria Ego is a comprehensively considered, open,
artistically devised and socially committed project that
implies, among other things, creations that combine and
further elaborate forms of artistic work known already to
date, such as the permanent installation and the work in
progress. These can be manifested in site-specific works,
as well as in processes in which the working and
existential experiences of domestic and foreign artists
and creative minds of the most diverse origins
(architects, sociologists, philosophers, writers) are
swapped and compared. Apart from being internationally
oriented, the work is site-specific and concretely
located in the premises of the old school building in
Bribir (made available to the project for the next twenty
years, thanks to the support of the Ministry of Culture).
It is intended that in this old school, after the
necessary renovation of the war-devastated fabric, one of
the first steps towards effectuating the programme,
activities of invited artists and other participants will
go on. These will be one-off affairs, and yet the
programme will also aim at the development of a permanent
display, of a collection and an archive, the creation of
which is the result of a processual approach to the
polysemous thematic framework and further elaborations on
the project.
This concrete hub of the project was preceded by an art
history background, which relates to the utopian
inspiration and often semantically modified history of
the theme Et in Arcadia Ego, which drew the attention of
creative artists from Antiquity to for example Goethe,
Schiller, Schubert… Arcadia, which is considered a place
of happiness, is often represented in word and image in a
setting of pastoral games. These features can be found in
the Croatian, local-patriotism oriented dramatist Ivan
Gundulić, for example, whose dream, a few centuries
later, was painted by his fellow countryman Vlaho
Bukovac. In the modern age the topic and phrase Et in
Arcadia Ego has been attentively interpreted by the
scholar Erwin Panofsky who has led us from the idea of
Arcadia as a place of primordial happiness and beauty (in
Virgil for example) to the polysemous possibilities for
responses and interpretations. There is for example the
reading in which this admonition resounds √ Even in
Arcadia, there is death (Guercino, 1621-1623), or that
which speaks nostalgically √ I too lived in Arcadia
(still used today, although an ungrammatical and
impossible reading) to the consolatory “Even in death
there can be an Arcadia”.
At the exhibition Et in Barbaria ego there is a
reproduction of the Poussin version of the Arcadian theme
(the second, 1640-1645 version of the
painting, now in the
Louvre) in the form of an enlarged section of the
familiar painting as mere staffage, just leaning against
a model of the school building in Bribir. It possible,
and at the same time questionable, that Bijelić is
thereby making the theme current in relation to the
concrete place of Bribir or that he is subjecting the
post-modern fondness for the quotation mode to
irony.
In any event, the historical background is evoked
metaphorically in the project with the very name of
Barbaria, which corresponds both with Arcadia and with
the concrete history of the selected location: Bribir, a
place in the Šibenik and Knin County, located below the
important architectural site Brbirska glavica, the
ancient and Liburnian settlement (Varvariae), which was
in the Middle Ages the seat of the rulers of this part of
Croatia, the Šubić family. Its present day state (and
that of a number of other, similar places in Croatia) is
marked by no traces of cultural and historical continuity
but rather of the devastation and despoliation of the
last war. In its wonderment of the fact of this current
situation, the cultural and social project called Et in
Barbaria Ego is directed at the revitalisation and
culturalisation of the area, less with a propagandistic
call for a better future, and much more with a belief in
the checkable real effect of the presence of the activity
of artists in real and actual givens √ with for example
issues at the level of the meaning of barbarianism as
against culture. On the other hand and at the same time,
the place of Bribir, as genius loci and as the place of
an artistic project (Bijelić’s), with its specific,
geo-cultural and political position marks (in the past
and future projection) a not entirely isolated
contemporary context of the peripheral space, which is
defined by those (increasingly more evident) forms of
artistic approach typified by a departure from the
routine mechanisms of culture production with the effect
of a historical insight into the process of the origins
of cultural parameters. Such efforts prefer the
periphery, the marginal as against the centre, and set
new criteria in cultural identification √ the older
pioneering examples of this kind of activity in the last
decades were, for example, Marfa, Texas, realised by the
American artist Donald Judd (christened by critics as
Bauhaus Texas for its need to rely on the tradition of
the Modern); the Mariposa/Tenerife project put on by
Helga and Hans-Jurgen Muller); Bruce Nauman in Arizona
and Insel Hombroich in Germany. The interest of these
projects inheres in their being persistent in work that
is organised locally while retaining an international
determination, resisting the charms (recently called the
mainstream) of the global, insisting on a critical
distance, without demands for elitism. This is an
experimental approach that elaborates seriously
considered (market-oriented only and hence evaluated as
successful) and alternative models of cultural and
artistic activity within the Western and globalised
world. Such examples are clearly in want of the naïve of
the pre-post-modern impetus of avant-garde origin, but
they are not at all in want of the characteristic trait
of the still more distant relative of homo ludens. In
this combination the position and real genius locus
(Bribir) and utopia (Arcadia) become a “different space”
close to the heterotopias of Michel Foucault, the space
in which there is interference of the public character of
cultural activity and the autonomy of artistic and
creative orientations.
Prof. Dr.
Blazenka Perica
Düsseldorf, July 2007