An American Tragedy: In the Zagreb footsteps of Tomislav Gotovac

It’s not easy to work in Paris, as it is in Rome, for instance, or Madrid, or Zagreb, which is heaven. You didn’t even need special police permission for the streets. You just go out and ask people to move aside... The whole town is like a back lot. – Orson Welles

Zagreb is the place with the sun – and the planets. Unique in the world, the Croatian capital encompasses within its boundaries a colossal scale model of the solar system. Ivan Kožarić installed Prizemljeno sunce (The Grounded Sun) in 1971; Davor Preis completed the job with Devet pogleda (Nine Views) in 2004, placing metallic spheres representing nine planets (including Pluto) of appropriate sizes and at appropriate distances relative to the sun. To navigate this city is thus, in conceptual terms, to wander freely beyond the Earth’s gravitational pull.

Zagreb is also unique for other reasons. For example, try walking down Unter den Linden in Berlin, or Champs Elysées in Paris, or Broadway in New York, stark bollock naked, periodically shouting “Berlin (/Paris/New York), I love you!”, and see what happens. In Zagreb you will of course be arrested eventually, but not before attracting considerable applause and approving smiles from all Zagrebians who were around on Friday the 13th of September, 1981 or who know what happened there on that date.

At precisely noon, city resident and all-around creative enfant terrible Tomislav Gotovac achieved his most famous work of performance art, titled Ležanje gol na asfaltu, ljubljenje asfalta [Zagreb, volim te!], hommage Howardu Hawksu i njegovu filmu Hatari – or, in English: Lying Naked on the Pavement, Kissing the Pavement (Zagreb, I Love You!). Homage to Howard Hawks’ Hatari!

Accompanied by photographer Ivan Posavec, the latter chronicling the event for posterity and implicitly validating its artistic status, 44-year-old Gotovac emerged entirely naked (and hairless, having shaved both head and beard) from the number 8 building on the city’s main street, Ilica. He then made his triumphal way for seven minutes along the tram-tracks to the main square, Trg bana Jelačića, proclaiming his ardour for Zagreb at the top of his voice. On arrival at the square, he bent down to kiss the asphalt – and was duly apprehended by the police on the basis of disturbing public order.

Cleaning of Public Spaces, 1981. Photos: Ivan Posavec. Courtesy of Tomislav Gotovac Institute.

This was actually the fourth such naked extravaganza by Gotovac, starting with his uninhibited performance in the lead role of Lazar Stojanović’s feature-length avant-garde film Plastic Jesus (1971). The quickly-banned student thesis film was made during Gotovac's 1967-1976 residence in the Yugoslavian capital, where he was studying at the Academy of Theatre, Film, Radio and Television. Apart from this sojourn – and his four earliest years in his birthplace Sombor, a provincial Serbian backwater best known for also spawning NBA superstar Nikola Jokić – Gotovac was always very much a citizen of Zagreb. Maybe even the citizen par excellence.

An enduring legend in the artistic community and a considerable celebrity beyond – widely regarded, along with Serbia’s Marina Abramović (nine years his junior, and who he inspired to enter performance), as one of the most important pioneers in the field of performance art – the irresistibly charismatic Gotovac’s contribution to the metropolis was immortalised in bronze three years after his death in 2010. On the pavement outside Ilica 8, a plaque displays an artistic representation of his footprints and thus commemorates both his feat and his feet (humour was a significant element in his artistic arsenal).

Installation view. Courtesy of National Gallery of Arts in Tirana.

A decade after unveiling the footprints, a major Gotovac exhibition was organised at Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, or MSU) under the off-puttingly unwieldy moniker Tomislav Gotovac a.k.a. Antonio G. Lauer: Ascending Descending Genealogy (opening in February 2024, it was recently announced that the show was extended to May 26th, 2024). Based mainly on a 2021 show at the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana (Albania), the exhibition at the grandiose MSU brought together artefacts from his various artistic practices: performance, photography and filmmaking. Indeed, beyond Croatia, Gotovac’s name remains almost as closely associated with avant-garde film as with performance art. He made more than 40 films, the most acclaimed of which was his second, the eight-minute black-and-white triptych Prije podne jednog fauna (The Forenoon of a Faun, 1963), in which three simple sequences shot by Gotovac in Zagreb are overlaid with sound extracts appropriated from Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962) and George Pal’s The Time Machine (1960).

Gotovac was obsessed with cinema from his teenage years, specifically mainstream Hollywood cinema. Anthony Mann’s The Glenn Miller Story (1954) was evidently a particular favourite; the real Miller and his filmic representation via James Stewart figured repeatedly in the exhibition; likewise Howard Hawks, cited by name in the title of the ‘Zagreb, I Love You’ performance – with specific reference to the rhinoceros-hunting scene in Hatari! (1962). As Gotovac commented, “The rhino symbolizes the rejection of the existence of any obstacle.”

Uniquely among Eastern European nations following the Second World War, Yugoslavia was open to cultural imports from the United States: Gotovac’s passionate but cerebral embrace of American movies mirrors that of his counterparts from elsewhere in the continent such as Godard, Truffaut, Fassbinder and Wim Wenders – men (and this is very much a matter of males) whose consciousness and sensibility were irretrievably altered, for good and ill, by their inescapable, all-pervasive influence; “The Yankees have colonized our subconscious”, as Bruno in Wim Wenders’ Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road, 1976) semi-ruefully remarks.

Gotovac’s own most enduring quotation: “čim ujutro otvorim oči, vidim film” (when I open my eyes in the morning, I see a movie). For him, life was a movie, and movies were life. In a Zagreb cinema in 1952 (aged 15) he saw George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951) – a torrid romance starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters. As a display-board in the MSU exhibition puts it, he “noted that this was his rebirth, adding that he could watch it every day.”

MSU attendees were afforded the chance to experience brief parts of Stevens’ picture via a section of the exhibition devoted to Gotovcac’s Duchampian ready-mades: seven television monitors showing looped extracts from a Hollywood film of the early 1950s, headphones providing the audio. Two of the seven clips were taken from A Place in the Sun, which was adapted for Paramount Pictures by Michael Wilson and Harry Brown from Theodore Dreiser’s landmark 1925 novel An American Tragedy. No elucidation was suggested as to why Gotovac was so infatuated with this particular film; the exhibition was exhaustive in its panoramic survey of Gotovac’s career – including a selection of nude self-portraits (“Some context of the exhibition is not suitable for minors” warned a couple of signs) – but light on actual analysis.

Ruke (Hands), 1964. Photos: Petar Blagojevic Arandjelovic. Courtesy of Tomislav Gotovac Institute.

Overwhelming in scale, if naggingly lacking in real coherence, the exhibition was, according to another display board, “based on the concept of scoring designed by the French curator Pierre Bal-Blanc, who organized the first iteration of the show in Tirana. The two levels of the exhibition space accommodate five conceptual partitions interconnected by a series of associations.” Again, visitors wishing to know more about Bal-Blanc and his “concept of scoring” had to conduct such research for themselves. The curator created his first scores for performance exhibition while he was director of Contemporary Art Center Brétigny. Bal-Blanc’s recent credits also include as co-curator of documenta 14 and guest curator for the 7th Lyon Biennial.

In this regard, the exhibition was perhaps more a starting point for potential engagement with Gotovac and his ideas rather than a destination or encapsulation. This fits with Gotovac’s evident philosophy that everything in his life was both connected with his artwork and was indeed artistic in itself: the life was the art and the art was the life.

Among the relatively small number of actual Gotovac-created pieces, Sarah (1977) stood out: a series of ordinary wooden boxes each containing a stack of neatly-bound newspapers, each protruding more prominently than the next. An intriguing work, whose meaning only became apparent if one knew that Sarah is the name of his daughter (much of this exhibition was drawn from her collection.) Presumably this was Gotovac’s way of representing, dealing with and commemorating her emergence into the world.

Glave (Heads), 1970. Photo: Juan Carlos Ferro Duque. Courtesy of Tomislav Gotovac Institute.

One of the most humdrum and quotidian – but fascinating, and even moving – items on display was the scuffed white two-metre-tall front door of Gotovac’s apartment at 9 Krajiška Street, affixed to a wall of the museum and moveable on its hinges. It has two locks, a chain, and a spy-hole. Way up above towards the ceiling are 25 framed black-and-white photographs which catalogue the flat immediately following the demise of its longtime resident, his mother: Nakon Beškine smrti (After Beška's Death, 1978).

The front of the door displays two small rectangular metallic name-plates: ANTONIO LAUER above T. GOTOVAC (he changed his artistic name to Antonio G. Lauer, in honour of his mother’s maiden name, in 2005). On the back, one on top of the other, posters for Gotovac shows, one from 1978 and one from 1993. In both, the artist is pictured with his back to the camera, a kind of lo-fi Caspar David Friedrich Rückenfigur. These would have been the last things he saw whenever he left his apartment, a droll foreshadowing of his imminent departure. On either side of the posters are small religious icon stickers of the Virgin Mary; on the left, somewhat randomly, a fabric patch of the Norwegian flag; on the right, a tiny post-it note with the biro-written block capitals message U KUPOVINI SAM / T. : “I’m shopping.”

The life is the art is the life. The paradox of the MSU exhibition is that collecting, displaying and commemorating (and containing) Tomislav Gotovac’s work in this particular city simply cannot be done within the walls of an institution. Lying Naked on the Pavement, Kissing the Pavement (Zagreb, I Love You!). Homage to Howard Hawks’ Hatari! technically began with the noon-day gun on Friday the 13th, February 1981, and officially lasted for seven minutes. But there is no end point in conceptual art: just as scientists have worked out that every breath taken by every individual on planet Earth today contains one molecule of Julius Caesar’s final breath (but only his?), Gotovac’s presence remains forever infused in the very air and the very stone of his city. To walk these streets is not only to navigate the solar system, but to participate in an unending Tomislav Gotovac performance. Zagreb, volimo te!