Dietmar Unterkofler: Grupa 143: Critical Thinking at the Borders of Conceptual Art, 1975–1980 (2012) [Serbian/English]

The late-conceptualist art collective Group 143 was founded in March 1975 by Biljana Tomić in Belgrade as an open educational and theoretical platform at the Student Cultural Centre. Besides Tomić, the other key figures in the group were Miško Šuvaković, Jovan Čekić, Paja Stanković, Neša Paripović, and Maja Savić. The group worked together for five years, producing a broad range of artistic work in the media of photography, film, the artist’s book, diagrams and charts, public lectures, and performance art. Their research was focused primarily on epistemological and theoretical questions about the “art world” in general and the critical potential of intellectualized art-thinking within the conditions of late socialism in Yugoslavia.

The theoretical foundation of their art was shaped by structuralist and post-structuralist French theory, language philosophy, post-constructivism, and British and American conceptual art. Their last public presentation of their work came in August 1980, when Group 143 had a solo exhibition at Galerija Loža in Koper. (Source)

Grupa 143: kritičko mišljenje na granicama konceptualne umetnosti 1975-1980
Publisher Glasnik, Belgrade, 2012
ISBN 9788651915539
393 pages

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Dawn Ades, Simon Baker (eds.): Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS (2006)

“In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille—poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled “enemy within” surrealism—used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris. Featuring 180 color images and translations of original texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille’s still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso’s Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille’s radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader.”

With contributions by Fiona Bradley, Neil Cox, Caroline Hancock, Denis Hollier, William Jeffett, CFB Miller, Michael Richardson, and Ian Walker.

Publisher Hayward Gallery, London, with MIT Press, Cambridge/MA, 2006
ISBN 1853322504, 9781853322501
272 pages

Exh. reviews: Peter Suchin (Frieze), Benjamin Noys (Radical Philosophy), John Phillips and Ma Shaoling (Theory, Culture & Society).
Wikipedia

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PDF (104 MB, updated on 2020-2-20)

Louise O’Konor: Viking Eggeling, 1880-1925: Artist and Film-maker: Life and Work (1971)

Louise O’Konor’s book is the first biography of Viking Eggeling, a Swedish avant-garde artist and filmmaker connected to dada, constructivism and abstract art and one of the pioneers of absolute film and visual music. The book is a result of 12 years of research in public and private archives in Europe and in the USA, and is a significant contribution to the history of dada and early abstract, animated film.

Translated by Catherine G. Sundström and Anne Bibby
Publisher Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm, 1971
299 pages
via DiVA Academic Archive

PDF (165 MB, updated on 2013-12-8)
Watch Eggeling’s Diagonale Symphonie (1924) on UbuWeb