Led Art: Documents of Time: 1993-2003 (2020)

“In an extraordinary socio-political turmoil that shoved Yugoslavia into a war and complete international isolation during the 1990s, activity in culture and the arts was one of possible ways to survive and not be drowned in cataclysmic reality. Under those circumstances, in 1993 painter Nikola Džafo has found Led Art (Ice Art) group. Its projects bear the epithet of engaged art that resisted the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Led Art gathered more than 300 individuals in close to fifty projects during the ten-year activity period: artists, sociologists, art historians, journalists, scientists. This book covers the activities of the group and the chronology of the social and political events in the former Yugoslavia.”

Translated by Goran Mimica and Svetozar Poštić
Publisher Multi-media center Led Art, Novi Sad, 2020
ISBN 9788690537570
254 pages
via Struron

PDF (23 MB)

Superstudio: Supersurface: An Alternative Model for Life on Earth (1972)

“Produced for the 1972 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Lanscape, Supersurface was the first of five films planned by Superstudio as a ‘critical reappraisal of the possibility of life without objects’. Superstudio envisioned a ‘network of energy and information extending to every properly inhabitable area’. According to the artists, this network would bring about the destruction of objects as status symbols, the elimination of the city as an accumulation of formal structures of power, and the end of specialized and repetitive work as an alienating activity. ‘The logical consequence,’ they write, ‘will be a new, revolutionary society in which everyone should find the full development of his possibilities’. Although only two of the films were ever completed, Superstudio published storyboards and texts for the entire project, entitled Five Fundamental Acts: Life, Education, Ceremony, Love and Death. Addressing the first of these five acts, Supersurface presents ‘an alternative model for life on earth’ in which the ‘network of energy and information’ is represented by grids and images of technology superimposed on a collage of natural and inhabited landscapes peopled by families engaged in domestic and leisure activities.”

9:30 minutes
via Radical Architecture, HT joost rekveld

Commentary: Superstudio (MoMA catalogue, 1972), Cristiano Toraldo di Francia (n.d.), Ross K. Elfline (Footprint, 2011).

WorldCat

WEBM

Artists & Agents: Performance Art and Secret Services (2019)

“Artists & Agents puts the spotlight on a neglected aspect of performance art from the 1960s to the 1990s: the interaction between secret services and performance art – an art form which the secret service agencies of communist Eastern European countries considered especially dangerous. Eastern Europe is one of the few places where archival records have been made public, and they reveal how these agencies acted to “undermine” and “eliminate” dissident artists. To achieve this objective, however, the agents themselves sometimes had to become “performance artists.”

Building on in-depth research into the archival records of secret services in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Germany, this publication shines a light on the files which the secret services of these countries kept about such artists. It showcases instances of artistic subversion and agent infiltration, some of which have not been disclosed before, while more recent works demonstrate that the issue of ramping up intelligence gathering operations in politics and everyday life is highly topical. This catalogue includes an introduction, a glossary explaining secret service terminology, entries on the relevant works of art, and background information on all of the files presented.”

Edited by Inke Arns, Kata Krasznahorkai, Sylvia Sasse, and HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstverein)
Publisher Kettler, Dortmund, 2019
Open access
ISBN 9783862068395, 3862068390
224 pages

Interview with curators: Map (2021, DE).
Exh. review: Georg Imdahl (FAZ, 2019, DE).

Exhibition
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (11 MB)