M20 Josip Vaništa

Untitled (Gorgona Manifesto) (1961)

Gorgona was a Croatian anti-art movement founded in Zagreb in 1959 by a group of artists, architects and critics who aspired to art that embraced absurdity, nihilism, irony and black humour. The name ‘Gorgona’ was chosen randomly from a poem written by the artist, historian and critic Dimitrije Bašičević (1921–87), who operated under the pseudonym ‘Mangelos’ (M67).

The group’s ideology was similar to that of Group Zero, and the Fluxus movement, with which they were in contact, in that it critiqued the alienation and dissatisfaction of everyday life. They rejected the conventional art practices promoted in Yugoslavia for more ephemeral actions and street happenings, as well as for pamphlets and handmade books. The movement emerged at an uncertain time in Yugoslavian politics. The liberalism which was supposed to have come from breaking with the Soviet Union in the late 1940s was less progressive than anticipated under Marshal Josip Tito. As a result, Gorgona events were discreet, word-of-mouth affairs that relied on photography for documentary evidence. However, their sense of radical modernism was to inspire later Yugoslavian conceptual artists, including members of the Slovenian OHO group (M32) and the Croatian Six Authors group.

Gorgona published an ‘anti-magazine’, also called Gorgona, which was a work of art in itself, and in which they promoted Gorgonesque ideology and Gorgonesque behaviour. Here, in the first number, issued in late March–early April 1961, Josip Vaništa (b. 1924) set out their manifesto.

* * *

Gorgona is serious and simple.

Gorgona stands for absolute transience in art.

Gorgona seeks neither product nor result in art.

It judges according to the situation.

Gorgona is contradictory.

It defines itself as the sum of all its possible definitions.

Gorgona is constantly in doubt …

Valuing most that which is dead.

Gorgona speaks of nothing.

Undefined and undetermined.

Zagreb 1961