M77 Vladan Radovanović

The Vocovisual (1984)

The Serbian artist and composer Vladan Radovanović (b. 1932) is a pioneer of early electronic music, sound art and Concrete poetry. Like many of the avant-garde who emerged in Yugoslavia in the 1950s and early 1960s, including the artists of Exat 51 (M14), Gorgona (M20) and the OHO group (M32), he created works that defied the state-enforced cultural orthodoxy of Socialist Realism by drawing on influences that derived from earlier modern art movements such as Dada. As a brief member of the Belgrade group Mediala, he had promoted happenings and gestural actions, but in the late 1950s he turned his attention to an entirely new artistic genre.

Radovanović’s most distinctive work consists of interdisciplinary compositions that blend sounds, words and the human body in three-dimensional space in order to transcend the traditional boundaries between art disciplines and directly engage with everyday society. These he called the ‘vokovizuel’, a concept later explored by the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan in his 1967 book Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations. Restlessly inventive, Radovanović devised minimalist chorales, experimented with tape music and in 1976 devised Yugoslavia’s first computer composition, Kompjutorija (Computoria).

In Belgrade in July 1984, Radovanović published a slim pamphlet entitled Vokovizuel to accompany an exhibition of the same name. Its text (reproduced in its entirety below) explained the theoretical underpinnings of what he believed was a unique artistic synthesis of sound, form and meaning.

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The interpretation of the vocovisual as an artistic genre, and my special VV poetics (or Sema Synthesis), have been determined through my work since 1954 and theoretically since the 1960s.

The vocovisual is a common term for the entire tendency from Simmias to date that despite its literary origin is neither poetry nor any other single medium genre. Today this can be seen as an independent art genre. It is an interdisciplinary, multimedia art that involves not only the visual and phonetic but also the tactile, kinetic and so forth. Despite being a multimedia discipline, it is different from mixed media, multimedia and intermedia in its designative meaning. By the same token the visual in the vocovisual may be distinguished from that in the plastic arts, as the phonic is different from that in music. The vocovisual is characterized by signs of a conventional and allusive type (including verbal and iconic signs), but not by those of a self-acting type. As in all arts, the basic type of meaning is designative, but in the vocovisual, artistic impact comes through an encounter of formal and designative meaning. The vocovisual is in continual semantic and syntactic interaction between artistic and extra-artistic realms. The designative quality expresses itself through the thematic. The theme can be anything (metaphysical, scientific, social, political, literary), but there must be a theme.

My own special poetics are just a part of the vocovisual and a synthesis, in a way, of features of ‘figured verse’, the symbolic letter, and those of the more recent poetics (concrete, visual, sound, kinetic, and spatial), but should not be identified with any tendentious poetics.