Tomislav Gotovac

Tomislav Gotovac (Sombor, Yugoslavia, 1937 - Zagreb, Croatia, 2010) was a prominent visual artist, photographer, performer, and filmmaker active during the second half of the 20th century. He was a fundamental member of the Croatian artistic avant-garde, being the first artist to stage a happening in the country and one of the driving forces of Yugoslav experimental underground cinema in the mid-1960s. With a worn-out confidence in politics, a radical attitude, and a tenacious determination to unite art and life, his artistic expression became a vehicle for change. Gotovac's work has transcended its time, influencing later international visual artists, performers, and filmmakers. His earliest works, photographic series and experimental films, date from the early 1960s, and already evidence an interchange between cinematographic and photographic elements that would characterize and consolidate his later output. In the early 1960s, he introduced social themes into his work, establishing a relationship between art and politics that resulted in works about the docility of the masses and the questioning of concepts such as social conformity. Gotovac was an activist whose tools were his body and his personality, a naked and uninhibited body and a personality marked by a tenacious perseverance in uniting art and life. He developed a contemporary and consistent language that began with the reinterpretation of historical political events and the exposure of everyday politics, giving rise to creations in which he ridiculed positions of power and all those who served them. Such was the relationship he established between his own life and his artistic experience that he designated each stage of his life as if it were an artistic movement: he called the period from 1956 to 1967 "Work Action"; that from 1967 to 1976 "Art Education Action"; The period between 1976 and 1986, "Haircut and Shaving Action," and the decade from 1986 to 1996, the most important in his output, "Paranoia View Art Action." During this latter period, Gotovac developed a worldview in which, through the lens of paranoia, he reinterpreted political events to place them in cause-and-effect relationships and deconstruct manipulation.