Hilde Brom: Your work, The Other Side of Us, is obviously intended for the audience of the Centre Culturel de Serbie in Paris, dealing as it does with the former president Francois Mitterand, but it also relates to Buren and the rise of text as a medium in the Conceptualism of the 1960s and 1970s. Do you have trouble leaving politics out of the frame of art history?
Djordje Bojić : Yes Buren is of a generation that was changed by political developments: there is no strict line connecting social shifts and political turmoil to an art practice known as Conceptual Art, but they did inform it, allowed for it. The Algerian war, May ’68 etc. My contemporaries and I experienced similar turmoil albeit of an apparently reactionary sort. What I always want to explore in my work is the current apathy in the West, amongst the youth and a generation only coming to age, and if this allows for any frisson, any exciting outcomes. All I see around me is this resignation. And not only in the face of Bush and his stooges, but with history itself. European history. My history. So yes, The Other Side of Us wants to expose Mitterand for what he did with regard Sarajevo. But Buren, as examplar, was suspicous of political statements as works of art and I would like to think I agree with him; that is way text for me is never to be allowed to stand alone, unchallenged, but is manipulated, distorted, pushed to its semiological limits.
HB: Power and its structures are at the root of a lot of your artwork, often tied up with the subversion of political imagery and symbolism. I’m thinking of the early work such as the Ikonoklasm exposition that showed in Hungary and Austria. But language, also always present, is itself a power structure for you.
DB: Of course it is: someone like Foucault shows the way and the end point has certainly not been reached. Language is my main medium, my tool of choice, and this is logical considering my background in philosophy and literature. Iconography holds an important place in the mindset of people coming from places where Orthodoxy is prevalent: Icons have a power connected to them and a reverence preserved for them, an equivalent of which is not easily found in the West. This fascinates me as much as the manipulation of language and what I’ve always tried to do, since that first show in Budapest, is marry the two: icon and language, subverting one to subvert the other.
HB: Appropriation is key to this process isn’t it?
DB: Yes and you find language everywhere, language that has already been manipulated and which is exercising power over the everyday world, over the viewer. I work within the everyday and what it has to offer me; I try not to make any of my texts up. All forms of language can be used to convery ideas, messages and that has always been what I endeavour to achieve. Well look, even the interview has become a tool for the artist: since the 1950s – I’m thinking here of Artists on Art, a translation of which, along with the 1974 second edition, was very important for me educationally – the interview has joined the ranks of the press release or manifesto, statements or even taught classes. It is education. Language transformed, shared; thoughts found and discussed. Power: like a game of tennis. And in the match between LGB artists and our societies, sometimes I’m worried we are losing.
HB: To bring in Buren again and his Art Monthly interview he stated that avantgardes are ‘a reaction agaisnt the society as a whole’. You do see yourselves as avantgarde? In the beginning it is safe to say that you clearly met this definition.
DB: LGB met the criteria of this definition in Serbia and Hungary, very much so. Our exhibitions and methods were avantgarde because of the form, as much as for the politics. But once we left and got our visas we lost that propulsion. Hans Haacke underwent a similar change and it is only natural; more so in a group. A work such as Bus is an effort at individualisation. Simple poems that before I would have worked on with Milos Lubardo were, in more recent shows ‘bent backwards’, made into objects and stretched across the gallery’s walls until they stated a personal message or intention. Phenomenologically decorative but ontologically opaque. Self-indulgent! That is what avantgardes do: they converse with themselves until that point in time when everyone else catches up. We now have to ask ourselves: has society butted in on our conversation?