ART Habens Art Review ART Habens Art Review - Special Issue #97 | Page 58

ART Habens
Ante Kustre
overnight, removed from the shelves or thrown
into garbage bins: some due to ideological
reasons, (ie Marxist literature), and some
fiction just because it was published in Serbian
language. My personal response to these
general attacks to books was series of
performances in public spaces in which I
burned inappropriate books: “Pretty books,
pretty flame” (as a paraphrase of the movie
“Pretty village, pretty flame”). I sold books by
kilos in performance “Liber – libra” and thrown
them into the sea “One book per capita
piscis”; and in the performance “Fahrenheit
451” I glued the red plastic folium sign “F 451”
near the door of the main bookstore in Split (
which definetelly closed, few weeks ago, as
last one bookstore in the town!). .In these
years, poverty knocked my door strongly and
books from my own library helped me to
survive – I used to sell them in antique shops
when I ran out of money. As you can see I am
fond of flashbacks in my narration, but I need
to get back in my answer to your question;
actually to Zagreb, which was culturally a very
alive city, in the European context, and I was
“provincially” hungry.
Shortly, I was swallowing books and movies in
Zagreb, music and paintings. But I didn’t get
fat and my taste stays the same: I still love fat)
books and slim women. Zagreb was also the
first place of painful rejection and no
recognition of me being a visual artist. In that
time, hyperrealism was in its peak of
popularity and in the bottom of my personal
taste.I came to an idea to make a
hyperrealisms’ exhibition of portraits: using
framed mirrors of different sizes! I would have
exhibited one auto-portrait: I would be
standing, one to two hours, in the gallery in
front of one mirror. There would be a group
portrait with the dog too: before the big mirror,
I would have tied the dog and the group of
spectators would see the group portrait. I
presented this proposal to the curator of the
SC Gallery, which was a salient spot of
contemporary and experimental art at the
time. He refused my idea with the explanation
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