How long did you stay at the Happy Gallery (Srecna Galerija) and
whom did you collaborate with?
At the Happy Gallery usually one would work until graduation. There were students of art history, so before me there worked
Goranka Matic, Jasna Tijardovic and others. We worked with Slavko
Timotijevic and Dragica Vukadinovic. Slavko was the gallery manager, even though Dragica was the chief. Everything that was done
at the Gallery was done by Dragica. Slavko spent all of his life in art
business and commerce. An extremely capable merchant. He was
the type of merchant like Lija Kastelija and similar ones in those
times, that were the real promoters of the new artistic practice.
Slavko was a merchant, but he knew how to recognise art. Still, he
didn’t have much time to spend at the Gallery. He had his Renault 4
and he was always on his way all over the country bringing works
from other centres, Zagreb, Ljubljana that we would sell at the
Gallery. Daily work of the Gallery he would leave it all to Dragica. If
it weren’t for her, there wouldn’t have been any of the comics’ exhibitions and most probably any of the photography exhibitions. She
was the one with the ideas for the gallery programs. He would recognise good ideas and would develop them. I personally spent my time
at SKC mostly with the conceptualist active in those days – Rasa,
Nesa, Opus 4, that were doing music, then Pajkic, Goranka. They
were my generation, even though they were some ten years older
than me. Still, somehow everybody remembers me as a part of that
group, even though, by age, I belonged to the generation of artists
such as Mileta Prodanovic, Mrdjan Bajic… that were considered kids
then. I even did some exhibitions with Nesa, Rasa, Zoran Popovic at
SKC, and later on, even at the MSU Salon (Salon of the Museum of
the Contemporary Art), but I was never a conceptual artist. I did appreciate the concept, but I considered their method as the last resort
when no other material is suitable to express the idea. That’s when
one chooses performance, body art and similar. Since I never found
myself in such a dead-end, I never really worked on it.
In those days you worked on tactile sculpture?
That was a great interest of mine for some time. I was involved with it in the early ‘70’s, let’s say, in 1974. I had a whole set
of such sculptures. They were not projected for vision, but to be held
in hand. For such purpose I collected various objects, and some I
made myself. The exhibition of these works was thought for a visitor
that would sit down and than slowly would take one object after an-
Ring, 1974
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