alogue of the exhibition. I was one of the artists represented at that
exhibition, there might have been some ten of my sculptures. Since,
after the exhibition, I had no place to conserve them, they were all
quite large, I threw them all away. Basically, I used to make those
monochrome sculptures for two major reasons. First of all, so that
my work could not be identified with the coloristic expressionism of
the trans-avant-garde, as it was considered at the time. Second of
all, for me an important idea was the one of the exclusion of the
everyday use objects from use. All those objects that I would letter,
they were real objects. It was extremely important for me that the
objects I worked upon had some properties of the originals. I would
buy new objects, shoes, watches, shirts and I would enclose them
with newspapers. The point was that all those objects were new and
usable, not some trash ready for waist, and that I felt bad throwing
away. I wanted, thought this treatment, to annul them. That was my
idea. Later on, some of the sculptures I thought I threw away, I found
in my mother’s cellar by chance, as I was preparing the “Hares and
Hounds” (“Grammas and frogs” (Babe i zabe)). The cellar was full.
There was work made before and in the ‘80’s. From 1987 I didn’t exhibit any longer. What helped me at the time of the trans-avant-garde
was the freedom not to be necessarily a conceptual artist. Conceptualists were hibernated at the time. The greatest Belgrade critics did,
overnight, changed their minds and started pushing the trans-avantgarde. There were Mileta, Tahir Lusic, and Nada Alavanja….
Your relationship with the soc-realist art gained a new direction at
that moment?
That was the time of the great exhibition at Usce, “200 years
of American Painting”. That’s when I saw Jackson Pollock live and
other things. Tito had died already. It was autumn. And I had found,
in front of some elementary school, a great red flag with a hammer
and sickle. They were renovating the school, so they protected the
floor with it or something similar and it was all stained. With all the
colour drips it looked just like a Jackson Pollock. Since the flag was
red and the colour drips were white, I wanted to add the blue, because of our three-colour flag, and also to associate it with the army
where they used to divide the teams into reds and blues and the
blues would always win. On the other hand, I didn’t insist it to look
like a Pollock, but like a bad version of a Pollock. I combined it with
a soc-realist sculpture that I made inspired by the work of my former
professor at the Atelier. My basic ide