I absolutely reject the social exploitation of concepts [1]

In June, we celebrated the tenth anniversary of The Spot Gallery with an exhibition by Željko Jerman and a series of accompanying events. On this occasion, we have prepared several texts reflecting on the artistic practice of this author. The first in the series is a text by Sandra Križić Roban.

Often in the evening, when everything is quiet and all the movement around me has died down, I look towards one of my living room walls. It took some time for me to start discerning a human figure in the tumultuous, fractured shapes, produced by treating the surface of photosensitive paper with chemicals. I do not know if it was there from the beginning, if the artist envisioned it like that, or if it appeared merely as a consequence of an unstoppable process demonstrating that Barthes was right when he wrote that “Photography evades us.”.[2] An amber-yellow amorphous form, partly enveloped by a black, faceted shape, runs along the middle of the frame; as if some outlandish cap-scarf were framing a face that is not there, dissolving along the edges of the box in which I enclosed this piece by Jerman, wanting it to crumble slowly, warning me about time inexorably changing the nature of a photograph. Even one that was not photographed, but created by means of the artist’s procedures, subjective, elementary, destructive. In the aforementioned note, Barthes goes on to state that a photograph reproduces what happened only once, however, Jerman’s works do not reproduce but rather elude; they denote his reality, while the image he creates – if it is an image at all – remains empty. There are no figures nor depictions, only the gestures of an artist who subjected the medium to his current desires, impatient as he was, with no formal education that might regulate him, which fortunately – did not happen.

 

I might look at a few more of these abstract forms, all encased in boxes – frames with the glass spaced away from their sensitive surfaces, which I have enabled to exist in agreement with their nature. All of these are the result of Jerman’s peculiar nature, which makes his work exactly what it is – opaque and intimating a reality that does not exist. His photographs, which we attribute to the photographic medium for lack of a better alternative, are gestures that reveal what they are actually made of, without being representational. Sometimes we might point at one of the works and say that we recognise a human form (surrendered to gradual disintegration, like most of what we see or are able to name), but this procedure will not get us far. That is precisely why the decision to reserve for Jerman the tenth anniversary of the photography exhibition space, the Spot Gallery, is symbolic. Because, as on several previous occasions, we are not concerned with what the photographs depict. We are simply letting them, in Barthes’ words,[3] be indefatigable expressions, of what the artists created, ardently advocating photography.

 

I met Jerman from time to time. Signing my copy of the brilliant My Year 1977, he thanked me for my “‘proportionately’ new support”, since in his opinion I “came into” photography late, in the early 1990s. Communication was challenging, but we used a notebook for assistance; there seemed to be a desire to say more, but in life, we enter some areas too late. I have returned to his methods many times, especially while researching the experiments of the so-called non-representational, experimental and conceptual photography, which we gaze at with interest, frustrated at times because we cannot tell what it is we are seeing and why it matters. Therefore, on the occasion of the anniversary, we have returned to his beginnings, which date back to the first half of the 1970s, aware that we will not be able to fully recreate his youthful works and the reasons that led him to disintegrate photography. As always, the meticulously prepared documentation that Darko Šimičić has collected over the years – dedicated to the artist and his work – is the indispensable “ground zero” from which I depart. Among other things, it contains the text of his important exhibition, held in 1975 at the Centre for Photography, Film, and Television (CEFFT) in Zagreb. Originally, Vlado Martek and Boris Demur were supposed to exhibit alongside Jerman, but at that time they started socialising with other artists who would soon form the “loose” Group of Six Artists, which is why Radoslav Putar remained focused on Jerman and his subjective photography.[4]

 

Jerman’s journey through photography begins with a photography course he took in 1968, which coincides almost exactly with his membership in a rock band. It is a time when the world is grey and he captures it in grey photographs, combining different techniques and often writing on photographic paper. His short statements are almost manifestos; there are also dates, death is a frequent (and inevitable) motif, and the formats he employs are already demanding. Not all, but the width of the photographic paper that was sold in rolls was set at 100 cm and measured 10 metres in length. In his own home he opened the photographic studio called Blow Up in 1970, a few years after the release of Michelangelo Antonioni’s eponymous film. Martek states that Jerman’s friends were impressed by this sort of initiative, which was rare at that time. Afterwards, in the early 1970s, he attended a correspondence school, however, the information about which school he enrolled is today not easily attainable. Antun Maračić mentions the Famous Photography School, but a search yields no results.[5] The school is said to be an American one, while Martek recalls it was located in London, also citing the artist’s difficulties with the English language. Apparently, friends helped him by translating the materials sent to him. It is an interesting piece of information and I hope further research will one day unearth which school he actually attended.

 

Radoslav Putar states that Jerman’s overstepping of photographic boundaries occurs “at the moment of stagnation or at least stabilisation of advances in the promotion of photography in our milieu”.[6] From today’s perspective, it was still a time of exceptional developments in photography, of the promotion that was made possible by the launch of the magazine Spot in 1972, as well as institutional support of the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade and the Rotovž Exhibition Salon in Maribor; in parallel, the series of exhibitions titled New Photography[7] promoted significant developments on the scene, especially the pivotal experiments of the conceptual 1970s. Although we will almost unhesitatingly regard him in this key, Jerman’s sensibility does not unquestionably yield to conceptualism. If we focus on the subject (which rests at the root of subjectivity) and we resist lamentations about its separation from the object (which is to some extent appropriate for photography as a medium that, in principle, enables neutral perception), we will probably also arrive at self-realisations, displaced from the mind to the body.[8] In fact, it is precisely the body that becomes the collective space of Jerman’s senses, which he begins to use in the early 1970s, aware of the limitations of the medium in which he operates.

 

Interventions into the medium, collages, photo objects and other combined media expressions shown in the exhibition Subjective Photography in 1975, Putar, among other things, describes as inarticulate, excitable, and maudlin; he recognises the artist’s abhorrence, his ability to simultaneously voice the position of an old man and a youth. Addressing Jerman’s innovations, he is aware that viewers might have trouble inferring the meaning of the works, given the way Jerman’s messages are conveyed. In the artist’s book he would publish a few years later, as a single copy, type-written on two folded sheets of A3 paper, we encounter the artist’s conceptual expression – a statement revealing the doubts that characterised his body of work.[9] In simplified terms: to do or to finish? To end or to love? Jerman’s subjective approach and elementary means are the foundations of his artistic concept of recording his own existence in space and time, and his conviction in the equivalence of existential and artistic reality. He is often both a creative subject and object, as, for instance, in sequences tied together into kinds of booklets in leporello format, (self)observing himself from the outside as if seemingly not drawn into the flow of the creation of the work.

 

Jerman remains known for the fact that he obstructed photographic techniques, often avoiding the use of the camera itself, or rather, reducing its expressive potential to the lowest possible level.[10] Although colleagues and friends regarded him on a par with Tošo Dabac, whose excellence he himself recognised and revered, Jerman turned to different creative procedures, literally and metaphorically imprinting his own traces on paper and peeling away its layers, treating the material he created with defiant abandon. The artist’s life and body were his enduring tool and object of interest, uncompromisingly presented in all phases of creative and vital force, as well as powerlessness. This state was never peaceful nor subdued, while his works continued their struggle for survival – especially those executed on photo paper by spilling chemicals, which he sent out into the world without adequate protection. His messages from the early 1970s onwards attest to a unique artistic practice of distinctly existentialist, ethical and self-destructive characteristics. Among other things, he captured certain intermedial happenings, exhibition actions, and wall inscriptions that he most likely wrote himself, subsequently intervening in the photographs in line with his principle of acting “with all available means, without prejudice about autonomy of the medium”, as he termed it.[11] Jerman remains unclear, often communicating with himself, letting us come closer to the place where he left a significant mark on the world, even though, in his words, that world was not his.

 

Sandra Križić Roban

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[1] Željko Jerman’s statement type-written on a paper near the top of which he pasted his self-portrait, 1970s. Private property.

[2] Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (translated by Richard Howard), London: Vintage Books, 1993, 4.

[3] Ibid., 4.

[4] I thank Vlado Martek for this information.

[5] Antun Maračić. “Jermanove role i rolice” [Jerman’s Rolls and Little Rolls], Željko Jerman. Role, rolice [Željko Jerman. Rolls and Little Rolls] (exhibition catalogue), Zagreb: HDLU, 2001, 26. The information about the correspondence school is provided in the artist’s biography. The cited correspondence school existed in Connecticut, but it is not certain that this was the school he attended.

[6] Radoslav Putar. Bez naslova [Untitled], Željko Jerman. Subjektivna fotografija [Željko Jerman. Subjective photography] (exhibition catalogue), Zagreb: Centar za fotografiju, film i televiziju, Galerija grada Zagreba, 1975, n.p.

[7] Four exhibitions were held, the first in 1974, the last in 1984, all co-organised by the three aforementioned institutions.

[8] Merleau-Ponty’s hypothesis expounded in a note on intersubjectivity. Vladimir Biti. Pojmovnik suvremene književne i kulturne teorije, Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 2000., 223.

[9] Željko Jerman. Unikat knjiga. Svijest. 29. 6. 1978., published by Ž. Jerman. Collection of Darko Šimičić.

[10] Zdenko Rus. “Trace”, Subjective and Elementary Photographs, Photo and Photogram Paintings 1970 – 1995 (exhibition catalogue), Zagreb: Moderna galerija, 1996, 3.

[11] Nena Baljković. “Željko Jerman: Fotografija kao vlastiti trag”, Pitanja, 7-8 (1975).