Jerman is Unique.

Our series exploring the artistic practice of Željko Jerman continues with a contribution by Vlado Martek, who offers personal reflections and memories of the artist.

I say: Whatever you do, as artists, be brave. But he says: This is not my world. Together, these catchphrases denote the content we fell into in the midst of our youth. There were many outings, traces remain, the buildings stayed with us; there is no trace of sadness, despair has no significance in the presence of art. It is a great transformation from the table, the bed, the studio, the conversation, the rain, the solitude, to the present-day parameters of an exceptional oeuvre.

 

We should start, in a way, with the watershed 1969. That is when I met Jerman, it was the year of the Moon landing, then there was the seminal exhibition in Bern titled When Attitudes Become Form, a sort of pinnacle of conceptual art, rock reached its apex with Woodstock, and I was 18 years old, at the height of youth. The meeting of two long-haired and hippie-minded people, which we were both well aware of, through music and song lyrics. But those were the building blocks of our revolt, articulated at first through behaviour and clothing, while later creativity inter-connected rebelliousness, talent and art. First there was long hair and behaviour (comportamento, to use Renato Barilli’s term), then came the artworks, call them what you will, just not the commonplace, in other words: radical.

 

We belonged to a lower social class, so many temptations fell away and our path to radical art was made easier. Of course, this art bore signs of origin on its faces. A certain outsiderism was autochthonous. It largely determined the physiognomy and place, both in society and in the corpus of contemporary art. A kind of autonomy of the atypical.

 

Jerman’s primary medium was photography (if we ignore the teenage interests in astronomy and rock music). When we met, he was exhibiting black-and-white photographs at social dances and was preparing to open up an independent photography studio – Blow Up. Then he got married, Branka was a wonderful model for him. His seriousness and the fact that he made a living from photography, all of this fascinated our friends, and I was magnetically drawn to it. We started holding meetings with other friends who were creatives. Tellingly, the first such working meeting took place at the abandoned cemetery in Jurjevska Street. Several years passed before we finally decided to perform out on the street, conducting anonymous artistic actions, in 1974.

 

Here I highlight Jerman’s enduring obsession and a recurrent theme in his art – death. The vast majority of his photographs from the 1970s are related to cemeteries, crosses, and processions. (In one such photograph, which he sent me as a postcard, he wrote “Hurry up and write, okay?!”)

 

Meeting Jerman was a fateful moment for me. Our wives were two same women, we were in two of the same art groups, we shared “The Only Contemporary Romantic Decree on Art” (from 1979) in the joint journal-magazine Maj 75, in which “we reject every individual and social exhaustion of the notions of love, soul, romance …”. I once said: “Photography is more poetic than poetry.” and “It is more photography than a bird.”, and “I have been preparing for photography ever since I started going out with it in 1966.”.

 

Of course this is connected to Jerman as a photographer, in a special love affair with photography, or, in avant-garde terms: with Jerman flirting with photography.

 

This brings us to Jerman’s notions of “subjective photography” and “elementary photography” and again to my building on Jerman’s insights, or conceptual orientation. Elementary processes in poetry are my working counterpart to Jerman’s broader practice of leaving a trace. Similar starting positions characterised many of our visual and linguistic works during the still utopian 1970s.

 

The horizon of utopia, feeble as it was, still existed. Jerman’s sayings: “In today’s society, to be romantic is to be revolutionary. Creative effort is enough. Awareness of the purpose of standard photography”, evoke a similar shared cosmos of utopian traces. Jerman’s most famous refrain from 1976, “This is not my world”, nevertheless conceals, besides the patent pessimism, a trace of utopian hope. Today, in 2025, artists do not think like that at all. We were children, not so much of flower power, as children of conceptualism. If we want to speak about artists imbued with a certain energy and of a certain generation, we should say that conceptualism was the (unconscious) bait; marzipan.

I will list a few words – concepts, that now seem anachronistic, old-fashioned, passé, etc. Sincerity, utopian, spontaneity, romance, romanticism, feeling, empathy, rebelliousness, feminised, lower class…

 

We may situate Jerman and his world of youth into a network of such determinations, i.e. into the early 1970s. After all, reading the works from the period reveals these features and their dogmatic nuances. The un-attractiveness and impermanence of material execution attest to the relationship towards aesthetics, towards the artifact as such, and all this with great power of self-confidence in such an explanation. I found my voice in this as well, drawing from it a great deal of self-confidence in the choice we made. Jerman encouraged people by being suggestive and highly enthralling. Art – as the Holy Grail. An absence of positive knowledge, absence of ambition, aesthetic and formal. Apart from two major exceptions: first: a responsibility for what we do; and second: the ethics that arises from empathy, feelings and faith in the utopia of free but honest art that pledges love and a romantic (relationship).

 

A sharp, yet enamoured stance towards the medium of photography, from beginning to end. So much so that even the successful works, albeit outside the medium of photography – lack that photographic element. Such was Jerman’s, almost erotic relationship to photography. After all, this love is filled with all kinds of things. The works at the solo exhibition organised by CEEFT in 1975 demonstrate the turbulent deconstructive relationship between the author and photography. (“Drop dead, photography!”, “Beginning of the End”.) Expressiveness was a trace of spontaneous honesty.

 

In retrospect, belonging to a lower class (along with Boris Demur and me) proved symptomatic and significant. The first venturing into the street with our works, as well as the works themselves and their narratives, reveal outsiders, transgressors of the medium, misfits, but they are the ones who will firmly tread these paths. The ethics of Jermanesque photography speaks to a practice free from designs. A neo-avant-garde deconstruction of the medium, as in the case of Jerman’s other arts friends, implies both a political and a social stance (amidst the partisanship of the era). Art is a comprehensive set of attitudes, practices, worldviews (We will be different; Nothing’s gonna change my world). There are no partial rebellions.

 

Can we speak of the reconciliation of life and art, in which life stands for the entire burden of geographical karma, parental karma, temporal karma? We can, though. A loquacious artist, Jerman is an example of such a thing. Things get forgotten in the works; they are more or less visible. Here is an artist transparent in an entirely empathetic way. (We could almost say: constantly talking about himself.) One of the conclusions that could be drawn from this is that: Elementary photography is an offspring of ethics (dialogue). The extent of Jerman’s enjoyment of art was immeasurable. This is the heart of a romantic; I feel things strongly and I will tell you about them. Each of Jerman’s photographic works is also a talkative event.

 

“I believe that all true art is classic, but the dictates of the mind rarely permit of its being recognised as such when it first appears. These great innovators are the only true classics…” (Marcel Proust). Canonical works are open to inexhaustible interpretation in every era.

 

“The radicalism of art is not as related to formal or stylistic innovations, nor to social or political imperatives, as it is to its capacity to question all perceptions of itself, entire cultures, as well as its ideological assumptions and consequences.” (Predrag Brebanović).

 

Jerman’s visage in particular set him apart from the average handsome face. So, both his face and his approach to art were exceptional. For an artist, that is an interesting detail. His great penchant for portraiture was evident and practically coupled with the aesthetic of a beauty enthusiast. Jerman had perfect the craft of photography and demonstrated it. But he soon added a “personal touch” to the production and treatment of photography. He also treated the photographic paper and other steps in the production process as if it were a canvas or ordinary paper. There was talk of grey photography. The legacy from Man Ray’s workshop came to life as well. Emotions in particular, rather than intellect, directed the traces and states on the photo paper. And of course, language was present too. In this practice, Jerman was conceptually inclined, although the resulting works were of expressionist nature; strong expressions were visually in the foreground. Yes, an illegitimate child of conceptualism (let us remember his other non-photographic pieces; for instance, “Creative Effort Is Enough”, “There Is No Lamb Roast”). Naturally, reason introduces whirlwinds of emotions, particles of humour, into the states of the works, which contain a balance within themselves, and it is how they have survived and are remembered as works of art that are divisible – “eternally”.

 

Polished art would make Jerman see red. It is no wonder since sincerity, spontaneity and expressiveness were more his style, in addition to the aforementioned un-attractiveness. With the cycle “My Year” the decade draws to a close, and with it ends his “elementary” relationship with photography. In conclusion, I would say that photography can also be a view of the world, to paraphrase Miroslav Krleža and his “Moonlight can also be a view of the world.” Of course, the stakes are different. Around photography and Jerman’s favourite theme of death, through Roland Barthes, we see a connection with the nature of the photographic image as an endpoint. For Jerman, photography was time.

 

A psychological character from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. I remember Jerman, he was a beatnik in terms of his attitudes, or rather a hippie in that progression, and he liked and occasionally played rock music. And then – there was the royal ladder, if you could step on it – to be an artist by choice, to invest in that direction, to become a creative prone to symbolisation and sublimation of the vast territory of life, particularly without the burden of classical constraints.

 

Then, to idealise freedom with the immeasurable assertion of art. The feeling of freedom was at its core. What wealth! Outside of class, regardless of money, regardless of mainstream culture and its myths. (Most often these are nationhood myths, or myths about the communist society, propagated by political elites. None of that appealed to Jerman. Except for rock music, girls and beer.)

 

Us friends often used to tease Jerman that he was the new Tošo (Dabac). He would start protesting, but he did become the new Tošo (of course, in a different ambit). It is a wonderful correlation between two photography greats.

 

“Intoxicate yourselves with virtue, wine or poetry”, Jerman chimed alongside Baudelaire. Youth loves intoxication. And on the other side, the infamous bourgeoisie as a target (nowadays completely outside the sphere of interest). Jerman’s circle of friends regarded this value system as the opponent of freedom, romanticism, etc. Thus, Jerman’s works in the 1970s reveal the more or less noticeable already mentioned attitudes. All of his works can be viewed as a response and an irreverent grimace at the rigid state of affairs in society, family, profession, art – and a plea for an authentic life.

 

The 1980s were a future that created a lot of turmoil, but faith in art remained (it did not use to be taken for granted, after all, many important things were not taken for granted). Jerman and his friends, his art buddies, found or invented a troubadouresque relationship to art, an exalted Muse, albeit in somewhat austere avant-garde circumstances. From a romantic perspective, Jerman loved art until the end.

Vlado Martek, 2025