I’ll Exibit Marinela, 1971
“I’ll exhibit Marinela”, was a decision made by Raša Todosijević that would lead to the first tableau-vivant in our art. That 23rd June 1971, at the exhibition opening, visitors of the SKC Gallery found Marinela Koželj, his life partner, as part of a space arrangement, which also included a blue night table with a bottle on it (also painted in blue), and a small object in the style of the American sculptor Alexander Calder. Aside from the artwork, Todosijević contributed to the exhibition by coming up with the perfect title: Drangularijum. It was a portmanteau made of a Turkish loanword referring to economically invaluable, but emotionally significant objects [drangulija = a trinket], and a Latin suffix that signifies artificial surroundings for assembling and observing certain live things or occurrences [-arium]. In this way, he somewhat cynically, posed a question of discordance between the status of any object brought into a gallery space – which after having been authorized by artists and institutionalized automatically becomes an artwork – and the habitus of an average visitor. Here, the visitors did not find handmade objects created according to the criteria of artistic language that traditional art carries and passes on to the next generations, but the elements taken from everyday life milieu, creating artistic expression in their mutual interconnection. It was, at the same time, a step towards dematerialization of artwork and re-examination of the relationship between the artist’s subjectivity towards the system of values and the language used to express art.
Stevan Vuković