 The observing and alert eye of Mileta Prodanović depicts things that many pass every day, but to which they don’t pay particular attention. By framing objects, store windows, money, food, advertisements, architecture, streets, destinies and everyday events, and by interpolating them with important works from art history and symbols of more developed cultures, Prodanović endeavours to insert into the minds of people a "missing link", the part necessary to make the world around us more civilised, more culturally "drinkable".
His latest literary work Agnec, published last February, won the Vital Prize and his exhibition entitled The Year of Leon opened last autumn at the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade.
- Why Agnec and tell us about the The Year of Leon?
Agnec is actually a story from the collection according to which the book was named. Nearly all the stories in the collection have an element of "derailment". They begin, one might say, almost "hyperrealistically" and then a turn occurs. Some critics were inclined to label it fantasy, but I think that we live in such a milieu that everything we thought impossible has proved possible. So these stories are inspired by our current surreal reality. The title story is about so-called transition and its victims, and it obtains a sort of metaphysical dimension. Agnec is the old Slavic correlation of the Latin Agnus dei, God’s lamb, the archetypical victim. The exhibition The Year of Lion also comes from the similar milieu "Serbia in transition", and features a collection of photographs depicting concrete lions on the fences and balconies of newly built houses. Garden ornaments– as today they are called – and "concrete goods" are a global phenomenon, but it is interesting that in Serbia and neighboring countries concrete predators are more common, animals like eagles and lions, whereas dwarfs and nonviolent animals like swans are less common. Sometimes, they consciously, or much more likely unconsciously, replicate details from historical sites. For instance, lions from the famous gate in Mycenae can be seen on the top of one just finished house in Skoplje (Macedonia), and a sculpture from the 14th-century porch in the monastery of Dečani has a naive replica on the fence of one Belgrade house in the Kaluđerica neighborhood. One of the themes of the exhibition is the relation of so-called high and low art, the avant-garde and products usually considered as manifestations of dubious taste. Aside from photographs, there are also multi-channel projections and a prepared lion skin. We obtained the skin courtesy of the Museum of the History of Yugoslavia, which holds objects that once belonged to the President of SFRY, Josip Broz Tito.
- How great are the distances between your painting, your literary opus and essay writing?
I believe it is very important to respect the language of each media. Interaction is desired, but one should always be cautious when applying it, otherwise we risk producing mishmash. Some ideas are simply more suitable for visual exposure while for others a narrative context is more appropriate. Thus it may be said that distance varies from case to case. However, I think that there is something from which it can be seen that everything originates from one focal point…
- You travel extensively, a fact that can be recognised in the motifs of your works. How much does real travel differ from travel in art?
I really love travelling. As a child, I had the opportunity to tour Italy with my parents and perhaps that was when I "caught the virus". I was studying when Yugoslavs didn’t need visas, so I would usually work for a month during summer, like many of my colleagues, usually on the restoration of frescos or at archeological excavations, and the earnings were sufficient to cover a month of travel throughout Europe. It was, all in all, a much safer time than today. When there was no place in a hostel, you could spend the night in a park. I don’t think that today, in this era of global insecurity, it would be a good idea.
Anyway, apart from viewing masterpieces of old art, I saw many exhibitions of modern art, some of which are today, a quarter of a century later, considered anthological. During real travel, I usually notice details behind illuminated facades where I find features, often bizarre, that speak much more about a city or country than what you could find on a postcard or in a travel book. My travelling fragments were published in newspapers, and last year in a book entitled Procession of Miracles. This was an interaction of photographed detail and short essays. Travelling through fictional landscapes is, naturally, quite different. Without a rich imagination, there is no point to such travels. However, the fact is that real travel is good material: sometimes inspiration for such cruising is controlled by thought.
- Have your views today become too mosaic in their multimedia dynamism and perhaps too far removed from their original iconic symbolism?
The fact is that the world around us is complex, speeded-up, the aesthetics and dynamics of the music video have retroactively influenced the dynamics of film and even literature. It seems that, all in all, there is too much information and perhaps the task of an artist is to make a proper selection rather than to enter this endless mainstream. Fortunately, there are still places where people can focus on their work, there are ways … After all, one can be a recluse in a megalopolis. Maybe this mosaic view you mention hinders the view of the whole but, again, maybe that whole actually doesn’t exist. It is elusive, it changes. All historical projects that offered a simplified picture of the world ended in totalitarianism and anti-humanism. It remains, therefore, to put up with that endless multiplicity and fragmenting.
- Your works seem to aim to uncover the ballast of banalizing reality. What are the forms you use and how do you succeed in preserving credibility and loyalty to art?
When they ask me what my profession is, I simply say that I am a painter and a writer, though these two simple definitions can be further elaborated: my pictures are sometimes traditional works on canvas, sometimes photographs, while the collective definition "writer" includes fiction and essays as well as shorter forms adapted to newspapers. Reality is complex and difficult to be perceived. Art is sometimes a fully new reality and sometimes a question put to the reality in which we live. Answers that are overly simplistic, answers that come from yellow journalism and political parties form a banal image of life. To make sense of our existence, we ought to ask unpleasant questions. That was known to medieval strongmen who established the institution of a "court jester", that distant ancestor of the critical artist of our day.
- You were classified as a post-modernist. Is it still possible, in today’s artistic expression, not only yours, to implement theory in this way or do you perceive your work in a different way?
Wherever critics place you – the fact remains that all of today’s artists are working in the period after the end of modernist project. One comprehensive and generally accepted definition of post-modernism hasn’t been ascertained, neither by theoreticians who have dealt with the phenomenon and even less by those who, as is usual in our country, learned about all that with great delay and indirectly from third party sources and understood "postmodern" as a sort of merry l’art pour l’artism, art for art’s sake. Simply, great utopias collapsed and the world fragmented into scores of stories. This relates both to art and to politics alike. The time in which I was growing up as an artist secured the right of accepting differences, of the parallel existence of several different languages, of putting an end to "streams" and this climate hasn’t changed much in the last 30 odd years. Therefore I think that all classification is senseless. Some creative works, a book, a performance, an exhibition, an oratory either function or do not. There is no third solution.
- In one of your books you wrote that "Belgrade is primarily characterised by wild building and unselected demolition". Has anything changed in Belgrade in the last decade of the 20th century?
 One of my books of essays attempts to find answers to this question i.e. to what measure did one destructive government in the 1990s shape the city-scape? With every regulation annulled, we ended up with small houses on top of apartment buildings; flat roofs turned into hip roofs, in other words a total destruction of the Modern. Perhaps we had luck in that these were poor years and these scars on the tissue of the city were made of non-lasting materials, so that they soon disappeared. Now we are again in a period of frantic construction. We’ll hear about this phenomenon in due time. But as Belgrade, by its nature, is a patchworkcity, one endless and sometimes charming stratification of patches – I’m looking forward to seeing this new layer on the face of the city.
- What has the new Millennium brought us and where do we, in your opinion, find Belgrade in this lapidary of everything we experienced in the last two decades?
Belgrade grows, changes, and again its configuration and location help it. In many "transitional" metropolises in East Europe, glass colossi are planted into the very core of the city. Historical circumstances here have shaped two urban cores, Belgrade at the mouth of the Sava into the Danube, and Zemun, having left an empty space in between. There, New Belgrade has emerged from a dormitory and is gradually becoming Belgrade’s "city". This development, unfortunately, doesn’t go along with building infrastructure, but when new bridges and a subway are built, Belgrade will become a logical and pleasant city. In any case, Belgrade remains one of the most perspective cities of South-Eastern Europe. Whether it will manage to realise this perspective depends on many circumstances, including ourselves.
- Is there today, in this time of general turbulence and blending of languages and expressions, enough space for those who belong to that "secret cult of Belgrade", even if they are not aware of it?
 Belgrade is in a social sense a multilayered city. It is neither too large nor too small. That means it is possible to read absolutely different books, go to different concerts, choose totally different theatres, see exhibitions that can satisfy the most different ideas of art. Not long ago we lived in a time when authorities tried to impose a one dimensional way of thinking. Belgrade had suddenly become narrow. Many respected people decided on either real or internal emigration. Against the city, as an institution, in the Balkan area of the last decade of the 20th century, the war was waged in different ways, somewhere literally, by shells, and somewhere the war was unseen. Belgrade is, by predisposition, by its nature, a platform for differences. Even those who attempted to subordinate Belgrade to their mad ideas attacked just this stratification. I think that everyone who recognises that stratification – whether they are from this part of the world or are foreigners who have come here for the first time – becomes, consciously or unconsciously, devotees of the "Belgrade cult". This is easily seen, in fact, when you meet a foreigner who forms an opinion about your native town that is better than your opinion of it; they admire something you’re more likely to be ashamed of; in short, a foreigner who quite uncritically falls in love with Belgrade. I have spoken with a number of people about this. Why would people, objectively, fall in love with a place where there are not many ancient buildings or even buildings that leave one breathless? My theory is that it is due to the configuration of the city, because of the steep streets with open views to a wide sky, to the special light and vastness above the rivers.
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Mileta Prodanović was born 1959, in Belgrade. He received his MA from the Faculty of Fine Arts in 1985. His completed his advance studies at the London Royal College of Arts in 1989/90. In 1990 he began to work at the Belgrade Faculty of Fine Art as assistant, then docent and now associate professor. He has taken part in several one-man and group exhibitions in the former Yugoslavia and in some European cities (Rome, Venice, Tübingen, Regensburg, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Vienna, Graz, Prague …) He represented Yugoslavia at the 1986 Venice Biennale.
Since 1983 he has been publishing fiction, essays from the field of visual arts and newspaper articles. During the 1990s he published essays on the topic of "war-culture-politics" in several Yugoslav and European dailies, periodicals and magazines.
He has published the books of prose, Dinner at Saint Apolonia (1984), New Cluny (1989), Travelogue via Pictures and Labels (1993), Dog With a Broken Back (1993), Heaven Opera (1995), Dance Monster to My Gentle Music (1995), Red Scarf All Of Silk (1999), This Might Be Your Lucky Day (2000), Garden In Venice (2002) and Alicia In the Land of Holy Carps (2003), the collection of travel fragments Around the World (2000), the book of essays The Older and More Beautiful Belgrade (2001) and a collection of poetry Miasma (1994). He is member of the Serbian PEN Centre. Mileta Prodanović is the winner of several national and regional awards from the field of literature and visual arts. He has been listed in several anthologies. His works have been translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Bulgarian and the Hungarian languages. | |
