Dr. Thomas M. Messer, longtime director of Guggenheim Museum in New York and honorary director of the foundation of the same name, and Lorand Hegyi, director of Le Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, in France, came to Belgrade on June 8 at the invitation of the ProArtOrg.
By Mihael Milunović
Photo by Dušan I. Dimitrijević |
| The visit of these superb professionals is part of a wider ProArtOrg programme whose long-range goal is to diversify and improve the quality of knowledge in the area of fine arts through intellectual exchange, as well work towards establishing more advanced relationships between actors and participants of the arts scene, such as curators-institutions, curators-artists, artists-institutions. These new relationships may bring about a greater sense of autonomy to the artists themselves. |
| The project was initiated as a call to diversify knowledge in this region through such cultural exchanges, which will be conducive to improving the work of individuals and institutions. Such exchanges are realised in the form of consultations or workshops in which renowned artists from the international arts scene visit the region, as was supposed to have occurred with Dennis Oppenheim this year, who unfortunately had to put off his European tour, including Belgrade, due to illness. Despite Oppenheim’s absence, an exhibition of his drawings was opened at the New Moment Ideas gallery in downtown Belgrade, consisting of some ten or so works from this significant and fertile American artist. |
Lorand Hegyi & Dr. Thomas Messer | |
Lorand Hegyi & Mihael Milunović |
After the exhibition, a series of lectures ensued, focusing on two major topics: "Life Experience – The Eye of the Beholder", in which Hegyi and Messer expounded on and summed up their personal and professional experiences that were at the heart of major artistic events. One example is "navigating big boats", which refers to managing super-structured art institutions over many decades, wrestling frequently with their untamable architecture (Messer with the Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Right) or with the conservative intolerance of political circles (Hegyi at the Ludwig Museum in Vienna). | |
| Both of these men trace their origins to Central Europe, which has long been a symbol of a tolerant and multi-cultural Europe, and both have interwoven its spirit into the fabric of their acquaintances and professional activity. |
| The second topic dealt with the specific features of the new European moment, that is, with the problems associated with the return of Eastern and Central European art to the European continent’s cultural framework. This art had previously belonged to the continent’s cultural framework, but due to political discontinuity, Cold-War amnesia and the self-isolation of intellectual elites, it had failed to produce a modern and unified reading of European art as a whole. |
| One may say that such topics are the de facto life’s work of Mr. Hegyi. As the director of the Budapest National Gallery and of Vienna’s Ludwig Museum for ten years, he worked uncompromisingly towards demolishing accumulated stereotypes regarding the creative output of ‘Easterners’ and realised hundreds of influential and already historic exhibitions in which a new concept of display dominated. The notion of equating the significance of avant-garde and key art figures was put on display, as happened with the new MUMOK 2001 set-up in which the works of Sean Scully, Bazelic, Gilbert & George were placed side-by-side with works by Roman Opalka, Zdenek Sykora, Braca Dimitrijević.
A total of four lectures and one exhibit were held as part of the ProArtOrg project, all of which enjoyed high attendance. They were accompanied by numerous print and electronic media interviews. |
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Lorand Hegyi & Mihael Milunović |
Serving on the ProArtOrg board of counselors, Messer and Hegyi will certainly pay more frequent visits to Belgrade, as well as mediate cooperation and hold consultations with the actors of the current art scene in Serbia and Belgrade.
They are thrilled by the enthusiasm of people who have demonstrated a zeal for learning and who want to introduce qualitative changes into their environment. Walking the streets of Belgrade, they not only made note of shop windows and the city commotion, but they also observed something that most Belgraders have forgotten about: the architectural heritage of Belgrade – its facades, buildings, ornamental art settings. They were fascinated by such diversity. | |
| They felt that Belgrade is a city with an open future, and that as a structure unburdened by a conserved past, as is the case with many other European capitals, it has the opportunity to be become a modern metropolis without complexes, to offer a notion of itself not merely through populist events and concerts, but by being profiled through the presence of art in its urban core – with sculptures, installations and gallery spaces.
The next visit as part this project will be Michelangelo Pistoletto, the renowned Italian painter and sculptor, who will spend two weeks in Belgrade as part of the resident programme, which will be accompanied by lectures and workshops. |
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Dennis Oppenheim was born in Electric City, WA. Following studies at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California (BFA in 1965) and Stanford University at Palo Alto, California (MFA in 1967), Oppenheim returned to the East Coast, to New York, where he worked as art teacher at Long Island City Junior High School. Dennis Oppenheim currently lives and works in New York. He is considered an extremely important artist on the American arts scene – a representative of conceptual art of the 1970s; he continues to be active in the field of contemporary art. | | |
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