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The world of suicide in conceptual and performance art: Croatia and the region

Suicide is one of obsessive themes in modern art, so art installations and performances today can be regarded as highly creative treasuriesof issues concerning human conditions. In spite of the fact that in the history of performance art suicide has never figured as a legitimate artistic act, because such occurrences have been largely mystified, one suicide at least has brought it to the annals and can be considered an ultimate art performance. It is the case of Tomo Ćaleta, the spiritus movens of the conceptual scene of Split. Four years after his provocative painting of Split’s Peristyleinto red, which was described as the first act of conceptual art in our country, in his 1972 performance (“I’m an artist”) Ćaleta threw himself from the 13th storey of a Split high-rise with a plate round his neck bearing the same title. Marina Abramović, a performance queen, has devoted a considerable part of her life to explore the limits of her own mental and physical endurance and encounters with death. In the seventies of the last century she performed with 20 knives that she was hastily sticking between her fingers, wounding herself more than once in the process. A similar relationship between art and life has also been problematized by Jusuf Hadžifejzović. In his performances “From pap to blood there’s just one step” and “Fear of drinking water” (1991, 1994) he exposed his family and himself to a symbolic risk by throwing darts at the photos of himself and his loved ones. After the Homeland War some conceptual artists in Croatia have explored the topics of death and suicide associated with the war and the current situation. In the performance “Shooting” shown in 2002 at the 51st Venice Biennale, Boris Šincek, an artist from Osijek, reenacted the artistic context in which he was shotat again. The custodian aimed at him with a gun and fired, while Šincek stood by wearingthe protective vest, allowing to be killed. In 2007 Zlatko Kopljar, an artist of Zagreb, put ona suicide performance he called K-12. The work was presented as a video installation where the audience is confronted with a drama of his death by hanging on a tree in nature. While we can wonder about the boundary between modern art and insanity, a Duchampian explanation may be this: if an artist calls something a work of art, it’ll become one. Suicide presentation in conceptual art may be understood as a sublimation of the fear of death. To recall a well-known Seneca’s saying: “To avoid the fear of death, I always think about .“

suicide; conceptual art; Croatia

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