COURAGE

gyűjtemények hálózata

The Student Newspaper published a photograph of Marijan Molnar dressed as a terrorist/criminal in 1981. With this photograph, which is a part of the "For the Democratization of Art" cycle, Molnar wanted to point to the "dose of terrorism in the field of art” by dressing himself as a terrorist. This means that the external difference is always the internal, that the external constraints pressuring art are always reflected in it, as an inherent (im)possibility to be tamed by the artwork" (Molnar, Marijan. Akcije i ambijenti, Zagreb: Naklada MD, 2002., 161).
Suzana Marjanić thinks that with this action, Molnar ˝also expressed his fascination with the anarchist groups of 1970s˝ (Marjanić, Suzana. "Performans i terorizam ili izvedba terorizma." Narodna umjetnost 50, no. 2 (2013), 102-127).

“In the army, the majority of the lower ranks are incompetents. And this in the army of the RSR [Socialist Republic of Romania]! Adolescence made me commit some “follies.” So others think. I don’t. For that reason they’ve brought me here. Military service means pickaxe, shovel, spade. My country needs me, but it despises me. I’m going to do my military service with [common-law] convicts.” This is a short extract from the manuscript that contains Ion Monoran’s army diary. From these few words, the reader may sense the drama experienced by the author when he was forced not only to carry out exhausting work, but also to live among individuals with whom he had nothing in common, and with whom, in normal circumstances, he should never have had to have any dealings.

In 1974 and 1975, Ion Monoran did his military service in special conditions at the Piteşti Petrochemical plant, because he had already been classed as a “hostile element” to the communist regime because of his attempt to flee Romania together with seven classmates when they were in their final year of high school. The harsh experience of doing military service in communist Romania in a special place, together with convicts, is recorded in real time in his diary.

Ion Monoran’s army diary is written by hand and remains unpublished. A few short passages, poeticised, appeared in the volume Eu însumi (I myself). The manuscript consists of approximately thirty pages.

“If only I could flow continually, and not tire, just as the river doesn’t tire,” is one of the last entries in this diary, which records the brutalising experience of an extraordinarily sensitive person confronted with the military service imposed by the communist state and with life alongside common-law convicts.

The central medium of this ‘performance’ however, is not the film itself, but the artists’ bodies, which become their own media/medium. In this case, it is a naked male body (Božidar is completely naked throughout the movie), which was seen by the dominant culture as excessive and scandalous. Among the taboos of Yugoslav culture was the question of homosexuality, which was directly addressed by this generation of artists. In the movie Maniac 7001 the above mentioned is additionally explored at the level of language. The statement ‘DICK IS NOT A MEDIA’ is shown to the spectator in the form of a political slogan. In the end it could be said that Maniac 7001 is to a large extent a synthesis of differing experiences and strategies, otherwise characteristic of the Novi Sad conceptual circle of the time, as a reaction of young artists to the different kinds of aesthetic and bureaucratic pressures to which they were exposed.” (Milenković, 2015, p. 25, 27) The action was not public and hence there was no public reaction to it. The film was only screened years later.

The book My Dossier, Pardon, Biography. Bulgarian Modernizations (1930s to 1960s) - ideologies and identities was published in 1999. It contains 20 autobiographical narratives from southwestern Bulgaria, collected through the biographical interview method by members of the Balkan Society for Autobiography and Social Communication (Petar Vodenicharov, Kristina Popova, Anastasia Pashova).

By collecting and publishing popular autobiographical histories, the Society aims at developing sensitivity for the life of "ordinary" people who did not belong to the communist power structures, nor to prominent dissident circles. The memories of the interviewed people born in the first decades of the 20th century, most of them in southwestern Bulgaria, reflect social realities from different periods of state socialism and the period of transition in the early 1990s. The narratives reveal experiences of and resistance against collectivization, the experiences of persecution due to social or ethnic origin, the outcome of the religious policy of the communist party and forms of everyday opposition against it. The autobiographical narratives show the pressure of the official biographical norms and tropes of the communist period which have influenced autobiographical narratives and private life: traces of keeping secret dangerous moments, the concealment of an "inappropriate" childhood, and its "forgetting" in the family narrative. But they also powerfully reveal forms of narrative and practical resistance as ways of asserting one's own identity.