Tomislav Gotovac
The Forenoon of a Faun
Artist
Tomislav Gotovac
(1937, Sombor - 2010, Zagreb), Croatian
Original Title
The Forenoon of a Faun
Date1963
Medium16 mm film
Dimensions7min, 40sec
Classificationsmotion pictures
Credit LineKunsthalle Praha
Image Copyright
© Tomislav Gotovac
DescriptionTomislav Gotovac was a prominent figure of the Yugoslavian neo-avantgarde, whose distinctive anarchist approach to art is inseparably linked to his life in the Yugoslavian city of Zagreb. His artistic practice combined visual art with the avantgarde and the experimental, with performance, body art, conceptual art, documentary film, and live action film. Gotovac was strongly influenced by Western culture, which began flowing into Yugoslavia after the county’s separation from the Soviet Union in 1948. He became obsessed with movies, particularly Hollywood productions, which heavily influenced his early photographic performances. During the 1960s, he used found newspapers and other fragments to create dadaist collages. In parallel, he also explored the topic of gender roles, addressing questions of relations between men and women, the dynamics of desire, the tension between the real and the imaginary, and the contrast of consumer society and the everyday reality of socialism. In 1967, Gotovac executed the first happening in Zagreb’s public space. His performances are often based on ordinary, mundane activities and convey socially engaged messages. An essential part of these performances is Gotovac’s nude body—for instance, in 1971, he moved around Belgrade fully naked; ten years later, he repeated a similar feat in Zagreb. He also used his work to explore the mutual relation between individuals and social and political systems. His later work reacted to the conditions of post-socialism and neoliberalism as well as to the concept of a globally operated system based on grand narratives disseminated through channels such as film, art, politics, and history.
Gotovac often referred to the experimental documentary film The Forenoon of a Faun (1963) as his artistic manifesto marking the beginning of his engagement with experimental film, which was heavily influenced by structuralism as well as mainstream Hollywood productions. This piece, much as his other films, is based on a variable rhythm and an interconnection between visual imagery and sound, a feature linked to Gotovac’s fondness of radio broadcasts, which facilitated an imaginary connection with the entire world. The piece contains three parallelly running sequences recorded using a camera on a tripod. In the first scene, the camera is static and captures the terrace of a sanatorium; the footage is accompanied by music from Godard’s movie Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live). The second sequence shows an old outdoor wall, while the third depicts a street view with the camera’s distance changing several times, coupled with street noises and a dramatic soundtrack. The first sequence also originally contained subtitles reading “It’s necessary to live… self-confidently…,” which also eventually appeared in the second and third sequences. The film was first screened in the year of its creation, at the GEFF (Genre and Experimental Film Festival), where it won several awards. In recent years, it was included in Gotovac’s film retrospective, which took place in Rijeka and Ljubljana (2017) and at the Austrian film museum in Vienna (2019).
Tomislav Gotovac (1937, Sombor – 2010, Zagreb) was born in Yugoslavia, present-day Serbia. From 2004 onward, he used the name Antonio Lauer. In 1941, his family moved to Zagreb, where he would spend the rest of his life apart from an eight-year hiatus between 1967 and 1975. After graduating from high school, Gotovac spent a year studying architecture at the University of Zagreb before spending several years working as a government clerk; in parallel, he began making art in the early 1960s. In 1967, he enrolled in the Academy of Theatre, Film, Radio, and Television in Belgrade, where he studied under the Oscar-winning director Aleksander Petrovič. After returning to Zagreb in 1976, he proceeded to exhibit his work both in Yugoslavia and abroad. In 2007, he was presented the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Croatian Association of Visual Artists. Gotovac died in 2007 in Zagreb. Following his death, his studio was turned into the Tomislav Gotovac Institute. His work represented Croatia at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, and in 2017 it was shown at Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens. The same year also brought Gotovac’s first retrospective exhibition, presenting the most complete overview of his work to date, held at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka and organized in collaboration with the Tomislav Gotovac Institute in Zagreb and the House of Arts in Ústí nad Labem, where the exhibition was later shown. His works are held in institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb.
Gotovac often referred to the experimental documentary film The Forenoon of a Faun (1963) as his artistic manifesto marking the beginning of his engagement with experimental film, which was heavily influenced by structuralism as well as mainstream Hollywood productions. This piece, much as his other films, is based on a variable rhythm and an interconnection between visual imagery and sound, a feature linked to Gotovac’s fondness of radio broadcasts, which facilitated an imaginary connection with the entire world. The piece contains three parallelly running sequences recorded using a camera on a tripod. In the first scene, the camera is static and captures the terrace of a sanatorium; the footage is accompanied by music from Godard’s movie Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live). The second sequence shows an old outdoor wall, while the third depicts a street view with the camera’s distance changing several times, coupled with street noises and a dramatic soundtrack. The first sequence also originally contained subtitles reading “It’s necessary to live… self-confidently…,” which also eventually appeared in the second and third sequences. The film was first screened in the year of its creation, at the GEFF (Genre and Experimental Film Festival), where it won several awards. In recent years, it was included in Gotovac’s film retrospective, which took place in Rijeka and Ljubljana (2017) and at the Austrian film museum in Vienna (2019).
Tomislav Gotovac (1937, Sombor – 2010, Zagreb) was born in Yugoslavia, present-day Serbia. From 2004 onward, he used the name Antonio Lauer. In 1941, his family moved to Zagreb, where he would spend the rest of his life apart from an eight-year hiatus between 1967 and 1975. After graduating from high school, Gotovac spent a year studying architecture at the University of Zagreb before spending several years working as a government clerk; in parallel, he began making art in the early 1960s. In 1967, he enrolled in the Academy of Theatre, Film, Radio, and Television in Belgrade, where he studied under the Oscar-winning director Aleksander Petrovič. After returning to Zagreb in 1976, he proceeded to exhibit his work both in Yugoslavia and abroad. In 2007, he was presented the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Croatian Association of Visual Artists. Gotovac died in 2007 in Zagreb. Following his death, his studio was turned into the Tomislav Gotovac Institute. His work represented Croatia at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, and in 2017 it was shown at Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens. The same year also brought Gotovac’s first retrospective exhibition, presenting the most complete overview of his work to date, held at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka and organized in collaboration with the Tomislav Gotovac Institute in Zagreb and the House of Arts in Ústí nad Labem, where the exhibition was later shown. His works are held in institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb.
