Jure Detela

Action in the Zoo

Action, 1975

On 1 August 1975, Jure Detela broke into the Ljubljana zoo to set forest animals free. It was a very dangerous thing to do, since the night guard fired shots at him. Later, Detela described the years 1975 to 1977 as a time of his engagement with conceptual art; and he almost certainly saw this action (also) in that context. The action was clearly also a conceptual act, which he accompanied with a text entitled “Announcement”; it was published in the 2nd issue of the student paper Tribuna 1975/76. There he interpreted his action as a “total metaphor,” which he wanted to be seen from both sides, his own and that of the animals: “If a total metaphor is seen from both sides, also from the side of the animals, the ‘outside’ position of the animals is eradicated.” (Later he would develop a radical critique of metaphorical thinking as such precisely in the name of his attitude toward animals.) With his act, Detela in fact put into practice a fundamental avant-garde metaphor: Kazimir Malevich had proclaimed: “I have liberated all the birds from the eternal cage, and have opened the gates of the zoological garden for the beasts.”[1] Other 20th century artists were thinking about the position of art vis-à-vis animals in their quest to build a new relation between art and life: a notable example is Joseph Beuys, who spent a week with a coyote in the United States. But Beuys had himself locked up in a cage with the coyote, while Detela opened the cages…

Miklavž Komelj

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Jure Detela (1951–1992) published two collections of verse, Zemljevidi (Maps, 1978) and Mah in srebro (Moss and Silver, 1983), during his lifetime, while the third, Tisoči krotkih oči (Thousands of Meek Eyes) was published posthumously in the book Pesmi (Poems, 1992). Most of his body of verse was published in 2018 in the two-volume Zbrane pesmi (Collected Poems). In addition, his autobiographical tale Pod strašnimi očmi pontonskih mostov (Under the Terrible Eyes of Pontoon Bridges) came out in 1988, and posthumously his Zapisi o umetnosti (Notes on Art, 2005) as well as two books of short writings from his legacy entitled Orfični dokumenti (Orphic Documents, 2011). Detela developed far-reaching ideas about art and about how to transcend the existing relations between people and animals; he was the first in Slovenia to write about animal rights, propounding ideas that were groundbreaking also by global standards. Of his poems he wrote: “I would like to reach that level of literalness that allows beings and things to appear in the world of a poem in their most entire possible expanse of existence and in all their possible manifestations, except those explicitly excluded by the literal context of the poem.” He saw this as the path to the sublime, which transcends the human condition. “Those who will use words in poems following my method won’t be people. (…) I don’t know for myself whether I am a human or not.”

[1]Cf. Kazimir Malevich, Чepнuй kвadpam (St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo Azbuka, 2001), p. 56.