Todosijević

Raša Todosijević
Special thanks to Raša Todosijević - the grateful citizens of Ljubljana, 2000
installation

Created over the last twenty years, all or practically all the works from my series Was ist Kunst?, Gott liebt die Serben, Mamma Give Me Serboranges, Thanks to Raša Todosijević, Sloboda Restaurant and, last but not least, the series of works entitled Mother for Sale! seem to share an apparently unexpected coexistence of technologically varied procedures and a blending of mutually unrelated materials.

Some may draw a superficial, outdated analogy between my work and Arte Povera or maybe Fluxus, but while on a certain level this analogy cannot be ignored, personally I think that in the cauldron of ideological rigidity and pushed against the wall of high technology, different kinds of political cretinisms and the extreme poverty of the Third World - in the purely Slovene sub-variant of this expression - my life (in Belgrade) resulted in some kind of contemporary anarchism, metaphysics (a witty, tragic and often horrifyingly blood-splattered other-worldliness, if other-worldliness can in any way be "witty" or "blood-splattered") and the emergence of a philosophy which can be summed up as a silly mixture of (Western European) rationalism, (Slovene) fatalism and (Balkan) egocentricity.

I must also mention that precursors of my present work can be found in works such as Testera Newspaper (Belgrade, 1976), Invisible Sculpture - Infinite Music (Belgrade 1981), Fountain of Death (Maribor 1988), Pyjamas - Gott liebt die Serben (Belgrade 1993) and in some of the small water-colours which I painted in 1991.

Raša Todosijević

(from the catalogue The Art of Eastern Europe. A Selection of Works for the International and National Collections of Moderna galerija Ljubljana, Innsbruck, 2001)