COURAGE

Свързване на колекции

This article was published in 1962 in Madrid's cultural review El Arbor, where Tijan was an associate. He discussed Ivo Andric and the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to him by the Swedish Academy for his life’s work – the novel The Bridge on the Drina. Tijan's description of Andrić's public activity focuses on the latter’s opportunism, because Andrić, as a civic intellectual, gained high status in the new communist hierarchy after 1945, becoming the president of the Writers Association of the New Yugoslavia. However, Tijan pointed out Andrić's later works, such as the novel The Damned Yard in 1956, in which some passages appear to be critical allusions to the then current Tito regime. Tijan did not avoid criticizing the attempt of the socialist regime to create a unique Yugoslav literature, with Andric's literary oeuvre as one of its touchstones. Conversely, Tijan denied the existence of Yugoslav literature, since he was prepared to argue that what truly existed were the distinct literatures of the Yugoslav peoples: Croatian, Serbian and Slovene. In his opinion, even the commitment of a great writer like Andric to the Yugoslav nationality could not change anything in that regard.

The Movement of Revolutionary Youth (HRM) was a predominantly student group with a radical left orientation that was founded at the beginning of December 1968 and that stood up against the upcoming Normalization until it was broken by the State Security during the winter of 1969 to 1970. Members of the HRM organised intense activity ahead of the first anniversary of the August occupation when they wanted to mobilize people against the Normalization regime. They published several leaflets for this occasion, one of them being the leaflet “To all – to all – to all!” which was signed by “workers, students, intelligentsia” and that urged non-violent protests on 21 August 1969, such as to boycotting public transportation, the press and shops. Pavel Šremer and Radan Baše from the Movement, and in cooperation with a printing trade union in Prague, saw to the printing of 200-thousand small leaflets. Initially, poet Jaroslav Seifert was asked to write up the text of the leaflet by the students. He thanked them for their trust but he declined their request arguing that they would manage to write the right text themselves. The final version was written collectively under the supervision of Petr Uhl. The whole event was finally called the Black Coffee Operation after two men in the printing trade union, Černý and Turek, and also as an allusion to the statement of the First Secretary of the SED Walter Ulbricht about the “coffee sediment of intellectuals in Prague”. The leaflets were also distributed beyond Prague, predominantly in North Bohemia and scattered by an engine driver, who was an acquaintance of Pavel Šremer, and his colleagues.

In 1978, Tomasz Konart invited Tomasz Sikorski to have a talk about independent galleries. The condition of the talk was that both participants had to take ten photographies of the interlocutor. The very photographies are the only evidence of the conversation. Also, the time of the discussion was strictly fixed to 30 minutes.
The documentation of the action Conversation and Photography was published in the catalog of the P.O. Box 17 Gallery. The catalog was edited by both Sikorski and Konart in 1979. It was made of the loose pages of A4 format. One of the pages showed exactly the action carried on by Konart. The work is a proper example of both the ephemeral nature of the neo-avant-garde art and its intellectual ambitions to analyze its own status.