Tomislav Gotovac
Hommage to Glenn Miller (1990)
Courtesy of the Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb
In 1990, shortly after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, legendary performance artist Tomislav Gotovac presented his Hommage to Glenn Miller in Sarajevo. It reflects the political phantasms slowly emerging in Europe with the collapse of state socialism and the dawn of a new, neoliberal era.
To the cheerful wartime hits of Glenn Miller, Gotovac enacts a small neofascist choreography in underpants, before reappearing as a Communist high priest in part two. His speech parodies the mannerisms of ideological agitators while offering a chilling barrage of paranoid narratives. They concern, among others, the near divine postwar supremacy of the United States and a coming war between Europe and Asia. Today, Gotovac’s fantasies are almost identical with widespread conspiracy theories and anticipate the language of the ultraright.
Tomislav Gotovac (1937, Somor, Yugoslavia–2010, Zagreb, Croatia) was a filmmaker as well as Conceptual and performance artist who created numerous photo series and collages. From the 1960s onward, his works dealt critically with social themes, arriving at new, formally radical, emancipatory, and anarchic ways of doing so. His works have been shown, among others, at the 53rd Venice Biennale; De Appel, Amsterdam; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; ZKM Karlsruhe; Wiener Secession; Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Video documentation of a performance, 37:08 min.
Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb