Josip Vaništa
Yesterday was Manet's birthday—so today, thanks to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Croatia, we present a contemporary homage to the artist. Josip Vaništa (Karlovac, 1924) is one of the last great active artists of the neo-avant-garde movement and one of the most enigmatic personalities of contemporary Croatian art. This view is often expressed by prominent curators and critics who recognize Vaništa in the international art scene as one of the forefathers of conceptual art in the world, particularly through his work in the iconic Gorgona art group (1961-1966). At that time and under that ruling ideology, the radicalism, even subversiveness of the members of the group, meant overstepping the borders of the academic and conventional rules of the environment in which they worked.
Nearly 100 years after Manet, Josip Vaništa sets up his homage to Manet in the shop window of the Schira Salon (Studio G), a frame shop in Zagreb. It is a silent protest against the harshness of the environment and the system that ridicules civilized, middle-class standards, denouncing the tradition as decadent and civil, while ignoring or attacking novelty.
Josip Vaništa sought the necessary gear for this display-installation—a gilt chair, a cane, and a top hat—through an advertisement in Zagreb’s daily paper. The only intervention on these objects, representing Manet’s qualities as a person of civil behavior and education, Vaništa made on the cane. He joined the ends of two walking sticks and made a bizarre object that could no more fulfill its function. Actually, in the context of the sixties and socialism with a human face, a top hat on one’s head was also impossible.