Was ist Kunst? was originally created as a video performance in collaboration with the Krinzinger Gallery in Innsbruck, taking place in Brdo, Istria, from October 1 to 9, 1976. This work played a pivotal role not only in the development of Raša Todosijević’s individual artistic career but also had a broader impact on conceptual and post-conceptual art movements in the former Yugoslavia. Its lasting influence, which persists today, was demonstrated in exhibitions such as … Was ist Kunst? … Summarizing Fragmented Histories in Graz, co-produced by Steirischer Herbst and the local Künstlerhaus in 2013.
In the exhibition’s announcement, which brought together about thirty regional artists and artistic groups to examine the state of art in societies of the former Yugoslavia, it was explicitly stated that the aim was to build on the question first posed by Raša Todosijević’s performance series. The announcement noted that “after nearly forty years of repetition, to the point of exhaustion, this eternal question remains unanswered, even when it continues to be posed as a challenge for artists actively engaged in the artistic discourse.”
There are two levels of influence from this particular work on artistic practices in the region. Both relate to a correction of linguistic and analytical conceptualism, which, to the disappointment of its founders, had begun to evolve into an artistic style. The first level of correction involves emphasizing expressiveness, which had previously been considered incompatible with the conceptual approach. Ješa Denegri wrote about this in relation to Todosijević’s work, while Isabelle Graw coined the broader term “conceptual expression.” The second level of influence comes from the demonstration of violence as a constitutive element of any system, including the art system (in the sense of the “symbolic violence” described by Pierre Bourdieu), as well as every radical attempt to question and change a system.
At the heart of Todosijević’s interrogation of fundamental artistic questions lies the belief that it is not definitions that allow us to recognize something as art (a subject of obsessive focus in analytical conceptual art at the time), but rather the habitus we have unconsciously adopted that shapes our worldview, including our perception of art. These ingrained patterns are not easily relinquished, even through intellectual understanding acquired by adopting new definitions of art; instead, they require a more existential jolt. In Bourdieu’s terms, both the epistemological and ontological questions of art are inseparable from an analysis of the procedures through which dominant groups, who hold real social power, impose certain paradigms as valid, while concealing the power relations that support them. Both the legitimization and delegitimization of an artist’s work as art are necessarily part of the power dynamics within the art field. Every choice is a move in that game, and every answer to the question posed takes one of the possible positions. Thus, perhaps the only step outside the possible, as the historical avant-gardes insisted, is to persistently and aggressively repeat the question “Was ist Kunst?” over and over again.
Was ist Kunst? is widely recognized as a video work, but it is important to emphasize that during the 1970s, it was also performed live in front of an audience in multiple versions. In the catalog dedicated to Raša Todosijević’s works from the 1970s, titled Velike južne predstave (Great Southern Performances), published by the SKC Belgrade in 1980, the following performances are listed: Was ist Kunst?, Biennale de Paris 77, Was ist Kunst?, Galerija Sretna Nova Umetnost, Belgrade 1977, Was ist Kunst? – Zabranjeno pušenje, Galerija Lavirint, Lublin, 1978, Was ist Kunst, Malgožata?, International Festival Performance & Body, Krakow, 1978, Was ist Kunst?, International Performance Meeting, SKC 1978, Was ist Kunst?, Österreichischer Kunstverein, Internationales Performance Festival, Vienna, 1978.
Unlike Todosijević’s earlier performances, which, according to Ješa Denegri, were motivated by the claim “Decision as Art” and declared certain everyday actions as elements of artistic work, this performance posed a fundamental ontological question about art. This question was delivered emphatically and repetitively, without resolution, until the investigator was exhausted, leaving the question open. According to Denegri, until this work, Todosijević practiced “artistic behavior as an act of artistic arbitrariness,” but with this work, he abandoned the “aprioristic nomination” and began using a questioning form to express the nature of art, claiming that “the way the artist poses the question of art is the artwork itself.”
Much of the discussion and interpretation of this work has focused on its video version.
Raša Todosijević’s Videography
In the catalog/book Video Art in Serbia (SCCA, Belgrade 1999), in Todosijević’s videography, Was ist Kunst, Patrizia Hennings? is listed as his fifth video production, following Pijenje vode (Drinking Water, 1973), Ko profitira od umetnosti, a ko pošteno zarađuje (Who Profits from Art, and Who Earns Honestly, 1975), Moje poslednje remek delo (My Last Masterpiece, 1975), and Sećanje na umetnost Raše Todosijevića (Memory of Raša Todosijević’s Art, 1976). The video performance Was ist Kunst, Patrizia Hennings? later had two more versions, in which the question was nominally addressed to different women whose names were included in the titles (Was ist Kunst, Marinela Koželj? and Was ist Kunst, Farideh Kadot?). Branko Dimitrijević, in the aforementioned catalog/book, emphasized the media upgrade of the performance, staged in front of the camera. He pointed out “the claustrophobic framing of the performance, where the effect of intimidation and aggression is heightened by the camera’s static nature” and noted that “the critical tone regarding the perception of art and its ideological framework is intensified by the duration of the media, making the event more oppressive for the viewer through real-time transmission.”
Georg Schöllhammer, in the catalog for Todosijević’s exhibition as Serbia’s representative at the 54th Venice Biennale (published by MSUV, Novi Sad, 2011), further emphasized the violence imposed on the viewers, who, in his opinion, are placed in “an identification conflict: they become both tormentors of the model and the artist himself, as he neurotically despairs over the question he poses.”
Watching this video is not just witnessing an act staged for the camera but is consciously designed with the viewer’s gaze in mind. Schöllhammer wonders whether the witness becomes a complicit participant or even an unintentional perpetrator of the painful act they observe, given that it unfolds for their eyes. This becomes particularly dramatic when considering Dejan Sretenović’s assertion in the catalog of Todosijević’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (MSUB, Belgrade, 2002) that this video performance is “a work firmly rooted in the objectivity of physical action, the production, and not the simulation of violent acts.” Thus, it is not merely a performance. It is not just an author’s dramatization of the question “What is art?” executed in a dramatic way for greater impact on the viewer, but rather a document of an attempt to persist in the constant questioning of art, without any illusion that anyone can provide an answer.
Stevan Vuković
