Tomislav Gotovac, 'Watch on the Rhine', 2015

Photograph, Level 12, Executive Meeting Area

The life-sized photo of an older man standing naked on a roof, which can be seen on Level 12 of the Erste Campus, shows Croatian artist Tomislav Gotovac (who died in 2010) during a 1994 performance in Zagreb. For this performance, Gotovac spent several hours on the roof of the modernist pavilion occupied by the Croatian Association of Artists, standing in a pose reminiscent of Renaissance standing sculptural portraits by Michelangelo as well as depictions of mythical guardian figures, looking towards the ongoing military hostilities that gripped Croatia at that point during the Yugoslav Wars.

With his title for this performance, “Watch on the Rhine,” Tomislav Gotovac was making reference to the synonymous American film starring Bette Davis from 1943, which has to do with German resistance to National Socialism. He reinforced this reference to a past event—the experience of which, it had long been hoped, would have taught people something that would prevent future wars—by deliberately locating his performance atop a building that Zagreb’s Muslim minority had used as a temporary mosque for a brief period during the 1940s. On this, Gotovac commented: “I was a mosque guard.”

As such, the artist’s naked body appears within eye- and earshot of real fighting—not only incapable of putting up any meaningful resistance against possible attack, but actually seeming entirely defenceless and painfully vulnerable.

Tomislav Gotovac (1937–2010) lived and worked in Zagreb. During his later years, he changed his name to Antonio Lauer. He was a film director and a conceptual and performance artist, and he created numerous photo series and collages. From the beginning of the 1960s onward, his output dealt critically with social themes, arriving at new, formally radical, emancipatory, and anarchic ways of doing so. 1967 saw Gotovac realize his first happening in Zagreb. His works have been shown at the 53rd Venice Biennale as well as at De Appel in Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, ZKM Karlsruhe, the Vienna Secession, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Text: Kathrin Rhomberg & Pierre Bal-Blanc