Tomislav Gotovac
Hommage to Glenn Miller (1990)
Courtesy of the Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb
Dates
20.9.2024–16.2.2025
Details
Video documentation of a performance, 37:08 min.
Location
Neue Galerie Graz, Graz
Part of
Horror Patriae: Exhibition
Production specifics
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.
Retrospective
Retrospective