Tomislav Gotovac Loves Zagreb

As one of the city’s most significant late 20th century artists, Gotovac’s work continues to celebrate the surreal

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On November 13, 1981, residents of Zagreb witnessed something unusual. When the clock struck noon, a man emerged onto Ilica—one of the city’s longest streets—and began walking toward the main square. He was completely naked and loudly shouting, “Zagreb, I love you!” as he moved along his path. When the man reached his destination, he laid down in the street and began kissing the asphalt. The whole scene lasted for seven minutes before police arrested him. His name was Tomislav Gotovac, and today his engraved footsteps lie just steps from the square, commemorating one of this legendary soul’s most iconic performances.

Tomislav Gotovac (1937-2010) is considered the forerunner of performance art in Croatia and the former Yugoslavia, and was one of the country’s most significant artists in the late 20th century. A multimedia and conceptual artist, as well as an actor and director, he was a central figure in testing the limits of societal and cultural norms throughout his creative career. Gotovac’s relationship with Zagreb, where he lived for just under 50 years, played a pivotal role in much of his work. Still, it was the artist’s boundary-pushing performance pieces—many of which were carried out within the former Yugoslavia—that earned him his celebrated status.

Tomislav Gotovac Loves Zagreb — Courtesy of the Tomislav Gotovac Institute

Gotovac utilized art as a vehicle for change, demystifying social politics and reinterpreting history through displays of the mundane. His favorite tool of art was his own self. For example, Gotovac often simulated everyday acts in front of the camera, such as “The Action of Taking 120 Pills” (1957) and “Showing Elle,” a piece that Gotovac recorded in 1962 using a 35mm camera. Images show the artist shirtless in the snow near Sljeme Mountain, just north of Zagreb, pouring over the pages of the French women’s fashion and beauty magazine. Through their simplicity, Gotovac easily conveys the stark contrast between consumerism and socialism.

The artist’s first works stem from the late 1950s, starting with photographic works and then continuing on to collages and soon, experimental films in the early 1960s. A pioneer of structural filmmaking—an avant-garde film movement in which the art relies more on the shape of the film than its content—Gotovac’s early works placed him alongside experimental filmmakers like Austria’s Peter Kubelka and American, Hollis Frampton. These included “Afternoon of a Faun” (1963), which Gotovac considered to be his flagship piece. The exploratory documentary consists of three sequences that the artist shot with a static camera, meaning one that doesn’t move. Its first scene shows a hospital balcony filled with patients, and the second—a peeling wall. The third clip is simply a continuous zoom of an intersection with cars and pedestrians.

One of Croatia’s great artistic agitators, Gotovac continuously pushed societal and cultural boundaries through his works. It was in the early 1960s that he also began incorporating nudity into his pieces, blurring the lines between public and private. For Gotovac, being naked out of context was not only an expression of freedom, but also a statement against authority and social conformity. In essence, he wanted to shake things up. At the same time, he was turning daily routines into “spectacles” by performing them nude in public, causing his audiences to rethink their own beliefs about adhering to social norms.

Gotovac first went nude in public in 1971, when he ran down a Belgrade street naked shouting “I am innocent!” as part of director (and prominent cultural dissident of socialist Yugoslavia) Lazar Stojanović’s film, Plastic Jesus. The Yugoslav government considered the artwork to be an attack on the state, banning the film through the republic’s dissolution and landing Stojanović in jail for several years. But it didn’t stop Gotovac.

His first Zagreb stripdown was the performance piece Action 100 (Whistling), which took place in 1979 at Trg Republike (Republic Square), coinciding with the city’s 10th Music Biennale. In the first part of the work, Gotovac conducted an ‘orchestra’ of just over 100 people blowing whistles, then reversed the roles during his second act. While his ensemble oversaw the music, the artist disrobed and ran around the packed square naked, blowing his whistle in front of the cameras until police stepped in and detained him.

Still, it’s Gotovac’s 1981 Lying Naked on the Asphalt, Kissing the Asphalt (Zagreb, I Love You) that remains one of his most memorable performances. It’s a homage to the American director Howard Hawks’ 1961 film, Hatari, in which hunters chase African wildlife for zoos. The rhino proves exceptionally hard to catch. “The rhino symbolizes the rejection of the existence of any obstacle,” Gotovac once said in an interview with Zagreb-based art historian Branka Stipančić. “For [Zagreb, I Love You] I shaved my head and beard and my entire habitus reminded me of that f–d rhino,” he said, “that’s why this performance is dedicated to Hawks.” It’s one that also solidified his relationship to the city that he called home for so many years.

Gotovac’s other performance works include Superman (1984), in which he donned a tight-blue, full-body leotard detailed with the superhero’s emblem, “S,” on the chest, a red cape, and red tube socks, and then walked through the city streets looking bored and clasping his hands in prayer. Another is Hair-Cutting and Shaving in Public, a performance piece Gotovac repeated on multiple occasions that’s fairly self-explanatory; afterward, he saved the cut hair in special envelopes, marking each with a section of hair from the performance.

The artist received the Croatian Association of Visual Artists’ Life Achievement Award in 2007, and passed away three years later. However, Gotovac’s work lives on in museums and through artists like Vlasta Delimar and Milan Božić, who reenact some of what were considered his most radical performances around the globe. Four Gotovac pieces, including “Showing Elle”, are part of the online catalog at NYC’s MoMA Museum of Modern Art, while the Art Institute of Chicago is home to the artist’s 1964 collage, Rothmans I - My Jazz.

For a deeper dive into his artistry, visit Zagreb’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MSU), Croatia’s largest and most modern art museum. It’s home to over 12,000 pieces of contemporary artworks in all forms, 600 of which are on permanent display. These include several of Gotovac’s pieces. Gathered under the title, Homage to Josip Broz Tito, the museum features four photographs of Gotovac performances that took place between Zagreb and Belgrade in 1980 and 1981. Each photo highlights a mundane action—reading the newspaper, listening to the radio, etc—that Gotovac carried out while Yugoslavia awaited the news of its president’s death, calling attention to the social and media frenzy that was occurring within the country at that time. MSU is also preparing an exhibit on Gotovac that will open this coming December.

In 2013, the city of Zagreb immortalized Gotovac’s footprints just steps away from Ban Jelačić Square, where the unconventional artist performed his legendary Zagreb, I Love You piece. It’s free to visit, and the wonderful symbol of recognition for one of the most compelling Croatian artists of his time.