Art as Burden

Having studied philosophy and literature at Zagreb University, Vlado Martek played an important role in the creation of the artists’ collective “Group of six artists” (Grupa šestorice autora) in Zagreb, with Mladen and Sven Stilinović, Fedor Vučemilović, Boris Demur and Željko Jerman. The collective, which was active until 1979, created many performances and actions, and published the experimental art journal MAJ/75. Inspired by poetry, Martek uses a wide variety of media, such as actions, graffiti, sculpture, and painting; he explores the possibilities around creating poetic structures and visual manifestations of a poem. The artist believes that the poem is not only a verbal or syntactic structure, but also a composition, and contends that each poem carries clues about the spatial, spiritual and intellectual conditions that immediately preceded its formation, and that their traces, when discovered, may reveal the essence of the poem. In this respect, he is interested in the tools used to write a poem, such as the paper, pencil and ruler, in their spatial relations, and the fortuitous lines with which the poet marks the paper. He questions what bearing these tools and objects may have had on the realisation of the poem, and explores these issues through the compositions he makes on paper, using these objects. Also inspired by concrete poetry, the artist discusses the graphic potentiality of language and narrative through his compositions.