UntitledGoran Trbuljak (HR)

Series of photographs and posters, 1981 - 2010

"Why in fact did I do the series of photographs Artist in Crisis and the poster Old and Balding Seeking a Gallery? I thought it would be good to do a series of works like this while I was still not in crisis. I photographed my head and hands with a graphic repro camera – which in a real crisis I certainly wouldn’t be able to handle – by lying underneath it. Similarly I would say that it would be better to start with a series touching on age and baldness before I become totally old and totally bald.

Why did I make a series of works where I did portraits of myself lying on the floor? I photographed myself with a wooden camera that I placed on the floor, for I had no tripod for it. To be able to shoot myself, then I had to lie down beside it on the floor. The lens had a cover that has to be moved to expose the negative. I did that by stretching out my left hand, as far as I could, to the cover, attempting as I did so not to move too much. I counted out in myself the seconds of the exposure. Because of all of this, I have a kind of melancholy look about me, deformed and flaccid cheeks and the rest of the muscle mass that I later attempt to put into order, by placing the horizontally taken photographs in a vertical position.

Why did I do the series of posters Old and Depressive Nobody,Resumé, and send a postcard with information about my thirty-year-long period of unhappiness in art to other artists? I thought that I ought to handle the theme of depression before I really fell into a depressive fit, because once you are in one, you don’t feel like doing anything. With the Resumé posters, I wanted to say that I had missed all the important themes in art in this and the last century … it is better that I say that than that others do. At the end, it seemed to me to be pretentious, and when the poster was already printed, I added a sentence in colour spray paint: Who cares, old fart. In the postcard, though, I wanted to celebrate an anniversary, but no one congratulated me on it. People are terrified of unhappiness, failure – just as they are of death. Artists indeed don’t fear death because they think they will live forever through their works. This is certainly accurate for the greatest artists. The others, those who are anonymous, the less successful have to talk about it during their lifetimes, for it’s better to talk about it while one still can talk about it. Later it won’t be possible to say anything on this topic.

Why did I make a photographic diptych in the series Self-Portrait in the Studio? In the first I am standing, in the second I am sitting. What links the two is the same somewhat sterile space. The camera is on its stand and as I am distant from it I have to shoot myself with a cable release. When you press the bulb, air streams along the cable from me to the camera and at its end presses down a pin that triggers the exposure mechanism. It might seem to someone that it is the other way around, that something is streaming from the direction of the camera towards me, for example, some IV drip that is of vital importance to me."

Goran Trbuljak (HR)

Goran Trbuljak, cameraman, director, fine artist, university professor. He studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Zagreb, graduating in 1972 in the printmaking department. After two years of post-graduate work at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris, he went on studying in Zagreb and in 1980 graduated from the then Academy for Film, Theatre and TV (today the Academy of Dramatic Arts), in the camera department. Since 1988 he has been employed as a teacher at that same tertiary level institution. As well as dealing professionally with film and with art in the area of the fine arts, photography, video, conceptual art, he also has worked as a graphic editor and photography editor in the journals Film, Polet and Gordogan and has occasionally written and still writes about photography, film and painting in Spot, Film, Danas, Start, Globus and Slobodna Dalmacija. He has been cameraman in numerous feature films, as well as in several short, experimental and TV films and series.

goran.trbuljak1@zg.t-com.hr