The Art of Walking / An Outing to the Lungs of the City: The Group of Six Author’s Walk Around Zagreb

On May 19, 1976, six young men took a walk around Zagreb, the second largest city in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the capital of its constituent republic of Croatia. These were Boris Demur, Fedor Vučemilović, Vlado Martek, Željko Jerman, and brothers Sven and Mladen Stilinović, the members of the Group of Six Authors, a casual grouping of friends who met up to hold what they called “exhibition-actions” in city streets (1).¹ At these events, group members made and displayed art, performed actions, spoke with curious passersby about their work, and hung out socially, creating a festive, open-ended atmosphere. Most of the exhibition-actions were held in Zagreb, and to prepare for them the group would go through a process of getting their older, respected friends who ran the City Gallery for Contemporary Art to request permits for the public actions, a bureaucratic necessity in a country where the socialist state maintained quite tight control of urban space. Sometimes, though, they wanted to do something on the fly or not have to bother with the red tape, and then might pick a location where their exhibition might be mistaken for casual socializing, like on an urban bathing area by the Sava River. In the case of Walk Around Zagreb, they just walked around the city each carrying one of their works, depriving the exhibition of its fixity in space, thus making it both less legible as an actual public event and less vulnerable to policing. 

Though approaches varied amongst the members, the Group of Six on the whole pursued art practices that were highly conceptual and that often took the form of deconstructed, deskilled reworkings of traditional media including painting, photography, poetry, and film.² A number of the artists made extensive use of text, especially Mladen Stilinović and Vlado Martek. The works they carried on the walk exemplified their individual deconstructive approaches: Sven Stilinović brought a cameraless photographic work, on which was messily written “This Is a Portrait of My Friend Željko Jerman” in photo fixer, and Vučemilović carried a similarly produced work but that consisted simply of white stripes on a black ground. Jerman himself wore a collared shirt on which was written “This is my youth,” and carried a cross-shaped work with camera[1] -based and cameraless photographic elements, including a print of his own hand. Demur brought a black painting, monochrome except for a white parallelogram in which was written “I’m not crazy enough to paint bourgeois paintings” in red. Martek carried Pride, a work consisting of a bicycle wheel with a slip of white paper bearing the title phrase and a photograph of himself wedged in its spokes (5). And Mladen Stilinović carried his Red Paintings (6), two drawings in oil pastel of different shades of red, each with the work “red” written in the same shade next to it. As a whole, the artworks rejected representation, skill, and presentation while also treating questions of subjectivity, desire, and the ideology of the late socialist Yugoslav state. 

Of the extant documentation images of the walk, one shows the artists walking quite casually, ignored by passersby headed the other direction, carrying their artworks alongside their bodies ( 2). Another image shows them posing with their works against a wall, facial expressions ranging from slight smiles to neutral (1). Their long hair and loose clothing made them signify as sloppy hippies, a factor which would have shaped passerby perceptions of them as they walked along. In a third photo, they stand in front of the high wooden fence and gateway leading to the courtyard of Jerman’s house on Voćarska Street, where the walk began (3). Demur is not in that picture, as he did not join them until later on, and they are accompanied by a female friend. Vučemilović and Sven Stilinović pose frontally with their artworks for the camera, but Marek stands sideways with his arms crossed, looking hip and a little defiant. Jerman is smoking and Mladen Stilinović is laughing, maybe making a joke or enjoying someone else’s. On their walk, the artists took a route that went from east to west, through the core of the city (4): from Jerman’s house down Domjanićeva Street then west on Vlaška Street to the central Square of the Republic, south to Flower Square, then along Preradovićeva Street where Demur joined the group onto Kavurićeva Street (today Hebrangova Street) to Marshall Tito Square (today Square of the Croatian Republic) and up Masarykova Street. At that point, they all went their separate ways. The whole walk took around two and a half hours.³

Walking as an art practice grounds itself in a certain time and place. Mechtild Widrich argues that site in contemporary art practice is often mediated by the presence of the artist’s body. At the same time, she notes, site-specificity as a concept cannot require a naïve commitment to that body’s presence.⁴ Artists’ bodies can both organize and disorganize the habits, rote forms of spatial perception, and dominant frameworks that function in a particular public space, inviting viewers to think differently about a range of spaces and to bring their attention to what is unfolding somewhere in the moment. In walking-as-art, a certain person or people walk in a given place on a certain date and time, and those baseline material facts create an especially close connection between this type of practice and site-specificity. But at the same time, in its habitual and everyday nature, walking resists specificity: most people do it so much that it can be hard or impossible to remember. Or you might remember having gone somewhere, but not every step that carried you there; walking, like breathing, needs to be forgotten in order to function normally. So the art of walking is an especially potent case of a practice that knits together site and the body while also slipping away from presence via lapses in memory, documentation, and viewer observation.

In the case of the Group of Six Authors’ Walk Around Zagreb, the oscillation between whether this was functional, unremarkable walking or special, artistic walking was central to the nature of the action, and probably also to people’s experiences of viewing it. I described above how during the walk each group member carried one of his own artworks. While in the photos of the artists standing still they are mostly posed to show the art to the camera, in the walking action shot they carry their works tucked under their arms in a way that does not seem like an overt act of clearly showing them. As already noted, the Group of Six created art that rejected representation and traditional aesthetics, and that for many non-specialist viewers strained recognizability as art, tout court. During their typical exhibition-actions, these works would have been laid out on the ground or sometimes produced on-site, and the artists would stand around talking to passersby about them. While unconventional, those actions still retained aspects of a recognizable exhibition format, and in some parts of the city might have seemed not far removed from the activity of vendors who were sometimes permitted to set up stalls for people to peruse. By contrast, the 1976 walk would likely have lessened conversational interaction with viewers and made it even less clear that an art exhibition was happening; the artists probably came off to many passersby simply as young men carrying strange objects from one place to another. Though it could easily be coincidence, none of the images of Walk Around Zagreb show anyone looking at the artists. This detail highlights the unobtrusiveness that can inhere in walking. Here we see walking not only as an intentional, out-of-the-ordinary and potentially subversive practice on the part of artists, but also as the everyday movement of people’s bodies through spaces that have come to seem so habitual and unremarkable that Zagrebites might not even have looked up to notice the artworks being “walked” down the street.

In this play between walking as habitual and rote versus creative and intentional, Walk Around Zagreb evokes the Situationist International’s dérive, an experimental mode of movement in urban space. Vincent Kauffman notes that for the SI, the act of walking in the city reflected a larger “tend[ing] toward invisibility,” a dissolution of art and the artist into the popular life of the people.⁵ Within that framework, the objectivity of walking lets it be a means of becoming invisible, through asking the walker to abandon their worn and familiar practices and attitudes. The dérive is thus “walking purged of autobiographical representation, … a practice requiring the enunciatory and ambulatory disappearance of the walker.”⁶ Walk Around Zagreb has an aspect of that dissolution, but juxtaposes it—almost comically—with the reassertion of autobiographical representation via the works the artists carried. Jerman’s handprints in photographic chemicals, Martek’s photo of himself juxtaposed with the word “Pride,” Sven Stilinović’s cameraless photograph with the messily scrawled words “This is a photo of my friend Željko Jerman”: across the works, the emotional and creative individual returned, even if only to be ignored by passersby. 

The individual’s experience of navigating an urban sea of signs and ideologies was an especial focus for Mladen Stilinović, who of all the artists in the Group of Six was most interested in urban space at a theoretical level. His numerous works reflecting that interest include photographic series of the mid-1970s self-published as fold-out books showing certain types of signage (e.g., for hairdressers, or for May 1), experimental films such as Run Away (1973) that use footage of city spaces to evoke the disorientation of vision and movement, and urban actions such as Cotton Pad Step (1975), in which he and his brother Sven laid a piece of gauze across the sidewalk and photographed unaware passersby stepping over it.⁷ Stilinović’s engagements with urban space point out the habitual forms of meaning-making and movement that structure the city, and by highlighting them signal their inherent strangeness, such as the quirky representational convention of hairdresser signage depicting heads painted in white on a black background.

An artist’s multiple from 1978 shows that Mladen Stilinović was attentive to different ways that public space might be resignified, and to how the use of space could both consolidate and subvert ideology. Starting that year, the Group of Six published a magazine called Maj 75, named after the date of their first exhibition-action together. Issues of the magazine contained works on paper by each artist, sometimes screen printed in small editions or produced by hand. Stilinović’s contribution to the first issue (A) is a single-page that reproduces a text he used in several other works:

I hear they’re talking 

about the death of art

The death of art is

the death of the artist

Someone’s trying to kill me

Help⁸

In other iterations from the year before (1977), Stilinović wrote this text in red paint on a piece of pink satin, stretched lumpily over a small wooden stretcher, and again on a piece of crinkled, flattened-out foil. In the 1978 version from Maj 75, the phrase is printed over a page of the newspaper Večernji list, turned sideways. The items on this particular sheet include a photo of Zagreb decorated in anticipation of the 11^th congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, and an article about the ponderous bureaucratic process that will determine how many students get admitted to the country’s universities for the coming year. Also present is an article entitled “An Outing to the Lungs of the City” about a mass walk on Sljeme, the mountain that abuts Zagreb to the north, organized by the newspaper on the occasion of the May 4^thholiday Fighter’s Day, a commemoration of the communist Partisan resistance against the Nazi puppet government during WWII. The event was entitled Sljeme Pathways of Comradeship 1978, and was organized so that participants could visit different stations and collect Večernji list badges on their way. The article is almost entirely occupied with pragmatic details about the walk such as the signage, the duration (three or four hours of “pleasant walking,” or much faster for experienced hikers), the presence of the Red Cross in case people needed help, the fact that everyone should bring their own food, and the organization of a “cultural-artistic” program in a field on the mountain, which included a judo demonstration. The article does not elaborate on the symbolic connection between the event and Fighter’s Day, most likely because the link between mass physical activity, large group socializing, and appropriate commemoration of the anti-fascist struggle would have seemed so natural to inhabitants of socialist Yugoslavia that it needed no explanation.

The phrase Stilinović printed across the newspaper is a succinct, funny assertion of the non-obsolescence of contemporary art. In the context of authoritative discourses that may claim the “end of art” based on a teleological model of modernism, Stilinović asserts that he is still creating, and doing so in a way that foregrounds the primacy of his own contextual experimentation. The humor in the phrase stems from the obvious lack of parallel between those end-of-art discourses and a threat to Stilinović’s person, and also from the way he frames himself ironically as the straight man in the work’s joke, someone who does not even understand the “end-of-art” discourse. Moreover, he juxtaposes the phrase and its assertion of the living, experimental nature of art over a sheet of newspaper with three stories that concern ideological and bureaucratic uses of the city. Read within the framework of this multiple, Walk Around Zagreb appears as a search within the city for a different kind of intellectual and creative “fresh air”: individualistic and let limning the threshold of invisibility afforded by urban space, both a public art exhibition and a simple hangout with friends. In the many reworkings of the exhibition format in the work of the Group of Six and in Zagreb’s broader experimental art milieu of the 1970s more broadly, Walk Around Zagreb stands out for this focus on walking’s double-edged relationship to visibility, and the possibility it afforded to skirt socialist bureaucracy by hiding a public event in plain sight. 

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1. For a comprehensive timeline of the Group of Six Authors’ activity, see Janka Vukmir, ed. Grupa Šestorice Autora [Group of Six Authors]. Zagreb: Soros Centar za Suvremenu Umjetnost, 1998. For more recent scholarship, see Marko Ilić, “Artists at Work: The Group of Six Authors and RZU Podroom (1975-1980),” in A Slow Burning Fire: The Rise of the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2021, pp. 167-205, as well as my own book about the group and their associates, This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024. 
2. The generation of Yugoslav artists to which they belonged is called the New Art Practice, and is famous for its socially astute, often ironic conceptualism, which makes extensive use of image appropriation and foregrounds questions of subjectivity. The publication to define this movement was Marijan Susovski, ed. The New Artistic Practice in Yugoslavia 1966-1978. Zagreb: Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1978. It was originally published in both Serbo-Croatian and English versions. 
3. Email correspondence with Vlado Martek, March 14, 2024. 
4. Mechtild Widrich, Monumental Cares: Site of History and Contemporary Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 35.
5. Vincent Kauffman, “Angels of Purity,” trans. John Goodman. In Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough. October Books. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2002, 287.
6. Ibid., 301.
7. There are many more works that connect to this interest. Though urban space was an especially strong focus in Stilinović’s work of the 1970s, the theme is also present in later pieces such as the 1998 triptych In the Cities, Lines for Bread, which show the title words cut out of a newspaper and collaged onto small, dark grey canvases with pink and red geometric shapes.
8. Čujem da se govori / o smrti umjetnosti / Smrt umjetnosti je / smrt umjetnika / Mene netko hoće ubiti / U pomoć

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  Adair Rounthwaite

  Adair Rounthwaite is Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb (2024) and Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York (2017), both from the University of Minnesota Press.