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Mangelos at Peter Freeman
Art in America, Dec, 2005 by Faye Hirsch
Dimitrije Basicevic (1921-1987), a Croatian art historian, critic and curator who lived in Zagreb for much of his life, was also an artist who, although he began making work in the 1940s, did not show until the late '60s, under the pseudonym Mangelos. The subject of a 2003-04 traveling exhibition that originated at the Museu de Serralves in Porto, Mangelos's work was seen in a few examples at the latest Carnegie International. Curated by the world's expert on Mangelos, Branka Stipancic, a recent show at Freeman included some characteristic work--mainly small, intimate pieces the size of book pages--from the early '50s to the late '70s.
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Generally, Mangelos may be seen as belonging to the post-war European strain of "zero-degree" abstraction in which rationalism was pushed to its limits, collapsing into a kind of absurdity. For Mangelos, the "zero degree" lay in language, which he wielded as words or phrases scrawled in a variety of tongues, often on paper or cardboard painted black, or simply as letters--roman, Cyrillic, runic, and, most eccentric, Glagolithic, a primitive, disused Slavic script. He especially liked Glagolithic for its obscurity to readers and its easy adaptation to geometric permutations. The show included, for instance, seven works in acrylic on board from Mangelos's 1978 "Glagolithic Letter" series, in which the letters look for all the world like some late, exhausted form of Suprematism, rendered in black, red and white (the artist's customary palette, along with, occasionally, gold).
Mangelos is most appealing when his sense of absurdity is at its strongest, or when his critique of a universalizing utopianism--the flaws of which could only be glaringly apparent to artists living in the Eastern bloc--softens into a kind of dream. For the first, one need only turn to a work called Energija (1977), an acrylic on wood panel in which the word "energy" is written in Glagolithic on a brushy red ground. As in many of his works, the ground looks as though it is obscuring something beneath (indeed, Mangelos often worked on black paint brushed over pages from books). One suspects a hidden subtext, now irretrievable. In the failed-utopia vein, Mangelos produced a series of globes, flatly overpainted like his other works, and carrying texts of mystifying content placed within ledger lines. "Hegel=it's=nothing=" is the translation from the German of the red cursive text circumambulating a gold globe; the ca. 1977-78 work's title, Hegel kritik der logic, hints at Mangelos's philosophical drift. The promise of comprehensiveness and comprehensibility inherent in a globe is delicately undermined by the dainty script and the obliterating wash of color, making the object feel like a lost world, its secrets aphoristic at best, drifting in from some distant, perhaps more hopeful, era.
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