Braco Dimitrijevic

FROM THE BOOK

"Braco Dimitrijevic's message is: every person is worth having a monument put up in his or her name. Every person is important, and should be recognized and acknowledged by others as such. Every person has the right to be perceived as significant. Braco Dimitrijevic writes the name of a casual passer-by, Gerda Bollen, on a huge sign placed on the façade of the Palais des Beaux-Art--a place usually reserved for announcements of exhibitions devoted to renowned artists. He also shows large-format portrait photographs of people who just happened to walk past him on the street on the façade of the Zagreb City Hall—a place usually reserved for portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Tito that adorned political parades. By doing so, the artist erects a monument for unknown people and proves his reverence for every human being. Thanks to this interpretation of the artistic act, his anti-hierarchic, radically humanist, and directly effective veneration of contemporaries moves center stage. Sheer coincidence turns selection into a relativizing moment, and social hierarchy is challenged as an arbitrary mechanism that should by no means be automatically accepted."

Lorand Hegyi, excerpted from Empathic Conceptualism: The Human Context of Casuality in Braco Dimitrijevic's Work in Braco Dimitrijevic.