FRAGMENTS AND REVIEWS

ON ANDREJ TISMA'S ART

   Andrej Tisma's art actions take place in the environment of the so-called expanded, but at the same time interwoven visual art and literary medium. Word, gesture, mathematical symbol or random snapshot meet in the same semantic plane to transform their barely hinted and contradictory semanticism. 
     Particularly interesting are Tisma's explorations in mail-art, a fairly recent artistic discipline, whose expansion over the past few years had pushed into the background conceptualism, concrete and visual poetry. In his mail-art creations Tisma makes use of stamps of his own manufacture ("remek delo / master piece", "neopisivo / undescribable" etc.) which he applies to postcards and other communicative material or employs them to intervene in official, mostly banal picture postcards, changing their kitsch appearance and message to a relevant poetic load. 
     Andrej Tisma's book "Alter" is one of the top achievements of the Yugoslav  avant-guard in recent years. 

   Miroljub Todorovic  

   (Fragments from the epilogue of the  "Alter"  book, Vrsac, 1987) 

     PERFORMANCES - (SPI)RITUALS    
 

    The title of Andrej Tišma's performance "Liberté, fraternité, égalité 1789-1989" staged at the "Diagonale" gallery in Paris on 20th January 1989, seemingly related to the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, was actually meant to stimulate contemplation of the current significance of these so frequently used terms. Have the demanded freedom, equality and brotherhood of the people been fulfilled by now, two centuries later? These were the questions Tišma posed to his audience during the discourse, which was the first part of the performance.

During the interaction, Tišma distributed clippings from erotic comics, bearing the motto "Liberte 1789-1989", impressed in red letters, thus asking the question of how far are we stretching the boundaries of freedom. After that, in order to "leave a mental trace" of this event, Tišma stamped bodies or garments of his visitors with the message "You met Andrej Tisma".

Tišma's project actually consists of "work with human psyches", through discussions and provocations by way of stating his own view of the arts and asking personal questions, in order to establish communication on a level where a person feels free to talk in public about himself, his feelings and ideas.

About fifty spectators were very much interested in the event and were ready to participate actively. An hour long lively dialogue with the audience evolved. There were spontaneous reactions, laughs and even singing, making the intention of Andrej Tišma to make a close encounter of an artistic kind a full success.

    Igor Antic     

   (From "Stav" magazine no. 31-32, Novi Sad, February. 1989.) 
 

     PHOTOGRAPHY

We know very little, almost nothing, about the nature of man and the world, about their real essence. No doubt this is why we bend so curiously, even longingly, over every photograph. We seemed to know no more about our Earth than we did about the Moon, yet when we saw the first photographs of that Moon, its wasteland seemed familiar, almost identical to the wasteland that modern poetry, for example, has spoken of.

It was precisely this curiosity, this voracity, that I discovered in myself as I paged through Andrej Tisma's series of photographic works, entitled "Danger". I seemed to be seeing things - grass, a tree, a hamster cut in two on the grass, a rose, a gray speckled rooster, a rubber glove--for the first time, although in fact just outside my window a rose is preening, not yet destroyed by the frost, and a gray speckled rooster struts nearby. Simone Weil says: "If unity of opposites is good, then evil is not the opposite of good". Andrej Tisma's "Danger" speaks of exactly that, and proves it.

After having studied classical art in Prague, Andrej Tisma seemed to start from Warhol's point zero. It is no coincidence that cows and goats often appear in these photographs. We might even say that, along with a young married couple, they are the main characters in this comic strip, this film. They regard the couple in their nakedness. The completeness of their nudity, the openness of their coupling--this is what is capable of being a counterpoint to violence, without intending, of course, to be a counterpoint to anything, to neutralize. With absolute nakedness, absolute privacy, absolute openness, Tisma knows how to freeze things when they are on the point of becoming sensational, pornographic, brutal. In every picture he appears with his wife, yet his art is anonymous in the extreme. Like a hippie, he leans toward flowers, and, like Henry Miller, to vaginas. And he knows how to raise all this to new levels, with his Polaroid marble, his black background and white stamp that says DANGER. Yes, these pictures prove, or more precisely, show, that the vagina, sexuality, and coitus are more beautiful than weapons and violence, or to paraphrase Bogdanovic's witticism, that a woman is more beautiful than a gun, that a gun is ugly, the vagina as lovely as a rose…

Otto Tolnai

(From the "Szempont" Radio Novi Sad show, September 1991)

        PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO ART 
 

          Tisma uses polaroids in very different ways, but the key system of combining them is based on the principle of Hegel’s triads. In other words, he juxtaposes two different pictures and it is up to the viewers to draw a conclusion from them. On the one hand, there is life, represented by powerful erotic scenes. On the other, he takes objects from nature, which could be called “found” objects and scenes that represent the other, the Thanatos. In such combinations, Tisma makes us wonder about the objective of art, about the meaning of modern life and, indeed, about what is it that artists should be doing. 

          Tisma's video has actually struck us as an entirely new approach to the creation of short artistic videos. He uses as his sources the current TV production, i.e. news, documentary and history programs, skillfully compiles them and creates a system which talks about an artist who has consciously and artfully weaved up an artistic viewpoint over a number of years, an attitude which certainly places Tisma among the leading figures of the contemporary art in this region. 

 Slavko Timotijevic  

     NETWORKING, (SPI)RITUALS AND ANTI-EMBARGO 
 
 
      The attitude towards art as a particular kind of spiritual energy exchange, which existed before the appearance of modern avant-garde movements, and which can be found in theoretical and practical work of Andrej Tisma, a mid generation artist from Novi Sad, is embodied in his (artistic) shapes which stand as a unique phenomenon within our contemporary visual art and culture. 
      Following the traces of main conceptual art forms and being involved in visual poetry during the 1970-s Tisma started to do mail art. This artistic strategy was only a starting point in a path that led to some new possibilities for him. 
      Later on, he moved on from the artistic interventions on postcard and stamps towards communication by video and audio cassettes and computer inscriptions. This collective exchange of energy has brought the foundation of The Network, a world wide open system of communications that was defined by Tisma as "a spiritual sculpture which wraps up the whole planet". Artists' ideas circulate and meet within this global sculpture, establishing a new principle of selection, so that the most original ideas incredibly quickly and efficiently become the benefit of all the participants in communication. 
     Andrej Tisma has developed meet-art since the mid eighties which has transformed his multimedia activities. Since he considers that inspiration always vanishes to a certain degree when it becomes materialized, he gets more involved in projects that require direct contact with the audience, and sometimes even their participation. The spiritual component of these artistic actions is stressed and he performs them under the name of (SPI)RITUALS. 
     Beside his recent performances in Belgrade and Milan, Tisma gave a lecture on his (SPI)RITUALS at L'INSTITUTE DES HAUTES ETUDES EN ARTS PLASTIQUES, Paris in 1990, after being invited by Pontus Hulten, who was the founder of the Modern Gallery in PARISIAN BEAUBOURG. In October 1992 Tisma presented these actions to audience in Seoul as well. During 1992 and 1993 he communicates within The Network sending his visual and textual works to his colleagues abroad in order to give them information about the situation in our culture under the sanctions. In September 1992 organizes "Anti-Embargo Networker Congress" in Sremski Karlovci. He continues this activity, especially after his recognition that his colleagues from all around the world are not fully aware of the consequences made by the sanctions, and their bad effect on our culture. Doing this Tisma not only widens formal horizons of art, but strengthens our tiny presence in the world cultural exchange today. 

      Svetislav Jovanov 

     (From the "Cage" magazine, Odzaci, October 1993) 
 
 

       As the most convincing and most authoritative protagonist of immaterial art forms on the contemporary Yugoslav scene, but also as its outstanding theoretician, Andrej Tisma calls his art works "(spi)rituals" – rituals of the spiritual exchange, which means immaterial art intended to be perceived neither though senses (like beaux arts), nor through a mental process (like conceptual art). Instead, it was made for the human spirit, which is a great potential waiting to be awakened, and the author thus elicits at the same time the "material" he uses in his work, the spiritual energy. He considers it a resourceful substance that can be shaped, directed, spread, absorbed, etc, in order to reach an ultimate goal, which is inspiration, the pure sensation of enlightenment and purification, and the touch with the meaning of our existence, and that is the main target of every artwork. The artist has almost been forced to give shape to the "material" he has chosen by processes once used by shamans, artists of the ancient times, that is, through ritual acts which function directly, without any object serving as media, and in that way shorten the communication channel to a great extent. 
     Trying to awaken in people a consciousness of belonging to humankind and everyone's mutual dependence ("Love"), putting an accent on the right of individual freedom and equality of races ("Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite 1789-1989" and "Stigmatization"), on the relations between an individual on the one hand, and nature and social environment on the other ("Be Grateful Child to Mother Earth", "43 Cubic Meters of Love",  or "Tisma at Delifrance") or on relations of an individual to another individual ("Street Encounters" and "Spirit Control") as well as on his personal attitude toward centers of power ("Encounter in my Heart"), this artist creates a spiritual space which unifies and crystallizes emotions which are rather general and common than personal, and, in relation to the society, they are not a reflection of the world outside, even to a lesser extent are they an expression of the artist's own consciousness or feeling, but they are, in fact, first of all, catalysts of the collective consciousness. 
      By awakening spirituality in the field of his own existence in space and time, Andrej Tisma does not only confirm himself as an artist, but also brings to the surface or reality some categories of value buried deep inside every being, which have been - whether we are willing to admit it or not - suppressed through time. 

   Luka Salapura  

   (From "Sveske" magazine, no 23, Pancevo, 1995)

A central critic/historian engaged with Eastern European telepathy art is Andrej Tisma. Tisma is a Yugoslavian art critic, curator, and artist who has been involved in mail art and participated in The Eternal Network, solo performance and concrete and visual poetry. Tisma has written a number of articles dealing with telepathy on Slovenian Conceptual Art group OHO, and Polish artist Andrzej Dudek-Durer as well as his own work with telepathy, (spi)ritual art and mail art. Tisma is an overt champion of articulating the presence of telepathy in art, and has written an article Art as Telepathy, Meeting and (Spi)ritual. Tisma also discusses telepathy in something that he calls (spi)ritual performance.

In (spi)ritual the stress is on internal transformation of the artist and the audience. In a way it is working with human psyche as artistic material. I use methods of lecture, conversation, distribution of printed matter, slide projections and manipulation of some ordinary objects and natural materials.
More important is that what is happening on the spiritual level, which is invisible but powerful. I could define it as transmission of spiritual energy, or inspiration from artist to the audience, and a specific feed-back. So (spi)ritual is not working on the level of senses, or intellect, and that's why it doesn't need visual, sound or verbal attractiveness. Instead, it is based on spiritual exchange in the direct contact between artist and spectator. All used techniques, objects and materials are just a milieu which supports that exchange. (Spi)rituals are usually based on telepathy, magic, and on shamanistic tradition of the past. (Spi)rituals are attempts to transmit artistic inspiration directly, without intermediary.

In an article published on the Internet called Encounter Art, Tisma links spiritual art to what he has termed Encounter Art by way of the dematerialization of art and non-material artforms. Encounter Art is meeting with other artists, communicating with them. It is a strand continuing from happenings of the late 1950s to Fluxus, including Joseph Beuys' lectures.
'Transmission of inspiration' was the aim of 'meeting' artists and engaging in Encounter Art. Swiss artist Hans Rudi Fricker called this artform 'tourism.' Meeting artists and engaging in art tourism relates to the communications aspect of Tisma's ideas about artist's communication networks, and Tisma is keen to say that Encounter Art belongs to 'spiritual art.' The eighties was a time of unprecedented global correspondences and travelling for artists, and "examples of artistic projects involving telepathy".

Tisma differentiates between this telepathy as long distance telepathy and more local or short range and sensually immediate telepathy. He describes his invited participation in Dudek-Durer's telepathic homage to Durer while in Philadelphia in 1987. Tisma organised a meeting with other local mail art artists in a restaurant, and together they all made an artwork for Dudek in Poland between 5 and 8pm.

We made a collage with rubber-stamps, stickers, and texts, but our real work was our telepathic connection with Dudek, and through him, with Durer, and all the participants of the project from all over the world who were doing the same thing at the same time.

Tisma draws parallels between Dudek-Durer's project and Encounter Art.Tisma has his own name for Encounter Art and claims that since 1985 he began to consider his meetings with artists as 'Meet-Art.' When artists meet they exchange from each other's minds. Tisma also believes a spiritual dimension is opened when artists talk about each other's work and when collaborating on art projects. "It is happening more directly and intensively than in telepathy at long distance, because more senses are included, proving the telepathic connection, enabling participants to react faster and more directly." Tisma also works with telepathy in his own mail art performances. In 1984 his performance titled Love Tisma used telepathy to
transmit love to the world. This art as telepathy was aided by a map of the world. More recently artist Kathe Izzo has used mobile phones, telepathy and love in her work.

Tisma, like Lucy Lippard, is both an art critic and a collaborator with telepathy artists. As an artist working with telepathy, Tisma consciously blurs the boundary between artistic performance and networking, and meeting artists and conducting (spi)rituals. Tisma also has (spi)rituals which do not involve meeting people:

My latest (spi)rituals consist of attempts to transfer spirit to artistically uninteresting objects and materials (pieces of paper, water, rock, etc.), that I mail or distribute in some other way, and which are supposed to radiate my inspiration to the recipient. I also carry out actions in a natural setting, sending out my positive spirituality to the surrounding world.
All these things as spiritual exchanges, inspiration, and telepathy are forms of the future non-material art which is now coming into sight in different parts of the world, and will be established in the next millennium.

Jacquelene Drinkall

(from 'Telepathy in Contemporary, Conceptual and Performance Art' Unpublished thesis, University of New South Wales: Sydney, 2006)

       The very spirit drives us to be highly creative beings when properly channeled into what we can receive from it. The artist Andrej Tisma seems to have, on many levels, awakened to this reality, and it's clearly on display through his visual art, his written words, and above all, his "Spi-Rituals." In using the very act of living as a form of artistic experiment and display, he has helped remind us that capturing the moment from this spiritual perspective is indeed the art of living with awareness.  
     I find very few people in my research who take what they do to a completely new level. Tisma has made a career of pushing the limits to wake up his audience, and the entire world. I was smiling in pleasant shock, when Tisma told me straight up, "this is a terrible idea to ever mix art with money." And he really does live by those words. This explains why his art is far beyond the confines of most contemporary work, and why he is constantly striving to fearlessly reach new heights of artistic expression.  
     Tisma does not see a separation in Art and Spirituality. He explains very pointedly, that inspiration, on any level, is a spiritual process, and that real art, does not manifest without this inspiration. I found this surprisingly similar to my Native American understandings of spirituality having no separation from existence itself. To walk the earth by day is a spiritual ritual in its own right. To draw energies from the five elements, to walk upon earth, to breath the air, to drink the water, to use the fire, and to manifest new ideas and emotions through spirit, is to live. And to live in this awareness of what fuels our life, is to walk with spirit. 
     Tisma clearly knows this, and his personal philosophies regarding this are permanently present in his works of art. His deeply rooted understanding of this living in spirit concept, rings clear, as he uses his Spi-Rituals to demonstrate the human experience as a spiritual work of art. And on that note, if there is one thing I might add, existence is a miracle in its truest form. The beauty of any Universal truth is that it remains calmly independent from all religions, laws, and the restrictions of any given paradigm throughout time. This universal truth that I refer to here is one that Tisma blatantly displays in his progressive works. Humanity is a precise reflection of the divine!

Dr. Joseph Kenneth, Metaphysician and Author

(The Light Body Travelers Society, 2016)

Andrej Tišma, as an independent and original member of the Yugoslav art of the other line and a consequential proponent of its poetics, in the late-socialist and transitional context, included various forms of performing practices in his intermedia and multimedia engaged projects, in addition to videos, postal and digital art.

His (spi)rituals, as a poly-genre form of performing expression, are immaterial works of art predominantly dedicated to the human spirit, which is a plastic material for creative work. For their understanding, two essential (self)determinations and manifestations of the entire creative art of Tišma's are of key importance. They flow parallel to each other and complement each other, while actively making diagnoses and prescribing therapies for the illnesses of the contemporary capitalist civilization. On the one hand, with his engaged works (video, photography, digital prints, net-art, electronic music) Tišma takes a critical stance towards the systemic negative sides of globalization and unsustainability of the planetary conditions of life. He protests against various social anomalies, provokes and rouses the audiences, offering them a humanistic perspective, destroying discourses of political power and, utopistically, points to the possibility and the need for a radical change of the social and historical circumstances. On the other hand, with his healing spiritual activity, guided by alternative ideas and values, he offered to mankind a medicine for traumas, destruction and deviations. He spreads spiritual energy towards nature and people, i.e. calming and harmonizing waves, love and peace, attempting to generate social and political effects in Yugoslavia and worldwide. He emanated his own inspiration in a telepathic and magic ways, improved the general social mood and health of people, plants and animals, and gave everyday humanistic contribution to the betterment of humanity and their planet.

A (spi)ritual artist, as a shaman, communicates with the spiritual potential and the primordial source of universal creative energy from which art, too is born. Through a direct transfer of inspiration, without a material carrier, he turns the everyday routine into works of art, while - through the creative process and mental interaction and resonance - he elevates the audience to the condition similar to his own. The audience experiences the same raptures and unification with the essence of existence, so art is manifested in the sphere of spiritual exchange among people, transforming and enlightening the recipients as creative spiritual beings, affecting as a result the re-modelling of the social environment.

The material nature of Tišma's (spi)ritual performances, i.e. the living performing art of the bodily present performer, also involved immaterial pragmatic action in the form of speech acts. With his politically engaged, effective statements, as well as his shamanistic communication, he realized plastic spiritual events and through his performance triggered bodiless transformations in the existing structure and flow of social, natural and world processes.

Tišma, just like Joseph Beuys, wanted through his art to point out the key issues of humankind in the 20th and 21st centuries and to bridge the gap between atavism and the positivist view of the world dominant in the modern scientifically oriented rational civilization. For this reason, he criticizes logocentric thinking, physicalism, scientism and technical and technological progress led by the logic of capital, which disrupts the global natural balance and challenges the survival of mankind. In an artistic way, he expresses an utopian longing for a suppression of reductionism of the materialistic understanding of man and the singlemindedness of the instrumental idea of sciences and technology. He tries to liberate the spiritual nature of the egotistic and allienated individuals, supressed by the ruling nihilistic culture, so that the creative powers of self realization of a well-rouded man being can develop. In his life and work, he is in search of a re-establishment of the long lost primordial unity and harmony of nature and the spirit of human in its totality. Rationalism is challenged by the way of thinking which - in finding the meaning and awakening of sensibility for a more humane world - includes archetypal, mythical and magical-religious themes, as well as rejection of the value paradigm of the contemporary global society dominated by material greed, narcisism, lie, hatred, aggression and destruction by the will for supremacy.

With his emancipatory performances, Tišma also emphasized certain local challenges to globalization. He was defiant in resisting westernization, hegemonistic west-centered cultural principle, bureaucratization and ideological instrumentalization of art, as well as the NATO neo-colonialism led by the terrorist elite of the US administration. He was aware of the fact that the mass media, as the ideational, material and technical basis of the trans-national capitalist class, are the influential instrument of the war machinery and industry of the global shaping of the thoughts and behaviour of the subjects.

Tišma has lived and he lives his art in an authentic way, as a modernist, in the spirit of neo-avantgarde fierce optimism, believing that the transformative potential of his (spi)rituals and an emancipatory engagement of the artist may encourage a revival of spirituality and bring about positive changes in personal, natural and planetary social reality.

Milan Djordjevic

(From "Interkulturalnost" magazine no.24, Novi Sad, December 2022)

      NETWORKING,  PERFORMANCES  AND STAMPS 
 

       A keen observer of alternative art on an international level, it is instructive in witnessing the changes in the tone of Andrej Tisma's writings as his country is plunged deep into war, and an economic and cultural embargo imposed on his native Serbia by United Nations. Well traveled (New York, Paris, Stockholm, etc.), and in touch with the international network of postal artists, Tisma was suddenly forced to confront his peacetime position of universal brotherhood, international cooperation, and concerted group action, against a backdrop of increasing hostilities. 
     As Serb refugees flooded into Novi Sad from Bosnia and Croatia fresh from ravages of war, Tisma staged performances for peace and against the embargo on his country. His writings on the subject are penetrating observations on the status and persuasiveness of art in wartime conditions. In addition to his performances and writings, Tisma has created a strong series of carved erasers, which are used on his outgoing correspondence, expressing his life as an artist under cultural embargo and wartime conditions. 

 John Held, Jr. 

(Bibliozine #44, San Francisco, February 1996)

Like many of us who write about the Mail Art experience, Tisma stresses the universality of the networking experience. Unlike most of us, Tisma's ideas have undergone testing by a civil war close to home. To his credit, Tisma has continued to expound an art of collaboration.

One of Tisma's major themes is that the artist is a "barometer of the traumas of his time, (and) an agent initiating the process of recovery." Written before the outbreak of conflict in his country (Toward the New Art, 1990), Tisma accurately foretold the direction his life would take in the difficult years to follow. He assumed a central position in the discussion of the ethical role of the networker during the Networker Congresses of 1992, a series of events encouraging cultural activists from throughout the world to debated the meaning of artistic cooperation on an international level.

Read more at:

Andrej Tisma: Spiritual Sculptor by John Held, Jr. (Foreword to the catalog of Andrej Tisma's rubber-stamps exhibition, Stamp Art Gallery, San Francisco, 1996)

     The impression of an art stamp, created and used by Andrej Tisma, is not only a carrier of artistic value. It is not even its primary character. Many of the stamps made by this artist carry short and concentrated messages of an engaged type, whether the engagement is of an artistic, social, ecological or political nature. 
      Obviously believing that a traditional artistic engagement implies a support of a certain system of governance and that, as such, it loses some of its value in the advancement of awareness, thus becoming a "political servant", Andrej Tisma strives, through provocation and introducing an individual into the art work through action, to take him out of a latent state of impotence. The final objective could be nothing but a "substitute of collective norm by true emancipation" (K. Thomas). 
     The priority in this form of artistic expression is given to the action of making the print of an art stamp. Without this action, the art stamp, at least the kind used by Andrej Tisma, would not have the necessary power that sets it toward the true emancipation of man as one of the most important characteristics of this work of art. 
      The place and context in which the art stamp is printed (the action is taken) tell about the importance of the implementation of the art stamp in the everyday life of a human. It should be emphasized that Andrej Tisma never escaped to or took refuge in the autonomy of art. He always moved towards the essence of the problem, trying to influence the awareness of the trends in social development that lead us all, on a local and planetary level alike, to the Apocalypse. 
     Whether we observe Andrej Tisma as a painter, graphic artist. conceptualist, performer or an engaged artist, his art always insists on the awakening of spirituality rather than its exclusivity. 
     Never adopting the retrograde phenomena in the  modern  art  trends,   but rather consequentially following the avant-garde course (risking incomplete understanding and acceptance), Andrej Tisma - with his artistic existence - sounds a warning. Technological development and fast flowing information gradually push humanity from the center to the margin of life. Humanizing technology by his art and through the network, this artist also influences the humanizing of the civilization. This is exactly why the art stamp, as used by Tisma, is an important and great art. Especially when we bear in mind that the quality of all great art is just this feeling of the artists for their time. 

     Luka Salapura     

    (From the  PECArT  show catalog, Novi Sad, 1996)   
 

   RUBBER-STAMP ART  
 

      Design of personal communication, as well as the communication itself represents a timeless need of each person to reach out for friendship, for love to enlarge its own world and beat loneliness and isolation. And each and every try is deeply personal and carries the unmistakable signature of its author. 
     The "seals", the sigils of Andrej Tisma, simple, and witty, always carry the message of love, whatever the design of the mark, the seal. The need for a wider, sincere humane relationship, the constant contact over the seemingly wide spaces of land, desert and seas of our small derelict spaceship, EARTH. 
     And contrary to Marshall McLuhan's THE MEDIA IS THE MASSAGE, it's the message itself transformed into the seal squible and by magic, becomes media. By design, by intent. By the endless search for a better word, world of friends, not foes, a world where no man is the WOLF to another man. Because, as the twelfth century Grusian poet Shota Rastelli wrote ages ago:  "Who does not seek friends for himself, is his own enemy." 

 Mirko J. Stojnic

(From the PECArT show catalog, Novi Sad, 1996)

DIGITAL PRINTS

 /EXCERPTS/

Since the beginning of the seventies, Andrej Tisma has been a part of the Vojvodinian art scene in a distinct, alternative and nonexclusive way. This artist has expressed his engaged relationship towards everyday life by means that are, themselves, a product of the world and time which he lives and creates in.

Photographs are the main artifacts in his mail-art works, his Xeroxes and electro graphics, his video and computer web-art achievements. In keeping with the desired type of statement, Tisma utilizes photographs as documentary proof of a completed piece of work (actions, performances, records), as a creative gesture by which he expresses his own privacy and artistic personality (a series of Polaroids from the eighties), or he actualizes meaningful, engaging, at all times sarcastic and metaphorically rich conclusions about the current moment of humans of our time, by using found or scanned photographs.

To the article >

Sava Stepanov

("Archeology Of Privacy" essay from the catalog "In My Room", March 2005)

Andrej Tisma is, in many aspects, a conspicuous figure, not only in the Yugoslav photographic scene. His multimedia actions (that absorb, in the broadest sense of that word, the role of the photographic medium, which serves as a good basis for manifold creative actions), as well as, his theoretical thinking and critical work, secure him a very important role and even one of leading positions in the Serbian art scene.

Goran Malic

(From the essay “Contemporary Photo Scene in Serbia - A short summary of recent trends that characterize the end of XX century”, Cyberex, Belgrade, 2006)

The meanings of Andrej Tisma's works reside and resound in the contrast between the perfection of the advertising image and the reality in which we actually live. Mr. Tisma would like us to be aware that these images exist to convince us to alter our behaviour, i.e., to purchase something which we might not have previously considered purchasing. Or, perhaps, more subtly, to act as yet another in a virtually endless string of such images that, taken in total over our lives, goes a long way toward influencing our thought, and circumscribing the possibilities of our thinking.

The advertiser must create a mythology of sorts, a visual mythology of perfection attainable through the product.  Mr. Tisma undercuts that message by simply contrasting this false fable of fashion with the physical reality of the everyday, thus inserting a much-needed pin in the inflated bubble of our expectations.  The point of his pin seems to be the contrast between the projection of an ideal, timeless, perfect product for consumption, with the everyday reality of decay and imperfection in which we actually live.  Mr. Tisma’s collages thus lead us to discover interesting parallels between Platonic idealism and consumer advertising.

Mr. Tisma reminds us that decay and decomposition is inevitable.  Timeless perfection is a chimera, all we can know is transformation.

And, didn't we know this already anyway? Mr. Tisma's works are here to remind us.

John Byrum

("Pin in the Inflated Bubble of Expectations", Catalog essay "Mental Survival, London, 2006)

It was through his forms of expression, above all digital and typical of the time in which they appeared, that Andrej Tišma managed to reflect the implicit emotional relationship between man and his environment, because art is actually never explicit. The images from the "Transition: Impossible" series show just these two forms of the phenomena. One of them are advertisments, but those advertisments are not the reality, they are virtual reality. Not a single one of those bottles, not a single object shown in these ads is what it is, rather it has been brushed up, processed, re-shaped and "coded" in advance into an ostensible shape of man's false reality, and this is what enters our mental image as a message of an ideal or idealistic world. On the other hand, he places and juxtaposes small, little objects which are frail, in which man exists and which are a part of the world of his social destiny. It is between these two paradoxes appearing in these images that there is a gaping world of our existence squeezed into the Balkan misfortune that has befallen us.

Compared to, for example Andy Warhol, who had taken a photo of a Hollywood icon Merilyn Monroe and by reprinting it created a planetary visual symbol of the 20th century, mythologizing the points of reference of the consummer society through visual and civilizational irony, Andrej Tišma deals with his own worlds with new signs and meanings. He contrasts two civilizational codes, two symbols with different signs, in which chasms of an annihilated man are revealed.

These images by Andrej Tišma, with their deep meanings, prompt us to understand man in a reflexive way, through his symbols reduced down to pictographic signs, but tackling our very existence as well. And it is exactly what is recognizable in these visual art works of mental structure.

Prvoslav Maric

(Words at the opening of digital prints exhibition of Andrej Tišma "Transition: Impossible" in Novi Sad, the "Podrum" Galery, March 15th, 2006)

The theoretical and artistic activism of Andrej Tisma has been equally successful in finding its way among the ever-changing artistic styles and ideologies, where he was particularly perseverant in his creative endeavors to decipher the space surrounding the art scene. From the very beginning, when he imposed himself as an atypical and therefore important representative of mail art, an area of a fluid communication by way of art, his works have contained a peculiar re-directing towards a new quality of defining within a wide spectrum of manifest languages of the alternative and marginal cultural and artistic scene. Among others, the aim was to overcome the self-proclaimed authorities. In this way, his strategies carried out through the production of art works, which are following in the footsteps of the original mail art visions, mail art as the "peripheral" artistic activism, defy an institutionalized principles-free ban, deterrence, submission, oblivion, art which infringes upon the domain of information system.

Tisma's templates with gruesome and realistic photo-details inserted in glamorous billboards of Dior, Rothmans, Barbie doll, Citroen, Mitsubishi and others, as part of the series of prints "Transition: Impossible", are not a "scandal of existence" but rather examples of a familiarity with the alphabet of the new montage and data processing.

Jasna Tijardovic

(Apropos the exhibition "Transition: Impossible" of Andrej Tišma, New Moment Gallery, Belgrade, Radio Beograd III program, November 2006)

Ever since he wrote his first pieces of writing and ventured out of painting, Andrej Tisma has - in various media but persistently and consciously - been scratching visible faces and invisible matrixes of the world, testing the world's and his own moral rationale, poring - in an artistic way - on the reality as well as on its media prostheses in an effort to wake up his own and the Other consiousness on the level of artistic action. His are, therefore, the kinds of artistic performances which do not only count on their artistic completeness and whatever feedback may be born in the minds of the assumed audiences, but also - almost in a romantic way - count on a palpable consequential change in the order of the physical, biological, virtual and political body of the world which he touches and disolves with his incorruptible art-machinery.

On the contents and subject matter level, on the other hand, Tisma juggles dedicated brandomaniac and polit-mythomaniac cults of the global day-to-day world, emptying their auras or filling them with acrid indications of his personal, often incidental counter-perceptions.

In short, the mellow countenance and visually polished techno-prints of our artist are concealing one of the world most consistent art commentators and opponents of the post-Debordian "Society of the Spectacle" and its globalistic political extensions. His minimalistically brilliant directness in expression has already won, if not the final, victorious result in the struggle with whatever he had undertaken to fight, then at any rate a high position and a secure place in the world of museums and galleries as temples served by the public servants of the same "Society of the Spectacle".

Vladimir Kopicl

(From the foreword to the Catalogue of Andrej Tisma's exhibition "Transition: Impossible", Pancevo, February 2007)

In the already mentioned situation of the diversity of expression in contemporary art, Andrej Tisma decided to observe the reflections of the "physical" globalism in the "virtual" - as the ideal globalism, in which the value of an individual is verified through communication, rather than through interest. That self-assigned role of a creative commentator of the phenomena and events from the "real" world in the "virtual" space enables him to accept information and facts and to contextualize them, just as Noam Chomsky does through his books in the "real" world.

The continuation of his mission is in Tisma's works in the new series, "Civilized Beheading". In this series, he asks the question: does the advancement of civilized society have any sense if it brings about the destruction of individual cultures (like the Incas and Mayas) or assimilation into another/different system of values (like what happened to American Indians, Yanomami people, Aboriginies). In this way, Tisma tries to attract the attention of the globalized world to a forgotten dimension - ethics.

Sava Ristovic

(From the preface to the catalogue of Andrej Tisma's "Civilized Beheading" show, "Nova" gallery, Novi Sad, June 2007)

It is in the current world, complicated by the ideology of irony and webbed over by a communication system of universal possibilities on the one hand, and the enslavement of that world by profit and wars in the name of peace on the other, on several visually analytical fronts of different directions but equally powerful in intensity, that the planetary artist of Novi Sad, Andrej Tišma, works.

In a plethora of information of visual determinations, this author points to the essence, emphasizing the current problematics. Namely, if we take into account a manifold prism of the contemporary art and its numerous challenges, we can conclude that few are the individuals who openly put their finger on a concrete problem of the modern era, thereby repeteatedly concluding that the whole 20th century was a century of destruction and that the 21st century, unfortunately for all, keeps up the tradition.

More precisely, Andrej Tišma transforms the actual moment into a universally understandable symbol of culminating globalization.

Danilo Vuksanovic, M.A.

(About Andrej Tišma's exhibition "Civilized Beheading", Nova Gallery, Novi Sad, "Dnevnik", Novi Sad, July 17, 2007)

Thanks to the worldwide development of mail-art, followed by net-art, Andrej Tisma devoted himself to art as communication and his visual works, with their attitudes and ideas, are available to recipients at any place in the world. It is enough to visit one of his websites to become a participant in world happenings, through the language of Tisma's art.

The form in which Tisma expresses himself is for him a mere tool, not a goal. With his works, as he says, he endeavors above all, to influence the consciousness of the recipients. Tisma, in every sense, tries with his oppulent symbolism, in a metaphorical synthetic unity of the picture, word and sound, to emphasize the problems of the contemporary world and humanity, who has found itself in a labyrinth of hidden meanings of contrasting mirrors. To find that hidden meaning, which, through ideological machinery misleads people and takes them away from their primeveal spiritual being, their cultural identity, this is what Tisma wants to point to with his artistic perception. The return to spiritual values, the return of humanity to its own self - is only possible if we become aware of the fact that it is all just a game which overshadows us with its ideological robe, destroying the picture of our value.

Through multi-layered dimensions of his works, Andrej Tisma makes us aware of the current and future ways of globalization, while at the same time, points to the reverse hiding under the advertisments' propaganda, under "humanitarian" actions of the "advocates of world peace" and "prophets of the general prosperity".

Independent of what new goals and directions technical civilization may put before us, Tisma's awareness-building and reminders of the existence of our spiritual dimensions in the time of decadence, continuing into the 21st century - this becomes extremely important for the audiences in our country as well.

Valentina Cizmar

(Magazine "Sveske", no. 88, Pancevo, June 2008)

The works of Andrej Tisma "Food in Context" in their subject matter and various paraphrases show the world and criticize consumerism and transience with a demand: "Art must have consequences"! In art, the world becomes transparent only if a work of art - so to speak - consumes it and if it touches or even hurts both the artist and us as observers.

This is exactly what is being initiated by these works, which - in addition to a social feature - deal with transience as well. Andrej Tisma presents foodstuffs, food on decorated plates, dialectically as a product of culture as well as a transient matter which is - with all its aesthetic features - from the very beginning intended to perish, so to say destined to end up in a waste container, together with 90 million tons of food stuffs which are, only in the European Union, annually thrown away as garbage.

In cultural and historical comparison, Andrej Tisma with his works follows the line of the transience motifs (Vanitas), which have ever since the Renaissance placed on the top the conflict between human humility and human ego - and here I would like to remind you of the great still lives with fruits full of symbolics, dead animals and kitchen utensils, but also of the 20th century Picasso's abstractions of objects and Warhol's presentations of worthless objects such as the famous can.
Iconography has changed significantly since the Renaissance, but the basic definition has remained and, through the social context in the artistic provocation of Andrej Tisma, it has gained a new dimension. In his works, he aims at an intellectual climate, at social responsibility and warns on the intricate relationship between the freedom of an individual and the economic and social determinants. He places this connection into the focus of his artistic research and, in this way, with all the crashes, a tie between aesthetics and morality can be determined.

In these images we can experience targeted provocation aimed at reflection, and it holds true for both video works presented at the exhibition. The first one, "Friendly Talk", was born in a context with prints: photos of foodstuffs as excerpts from advertisements, news and magazines Tisma brings in an ingenious way in alliance with the present, that is with wars, environment pollution and sickness - conveying a message that for him decomposition - disintegration of foodstuffs reflects the disintegration of civilization.

The other video, "Bodies and Objects", let me find an appropriate word, is shockingly brutal. It is a reflection upon life and death, slaughtering of animals related to man's feeding and - as Andrej Tisma says - upon the relativity of the condition of life and death; on the shortness of our life in the context of transience and transition from one status to another - and again in relation to the slaughtering of animals, often only to provide a brutal benefit for others.

Erwin Miedtke

(Deputy Director of the City Library of Bremen, at "Food In Context" show opening, Bremen, September 2011)

It is in an ironic, parodying and sarcastic, actually frank, witty and subversive way that Andrej Tišma utilizes the strategies of the society of spectacle and the technology of its visual language as a basis of an engaged artistic production and presentation of an opposing signifying practice of general symbolic shaping of the society, which communication-wise functions as a global political actor of the changing perception of reality. Efficient and empowered by the media, the artistic method of the Debord-type of guerilla fight for the truth stands for Tišma's sensational approach to authors' photographic images, and to those found in the virtual space, also quotations, fragments, symbols, social and cultural references. In fact, by conceptual molding of the relationships among them, he creates shocking collage-montages of visual texts, series of digital prints as provocative political statements of contextually transformed meanings of image based information. He thus points to the problems of ecology, bioengineering, genetic engineering, consummerism, cultural uniformity, imperialistic crimes and the system of colonial exploitation. By subversively placing the dominant Western visual symbols into different contexts and new narative entities, Tišma takes a subjective approach in re-interpreting them and creating new media-constructed meanings of images, in a utopean endeavor to influence viewers on an international scale, to help them shed false awareness and to get a different and comprehensive view and understanding of global events and circumstances. He attempts to create effects in political and ideological fields through an artistic communicational diversion against the globally generated neo-liberal identity and meaning of life of various social subjects, intervening in the culture-coded imaging order of an estheticized world normality paradigm, which supervises and controls the public, in a manipulative way psychologically affecting the perception of reality.

In a visual reconstruction of the viewer's screen, Tišma mostly uses a documentary, objective stance towards reality, its contents and facts, as empirical evidence of dehumanizing negativities. However, paradoxically, he also makes use of fictional fabrications of reality, photomontage and computer generated images, as the opponent's weapon in exposing the truth about the real nature of the world behind his made-by-media false appearance, optimistically convinced that, in the chaos of information hyperproduction, his messages will have a significant influence on numerous viewers.

Milan Djordjevic

(From the article "Photography In the Art of Andrej Tisma", ASA - architectyre, science, art, no. 009, Belgrade, October 2021.)

VIDEO

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Andrej Tisma, one of the leading international contemporary artists, works with a variety of artistic media including video art. The main characteristic of his videos is that they are short and, when seen together, explicitly complex.

Contemporary society and changes in the modern world clearly affect his sensibility and manner of artistic expression. Political and social environments, war, social misery, the changing of social systems, disease, and total chaos of the "new order” have clearly made a marked impression on his video work. The United States, as the global superpower in this “new world order”,  has had a strong influence on Tisma’s videos, and he reacts through them in a spirited style. He depicts with realistic detail, the situation of individuals in the world which are induced by the will of the mightiest.

To the article>

Biljana Mickov

(From the essay "The Satire of Media Lies", 2006)

A large number of cultural monuments originating from the last thousand years stand in Serbian territory as firm proof of the spiritual presence of Serbian nation in this historical and geographical area. However, the reality of the present time is very complex. Serbian culture is endangered and Kosovo is the most drastic example. Since the period of the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, Kosovo remains an unsolved enigma in the hands of those who do not care enough about this ancient cultural legacy, although it is protected by UNESCO.

Andrej Tisma, a contemporary artist, reacts to current world events and occurrences in the region with strong activism in his new video work entitled, “Civilized Beheading”. He documents recent events in Serbia and Kosovo and has collaged the parts together, connecting them with other similar historic events. The work is impregnated with music as a component of the core video. Themes used in the video resemble contemporary liturgical sounds combined with strong sounds of cutting wood, which contribute to the intensity of the visual effects.

The video begins with images of frescoes on monastery walls as remarkable proof of the cultural presence, transitioning to iconographic representation of saints, Serbian kings and czars, and the largest Orthodox temple of St. Sava which depicts historical facts. The interchanging of icons with imagery of disappeared and exterminated nations (such as the American Indians) is a unique comparison and rememberance of the past.

By linking past and present historical events, Andrej Tisma leads the viewer toward his goal, toward his dynamic and intensive message. By exchanging iconic signs and inscriptions with the geographical landscapes of Kosovo and Serbia, Tisma involves the viewer in an active way.
 
The image of a stump as a symbol of beheading, along with scenes of ruined monuments from the 12th and 13th centuries, and visual signs of KFOR, NATO, and UCK (KLA) moving over existing damaged monuments, symbolically indicates the cause and the offender. Are the Serbs surviving and facing beheading again? The artist wants to answer this question, and his answer inspires us.

                                                          
Biljana Mickov

(From the preface to the catalogue of Andrej Tisma's "Civilized Beheading" show, "Nova" gallery, Novi Sad, June 2007)

The engaged video art of Andrej Tišma, created with the use of analog and digital technology in the late-socialist and transitional historical context, represents a logical progressive phase in the media-related and technical development of his new artistic practice, preceded in his opus since the early 1970's, by artist photography and art photography as forms of non-classical expression and an effort to overcome the static character of an image. Attracted by creative potential of the technical innovations, and aware of the time in which he lives, civilizationally shaped by electronic visual media and the technical revolution of the emerging information society, he showed an early interest in video as the most developed multimedial tool and a form of alternative artistic expression and communication with the contemporary public.

The creative video works of Andrej Tišma encompass various, artistically and historically typical, media-like, genre and technical approaches and procedures, i.e. the essence of the poetic orientation of his entire work as an author. In the initial period of the artistic use of the new audio-visual medium in the mid 1980's, information of which is scarce, and art critics did not write much about it either, within the practice of the (post)conceptual expression, Tišma carried out, for a camera objective, without spectators, five video performances, registered and documented with the VHS analog technology. These video performances were recorded in an untraditional artistic environment, according to a fixed planned scenario, i.e. in line with strict ideational requirements and clear-cut author's instructions, in one frame and in real time, without additional editing and post-production alterations and amendments.

In 1990, Tišma obtained his own analog equipment consisting of a player and a recorder, and later a camera, and made a series of video works devoted to objective idealistic dialectics of the reality and its axiological and ethical consequences. The series was created by a post-modern appropriation of diverse selected materials originating from TV production and an arduous editing process of re-contextualization and juxtapositioning in a new, critically disturbing audio-visual entity of denotationally opposing and final ontic elements and phenomena, partly supported by recordings made with the camera.

Andrej Tišma is one of the pioneers of the theory and practice of internet and digital art in Serbia in the 1990's, whose creative opus, in the context of techological and neo-liberal transition, also encompasses computer creation of home-made engaged video works on the web, from 2003 till today, as a modern, attractive and efficient emancipatory tool for visual pronouncement of critical attitudes towards the world and for putting forward resistance to its establishment.

In the last quarter of a century, Tišma is a part of the domestic and internationoal scene of artists' media activism in the age of culture because, with his political debates on the mailing lists and with his entire diverse production, he used the new media to critically scrutinize, among others, the role of Western corporate television in the mainstream production of the image-based order, the matrix reality of the totalitarian globalized capital. He deconstructed the imperial discourse of the official EU and USA mass media, which had spread propagandistic information about the Yugoslav wars and the NATO bombardment, as well as actively participated in the manipulation of public opinion, generation of conflicts and the destruction of the SFRY. On the internet, as an international on-line space of the engaged artistic practice and creative political activism, in a subversive way Tišma exposes the alienated mechanisms of action of the communication network of corporate media, which apply political design and esthetic beauty treatments to the ugly face of the global capitalist totalitarianism, hidden behind the pretense of humaneness of the guardians of world peace and role models of democracy and well-being. However, he is also aware of the problematic nature of techno-fetishism, i.e. of the idealization of the internet as the only uncensored media sphere of the democratic and alternative artistic and political activism. In fact, through his own experience, he also observed its dark sides as a new private means of production and corporate control, supervision, subdjugation and economic exploitation of its users, which made the globalization of neoliberalism possible too. Even so, in the spirit of neo-avantgarde contentious optimism and utopian endeavor of the world pioneers of socially engaged video art of the 60's, with his provocative works in the service of ideas and communication, Tišma wishes to turn public attention to the fundamental issues of humanity and to bring about concrete social and political effect worldwide. He shows the unsustainability of the current living conditions and foretells their total collapse, he attempts to affect re-modelling of awareness and civil responsibility of the recipients and points to a possibility of radical change of the social and historical circumstances, destruction of the status quo and the need for the world to become a better place.

Milan Djordjevic

(From the article "Engaged Videography of Andrej Tišma", Nova misao, Novi Sad, Autumn 2021)

WEB.ART 

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Tisma's work acts as a constructive protest, a creative healing process to both the lives of individuals and the sour relations cultivated between rulers and the ruled. 
His work sets a positive example of how communication and creativity provide the means to comment on ones position in the world.   Within these web works the user is an active component reading and untangling the web specific languages whilst watching Tisma's ideas and beliefs unfold. Questions are raised concerning the users own opinions, confronting and challenging their position. In combining language with structure and ideas Tisma has ensured a successful artwork whereby the viewer leaves the piece but retains the message and purpose of it. In this case the ethical principles, an awareness of ones circumstances and the ability to engage with ones social and political environment.                                                                                   To the article >                    

Daniel Stringer  

( "Ecological Ethics: Politics and communication in A Tisma's Web.Art", August 2001)

      While the conflict of the former Yugoslavia has made its presence felt on the Internet, it has also led to some  creative artistic endeavors. During the threat of NATO bombing, for instance, artist Andrej Tisma organized an Internet contest for the "humanitarian bombing of Serbia" ("Humanitarian NATO Bomb for Serbia!") in which contestants contributed bomb designs.  The winner was awarded with a set of Monica Lewinsky's lips.      

  John Horvath

("Beating Breasts", Heise, Germany, November 7, 1998)  

 
    Andrej Tisma is another virtual friend of mine and we work on couple of web projects together. He is a funny and clever man who can reflect the bitter happy soul of the Balkans. He never lost his sense of 
humor even in war, under the air raid.                   

 Genco Gulan

 
   Andrej Tisma of Yugoslavia presents "Famous US Products," which connect US-based multinational corporations such as McDonald's and Coca-Cola with US military adverturism. "American Toys": fictitious toys combine US pop culture with weaponry. His "USA Questionnaire"  puts US military action in historical context, referencing Iraq and Vietnam, and repression of Native Americans. Questionnaire places blame on Madeleine Albright and proposes that she be exterminated. In "Glorious Victory," Andrej Tisma juxtaposes soft pornography with missiles and bombs. 

 Trebor Scholz

(Carnival in the Eye of the Storm War / Art / New Technologies: KOSOV@ exhibition at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, 
April 2000)

That confusion recalls Andrej Tisma's web-work "Glorious Victory", associating porno images with bombers and missiles. But the reference to the 1930s also brings to mind the more complex, "retrogardist" strategies of the group Neue Slowenische Kunst.

Brian Holmes

(NY Artsmagazine Features Vol.5 No.6, June 2000:
Kosov@: Carnival in the Eye of the Storm)

DIGITAL AND INTERNET ART

As early as in his works dating back to the late 1970's and early 1980's, Andrej Tisma presaged that he would cultivate his own distinctive form of expression. Namely, his works - both those preceeding the mid-1990's, when he accepted the computer and the internet as means and space, and those that followed - point to an author who is very sensitive to the time in which he creates, but at the same time searches for his own proprietary forms of expression within the accepted rules of the arts. At the beginning, those were photographs, postcards and stamps. During the 1980's he was totally devoted to art as communication, creating a unique mail-art project in this region.

Starting in the mid-1990' he introduced into his creative work the computer and the internet, which, on one hand helped him to communicate, and which on the other hand he used as creative tools and, thirdly, they became a new space in which he moved.

This is why we can say that the work of Andrej Tisma is a stand-alone phenomenon in the Serbian art which could occasionally baffle even experienced professionals.

What is characteristic of Tisma's recent production is the fact that he still understands art as a part of communication process. Like a modern virtual nomad, he roams the world and communicates with the entire world while sitting in his room. And the other way round: the whole world flows into Tisma's field of artistic perception through his computer monitor. Since communication is global and momentary, Tisma's works of art respect these principles and this is why his form is short and compressed and he uses generally familiar and recognizable presentations with all their symbols, while his response technique to global impulses is the collage principle in building up his work of art.

Sava Ristovic
(Radio Belgrade 2, "Znakovi" radio show, April 2007)

ANDREJ TISMA'S SOUND WORKS

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Andrej Tisma wisely calls this kind of his work "Sound Works", because it is hard to classify them according to the usual categories of the art of music, even including electro-acoustic and computer music. In the beginning, the "sound works" were mostly components of syncretic entities (video-art, web.art, performance). Once extracted from this context - as we have seen - they live their audio-lives, for which the most appropriate media are just the radio and sound carriers. It is interesting to note that independent as they have become the sound works of Andrej Tisma keep the main characteristics of his multimedia works: collage, quotations, mystification, intervention, "unusualizing", and, above all - engagement.

Tisma utilizes instant sounds from the rich computer audio-palette, sound base of popular video games, rhythm machine, recordings (from Bach to turbo-folk, techno music and Esma Redzepova), blending them into an integral whole, with good measure and taste.

The author focuses on "short forms", therefore he is more up-to-date and closer to the sensibility of the contemporary listener. In these works, like in Tisma's other creations, one cannot fail but notice his engagement before all against war, against globalization, violent behaviour, militarization, trash, kitsch and self-advertising. Sound collages are socially engaged and just for this purpose stripped, unadorned - advertising sounds, military orders from video games or rhythm machine have an even more forceful, violent and aggressive impact.

Dusan Mihalek

("Polja", 9-10. Novi Sad, September 2007)

The sound works of Andrej Tisma have been positioned as an elaborated auditive image of the author's idea that engagement in the arts can be embodied, not as art value as such, but rather as a clearly directed effect of perlocutional performance. This, in turn, according to Austin's analysis, would mean that his artistic act in fact does not only strive towards some change in the otherwise variable pattern of the art system, but that it most seriously counts on the consequences which are equally both beyond aesthetics, but also effectual in an all-encompassing planetary ambiance.

The first association of a relatively well-educated listener to Tisma's sound work most frequently leads to an exorcist reminder of a paradigmatic album of the 1980's - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by David Byrne and Brian Eno, a cultic example of extatic sampling, of which some people thought that it was a small technical revolution in production, whilst the album, according to subsequent testimony of Brian Eno, was supposed to express the contemporary world in minimalist terms through newly recomposed, polyrhythmic unatainable "dark heart of Africa" freed from casual singleminded ethno melodies. That chaotic internal component of the old sound is a clear derivative of this new, Tisma's sound, particularly in its semantically legible, linguistic component, which expresses and ironically exposes the forceful shadows of the current aggressive wing of the civilization which exhausts itself in attempting to found a globalistic monoculture and economic exploitation-based mega machinery which effuses and imposes only a weakening rhythm of proclamatory progress while eliminating all other differences with the symbolic polyphonous murmur of "Africa", i.e. the unaccustomed Other in front. Or on the floor.

In the Dictionary of Electro-acoustic Music complied by its Serbian pioneer Vladan Radovanovic, the entry "Electro-acoustic music" reads as follows: Introduced as a medium - a world of new sounds and set of techniques - rose to the status of a style, due to limitations and specific features on all levels, and finally - with multiple increase of realizational powers - almost lost its stylistic characteristics now to become a medium of all styles. Something similar could be said about this para-cockpit refraction of voices, harmonies, styles, messages and even linguistic, ethnic and ethic fractures and crossings which are not Tisma's goals, but which are used and sampled by him. Except that in this sense a medium and its capacity might rather imply a good spirit or rebelious will of the artist himself than any kind of media or artistic interface, even if it were both music and the baby brother of the hoe - the computer.

Vladimir Kopicl

("Izba" Club, Novi Sad, September 2007)

One of the most prominent figures of the Novi Sad alternative scene, Andrej Tisma has throughout his activities tirelessly, inventively and with curiosity researched into the modes of expression of various fields of artistic practice, from literature to new multimedial art forms, such as performances, printed multiplied artefacts, e.g. rubber-stamps, but also digital art and web-art. In doing so, he has always been in the ranks of the most topical and leading creative personalities and theoreticians in the new and alternative artistic circles. This is why his new preoccupation with digitally created tonal and sound collages, facilitated in the recent years by the head-spinning development of computer technology, looks totally logical and natural.
Straightforward and direct artistic engagement is the key element of Tisma's sound works, the basis of which is made up of heavy, rolling and yapping repetitive machinery rhythms, juxtaposed in a collage to samples of sounds and voices of human talk, exclamations, laughter, melodies of the Guca trumpet players or contorted melismas of Arab songs - all of this creating a fantasmagorical tonal web, stirring and chaotic at the same time, like an auditive reflection of the similarly chaotic life of today.
Tisma's sound works, the titles of which - "Peace Mission", "Power Station Destroyed", "Friendly Fire" or "German Picnic In The Balkans" - truly reflect the author's clear and direct engagement. His works, sometimes frightening, sometimes consciously childish, and at other times self-ironic, have been created as an expression of protest against contemporary global phenomena: globalization, militarism, hipocrisy of world politics, dehumanisation and self-advertising. They have been shaped as straight, naked and violent statements, so that listening to these sound works of Tisma's, accompanied by adequate video projections, do not leave indifferent anybody in the audience.

Borislav Hlozan

("Dnevnik", Novi Sad, 4.7.2008)

The follow-up program of the 37th International Festival of Alternative and New Theater presented the internet artist from Novi Sad, Andrej Tišma, with his new project, a musical-visual work entitled "Delicate Situation". Here again we have seen very engaged, topical, but also witty and ironic short cuts in which Tišma comments on, interprets or just sheds light on planetary phenomena and themes - from political, ecological, health-related to culturological and generally civilizational ones. They are violence, war, starvation, greed, pig flu or climate changes.

In the 21st century civilization it is not difficult to find topics, says Andrej Tišma, in a whole range of discourses, from political to intimate, but he creates a reception space on the very verge of the artful. He keeps recycling to banality and insignificance both civilizational themes and artistic material, as well as ready-made items such as pictures, videos, music from the internet, free and available to everyone and by no means exclusive. It is a chaos of total concensus in the infinity of all-pervading communication, visibility and heterogeneity.

What Tišma problematizes is this general pluralism and the opennes of space for everything, while, paradoxically, in this global mechanism there is no space for an idea, for criticism, for subversion of either institutions or the whole system. In a world like this, even artistic creation is not a sphere of criticism, but just a symptom of that world. The novelty in Tišma's "Delicate Situation" is the music which he integrates in his video works.

Aleksandra Rajic

(Radio Novi Sad, "Spektar", 2010.)

The opus of Andrej Tišma is rich and varied. Music, or - as he would say - "sound works" is yet another state of aggregation or a dimension of his art, besides his visual art works, performances, digital art and literature.

This music is, although a separate branch of Tišma's activities, still a part of one and the same tree. It can be seen in the creative "composing" process and in the messages, in the attitude. These sound works are collages made up of samples from a wide range of sounds and types of music - from military orders, speeches and video games to Bach, Arab music, pop rock, trumpeters and Esma Redžepova, while the rhythms and effects are mostly Tišma's own creations. The use of various sources enables the author to select the best, or - for a given composition - the most suitable musicians and music tunes, which is certainly an unusual advantage of that kind of work process.

Regarding its message and attitude, this music is fully engaged. There is something vaguely raw in the sound of these works, they are tough sound messages which Tišma sends to the world powers and power wielders. But his toughness, luckily, is not the only and the most powerful of Andrej Tišma's methods of struggle - there are also always invincible and, in contemporary art, so rare but all the more so precious - irony and sarcasm, that is wit and sense of humor.

Nikola Glavinic

(Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, Novi Sad, 2013)

In the creation and presentation of his sound works, consistently with his creative poetics, Andrej Tisma used multimedia communication means and principles of alternative art, corresponding to the technological and spiritual situation of postmodern civilization. With its recognizable and attractive world music idiom, conceptually shaped sound content, he speaks emphatically critically, clearly and humorously against globalization and its negative, dehumanizing manifestations. With subversive techno-musical discourse, he deconstructs and reconstructs the sound images of the wear and tear of symbols and myths of the West, reveals behind the illusion of humanity the complexity of the mechanism of imperial evil guided by planetarily destructive principles of profit and power. With engaged new media artistic means, he rebelliously unmasks the ideological function of the cultural superstructure of neoliberally founded Western hegemony in an effort to provoke the physical, moral and intellectual reaction of the recipients and influence their experience and understanding of current domestic and foreign policy by pointing to possible alternative world models.

Milan Djordjevic

("Alia Mundi", Belgrade, December 2020)

ON ANDREJ TISMA'S ART CAREER

In September 2011 the Serbian performance, mail and internet artist Andrej Tišma visited Bremen to join the opening of his first solo exhibition in Germany "Food In Context". On this occasion Tišma, who lives and works in Novi Sad, was interviewed by Andreas Bösche.

In the talk Tišma expressed remarkable and fascinating statements about the milestones of his artistic career, starting in socialist Yugoslavia and leading him to communist Czechoslovakia for further education. Back in his hometown Novi Sad, Tišma became not only a witness of the living conditions in a socialist country.

Supported by the strong assistance of his multi-ethnic family he also developed an outstanding moralistic view on the world and society in general. This had a deep impact on his art.

The desire to "heal" society made him develop works and performances that should help people in their daily life, but also in times of major troubles. In this context Tišma talks about his anti-war performances, for example the "Objava mira" (Declaration Of Peace) performance in Sremski Karlovci during the war in Croatia. Even today he turns out to be a brave and imperturbable artist who tries to influence fatal developments in Serbia and worldwide through his work.

Andreas Bösche

From the interview with Andrej Tišma: "By Art As Well Society Can Be Healed", Südosteuropa Mitteilungen, München, Germany, 04 /2012

The practice of Novi Sad contemporary artist Andrej Tisma is another example of using the internet as an 'artistic weapon'. During the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, Tisma produced two websites: one where he responded to questions from around the world about the bombing ( http://www.atisma.com/newsite/Live chat to ABC News 1999.htm ) and another created as a duplicate - an artistic copy, takeover of the KFOR (Kosovo Force operated by NATO) website, which he used to report on the Kosovo War. The website plagiarism subverted KFOR's rhetoric through the articles written by Tisma, completely disputing KFOR's original reports ("KFOR Celebration" http://www.atisma.com/webart/KFOR/kforonline_com.htm ).

Tisma also produced a number of texts (online bombing diary "To survive a bombing" http://www.atisma.com/webart/surviving/survive.htm ) illustrated by private and documentary photos) and net artworks in 1999, like "Bomb Contest" ( http://www.atisma.com/bomb.htm ), "Eyewitness to the Bombing" - USE FIREFOX BROWSER ( http://www.atisma.com/webart/Eyewitness/Tisma_Eyewitness.htm ), "NATO Olympic Mascots" ( http://www.atisma.com/webart/maskote/mascots.htm ), and so on. His activity on Nettime and the Syndicate was an internet war in itself. For his criticism directed against NATO, and what he believed was the moderator's 'Soros politics', he was denied access to the list on several occasions. The first message on the topic of the NATO bombing which appeared on Nettime was from Andrej Tisma and said, 'Message from Serbia, in anticipation of the NATO bombing. It could be my last post. But do not worry. If I die, my website will remain'

Nina Mihaljinac, Vera Mevorah

(From the "Broken promises of Internet and democracy: Internet art in Serbia, 1996-2014", Media, Culture & Society, vol. 41, 6: pp. 889-900. , First Published March 7, 2019)

ON TISMA'S NEO-AVANT-GARDE ART ACTIVITY FROM THE 1970s TO THE 2020s

A permanent and basically determinative characteristic of Andrej Tisma's artistic positioning in the historical development of Yugoslav and transitional "other line" is reflected in a consequential utilization of new media and strategies in the humanistically oriented effort to actively influence his micro and macro social reality, therefore to revolutionize the plenitude of life. His decades long continuous avant-garde creative commitment lies in a utopian endeavor to artistically in an interactive manner re-shape recipients' souls through mental powers, on the basis of essentially different evaluative and ideational relationship of man with nature and himself, and to create a world order fundamentally different from the currently governing capitalist one. This is why Tisma, both in physical and virtual reality, incited, awakened and sensitized domestic and international public by ideologically subversive images, attitudes and emotions, critically pointing to the major civilizational problems and affecting change of their media-influenced opinions, with a goal to see them changed for the better. Testing in this way the limits of social and political impact of artists, with his overall creative engagement, substantially tied to life, he has been striving, with his entire personality, to act in a dual but convergent way, by diagnosing and healing the diseased humanity. Tisma has consequentially put to practice his fundamentally avant-garde idea in street actions, performances, stamps and artistic meetings, photographs and video works, through the Institute of Love and "Love" magazine, decades long creative and custodian work in the scope of the international mail-art movement, as well as in his web art works, websites, participation in world mailing lists and social networks, essays, art criticism and theory, prose and poetic works, digital prints and music.

At the beginning and throughout 1990's, Tisma was a prominent opponent not only of nationalistic narratives, but also of the Western media propaganda and legitimization of the tragic dismemberment of the SFR of Yugoslavia. He also fiercely opposed the hegemonic international economic sanctions and their unjust and destructive effects on innocent people and culture. He relentlessly criticized the hypocrisy and the imperialistic political agenda of the USA and EU, which was manifested in the preparation and manipulation of the Yugoslav tragedy and capitalization on it, and which subsequently flourished in post-socialist neocolonial position aided by war profiteering and mafia-like comprador elites of the transitory period. All this resulted in a destruction of opportunities for the majority of citizens to live lives worthy of man in their own countries.

With his entire and diverse engaged art, Tisma has vehemently and fearlessly opposed the enslaving, exploitative and murderous neoliberal globalism in all its overwhelmingly negative forms. In his passionate polemics and valuable art works, he has used wit and lucidity to expose the Western imperialism and the crimes of its NATO military alliance which also includes generating usable religious fanaticism, fascism, wars, terrorism and global humanitarian and ecological catastrophes, driven by madness, egotism and insatiable greed for profit of one percent of the humankind.

In addition, another fact of a decisive importance is that Tisma has, in physical and digital space, fought for the truth from a financially independent, nonpartisan and creatively autonomous position, as a progressive artist and a versatile initiator of an alternative stream of multimedial art of communication. Moreover, he has maintained a critical stance towards the appearance of bureaucratic custodianship which is carrying out ideological and political instrumentalization of art imposing on it rules of life and work as the state funds would have them. In other words, he has not made allowance for ideological, dogmatic and utilitarian (mis)use of art, defended freedom, equality and justice, which - besides love, peace, international friendship and solidarity - are the basic ethical principles of his art of communication, the goal of which is a collective creative exchange on a planetary level.

Milan Djordjevic

( From the "Neo-avant-garde testing of artists' social impact" - "Polja" July-August 2019)

A turbulent development of the Serbian neo-avantgarde art in the second half of the 20th century brought thoroughgoing and groundbreaking changes on the local cultural scene, with the appearance of the generation of alternative creative artists whose attitudes and works were in harmony with the current streams of the contemporary world alternative art. One of the most prominent among them is undoubtedly an artist from Novi Sad, Andrej Tišma, who has - since the 1970's till today - greatly contributed to the development, affirmation and critical and theoretical perception of various aspects of new artistic practices.

Subversion places Andrej Tišma into a special position in the context of the domestic alternative creative world because Tišma has never hesitated to oppose the deeply-rooted, predetermined and conventional norms of the given moment and contemporary art, sharply and critically scrutinizing them. He has been looking for his own answers to the open questions of the time and the current creative practices, without belonging to any movements or group of artists, but always remaining open for communication and co-operation with creative workers from all over the world with whom he has shared common artistic and ideational viewpoints. His unaffiliated position and refusal to adopt currently dominant ideological standpoints, also found among artists of his generation, often formulated on the basis of dictates of the global political trends directed against Yugoslavia and the Serbian people, were the reason why his creative work was sometimes disputed and not understood. In spite of everything, Tišma has always remained a free-spirited, cosmopolitan and an unwaveringly engaged artist, driven in his activities by a conviction that art must be open and uncompromizing in pointing to the key problems and challenges of today's world. Therefore, his works and projects have focused on a broad spectrum of topics, from ecology, opposition to militarism and imperialism, peace activism, to alerting the public to the detrimental consequences of unstoppable capitalist globalization and danger of high-tech abuse. Even though this kind of his engagement was often juxtaposed in a subversive way against the current world ideological trends and "political correctness" of the contemporary alternative art, Tišma's creative work has received a very good and widespread response worldwide.

Ever since the early 1970's, Andrej Tišma has been multifariously engaged on the Serbian alternative scene, as one of the originators of mail-art, performance and video-art, while at the same time carrying out pioneer work in the field of computer graphic art, internet art and composing techno-music. His creative work also includes literary achievements represented by a dozen published books of poetry and prose, as well as visual arts criticism and several books of texts and essays devoted to modern art. Tišma's inventive and diverse artistic engagement testifies to a unique alternative artist, who has boldly searched for and found ways through his creative works and activities to answer the open questions and challenges of today's world, sometimes in a sharp and admonishing tone and some other times humorously or ironically.

Borislav Hložan

("Politika", Beograd, August 19. 2023.)

Milan Djordjvic's remarks on Andrej Tisma's Art in the book "Subversion And Healing: Art of Andrej Tisma", Akademska knjiga, Novi Sad, 2022)