Slovenia and the OHO Art Collective
In the 1960s Milenko was a member of the Slovene neo-avant-garde movement OHO — a collaborative of visual artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians and theorists. After a few years, the movement transformed into the OHO Group (1966-71), where Milenko, one of the four founding members, started with visual poetry, drawings, paintings and objects. As part of the group, Milenko held to the stated goal of challenging the status quo of what art was and how we can experience it in our everyday lives. This quickly graduated to conceptual projects, actions and happenings.
In the summer of 1969, Milenko found a more collaborative approach to his art: instead of just making objects, he focused on highlighting his own relationships with fields, parks, walls, rivers, sunsets, night skies, and people. The principles he invented in those years influenced all his later work.
After a few years, members of the OHO group started to question their involvement with traditional arts venues. Their experience of the art world, through exhibits such as the International Show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1970, seemed the antithesis of the original pursuit — to push art into life. In April of 1971, the OHO Group left the art world and moved in separate directions; Milenko stopped identifying solely as an artist and started to explore new territory at the nexus of art and community.
“In my teens I joined with friends and experimental artists to form Group OHO (uho = ear, oko = eye, oho = ear + eye) to move our work out of the conventional ‘art’ environment of studios, galleries and museums and into the street, the workplace and the market square. The idea that art should be a part of everyday life has been with me ever since.” - Milenko
The OHO Group, a Slovene artistic collective formed in the late 1960s, consisted of Marko Pogačnik who was the group’s main organizer, Milenko Matanovič, David Nez, and Andraž Šalamun as the permanent, core members.
As explained by Slovenian Art Historian Igor Spanjol, “In his youth, Matanovic was an active and inventive member of the Ljubljana ‘hooligans’ circle.. initially a pejorative word for long-haired youths who dressed unconventionally and listened to rock music, with connotations of asocial and potentially dangerous attitudes, which served as an excuse for more or less severe repressive measures. After a while, the ‘hooligans’ adopted the moniker, challenging with their unconventional behavior both the increasing consumerism of socialist society and the formalist conventions regulating the socialist system. They expressed their disillusionment with the empty social form, the amassing of things, and the neglect of human values and relations by protesting and by seeking more genuine and direct human relations. They felt an affinity with rock culture, slowly gaining ground in Slovenia at the time, finding in it a similar sense of protest and rebellion. In art, they were drawn to avant-garde trends in their search for the free expression of their individuality and direct communication.”
The OHO Group achieved success in the late 1960s and early 1970s by exhibiting throughout former Yugoslavia as well as internationally, including the Information at MoMA in New York in 1970. Recognizing the group’s pioneering importance in linking art and nature, the group’s early work was exhibited at the 2017 Biennale of Venice.
Today the OHO Group’s legacy continues as a crucial reference for Slovene contemporary art. Milenko’s works have been reenacted by other artists, a major Slovene prize for young artists has been named after the group, and the work continues to be exhibited worldwide.
“In former Yugoslavia, I experienced the societal pressure to be good and diligent. Instead, I became an artist because I wanted to assert my individuality. Most of the work was done with very few people around. Nobody told me to stop doing what I was doing. A small group of colleagues and friends followed our work, and we encouraged each other. Mostly it was all just a ‘happening’, and didn’t need or receive any approval.”