Signalist documentation centre

Signalist Documentation Centre was founded in 1970, immediately after numerous contacts with a large number of avant- garde artists from all over the world had been established and the first voluminous parcels had arrived: books, journals and other information material. Upon arrival (journals, catalogues, books, postcards, letters, photographs, objects, records, original work of art, cassettes, etc.) documentation was partly classified and registered in some volumes of the International Review for Signalist Research SIGNAL. But, generally the material still remained unsorted, in a state of a dynamic or, more precisely, creative chaos.

One of the basic aims of the Centre is, for sure, collecting and saving signalist documentation and works (papers) concerned with signalism and avant-garde creative movement which originated and developed in Serbian culture and was active in the broad Yugoslav space [1]. There is quite a lot of such material and it has already been used for a doctoral thesis Signalism: Genesis, Poetics and Artistic Practice, written by Živan Živković assistant (now professor) at the Faculty of Philology, who obtained his doctoral degree at the same faculty in April 1991. Yet, as quite logical a great deal more documents (books, journals, catalogues, etc.) refer to European and world avant-garde from the seventies and eighties, especially Visual Poetry[2] and Mail Art. One may freely say that the main contents of the Signalist Documentation Centre, is in fact formed of publications which in a way represent these two artistic forms and artifacts connected or directly concerned with them.

The material which has arrived to the Centre comprised mainly works, books, catalogues mainly sent by artists who themselves wished, first of all, to contribute in the review SIGNAL[3]. This journal has achieved remarkable recognition within international avant-garde circles in the beginning of the seventies.

A great number of works and other documents was obtained due to calls for anthologies that I composed for magazine Delo no. 3, 1975. and Mail Art - Mail Poetry, Delo no. 2, 1980.

Cooperation and exchange with other archives and similar centres was established. In the beginning and mid seventies, most successful communication was with neo-Dadaist centre and archives of avant-garde artist Klaus Groh, who later became a professor in Oldenburg (Germany). Here, one should also mention The Jean Brown Archives, Tyringham, Massachusetts, who specialized in Dadaism and Surrealism but contains avant-garde works from the period after Second World War, as well: Lettrism, Concrete Poetry, Fluxus, Happening, Pop-art and Conceptual Art.

There existed an interesting and fruitful exchange of information and publications with Sohm Archive which emphasized its rich collection of the Fluxus movement and Happenings as its specialty and published a significant monograph Fluxus and Happenings in 1970. The owner of this archive, Hans Sohm, was especially interested in collecting documents and other material concerning signalism and Yugoslav avant-garde on the whole. Since about ten years ago, this archive has become part of the Statsgalerie in Stuttgart.

One of the largest archives, if not the largest, specialized in Concrete and Visual Poetry (with a separate section devoted to Mail Art) is the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Miami Beach, Florida. Up to my knowledge, the most complete and best presentation of Signalism abroad is found in the Sackner Archive.

(From the book PLANETARY CULTURE, 1995)