In Canada, where he has lived for more than four decades, Bratsa Bonifacho is best known as an abstract painter – a creator of visually and conceptually rich canvases in oil and encaustic. As a young man in his native Belgrade, however, Bonifacho first distinguished himself as a pioneer in a discipline that would later be identified as performance art. Between 1959 and 1965, well before Marina Abramović emerged as a ground-breaking performance artist, Bonifacho undertook a series of architectural interventions and choreographed “happenings” on the rooftops of Belgrade. Indeed, it appears that Abramović participated in one of Bonifacho’s community-involved live-art events when she was a high school student.
Born in 1937 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, he grew up in modest circumstances, living with his family in an apartment in a six-storey building on King Petar Street. When he was a teenager, his gang of friends gave him the nickname “Bonifacije”, after the character Victor Boniface in the 1951 French film The Sleepwalker. (Directed by Maurice Labro and starring the acclaimed French actor Fernandel as the sleepwalker, the film was originally titled Boniface Somnambule.) Although he initially disliked the sobriquet, it endured and became Bonifacho after the artist moved to Canada. As it turned out, when he started creating his rooftop happenings, with all their daring and drama, the name of a fictional character played by a film, stage, and vaudeville actor served as a serendipitous allusion to the crossover between visual art and performance. From 1957 to 1959, Bonifacho studied painting and drawing at the Sumatovachka School of Art in Belgrade. He then pursued degrees in fine arts and architecture in the Faculty of Applied Arts at the University of Belgrade.
In 1959, when Bonifacho was still an art student with a studio in the attic of the King Petar Street residence, he conceived the idea of using the built environment as his canvas. One side of the building, where his studio was located, possessed a tall and steeply pitched roof that invited exploration and intervention; on the other side, there was a large and beautiful terrace, commanding a grand view across Belgrade to the Danube River and beyond. Initially, Bonifacho acted alone, painting abstract signs and symbols on his building’s roof. As documented in a black-and-white video of the time, he would stride up the sharply inclined roof, as nimble and fearless as a mountain goat. Without the aid of ropes or ladders or even suitable shoes (in the video, he appears to be wearing open-backed slippers), he would position himself and proceed to paint. He titled the ongoing project Roof Art or Eyes over the City, gradually expanding his urban “canvas” to weather vanes, power lines, and the sides of other buildings. The images he created, he says, “represented eyes, dead eyes which, with their frozen gaze, unceasingly observed the urban panorama.” [i]
Because a number of these large images resembled targets in their use of coloured concentric circles, his older neighbours were alarmed, recalling the intense aerial bombing Belgrade had suffered during World War II. However, it was not Bonifacho’s intent to summon up that history. As stated, they symbolized eyes and, incidentally, they accorded with the nascent pop art and hardedge movements in Western culture at the time. They are reminiscent of Jasper Johns’s Target paintings, created in the mid- to late-1950s, and also of Kenneth Noland’s concentric circle paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s. (Both Johns and Noland seemed to evoke Robert Delauney’s abstract paintings of 1913 and 1914.) Bonifacho’s compositions suggest how uncannily attuned he was with the inventive work being done half a world away. He was in the vanguard, spontaneously evolving his art practice in concert with emerging trends in the West.
Working on his own and without inviting the media to witness what he was doing, Bonifacho nonetheless attracted growing attention to his painting interventions, not only among his neighbours but also among writers, journalists, and intellectuals in Belgrade. As described, an early video records a solo painting performance on a rooftop on King Petar Street. As Bonifacho expanded his vision, he created more elaborate live-art events, staging a performance with a group of young women, all wearing costumes he designed. He also engaged the participation of members of his community and beyond, including middle-aged and older residents of his building and neighbourhood. (A young Marina Abramović also participated in one of Bonifacho’s performances and one can speculate that she found in that work inspiration for her own acclaimed practice.) Bonifacho positioned the participants in rows at the periphery of the large terrace looking out towards the city limits and then directed them to slowly and silently move their heads, arms and torsos in concert while keeping their eyes fixed on an imaginary focal point. Their choreographed movements and fixed line of vision complemented the stylized eyes painted on the rooftops; the performances staged at dusk, the artist says, were particularly mesmerizing with their play of light and shadow and use of reflective materials.[ii]
Bonifacho’s innovative performance works gained local, national and international media attention, beginning with reports in daily newspapers and then in more broadly based magazines and periodicals, and climaxing with video-taped coverage by French and Italian television stations. His actions and interventions were both daring and unprecedented in what was then the communist country of Yugoslavia. Although “performance art” was only identified as such in the 1970s, its roots are well understood to lie in Dadaist and Futurist cabarets of the early years of the 20th century, and then in alternative art practices of the late 1950s and 1960s. (Early live-art forms such as “body art”, “happenings,” and “actions” were retroactively identified as performance works.[iii]) In 1959, the American artist Allan Kaprow staged a carefully choreographed, multi-media event at the Reuben Gallery in New York City and called it a “Happening.” In Osaka, the Japanese Gutai group had begun creating happening-like spectacles in 1954. Notably, Bonifacho was the first in his part of the world to participate in what would become an international movement. It was a represented a radical approach, one that recognized the artist as an actor in his own live event, that “dematerialized” the art object, and that sought to take art-making out of the studio and into places where audiences could witness its full realization.
– Robin Laurence
[i] Artist’s statement, 2012.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Robert Atkins, Artspeak (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), p.121.