Braco Dimitrijević: His Pencil's Voice / Njegove olovke glas
B/W photos Sven Stilinović & Fedor Vučemilović
Galerija SC & Muzički salon Teatar ITD
Zageb, 1973.
Single. Jacket / wrap & "records".
In very fine codition. Very very rare.
Ursula Block’s seminal catalog of art records and anti-records, entitled Broken Music, includes several artifacts that today are coveted by collectors of unusual records. One seminal item in that catalog Njeqove Olovke Glas, a.k.a. His Pencil’s Voice, a “record” produced by the conceptual artist Braco Dimitrijević: he piece is an LP jacket with a piece of cardboard inside; the “record” is a piece of cardboard inside the jacket.
Dimitrijević used a pencil to draw a spiral on the cardboard record, meant to represent the its grooves. The title, His Pencil’s Voice, is no doubt a reference to the early record label, His Master’s Voice: Little is known about His Pencil’s Voice, so I emailed Braco Dimitrijević to learn more. He is a man of few words, always keeping things to the point when conversing via email. He explained that His Pencil’s Voice was created for a solo exhibition in London’s Situation Gallery, which was a linchpin of the modern art scene in the seventies.
“What bothered me always was the process of realization from the idea, the sketch to the final art work,” he explains. “This was not only in visual arts, but in music too. So I wanted to create a record with no score performed, but what is written is drawn to be played.”
In essence, Dimitrijević saw His Pencil’s Voice as a more direct way of producing a final art product, cutting out the laborious production process. “I drew by hand the spiral on the paper and brought it to printers to make a zinc plate to emboss and print the label,” he recalls. “In other words, unlike a classic record where the music is written as notes, which are then played by one or several instruments, recorded, and listened to, for my record what is written is played directly by the record player.”
Dimitrijević points out to me that he has made analogous works using photographs and stone as media, but doesn’t elaborate. I suspect he is talking about the series of works from the start of his career that began life in 1968 as “Accidental Sculpture” and “Accidental Drawings and Paintings,” both projects he started while still in art school in Zagreb. On one occasion in 1971, he made a “portable monument” — a stone plaque that could be placed anywhere, which bore the inscription, “This could be a place of Historical Importance.” This seemingly satisfies the same criteria as His Pencil’s Voice, in that Dimitrijević is bypassing the creation process by designating any environment as artistically significant.
The other analogous project is his “Casual Passer-By” series of photographs, which is archived at the Tate Modern art museum in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For that work, he took portraits of people that he encountered on the street. His rules were simple: he took the first person he encountered that was willing to participate, documenting the person’s name along with the time and date. This image was then pasted, like a billboard, on a London bus for two weeks. By bypassing the usual selection of a formal “model,” as well as the typical methodology done to prepare for a photo shoot (makeup, lighting, set design), he again skips the typical artistic production process in favor of something more direct.
Dimitrijević isn’t sure how His Pencil’s Voice ended up in Ursula Block’s book, but he does tell me that it was included as the final record for an exhibition called “The Record as artwork: from futurism to conceptual art,” which was assembled by the famous Italian art historian Germano Celant. Celant is known for introducing the term Arte Povera (“poor art”), referring to a process of creation that breaks from the traditional practices and materials used in art, instead favoring cheaper and more rudimentary materials. One can see this tendency in His Pencil’s Voice, which substitutes graphite on cardboard for a professionally reproduced vinyl record.
Over the years, Dimitrijević has produced an extensive body of work, and I reflect that he may regard His Pencil’s Voice as one minor work among many. To wrap up my questions, I ask him what his thoughts are on this piece, nearly forty years after the fact.
“I did a good job,” he tells me, with characteristic brevity.
Source: Anomaly Index
