Mira Brtka / Unstable Balances (1962-2012) – by Francesco Saba Sardi

Interview

Saba Sardi – I was thoroughly impressed with the images of the works I saw on your website. Above all, I was struck by the image of your installations that I would call lightning signs. Signs-flash-matter-color, prodigiously suspended in the void, or traversed by emptiness. Of no less interest are your filiform inventions, including images that I would tentatively call “anthropomorphic” – let’s say so, but correct me in their definition.

Mira Brtka– I am grateful to you for initiating a dialogue only on the basis of having viewed a reproduction of my works 0on the internet. This is a disposition and an openness of thought which help me, and perhaps force me, to briefly review the events that formed my position in art. Meanwhile, to your equally fulminating and flashing assessments of my current work, I would just like to add the recent words of a critic for whom my white lines from the 1960s were not at all the same as the white lines of today. If I only put these considerations together, I would already have enough material to think about for the next few years.

Saba Sardi – Another aspect of my brief interview concerns your birth as an artist, which, I believe, should not be distinguished from your friendship with Nobuya Abe, who was also a friend of mine, and whom I know by one of his works in which the West met Zen. He passed through Western culture with an unmistakable Japanese trait. An exchange of vision that has given rise to works of great value.

Mira Brtka – I am pleased to hear the name of Nobuya Abe after so many years, and to know that he has not been forgotten by those who knew him. Of course, Abe is at the heart, and perhaps even at the origin, of my story as an artist. He had arrived among us in the early 1960s, almost by chance, with a note in his hand on which my address in Rome was written, which was given to him by our mutual friends from Belgrade. For Marcia Hafif, Paolo Patelli, Aldo Schmid, Ines Fedrizzi, Milena Čubraković, Hardu Keck, Peter Chinni, Gencay Kasapçi, Michelangelo Conte, and for me, Abe soon became a teacher and a friend.

In our meetings with Abe, at his home or at the openings of the exhibitions, there were discussions with critics and art scholars that gave us all the courage to start every time ahead. I still remember [Giulio] Carlo Argan, Nello Ponente, Gerardo Dasi, Enrico Crispolti, Filiberto Menna, Giuseppe Gatt. For his part, Abe used to repeat that all of us were infected with bacteria circulating in the air: we had to revolutionize the world, improve it, at least.

Saba Sardi – In this regard I wonder and ask you if you too have attained an attitude that can well be defined as zen, by the term zen here meaning a moratorium of rationality, of logos. A synthesis of zen can be detected in archery, the use of the sword, both of which should not act as intermediaries: these are the tools intended to reach a target. All art understood as poiesis is zen, it is immediacy, it is revelation, it is light.

Mira Brtka – At the 1964 Verucchio Conference [organized by Argan], Abe declared that the horizon of the future of art was not at all serene, and that while polemics follow polemics, and tendencies overlap with tendencies, science in the meantime mechanizes all kinds of human activity. However, I believe that Abe had a balance, I would say, between emotion and rationality. The West and the East together, not just one and not just the other.

After the informal and material experience, the works of some of us were taking on a, let’s say, constructive character. This was a search for an order, for an image, for emblematic forms, strongly suggestive. It was a new aspect particularly interesting not only for the poetics, but because, to us, it seemed to be in an antithesis to the permanent crisis, determined, also in art, by the fast consumption which every other type of material production suffered. Work was done in this direction to relieve the lasting and concrete value of imagination and expression. With Abe, we all shared the idea that we needed to return to being committed to the human person as well as to counter any withdrawal of the feeling of fraternity.

It is in this search for a just position between linguistic rigor and humanism, that his Zen teaching was involved. The immobility in a point of a dynamic equilibrium was just one’s concentrating to hit the target. Recollection of material and spiritual forces to finally deliver the blow to be scored by whatever means you had in your hands.

Please note, however, that the name chosen by Abe for our group, Illumination, confirms what I was saying, namely that he pursued a point of contact of his Zen component with the West. In fact, the name of the group is obviously derived from the collection of prose poems, Illuminations, which Arthur Rimbaud began to write immediately after his participation in the Paris Commune of 1871.

I don’t know if this answers your question or meets your request, but the revealing light in immediacy did not come only from a sanitized and completely ahistoric transcendence.

Saba Sardi – What was your relationship with Nobuya Abe in the Illumination group and how long did you continue your collaboration with him? In the light of today’s experience, how do you read the artistic exchange of that time?

Mira Brtka – It was said to me that I was a being with three homelands: Yugoslavia, where I was born, Slovakia, where my ancestors came from, and Italy, where I was growing up as an artist. But here, in Italy, I would add that there was also Abe’s Japan.

I often acted as an interpreter in Abe’s various meetings with prominent people in the art field of that period. My knowledge of several foreign languages offered me the opportunity and chance to meet artists such as Fontana, Capogrossi, Dorazio and others to prepare exhibitions of Italian artists in Japan.

Consider that in addition to the strictly artistic matters, being friends with his wife, Toshiko, put me in a position to have very frequent contacts with Abe, and in all kinds of situations of his most minute everyday life.

After Abe’s sudden death in 1971, Toshiko handed me articles, letters and a variety of documentation from her husband, convinced that I would be able to shed light, at least in part, on Abe’s ideas and activity in his Roman period.

The time seems to be coming for this. Although with a great deal of delay, I have already managed, in my Foundation, to achieve something immediate and concrete in this regard, and we are also preparing various exhibitions of the Illumination group in Germany and Italy.

It is clear that this is not an issues of digging up a memory in order to revive a personal memory; I rather want to keep one more chance for art alive.

Saba Sardi – Another aspect of great interest concerns your artistic and intellectual production after the Illumination period in Italy. Would you like to tell something about it?

Mira Brtka – With all my confidence today I can state that in that Roman period of regular frequency with Nobuya Abe, there formed the nucleus of my artistic activity, which has never abandoned me even to this very day, after half a century.

Much of my current work was exhibited in November this year at the Novi Sad Museum of Contemporary Art in a wide-ranging retrospective that had the title “Unstable Balances”. And perhaps with this definition I approached again the idea of Abe, to find the right balance between the senses and the mind, between the soul and the body, between color and form. And of course among the many forms there are also those that you have called “anthropomorphic”, that is, human.

Saba Sardi – Your current artistic production has intrigued me, and I would love to know more beyond these few schematic elements which I have listed above.

Mira Brtka – One point. Then the line, the surface, the white. Color non-color. Simplicity, clarity. Transparency in sculpture… I always have all this in mind before starting a new job.

Abe said that being conscious is a strange thing; but the fact that man has a conscience means that he has lived through the situation of his time.

Perhaps the diversity between my white lines of the 1960s and those of today, is precisely due to the awareness of living and consuming one’s time.

Saba Sardi – I thank you again, immensely, for your attention. A warm greeting to you, bye.