[ Dictionary, Branka Arsic and Mrdjan Bajic, Dental, Belgrade, 1995. ]

Radical art of the Sixties and Seventies, and the accompanying theory, were obsessed with various kinds of terminological analysis. Often, this was the only content of some, let's say, conceptual work -- which could have, as final outcome, the multiplication of uninteresting tautological projects. The key of the dominant currents of art has been long since changed, and entry into the zone of which, for lack of better terms, we still call "postmodern" meant the abandoning of these pseudoscientific, habitually pretentious projects. Mrdjan Bajic, who matured as an artist in a time which encouraged the use of the "first person singular", did not all-encompassing lexicographical pretensions: surrounded by a world which had lost all parametres, he simply tried to sketch the intimate map of his world using the matrix of a dictionary.

Recnik (Dictionary) is a double book -- "bi-authorial" and "bi-medial". It came into being when Branka Arsic, theoretician and philosopher, wrote a series of texts inspired by some of the drawings in Mrdjan Bajic's cycle. It is possible to speak of points of similarity between the two methodologies, but also of points of smaller or bigger collision. First, it should be said that in both cases we are dealing with the "soft" approach characteristic of the art and the theory of this time, the approach in which intuition is not inhibited by formal requrements. Bajic's procedure, as well as Branka Arsic's, includes collaging of elements -- in his case, of printed "patterns", sometimes of photographs and "matter" which Bajic used in his drawings and large spatial works, and in hers, of quotations, both larger ones with attributions at the beginnings of sections, or of "fractals" completely incorporated into the tissue of the text -- and ranging from Plato and Leibniz to Kafka, Benjamin and Beckett, and to the lyrics of rock band Hüsker Du. Of course, there are differences as well. Bajic's visual entries have an unambiguous "instantness". Branka Arsic's text, on the other hand, introduces a strategy of gradual and very layered seduction: constantly starting new trains of thought, she creates a subterranean branching structure around the chosen vocabulary units which is, in its way, a simulation of the lexicographic universe itself. Naturally, dictionaries and encyclopedias are not books which are read linearly, so Branka Arsic's text achieves its desired effect when the strategy of "using" the book is shifted towards crisscross or "random" reading.

The design of Recnik sets completely new standards for this kind of book in the Yugoslav publishing industry -- as was confirmed by a Belgrade Book Fair award, if such a thing is at all relevant. Clear and comprehensive, nearly classical, it shows that extravagance and abuse of cutting-edge software are not prerequisites for giving a book a modern visual identity.

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