Katalin Ladik

Today based in Budapest, Ladik was animated and sometimes controversial spirit in the neo-avant-garde in Yugoslavia before the country’s collapse in 1992. Her output includes a novel, poetry, sound poems, graphic scores, performances and happenings. She has enjoyed close working relations with musicians, performing, for instance, with Dubravko Detoni and Milko Kelemen’s experimental music group ACEZANTEZ in the early 1970s. Later in the decade she had a role as a vocalist in a monumental performance of Kurt Schwitter’s ‘Ursonate’ (1979). Conducted in Belgrade by Oskar Danon, it involved four vocalists, four orchestras, banks of tympany augmented with tape music by Vladan Radovanović made from fragments of folk, electronic and pop music. Ladik is also a visual artist. A member of the Bosch + Bosch group in Novi Sad, she created collage graphic scores for what she called her phonopoetics in the early 1970s. Slicing material from glossy West German women’s magazines as well as other graphic materials including sewing patterns and stamps, Ladik produced powerful images for use in public performances, interpreting them in situ. As if employing the kinds of editing, pitch-stretching and duplicating techniques available in the studio, Ladik’s ‘natural’ voice seems strangely involuntary. Ladik was a celebrity in Yugoslavia. She performed naked, treating her body like as an instrument (running a primitive bow across her hair). When, in 1975, these performances attracted the attention of mass-market magazines, she was thrown out of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia for ‘immorality’. In the paradoxical fashion of Yugoslav socialism, she then become a star on state TV, appearing in one of its forays in erotica. Never a campaigning feminist, Ladik’s performances always put female subjectivity to the fore, often in uncompromising ways.

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Glimpses from the history of the Eastern Bloc’s neo-avant-gardes: Katalin Ladik’s collage-portrait