Page 147 - Famous

 ANNE FRANK HOUSE
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Journey of the Magi` and what was that festival called again in Greek? ists: `An artist is someone who manages to change a solution into a
Yes, Epiphany. `Epiphany`, meaning `appearance` (to the heathens, the mystery.` What does he do with that mystery, this happy artist? No, he
foreigners and us, to be precise). What did appear in Nazareth, what does not solve it. He starts to search for her whom G.B. Shaw named
did reveal itself there? Something, anyhow, with claims to the name of `the sphinx without mysteries` - the muse, maybe. What she does
`firmament`, a nocturnal phenomenon radiating appreciably more light and wants Bajramovic to do, what she still has in store for him, is and
in Galilea and Bosnia than it does north and west of these, whether should be a mystery for now. What is certain, notwithstanding, is this:
that be Genova, Gelsenkirschen, Goteborg or Gennep. Yes, behold first Bajramovic silenced me, then he made me speak interminably.
the verbal byways one must travel in reaching sacred places and in May I be forgiven for both.
defining one’s quiet adoration of a work of art which has mastered its Maarten Beks, Dutch art magazine “Kunstbeeld”
foreign, Neanderthalian languages and its Dutch - High Netherlandish
- so perfectly. As well as that language which is so eloquently mute
that one is tempted to become verbose. As at this moment. Mirso is
star-struck. The second painting he presented to me was almost as
`astral` as `Epiphany`, even though it `showed` and `indicated` more
about our world. For instance? Well, simply a street in a town, called
Sarajevo or Dubrovnik, those ideal places where Mirso was born and
bred. High above nocturnal Sarajevo the stars are spotted and iden-
tified: first Mars, than Venus, first war than sex, or rather love and
what passes itself off for it in this existence down below. Between
that town and those stars there is no (Southern) Cross but there is a
half moon. Is the title of this painting indeed `Dubrovnik`? Or would
`Last time I saw Sarajevo` be even more suitable?
Up to this point I had moved in the realm of magic, poetic, not to men-
tion orphic, art. An art, it might be claimed with slight exaggeration,
which is the especial reserve of artists deriving from regions east of
us. That’s where they know best how to paint such sacred nocturnes,
how to perform the astral liturgy. Mirso Bajramovic too is one who
paints `Hymns to Night`. He too follows Jean Cocteau’s poetical direc-
tion of `carrying night through day`, extending the possible world of
the dream into the profane world of up-to-datedness. But he is not
just a painter of nocturnes and `Night thoughts`. He is also a com-
monsensical man with a Western inquisitiveness about the system,
the anatomy of romantic imagery. I say: part of his art is about art
and even that Art creates art. This did not make him a post-modern-
ist. To him the modern tradition is not `old news`, a decrepit archive,
`Yesterday’s Papers`, from which one may legally quote from memory.
No, he remained IN the tradition. Which is still as fully operative in
former Yugoslavia as it is in the whole of Europe.
So Mirso Bajramovic is not simply an artist who carries night through
day, he also wants the sun to shine in the darkness, make the light of
reason clarify the dream. Or rather: he comes up to the arch-aphorist
Karl Kraus’ expectations about people who dare call themselves art-

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