ANTE BOZANICH
ANTE BOZANICH
1. Eyes on TV monitor
Description: From the video installation [Title of Work] by Ante Bozanich, c. 1970s.
Author: Ante Bozanich
Date: [insert year]
Source: Courtesy of Ante Bozanich / [official archive or website]
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
2.
Description: Video installation showing a CRT television suspended on chains with a video recorder below, displaying moving clouds. Artwork by Ante Bozanich.
Author: Ante Bozanich
Date: [insert year]
Source: Courtesy of Ante Bozanich / [official archive or website]
License: CC BY 4.0
Still from video work Soft Pain, 9:20 min, color, sound
Author: Ante Bozanich
Date: 1982
Source: Courtesy of Ante Bozanich
License: CC BY 4.0
Description
Soft Pain captures the peculiar dissociation of heroin culture with unswerving veracity, as juxtapositions of erotic tableaux and injection close-ups create an unresolvable dialectic. Bozanich melds dark stylization with gut-wrenching realism in mainline close-ups — a Beauties-and-the Beast view of opiate anomie.
With: Judy Taylor, Susan Aberth, Louise Avila, Ante Bozanich.
4.
Still from video work Hole, 11:50 min, color, sound.
Author: Ante Bozanich
Date: 1989
Source: Courtesy of Ante Bozanich
License: CC BY 4.0
Description
The progressive loneliness and estrangement from others in the face of increasing population density is elaborated upon in Hole. Here Bozanich looks both further within and further without, searching for the social contexts of alienation. Anchored by the life cycle of a family of rats seen in their nests through a long tube, Bozanich maps the correspondence of inner and outside worlds in a succession of alternately intimate and distanced images that depict homeland and nationalism, country and city, pets and vermin, childhood and sexuality, leisure and religion, birth and burial. Bozanich concludes with a conception of shared experience as a collective quantification of lost moments.
Still from video work I am the Light, 3:57 min, b&w, sound
Author: Ante Bozanich
Date: 1976
Source: Courtesy of Ante Bozanich
License: CC BY 4.0
Description
I am the Light explodes with an intensity of focused aggression. Alone before the camera, his face distorted by grimaces and expressionistic lighting, Bozanich hurls insults, obscenities and pleas in a dramatic confrontation with the viewer.
6.
Still from video work Pale of Night, 5:57 min, color, sound
Author: Ante Bozanich
Date: 1986
Source: Courtesy of Ante Bozanich
License: CC BY 4.0
Description
In this work, Bozanich pushes his interiority to an essential level, where it becomes paradigmatic of shifts between social and personal realities. Pale of Night is a psychodramatic tour-de-force, expressing the alienation and terror of the self. Bozanich's miniaturized and mediated rituals with pets and symbolic props enact our increasing reduction and isolation within microcosms — Bozanich uses his apartment as a metaphor for the self. As Camus said of Nietzsche's life, "thought alone, carried on in isolation, is a frightening adventure." Bozanich's illumination of his interior haunts is chilling and courageous.
Ante Bozanich
Biography
Working in a relative obscurity and on an intimate scale, Ante Bozanich has produced a powerful body of psychodramatic work exploring the exile of the self in a contemporary culture. Born in Croatia, he immigrated to the United States in 1967 and began working in video in 1974 while living in Los Angeles. Bozanich’s work reflects the influence of performance and body art on the Southern California video art of the sixties. His early works feature visceral confrontations with the camera; the artist uses the instantaneous and intimate nature of video production as a psychodramatic construct. Bozanich’s psychic power treatment and his ability to reach in his inner depth is what distinguishes his work from others. Advancing his deeply personal and sometimes primal character in his work, his later tapes continue to illuminate his interior haunts with courageous acuity. Writing in Video 80, artists Bruce and Norman Yonemoto state that Bozanich’s personal existential vision foreshadowed the nihilism of punk and neo-expressionism. His works “embody Antonin Artaud’s obsession with art that is at once ‘violent, insulting, dangerous and self-destructive.’ ”
Bozanich was born 1949 in Vis, Croatia. He received a B.A., an M.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles. He received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ford Foundation. Bozanich’s tapes have been exhibited internationally at festivals and institutions including the Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Hare Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Artspace, San Francisco; San Francisco International Video Festival; Image Forum, Tokyo; Museum of Modern Art, New York, Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the American Film Institute’s National Video Festival, Los Angeles and others. His work is in permanent collections at the: Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Charleroi, Belgium , UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles , Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, J. Frank Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino (GAM), Italy, Museum of Modern Art (MSU), Zagreb, Croatia, Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive, Long Beach, California, The Kitchen Collection, New York, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, California and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan.
Bozanich is married to art producer Daniela Bozanich.
He lives and works in New York.