The most striking aspect of Braco Dimitrijević’s unorthodox attitude is his sceptical vision of historiography and the Western-dominated art-related discourse. His oeuvre is an attempt to expose the underlying mechanisms of (art) historical texts and to demonstrate that these are predominately based on coincidence. In the late 1960s, he agreed with the then-popular notion that art must be universally accessible, and that everyone is an artist. He made his international breakthrough with his photo series ‘Casual Passer-By’, in which he enlarged photos of anonymous passers-by into billboards and displayed them in crowded public places. Dimitrijević also replaced public statues of famous figures with bronze busts of unknown people. Moreover, he furnished unimportant spots with marble commemorative plaques bearing the inscription “This could be a place of historical importance”.
Whilst Dimitrijević’s early work was located in the public domain, he began making interventions within museum collections in 1976. He used triptychs to criticise the power of museums, which assign cult status to certain artists whilst excluding many others. He regarded fame or obscurity as a question of convention. These triptychs also provide a commentary on traditional display modes and the museum fetishization of art. With his combinations of fruit, vegetables and later also stuffed and even live animals, which he displays alongside original artworks from the most prestigious collections in the world, Dimitrijević strives to align nature, ideology, labour and art. He sees little difference between museums and zoos. For example, he would have liked to see lions prowling around the Louvre but had to content himself with introducing reproductions of artworks into the cages of live animals in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes.
