Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945–1985 (original) (raw)
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Awakenings: The New Art Practice in late 1960s Socialist Yugoslavia
2022
The year 1968 brought along a call for freedom. “Imagine…”, sang John Lennon. The intellectual youth strove for a changing world through urban protests, sounds of rock music, and new ways of practicing arts. In her “occasionally critical memoir,” US American art historian Lucy Lippard tells of meeting a number of conceptual artists in Vancouver in 1967, and realizing how artists there and in New York, as well as Europe, were on different wavelengths yet produced similar work, which confirmed her belief of "ideas in the air"- which she defines as "the spontaneous appearance of similar work totally unknown to the artists that can be explained only as energy generated by sources and by the wholly unrelated art against which all the potentially "conceptual" artists were commonly reacting." 1 (ix) Art had become, as is no surprise, a popular tool to express oneself as part of the collective unconscious. This could be felt in some of the countries behind the “Iron Curtain”. Socialist Yugoslavia witnessed an absolute transformation: the shift to conceptual art brought birth to the use of new media, and so emerged The New Art Practice movement “with its non-artistic means and radical attitudes—from idealism and utopia to criticism, irony and skepticism”2, as described by art historian and curator Dunja Blažević. How was it possible for a socialist country to be recharged in the 1960s and become a hub of conceptual art? How was it different from the victory of conceptual art in other countries? And what can we learn from this this particular situation in Yugoslavia 60 years later?
Modernism In-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia
2012
Socialist Yugoslavia was a country suspended between traditional cultures, competing concepts of modernization, and rivaling Cold War blocs. As a result, it produced a diverse body of architecture that defies easy classification and blurs the lines between the established categories of modernism. This book explores the historical “in-betweenness” of Yugoslav modernism and the strategies architects used to mediate different—sometimes directly opposed—concepts of culture and architecture. Surveyed here is a wide range of topics: from city building and state representation, to the typologies of everyday life. Also discussed is the work of Yugoslavia’s leading architects, who transformed their in-betweenness into a new quality: Edvard Ravnikar’s seamless blending of such varied influences as Jože Plečnik, Le Corbusier, and Otto Wagner; Bogdan Bogdanović’s war memorials, which filtered deep-seated cultural archetypes through the lens of Surrealism; Juraj Neidhardt’s efforts at forging a modern identity for Bosnia based on the vernacular Ottoman heritage; and Vjenceslav Richter’s neo-avant-garde experiments, which provided some of the most convincing representations of Yugoslav socialism. Wolfgang Thaler photographs document these and many other stand-out achievements.
Literature, revolution, and national aesthetics on the interwar Yugoslav left
The interwar years are relatively understudied by intellectual historians of Eastern Europe. This is especially true of the study of the region’s radical left-wing cultures, where attention has tended to focus on the Marxist revisionists of the post-war decades. As a period typically identified with political repression and economic crisis, the years following the end of World War I and the outbreak of World War II are assumed to hold little interest to the intellectual historian. However, throughout Eastern Europe, the 1920s and 1930s saw the growth of rich left-wing cultures that engaged with a diverse set of ideas from Western Europe and the Soviet Union, and adapted them to their local conditions. This article explores the development of leftist ideas during the interwar period by examining three prominent figures from Yugoslavia’s literary left: the Croatian modernist Miroslav Krleža, the Montenegrin critical realist Milovan Ðilas, and the Slovene Christian socialist Edvard Kocbek.
Musicologist, International Journal of Music Studies , 2017
In this paper I discuss the notion of 'socialist modernism' and argue for its introduction into Serbian music history and musicology as an appropriate label for a vast number of works composed in the seventh and eighth decades of the 20 th Century. The term is borrowed from Serbian art theory, where it was introduced by Ješa Denegri, who defined 'socialist modernism' as a further development of the notion of 'socialist aestheticism', which was the first sign of distancing from the 'socialist realism' as the dominant aesthetic position in the years immediately after the end of the WWII. While both terms have been widely used to discuss the visual arts and architecture (e. g. Miško Šuvaković), they have not been applied to the study of Serbian and Yugoslav music history. It is my goal to analyse the main facets of 'socialist modernism' and to compare this notion to other prominent terms, which are commonly used to describe the art music production of the majority of Serbian composers in the given period, notably to 'moderated modernism' and 'neoclassicism.' Denegri used the notion of 'socialist modernism' to point to the specific position of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia 'between East and West' during the Cold War. He defined it as a " unique formation that emerged at the crossroads of the features of Eastern and Western cultural models. " Similar tendencies can also be observed in Serbian art music since the late 1950s, with an increasing desire to 'catch up' with the dominant currents of European musical (high) modernism. As a paradigmatic example of this stylistic approach in art music of the 1960s and 1970s, I discuss the poetics of Aleksandar Obradović (1927–2001), one of the most prominent Yugoslav (Serbian) composers of the period, whose artistic profile vividly illustrates the currents of political developments and changes in Yugoslav art in the second half of the 20 th Century.
A Socialist Neo-Avant-Garde? The Case of Postwar Yugoslavia
New Narratives of Russian and East European Art, 2019
The post-1945 resurgence of radical art forms such as the readymade and the monochrome in Western art is often interpreted as a superficial repetition of the historic avant-garde, devoid of its original political content. Still, this well-established narrative of the neo-avant-garde only accounts for art in Western liberal-democratic contexts. In socialist Yugoslavia, a distinct strand of neo-constructivism emerged in the 1950s, which sought to recapture not only prewar constructivism’s experimental aesthetics, but also its utopian politics. It was fueled by the revolutionary aspirations of socialist Yugoslavia, which strove to articulate a brand of socialism independent from Moscow, as well as an awareness of prewar constructivism that was unmatched in Western Europe. Represented by figures such as Vjenceslav Richter and the collective EXAT-51, this socialist neo-avant-garde challenged both the traditional historiography of postwar abstraction, and the assumption that experimental aesthetics have not existed under non-democratic conditions since the Soviet 1920s.
Transformation of Modernism in Socialist Yugoslavia Architecture
PRIZREN SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, 2018
The Socialist Yugoslavia regime, which was established after World War II, led to innovations in many areas, spreading the modernism that Yugoslavia inherited from the Kingdom period to many areas. It also allowed freedom of expression and opened up to Western European countries kel social, political, commercial and so on kel compared t o the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries. Provided the development of relations. These openings also led Yugoslav artists to explore various artistic movements abroad and to be inspired from abroad. In this study, it is aimed to examine the effects of the ideological background of the new regime on architecture. The effects of Tito on the transformation of the modernist movement that emerged in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia through the Tito period and the development and change of art and architecture. 1. Introduction The first division of Europe in the east and west is based on the division of the Roman Empire into two in the early 4th century. The territory of the two emperors (Diocletian and Constantine the Great) who created this division was later called Yugoslavia. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire-in the 7th century the Slavic tribes settled in the Balkan peninsula were divided into two as Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic Church in 1054. Northwest of Yugoslavia, Western Catholic Church (Romanesque-Gothic-Renaissance-Baroque); and the southeast of it was under the influence of the Eastern Orthodox Church (Kuliç Mrduljaš and Thaler, 2012). This division has also been effective in the six republics of Yugoslavia. Slovenia and Croatia, Western Catholic; Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Macedonia have adopted Eastern Orthodox teachings. The east-west contrast of Yugoslavia, which was established after World War II and observed in its own formation, is seen to continue the socialist ideology that Yugoslavia gained from the East / Soviet Union by taking into consideration the cultural structure of its geography and society. However, in order to unite six different republics in Yugoslavia under the same roof, they adopted an anti-historian approach of modernism and aimed to create a Yugoslav identity independent of Byzantine, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian influence. This ideology, which was formed under the leadership of Tito, was continued in the name of 'Titoism ı, which is a form of Marxism, against Yugoslavia and capitalism and Stalinism. Although Tito was in the same communist regime as Stalin, he pursued a liberal, libertarian, anti-stalinist policy. This regime is not only in politics; and in architecture and art. 2. Tito's Approach to Art and Architecture The Communist Party, led by Josip Broz Tito, created a new Yugoslav identity, followed its policy and II. In
Aesthetic Marxism: Yugoslavia and after
As in other socialisms, artistic culture was very important political issue in Yugoslavia, and Marxism was at the same time its official ideology in hands of the League of Communists and a field of expression for critical voices. In transition from Yugoslavia to new nation-states and from socialism to capitalism, cultural field lost its ideological weight and Marxism nearly disappeared from public use. Its place, now much less important, was taken by post-structuralist and post-modernist theories. Then, the Crisis gave marginalized Marxism another chance to appear as persuasive and productive way of thought with a possible practical impact. While in the period of socialism aesthetic Marxism was developed as an utopian critique of official cultural ideology competing with it for the position of Marxist orthodoxy, in period of the Crisis elements of Marxist approach are engaged together with post-structuralist and post-modern (anti-)aesthetics mostly by artist themselves. They do not look for orthodoxy but for practical answers: what can art do in transition from late capitalism to post-capitalism, and can it embrace some kind of aesthetic utopian vision again? Instead of getting the answer, these attempts produce a situation of " squaring the circle ". What they produce in aesthetics and in art is so-called real utopia-an oxymoron of contemporaneity. To present these transitions in the field of aesthetic Marxism and its utopian perspective, this paper will proceed through four steps:
2010
Considering invisibility of the New Tendencies in the dominant narrative on European modernism, ongoing process of consolidation of the new media art might be a platform from which to introduce the New Tendencies into the context of new media art history. However explanations given in the recent interpretations of that international art Movement clearly demonstrate that along the lines of that process a spatial configuration of the New Tendencies could be significantly redefined. In order to provide a counter-balance to such an attempt, it is necessary to explain the reasons which made Zagreb and Former Yugoslavia unique locations and appropriate ideological and intellectual framework of that international art movement. Such an explanation is the content of this article.
2014
On The Very Edge brings together fourteen empirical and comparative essays about the production, perception, and reception of modernity and modernism in the visual arts, architecture, and literature of interwar Serbia (1918–1941). The contributions highlight some idiosyncratic features of modernist processes in this complex period in Serbian arts and society, which emerged ‘on the very edge’ between territorial and cultural, new and old, modern and traditional identities. With an open methodological framework this book reveals a vibrant and intertwined artistic scene, which, albeit prematurely, announced interests in pluralism and globalism. On The Very Edge addresses issues of artistic identities and cultural geographies and aims to enrich contextualized studies of modernism and its variants in the Balkans and Europe, while simultaneously re-mapping and adjusting the prevailing historical canon. BOOK REVIEWS: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/article/on-the-very-edge-modernism-and-modernity-in-the-arts-and-architecture-of-interwar-serbia-19181941-ed-bogdanovic-jelena-lilien-filipovitch-robinson-and-igor-marjanovic-leuven-leuven-university-press-2014-x-349-pp-bibliography-index-illustrations-figures-maps-5900-paper/9B9B1588BBB2B2639F08BD194E620ECC http://beogradskonasledje.rs/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/217-220-zlata-vuksanovic-macura.pdf https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=244386 https://www.academia.edu/35693547/Review\_of\_On\_the\_Very\_Edge.\_Modernism\_and\_Modernity\_in\_the\_Arts\_and\_Architecture\_of\_Interwar\_Serbia\_1918-1941\_ed.\_by\_Jelena\_Bogdanovi%C4%87\_Lilien\_Filipovitch\_Robinson\_and\_Igor\_Marjanovi%C4%87 https://www.academia.edu/23326774/Walking\_a\_fine\_line\_-\_Jelena\_Bogdanovi%C4%87\_Lilien\_Filipovitch\_Robinson\_Igor\_Marianovi%C4%87\_editors\_On\_the\_Very\_Edge.\_Modernism\_and\_Modernity\_in\_the\_Arts\_and\_Architecture\_of\_Interwar\_Serbia\_1918-1941\_ https://www.academia.edu/23527152/Aleksandar\_Ignjatovi%C4%87\_On\_the\_Very\_Edge\_Modernism\_and\_Modernity\_in\_the\_Arts\_and\_Architecture\_of\_Interwar\_Serbia\_1918\_1941\_Leuven\_Belgium\_Leuven\_University\_Press\_2014\_by\_Jelena\_Bogdanovi%C4%87\_Lilien\_Filipovitch\_Robinson\_and\_Igor\_Marjanovi%C4%87\_eds.\_Southeastern\_Europe\_40\_1\_2016\_118-120
Modern Intellectual History, 2020
Between the years 1949 and 1953 the leaders of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia embarked on a series of radical social and economic reforms that restructured state-society relations in line with a decentralized, participatory model of socialism. "Self-management socialism," as this system became known, served to harmonize local revolutionary ambitions with the embedded liberalism of the postwar international order into which Yugoslavia sought to integrate. During the early reform period Yugoslav intellectuals reorganized socialist ideology around new understandings of autonomy and creativity in ways that resonated with liberal traditions and diverged sharply from the Soviet paradigm. These concepts informed Yugoslav ideas of social self-management and national self-determination and facilitated the country's orientation to the postcolonial world. They also underpinned the new realm of cultural production, where reformers such as Miroslav Krleža and Marko Ristić mobilized this new concern with autonomous creativity to revive previously discarded aesthetic theories of interwar modernism.