Desirable and Stigmatized: Subject, Form and Content as the Main Categories in the Discourse of Croatian Socialist Realist Art Criticism (original) (raw)
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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:
Život umjetnosti, 2018
World War I produced a completely new phenomenon on the Croatian territory—a joint exhibition of female artists. This was the Intimate Exhibition of the Spring Salon held in 1916, which represented a harbinger of women’s artistic association in this region and brought a wholly new dimension of exhibition practice as one of the results of the first wave of the feminist movement. The paper presents a history of the idea of assembling female visual artists related to the exhibition of Nasta Rojc, Mila Wod and the Croatian folk art that took place in Vienna in 1914, and gives a contextual analysis of the impact of the First World War on gender roles and women’s position in society. The main part of the paper focuses on the recording and systematisation of antifeminist utterances which accompanied the 1916 Intimate Exhibition — primarily those by Kosta Strajnić and Vladimir Lunaček— and locates the origins of these utterances in the “feminine stereotype” and the notion of creativity as an ideological component of masculinity (Griselda Pollock). On the other hand, such attitudes provoked a feminist reaction which led to the first openly feminist utterances in the public space (Zofka Kveder, Andrija Milčinović), while the exhibition itself not only brought visibility to female artists on the Croatian visual art scene, but can be considered as the first step in feminist aspiration towards mastering the visual arts domain of public activities within the dominant patriarchal social model.
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The five or eight years leading up to the failed “Prague Spring” represent the most important period of Czech humanities tradition during the Communist Party dictatorship. Art history did not directly participate in either of the most prominent period discourses, but it was able to develop its own specific methodologies following the Czech continuation of the Vienna School legacy. The contribution analyzes the discourse of Marxist Iconology, developed by J. Neumann and R. Chadraba, and presents the case of F. Šmejkal and his concept of Imaginative Art, which was, interestingly, the sole case during the whole 40 years of the Communist Party rule when the highest Party officials became directly involved in Czech art historical practice. From the point of view of art historical practice, the most important feature of the brief period 1963–1969 was the new possibility of contacts with foreign art historians and of traveling abroad.