Awakenings: The New Art Practice in late 1960s Socialist Yugoslavia (original) (raw)
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?
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