Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ALIENATION EFFECTS THEATER: THEORY/TEXT/PERFORMANCE Series Editors: David Krasner, Rebecca Schneider, and Harvey Young Founding Editor: Enoch Brater Recent Titles: Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness by Karen Gonzalez Rice Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91 by Branislav Jakovljević After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance by Daniel Sack Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance by Faedra Chatard Carpenter The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North by Douglas A. Jones, Jr. Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self by Tzachi Zamir Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning by Scott Magelssen Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance by Andrew Sofer Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love by Nicholas Ridout Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex: Race, Madness, Activism by Tony Perucci The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice by Judith Pascoe The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance by Brandi Wilkins Catanese Artaud and His Doubles by Kimberly Jannarone No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater by Angela C. Pao Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body by Harvey Young Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea by Suk-Young Kim Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde by James M. Harding Alienation Effects PERFORMANCE AND SELF-MaNAGEMENT IN YUGOSLAVIA, 1945– 91 Branislav Jakovljević ANN ARBOR University of Michigan Press Copyright © 2016 by the University of Michigan All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid- free paper 2019 2018 2017 2016 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978- 0- 472- 07314- 6 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-472-05314-8 (paperback: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-472-12198-4 (e-book) ISBN 978-0-472-90058-9 (open access e-book) To Nikola and Maria Acknowledgments I dedicate this book to my children, Nikola and Maria. Yugoslavia will be a part of their lives more than they will ever be able to know— so much for intangible heritage. I would have not been able to write this book without the commitment and support of my wife, Jasminka. Much more than the translations from the French in this book is hers. In Alienation Effects, I investigate the transformation of performance, broadly conceived, in Yugoslavia in the post– World War II period. In the period that extended from the establishment of self- management as the dominant ideological and economic model, contemporaneously with early experimental work in theater and visual arts, to the hyperinflation that spelled the end of the Yugoslav brand of labor and highly visible postmodern cultural productions, the concept of performance in Yugo- slavia spanned a broad range of activities, from labor organization to con- ceptual art. Instead of composing a historical survey, in this book I have tried to understand different historical periods by focusing on a select number of case studies, each of them requiring a different methodology. My work on the 1950s and early 1960s was based on archival research in Serbia and the United States. This painstaking labor was made easier by the assistance of friendly staff of the Archive of Yugoslavia (Arhiv Jugo- slavije), Museum of Yugoslav History (Muzej istorije Jugoslavije, espe- cially Momo Cvijović), and the Hoover Institute library at Stanford Uni- versity. I am grateful to Mary Munill from the Stanford Library office for Interlibrary Borrowing. Throughout the process, I relied on generous help of my friends from the National Library of Serbia (Narodna bib- lioteka Srbije): Svetlana Gavrilović, Sreten Ugričić, and Saša Ilić. In my research on the late 1960s and 1970s (and beyond) I employed both archi- val and ethnographic fieldwork methods. I am grateful to Slavica Vukadinović, Srđjan Veljović, and Stevan Vuković for their help in ac- cessing archival material held in Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center (Stu- dentski kulturni centar, SKC). These documents came to life through my conversations with some of the main protagonists of the conceptual art viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS scene in Belgrade of the 1970s and 1980s, Slobodan “Era” Milivojević, Raša Todosijević, Zoran Popović, and Jasna Tijardović. I offer my thanks to them for sharing their time and memories with me, and for giving me a permission to use the photographs of their performances in this book. Big thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić for their help in obtaining the images of Mladen’s works and the permission to use them. I also want to thank Dunja Blažević, Ljubica Mrkalj, Nebojša Janković, and Žarko Papić for providing me with important information about their activities on the Belgrade art scene of the 1970s, and Goran Đorđević for letting me use images of some of his works. I also want to thank Marinko Sudac, Irwin, Belgrade Student Cultural Center (SKC), and Anne Marchand for allowing me to use the images from their collections. The image on the book covers was made during the concert of Belgrade Symphony in Train Factory “Goša” in Smederevska Palanka on the occa- sion of Youth Day, on May 25 1954. I made every poossible effort to find the person who made this photograph, but to no avail. The cover was designed by Belgrade- based multimedia artist group Škart. My thanks go to Đorđe Balmazović and Dragan Protić for their flexibility and for doing great work under pressure of deadllines. I also want to acknowledge the work of a new generation of artists, theoreticians, and art historians whose critical interpretation of conceptual art in Serbia and Yugoslavia was important for my own work: Milica Tomić, Branimir Stojanović, and Jelena Vesić. My archival research and fieldwork would not have been possible without support from the Hellman Foundation and Stanford University. Just as important as financial support was the intellectual and institu- tional support of Harry Elam, under whose tenure as department chair of Stanford Drama/TAPS I started this book, and of Alice Rayner, who chaired the department when I finished. My special thanks to Peggy Phelan for her friendship, support, and guidance throughout this period, and beyond. I want to thank them and my other colleagues for providing a cordial and supportive work environment. They taught me that self- management is not only a principle of labor organization, but also a very delicate art of working together. It is an art of generosity and care, and is not limited to immediate interactions. In my labor on this book I bene- fited enormously from Amelia Jones’s comments, from Mariellen Sand- ford’s copyediting, and from the patience and understanding of my edi- tor, LeAnn Fields. Ljubiša Matić made indexing into an art form. I am indebted to him for his attentiveness to every word and letter in the book. He was the last line of defense against typos and other omissions. I am ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix solely responsible for any mistakes, large and small, that made it into the published version of the book. My work on this book started long before I even thought of writing it. It was fueled by the unraveling of the country where I was born and raised. I received my first lessons about self-management as an egalitarian practice and its distortions as an ideological discourse from my parents, Branislava and Radoš; I articulated my first critiques of Yugoslav politics in conversa- tions with my sister Lidija. This daily exercise of critical thinking continued over the years through dialogues with my friends Perica Gunjić, Milan Rakočević, Pavle Levi, and many others. I hope that in this book captures some of the verve and passion of these shared experiences. Contents Introduction: Socialism and Sociality 1 Self- Management 1 Alienation 14 Performance 24 ONE Bodywriting 33 Performance State 33 Choreography of Labor 38 Et in Illyria Ego . 55 Socialist Baroque 65 Socialist Aestheticism 83 Labor’s Other 98 TWO Syntactical Performances 116 Beyond the Performance Principle 116 Cracked Baroque 124 Performing Self- Management 132 Expanded Media / Constricted Politics 141 The Magician as Surgeon 150 The Surgeon as Stitcher 162 Alienating the Unalienable 177 1968/86/89 187 THREE Disalienation Defects 196 A Federation of Interests 196 The Other Line 211 Did Somebody Say Alienation? 224 The Strange 237 Money as the Medium 247 xii CONTENTS Postconceptualist Politics 258 The Use- Value of Postmodernism 265 The Management of the Self 278 Afterword: “A” is for . 287 Notes 291 Bibliography 331 Index 353 Introduction: Socialism and Sociality SELF- MANAGEMENT In Perestroika Timeline, the Saint Petersburg art collective Chto Delat? estab- lishes a connection between the crisis that spelled the end of the Cold War and the one that shook world markets some twenty years later.1 The instal- lation consists of simple gray- scale images, with captions painted directly on a gallery wall, beginning with Leonid Brezhnev’s death in 1982 and pro- ceeding with a series of political and cultural events that mark the decade that followed, such as the 1985 appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party; the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant; the 1987 landing in Red Square of a small plane operated by the young German, Mathias Rust; the 1988 start of the with- drawal of Soviet armed forces from Afghanistan; all the way to December 1991, when the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus signed the Be- lavezha Accords, putting an end to the Soviet Union.