Inheriting the Yugoslav Century: Art, History, and Generation
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Inheriting the Yugoslav Century: Art, History, and Generation by Ivana Bago Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Kristine Stiles, Supervisor ___________________________ Mark Hansen ___________________________ Fredric Jameson ___________________________ Branislav Jakovljević ___________________________ Neil McWilliam Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 ABSTRACT Inheriting the Yugoslav Century: Art, History, and Generation by Ivana Bago Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies Duke University ___________________________ Kristine Stiles, Supervisor ___________________________ Mark Hansen ___________________________ Fredric Jameson ___________________________ Branislav Jakovljević ___________________________ Neil McWilliam An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 Copyright by Ivana Bago 2018 Abstract The dissertation examines the work contemporary artists, curators, and scholars who have, in the last two decades, addressed urgent political and economic questions by revisiting the legacies of the Yugoslav twentieth century: multinationalism, socialist self-management, non- alignment, and war. I conceptualize the work of contemporary artists as that of Yugoslavia’s “surviving generation,” and use it as a starting point for a reconstruction of what I argue is a decolonial twentieth-century Yugoslav aesthetics that has persisted into the present despite numerous and violent historical ruptures. I also seek analogies between this aesthetics and a number of theoretical frameworks, in particular those of Edmund Husserl, Frantz Fanon and Judith Butler, whose work similarly arose out of constellations of crisis, death, and survival. The worldwide strengthening of conservative and nationalist movements following the crisis of capitalism in 2008 reveals the violent break-up of socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s as a precursor to global developments, rather than an exception, and my dissertation argues for a global import of the Yugoslav experience. From the anti-imperialist assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, the communist-led resistance during WW2, the anti-Stalinist socialist state and its prominent role in the Non-Aligned Movement, to the war-ridden, post-communist transition, the Yugoslav century is not only co-extensive with the dreams and disasters of the “short twentieth century” (1914-1991), but can be seen as this century’s metonymy, or even, synecdoche. The engagement of contemporary artists, scholars and curators with the aesthetic and political legacies of the Yugoslav century, the dissertation argues, opens up the possibility to read Yugoslavia both as a proper name, iv designating a particular history, and as a universally valid signifier for a number of unresolved and persisting questions of the past: the quest for social equality, ongoing forms of colonialism and decolonization, the return(s) of nationalism, and the crises of capitalism and democracy. v Dedication To my parents, Ana and Stjepan. vi Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ............................................................................................................... ix Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... xii Preface .......................................................................................................................... iv 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 A Yugoslav history ....................................................................................................................... 8 Yugoslav aesthetics and (post)Yugoslav art ........................................................................... 21 (Surviving) Generation .............................................................................................................. 30 Structure and method ................................................................................................................ 37 Chapter 1. Surviving Generation: Gavrilo’s Shot and the Debris of Juvenescence ..... 45 Insurgent baptism ...................................................................................................................... 48 Arrested tracks ............................................................................................................................ 57 Father ........................................................................................................................................... 74 Yugoslavia’s Antigone ............................................................................................................... 96 Surviving generation ............................................................................................................... 106 The Children of Omarska ...................................................................................................... 117 Chapter 2. Similar Singing: A (South-Slav) Peoples ................................................... 141 A special relationship .............................................................................................................. 145 A single harmony .................................................................................................................... 157 The muted tone ....................................................................................................................... 164 Permeated by the peoples’ spirit ........................................................................................... 177 A peoples .................................................................................................................................. 200 vii Chapter 3. Krleža’s Fanonist Aesthetics and Its Post-Yugoslav Generation ............. 215 From role model to enemy of social art .............................................................................. 217 Manifesto of “our realism” as the formula of Yugoslav aesthetics (the vulgar materialist) ................................................................................................................................................... 227 Towards socialist, self-managed, non-aligned Yugoslav aesthetics (the tormented Fanonist) ................................................................................................................................... 241 Post-Yugoslav generation: Krleža and/as Yugoslav history (the drunken historiographer) ....................................................................................................................... 255 Post/(Post)/(Post-)Yugoslav art: the present of history .................................................. 272 Chapter 4. The Living Presence of the Körper: Monument Group and the Phenomenology of Death .......................................................................................... 287 Husserliana is burning ............................................................................................................ 291 In our vital need ...................................................................................................................... 303 Nachlass ..................................................................................................................................... 315 A new language ....................................................................................................................... 323 Phenomenology of death ....................................................................................................... 331 Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 368 Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 381 Biography ................................................................................................................... 400 viii List of Figures Figure 1: “In 1991 against Yugoslavia, in 2014 against the Yugoslavs,” protest of Croatian Homeland War veterans in Zagreb, 2014. ................................................................................... 401 Figure 2: “Haunting Relics of a Country That No Longer Exists,” http://www.nationalgeographic.com, computer screenshot .................................................... 402 Figure 3: The Top List of the Surrealists (the ritual of omlećivanje), TV series, 1991 (?) ........... 403 Figure 4: Sve je pitanje principa / It’s a Matter of Princip, T-shirt, 2014. .............................. 404 Figure 5: Vlak u snijegu (The Train in Snow), dir. Mate Relja, based on the children’s novel by Mato Lovrak (1931) (above) Murder on the Orient Express, dir. Sidney Lumet, 1974, based on a crime novel by Agatha Christie (1934) (below) ........................................................................... 405 Figure 6: Vlak u snijegu