Bojana Complete Thesis 1
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NON-ALIGNED MODERNISM: YUGOSLAVIAN ART AND CULTURE FROM 1945-1990 BOJANA VIDEKANIC A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO NOVEMBER, 2013 © BOJANA VIDEKANIC, 2013 ii Abstract This thesis seeks to understand and recover contemporary social, political and aesthetic value from the often dismissed or marginalized history of Yugoslavian modernism. The significance and complexity of the Yugoslavian experiment with modernism has often passed unrecognized. It has been dismissed as derivative and marginal or else eclipsed and tainted by the collapse of the Yugoslavian state in the early 1990s. To understand Yugoslavian modernism’s particularity we must recognize that socialist Yugoslavia existed as an in-between political power that negotiated the extremes of the Cold War by building a version of socialism independent from the Soviet model. Its art and culture were equally idiosyncratic. Although Yugoslavian cultural and political elites accepted modernism as a national cultural expression, the way that modernism developed did not strictly follow Western models. As a mixture of various aesthetic, philosophical, and political notions, Yugoslavian modernism can only be described by a political term associated with the international movement that Yugoslavia participated in at the time: Non- Aligned. I make a parallel between Yugoslavia’s political ambitions to build a country outside of the two Blocs and its rising modernist culture meant to reflect ideas of Non-Alignment, self-managing socialism, and nation-building. Yugoslavian Non- Aligned modernism also had strong anti-imperialist characteristics influenced by the country’s colonial and semi-colonial status vis-à-vis Western Europe. Modernist influences were therefore refracted and changed as they penetrated the Yugoslavian iii cultural milieu. Artistic and intellectual groups, exhibitions, and political ideas discussed in this thesis show a tendency to oscillate between revolutionary socialist ideas, and more conservative aesthetic and political attitudes. But it is precisely this curious mixture of aesthetic utopianism and aesthetic and political pragmatism that make Yugoslavian modernism interesting and valuable to reconsider now. Instead of reading Yugoslavian modernism as derivate of predominantly Western forms, we should read it as a form of alternative modernism that developed its complexities not only because of the Western colonial and imperial cultural project, of which Yugoslavia was a part of, but in spite of it. Non-Aligned modernism is therefore both a critique and a continuation of the modernist project and as such deepens our understanding of modernism and its struggle to actualize its progressive ideals. iv For my daughter Yara that she may always persevere and flourish v Acknowledgments Every dissertation is a work of a large team of people who support, nourish, and endure with the candidate. My thesis is therefore indebted to a number of individuals who have lead, helped, and supported me throughout the years of writing and research. I would first like to thank my committee members, my supervisor Richard Hill who has not only provided intellectual support but also helped me navigate the treacherous mental battle that one has to go through in order to complete the thesis writing process, and although Richard and I come from two different cultures and from two different continents our experience of modernity’s dark sides and its utopias was very similar. I would like to thank Ken Little who has amazed me with his thinking in the early 2000s when I first met him, and who was willing to take up this beast of a thesis and help me wrestle with the strange manifestations of the communist past. I would like to thank Sarah Parsons whose steady voice of wisdom, clarity, and reason has allowed me to stay sane, and whose advice on both research in art history and navigating academia has been indispensible. My work would also not happen without my long-time mentor Carol Zemel who has helped me shape this thesis and has supported me immensely in my career. This research would not have happened without my external committee member Dot Tuer who has impressed me with her command of Eastern European history and culture, and whose sharp, piercing intellect has helped me see the value in the work that I do and its standing within contemporary art history. Finally I would like to thank the rest of my defense committee Shelly Hornstein and Yvonne Singer who have graciously accepted to sit on my defense and contributed to the dialog about my work. This thesis however would not have happened without the most important people in my life, my family. I would like to thank my husband Berislav who has patiently and steadfastly endured my anxiety, mental stress, and all other ups and downs of writing. His intellect, his trust, and his love have guided me throughout my life, without him I would not be here, and I would not be who I am. I would like to thank my loving, dedicated parents, without who I would never get to graduate school. They have dedicated their lives to me, invested their time, money, and patience and without their love and support I would not have made it. I want to thank my daughter Yara for being so patient as her childhood was spent watching me hunched over in library writing. Thank you! Finally, I would like to thank all my friends, especially Jasmina Kallay and Sarah Campbell, rest of my family, and colleagues for their support and encouragement. A special note goes to my mentor Joan Coutu who has always believed in me, and to all the members of the Fine Arts Department at University of Waterloo. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Dedication iv Acknowledgments v Table of Contents vi Introduction 1 A Prelude from a Present Now Passed 1 Non-aligned Socialist Modernism 5 The Literature on Yugoslavian Socialist Modernism 9 Socialist Modernist Art Histories 25 Chapter One: Yugoslavian Socialist Realism: An Uncomfortable Relationship 39 Precarious Histories 39 Theoretical, Social and Political Contexts of Socialist Realism in Post-war Yugoslavia 46 The First Exhibition of the Yugoslavian Association of Fine Artists in 1949 57 Aesthetic and Political Alternatives After the 1949 Exhibition 79 Missed Opportunities? 90 Chapter Two: The Ascent of Official Socialist Modernism 92 Socialism’s Futures 92 Defining State Socialist Modernism 97 Forms of Socialist Modernism: The Monumental Sculpture 123 Dusan Dzamonja: The Politics of the Autonomous Work of Art 132 Vojin Bakic: The Future is Near 147 Bogdan Bogdanovic: Memorial Site as a Ritual 154 Memory, History, and the Everyday in Socialist Modernism 159 Chapter Three: The Socialist Mass Culture: Spectacle for the People 167 Youth Day: Thinking Through the Spectacle 172 Historical Narratives 174 Youth Day as an Urban Spectacle 183 The Image of the President 205 The Countermovements 219 Chapter Four: Alternative Forms of Art and Utopian Socialist Culture in Yugoslavia of the 1950s and ’60s, EXAT 51, Vjenceslav Richter, and Praxis 239 EXAT’s Neo-Constructivist Socialism 243 EXAT’s First Exhibition and Formal and Theoretical Ideas 247 Vjenceslav Richter, Sinturbanizm and Socialist Modernist Utopia 276 Vjenceslav Richter and Praxis: Parallel Visions of Progressive Socialist Culture 289 Praxis and the Culture of Humanist Socialism 291 Praxis and Art 295 Parallel Visions 300 Post Scriptum Some Concluding Thoughts on Socialist Modernism 305 Bibliography 313 1 Introduction A Prelude from a Present Now Passed: the Communist Archive circa 1980 History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]. 1 –– Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History In the early 1980s Yugoslavian neo-avant-garde artist Mladen Stilinovic initiated his first Exploitation of the Dead series (Fig. 1). Varied in size, structure, and imagery these elaborate installations featured a variety of iconic, mythical symbols of Eastern European culture, communist politics, and art. Some of the symbols, such as Kazimir Malevich’s square, were taken directly from the visual repertoire of the Russian avant-gardes. Others were drawn from socialist-realist art or borrowed from the wider symbolic repository of the communist visual vocabulary: the communist star, the hammer and sickle, assorted military paraphernalia and so forth. Stilinovic also transformed the objects to varying degrees by adding his own painted, drawn, written, and sculpted visual commentary. The artist imagined his work as a way of signaling the death of crucial artistic and political ideological apparatuses. The dead he was exploiting were the failed modernist aesthetic propositions, remnants of communist structures, and ruins of utopian dreams that had turned into nightmares by 1984 when he began the series. Stilinovic’s art from this period was a voice in the 1 Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hanna Arendt, trans.Harry Zohn, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969a), 261. 2 wilderness, a prophesy of the end of an era, a long-protracted death of the revolutionary ideas launched into action in October 1917. The work also addressed the death of socialism in Stilinovic’s own country –– Yugoslavia. In the mid 1980s the official Yugoslav political establishment still held on to an illusion of the success of its self-managing socialist utopia as it was pronouncing the country’s viability as an in-between power (one neither East nor West). Despite the cynicism woven into Stilinovic’s installation, Marina Grzinic has convincingly argued2 that the artist was also mourning the end of the socialist era. Born immediately after the war, Stilinovic, with many other Yugoslavian baby boomers, helped build the country, bringing it into late twentieth century modernity. His generation witnessed Yugoslavia’s greatest prosperity and its violent end.