engleski

Red on Pink: Recognizing the “Critical Moment of Aesthetic Experience” in Post-Yugoslavia

Within the proposed paper, the following problems would be analyzed: what does a quarter of century after the dissemination of Yugoslavia mean to remember it? How does contemporary art problematize remembrance of the former state, and how does art articulate a political answer to the question of disintegration of the former state? The objective here is to analyze actual political ideologies within the wider space of ex-Yugoslavia, and contribute to the revolutionary art studies of the 20th and 21st centuries, respectively. Our main thesis is that actual ideologies rest on the process of erasure of the concept of Yugoslavia as an emancipatory, class oriented project ; it is rather a process of “transition, ” meant to transform the former communist Yugoslav societies into liberal, democratic, and capitalism-oriented societies. To achieve that, we employ a comparative approach to the critical (post-socialist) art practices, especially two opposing strategies: anti-utopian during the 1980s and early 1990s and utopian within the contemporary left- reformism, followed by two levels of understandings of the former Yugoslavia’s “post-socialist condition” being shaped. The first is a phenomenon in art that occurs in late socialism, reveling the ‘process’ of its dissolution, and the second as a period of transition which coincides with two non- separate processes: the capitalist “transition” leading toward the establishment of the neoliberal paradigm, and the ethnocentric restoration leading toward the renewal of an organicist national state. We will try to prove that unlike the neoliberal or nationalist concept of “non-Yugoslavia”, the idea of “post-Yugoslavia” is marginal and in minority. Nevertheless, this idea of a critical establishment of continuity and association with the emancipatory legacy and cosmopolitan values of the Yugoslav project does exist, though it is mostly in fragments, and within what is only now emerging as a relevant left- wing political platform in cultural and art practices.

Former Yugoslavia; Post-socialist condition; Left-reformism; politically engaged art; utopia

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