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Adair Rounthwaite, "This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
01:01:44
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A
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B
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to New Books in Eastern European Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Eva gli, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Adair Ranthwaite about her new book, this Is Not My Art in Public Spaces in Socialist Zagreb. Now, Adair is a historian of contemporary art. She's a professor and chair of the Division of Art History at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on performance, audience participation, conceptualism, institutional critique, and the relationship between art and urban spaces. Her work has a dual geographic focus in Northern America and in from Yugoslavia and its successor states. Adair, welcome to the show.
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C
Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.
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B
Now, Adair, I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about yourself.
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C
Yeah, totally. As you already mentioned, I live and work in Seattle, Washington, on the left coast of the United States. But I'm originally Canadian. I'm from Toronto, and I jumped around geographically a fair amount, getting a master's at the University of Amsterdam and a PhD at the University of Minnesota, then a postdoc at McGill University in Montreal before landing here. And yeah, as you also mentioned, I'm an art historian, but with a strong relationship with my neighboring discipline of performance studies. That's been a big part of my work. Since graduate school.
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B
Terrific. And now this is your second book, this Is Not My World. It focuses on, as you explain, an experimental milieu of the city of Zagreb in socialist Yugoslavia, this period between 1975 and 85. And this is what we're going to talk about today. But I just want to note that you dedicated your book to parents everywhere struggling to get through the workday on too little sleep. And I thank you for the dedication to and really making visible that invisible context and labor that is really framing everything that we do and publish and write and all our thoughts. So that's a wonderful introduction to this study. But I want to know a little bit about how you became interested in this area of research. So you have this dual focus on North America, and then where does Zagreb and Yugoslavia come back?
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C
Yeah, that's a really good question. And it's actually a little bit of an unusual scholarly trajectory. So my training in graduate school was focused broadly on contemporary art, but with an especial focus on American contemporary art. And my first book was about participatory, publicly interactive art practices in New York in the late 1980s. And the question of audience interaction and how audiences, artists, and artworks kind of come together to make something in a specific space, a specific context, is really an ongoing interest. But basically, you know, I was already, when I was writing my dissertation about contemporary American art, I knew that I did not want a career just being an Americanist. I didn't identify with that at a basic level. I mean, I'm now I'm a naturalized American citizen, but I was not, you know, I'm not from the United States. And even though it seemed like there could clearly be a pathway to just writing about amazing American experimental artists for the rest of my career, I didn't want to do that. So I was looking for kind of a different geographic region and was really pretty open to seeing what that could be. I also understood that any kind of new geographic focus would need to go with language acquisition. And so, honestly, pretty randomly, I think this must have been. In 2007, I saw an exhibition of the work of Mladin Stilinovic at Documenta in Castle. And the work that was being shown there was his Exploitation of the Dead, which is a group of around 400 small wall mounted objects that are sort of like this difficult and painful visual archaeology of various 20th century socialisms, but especially Yugoslav socialism. It's these little things that are mounted on walls that contain things like the wing of a dead bird, a photograph of people doing collective labor. But there are also References Soviet avant garde of the 1920s. And I was just really interested in this work. And then coincidentally again, shortly thereafter, I believe it was 2009, I went to a performance studies international conference in Zagreb and I was sort of like, well, maybe this is it. And so the following year I went back to do an intensive language program and just began kind of like networking, getting to know the institutions and the people in the experimental arts community. And that's what led me here. So there's like overarching interest in audience interaction and participation, but kind of fundamentally like an openness just to do something different.
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B
Yeah, sounds like a terrific reason and path into this story which plays with accidents quite a bit, isn't it? Now, your study focuses specifically on this group of six authors. Tell us about who belonged to the group and its broader circle, because it's really ultimately not just these six authors, is it? Absolutely.
- [07:20]
C
Yeah, you're right. So the, the so called group of six authors, the Grupa Sha Storice Autora, were six young men, two brothers, who are Mladin Stilinovi and Sven Stilinovic and then Borisdemor Fedor Huchimilovi, Vladimarcek and Zerico Yerman. And this was a group of young dudes who sort of knew each other through different familial and friendship circles in the city. So there's a little bit of a kind of like organic, you know, social network quality to how they came together. They had a variety of types of artistic training. Most of them had not been formally trained as artists in the art academy. A variety of sort of degrees of economic security and family economic privilege. I mean, you know, technically socialist Yugoslavia was a classless society, but in practice it absolutely did not work that way. And so, you know, there was a big difference between artists who are coming from working class backgrounds versus more upper middle class backgrounds. And there's variety in this group. And they came together in a context where, you know, where we did not see the type of state censorship of art that happened in numerous Eastern bloc countries and where they were honestly pretty well connected to people who ran the city's major art institutions. They had good relationships with senior colleagues who headed like the, for example, the Museum of the City of Zagreb that showed modern contemporary art, but who were at the same time kind of frustrated with the bureaucracy of those institutions and wanted to do something fresher and more direct where they could address a non art public in a more meaningful way than kind of like waiting for several months to mount a show in a Gallery and then sort of be subject to the strictures of those, like, actually art spaces. So I think that it's. Yeah, really just important highlight that Yugoslavia had this very robust official system that made experimental art a major part of state institutions. But at the same time, these artists were still seeking something outside of that that was more spontaneous and more under their control.
- [10:08]
B
Yeah, now that's really interesting. And we'll talk about maybe a bit later on comparison to something like Soviet Union or Western Europe and the US and there is that very kind of unique, I would say here, relationship between the artist and the institutions and the scene outside institutions, which is quite interesting. Now, in the introduction of your book, you identify intimacy as the guiding thread to your discussion. I was quite intrigued by this concept. Can you tell us how does this work in your analysis?
- [10:44]
C
Yeah, thanks for that question. Because it's indeed so important for the book. And I am using this concept as a way to connect two different levels that are really crucially sort of implicated with each other in the work of these artists. One of which is questions of relationality. And those can be between artists amongst each other or with their audiences. And another is the question of materiality of the artwork. And so, you know, in the scholarship in this field. So I'm thinking like, you know, art historical scholarship, not only about the former Yugoslavia, but broadly about formerly socialist Europe. There's a lot of emphasis on the relationship between artists and a state. Right. Which makes sense, you know, because these states provided both special opportunities and specific constraints to the work of artists. But as I found my way into the, you know, just kind of like really understanding these practices, I discovered that far more important to these artists from their own perspective were questions of much smaller scale. Relationships. So intimate relationships that they then kind of like displayed in public in unusual and potentially transgressive ways or community relationships. And, you know, relationality in their work never comes off as something easy. There's often a sort of difficulty to relationality. But it's something that's a big focus and very important. So I'm thinking, for example, of a work that Jericho Yerman did in one of the group's actions on the Turg Republique. So what's today? The Turgbana Jelatisha, the center square of the city where he wrote this giant banner that said intimate inscription. And he did that with his girlfriend. And so on one level, it is an intimate inscription, right? Like, he's working with his partner. They're doing this together. It's a message that's Kind of opaque, but at the same time, it's an empty message. It has no content, and it's broadcast to the public. So there's a lot of play kind of between those. Those levels. And I also see that kind of intimacy as being connected really to the material nature of these artworks. So often, you know, we'll think about conceptualism as a dematerialized kind of art making. And indeed, these artists were. They were not making works that were supposed to be precious or that could only exist in the space of a gallery. They were often not even that careful about the works that they did, you know, that they did create. But that does not mean that the materiality is not important. And actually, what I see in these practices is a kind of turn towards material as something that's fragile, that is messy, that disintegrates, but in that quality says something really important about the nature of the subject and their openness towards others and their openness towards the world. And so I wanted to, you know, use this notion of intimacy, like, both to illuminate the stakes for them, but also to kind of like take a close look at the works themselves, like the material remainders or also the specific forms that performances had in city space. Like, how did these works ask us ask viewers to look? How did they ask them to relate to them?
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B
I really love introduction of that concept early in your discussion, because it really helps you think about these pieces in a different way as you kind of talk about the group. And to me, there's something about Zagreb and cities, Gustav, at that time, they are intimate space in a way. They are the size and those relationships. They are still at a level that's manageable and intimate and close. So.
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C
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, a little bit to your last question as well, the art circles in these cities are intimate. No, I mean, it's these sort of like circles of people who are invested in experimental art, who are related to each other, who have dated each other, other sharing living spaces. And so there, you know, there really is a kind of like, there was a lived closeness to the art environment.
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B
But it's also, in a way, as you noted, like works on a number of different levels. It's in a way, subversive, right? In a socialist state. It's all about the community and the sloganeering and the rest. It's quite an interesting, as I said, a viewpoint and an entry point into this discussion. Now, you focus quite a bit on the exhibition actions that the group of six authors performed in public spaces, mainly in Zagreb. But Also other places in Yugoslavia and in Italy. Can you tell us what these are? What are exhibition actions?
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C
Yes. Yeah. So it's a sort of funny term, but this is the term that the artist chose. So, you know, they're not calling them just performances. They're not calling them just actions, which would be maybe more of a, like, generic descriptor. They're calling them exhibitions. They're also actions. And so There were about 20 of these events that they held between 1975 and 1979 that were events in public space where they would show work and sometimes also make work and talk about it with passerby audiences. And the important thing to highlight? Well, there are a couple of important things. One is that these events, for the most part, were legal, right? Like, you know, public space is pretty carefully controlled Socialist Yugoslavia. So you couldn't just kind of, like, go into a city park and set up an exhibition. The police would come and clean it up. And so they did have permits that were signed for them by people who worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art in order to be able to legally permit these actions. But at the same time, it was a strange kind of event. So they were kind of, you know, it was, like, technically allowed, but also confusing, I think, both to passersby and to law enforcement. And they held these in a range of different spaces. I mean, as you said, there were some that were. There were a few that were outside the city of Zagreb, but also even in the city, they picked a lot of different spots. So in the main city square on a weekday, when everybody is coming and going to do their shopping or to go to work, but also in an urban bathing area on the edge of the Sava river, an early one was held in a suburb of the city. So in these kind of, like, newly built areas with high rises, where a lot of regular people live. And in each of these contexts, there would have been a different kind of cadence or texture of interaction with the public. Like, sometimes almost nobody came by, and they were kind of doing their own thing. Sometimes they were talking to hundreds of people a day. But one of the most interesting things that I learned about these events when I was doing the research and interviewing the artists. And I was super lucky to be able to speak both with Mladin Stilinovi and Boris de Amur before their deaths. Stylinovic, a few different times, was that each of the group members kind of felt differently about these events. They were seeking different things. Like, Ilina Levic really just wanted a place to exhibit. Vlado Marcek loved Talking to people. He's a great kind of conversational guy. And so this was a format that was, you know, had a lot of interactive potential with people in the public, but they could also accommodate significant differences between the individual artists and what they were seeking. And for the most part, they didn't actually collaborate on making artworks. They showed their own works. So it was clear that it was like individual people coming together to show their works and in this context, but that they were kind of like, uniting, not as collaborators, but as friends, basically, of the ones that didn't have official permits. One of them that really interests me is a walk around the city of Zagreb where they simply held. Each one of them, held one of their artworks, and they went on a pretty long walk through the core of the city. And I love imagining that action because of how. Because of how ambiguous it would be to the public. You know what I mean? Like, you're out in public, you could talk to people, but you wouldn't necessarily know if you just saw a bunch of guys walking.
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B
What it was. Yeah.
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C
Objects like what it was. Yeah. So it's as sort of like it's overtly an exhibition, but also in a bunch of different ways. It's kind of liminal both to the exhibition and to existing forms of interacting in public space.
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B
In a way, it flips the exhibition format. Like, it's not the audience walking around, it's the artworks walking around the audience. Terrific. Now, language education and pedagogy are also big areas of interest for these artists, and it's quite a different and interesting focus that they have here. Can you tell us a bit about what drew them to these themes and how are they explored in their works? And I have to say, some of my favorite pieces are actually pieces that deal with language and pedagogy. It's very beautifully thought through, I guess.
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C
Yeah. I find those works really moving as well. And as you know, in the book, I primarily focus on this topic in chapter two, where I'm looking especially at the works of Lado Martek and Mladen Stilinovic, who were two artists who had a really. Each had his own very enduring interest in the question of language, though from different perspectives. So Martek is somebody who is a visual artist, but also identifies as a poet and whose work really revolves around using each of those categories to problematize the other, but who's also fundamentally melodramatic in his use of language. Mladen Stilinovic, on the other hand, was very interested in the ideological valences of language and how vile language, which is something that's available to all of us. Right. Like, it's a very everyday thing that we use, that we manipulate. You can both map and deconstruct ideology. And in both of their work, I see the. The question of education as one of the fundamental ways that they're reflecting on their socialist context. Right. Because education is so important in socialist states, you know, from an ideological perspective, but also like the. The processes by which subjects become part of ideology are learning processes. And I think that they had a really, really an interest in kind of like revisiting these scenes of childhood as ways of imagining how ideology could be undone for an individual subject at a very detail. And so in their works, there's an interest in learning, but they also depict themselves as poor students, if you will. So there's a major catalog from a few years ago of Stellanovic's work that's called Nula Zvlada Nye. So, like, zero, zero for conduct, which kind of, you know, for this is like an F for effort kind of thing. And, you know, they were artists who were interested in this sort of, like, humor and the rebellious attitude of depicting themselves as poor learners, as people who hadn't learned the lessons of ideology, but who also hadn't really learned the lessons of modern art. And in the way that these canons and systems want you to do. So there's really an amazing playfulness that comes with their relationship to education. Yeah, I think it's one of the.
- [25:38]
B
It's really, as you layered, very playful, but highly political. Both language and education policy were the most contested issues in former Yugoslavia and in many ways very closely connected to the outbreak of the conflict. But the mark that you would get for conduct, your book reminded me that, yeah, there was like, part of your grading scores in school, like you would get a mark for conduct completely separate to your academic performance was your conduct overall. Conduct that. It made me think, and I obviously haven't thought about it in ages, made me think what interesting concept that was. And if we had that in school. I'm based in Australia. If my university students had a mark for conduct, that could help them lift up their marks or lower their mark overall score, what that would look like. But, yeah, it seems such a straightforward thing. Right. But actually it's very deeply ideological and pedagogical, and I really love how you brought it. That's why I think some of these works really resonated with me in an interesting way.
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C
Just to add one quick thing to that too. And they also, these are artists who really know their history. Right. And like, stealing was so, you know, was very aware of exactly what you're talking about, about sort of like politicization of pedagogy and language policy. And like, one of the works that I really think is so smart, that I talk about in that chapter is a work where he's simply copying lines from like a language primer or a language burning book from the period in the late 1940s, right after the foundation of the country and the partisan struggle. And he does it in this kind of like childish handwriting. It's very typical of his work. So he's actually like literally repeating the lesson, but also revisiting that kind of foundational moment of pedagogy for the country.
- [27:58]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Now, photography is also a big part of their practice. And in your book you focus on the use of photography in their works. And I guess Zelco Yerman's project, my year 1977 is a central piece there. Tell us a little bit about this project and more broadly, photography in the context of the group of six authors.
- [28:23]
C
Yeah, definitely. So photography had a very plural function for this group. Numerous artists used it in their own practice in different ways. It also functioned very importantly to document the actions that they. The exhibition actions that they did together. But I think that Jerico Yerman's work, which is the subject of my third chapter, occupies a really special place not only in the work of the group vis a vis photography, but in the broader history of photography in the later 20th century. So German identified as a photographer. I mean, he was really kind of like a multidisciplinary contemporary artist, but he saw himself as a photographer. He even worked as a photographer. He had a photography studio where he took pictures of people for, you know, official purposes, like your passport or whatever.
- [29:28]
B
But not successfully, right?
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C
Yes, not successful.
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B
Liberty of liberty. They did he. I really love that bit.
- [29:33]
C
Yeah, he did it badly.
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B
Badly. Yeah.
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C
And in a space that was like, you know, in his house and tiny and very like, you know, just. Just barely professional kind of thing. And so Yerman was an adept user of the camera, but he was also fundamentally interested in photographs as something that had a corporeality that went beyond the camera. So he was using a lot of non camera based intervention in photographic paper, using photographic materials. And these could look like images where he, you know, works where he developed an image from a negative but then altered it in some way, like scratching, tearing, splashing, developer on the paper so that it came out kind of uneven. But also works where there's no negative involved at all, such as writing in photochemicals on, like, a big roll of photography paper and then just letting it expose. So he had this very creative, very flexible and very physical relationship to photographs. And it's through that lens that I consider this work my year that he created in 1977, where he took a picture of himself or had someone take a picture of him every day in the year. And. And then also wrote a little text to document what was going on with him. And, you know, if you sort of look at it without the context of his practice, it looks almost like a sort of failed or lazy documentation product. Like the photos, you know, are overexposed or have crazy high contrast or weirdly framed. And he's giving us little fragments of his daily life, but not by any means telling us the whole story. But what I see in that documentation work is actually, you know, to bring back the concept of intimacy, a very intimate sort of documentation of his life with the tool of photography in a way that asks us to look at how incredibly difficult it is to document. So even if you're so close and so diligent that taking a picture of yourself every day that you're writing these texts, there's gonna be something that sort of peels away from the reality. There will be, like, an insufficiency of the document. And at the same time, at many different places, we see relationality emerging in that work. So we see German hanging out with his friends in the Gruppe Storize. We see the beginning of his love affair, which eventually becomes a marriage with his fellow artist Vassta Delimar. We actually also see these sort of subtle performances of self that are informed by, like, rock music and by later 20th century global popular culture. So the documents are both poor, but they're also very rich in illuminating this network of relationality that he's part of and the types of spaces in which it unfolded.
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B
That's very interesting and made me think about taking a photograph of yourself every day in our current context, where we are constantly snipping photos. And is that any richer or any more closer to this aim of archiving our life in any particular way? Yeah, but you mentioned intimacy again here. And also emerging in the relationship between these artists. And here, Yevman's relationship with Blaster Delimar. Tell us about that dynamics as partners, as artists, collaborators. What does that look like?
- [34:07]
C
Yeah, absolutely. So German and Delimar met in, I think, 1970, in that year, in 77, when he's doing that project. And then they very quickly become romantically involved with one another and start collaborating in 1979. And they have what's actually really a pretty brief period of collaboration. It's only a couple years where they're making performances together. That sort of, for him at this moment, when he has had an experimental practice for some years and is open to incorporating performance as a bigger part of that practice than it's been before, like overt performance with his body. But that for Delimar, is really kind of at the beginning of her experimental career. And she is an artist who actually was educated at the art academy. But it's talked about the group of six and their milieu as offering her this sort of like, really creative experimental context that she was craving in the pretty, like, you know, more staid, modernist, much less experimental education that she'd had. And so when Yerman and Delimar begin collaborating, they're making works that are explicitly about their relationship. And, you know, every sort of like pair of artists who is a couple has their own particular dynamic of how their own relationship relates to their work, right? With these artists, the nature of their relationship and what that says about the ability to relate, you know, for human beings to relate broadly writ is really front and central to the work that they're doing together. So their own relationship was like a major point of interest and a major point of focus. The first work that they do together in 1979 is a performance called Attempted Identification, where they both write the word ya or I on their chests with paint and then when they're naked and then simply smush themselves together in a hug and then stand apart and stand friendly to the audience to show everybody the kind of messed up paint. And this is a really. This is a really simple gesture at a basic level, right? It's a simple action, but it has many layers in terms of grappling with both the desirability and the difficulty of intimacy. You know, wanting to be close to somebody, even wanting to show that closeness off in a public context, but then having that closeness be something that threatens or, you know, potentially compromises one's own identity. And so I think that the attempted identification that the title is talking about is an attempt at identifying with each other, which has failed in some way. But it's also an attempt to identify as, you know, a self contained subject, like to identify even on one's own terms, which this kind of messy relationality can make difficult.
- [38:08]
B
Once the relationship breaks apart. The story doesn't end in a way. Delimer is involved with another artist. So that kind of a circle continues of closeness, and you can't escape that scene. In a way. Yeah.
- [38:23]
C
Yes. She goes on to begin a relationship with Vladimarotek, with whom she's not really. Though they're not official collaborators. There are numerous works that she made in that period which are sort of like a reference to him or in which he's involved. Yeah. I mean, to that point of the smallness of these circles. So she was not only married to German and Martek in succession, she was the second woman to be married to those two guys in that order.
- [39:01]
B
You.
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C
Know, so which really sort of like, you know, on some level, it's sort of like, okay, it's somewhat sort of socially incestuous, but it's all, you know, just speaks to the tightness of these circles, you know. Yeah.
- [39:20]
B
And there's a work there that you show in your book of their last meal together before the breakup. And it's quite moving and quite a. Kind of. Immediately puts you in the middle of that story. It's such a powerful piece. But, yeah, it tells a lot about that closeness because the image also puts you very close to them at the table. But. Yeah, and almost claustrophobia of that circle, in a way.
- [39:48]
C
Yeah. That is a beautiful image by Boris Tvetanovic, who's a photographer who created so much important kind of documentation of this moment. And I was so happy to be able to use it. And something to note too, is that even though what's shown in that photograph is not an actual performance, Delimar, in her later work, has made a lot of use of sharing meals in performance contexts. And so there's this kind of like, slipperiness or continuity between. Yeah, their. Their everyday life, the kind of like difficult and intimate details of their breakup and how she's addressed relationality in her broader practice.
- [40:35]
B
To talk about intimacy in a different way, you also focus on kitsch, which is a bit of an intimate, everyday part of our life, hidden. Sometimes we are embarrassed by. But kitsches are really, again, layered, complex approach to this history, in a way. Tell us about kitsch and both the artistic and political aspect of this concept in the work of these artists.
- [41:03]
C
Absolutely. So, yeah, this is a concept that I was considering for a while before writing the book. Several years before its publication, I co chaired a session at the College Art association about kitsch in socialist artistic context, together with my colleague Milena Tolmic. And the conversations with her at that time really kind of got me thinking about it. A big motivation for that Fourth chapter where I'm addressing kitsch was also to try to understand the relationship between the practices of Las de Delimar and Tomislav Gotowac. So these are two artists who were close friends. Delimar provided a lot of support to Gotowac in the last few years of his life. They're also, on a basic level, associated with one another because they both love to perform naked and did that a lot. But I was like, okay, you've got these two people who are associated through friendship. They're both mega into nudity, but there must be some more fundamental conceptual connection. And I really found that through developing this concept relative to their work. I also want to point out that this concept is not original to my thought about the region. There's been so much important scholarship by writers such as Danilo Kish and Dubrovka Ugrasic, who've talked about the political valence of kitsch in the former Yugoslavia and how there's both a sort of kitsch associated with the socialist state, but also with the post nationalist, ethno nationalist state. And so, drawing on that work, I was thinking about kitsch as a way in which these artists proposed certain forms of experience to their audiences. So, you know, from an art historical perspective, often when we discuss kitsch, it's through the, like, appropriation of images or objects, right? Like, for example, in Pop art. And there are examples of that in the work of these artists. So, like, Gotta Watts dressing up like Superman, for example, you know.
- [43:39]
B
Homemade costume.
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C
Yeah, homemade costumes, exactly. But there was also in some ways a kind of, like, interest in these very, like, rote ways of interacting in public and how they could be undermined or redirected using imagery that was both familiar to audiences and also strange. So, you know, Dalimar did a very powerful performance in 1985 called Tied to a Tree, where she has somebody tie her to a tree in this busy, kind of pedestrian, like, walking square in the city. And she's wearing an outfit that's kind of like an orange sheath. She's wearing, like, a necklace with a cross. And so the image on the whole really echoes, like witch burnings, potentially. Joan of Arc. She had makeup that looked like she had been beaten on her face. And so on the one hand, she is sort of like, stepping into this. These various stereotypes, right? Stereotypes of woman as an object of violence, but at the same time, she's putting this in the middle of a city square. She's displacing it to kind of both, I mean, shock and surprise people, but also Interrogate the nature of that public space. Like, you know, okay, audience member, you might be shocked. And what does that mean if you think that this type of violence is shocking because it's been around for so long? On the other hand, you might just like, keep going about your business. And then what does that say about your own sort of existence in public space if you can just sort of metabolize this imagery and keep going. So this dynamic between familiar and the strange is really at the heart of what I'm trying to get at with using that concept of kitsch with both.
- [45:59]
B
Of their work at the same time. It's a space that celebrates that masculinity, right. That has a lot of. In terms of what's commemorated, what kind of public art is on display. It supports that. But then we are shocked still when we see the product of that. So, yeah, it's quite an interesting dynamic there that you talk about your work really, and your research has quite global perspective. And I was wondering if you can tell us, where do you place the work of these artists in the broader context of their time? You refer to Moscow Conceptualism a couple of times in your book, but also practice of North American authors. What do you see, I guess as a unique or common in the practice of these artists?
- [46:47]
C
Yeah, well, I mean, I think that an important thread connecting them to experimental practices in the Eastern Bloc from the late 60s through the 80s is this creative use of space. Right. I mean, throughout the formerly socialist sphere, artists were doing all sorts of interesting things with space, appropriating state spaces for showing experimental work, working in private spaces, working in outdoor spaces. So the fact that there's a major concern with an interest in space is a connecting thread to much of what was happening in Central and Eastern Europe in the later 20th century. At the same time, I feel like there is a kind of. I don't exactly know how to put my finger on this, but almost a kind of breathing room or a relaxedness that typifies this art that you don't see in Moscow Conceptualism. Or for example, in the rigorous performance of the like of post of normalization Czechoslovakia. Right. Like, at one point when I was talking to Ladin Stielinovic, he said something along the lines of, you know, we knew what the various socialisms were like and we knew that ours wasn't that bad. And I think that that sense of like being in a socialist country grappling with its ideology and its. The way in which it forms subjects, but at the same time having some leeway is that it kind of bubbles to the surface in some of the. More like, challenging content in this work in terms of how it kind of really flaunts intimacy. Sort of like dances around the thin boundary between the intimate and the public. With artists in North America, you know, there's some examples that I found that have almost uncanny resonance. Like, there's a work that Adrian Piper created In the late 1960s, I think, where she's documenting herself, like walking in city space, that is so unbelievably similar to a work that. That Vlasta Delimar did, that I talk about in the book. But she did it. Delimar did it about a decade later. And Branislavia Kofievic has talked about how conceptualism is characterized by the sort of bubbling up in these very different contexts of similar forms, but that mean very different things given in a particular context. And I think that's a really nice way of thinking, way of putting it. When I think about just the sort of structural and intellectual differences with artists in North America, something that I talk about in the book is the very different role that educational apparatuses played in these contexts. I mean, in the United States, it's really hard to find conceptual artists who don't have a college degree, like they almost all do. And educational institutions were a major part of those scenes. And there was definitely in Zagreb, a kind of contact with educational institutions at different points. You know, like, for example, the group held an action at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Zagreb. They actually also kind of wrote after the fact that they thought the students were like real jerks and not really open to, like.
- [51:06]
B
Mental artwork.
- [51:08]
C
But fundamentally, like, the people in this context were more self trained and self chosen. And given the nature of Yugoslavia's scene, you could have mobility and you could have visibility as somebody who didn't go to, you know, didn't go to school. And so I think that, like, the way in which, like, North American conceptualism normalizes the role of institutions. And I'm thinking they're both like educational and museum institutions and makes them like a big focus and sort of like fights back against them in these very active ways, it just wasn't as much of a focus or an interest in the same way in Yugoslavia.
- [52:02]
B
Yeah, no, that's really interesting. And I have to say, reading your book left me melancholic. And it's specifically, it's exactly this breathing room that you mentioned, you know, that there is for a system in a way that you have, you can be part of it, but also A part of it or next to it, or there is that flexibility in that breathing room in a number of different ways to be within a system, but also have space to think about it and think back at it in a way. Now, late 1980s and early 1990s, obviously kind of period of high political attention in former Yugoslavia. And I'm interested can tell us a bit about the artist's reaction to the breakup of this country that really formed their practice.
- [52:57]
C
Absolutely, yeah. So, I mean, different artists in the group have different or had different personal feelings about whether Croatia as a nation or Yugoslavia as a nation was a better fit for them. But they were consistently interested in sort of problematizing, sometimes in quite subtle ways, the notion of identification with a nation as such. So in the 1980s, a number of the artists in the group, interestingly, have a kind of, like, return to representation in their own practices. So the work by a lot of Stelingovic that I mentioned at the outset, Exploitation of the Dead, is like that. You know, Vladimarcek was making works in the 80s, both in paint and in clay, that are these very kind of, like, roughly rendered human and animal figures. And Sven Stilinovich was making works that used, like, wooden stars, so mimicking the Yugoslav flag and kind of like altering them in various ways. So there was a lot. There was definitely some clear manifestation in the practices of grappling with Yugoslav ness coming to an end. But I think that what stayed constant from the late socialist period was this sense of disidentification. You know, the title of the book is taken from Geereman's work, this is Not My World. And I would say that for all of these artists, you know, after the breakup of Yugoslavia, it is still not their world. And the ways in which it's not are different. And the particular ideologies, the changes in the ideologies pose new aesthetic and sort of political problems, but they're not going from being, like, comfortably identified to the opposite or from, you know, being like, feeling like the socialist state fundamentally, like, is incompatible with their sense of self to feeling like, oh, now I fit within post socialist Croatia.
- [55:32]
B
So, yeah, yeah, that's a challenging and a complex dynamic, isn't it, for artists across former Yugoslavia? And I don't think it changes very much this many years after breakup. That sense of groundlessness, I think, is pretty common thread. Ader, thank you so much for talking to us today about experimental Zagreb. I absolutely loved it. I loved the book. I would invite our audience to grab it, read it, look at the beautiful artworks or challenging artworks that you've chosen for us. And I want to know what are you working on next? What comes after Zagreb?
- [56:17]
C
Yes. So now I'm working on a comparative study that focuses both on the US and on Eastern, central and Eastern Europe that's about right wing art and arts policy. So I decided to do something substantially different than in this book, to look at practitioners on the opposite side of the political spectrum. It's an interesting set of problems because there aren't that many well known contemporary artists who, you know, are right wing identified, who make experimental art. Right. So it's the sort of visual forms that that takes. You know, it's sort of like it's complicated to identify even what the corpus is. But the study is really motivated by wanting to understand the subjectivities of artists and audiences in fuller, more complex ways. And one of the aspects of it that I'm really excited about, excited about, is looking at contemporary religious art. So both art that's actually in churches in some cases, but also art that draws on religious imagery. And one of the chapters is gonna be about the group biafra, who were, we almost might think of them as a kind of like anti group of six authors, because they were active in a very similar period, starting earlier, like around 1970, but who made work that was like, very much invested in the expressivity of sculpture and painting, that was very much invested in the emotional, sovereign, human subject. And it segues, especially in the post socialist period, into an interest in Catholicism, in religious imagery. And so, yeah, that's my new project.
- [58:36]
B
Terrific. Well, I hope you'll be back on the New Books Network to talk about, I guess, a sequel, in a way, to this study. Thank you again for our conversation today.
- [58:48]
C
Thank you so much, Eva. It was great.