The book “Photography and Propaganda” links or edits the ideas of Yugoslav avant–garde groups, above all the surrealists, and then also those rallied around the paper Nova literatura (New Literature), with the agitation and propaganda culture based on the thesis advanced by Boris Groys in his work The Total Art of Stalinism, Avant–Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond (1992). The art historians invited to contribute to this book are thus today their ‘delayed public’, approaching these phenomena from both historical and contemporaneous perspectives, shaped by their own preoccupations and urgencies. They rather counted (consciously or not) on ‘an audience to come’ and so could be said to have been meant for the future. Many of them took place in private spaces, in solitude, in nature, or camouflaging themselves as non-art, as part of everyday life, a protest, a crowded street, radically redefining or ignoring the idea of audience. What is discussed in Removed from the Crowd: Unexpected Encounters I are practices that were in search of new methodologies, exploring the interstices between the collective and individual, private and public, action and escapism, art and non-art, artist and curator, nature and the urban space, the visible and the invisible. However, a critical remark could also be made to the effect that the standard of living was not so good that it could not be better.īringing together newly commissioned essays predominantly from an emerging generation of researchers and writers, this reader focuses on conceptual and experimental artistic, curatorial and institutional practices that have rarely or never been brought into relation with parallel developments outside their respective context, in this case Latvia, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Chile, Peru, Poland and Romania. That was a unique combination of the Marxist theory and a complex, hybrid practice, where a conclusion could be drawn at every moment that life was better than in the state socialism in Eastern Europe and that capitalism in the West went too far in many respects anyway. On the one hand, every individual was exposed to the ideological and emancipatory impulses intended to curb everything that was considered to be retrograde, while on the other, a direct contact with the West was established through radio and television programmes, foreign tourists visiting the country, tourist trips abroad and local people leaving to go to work in the most developed European countries. Both processes combined led to changing old and shaping new forms of everyday practice and ran independently from the obvious internal deficiencies of the political system, as far as democracy was concerned. The modernization of everyday life in Yugoslavia unfolded by implementing the socialist concept of modernization, as well as by accepting general European or Western European influences.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |